Bezos Saving $600M in Miami Move & Zuck Roasts Apple Vision Pro

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0:27Good morning, Brew Daily Show. I'm Neil Freiman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, CEO entrepreneur moved to Miami to avoid taxes in 2024. or Jeffrey, Jeffrey Bezos. Then Mark Zuckerberg filmed a remarkably candid video telling us exactly what he thinks about the Apple Vision Pro. It's Thursday, February 15th. Let's ride.

0:54What was supposed to be a celebratory day in Kansas City turned to horror when at least one person was killed and more than 20 people were injured in a mass shooting at the end of the Chiefs Super Bowl victory parade. The shooting occurred outside Union Station on the edge of downtown, despite more than 800 police officers who were in the building and nearby, because this was a massive event that the city had looked forward to since Sunday's victory. Authorities said three people were detained but haven't identified a motive. Yeah, apparently the Chiefs players have really stepped up to helping calm kids down and interacting with the community.

1:28But yeah, just a truly terrible thing. and we are certainly keeping you in our thoughts today, Kansas City. Before we jump into our show, let's hear a quick word from our sponsor, Veeam. I think it's time for a quick refresher for everyone listening as to what exactly Veeam does. All right, well, here we go. Veeam offers data security so that any old malware attack doesn't bring your business to a halt, but it also offers data recovery. So even if something does go wrong, you can rest easy knowing Veeam has your back. Data security and data recovery, a dynamic duo if you ask me. So if you're a business and you have sensitive data that needs protecting, maybe give Veeam a shot.

2:05Head to Veeam.com to learn more. That's V-E-E-A-M.com today. Does it ever feel like you're a marketing professional just speaking into the void? But with LinkedIn ads, you can know you're reaching the right decision makers, a network of 130 million of them, in fact. You can even target buyers by job title, industry, company, seniority, skills, and did I say job title? See how you can avoid the void and reach the right buyers with LinkedIn ads. Spend$250 on your first campaign and get a free$250 credit for the next one. Get started at linkedin.com slash campaign. Terms and conditions apply. This first story might make you want to move to Florida.

2:42Well, if you're a multi-billionaire selling massive amounts of stock, Jeff Bezos, who hasn't sold his Amazon shares since 2021, offloaded$4 billion worth this week as part of a two-year plan to trim his holdings. The question everyone is asking, why now? Well, his move to Florida from Washington seems to have a lot to do with it. Last November, Bezos said he was moving to Miami to be closer to his family and his space company Blue Origin. But what a strange coincidence. He'd also be saving hundreds of millions in taxes with a change of address. That's because Florida has no taxes on capital gains.

3:21While in 2022, Washington imposed a 7 % capital gains tax on sales of assets more than$250 ,000. So because of this move, Bezos has already saved$288 million in taxes he would have paid to Washington. And it could ultimately save him at least$610 million when all of the stock sales go through. Toby, this is a pretty stark example of how tax policies in different states can lead to the reshuffling of wealth across the country. with significant impact for government revenues. Yeah, it's definitely a big loss for Washington. I'll tell you that. The state brought in$900 million from that new 7 % capital gains tax in 2022, which absolutely blew past their estimates.

4:00But more than half that revenue came from just 10 people. So when you're losing someone like CEO entrepreneur, Jeffrey Bezos, it actually does impact the bottom line of the tax revenue that the state was expecting to generate. Yeah, I mean, Bezos would have provided a quarter of all the gains from the capital gains tax. It really is an interesting fine balance you have to strike for states because Washington is home to a decent amount of wealthy people because it is also the home to Microsoft, Starbucks, Boeing, huge corporations. Amazon. Amazon. Yeah, I forgot about Amazon. So there's a balance you have to strike.

4:36We have these really wealthy people and corporations in our state. We want to make money from them via taxes because why else have them. But you don't want to go too far in the other direction and cause them to leave. And we're seeing a mini exodus of sort. Other billionaires are leaving Washington. California is suffering a similar problem. They're moving to these lower tax jurisdictions in Texas and Florida. And in this increasingly mobile society where a billionaire can just pick up and buy a$200 million house in Miami, they're probably going to do that if they can save whatever Jeff Bezos is saving$610 million.

5:12Yeah, it's definitely a dangerous and fine line, not dangerous, but a fine line that Washington is walking here. You want people to pay their fair share, but you also don't want to disincentivize these people. I'll tell you who is welcoming them with open arms, though. It is Florida. Florida has been absolutely cooking, Miami specifically. Remember, Ken Griffin from Citadel moved to Miami during the pandemic. It's now building a$1 billion office space there. He also said that he thinks that Southeast can eventually surpassed New York as the financial center of the company. So a lot of attention.

5:44Amazon is building out a bigger footprint in Miami as well. Bezos is snapping up houses there. He paid $79 million for a mansion and then bought the next property over for$68 million. So a lot of money flowing into South Beach in particular. Miami is the fifth most important real estate market for the world's wealthiest people right now, which is kind of crazy to think about. It's only behind in Los Angeles, Hong Kong, New York, and London. It's not that big of a city, but because of its tax policies and maybe its weather, too, that might have something to do with it, the world's wealthiest are really flocking there.

6:19And you're seeing shifting geographies all over the place in the corporate world these days. Elon Musk has pulled Neuralink incorporation out of Delaware and moved it to Nevada. And then just this morning, or late last night, actually, He reincorporated SpaceX from Delaware to Texas. So you are seeing a lot of movement away from the northern cities that have heavier tax policies to the south in this increasingly mobile world. Absolutely. Let's move on. We have another trillion dollar market cap to tell you all about, but it's not part of FAANG or the Magnificent Seven. It's not even a company at all.

6:56It's Bitcoin. Bitcoin is back, baby. its recent rally pushed its market cap back into the 13-digit club for the first time since November of 2021, and it's priced to over$51 ,000. That would make it the eighth largest company in the world, if you know it was a company. It seems that the recent price rebound is driven mostly by the same excitement that kicked off this rally, the approval of Bitcoin ETFs by the SEC. Since that rather begrudging approval, things have been going quite swimmingly for the cryptocurrency. CoinShares data on Monday showed that inflows to the new Bitcoin ETFs are well ahead of outflows.

7:34A net$2.8 billion has been deposited since their approval in January, with$1.1 billion coming in the last week alone. So it seems like interest hasn't fallen off and is in fact accelerating instead. I'll say it again, Neil, Bitcoin is back. People still don't know what Bitcoin can be used for, but apparently one thing it does do and has shown it does do over the course of its more than decades long run is go up in price. And that is a good enough reason for people to buy in. I mean, its all-time high was 69 ,000 and it's at 52 this morning, even higher than 52. So it's getting close to its all-time high after all that's happened.

8:15We've seen boom and busts over its course of its history, but every time it seems to collapse, it grows even higher. Yeah, I do think that what we're seeing here is a lot of people celebrated the arrival of Bitcoin ETFs as the arrival of institutional money getting involved with Bitcoin. And I think what we're seeing is a lot of institutional investors are maybe playing a little bit of catch up. A lot of them were pretty risk averse in 2023 just because of the high interest rates. It was a bit of an uncertain climate. But now, if you want to make up for last time, where do you go for outsized return?

8:50You check out crypto and you also check out AI a little bit. So I do think we're seeing maybe some catch up here. And that's why we're seeing a little bit of frenzy around Bitcoin again. Very interesting to hear the Robinhood earnings call. Their CFO said that one in 20 of Bitcoin investors are getting into the crypto through an ETF. And most of those were new investors in Bitcoin. So that's a signal that the ETFs are attracting new retail investors, which was exactly what they had intended. Yeah. And then the final element pushing Bitcoin's price up is the upcoming Bitcoin halving, which is an event that occurs every four years or so that reduces the reward for mining Bitcoin transactions by a half.

9:29That does not sound like a real thing. It sounds like something I'd read in like J.R. Tolkien. I know. Well, it's programmed into Bitcoin. Like these events happen. They are predetermined and happen right around four years. And usually there is a massive price run up after it because, again, it's constraining supply of Bitcoin and supply and demand, baby. So Bitcoin having that is slated to happen in April. So mark your calendars. All right, let's move on. If you were scrolling through Instagram the other day and stopped to watch a video Mark Zuckerberg posted, you were in for a rare sight in Fortune 500 CEO land.

10:02Zuck was talking specifically and candidly about a rival's product. It's no secret that when the Apple Vision Pro came out, people immediately began speculating on what Zuck and Meta's 10-plus-year-old reality labs divisions thought about Big Bad Apple horning in on their turf. And in the video Mark posted, he told us that he was pretty unimpressed. He thought that the pass-through technology was worse and darker than on the Quest 3 and repeatedly mentioned the fact that the device was over seven times more expensive than the one his company makes. The standout line was, I quote, I don't just think that the Quest is the better value.

10:39I think Quest is the better product, period. I can't stress enough that this is not something that you usually see CEOs doing. What do you make of Zuck sitting in his living room and just talking to us about his competition? Can you imagine the CEO of Five Guys just walks into an In-N-Out, takes a burger, takes it home, and is just like, I think mine's a little bit better. No, this is extremely unusual. I'm trying to get into Zuck's headspace right now, thinking about why he would post this. What is the point? This is very unusual, as we've said. So I guess my thinking is that, you know, as I've said with this whole Vision Pro rollout, is he only has things to gain from Apple getting into this space.

11:18As you mentioned, the Quest has been available. Meta's had a headset for 11 years now. I don't know how much there is awareness around it, but Apple getting into the industry and releasing its own headset, that maybe creates this halo effect that Zuck thinks can only be good for him. So playing up the rivalry, I think, or he thinks benefits him. We'll see if it actually does. Yeah, I mean, he brought the receipts to this video, of course. I mean, it is a video that he had control over, but he said Quest 3 weighs 120 grams less. Remember, that's a big knock on the Apple Vision Pro that it's so heavy on your face.

11:52He also says that he finds it gives you greater motion because there's a lack of the battery pack, and then also there's a wider field of view. So he did definitely bring what he saw were the aspects of the Quest 3 that made it better than Apple Vision Pro. But I did see kind of multiple reactions to this. Kind of like the Twitter tech crowd really celebrated and said that it shows that he's still got that fire in him. It's still a founder-led company. You wouldn't see any other companies doing this other than Meta, which is probably true. But also, if Meta wasn't on kind of this all-time heater right now, if it didn't just pass the trillion-dollar market cap, Would you really want your CEO addressing the competition?

12:29So I think it is a product of the environment and the year that Meta has had. But I guess if you've had that year, you can do whatever you want. Yeah, Zuck's like on a hot streak. He's a basketball. He's like Klay Thompson who just hit five threes. Then he's just running down the court about to jack up another one because you're just riding the heater. But yes, the product that he has is 11 years old. And the product he was reviewing is 11 days old. Apple is totally going to iterate off this V2, V3, V4. It's going to be so much better than what it is now. So it is a really unfair comparison. I'll say the line.

13:01It's not an apples to apples comparison. Sorry, everyone. OK, we are going to hear a quick word from our sponsors, but stick around because Neil is sharing his Neil's numbers right after this. Eczema isn't always obvious, but it's real. And so is the relief from EPCLIS. After an initial dosing phase, about four in 10 people taking EPCLIS achieved its relief and clear or almost clear skin at 16 weeks. And most of those people maintain skin that's still more clear at one year with monthly dosing. EbGliss, LibriKizumab, LBKZ, a 250 milligram per two milliliter injection is a prescription medicine used to treat adults and children 12 years of age and older who weigh at least 88 pounds or 40 kilograms with moderate to severe eczema.

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14:14Tonight on NBC, Jimmy Fallon and Bozema St. John host a highly anticipated new competition show. I hire 10 creatives from all walks of life. They will be battling it out to see who can impress the world's biggest brands. This is a huge opportunity. This is the battle for the next big idea. This is not play play. We're spending millions of dollars. I'm so excited to embark on this adventure with all of you. Make the best idea win! On Brand with Jimmy Fallon. Series premiere tonight on NBC. Welcome to Neil's Numbers, the segment where I share three stats from the week's news that will make you the small talk hero at the office today.

14:53For my first number, it wouldn't surprise you if Baylor University in Texas beat Ivy League schools in sports. But maybe it would surprise you that Baylor University is beating the Ivy League in investing, too. Baylor's endowment grew 6.4 % in the fiscal year ended June 30th, topping the returns of all the Ivy League endowments, the Wall Street Journal reported. With a 10.9 % annualized return over the past five years, it's beating all the Ivies except for Brown over that period. and it ranks in the top 5 % for all U.S. endowments in that span. It is all thanks to the investment chief, David Moorhead, a.k.a.

15:28the Oracle of Waco. When he arrived in 2011, Baylor's endowment was$900 million. Today, it's at$2 billion. What's Moorhead's winning strategy? Well, it is a risky one. He's much more active than other endowment fund managers, adding or trimming holdings when an asset moves 10 % one way or the other. If the market goes up, we take some money back. If the market goes down, we give it money. He said, it's finance 101. Yeah, I mean, shout out, Baylor. Also, first of all, school pride manifests in really strange ways. Why was I happy that Brad was sitting atop the endowment rankings? But hey, we'll take it where we can get it.

16:03I definitely think size of endowment plays a factor here. I mean, Harvard's over$50 billion, so you can't be splashing money around with an endowment that size. But there's not, I mean, I don't want to say there's not a lot to lose for Baylor. But again, you can be a little bit more aggressive or when people are being more conservative because it is a relatively smaller endowment. His strategy around the sort of back to normal trade coming out of covid was very interesting because everyone else was buying. You know, we were airline stocks, hotels, restaurant stocks coming out of the pandemic. But this guy was buying fuel payments provider for the trucking industry, Fleet Corp, Transdime, which is a maker of aerospace components likely to benefit from the resumption in travel.

16:46And then Excesso, which is ticketing software for theme parks. So you've got to go. He went a little level down. Yeah, deeper than we did. OK, moving on for my second number. You've heard about this conspiracy that Taylor Swift is a Pentagon asset who is part of a government plot to engineer a relationship with Travis Kelsey, have the Chiefs win the Super Bowl and boost her popularity to give her impending endorsement of President Biden in the upcoming election greater heft. Right. Well, a new Monmouth poll out yesterday showed that nearly one in five Americans believe this is true. Well, more than 80 percent reject it.

17:19It does split significantly along party lines. About a third of Republicans believe in the Taylor Swift government psyop compared to six percent of Democrats. And I think this aspect was the most fascinating. Forty two percent of people who believe the conspiracy had never heard of it before they were informed of it in the poll. Yeah, I mean, I'm going to take a stance here. Honestly, good for Taylor Swift's brand, because if you're at the level of being a government side of influencing elections, that means you've made it, baby. So I think it's very good for her brand. But also, Taylor Swift has seen the real results of actually driving people to turn out and vote before.

17:56So that's probably why this is like mixed into this kind of conspiracy theory. I mean, she posted just one link on her Instagram story. Vote.org said it drove 35 ,000 registrations shortly after. So she really does mobilize a young force. So she has influence, whether she wields it or not is up to her. She endorsed Biden 2020, and Biden is reportedly very hoping for endorsement in the upcoming election as well. My final number is about two five-star prospects who received scholarships to play at Winthrop University in South Carolina. To play what, you ask? Well, cornhole. Yes, Gavin Heyman and Jackson Remick, two high schoolers from Colorado, appear to be the first ever Division I recruits for Cornhole, the backyard game that requires players to throw beanbags into a hole.

18:43For context, this is as seismic as when Toby Howell decided to play soccer for Marquette, a total game changer. These 17-year-olds are elite at Cornhole, winning the American Cornhole League High School National Championship twice. They're going to serve as the centerpiece of Coach Dusty Thompson's plan to build a powerhouse program at Winthrop. The star cornholos aren't getting a full ride to Winthrop, though, because the sport isn't sanctioned by the NCAA. But still, getting at least some of your tuition knocked off because you can throw bags with extreme precision has got to make their parents happy.

19:16We're really getting into Toby's college lore today. But yes, I love the fact that not only are there cornhole recruits, there are five star cornhole recruits. I didn't know we were at a star rating system for this sport yet, but I love it. Sounds like these two are worth the billing. Two-time American Cornhole League high school national champions. They truly are the, I mean, LeBron James didn't go to college. I guess the Anthony Davis of Cornhole recruits. Yeah, I mean, Cornhole is becoming a serious sport. ESPN televises it. These athletes are expected to get NIL deals, endorsements. So they're expected to make money from playing at Winthrop.

19:54Meanwhile, Winthrop is near Rock Hill, South Carolina, which is apparently the global headquarters of Cornhole. They host a lot of championships there. So it's maybe not a coincidence that Winthrop and Cornhole and Rock Hill are all together in the same space. Absolutely. Let's move on. Earnings reports are always a stressful market moving time for companies. But Lyft somehow made its most recent report more stressful and more market moving than ever before. the company accidentally added an extra zero to an important profitability metric, convincing investors that they expected their profit margin to expand by 500 basis points in 2024, when the number should have been 50 basis points.

20:36So even though it's only one zero off, it corresponds to around$630 million in forecasted profitability. That error also sent the stock up 67 % in after hours trading as investors were buoyed by the unexpected optimism, before falling to up just 15 % after the correction. Lyft's CEO has since come out and apologized for the error, telling Bloomberg in her interview that it was, quote, my bad, your bad indeed. Neil, it led a lot of people to wonder, what the heck is the proofreading process like at Lyft if a mistake like this can slip through the cracks? Right, you might think with all of the earnings reports that come out every single quarter, there'd be more typos, to be honest, but analysts said that they had never seen anything of this scale in at least 25 years of covering Wall Street.

21:22So this was actually pretty significant. And it overshadowed what was a really good quarter for Lyft. So I'm sure the executive team is just really upset that everyone's talking about their typo instead of the fact that they're kind of on the path to profitability now. Yeah, but the weirdest part was that yesterday, after the mistake was corrected, the stock still was up as much as 30 % during the day, which is its biggest interday gain ever and hit its highest point in a year. So it was like a very weird thing where how much of it was hangover from the 60 % rise? How much of it was, yes, that they actually did have a good quarter?

21:56The CEO tried to blame it on AI for a second in an interview, but then someone came out and said, hey, listen, AI does not write our press releases. We don't really know what he was talking about. I did go in down the rabbit hole and see, has something like this happened before to other companies? And my favorite one was actually back in 1999, a biotech company switched two digits on an inventory report. The share slid 10 % after he corrected his mistakes. They had to do it via fax, though. Imagine having to fax a correction to all these investors and have word travel slowly via fax versus via the internet.

22:32So definitely a different time back then. Finally, it's time to hand out this week's We Are So Back Award. And what is so back this week are rom-coms. Yes, movies starring two very attractive people falling hopelessly in love and making us laugh along the way could stage a comeback after the surprising box office success of Anyone But You, starring Glenn Powell and Sidney Sweeney. In seven weeks at theaters, the film has racked up$170 million globally, including$80 million in North America. Compare that haul to its budget of just$25 million. Hollywood is a copycat industry, so when studios see that kind of return, they could pile into more rom-coms, especially as big-budget superhero flicks fall out of favor with audiences.

23:13and if so, it would mark the revival of a genre that hadn't got much love, ironically, by Hollywood in the past decade. Between 2004 and 2010, studios consistently released between 15 and 25 rom-coms every year, but from 2011 through last year, there were less than 15 new rom-com or romance releases per year, and most years there were fewer than 10. Toby, is Hollywood's interest in rom-coms a one-night stand, or do you see actual chemistry? I am hesitant to crown rom-coms as back, Neil, because I think this was kind of a one-off movie. I mean, it was starring Sidney Sweeney and Glenn Powell. There was a very large TikTok kind of interest in their relationship outside of the movie.

23:54Like there was definitely rumors going around between some chemistry between them off the screen. So I think that helped kind of fuel this marketing boom. Also a TikTok trend kind of piggybacked on top of the movie. People started dancing to a song, Natasha Benningfield's Unwritten, absolutely incredible song. Yeah, exactly. And that kind of helped propel its popularity And we saw that in the weird box office performance of this, because when this movie dropped, it brought in six million dollars in its opening weekend. Relatively disappointing. Nothing to write home about. But then it just kept chugging along.