The most expensive banana in the world and other indicators

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0:11This is The Indicator from Planet Money. I'm Waylon Wong here with Adrienne Ma. Good morning. Okay, Bela Lugosi. And also from Planet Money, we have the inimitable, the formidable, the corporeal, Keith Romer. I'm incredibly corporeal today. Hello. That's a relief. I'm glad to be here with you and Bela. It is Friday, the end of the week. And with Friday comes Indicators of the Week. Today we'll be digging into how much one banana could possibly cost. Ten dollars? I mean, maybe. We'll also talk about why it's difficult to get price information from funeral providers and just how much Elon Musk has profited off Trump's election.

1:00This message comes from NPR sponsor Zendesk, introducing the next generation of AI agents built to deliver resolutions for everyone. With an easy setup that can be completed in minutes, not months, Zendesk AI agents resolve 30 % of interactions instantly, quickly giving your customers what they need. Loved by over 10 ,000 companies, Zendesk AI makes service teams more efficient, businesses run better, and your customers happier. That's the Zendesk AI effect. Find out more at Zendesk.com. Before I tell you what my indicator is, I want to tell you what it's about, which is death. Bummer. Dun, dun, dun.

1:39Favorite topic heading into a weekend. Lay it on us, Adrian. My indicator is about the funeral industry, which is a business where putting prices on things can be difficult. Because, I mean, think about it. How often do you drive by a funeral home and they have a big sign outside that says, This weekend, cremations,$9.99. Five million served. But this is all part of the issue, right? It's like funeral homes are not known for advertising their prices. And to make matters even worse is like when people need funeral services, they're usually grieving, right? The shopping around for the best deal is not the first thing on their mind a lot of the time.

2:19And this means some consumers can get taken advantage of. They could get overcharged or hit with hidden fees or upsold things they don't need. Like the fancy lights around the rim of the casket kind of vibe. I mean, that is a necessity to me. Yeah, that's fair. That's fair. It's honestly shocking how much all of this costs. Like when you hear how much, you know, like a standard kind of funeral costs, it's really mind-boggling. I mean, so a few decades ago, the Federal Trade Commission actually realized that this was an issue. And they came up with this thing called the funeral rule. And in short, this rule says that funeral homes have to be transparent about their prices.

2:58And last year, the FTC did this sort of random audit to get a sense of whether funeral providers were following this rule. They called about 280 of these funeral homes, and they just released the results of this audit this week. And any guesses as to the success rate they had on getting price information from funeral providers on the first try? I'm going to do, let's say, 40 percent, like less than half the group. I'm going even lower. I think it's like 20%. So the actual number is 30%. So that is my indicator of the week, 30%. That is about the rate of success they had on getting information on their first attempt, which is, I would say, not a great number.

3:44No. Because that means 70 % are not complying with this rule at all, at least not right away, first try. Well, eventually, they did have more success. like they would make up to three calls. Oh, because that's what a grieving person wants to do, is make multiple phone calls to the same place to get some basic information. Precisely. So they did say that this is a problem, like having to make multiple phone calls to places. And actually, here's another telling detail from the report, which is that for many of the places they called, they weren't able to get any pricing information at all, even after multiple calls.

4:20So the results of this report suggest that despite having these rules, a lot of funeral providers are still being cagey with customers. OK. Natural transition from funeral parlors and death to really anything. My indicator. What do you got, Keith? My indicator is$67 billion, which is Bloomberg's estimate for how much Elon Musk's net worth has increased since Donald Trump was elected. Oh, how many funerals will that pay for? We'll never know. Even if you ask, they wouldn't tell you. That$67 billion number, that is an estimate. But Elon Musk, one guy is now worth around a third of a trillion dollars.

5:07I find this like almost hard to believe. Is this just from the value of Elon Musk's like? I mean, this is net worth. This is net worth. So it's everything, right? Like everything he owns is their estimate. So think of all his companies. He's got rocket ships. He's got satellites. He's got brain implants. He's got AI. He's got a failing social media company. And the big one, right, is Tesla. And he owns pieces of all these. In the last two and a half weeks since the election, Tesla itself, the stock, has gone up about 35%. It's one of these stocks that's really benefited from the post-election bump.

5:42So I've got sort of three explanations for what's happening here. The first one, the most cynical one, is that essentially crony capitalism, right? Like markets are thinking, you know, Musk spent over$100 million supporting Trump's campaign. And now, you know, Trump owes him and that's going to like help his businesses. Not a bad return on investment. Yeah, it's like 600 something X return on investment. You put in$100 million, you get$60 billion back. It's a great deal. My second, slightly less cynical explanation is that all of the deregulation that Trump is promising is just going to be helpful for somebody like Musk, who a lot of his companies are kind of on or across or skirting around regulatory lines anyway.

6:25Maybe with a little more freedom from regulation, they can really, you know, take off. Yeah. And there were reports this week, for example, that the Trump administration might take over regulatory control from the states for self-driving cars, presumably in a way that helps Tesla's big push into that space. And then explanation number three is just that Elon Musk and everything he touches is a meme stock. All right. So GameStop 3.0, 4.0. I don't remember what iteration of GameStop we're on. Sometimes markets are just vibes, right? Things associated with Elon Musk. They are having their kind of line go up moment right now.

7:08Do you know what else is way up since the election? Musk's favorite joke cryptocurrency, Dogecoin. Oh, I haven't thought about Dogecoin in a long time. Well, you should have. It has more than doubled since the beginning of the month. Okay, so you're saying this run in Dogecoin wasn't about the fundamentals? Not as far as I can tell, no. Hmm. Curious. Okay. Speaking of curiosities, here's my indicator. Gentlemen, I present to you one of the most talked about contemporary artworks in recent years. Comedian by the artist Maurizio Catalan. It is a yellow banana attached to the wall with a length of duct tape.

7:47Let's start the bidding at$1 million. Do I have$1 million? Can we do this like a reverse backwards auction until we get down to what we're willing to pay for? because I'm not going up. Well, banana beauty is in the eye of the beholder because comedian won up for auction at Sotheby's on Wednesday and the bidding went up and up. These are words I never thought I'd say. Five million dollars for a banana. Ultimately, the winning bidder paid 6.2 million dollars for this piece of art. That is my indicator, 6.2 million dollars. And this is a real, honest to God, perishable banana duct taped to the wall.

8:27It debuted at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2019 and caused a sensation. I mean, one function of art is to provoke, and this definitely did. I'm feeling FOMO just, like, hearing the description of it. Now, to be clear, the winning bidder is not getting the original banana from Art Basel. There's actually been three editions or versions of this art, and they are long gone, one even got eaten. The new owner gets duct tape, a banana, installation instructions, and a certificate of authenticity. So this is like the art equivalent of a meme stock. Yeah, like what is stuff worth? It's worth whatever people are willing to pay for it, whether you think it has fundamental value or not.

9:09The winning bidder for Comedian is a crypto entrepreneur and art collector named Justin Sun. He said the banana links the worlds of art, memes, and crypto. So maybe everything's just an expensive joke now? I don't know. The artist has described the banana as a reflection on what we value. And this week we saw what that value was. We value a banana taped to a wall. And Dogecoin. To paraphrase Arrested Development, there's always money in the banana art.

9:45This episode was produced by Cooper Katz McKim with engineering by Kwasi Lee. It was fact-checked by Sierra Juarez. Cake and Cannon edits the show in the indicators of production of NPR.