#15 Edition of The Daily Grind

In today’s newsletter:

• Reddit the next meme stock: Reddit's Unconventional IPO: A Social Media Experiment.

• 1st private moon landing: stock price soared over 250% and then also got dumped to a 105% gain as of now

• Instagram Launches it’s creator marketplace

• India’s first anime channel and a ton more….

Is Reddit the next meme stock?

Reddit's Unconventional IPO: A Social Media Experiment.

Reddit, the birthplace of meme stocks, is stepping into the stock market limelight with its own IPO. Here’s the tea:

• Unlike typical IPOs, Reddit plans to offer 75,000 of its power users a chance to snag shares at the IPO price, a perk rarely seen for individual investors.

• Why the special treatment? Reddit aims to reward its volunteer moderators, the unsung heroes who keep its communities in check.

• But initial reactions from Reddit users suggest skepticism, with one top comment predicting "the beginning of the end."

• Financially, Reddit has struggled to match its popularity with profitability. Despite being a top US website, it's been in the red since its founding in 2005, raking in $804 million in revenue in 2023 compared to projected giants like X, with $2.5 billion.

• Reddit's risk factors list is longer than Facebook's and Twitter's combined when they went public, according to Bloomberg Opinion's Dave Lee. Brace yourselves for a wild ride.

• To boost revenue, Reddit eyes AI, striking a $60 million per year deal with Google to license its vast message trove for AI training, potentially opening doors to more partnerships.

In short, Reddit's IPO promises to be as quirky and unpredictable as its platform itself. Reddit’s IPO has been nothing short of complete awesomeness, adding flavour to the mundane process of going public. Whether it works out for them or not, it’s going to be genuinely entertaining.

First Private Moon Landing

At 4:53 am (IST) on February 23rd, Intuitive Machines's Odysseus lander achieved a historic milestone by becoming the first US spacecraft to land on the moon since Apollo 17 in 1972. Talk about shooting for the stars!

• Despite a last-minute navigation hiccup, Odysseus touched down at the moon's southern pole region around 5:00 am IST on Friday, following its launch aboard a SpaceX rocket a week earlier. It's now on a mission to uncover the moon's secrets, including the presence of water in its craters.

• While NASA aims to send humans back to the moon through its Artemis program, budget constraints have prompted the agency to team up with private companies under the NASA Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative. This partnership allows NASA to send data-collecting instruments to the moon via private spacecraft, like Odysseus, at a fraction of the cost.

• NASA paid Intuitive Machines $118 million for Odysseus to ferry six high-tech research machines to the moon. This approach, according to Thomas Zurbuchen, could save NASA half a billion to a billion dollars compared to leading such missions itself.

• Cheaper missions also mean higher risks, as seen with Astrobotic Technology's Peregrine lander, which failed to reach the moon last month due to a fuel leak. The space game isn't without its challenges!

• Intuitive Machines's stock, once struggling post-IPO, has skyrocketed 260% since last month, thanks to the excitement surrounding Odysseus. Who knew moon landings could be such a hit among finance bros? It's not just for space nerds anymore!

There's more to the story in a press conference, the company revealed that its Odysseus moon lander tipped over. Since then, the stock price has fallen from its peak, leaving it with only a 105% gain now.

SNIPPETS

• Instagram has officially launched its marketplace, connecting brands and creators in eight new countries. The platform, initially tested in the U.S. in 2022, has successfully onboarded "thousands" of creators and brands. The expansion brings access to the marketplace in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Japan, India, and Brazil.

• Airtel and Sony tie up to launch India’s first anime channel ‘Anime Booth’.The channel will be accessible through Airtel’s DTH services, including Airtel Digital TV and Airtel Xstream TV, at a subscription cost of ₹1.8 per day.

• Nvidia delivered a stellar, expectation-beating earnings report, catapulting its performance even further on Thursday by adding $277B to its market cap. This achievement surpasses the single-day value gain record set earlier this month by Meta. Goldman Sachs claims that “Most Important Stock On Earth.“

• Paytm founder and CEO Vijay Shekhar Sharma is stepping down as part-time non-executive chairman and board member of the embattled Paytm Payments Bank.

• Figure AI raises $675M at $2B pre-money valuation, from Bezos, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Amazon, Intel, OpenAI.

• Crypto projects have received over $90 billion in all-time funding.

AROUND THE WEB

• The podcast of the day is about social arbitrage trading, with Chris Camillo(a great twitter follow) on B The Trader’s channel.

• 17 tips to improve your ChatGPT prompts.

• The reddit of the day is r/AskReddit.