Happy morning, Munchers! 🙏

As always, here is your daily dose of the news that matters, from Wall Street to Dalal Street - in 4 minutes and 53 seconds.

Yesterday, European regulators trained their eyes on Amazon, Elon Musk made his dog CEO of Twitter, and Salesforce found out that firing 7k people in a day isn't a good idea. 🔥

Let’s dive in.

What’s hot, what’s not?

Market Commentary

• High inflation isn't dampening spending. US retail sales rose 3% - smashing expectations and making tons of economists do a double take over their strongly held opinions on the world. Higher for longer it is.

• Strong consumer spending means that central banks have a little more leeway to hike rates because they get granted a little more space to hit the brakes.

• Indian markets were dragged up marginally by some renewed strength in the IT, realty, and auto sectors. Dalal Street's trader bhaiyas are having a lot of fun.

Story Roundup

1 - Europe gets suspicious of Amazon's Roomba purchase. 🧹

Half a year back, Amazon flexed their bank account and got ready to splash $2bn on the company that makes Roombas.

Their thinking with it is pretty straightforward.

They want to add Roomba to their growing portfolio of tech products that can be used at home (Alexa, Ring, speakers, etc).

But there's one big problem with this.

When a big tech company can hear what you say, see what's outside your house, and observe your spending habits, something might be fishy.

Regulators don't trust Amazon with Roomba - specifically how they take photos inside people's homes.

Amazon has to speak with the US FTC and Brussels-based regulators to sort this out.

At least someone's looking out for us... 💀

2 - Elon Musk gets on the lookout for Twitter's leader. 👀

Twitter's been balancing on a knife's edge for quite a while.

Advertisers have pulled out, but user traffic has spiked. No one knows which direction we're going in.

But Elon Musk has a plan to put the bird back on track.

He told a government summit in Dubai that he will "find Twitter a CEO by the end of the year".

In the meanwhile, Elon baba wants to stabilize the organization and make sure that they are in a financially healthy place.

On an unrelated note, he posted a picture of his dog yesterday, and named him as the new CEO.

He also said that his dog was "so much better than that other guy".

Hey, at least he knows how to laugh. 🤣

3 - Salesforce regrets letting go of 7k in a day. 💀

When 2022 hit, Salesforce got into quite a pinch.

They over-hired during the COVID boom and it all came back to them.

To cut costs and keep the business lean, about 7k employees were given the sack during a 2-hour Zoom call.

At the time, "global macro conditions" were blamed, but CEO Marc Benioff thinks that things could have been done better.

He acknowledged that hiring ticked up because of how much revenue accelerated during the pandemic, and they didn't anticipate a slowdown this hard.

Firing so many employees also poses a big cost - because they need to offer a minimum of 5 months of pay and benefits.

Hard-knock life. 🤞

4 - VCs pour millions into passwordless authentication. 🔑

Money might be harder to come by in startup land - especially if you're doing something obscure.

But a few mavericks are bucking the trend.

Passwordless authentication and user management platform Descope just raised $53 million, and it's quite a mammoth deal.

This money is gonna go toward growing their product's capabilities, investing in research, and splashing cash toward other open-source initiatives.

The company and investors aren't that interesting though.

What I find interesting is that this $53mn check was a seed round.

So much money being thrown into a relatively new, untested company could mean that nature is healing.

Those days of multi-million dollar deals might be coming back.

Fingers crossed. 🤩

5 - Spurs get ready for a billion-dollar takeover. 💸

The Prem is attracting some big bucks - and the latest attraction is a big one.

Iranian billionaire Jahm Najafi is preparing a blockbuster $3.75 billion takeover bid for Tottenham Hostpur.

They're valuing the club at $3 billion and giving them $750 million of debt as a credit line.

His sports consortium will put forward 70% of this money and other Gulf-based investors will take care of the remaining 30%.

It's interesting to see how much money has been splashing into sports of late. Big-name investors are looking to diversify away from bland, boring FDs and get a little more glam in their portfolio by buying up sports teams.

Guess they're playing ball. ⚽

Hope you enjoyed this issue of the Market Munch. If you've got any feedback - good or bad (😏) you can hit reply to this email. Thanks a ton for reading!

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Cheers, and have a lovely day. 🙏

Aryaansh