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 58 seconds.

Yesterday, Alibaba did some mitosis, AMC rocketed after an offline Amazon push, and Elon Musk dropped Twitter on the ground. 🔥

Let’s dive in.

What’s hot, what’s not?

Market Commentary

• King Dollar’s hefty slide is being welcomed by the world with open arms, as America’s tight grasp over the world slowly loosens.

• Tech stocks looked tipsy, Bank stocks looked steady, and bond markets looked calm. Pretty decent markets yesterday. 😅

• The BoE Governor said that no financial crisis is imminent, but rules may need to be tightened after the SVB and Credit Suisse shenanigans.

Story Roundup

1 - Alibaba does some mitosis. 🦠

Looks like Jack Ma paid a lot of attention during his Grade 9 biology classes.

Alibaba is now planning to split up it’s behemoth business into 6 different units - and by split up, I mean SPLIT UP.

Each of these units will have a separate CEO and board, along with the possibility of each company going public on it’s own.

Beijing has increasingly turned it’s all-powerful eye on Alibaba’s business, with fines totalling $2.8bn coming their way over the last 2 years.

But the main aim of the split is to “become nimble” and “unlock shareholder value” - which is why there are gonna be tons of IPOs too.

The market is the best litmus test of how companies are faring - and time will tell how this one floats. 📦

2 - AMC pops after Amazon acquisition rumours. 📈

People are moving out of their homes and slowly getting back to normalcy.

Amazon wants to try take a bite of that pie.

A report by their investment advisors said that they are exploring a takeover of AMC - the same movie meme stock that popped during the pandemic.

Their current market value sits at around $4bn - but some eyebrows should still be raised about the acquisition.

AMC has some really high debt and the valuation still remains a very hot point among it’s key investors.

Amazon is probably gonna be better served by going for Cineworld - another struggling movie chain that’s had a pandemic-induced reversal of fortunes.

Plus, Baba Bezos wants to spend a lot of money pumping movies out - with about 20 films slated to be released as Amazon Originals.

Grab the popcorn, folks. This is gonna be a fun one. 🍿

3 - Elon Musk chops Twitter’s value in half. 🔪

If you have a spare $25 billion lying around that you don’t really need - you have two options.

Option 1 is to hit reply to this email and let me know how I can pick it up, and Option 2 is to buy Twitter.

Elon Musk clearly chose Option 2 - and he’s internally marked down Twitter’s valuation to $20 billion.

That’s a 55% drop from the price he paid for it, which basically means that a lot of his money has gone up in smoke.

This steep drop happened because he’s offered employees new equity grants at a good discount - which is super common with early-stage companies.

In theory, this gives Twitter employees a healthy upside if the company recovers.

Operative sentence: if the company recovers.

Elon Musk has a looong way to go. 😅

4 - Microsoft lets AI go ham on security. 🔐

Bill Gates has a big mission, and he wants to inject AI into everything he can.

So say hello to Microsoft’s latest brainchild - a new tool that summarizes security threats and tells you how to eradicate them.

This one is called Security Copilot, and the use cases seem interesting.

The main goal is to complement the work of cyber-security and cyber-risk guys. Around 1,300 passwords are stolen per second (yep, you read that right) so fragmented tools are not gonna be enough to stop hackers.

Security Copilot is like an “all-in-one” that monitors tons of ransomware gangs, 250+ cybercrime organisations, and receives 65 trillion+ threats per day.

Think of it like GPT being your personal password protector. 💀

5 - America finally manages to point the finger at SBF. 🫵🏻

The US has sued SBF for paying a $40mn bribe to Chinese government officials.

This bribe was apparently paid so that Alameda could regain access to their banned Chinese trading accounts and so that he could exploit the loophole that kept FTX alive.

SBF also laid blame for FTX's bankruptcy on a "months-long PR campaign by Binance’s CEO".

Oh, and the bribe was paid in Bitcoin. 🤣

Crypto bros are having a HORRIBLE year.

Hope you enjoyed this issue of Market Munch. If you’ve got any feedback - good or bad (😏) you can hit reply to this email and I'll get a ping in my inbox. Thanks a ton for reading!

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Cheers, and have a lovely day. 🙏

- Aryaansh ⚡