2) The Bitcoin faithful haven’t reached the moon yet, and it appears there are fewer folks who have faith that’ll happen soon. With the price of Bitcoin down to $26.8k from its 2021 high of ~$69k, 12k+ people gathered at the Bitcoin 2023 conference in Miami Beach to talk shop, down from 25k+ in 2022.

3) Esports industry investors may need to press pause and reconsider their gaming strategy. Esports group FaZe Clan, which went public on the Nasdaq last year, laid off 40% of its employees and risks delisting if it can’t get shares back above $1. Meanwhile, America’s biggest esports league saw a 32% dip in spring season viewership compared to 2021.

4) In its chase for domestic dominance, JPMorgan Chase has opened branches in 25 new states and DC since 2018, and now boasts ~4.8k branches nationwide. (For context, Bank of America claims 3.9k branches.) JPMorgan’s expanding footprint matches its outsized role in US banking — it’s responsible for 13%+ of deposits and 21% of credit card spending.

2) Taco ‘bout riding trends — with Mexican food sales projected to grow by $113.8B through 2026, hot sauce aficionado Cholula is, quite literally, turning up the heat on competition. The company, bought by McCormick & Co. for $800m in 2020, is expanding beyond hot sauce for the first time with new salsas and seasoning blends.

3) During Google’s I/O developer conference, the company amped up the volume on its AI love song 143x — in the form of mentions of the word “AI.” CEO Sundar Pichai led the charge by saying “AI” 1.15 times per minute during his keynote. The term “generative” got 30 mentions (probably generating some eye rolls in the process); meanwhile, OpenAI only mustered a single, byte-sized mention.

4) Looks like job satisfaction is reaching new heights, leaving employees on cloud nine-to-five. According to the Conference Board’s latest survey, 62.3% of US workers said they were satisfied with their job last year, the highest number since 1987 when the organization began surveying. Satisfaction has been steadily rising since it bottomed out in 2010 at 42.6%.

2) Five… Five billion… Five billion in financing for the footloooong. Subway, valued at $10B+, has been seeking a sale since at least February, and adviser JPMorgan is now offering a $5B debt financing package to help sweeten the deal. That’s a lot of bread! Despite closing a net of 3.2k domestic stores between 2020 and 2023, Subway leads US restaurants with nearly 20.6k stores. Starbucks, in second place, has 16k.

3) Taylor Sheridan’s cowboy dramas have been a cash cow for Paramount, to the tune of $500m+ annually. Costs have included $500k per minute of the first season of “1923,” renting Sherdian’s $25-per-cow cattle herd, and up to $50k a week to film shows on Sheridan’s 266k-acre Four Sixes ranch in Texas, which he bought in 2022 for $341m+. ​​Talk about vertical integration.

4) The cost of this weekend’s coronation proceedings for King Charles III ran in the £50m-£100m range ($63m-$125m). For reference, when Queen Elizabeth II took the throne in 1953, the pomp and pageantry cost an inflation-adjusted ~£50m, and George VI’s coronation in 1937 rang up a more thrifty ~£24.8m. With the holiday weekend, the UK’s leisure industry is expecting some royal treatment of its own by way of a £350m boost.

2) Listen up, kids. The next time an adult asks you what you want to be when you grow up, tell them you want to open a brick-and-mortar confectionery operation that leverages the latest algorithmic recommendation tech. In other words, you want to open a candy store — of which there are 3.3k in the US — and market your goods on TikTok. One shop, Candy Me Up, has 1.1m+ followers, and a single video can stir up 10k orders.

3) Look, we get it. Bamboo looks nice. And it’s sustainable. But you can’t just freely use it in your marketing for products made of semisynthetic rayon, which appears to be a popular new trend among retailers. Well, you could, but you may end up like Kohl’s and Walmart, who the FTC fined $2.5m and $3m, respectively, last year for trying to, uh, bamboozle customers with their so-called “bamboo” sheets, towels, and rugs.

4) This AI stuff is really making a case for itself: Legal AI startup Harvey recently raised $21m in funding to help lawyers make their billable hours a byte more efficient. The company reportedly already has 15k+ law firms on its waitlist, and will be used by thousands of lawyers at prestigious firms like Allen & Overy and PwC.

2) It’s hard to complain about a $1.3m compensation package — unless you’re Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, one year removed from a $212.7m haul. As jarring as the drop may seem, this is all according to plan, per Insider. In 2021, Jassy received ~$212m in stock awards, which will vest over 10 years and drive a bulk of his comp over that time. With no further stock in 2022, Backup Bezos was left with his measly $317.5k base salary and $981k in 401(k) contributions and security costs.

3) What’s eating at in-office employees? Not just their commute, but also a lack of, you know, actual eating. Decision intelligence company Morning Consult found 63% of remote workers eat breakfast daily, compared to a 53% morning nosh rate for in-person workers, many of whom eat “on the go.” A further flex from the at-home crowd: lunch. They visit restaurants midday slightly more than their commuting comrades (14% to 11%, respectively).

4) You might feel like you’ve been living in a cave, but Spanish athlete Beatriz Flamini just came out of hers on Friday after 500 days. Flamini was part of an experiment studying how humans fare underground. Flamini — who was ~230 feet below — mostly read, exercised, and knit. “In fact, I didn’t want to come out,” she said.

5) Tomorrow is Tax Day in the US. You may want to grumble, but at least you can take solace in not being a Swedish bitcoin miner? The Nordic nation will abolish tax incentives for data centers this summer, amounting to a “prohibitively expensive” 6,000% tax increase per kilowatt hour of energy. The bitcoin-mining sector, drawn in by massive 2017 tax cuts, hasn’t fueled the job growth Sweden was seeking, and now it may be curtains.

2) ByteDance is doing the thing again. The controversial TikTok maker has another hit with Lemon8, now up to 16m global downloads. The lifestyle app, described as a Pinterest/TikTok hybrid, had a quiet US launch in February, but picked up speed in March with a reported ~4.25m US users. You may point to TikTok’s #lemon8 hashtag accruing 2.4B views as one reason for the growth and… yeah, we would, too.

3) New York City’s budget office found the total amount of unpaid fines for parking violations, speeding, running red lights, and unauthorized use of bus lanes there totaled $1.02B between 2017 and 2022. Normally, a chunk o’ change like that would raise our eyebrows, but this is New York drivers we’re talking about.

4) The IRS recently unveiled a game plan for its $80B in long-term funding, which includes improvements in tech, auditing, and making people who attempt to reach the agency on the phone a lot less pissed off. After a recent hiring push, the IRS is now answering 80%-90% of calls, up from 17% in 2022, and wait times are down to four minutes on average, down from 27 last year.

5) Illumination and Universal’s The Super Mario Bros. Movie goomba-stomped multiple records over the weekend, scoring the biggest opening ever for an animated film — $377m worldwide — plus the biggest debut ever for a video game adaptation and the top opening of 2023. Mamma mia, that’s a lot of gold coins.

2) Twitter revenue appears to still be way down. The site’s top 10 advertisers spent $71m from September to October. Over the past two months, they have spent just $7.6m. Musk’s company continues to push paid verification — an idea apparently so unpopular, even the King said he isn’t interested.

3) Apparently, there are college counseling consultancies that cost more than the average house. Command Education reportedly charges up to $750k to start helping seventh-graders get into elite schools, and up to $500k for ninth-graders. A reminder for parents shelling out that cash: save up a little extra for your child’s eventual therapists.

4) Crashing down to earth, Virgin Orbit — valued at ~$4B in 2021 — is now worth ~$74m, and has halted operations and laid off most of its staff after its satellite launching business failed to generate enough revenue.

5) In 2019, the top 25 Latin music tours grossed $251.3m across 2.8m tickets. In 2022, the top 25 grossed $990.8m across 8m tickets. Bad Bunny alone grossed $373.5m of that. Not bad, Bunny.

2) Remote work is an increasingly remote possibility for American workers. According to new Labor Department data, 72.5% of businesses had little to no remote work in 2022, up from 60.1% in 2021, and close to the 76.7% pre-pandemic figure.

3) Here’s some star bucks for ya: When the $150B International Space Station has to dodge space junk, the cost of an emergency maneuver averages $1m per incident. As for the commercial satellite industry, evading space junk is considerably cheaper — in some cases just $699 a pop — thanks to satellites’ relatively small size. (Still, satellite operators are on the hook for ~$58m in annual junk-ducking costs.)

4) A Massachusetts man was sentenced to 4.5 years in prison for stealing $8m+ through online romance scams. One case involved a Florida woman who he had send over $200k+ to help release him from custody… after an “explosion on his oil rig.”

5) A group of MIT researchers doing God’s work — testing 1k+ Oreos to understand the best way to separate the cookies such that the creme sticks to both sides — found that, no matter if they’re slowly twisted apart over five minutes or 100x faster than a human, the creme will stick to one wafer ~80% of the time.

2) Ever wonder if pro baseball players have to pay for WiFi on flights to games? Well, the New York Yankees and Cincinnati Reds do. In-flight WiFi can reportedly run a team ~$40k/yr.

3) Crunchyroll is the name of both a delicious sushi variety and the anime streaming service Sony bought from AT&T for $1.18B in 2020. An estimated 300m people watched Japanese animation in 2022, up ~100% from 2020. Crunchyroll says it is “solidly profitable” with 10m paid subs.

4) Taylor Swift kicked off her first US tour in five years. We definitely didn’t manage to get tickets, but we did learn new stats about her fandom. Some 45% are millennials, 74% are white, and 49% reported a household income under $50k.

5) The French Bulldog is having a good week. The American Kennel Club said it was the most popular dog breed in 2022, based on 716.5k registrations. That’s up 1k+% since 2012, when it was the 14th most popular breed.

2) The price tag on New York City’s 1.5-mile Second Avenue Subway extension to East Harlem is now expected to be $7.7B, up $800m from previous estimates, making it one of the most expensive per-mile railroad expansions in human history.

3) So far, the biggest movie of 2023 is 71-year-old Chinese filmmaker Zhang Yimou’s Full River Red, with the blockbuster raking in $670.3m so far in China. This week, it’s coming to 150 theaters in the US and Canada.

4) It’s rough out there. Per estimates from Redfin, US sales of luxury homes in the three months ending Jan. 31 were down 44.6% YoY, and non-luxury sales were down 37.5%. In Miami, luxury sales dropped 68.7%.

5) Instant Pot’s pop: Sales of the kitchen gadget reached a steaming-hot $758m in 2020, but cooled 50% to $344m in 2022. Instant Brands now has ~1.9k+ employees after cutting 15% of its staff.