smohnot

TikTok has not been sold for $14B but Trump signed an executive order to transfer TikTok to US owners... for less than 1x it's US revenue.

It reminds me of the oligarchs in Russia, license raj in India, privatization in Mexico etc…

being close to political power lets folks buy up crown-jewel assets at a fraction of their true value.

This article isn’t referring to ai generated music

Cali is tough- the regulator is really standing in the way of a functioning market and is driving insurers away... Allstate stopped writing new policies in Nov 2022 and said they would pull out of the state entirely unless they could increase rates drastically... so they were allowed this increase.

The 2017 and 2018 wildfire seasons wiped out nearly two times the combined underwriting profits for California homeowners’ insurers for the prior 26 years… it’s acceptable to have large losses in this business but you need to have years of gains to offset them. CA is the only state that doesn’t allow for consideration of reinsurance costs in ratemaking.

CA requires insurers to underwrite using historical data from the past 20 years (which doesn’t include housing growth in high-risk regions or increased fuel load following years of drought and poor fire suppression strategies) to determine catastrophe losses vs predictively modeled data incorporating climate change. It is the only state that disallows forward-looking models when pricing wildfire risk.

Until California does something to ensure that the prices of insurance reflect the risk (letting them use modern catastrophe models, letting them price in reinsurance, approving rate filings in a timely manner), insurers will continue non-renewing folks and pulling out of the state altogether. It filed the rate increase in April 2023 and was just approved. In the meantime, Allstate has not added a single new homeowner in the state.

Leo does a great job explaining why VC's want liquidation preferences.

But founders/employees want them too! With all the crazy founder-friendly deals of 2021, I never heard of one in the US without a liquidation preference.

Why? Liquidation preferences allow the VC bought securities to be treated as "preferred" and reduce the common stock price in the 409a valuation report, allowing early employees to get options at low prices.

If VC's invested in common stock the strike prices would be much higher, making it less lucrative to be an early employee.

In parts of Europe there is different tax treatment for options and employees generally don't own as many shares due to it... and some of those companies don't have liquidation preferences. I believe Klarna (Sweden) doesn't have preferred shares, meaning the huge swing in valuation they had over the past few years is not as bad as it seems.

TBH the whole 409a thing is a charade & we probably need to clean up how we do accounting & taxes but until we do, preferred shares are here to stay.