MARKET MOVERS

  • Elon Musk takes 9.2% stake in Twitter. Shares of Twitter Inc. rocketed toward a five-month high Monday after it was disclosed. In a Schedule 13G filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Tesla Inc. TSLA, -0.94% Founder Musk had acquired 73.49 million shares of Twitter or 9.2% of the shares outstanding. Wedbush analyst Dan Ives says this could lead to a more active stake and a potential more aggressive ownership role of Twitter.

  • Tesla deliveries hit record. The company reported first-quarter deliveries of about 310,000 vehicles on Saturday. Tesla’s daily production in the first quarter was about 3,400 vehicles a day, up from about 3,300 vehicles a day in the fourth quarter of 2021. That is based on when Tesla facilities were actually running and bodes well for the future. Currently, Tesla is expected to deliver about 340,000 vehicles in Q2.

  • Starbucks halts share buyback. This will be effective immediately, as Howard Schultz returns to the company as chief executive for the third time. The pausing of the share buyback comes as Starbucks faces pinched supply chains, effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, and heightened tensions and political unrest. Share buyback suspension will allow Starbucks to invest more in the company's people and its stores, CEO Howard Schultz said.

  • Crypto is now in the institutional game, says BowTied Bull. Hard to debate this. When you have: 1) public company CEOs buying, 2) small countries buying, and 3) hedge funds and mutual funds buying, you’re in the institutional game. Big picture Crypto looks pretty good. It bakes in a $1.3T demand increase over the next 28 years which isn’t a massive number. Read more here.

  • Container congestion is causing more disruptions. About 3% of the world's containers go in and out of Ukraine in Russia. It might look like a small number but what this means is that since the sanctions were self-imposed by container companies, all the containers that were heading to Russia or Ukraine are now stuck on ships and are causing congestion in the supply chain. Source(5:19)

  • Terra is now the 3rd largest holder of Bitcoin. Terra has accumulated nearly 31,000 BTC to date, just behind MicroStrategy and Tesla. The two-year-old UST is also now the fourth-largest stablecoin by market cap, behind Tether, USDC, and the BUSD stablecoin founded by Paxos and Binance. Adding bitcoin as a piece of this reserve just furthers their mission of being the largest decentralized money there is. Read more here.

WHAT TO WATCH

  • AMD to buy cloud-services provider Pensando for $1.9 billion. Pensando’s distributed services platform is already deployed at scale across cloud and enterprise customers, including Goldman Sachs, IBM Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Oracle Cloud. The acquisition is expected to close in the second quarter of 2022. Upon closing, Pensando CEO Prem Jain will join AMD as part of the Data Center Solutions Group.

  • Exxon gives green light to $10 billion Yellowtail development off the coast of Guyana. The project will include six drill centers and up to 26 production and 25 injection wells. There is an expected production of about 250,000 barrels of oil per day starting in 2025. Yellowtail production from One Guyana floating production storage and the offloading vessel will develop an estimated resource of more than 900 million barrels of oil.

  • Hertz plans EV expansion with 65,000 Polestars. The cars from Polestar, an all-electric automaker controlled by Volvo Car AB and its owner Zhejiang Geely Holding Group Co., will join some 100,000 Tesla vehicles that Hertz said it’s buying in a $4.2 billion purchase announced in the fall. Both deals give the rental giant a steady stream of some of the most coveted battery-powered cars. Read more here.

  • All eyes in the crypto world are on Miami this week. The 2022 Bitcoin Conference is happening this week in Miami. Expect some buzzy announcements. This was the event at which El Salvador President Nayib Bukele said his country would adopt bitcoin as legal tender last year. He’ll be speaking again, along with Peter Thiel, Cathie Wood, and Aaron Rodgers.
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