What time is it? $GME time!
Tippets by Taps #156: GameStop, a hostage negotiation, cover letters, and more. Enjoy!
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GameStop. A dying retailer slated to close over 1,000 stores this quarter. Also, the hottest stock in the world, up a whopping 400% in the last week. There have been enough hot takes, podcasts, and explainers put out there to fill an entire school library. For anyone looking to get up to speed, I found this article in Vice to be a great explainer. Well-written, funny, and informative, it does a comprehensive job explaining the run-up to events that caused AOC and Ted Cruz to agree with one another, and that made Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, an ‘anti-establishment’ hero.
For more on how this whole situation evolved you can go here, here, and here. It’s also worth watching Trevor Noah explain it in the below video (Margot Robbie makes a cameo…sort of).
Most of the linked articles above were written before Robinhood, the free trading platform popular among millennials, and other brokerages restricted trading of GameStop stock. As such, they don’t detail the conspiracy theories that the trading restrictions prompted. Namely that the company is in the pockets of hedge fund managers / Wall Street, and shutting down trading was done to save Wall Street firms. Fact check: FALSE.
While the Main Street vs. Wall Street narrative is an easy one to understand, and Robinhood colossally bungled the messaging at the time of the restriction, the reality, as it often is, is a lot more complex. This Tweetstorm does a good job explaining what actually happened, but it certainly is not as simple as, “a bunch of Wall Street suits called up their VC friends and forced Robinhood to stop the trading. Wall Street and Robinhood bad. Reddit trading good.”
And as far my take, the only one I’ll offer is the one I tweeted Tuesday this week.
If Twitter had an edit button, I’d go back and change it slightly.
A lot more to come on this one!
Other Tippets from Around the Web
Apple (AAPL) reports record-breaking Q1 2021 earnings with $111.4 billion in revenue
The biggest company in the world just keeps knocking the cover off the ball. The company posted massive earnings last week, with a record $111 billion (with a B!) in revenue and over $28 billion in profit for the quarter! 🤯 With that amazing quarter, you’d expect the stock to have moved a lot considering the crazy trading week with GameStop et al? The stock ended down 3%…¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The T-Shaped Information Diet
In a world overflowing with content, it can be hard to separate the wheat from the chaff. In a great post by my friend Nick deWilde from his newsletter, The Jungle Gym (you should subscribe!), he talks about how to curate information streams that consistently deliver high-value insight.
American Parents Set Out to Find a Son Lost in Syria’s ‘Bermuda Triangle’
This is a wild read detailing how 32-year old Sam Goodwin’s quest to visit all 193 countries resulted in him in solitary confinement in a Syrian jail facing the prospect of life in prison, set free after the tireless efforts of his family and friends (but with surprisingly little help from the US government).
The Art of The Cover Letter
A hilarious, deftly written piece on the cover letter, arguably the least read piece of writing someone will ever produce. Some of my favorite passages below, but if you’re looking for an unexpected chuckle, the whole thing is worth a spin.
In the butchery of cover letter editing, one removes metaphors with chainsaws, cauterizes complexity with hot iron, and amputates anything more ambiguous than a grunt. I have no mercy for the saccharine cant of wild-eyed naïfs who write, “I would be thrilled to work as an entry-level associate.”
Because you wouldn’t.
I’ll say this: what I have done to language in the service of cover letters haunts me. At worst, cover letters strain one’s faith that words convey meaning at all, let alone that sentences can shimmer, steal breath, or gird spines. I spend each day climbing mountains of junky paragraphs, scavenging for hunks of usable scrap—like so much copper wire—my senses deadened by the incessant clang of multipart adjectives.
The cover letter is not written with any expectation of readership or audience. It is written with hope and desperation in equal measures. One writes under conditions of duress, anxiety, optimism, nausea, arrogance, and deep insecurity. And in these respects, the address to no one—writing for an imagined and idealized audience—might be the only redeeming quality of the whole endeavor.
Quote I’m thinking about: “Let your plans be dark and impenetrable as night, and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt.” ― Sun Tzu, The Art of War
If you have feedback on anything mentioned above or have interesting links/papers/books that you think would be worth sharing in future issues of Tippets, please reach out! Click the feedback link below, reply to this email, or DM me on Twitter at @taps.