Finance
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The economist who wrote the book on sports finance has a number for FIFA’s World Cup haul: $15 billion
At soccer’s World Cup, the top scorer gets the “golden boot,” and the best goalkeeper is handed the “golden gloves.” This year’s tournament will also provide organizer FIFA with a golden opportunity to create billions in additional ticket revenues. Ticket prices are so high that even President Donald Trump, a billionaire ally of FIFA President…
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Elon Musk’s best friend could make more than $100 billion from SpaceX’s IPO. His firm is also owed billions by SpaceX
Elon Musk has a shadow. His name is Antonio Gracias, a handsome private equity investor from Detroit. The two met through the Silicon Valley web at the turn of the century, and soon Gracias—at 55, just one year older than Musk—lent Musk $1 million in his early days at Tesla, when the company was teetering…
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‘Nobody knows anything’ and ‘this time is different’: the phrases that define — and haunt — the AI economy
There are two phrases that have reliably marked every great financial bubble in modern history. The first is “this time is different” — what Sir John Templeton called “among the four most costly words in the annals of investing,” the signal that investors have begun rationalizing sky-high valuations by convincing themselves that old metrics no…
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A billionaire and an A-list actor found refuge in a 37-home Florida neighborhood with armed guards—proof that privacy is now the ultimate luxury
A quaint, 37-home neighborhood an hour from Miami is attracting moneyed residents, including actor Mark Wahlberg, despite not having a private golf club or coastline. Instead, its major selling point is privacy and a well-trained security staff of former military and police. Stone Creek Ranch, located in Delray Beach, Fla., is one of the hottest…
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The pig in the python: Baby Boomers are strangling the economy they built by refusing to move or retire
In 1974, New York Times humorist Russell Baker identified a “pig in the python” working its way through the economy: the bulge of 76 million Baby Boomers squeezing through America’s economic system, distorting everything they passed through. When Boomers flooded the labor market in the 1970s, they created a competitive squeeze that never fully released…
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Oil drops as U.S. says deal with Iran and Hormuz reopening is near
Oil dropped as the US and Iran edged toward a deal, although President Donald Trump said that Washington’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz would remain until an agreement was completed. Global crude benchmark Brent fell as much as 5.2% to $98.12 a barrel, while West Texas Intermediate was near $92. Trump said in social-media…
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Russia’s economy is much worse than it seems, and ‘elites are increasingly alarmed’ as alternate GDP gauge shows huge contraction
The Swedish government has come up with some drastically different economic figures on Russia that make the Kremlin’s official data seem like a Potemkin village. In a New York Times op-ed on Wednesday, Foreign Minister Maria Malmer Stenergard cautioned the West against overestimating Russia and said the economy is more fragile than it appears. While…
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Alaska’s oil revival sparks a new energy rush Into the Arctic
When John Kurz left Alaska’s North Slope in 2009, he was staring at a grim future for what had once been the country’s premiere oil field. Crude production had plummeted to 567,000 barrels per day, barely more than a quarter of the roughly 2 million barrels pumped daily at the field’s peak two decades earlier.…
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SpaceX stock is about to join this growing constellation of public companies building a space-based economy
Investors are salivating for SpaceX’s blockbuster IPO in a few weeks, but there are already a number of publicly traded stocks with exposure to different parts of the expanding space economy. The space sector has come into renewed focus as the U.S. and China race to the moon. Meanwhile, SpaceX also seeks to build a…
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‘We want neighbors, not tourists.’ Madrid’s renters march with message for the boom economy
Thousands of people rallied in central Madrid on Sunday against spiraling housing costs that have priced many Spaniards out of the housing market despite a recent economic boom, particularly in cities such as the capital and Barcelona. Spain’s housing crisis is one of Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s main political vulnerabilities before elections in 2027.…