My Insanely Overambitious Dreams to Insanely Innovate the FinTech News & Information Segment
I came across this ridiculous story on Bloomberg tonight and it kicked off a long-overdue post here!:
I’m no fan of Elon Musk - nothing personal, I just think his companies are completely full of shit and his “Cult-of-Personality” valuations are so overblown they remind me of Enron at its height.
But all that said, this story is ridiculous. This city signed an agreement, a contractual obligation, with SpaceX. They had legal representation. And with just a ten minute precursory look at that agreement, it’s quite obvious to me that Musk and SpaceX aren’t at all operating outside the contract’s perimeters in any way.
In other words, this city signed up for this. Tough shit if you didn’t read the fine print. Frankly the downside is way overstated here to begin with; the economic upside and all that goes with it is barely mentioned. My guess is the author got his hands on a small group of disgruntled residents and put together an incredibly slanted story.
It’s not like there’s a launch three times a day (though in all honesty how good would that be for this city and SpaceX??!! Jobs, new development, enormous increases in local tax revenues for new schools, hospitals, parks - you name it…). And unlike the analogy one resident makes to SpaceX “being like Nazi Germany” - let’s get real. SpaceX didn’t roll in with a several battalions of troops and armored tank divisions and annex the damn city. They actually were competing with two other municipalities to be chosen by SpaceX! They offered incentives - State and Municipal Government - to win that competition.
My Firm is going through something slightly similar in a large real estate development in the southwest (I can’t name names; lawsuits will be flying any minute now and of course I don’t want to exacerbate an already delicate situation). We’ve brought together a deal that will change this particular city forever. And a small but extremely vocal group of longtime residents are giving us hell once the deal was approved (overwhelming by the mayor, city manager and an 11-0 City Council vote). And then this group somehow formed and they gained some media attention.
I mention this only because I guarantee you that’s what is happening here. This article focuses so much on the downside portions of the deal you’d think Musk was Darth Vader himself…and of course it doesn’t even mention any of the hard numbers that are from my quick read of the deal make up the enormous upside for this city.
Full disclosure: Bloomberg is a close partner of both my firm, Atlantic Lighthouse Management Ltd, and a Financial Technology Company we spun off and still have a substantial equity position in, Mercator Technology Group, Inc. (formerly an internal division of our firm). And to be frank I cannot say enough incredibly positive things about Bloomberg and all its business divisions. But the News Division has been relying more and more on some crap freelance reporters that are pushing out garbage articles like this one, and that’s sad to see from the by far and away premier global source of Financial News & Information. I understand the Digital Media segment extremely well, it’s what I did for over a decade. As a stand alone property Bloomberg News wouldn’t even exist - although the financial news sub-segment of Digital Media is in fact one of the “easier” sub-segments to monetize it’s by no means easy…and it’s extremely competitive. Add in Bloomberg TV and this company just hemorrhage cash.
Of course, Bloomberg L.P. the company as a whole is extremely profitable and one of the very best partners in the Financial Services Industry we’ve ever encountered. Their business model is genius, and their “Bloomberg Terminals” as we still call them on Wall Street (they used to provide those big full Bloomberg video terminals and of course for anyone who’s ever used one the infamous Bloomberg keyboards, which indeed are still used by many today), which is simply their Enterprise Financial News & Information offering (their very robust platform offers a lot more than just that; indeed while we have our own proprietary trading platform our Proprietary Trading Group utilizes, their trading platform is outstanding and I highly recommend it) sits on nearly every desk in Financial Services Companies around the world. We alone have 200 enterprise subscriptions for Atlantic Lighthouse Management and its subsidiaries; we have an exclusive partnership agreement with Bloomberg and while I of course can’t tell you what we pay…it isn’t cheap.
So to state it in a very simplistic manner, they have an Enterprise Subscription Services business model that is extremely profitable and subsidizes the Bloomberg News division.
And considering how incredibly vital they have been as a close partner of our Firm for over six years now, and my own extraordinarily positive personal opinion of their services, I’m the last person that would sit here at 9:30 PM EST with a million other far more pressing things to do than to bitch about some short-form article that criticizes, ironically enough, a company and a man I criticize every chance I get!
But these are the type of articles that shouldn’t even be considered by a Bloomberg editor to be pushed live. This belongs on Motley Fool at best, maybe Business Insider even. But not Bloomberg…they are way above this.
And to end this rant of a post in summary…I’m seeing more and more of this garbage on the Top Tier financial news sites and it’s concerning. I’ve got freelance bloggers (or journalists if you prefer - they are in today’s news world, again I understand the space extremely well) writing up posts that I know one day soon will hit a Business Insider or God forbid a Bloomberg News…“Small Wall Street Firm Killing Rare Endangered Desert Animals” or “Citizens Unite To Stop The Paving Of The Last Piece of Desert Waterfront Paradise” etc etc.
It will not stop our development, it’s as done a deal as one can get. But it will absolutely slow down its progress, it will add millions and millions of dollars in legal, public relations, and other ultimately “Sunk Costs” that will force changes to what is a truly beautiful business model, one where everyone wins and wins big. And it’s a project that I have a large personal stake in, something I rarely let occur…so the development’s Risk Exposure is ultimately much higher than any other project in our Real Assets Group’s investment portfolio.
In the end, I would just like to see the top tier financial news sources like Bloomberg, or CNBC, Financial Times, the Economist etc etc rely less on these types of stories with headlines that guarantee a ton of unique views (any title involving “Elon Musk” goes vertical fast and spreads virally like crazy; even better if the headline alludes to a small city that HATES Musk…doesn’t really matter what the hell the actual content is at that point, does it?), and maintain the editorial standards as best they can in a Digital Media competitive environment that is frankly f**king incredibly brutal, fast moving and skewed towards these kinds of articles that really if you read it closely don’t communicate a goddamn molecular piece of information worth reading about.
This is a post I know is written ultimately in vain. The reality is, this is an environment where even the most esteemed, highest-quality news and information sources we turn to have to push rubbish like this article live and push it live quickly simply to survive. It’s why both my company, its subsidiaries, and even myself personally, pay literally millions of dollars annually in subscription and retainer fees to the very best news and the globally elite intelligence & information firms to feed our risk, research and analysis platforms the very best information we can possibly procure. It’s also a niche - but I believe extraordinarily lucrative - sub-segment where someone who develops the right proprietary technology and business model could absolutely KILL it. Trust me, we are spending frankly too much working on it, and searching the globe for companies that are getting pieces of the model right.
I could repeat a thousand cliches that refer to information as the most valuable commodity one could procure. In the end, they’re pretty much all true. Especially of course in the Financial Services Sector - but really it’s the most powerful and valuable commodity in every business segment. The FinTech space (Financial Technology) is one which my Firm, Atlantic Lighthouse Management, is so focused on it could easily be called an obsession. And the the news, intelligence and information sub-segment of FinTech is one area I don’t think anyone has yet to really create something insanely innovative, something that changes the entire game.
I hope Atlantic Lighthouse Management, or Mercator Technology Group (of which we still hold a substantive equity stake in, along with several other companies, each of whom are among quite literally the largest and most innovative companies in Technology and Finance in the world), is somehow in the forefront of the inception of the insanely innovative Killer Application I constantly have been thinking about for years and years. That’s a big part of why I’m still in the game, working endless hours and traveling the globe as I build yet another Startup Company from inception.
It’s why I still am the Serial Entrepreneur I was when I launched my first startup, Rent-A-Kid, when I was just 12-years old. It’s no longer about the money anymore (and I am truly eternally grateful for that - another topic for another day, TRUE benefits of Financial Freedom that comes with monetizing your proprietary IP, and converting paper wealth into hundreds of millions of dollars, safely burying a large percentage of that hard currency into the safest, most secret and most easily accessed places one could find - I just got the concept for my next post on “Inside The Mind Of A Serial Entrepreneur,” my far too often neglected blog on Tumblr, www.troyjjensen.tumblr.com). It’s about truly creating something so insanely innovative it changes quite literally the world in some substantial way, small or large, forevermore.