Friday's Fast Five: Week of 3.8
He Got Bored. Built an Empire. Then Cracked the Formula for the World’s Fastest Sport. (The Wall Street Journal): Dietrich Mateschitz never intended to build a Formula One world champion. Then again, he never intended to build a global energy-drink empire either. He pulled off both unlikely feats because of the same basic impulse: He was bored.
How the Soros Funds Lost Game Of Chicken Against Tech Stocks (The Wall Street Journal): For months, through late 1999 and early 2000, the Monday afternoon research meetings at George Soros's hedge-fund firm centered on a single theme: how to prepare for the inevitable sell-off of technology stocks. Almost as if reading from a script, Stanley Druckenmiller would begin the weekly meetings with a warning that the sell-off could be near and could be brutal. For the next hour, the group would debate what signs to look for, what stocks to sell, how fast to sell them. For all this, when the sell-off finally did begin in mid-March, Soros Fund Management wasn't ready for it.
Toyota wants hydrogen to succeed so bad it’s practically paying people to buy the Mirai (Tech Crunch): If you hurry, you can get $40,000 off a 2023 Toyota Mirai Limited, a fuel-cell vehicle that retails for $66,000. When you factor in the $15,000 in free hydrogen over six years and the available 0% interest loan, the new car would run you just $11,000. That’s how much it costs Toyota to make the vehicle’s fuel cell stack alone, according to the most recent estimate. You buy the fuel cell, Toyota pays for the rest of the car. It would be a great deal, if you can find the hydrogen to power it.
Jude Bellingham’s non-goal shows us football’s full-time law needs to change (The Athletic): The laws allow for subconscious bias, the possibility of home teams or favorites being given more chances, and for inconsistency, with referees interpreting what constitutes an attack differently. Bellingham’s ‘goal’ should not have stood, but the vagueness and limitations of football’s laws put referees in a difficult position. The game is already hard enough to control. This is not a case of a rule being changed — but of basic clarity being introduced.
Nvidia Is Now King of the Magnificent 7. Why It’s Not Even Close. (Barron's): There’s Nvidia —and then there’s everybody else. Once again, the chip maker has proven that it stands alone as the king of the artificial intelligence boom.