• The new “Star Wars” attraction is coming to Disneyland on May 31...but you’ll need a reservation to get in.

“No one has ever attempted anything of this magnitude”—Iger again.

• The Dumbo in the room is Disney CEO Bob Iger, who was awarded $65.6 million last fiscal year. Iger is one of entertainment’s highest paid execs, though his max annual pay was recently cut by $13.5 million.

"Jesus Christ himself isn't worth 500 times his median workers' pay"—Abigail Disney, the granddaughter of Disney cofounder Roy Disney to CNBC.

Airbnb is buying HotelTonight, the last-minute booking service you use when your friend says you can’t crash because her “roommate is sick.” You don’t even have a roommate, Janet.

The financial terms weren’t disclosed, but HotelTonight was valued at $463 million when it last raised money in 2017. That would make it Airbnb’s largest acqusition ever.

The strategy behind the deal

Airbnb, the disruptor du jour in the hospitality industry, is on a quest to become an “end-to-end travel platform,” jargon for “we want to control every aspect of your travel experience.” So how does HotelTonight fit in?

• It adds more hotel inventory to complement Airbnb’s bread and butter: short-term home rentals.
• That kind of inventory is in demand: The company said that in 2018 it more than doubled the number of rooms on properties hosts can categorize as “boutique hotels, bed and breakfasts, and other hospitality venues like hostels and resorts.”

What’s next for Airbnb

Like any private company valued at $31 billion, you’re going to start getting questions about an IPO. That’ll likely happen at some point in the next year or two, but Airbnb is in no rush to go public like Uber and Lyft. Something else it doesn’t have in common with those two? It’s been profitable for the last two years.  

Right now, it appears Airbnb’s aim is to build an “expansion narrative,” as CNBC puts it. That means showing investors it can become that end-to-end travel platform with initiatives including…

• Airbnb Experiences: “Activities designed and led by inspiring locals”
• Airbnb Plus: A hotel-like service
• Transportation: Still unclear, but Airbnb hired the founding CEO of Virgin America to be its first-ever global head of transportation

A final note about competition...it’s intense. Booking Holdings and Expedia Group (with a combined market cap of close to $100 billion) don’t need any “expansion narratives” to quickly counter Airbnb’s moves.

This week, the L.A. Times released its official french fry rankings. Take a good look...

It rated Five Guys and McDonald’s as the two best and In-N-Out and Sonic as the two worst.

We can do better: We have over 1 million readers and we’d much rather trust your collective taste buds than one writer’s hot take

Which fries do YOU think are best?

Nigeria: Africa’s largest economy and most populous country is scheduled to hold presidential elections today. Current President Muhammadu Buhari is facing off against Atiku Abubakar, a wealthy businessman. Whoever wins will have to confront the oil-dependent country’s growing challenge of extreme poverty.

Maybe three ways...

India: The government’s new proposal to force internet giants to remove content it views as harmful is drawing comparisons to China’s strict censorship system. Platforms affected could include Facebook, Google, TikTok, and more. The result?  “A splintering internet, where a onetime unified information superhighway has become increasingly restricted in certain areas,” writes the NYT.

Why wouldn't they just produce less waste food and lower the prices on their current offerings?

It should urge them to also unionize.

• Starbucks (-0.18%) disclosed for the first time how much it pays its median worker: $12,754 per year plus 52 lbs of coffee. That’s one pound of coffee and about $245 a week.

• The NFL and Colin Kaepernick have reached a settlement. The former 49ers QB is reportedly getting a payout in the “$60 million to $80 million range.”

Deutsche Bank’s Got Issues

"At this point, Deutsche Bank's biggest problem may simply be how many problems it has." Don't sugarcoat it, Bloomberg.

So what are all those problems? Germany's top bank has suffered a prolonged spell of declining revenues, growing expenses, crumbling credit ratings, and misconduct fines to the tune of $17 billion in the last decade.

Paired with outdated technology and difficulty attracting top talent? Well, maybe the memes say it best—is DB still a BB? Its shares lost more than half their value in 2018.

The bank has tried to turn things around. CEO Christian Sewing brought DB its first annual profit in four years last year, and he's cut costs even morethan he pledged.

• But cost-cutting can only get you so far when you were one of the slowest banks to remedy your balance sheet and c-suite post-2008 crisis. That's why some have called for a German government-brokered merger between DB and Commerzbank—the country's two biggest private sector lenders.

+ While we're here: DB allegedly denied then-candidate Donald Trump a loan during the 2016 campaign, per the NYT. Why? His "divisive candidacy" made it too big a risk.

Hopefully by the time Q1 earnings begin in April, your memories of sub-zero temps will be long gone. Not so for c-suites. That's because weather repeatedly pops up as one of two unwanted guests for earnings season. The other? Currency market woes.

The ICE Dollar Index jumped 4.4% last year, the most since 2015. And for multinationals that sell products overseas, that dollar strength (paired with the ongoing trade war) presents a major challenge, reports Bloomberg.

• Quantifying that challenge? Every 7% to 8% change in the dollar results in a 1% move in the opposite direction for U.S. corporate profits, per Credit Suisse.

Who's worried? Already, IBM took a larger-than-expected revenue hit. Johnson & Johnson's international growth was next to nil thanks to currency fluctuations. And United Technologies called foreign exchange a headwind in Q4.

This isn't new, though. North American firms reported a collective $11.8 billion hit in the third quarter of last year c/o negative currency impacts—which was itself nearly 12x the hit a quarter earlier.

Morning Brew

When Microsoft went public in March of 1986, co-founders Bill Gates and Paul Allen, two friends from high school who bonded over their mutual love of computer science, became multi-millionaires.

Gates, then 30, remained CEO and rose to prominence as one of the richest people in the U.S. The shares he sold made him $1.6 million, and the 45 percent stake he retained gained a market value of $350 million.

The young CEO celebrated his newfound wealth by making a very sensible decision: He paid off his $150,000 mortgage, he told Fortune in 1986.

"I bought one thing that was a tiny bit of a splurge," Gates told David Rubenstein during a 2016 Bloomberg interview. "It was used, but it was an incredible car."

Gates first purchased a Porsche 911 Turbo in 1979 and rumor has it that he was pulled over quite a few times in the blue sports car. This 911 has since been auctioned off for $80,000. 

Gates didn't let the car sit around gathering dust: The CEO loved to put its speed to the test in drives around the New Mexico desert, near where Microsoft was headquartered at the time. After one particularly raucous night, he even had to call Allen to bail him out of jail, according to a Time profile from 1997.

"Sometimes when I would want to think at night, I would just go out and drive around at high speed," Gates told Rubenstein. "Fortunately, I didn't kill myself doing that."

Gates's wealth continued to balloon after Microsoft's IPO and he became a billionaire in 1987 at age 31. At the time, he was the youngest person ever to reach the milestone. And by 1995, his fortune had grown to $12.9 billion, making the then 39-year-old the world's richest man, a title he held for years afterward.

According to the 2018 Global Wealth Report from Credit Suisse Research Institute, you need a net worth of $871,320 U.S. Credit Suisse defines net worth, or "wealth," as "the value of financial assets plus real assets (principally housing) owned by households, minus their debts."

More than 19 million Americans are in the 1 percent worldwide, Credit Suisse reports, far more than from any other country, while "China is now clearly established in second place in the world wealth hierarchy," with 4.2 million citizens among the world's top 1 percent.

To be among the top 10 percent worldwide, you don't even need six figures: A net worth of $93,170 will do it.

And even if you have just $4,210 to your name, you're still richer than half of the world's residents.

When it finally does go one day this is the part I will need to order:

I found a $99 Chromebook last night and I am wondering if I could share it with others if need be?

Airbnb booked "substantially more" than $1 billion in revenue during the third quarter, the company said yesterday in a memo. That means this fall was Airbnb's strongest quarter since it launched in ‘08.

Feels like a few things were missing from that memo, no? All Airbnb disclosed was a loose revenue stat. But according to CNBC's insiders, Airbnb...

     1) Is on track to be profitable for a second straight year

     2) Reportedly posted $2.6 billion in revenue during 2017

     3) Is worth about $31 billion

All that without a permanent CFO since February.

Not to mention, this marks the first time Airbnb released its revenue...scheduled conveniently ahead of its proposed 2019 IPO. Sound familiar, Uber?

+ While we're here: In-law guest rooms are being swapped for industrial chic lofts in record numbers this Thanksgiving. Airbnb said it expects one million guests to stay at its U.S. listings during the holiday.

Reportarobocall.com ?

oops... found it...

Anyone know how this all turned out after all? just curious.

And we never saw this happen Mr. Ryan..... 

I wonder how Amazon Fresh works with Whole Foods now?

Anyone know?

Well... this never happened.....

Here’s an interesting chart for you.

Hmmm… how does this Credit Suisse report from 2017 related to Bezos’ comments? Let’s start with what he said and to whom.

“Amazon is not too big to fail … In fact, I predict one day Amazon will fail. Amazon will go bankrupt. If you look at large companies, their lifespans tend to be 30-plus years, not a hundred-plus years,” Bezos told staff, according to a recording that was heard by CNBC. […]

“If we start to focus on ourselves instead of focusing on our customers, that will be the beginning of the end,” he said. “We have to try and delay that day for as long as possible.”

So to start with, he’s actually saying that his 24 year old company is late middle-aged by large company standards, and the Credit Suisse data shows that it’s actually geriatric compared to the average.

Secondarily, context is key. He wasn’t talking to investors but likely senior staff, people who make a difference to Amazon’s ongoing ability to innovate and grow.

And what is he telling them?

Don’t be complacent. Don’t believe the press. Focus on customers. Keep aggressively making things better for customers.

This is fairly standard motivational stuff for corporate talks. The only reason it’s interesting is that Amazon is a trillion-dollar company and Bezos is the richest man in the world. Otherwise, it’s generic CEO pablum that the people listening were probably playing internal games of buzzword bingo to.

There aren’t that many really old companies running around any more. And many of them sell legacy products, as Jim Beam does. The world is changing more rapidly than ever, and corporations are struggling to keep up in the face of disruption.

Bezos is right, but he’s also somewhat banal.

Jeff Bezos said Amazon will go bankrupt, is this true or just a publicity stunt?