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In today's email: John Foley, Masa Son, Tim Cook, Reed Hastings, and the formidable Lina Khan. I'll be back on Wednesday with more.
Bill
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Notes on Peloton’s collapse, Netflix’s future, M&A arbitrage, and Apollo’s next potential pound of flesh. Poor Peloton, that rare beacon of Covid hope that is now likely to experience the other side of life in the public markets. It will take its place in the overhyped gym equipment pantheon alongside the venerable Stairmaster, the clunky Nordictrack (version 1.0), not to mention the many other failed businesses that tried to make a virtue out of group fitness. At least SoulCycle never marketed itself as a social media company.
Back in December 2020, when we were muddling through that endless pandemic winter, the company had a market value of $50 billion. Now that Wall Street is looking forward to some version of normal later in 2022, the company is worth around $9 billion—and that’s only because of the intrigue that Apple (or perhaps Nike or someone like that) may buy it.
As we’ve discussed before, I’ve been a skeptic of Peloton’s stock performance since October 2019, when I heard C.E.O. John Foley blither on at the Vanity Fair New Establishment Summit about how the bikes were not actually fancy fitness furniture but rather a mechanism to create a social community of wealthy urbane fitness nuts. It was surely an optimistic view of the company’s prospects, and not altogether different from Adam Neumann’s bygone proclamation that WeWork wasn’t an office rental company but rather some new age “community” of its own...
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