Ferrari EVs will ROAR, how many Bitcoin are left, MrBeast's $100M Amazon show, Elon Musk’s SpaceX spy satellites, and the 2 Pickleball leagues merge - #18

Welcome to Episode 18 of the irl Media NEWS Podcast. I'm your host Chris Thompson, and today we're discuss Ferrari’s says their new EVs will ROAR, how many Bitcoin are left in the world, MrBeast gets a $100 million dollar Amazon Prime Video TV show,  Elon Musk’s SpaceX is building spy satellites, and the Major League Pickleball (MLP) and the Professional Pickleball Association (PPA) merge.

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Chris Thompson
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irl Media NEWS brings you the business behind the news, with a healthy dose of sarcasm.

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Transcript

Welcome to Episode 18 of the irl Media NEWS Podcast. I'm your host Chris Thompson, and today we're discuss Ferrari’s says their new EVs will ROAR, how many Bitcoin are left in the world, MrBeast gets a $100 million dollar Amazon Prime Video TV show,  Elon Musk’s SpaceX is building spy satellites, and the Major League Pickleball (MLP) and the Professional Pickleball Association (PPA) merge.

​​All that and more in today's episode of the irl Media NEWS Podcast. Let’s get into it.

Business

Are you as sick of EVs creeping up on you in parking lots and scaring you as they silently sneak past you? Well you’re not going to have to worry about that happening with Ferrari’s new line of EVs launching in 2025.

Ferrari’s CEO Benedetto Vigna has made a promise to Ferrari enthusiasts worldwide that their new electric vehicles will still provide the same “unique” thrill as their gas powered vehicles, complete with their own custom sound when a driver accelerates.

Ferrari has been mum on details about their first EV model, and are keeping things like the model’s name, starting price, and tech specs quiet for the time being.

What they have been willing to share is that Ferrari is expecting approximately 60% of their sales will come from fully electric and hybrid cars by 2026.

In the last quarter of 2023 Ferrari adjusted earnings of $2.39 billion before pesky things like interest, tax, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA). For the period of July-September 2023 Ferrari's adjusted EBITDA climbed 37 percent to $645.54 million.

Crypto

In crypto circles people talk about the mythical maximum number of Bitcoin that will ever be minted, but that number is misleading.

Of the 21 million Bitcoin, 19.6 million have already been mined, leaving only 1.4 million Bitcoin left to be mined.

As of Wednesday, March 20, 2024 at 11 AM EST each Bitcoin is currently trading at $64,324.

That would put the value of those 1.4 million unmined Bitcoin at $90,053,600,000 billion dollars!

The reality is there actually aren’t really 21 million Bitcoin in existence, at least not anymore. Chalk that up to people who have lost access to their wallets containing Bitcoin, people who forgot they even mined or had Bitcoin when it first came out and wasn’t worth anything, or people who have passed away and never shared with their family’s their wallet’s passphrase. The list of reasons that millions of Bitcoin have been locked up and are inaccessible goes on and on.

Add to that the creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, is estimated to have mined between 750,000 and 1,100,000 Bitcoin - and he never sold any!

Since no one really knows who Satoshi Nakamoto is, and a court has ruled that Australian computer scientist Craig Steven Wright is definitely not the real Satoshi Nakamoto, the world may never know his true identity. That means an estimated $70,756,400,000 billion dollars worth of Bitcoin has been taken out of the Bitcoin ecosystem. That’s nearly 7% of Bitcoin’s total supply gone!

According to crypto analysts David Puell and James Check, they estimate that anywhere from 3.89 million to 4.87 million coins could be considered lost, or referred to as zombie coins, including Satoshi Nakamoto’s holdings. That could amount to $313,257,880,000 billion dollars of Bitcoin lost to the world.

One of the first rules of economics is the lesson of scarcity. Wikipedia says scarcity "refers to the basic fact of life that there exists only a finite amount of human and nonhuman resources which the best technical knowledge is capable of using to produce only limited maximum amounts of each economic good."

For anyone that doesn’t believe in crypto, just think about what happens when some of the wealthiest people and countries in the world want something that is in limited supply and will someday stop being produced. Then consider how high the price of a single Bitcoin could reach someday.

Entertainment

I’m not here to tell you I was right when I reported a few weeks ago that MrBeast was in negotiations with Amazon’s Prime Video to get his own TV show, because I would never want to brag about something like that even if I did write a article about it in our January 29th, 2024 newsletter, or the YouTube video MrBeast Is Negotiating A $100M Dollar Deal With Amazon Prime Video? I made on February 27, 2024 (see video below).

What I am here to tell you, after my humble bragging, is that it has been confirmed that MrBeast has signed a $100 million dollar agreement with Amazon Prime Video for a show called “Beast Games” that will be a reality-competition show where one winner will get a $5 million cash prize, which is thought to be the biggest payout in TV history!

Jimmy “MrBeast” Donaldson has over 245 million subscribers, and brought in an “estimated $82 million in gross earnings over the 12-month period between June 2022-June 2023”, according to Forbes magazine.

Space

Is Elon Musk building a spy satellite network for the United States based on his company SpaceX’s Starlink satellite designs?

It’s been reported by NBC that Elon Musk’s “SpaceX is building a network of hundreds of spy satellites under a classified contract with a U.S. intelligence agency.”

According to The Wall Street Journal SpaceX has a “$1.8 billion classified Starshield contract with an unknown intelligence agency without detailing the purposes of the program.”

Read: They’re building spy satellites!

I’m not sure how I feel about this, or if I even have an opinion (which is a strange feeling for me).

On the one hand, creating a multi-planet civilization is expensive but that has been Elon Musk’s stated goal since he founded SpaceX.

On the other hand, anytime a private company gets into bed with a government there are ethical discussions to be had.

It’s not like these new spy satellites are tactical weapons. They’re used for spying on other countries from 500 miles overhead.

What about if information, that one of these SpaceX-built spy satellites, was used to make a decision that resulted in a Predator drone firing a missile on a compound in Afghanistan resulting in the loss of human life.

Not so easy now is it to weigh the ethical costs of doing business with a government now is it?

Sports

Pickleball continues to be one of the fastest growing sports in the world, with 36.5 million people having played the game at least once in the year.

Two of the biggest Pickleball leagues, Major League Pickleball (MLP) and the Professional Pickleball Association (PPA) have taken notice of the phenomenal growth of the sport, and have decided to combine to create a new venture which hasn’t yet come up with a name or brand (come on people - Branding 101 says you should have these kinds of things figured out before you announce your merger!)

According to reporting by CNBC “the deal will unite the two largest pickleball organizations into a holding company, but the PPA Tour and MLP will retain their own distinct brands and formats.”

So if both leagues are keeping their own brands then what was the purpose of the merger?

Someone wake me up when either Major League Pickleball or the Professional Pickleball Association figure this merger out.

That's it for our show today. We really appreciate you sticking around to the end. 

If you don’t want to miss an episode please consider subscribing and following us wherever you get your podcasts from, so we can continue to bring you the business behind the news. 

I’m your host Chris Thompson, and this has been an irl Media NEWS Podcast.