Tesla fires Supercharger team, Walmart partners with Roblox, Jay-Z’s $1,200 Champagne, Lando Norris wins 1st F1 race, and Mystik Dan wins Kentucky Derby - #29

Welcome to Episode 29 of the irl Media NEWS Podcast. I'm your host Chris Thompson, and today we discuss Tesla fires Supercharger team, Walmart partners with Roblox, Jay-Z’s $1,200 a bottle Champagne, Lando Norris wins 1st F1 race and Mystik Dan wins the Kentucky Derby.

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Transcript

Welcome to Episode 29 of the irl Media NEWS Podcast. I'm your host Chris Thompson, and today we discuss Tesla fires Supercharger team, Walmart partners with Roblox, Jay-Z’s $1,200 a bottle Champagne, Lando Norris wins 1st F1 race and Mystik Dan wins the Kentucky Derby.

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

Business

What did Elon Musk just do?!?!

Tesla has just laid off nearly their entire Supercharger team, and have announced they are stopping the build out of their Supercharger network going forward.

Elon Musk make the announcement on May 29th that Rebecca Tinucci, the head of the superchargers group, Daniel Ho, who heads up the new products team, would be leaving along with their entire team of 500 employees.

So why would Tesla shutter their entire Supercharger team, and stop building out the network?

By all accounts Tesla’s Supercharger network is the largest charging networks in the world, and in terms of reliability and availability it has one of the highest consumer ratings compared to other competitors who are often broken and do not offer the fast-charging method that has made Tesla’s Supercharger network coveted by EV owners.

Tesla’s Supercharger network also makes the company a pretty penny. Bloomberg did some reporting and back of the napkin math that figures if each Tesla “charger delivered around 200 kilowatt-hours a day and that Tesla collected an average tariff of $0.4 per kWh, we estimate that the company generated around $1.74 billion of charging revenue” in 2023. They even estimated that Tesla’s Supercharger network could generate profits of $740 Million by 2030.

Today Tesla is the dominant EV charging network, with over 50,000 sites globally, and 15,000 in North America.

So I’ll ask the question again: Why is Tesla laying off the team that is building their Supercharger network, and stopping the development of new charging stations that aren’t already in progress, especially when you take into consideration that their Supercharger network has become a profit center?

The answer may be partly due to Tesla’s falling revenue and their need to cut costs, but this feels more like cutting off one's nose to spite one's face.

I think the answer lies more in the competition Tesla is beginning to face in the EV charging market. For a long time they were the leader, and even today still have the largest network of EV charging stations. Now that the majority of other vehicle manufacturers are adopting Tesla "North American Charging Standard" (NACS), and new EV charging providers have entered the market and are catching up to Tesla in terms of reliability and availability, it might just be a matter of Tesla exiting a business they had only been in in order to bolster the charging availability for their vehicles in order to get around that whole chicken-and-egg conundrum of building vehicles but there not being any chargers for their customers to recharge at.

Tesla has been crystal clear that they are not shutting down their Supercharger network, and will not only complete any EV charging buildouts that are in progress, but will also add some new Supercharger locations in the next year.

So could Elon Musk and Tesla change their mind in the future and restart their internal Supercharger network team? Sure, but I don’t think that’s likely to happen, and why would they? They’ve already built the predominant EV charging network throughout the world, and their "North American Charging Standard" (NACS) has been adopted by the rest of the EV industry. There are now a lot of competitors catching up to them, so the EV charging market is about to be a commodity with limited differentiation. It’s like picking between where to get gas between 2 gas stations with the same exact prices. Usually you’ll just choose the gas station on your side of the road since they offer the same products and services.

Tesla could always go the outsourced way, and hire a subcontractor to not only service existing locations but also build out new additions to the Supercharger network instead of handling that all internally managed by a big team that only adds to their headcount that affects their bottom line.

So while Tesla is dismantling their internal Supercharger team, and slowing the growth of their existing network, it will help Tesla to reduce their costs while not affecting them very much in the market. It might be seen as a no brainer in a future Harvard business case.

Tech

What do you get when you combine Walmart’s incredible efficiency and vast supply chains, with Roblox’s global platform with 70.2 million daily and over 216 million monthly active users who
gather together every day to imagine, create, and share experiences with each other in immersive, user-generated 3D worlds?

You get one heck of a partnership to sell physical goods directly to users inside of Roblox, and this could be huge!

You might be asking yourself: How will this partnership work in terms of the Roblox user’s experience?

“After trying out the virtual items on their avatars, players will be able to load an e-commerce experience that takes the form of a browser window inside Roblox imitating the experience of shopping on Walmart’s website — essentially a virtual laptop set up inside Roblox to access Walmart.com. The commerce feature within Walmart Discovered will be gated specifically to users aged 13 or older in the United States only.” according to reporting from Digiday.

Walmart isn’t recreating the wheel here in terms of user experience. Plenty of other brands have built popup shops in Roblox, or other Metaverse platforms, in order to market real world wares to virtual users.

It’s the seamlessness and ease of converting virtual Roblox users into real world customers that has me excited about this Walmart and Roblox partnership.

Entertainment

Everything Jay-Z touches turns to gold, including his new $1,200 a bottle Champagne.

Robb Report dives into what it takes to make Jay-Z’s new Champagne, officially named  Armand de Brignac Blanc de Noirs Assemblage No. 4., but those in the know just called it by its nickname “Ace of Spades”, because of its distinctive and decorative metallic packaging.

Armand de Brignac is owned by Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy and Shawn “Jay-Z” Carter, and is produced by Champagne Cattier.

The champagne is so rare that only 7,328 bottles would be released of this Pinot Noir offering, at a whopping $1,200 per bottle which pretty much cements its baller status!

Formula 1

I guess the 110th time was the charm for Lando Norris, who won his 1st race at the Miami Grand Prix Formula 1 race over the weekend.

I’m a huge Formula 1 fan, ever since I used to sit on the couch watching with my dad when I was little. I’ll fully admit I got busy in life, but I came back to the sport with Netflix’s “Drive To Survive” series during Covid and it’s become like a religion to me.

And as a self avowed “car guy”, McLarens are my favorite cars (but don’t tell my Porsche loving family).

As you can imagine there was a lot of celebrating by Lando Norris and his McLaren team, but what I was most struck by were all of the other Formula 1 drivers on the grid who came up to him in the winner’s circle to congratulate him including his former teammates at McLaren such as Daniel Ricciardo and Carlos Sainz, fellow Brit Lewis Hamilton, and Fernando Alonso. That was in addition to his good friend Red Bull’s Max Verstappen who came in 2nd in the Miami Grand Prix, and Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc who came in 3rd.

I loved seeing not only one of my favorite drivers win, but also for a Formula 1 driver to get their very first win after 110 races and 15 podium finishes.

Congrats Lando Norris on your first of many wins to come.

Sports

The Kentucky Derby ran over the weekend, and the horse Mystik Dan won in a dramatic three-way photo finish.

I used to be a lot more into horse racing when I was a teenager, and used to go to the Saratoga Racetrack every August for the meet. In recent years I've dove into the business side of horse racing, joining a horse racing syndicate and investment fund that invests in racehorses. 

But my appetite for watching horse racing has waned, as more and more racehorses die each year. The causes for their deaths are numerous, but the impact to the sport, and the perception in people's minds, has begun souring me to watching the races. 

I'm not naive enough to think that I'm not a part of the problem due to my investments in the horse racing industry, and that's something I'll have to wrestle with morally in the years to come.

There were a lot of positives in this year's 2024 Kentucky Derby, beyond just the three-way photo finish. There was a Black trainer who saddled a horse in the Kentucky Derby, and he was the first black man to do that since 1951. 

Let that sink in for a moment. 

For a sport so dominated by stereotypical white males, and dependent on Hispanic laborers, it's taken 73 years for a Black man to again be the trainer of a horse entered into the Kentucky Derby. 

Clearly there's a lot more progress that needs to be made in the sport of thoroughbred racing.

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.