Plus: Elon’s $43-billion memeified bear hug April 18, 2022 Made in Canada IN THIS ISSUE 🏀 Tournament time in TO 🍔 Bored Ape burgers 🐦 Elon's proposed Twitter takeover WHAT'S UP THIS WEEK Vaughn Ridley / Contributor / Getty Images WEDNESDAY April 20 Inflation! It's obligatory that we mention it in every edition of TLDR. Because it's the economic story that won't go away — and for good reason. On Wednesday, StatsCan will tell us how much consumer prices climbed in March. Economists predict inflation to be up a not-great 5.5% from last year. But! That would mark a slight, encouraging-ish fall from February's 30-year high of 5.7%. Want more inflation news? Keep scrolling. Tesla will report Q1 earnings. Last year, Musk Motor Co's™ market cap exceeded that of the world's five largest automakers combined, and Tesla has already announced that it delivered a record number of cars in Q1, despite supply-chain SNAFUs and factory shutdowns. Expectations are super high for Tesla in the near and long terms, so the company needs to show strong earnings. WEDNESDAY One more time! The Toronto Raptors will beat the 76ers in the NBA playoffs' first round. You read it here first. But even if they don't, Raptors majority owner MLSE will be mightily pleased to have fans in the stands (buying overpriced beer, etc.) when the series moves to Scotiabank Arena on Wednesday for Toronto's first playoff game since 2K19. THE FOMO INDEX IMPORTANT 🏠 Turns out, private investors own nearly one-third of homes in Ontario and B.C. And you thought houses were for people to live in. Source 🤷‍♂️ NYT reports that if Jeff Bezos gave away 1.9% of his wealth, he could pay for a year of Pre-K for every U.S. child. He hasn't, though, because reasons. Source 👔 A forward-thinking Ontario township is testing four-day workweeks. Respect. Source ⛽️ Vancouver's proposing a $10K fee for gas stations that don’t have EV charging. Source CRASH & BURN 🤑 TO THE MOON ⚡️ Ethereum’s much-delayed, electricity-saving update — in the works since at least 2019 — is delayed again, this time from June to the fall. Source 🏈 The Boston Globe reveals Tom Brady ended his brief NFL retirement only because his next job fell through: part owner of the Dolphins. Source ⚾️ The Giants’ Alyssa Nakken makes history as first woman to coach on the field in an MLB game. Source 🙌 The LA Times investigates the last stubbornly uninflated thing: a $0.99 USD tallboy of Arizona iced tea. Source WHO CARES WHAT ELSE HAPPENED LAST WEEK We regret to inform you there's now a Bored Apes burger place IMPORTANT The Bank of Canada — in a move that surprised precisely no one — jacked up interest rates by half a percentage point, a first since 2000. The BoC is expected to keep hiking rates, from the current 1% to perhaps as high as 3% by next year, which could weigh on stocks. The U.S. inflation rate continues to make Canada look super-duper good. Data out Tuesday showed consumer prices have risen 8.5% since last year. This was lower than forecasted but, nonetheless, puts a bunch of pressure on Mr. Money Printer Go BRRR Jay Powell to hike interest rates and cool the U.S. economy. Let's hope he doesn't trigger a recession. INTERESTING Bored Apes Yacht Club, the uber-popular NFT collective, is getting into moving pictures with a trilogy of animated short films. Also last week, a BAYC-linked group launched Bored & Hungry, an ape-themed Long Beach burger joint. Who cares? Well, both projects suggest the Disneyfication of NFTs is well underway, as BAYC, CryptoPunks, et al., try to leverage their digital clout into profitable IP. Elon Musk offered to buy Twitter in a US$43-billion bear hug. You probably know all about the deal by now. What's interesting to us about the whole thing is that, no matter the outcome, Musk essentially memeified a hostile takeover, driving up Twitter's stock price, creating tons of chatter, and potentially screwing over whichever hedge funds have shorted the company's stock. And why has he done this? Maybe in part because it's funny, which is also part of the reason people started buying GameStop. We're living in a topsy-turvy financial world. THE BIG IMPORTANT STORY AS TOLD TO Interview: a Ukrainian dealmaker turned resistance fighter For this week's TLDR, editor Jared Sullivan spoke to Oleksandr Vodoviz, a 38-year-old executive for Metinvest — a massive international steel-and-mining company headquartered in Ukraine — about what it's like to work remotely from a battle zone. I had a lot of projects going on when the war broke out. I'm the head of mergers and acquisitions for Metinvest, Ukraine's biggest private company. I buy and sell companies, steel plants especially. We were building a new steel-rolling facility in Italy for $1 billion USD. I was sleeping when one of the first drones was shot down. It was February 25, at about four in the morning. I live near the centre of Kyiv, and the Ukrainian military's anti-aircraft defence hit a Russian drone near my flat. The explosion broke the windows. And yet I still didn't believe that the war had started. Nobody did. I told myself that the blast was from a gas explosion or that it had to do with the electricity or the heating. Then I read the news, and I knew. In the morning, I decided to go to the office. The city was madness. People were fleeing. Thousands of cars clogged the roads. I had to walk to my office, which took half an hour. Metinvest accounts for about 5% of Ukraine's GDP and employs about 67,000 people globally. About a thousand work in the Kyiv office. But when I arrived that morning, there were only 10 or 15 people there, all top management. What do we do next?, we asked one another. How do we save people? Click here to keep reading. TOTALLY NONESSENTAL GOOD READS 👨‍⚕️ The Nurse Imposter Maclean's 💰 9 Ways to Imagine Jeff Bezos's Wealth The New York Times 💨 'It's Easier to Sell a Dream Than Reality': Inside Canada's Cannabis Crash Canadian Business THE WISDOM OF TWITTER Trolls of Twitter, unite! THOUGHTS ON TODAY'S ISSUE? 🤑 Love it 🙂 Good 🙁 So so Leave us more feedback Sarah Rieger (news writer), Brennan Doherty (writer), Devin Gordon (writer), Jared Lindzon (writer), Jared Sullivan (senior editor), Steve Frank (senior editor), and Kat Angus (managing editor). Full disclosure: contributors to this newsletter own ethereum. Corrections: Our April 11th edition erroneously reported that American banks were announcing Q2, instead of Q1, earnings. We also incorrectly stated that bank stocks have been booming. They have not. Ouch! Sorry! Wealthsimple Media Inc. 80 Spadina Ave Suite 400 Toronto, ON, M5V 2J4 Replies to this email address are not monitored. Have questions? 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