“Sideways to down” is a good way to describe this week’s market cap activity with the Fab Five down $373 billion and the Telco Top Five down $25 billion. With 7.5 weeks of trading left in the year, it appears that the Fab Five is headed for another $2-2.5 trillion in market cap added ($9 trillion added over the last three years) while the Telco Top Five on track to give back all of 2024’s gains.
The biggest headline for the week was the approval of Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s pay package by 75% of their shareholders. The full details of the milestones Elon Musk needs to hit to be eligible for shares is described in this CNBC article.
Not a lot of news in the telco world this week. Roger Entner’s podcast “The Week With Roger” has a great segment on what’s going on with Verizon that is worth a listen (here). His views line up with those expressed in last week’s Brief.
It’s way too early to make any judgements on Verizon’s marketing activities, but we found this commercial (10 million views) to be a humorous throwback:
Definitely different. Not sure the “bring your bill into a store” or “call now to switch” resonates with the younger than 40 generations but at least the marketing group isn’t going full Chrismahanukwanzakah on us (not embedding those ads due to their content but they are here if you want to see what advertising looked like at Virgin Mobile in the 2007 timeframe. I remember many Sprint execs cringing when they saw these ads even though Virgin was and MVNO).
In the next Brief we are going full cable. With Charter’s equity market cap now below $30 billion, we will dissect earnings and see if a combined Cox-Charter can rescue the Stamford-based communications company.
File is below (note that the mobile net additions for the cable companies has been updated to include Altice who announced earnings last week). iPhone 17 data is out tomorrow afternoon.
