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Think of the market these days as a perpetual confusion machine. Much has been made of the dichotomy between robust valuations for stocks and the sorry state of the world.
For further confirmation, check out the reaction to the earnings report Slack released Thursday for its quarter that ended in April. The messaging company is much in the news, what with office workers having been sent home. Its stock price has been on a tear, as has its business, which has notably been pitted against a product from Microsoft called Teams. (A digression on stock tickers: TEAM is the ticker for a different collaboration-software company called Atlassian; Slack’s ticker is WORK; Zoom’s ticker isn’t ZOOM, but rather ZM; Salesforce’s symbol, CRM, for customer relationship software, must have seemed really clever years ago.)
As for Slack, it added 12,000 new paid customers, a big number. It lost money, as fast-growing tech companies are wont to do, but it added cash quarter over quarter, a good thing. It grew revenue 50% to just over $200 million.
Here’s the catch: The revenue growth was about the same as the previous quarter despite a month and half of sheltering in place. Investors expected better. Slack’s stock slumped. It’s down 17% in pre-market trading now.
Sometime bad doesn’t matter and good isn’t good enough.
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The Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund Mubadala is investing $1.2 billion in Jio Platforms, the Indian cell-phone carrier owned by petrochemical giant Reliance Industries. You need a scorecard to tally the recent investors in Jio: Facebook, KKR, Vista Equity, Silver Lake, and General Atlantic.
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It has become popular for companies to publish their commitment to racial justice. Fortune is starting a project to track the experiences of black employees inside those companies. Please submit your anonymous thoughts and anecdotes here.
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Also, my friend and former colleague Dan Primack is hosting a Peloton ride Saturday morning at 8:00 am PT/11:00 am ET to raise money for the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund. The on-demand session is the 45-minute Black History Month ride from Feb. 8 co-led by Alex Toussaint and Tunde Oyeneyin. More details, including how to donate, are here. I’ll be on the ride. If you can figure out my handle, please high five me.
Adam Lashinsky
This edition of Data Sheet was curated by Aaron Pressman.
NEWSWORTHY
Who you calling a pinhead? In case you're dragging a little bit at the end of this very difficult week, Elon Musk is here for you. After seemingly taking it easy on Twitter for a few days ("Off twitter for a few days," he wrote on June 1), the Tesla CEO got angry at fellow tech billionaire Jeff Bezos. "This is insane @JeffBezos," Musk wrote, adding: "Time to break up Amazon. Monopolies are wrong!" Musk got angry after Amazon's ebook publishing unit took down a book called Unreported Truths About COVID-19 and The Lockdown. Amazon subsequently said the removal was a mistake and the book would be relisted.
We've seen this movie before. State-sponsored hackers are going after the 2020 presidential campaigns, according to Google's Threat Analysis Group. Iranian hackers phished for emails at the Trump campaign while Chinese hackers went after Joe Biden's organization.
A penny for your thoughts. Maybe Google employees can't avail themselves of free snacks and dry-cleaning pick up at work anymore, but the company is thinking up new perks. Work-from-home workers will get a $1,000 allowance to pay for equipment to kit out their space.
Opening the window. On Wall Street, after a long drought, the market for tech initial public offerings is heating up again. Cloud data company ZoomInfo, which we mentioned the other day, priced its shares on Thursday at $21. The new stock closed up 62% on the day at $34. That values the startup at over $13 billion. Telemedicine service Amwell filed to go public soon, too.
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
Self-driving cars should make driving safer, but how much safer? A new study by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety says not that much, as Associated Press reporter Tom Krisher explores in an article analyzing the issue. Humans cause 94% of all car accidents but autonomous vehicles would prevent only about one-third of them, the study concludes.
Just how many crashes are prevented depends a lot on how autonomous vehicles are programmed, [institute vice president of research and co-author of the study Jessica] Cicchino said. More crashes would be stopped if the robocars obey all traffic laws including speed limits. But if artificial intelligence allows them to drive and react more like humans, then fewer crashes will be stopped, she said.
“Building self-driving cars that drive as well as people do is a big challenge in itself,” IIHS Research Scientist Alexandra Mueller said in a statement. “But they’d actually need to be better than that to deliver on the promises we’ve all heard.”
FOR YOUR WEEKEND READING PLEASURE
A few long reads I came across this week:
The Incredible Story of the US Army's Earth-Shaking, Off-Road Land Trains (The Drive)
Oh, your pickup has a lift? That's cute.
The Stockbrokers Of Magic: The Gathering Play for Keeps (Wired)
The market for the popular strategy game’s cards has started to resemble Wall Street, complete with speculation, arbitrage, and yes, insider trading.
What Is the Stock Market Even for Anymore? (New York Times Magazine)
With the economy in free fall, the resilience of share prices defies the misfortunes of most Americans.
The Woman Who Found a Snail in Her Soda and Launched a Million Lawsuits (Narratively)
Sixty-six years before the infamous spilled McDonald’s coffee, May Donoghue drank a ginger beer with a dead mollusk in it and changed personal-injury law forever.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
After the tragedy of George Floyd’s death, where do A.I. and policing go from here? By Jonathan Vanian
Facebook to label state-owned media outlets’ posts, pages, and ads By Danielle Abril
As major scooter companies struggle, upstarts seek inroads By Lucinda Shen
How Tractor Supply Co is using tech to deliver e-commerce to its rural customers and fuel a sales surge By Phil Wahba
Trump seeks new ways to crack down on Chinese stock listings in the U.S. By Eamon Barrett
The year in leadership: Everything to know about the most recent crop of leaders to score top CEO jobs By Shawn Tully
How we can set up America’s insurance system for a future pandemic By Daniel S. Glaser
(Some of these stories require a subscription to access. There is a 50% discount for our loyal readers if you use this link to sign up. Thank you for supporting our journalism.)
BEFORE YOU GO
The other day, I linked to comedian James Veitch's hilarious video showing what happened when he replied to a scammer's email. This week, Veitch's publisher is out with a new edition of his book replaying multiple encounters with various scammers. It's called DOT CON: The Art of Scamming a Scammer. And while it's not exactly deep, it's a diverting read that may bring you some needed laughs. Have a good weekend.
Aaron Pressman