Fanboy energy 📈

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Welcome back to the grind. Let's get into it.

By Allison Morrow

🔌 FUELED BY SPITE

Rivian shares continued to soar Monday, putting the stock more than 85% above its IPO price. It hasn't even been public for a full week.

The electric truck maker has rocketed from relative obscurity to Wall Street darling, and it owes much of its breakout success to one very powerful fanboy: Jeff Bezos.

And, less directly, to that fanboy's nemesis Elon Musk.

Bezos has been pushing the Rivian brand for a while. In July, when the Amazon founder hurled himself to the edge of space, there were Rivian trucks shuttling him and his fellow astronauts around the West Texas launch site. That was a strategic product placement by Bezos for his handpicked contender to take on Tesla. The highly publicized Blue Origin was the perfect moment for the famously (slash notoriously) calculating Bezos to push his pet projects on a global stage.

The cherry on top: It was also a big middle finger to Musk.

SOME BACKGROUND

Bezos and Musk have spent much of the past year yo-yoing between the titles of Richest and Second Richest person in the world (Musk currently leads by a mile).
But their feud goes back years, centered on their competing space travel ambitions.
Rivian's blockbuster IPO last week — the strongest debut by a US company since Facebook listed its shares in 2012 — gives Bezos something of a win in the proxy battle he's fighting with Musk.
Two years ago, Amazon led an investment of $700 million in Rivian and announced it was ordering 100,000 of its electric vans. At the time, the EV field was crowded with upstart brands such as Nikola, Lordstown and Fisker, all of which were vying to position themselves as the next big thing. Since then, Rivian has emerged as the heavyweight (helped as much by investments from Amazon and Ford as by serious regulatory investigations into would-be rivals Nikola and Lordstown).

Bezos may be Rivian's biggest backer, but the company also owes Musk a debt of gratitude for fomenting the EV hype that investors have been getting drunk on for the past few years. FOMO is a powerful force on Wall Street, and those who missed out on Tesla a decade ago may be trying to make up for it by buying shares of Rivian, a 12-year-old startup that hasn't yet delivered any products to customers and somehow is worth more than Ford and GM. (As of Monday, it had a market cap of $127 billion, with a grand total of zero dollars in revenue.)

Can Rivian live up to the hype? It's is anyone's guess. But investors may take comfort in knowing that that Rivian has the backing of someone with pockets as deep and grudges as bitter as Bezos'.

And one thing we can all count on is that uber-rich men will literally buy entire companies to spite their enemies rather than go to therapy.

RELATED: The Lucid Air, the first model from California-based electric car start-up company Lucid Motors, has been named MotorTrend's 2022 Car of the Year.

#️⃣ NUMBER OF THE DAY

$1.2 trillion

President Joe Biden just signed the $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure package into law. The legislation will deliver $550 billion of new federal investments in America's infrastructure over five years, including money for roads, bridges, mass transit, rail, airports, ports and waterways. The package includes a $65 billion investment in improving the nation's broadband infrastructure and invests tens of billions of dollars in improving the electric grid and water systems. Another $7.5 billion would go to building a nationwide network of plug-in electric vehicle chargers.

🥧 FOOD NEWS

Time for another round of Nightcap's Food News Digest – all the news that's fit to eat. First up: Let's talk about this monstrosity from the evil geniuses at Reese's:

Hershey, which owns the Reese's brand, has gone and made a super-sized peanut butter cup as a stand-in for Thanksgiving pie. The thing is 9 inches in diameter, weighs 3.4 pounds and will set you back 45 bucks.

I want to love this. I certainly applaud the ingenuity and craftsmanship. But two thoughts bedevil me:

Reese's mini cups are superior to all other iterations because of their ideal chocolate-to-peanut butter ratio. I will die on that hill.
We've got enough competition going on in the pie space, what with the age-old debate over pumpkin vs. apple vs. pecan. I can't let Reece's in on this game – it doesn't even have a crust. Disqualified.

🍗 Next Up: Wings of Change

Applebee's thinks kids want Cheeto-flavored chicken.

The chain is bringing a bevy of Cheeto-dusted wings, as well as something called "fried Cheetos cheese bites" to its menu for a limited time. It's a way to "reach out to the Gen Z demo," the restaurant's chief marketing officer told my colleague Danielle Wiener-Bronner.

The business context here is that demand for wings has shot up during the pandemic – a comfort food that holds up well under the strains of packaging for delivery and can be easily re-heated. Competition's picking up, too. Last week, DJ Khaled launched Another Wing, a delivery-only wings brand. And Brinker International, the company that owns Chili's, has its own wings brand, It's Just Wings.

In conclusion: Yes, Cheeto wings are a gimmick, and yes, they look pretty gross. Would I eat them? Absolutely. Would I feel bad about liking it? One hundred percent.

🎄 And Finally, Speaking of Chicken...

The Christian-owned Chick-fil-A announced it would close on Saturday and Sunday the weekend of Christmas. Plan accordingly.

🏦 QUOTE OF THE DAY

Every day she gets a grade from shareholders, and that's the stock price. And every day that she's been in the role, the verdict is Citigroup is worth more dead than alive.

—Mike Mayo, banking analyst

It's hard to overstate what a difficult job Jane Fraser, the first woman to lead a top American bank, has inherited. Shareholders are demanding bold action to turn things around at Citigroup. I wrote about Fraser's first nine months in the role and how she's staking out a fairly radical position on Wall Street — that ruthlessness doesn't have to define a bank's culture.

WHAT ELSE IS GOING ON?

👀 Ohio's attorney general sued Meta, the parent company of Facebook, alleging that the company misled the public about its algorithm and the harms its apps can cause to users.

💤 Casper, the trendy mattress company, is being taken private barely two years after its splashy public debut.

⛽ The average price of gasoline in California hit $4.682 per gallon on Monday, setting a new record for the state for a second day in a row. The national average, meanwhile, ticked up slightly to $3.415.

🛢️ Royal Dutch Shell said it would scrap its dual share structure and move its head office to Britain from the Netherlands, pushed away by Dutch taxes and facing climate pressure in court as the energy giant shifts from oil and gas.

🎮 It's six weeks till Christmas, and demand for some tech gadgets is already outstripping supply, analysts say.

📈 Goldman Sachs predicts that the economic recovery from Covid-19 will reaccelerate, driving the unemployment rate back to a 50-year low by the end of next year.