The death of 'diet' 🥤

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The death of 'diet' 🥤

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Tonight: Analysts are absolutely befuddled by the Trump media company's business plan. Plus "diet" soda is out of fashion but you can pry my Diet Coke from cold dead hands, Gen Z. Let's get into it.

By Allison Morrow

💸 THE TRUMP SPAC

The buzz around Donald Trump's new media venture has a distinctly early-2016 feel to it. There are bunch of red flags. The establishment is saying it's probably a sham. And still, people want in.

Here's the deal: The company, Trump Media & Technology, has no known revenue or product, my colleague Matt Egan writes. It's incoming CEO, Republican Congressman Devin Nunes, has no business experience in technology or social media. And federal regulators are already investigating the deal to bring the media venture public.

Despite all that, it's achieved an implied valuation above $10 billion, according to Renaissance Capital.

"This is weird and murky," Matthew Tuttle, CEO of Tuttle Capital Management LLC, told Matt. "I've never seen anything like this before. And I probably never will again."

Let's unpack this bizarre situation. When a deal was announced to take Trump's company public via a SPAC, the parties initially released very little concrete information about the fundamentals of the business.

But last week, Trump Media & Technology Group released a 38-slide presentation that, well, raises more questions than answers. And contains the kind of amateur copy-paste-from-the-internet work that most of us learned was not OK in, like, 8th grade.

A page titled "Infrastructure" defines a "user" as a "person, or organization, or system that has one or more roles that initiates or interacts with activities." It goes on to say that includes a "sales representative who travels to visit customers."
…Which makes absolutely no sense. This is supposed to be a media company, not a platform that caters to traveling salespeople.
Judd Legum, who writes the political newsletter Popular Information, flagged the definition of a "user" in a Twitter thread over the weekend. Legum pointed out that the language on the infrastructure slide is just "cut-and-pasted from other sites." (And indeed, the slide's text matches what is written on a page last updated in 2016 on Techopedia, a website that includes a tech jargon dictionary.)
Likewise, the definition of a "client" matches what is found on the website of Cloudflare.
Key quote: "Not only does this company not have any technical infrastructure, it could not be bothered to even write its own slide of what the infrastructure will be," Legum wrote.

And it's not just typos and weird copy-paste issues. There are serious errors about the valuation "and very fundamental components of the deal," said Matthew Kennedy, senior IPO market strategist at Renaissance Capital.

Investors should view this as a gamble, he said. "It seems like a lot of the valuation is based on hype and the personal popularity of Donald Trump. That's not a sound investment rationale."

TMTG did not respond to requests for comment. Read Matt's full report here.

#️⃣ NUMBER OF THE DAY

9.6%

I hope you're sitting down because this will come as a shock: A key inflation gauge showed that prices are – wait for it – still going up. The producer price index, which tracks the average changes in selling prices that domestic producers receive over time, rose 9.6% over the 12 months ended in November. It was the biggest jump since the data series was first calculated in November 2010, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and a larger advance than economists had expected. ICYMI: Last week we learned that consumer price inflation rose by 6.8% over the same time period, an increase not seen since June 1982.

🥤 THE DEATH OF 'DIET'

The thing with Gen Z is that they're growing up with all these wild ideas about how "diet culture" and "demonstrably harmful and antiquated nutrition science" are "toxic" or whatever…

As an elder Millennial raised on SnackWells, Diet Coke, and good ol' fashioned extreme early-90s beauty standards, I don't really understand it all. But it seems the kids are coming for our diet soda. Or at least the "diet" part of it.

"Zero sugar" is the new "diet" for many no-calorie soft drinks, my colleague Danielle Wiener-Bronner writes. Word on the street is "diet" signals deprivation, "zero" has fewer negative connotations." As in, "hey, this drink still has zero nutritive value but it's better than being on a stupid diet."

"No Gen Z wants to be on a diet these days," said Greg Lyons, chief marketing officer at PepsiCo Beverages North America.

And fear not, fellow admirers of aspartame-sweetened soda: The no-calorie beverages are just getting a brand makeover as dieting becomes a dirty word and younger consumers opt for alternatives like seltzer. Read Danielle's full-calorie, non-diet report here.

QUOTE OF THE DAY

Boost everybody.

Andy Slavitt, a former senior pandemic adviser to President Joe Biden, said CEOs should rethink their office reopening plans in light of the Omicron variant. "If I'm an employer with the option to have people work virtually, I am going to continue to take that," he said.

Further, Slavitt said, there's "no question" CEOs should require employees to get boosters. "Omicron has turned this undoubtedly into a three-dose vaccine, if it wasn't heading that way already," he said. "Two doses just aren't going to be sufficient any longer."

WHAT ELSE IS GOING ON?

🇩🇪 Germany is teetering on the brink of recession this winter as supply bottlenecks and a wave of new coronavirus cases hobble the economy.

🍎 The Labor Department has launched a whistleblower investigation into Apple.

👟 Nike bought a virtual sneaker company to help it expand its footprint in the fast-growing "metaverse." So just to review: Nike wants to sell digital shoes for avatars in a virtual, blockchain-based environment that Mark Zuckerberg thinks is the future... all right, y'all, I'm done.