The Dive | Business News

It is a surprising move for a television-star celebrity billionaire - that is, to start a Drug Company where Americans can access heavily discounted medicines. But it's what Mark Cuban has decided to do. Cuban - an early pioneer of internet streaming, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks NBA team, and Shark on the TV show Shark Tank - has entered the healthcare space with a company that carries his n...

There's been years of reading headlines about the soaring prices of houses, not just in Australia, but all over the glob - the UK, US, Canada, New Zealand and the Czech Republic. But, with a global economy now fighting inflation, there's signs the rocketing residential prices might be a thing of the past. Today, Bryce and Sascha look at the housing boom, and examine if it's actually unravelling? R...

Move over N*Sync, Boys 2 Men, One Direction and Backstreet Boys, the biggest boy band… actually the biggest band, period, for the past few years is the K-pop group, BTS. Unfortunately, but like many bands before them, last week they released a Youtube video announcing they’d be taking a break. The group also explained they want to develop individually and that the pressure of being in BTS was...

It’s almost the end of June, which is the end of the Financial Year here in Australia. Around this time, we always hear the same story... that global companies rake in huge profits, while simultaneously paying next to nothing in tax. The same pattern eventuates. We get frustrated. Politicians get riled up. But ultimately, nothing changes. But, earlier this year the OECD agreed to impleme...

“Golf, but louder.” That is the slogan for the latest big money tournament in professional sport - LIV Golf. Run by Greg Norman, backed by the Saudi Government, this tournament is throwing humongous money - aiming to attract top golfers to join this new competition. The new tournament is proving to be divisive. The Saudi government - who're internationally criticised for their atrocious record of...

Earlier this month, New Zealand proposed a world first - having farmers pay for the emissions of their animals. Essentially, a methane tax for livestock. In a country that only has 5 million people, but 10 million cows and 26 million sheep - and where 50% of their emissions come from agriculture, it's no surprise it's front of mind in New Zealand's battle to get to net zero. In this episode,...

Inflation is the biggest story of the moment. The rapid climb of the cost of basic goods and services is damaging economies, markets, businesses - and most likely your hip pocket as well. We predict you've spotted a sign of inflation.  In the US, a photo of a Los Angeles gas station went viral charging more than $8 a gallon for fuel, in Australia - a photo went viral after a $12 iceberg...

In honour of the Queen's Birthday weekend which we're celebrating here in Australia (despite her actual birthday being on 21st April) The Dive team wanted to look at monarchies around the world. To be precise, we were interested in how much these Royal Families own, how much they cost and whether they bring in any additional revenue for a country. Alec and Sascha ponder the question, 'what's the v...

Last week, a surprising police raid took place in Germany. 50 police officers raided DWS Group, a subsidiary of mega investment bank Deutsche Bank. What was the alleged crime? Greenwashing. If you haven't heard of Greenwashing before, it's a term used to describe when a company markets their product as ‘sustainable’ or ‘environmentally friendly’ when it really just isn’t. It's classic ma...

Last week an Elon Musk email was leaked where he said, "Anyone who wishes to do remote work must be in the office for a minimum (and I mean *minimum*) of 40 hours per week or depart Tesla." It led to a big conversation at the Equity Mates office, about whether working from home just a phase, and will there eventually be pressure to return to the office on the horizon? Sascha and Darcy ex...

Sheryl Sandberg, the Chief Operating Officer of Meta (formerly Facebook), announced she was stepping down from the company after 14 years at Mark Zuckerberg’s side.  And reports of her closeness with Zuckerberg aren’t exaggerated - when she started the job she asked for three things – that they would sit next to each other, that they’d meet one-on-one every week, and for honest feedback when...

AGL is Australia’s oldest and largest electricity generator. It is also Australia’s largest emitter of carbon dioxide. The company plans to shut its last coal fired generator in 2045. And has been resisting calls for it to accelerate plans to shut down its coal fired power plants. Which has put it in conflict with Mike Cannon-Brookes, who has been using his considerable wealth to try and accelerat...

Today we’re going to unpack the business story behind the big entertainment headlines of last week - Justin Timberlake’s 100 million dollar payday!  You may not know it, but chances are whenever you’re streaming music on Spotify or Apple Music, the money isn’t going to the artist. It’s not even going to the record label. These days, it’s pretty likely the revenue from that stream is ending up...

Glencore, the Swiss and British commodity trading and mining company, plead guilty in the US, the UK, and Brazil, to spending hundreds of millions of dollars to bribe officials in numerous countries and also, to running a scheme to manipulate oil prices.  For such a big scandal, The Dive team felt it had got remarkably little coverage. So we wanted to unpack exactly what happened at Glencore...

This week saw the sale of one of the world’s most coveted assets. And it wasn’t a billion dollar tech unicorn, or a one of a kind Picasso, a Stradivarius violin, or even a super yacht. It was a football club. Not just any football club - one of the Big 6 clubs of the English Premier League - Chelsea - which finally sold, after being seized from its Russian owner - Roman Abramovich. The battle to b...

It's been over 50 years since we put a man on the moon. So it was a surprise to The Dive team when they found out there's a new space battle at play between nations. This time, it's all about who can kick-start mining lucrative celestial elements. As you'd imagine, all this is putting pressure on the delicate balance of inter-galactic relationships between nations. Today, Bryce joins Sascha in the...

If you’ve gone food shopping lately, it’s hard to ignore the ever-climbing prices. And if you haven’t seen it on the shelves, you’ve probably heard about it on the news. While there's been escalating prices across the board, there’s actually a number of food stuffs where there’s been more pronounced increases. Wheat is one of them, and it's... kind of everywhere. It's used for cereal, bread,...

Have you ever asked for a pay rise and been knocked back? That's what happened to Jamie Dimon, the CEO of Investment Bank JP Morgan, and Pat Gelsinger, the CEO of Intel recently. And they aren't alone, it's part of a larger trend where shareholders are pushing back against managements’ sky-high remuneration. What happened in these cases? Well, the world’s largest investment bank was preparing a 20...

What was your lockdown like? For many of us it wasn't a great experience, but thankfully (for most) it's in life's rear-view mirror. But for the residents in Shanghai, it’s not. What's more, this is a hard-lockdown that many people never experienced. The government has instructed residents not to leave their house - for anything. Unable to throw out their rubbish, walk their dogs, or even go to bu...

On the weekend Elon tweeted:  Twitter deal temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users. Then he hit pause on his takeover deal with Twitter. Then all hell broke loose. What are bots? On social media, they are automated accounts that can do the same things as real human beings: send out tweets, follow other users,...

The gig economy! It's not just for musicians anymore... all you need is your smartphone and an app, and within minutes you could be driving people around, delivering food, or walking dogs, in exchange for cash. It's thanks to companies like Uber, Doordash, and Wag that built marketplaces that facilitated work easily. That's the gig economy. This way of working is a two way street - while there’s n...

It’s reporting season… again. Christmas may only come once a year but reporting (or earnings season in the US) seems like it never ends. And for anyone who’s thinking... umm what is reporting season? It’s the time when public companies release their most recent quarter's financial information in… a report. Think of it like a school report card for companies.  In that, when you do well, the ma...

It's election season. Australia heads to the polls in a matter of weeks, America is voting on primaries for the midterms, the UK just held local elections and France just voted in Macron for another term. But how much is the price of democracy? In Australia, the Grattan Institute expect that politicians will spend almost 500 million dollars trying to get elected in 2022 - with mining billionaire C...

Streaming services have spent huge amounts locking celebrities and media personalities into exclusive contracts over the last few years. In this episode, Alec and Sascha look at three big deals with Netflix and Spotify - the Obamas, the Sussexes, and Joe Rogan - and why two of these are now coming to an end. With the recent tech sell-off that's seen both of these companies in the red, we're asking...

All around the world, the headlines are the same - the global interest rate is rising. In Australia, the RBA has just made the first interest rate increase in 11 years, raising rates from 0.1% to 0.35%. We're in good company - in the US, interest rates were raised from 0.25% to 0.5%, in the UK and South Africa, there have been two interest rate rises, and South Korea has raised from 1% to 1.5% thi...