Hi, we've got 3 charts for you today:
Do you ever find yourself logging back onto work late at night? Just for one crucial email or message that needs to get sent? If so, rest assured, you're not alone.
The Triple Peak
By counting keyboard strokes Mary Czerwinski, a research manager at Microsoft, and her team have mapped the typical work day for a group of Microsoft employees. They found that employees were most busy hammering their keyboards in late morning, before productivity slowed around lunch time, after which they would hit a second peak of productivity at around 2:30-3pm.
But the most interesting data was the rise of the triple peak group — a finding we've reproduced from Microsoft in the chart above. Czerwinski and her team found that about 30% of Microsoft employees studied were logging back in and busting out another work session late at night.
The pandemic changed work for the better in so many ways, but an increased tendency to jump on emails at 10pm isn't one of them. If you're a triple peaker let us know. If you're a triple peaker on a Friday though... we wish you well.
Note: This triple peak didn't show up on the overall dataset of all the employees, instead it was only pronounced in the subset of about ~30%.
So Elon went and did it.
After buying a 9% slice of Twitter, Elon Musk decided he wanted the whole pie, offering $54.20 a share for Twitter yesterday... for a total price tag of $43bn.
In a letter publicly disclosed, Musk promised to "unlock" the "extraordinary potential" of Twitter. If talking financially, Musk has a point. Since its IPO in 2013 Twitter's share price has mostly been below where it started. Slow user growth and a lack of user monetization (admittedly two things rivals Pinterest and SNAP have also contended with), has seen Twitter dramatically underperform Facebook (Meta).
But Musk says he's not talking "financially", saying yesterday that he doesn't care about "the economics" of buying Twitter, instead hoping to foster an "inclusive arena for free speech".
Is the funding secured?
Whether Musk cares about the economics or not, they are relevant, particularly given that 4 years ago Musk said (on Twitter of all places) that he was planning to take Tesla private, with "funding secured". It wasn't.
And so, even for the world's richest person, $40 billion is a chunk of change that's hard to come by without liquidating a lot of his Tesla shares (which would trigger a tax event) or borrowing. For what it's worth, Twitter's shares are trading at about $45 as we write this, some way off the $54.20 Musk has offered, suggesting a decent amount of investor skepticism that this deal actually happens.
The winds they are a-changin'
Two weeks ago, for the first time ever, wind power was the second-largest source of electric generation in the US for the day, out-supplying both coal and nuclear according to data from the EIA. For that day at least, that meant wind was second only to natural gas.
Over the coming months and years, this phenomenon is likely to become pretty commonplace, as installed wind capacity continues to grow at a strong clip while coal use continues to fall — the use of coal for electricity generation has more than halved since 2007 in the US. Go deeper: check out how electricity generation has changed in the US over the last 70+ years.
1) Russia's vessel the Moskva - which was a 12,500 tonne warship that was roughly the length of two football fields - has sunk in the Black Sea.
2) JP Morgan kicked off US earnings season, reporting profit that dropped 42% relative to last year (but still a chunky $8 billion of profit for the quarter). Goldman Sachs also reported a slowdown.
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4) This might be the most useless x-axis we've seen on a chart in a long time.
5) Check out the winners from the Shot on iPhone photography challenge from Apple.
6) If Mark Zuckerberg and Tim Cook agreed on something, it would be this business newsletter from our friends at The Daily Upside.
7) Scientists have confirmed the size of a comet in Neptune's orbit, measuring the icy comet at roughly 85 miles across, with a mass equivalent to about 2,800 Mount Everests.
*Investing in securities involves risks, including the risk of loss. Composer Technologies Inc., SEC Registered RIA. This is not a recommendation of a particular security or strategy.
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