📈 Custody Battle
Hopefully, you don’t spend as much time on Twitter as we do, but if you do you will probably notice that factually incorrect takes go viral more often than well-thought-out tweets. Famously during the 2020 Presidential Primaries, this tweet went viral and was even aired by MSNBC!
Some basic math finds that $500 million / 327 million = $1.53 per American. So, off by just a million or so.
Live look at math teachers:
Now even our editor (an English major who doesn’t believe in Math) could spot this error from a mile away. But, some incorrect takes and outright lies circulate on Twitter for much longer because they are not as easily fact-checked. This combined with America’s love for a good conspiracy theory leads to some outrageous takes on the ole interwebs.
Our current annoyance getting circulated as “fact” is that Vanguard is the largest shareholder in numerous companies and that this somehow means they are some sort of the (((DEEP STATE))) or some shadowy cabal running the company. And apparently, if you are a retired MMA athlete you can tweet this falsehood and get 50k likes.
Now he is technically not wrong (in the first tweet). Despite Elon Musk’s Twitter buyout ambitions, Vanguard is the largest owner of Twitter.
This is such a lazy take that it hurts my brain. Once again, we turn to our friend Nicky Numbers (@dollarsanddata) to shed some sanity on this situation.
First, I would like to point out that Nick’s correct take has less than 1/10 the likes as our retired MMA fighter’s nonsensical tweet. This is a problem with social media that we don’t have the time or intelligence to fix but lets at least solve this one.
Nick correctly points out that Vanguard is a custodian, and no that is not a politically correct term for a janitor. It means, well here is a definition…
TLDR: A Financial custodian holds your assets (in this case stocks) on your behalf. The alternative to this would be you getting a stock certificate in the mail every time you buy stock online. Which would be preposterous for a variety of reasons.
Who the f@$k uses mail or paper receipts?
It’s going to be very awkward when your stock certificate arrives in 3-5 business days and you have already sold it
If you lose that certificate you no longer have a right to that stock
While all those scenarios sound insane in 2022 this was pretty much how it worked until the 1990s. So knowing this we can all agree to let Vanguard have custody of our stocks sounds like a good idea right?
So if we don’t want to deal with being our own custodian and Vanguard does it basically for free we are alright with them dealing with that for us. Since Vanguard is the largest Asset Manager behind Blackrock (who also gets dragged into these debates) and Tesla is one of the world’s largest companies it would make sense they are a top shareholder.
In fact, Tesla is a top ten holding in both of its largest mutual funds, which just so happen to be the largest mutual funds in the world. Because of this if you search you will find Vanguard or Blackrock as the largest owners of most large/popular stocks.
And that is because they own them for you!
They manage them in mutual funds, they manage them in ETFs. They own them for you in 401k’s, Roth and Brokerage accounts.
What’s the Upside?
YES, Vanguard and other large investment firms own a large chunk of most publicly traded companies. BUT, they own them for YOU.
Don’t let inflammatory accounts or misleading articles distract you from the fact these companies, while powerful, exist to serve you by helping us invest effectively.
For Your Weekend
Our round-up of essays, podcasts, and streaming shows to check out over your weekend. We cast a wide net so you don’t have to.
Read:
Someone Turned Their Imaginary Friend Into an AI Microwave and It Wanted to Kill Them by Adele Ankers (IGN)
Rizzotto decided to try and bring his imaginary friend to life when OpenAI, an AI research and deployment company, released a new version of GPT-3, otherwise known as a "generative pre-trained transformer" that uses deep learning to generate human-like text. Rizzotto bought an Amazon smart microwave and equipped it with the cutting-edge language model.
Rizzotto uploaded this book into the GPT3 model so that its training data would include all of the main interactions they shared together in his youth and bring Magnetron back. Rizzotto initially deemed the experiment a success as he put the microwave to the test and discovered that the "conversations flowed naturally," but there was one major snag.
Magnetron would occasionally exhibit "sudden bursts of extreme violence" towards Rizzotto and eventually asked him to do something he never thought a machine would ask him to do: Magnetron wanted its creator to get inside the microwave. "He asked me to enter the microwave," Rizzotto revealed. "Was this a bug? I had no idea, so I decided to play along."
Watch:
The Flight Attendant - Season 1 (HBO Max)
Season 2 of The Flight Attendant premiered this Thursday. The series follows Cassie Bowden (Kaley Cuoco) whose life as an international flight attendant gets turned upside down when she finds herself at the center of a mysterious murder. It’s funny, thrilling, and punchy.
Chuckle:
