| |  | TOGETHER WITH |  | | | Good morning.
The free rides at Goldman Sachs are over — literally. Per the New York Post, the investment bank will stop offering staffers free car rides to and from the office, a perk that was launched early during the Covid pandemic.
Meanwhile, at one point last year, Goldman’s highly compensated CEO David Solomon was said to have used the company's private jet to take seven trips to the Bahamas in as many weeks. Goldman staff did, however, recently have their daily dinner allowances hiked to $30 from $25, which should be more than enough to let them eat cake. | | | • | | CNN+ will shut down just a month after launching. | | • | | The world’s largest meat producer is way off the mark on its net-zero pledge. | | • | | Amazon wants to be a third-party shipping service. | | | | |  | Streaming | CNN+ Will Shut Down A Mere Month After Launching | | It’s been quite a week for the streaming industry. After Netflix reported its first net subscriber loss in a decade, it didn’t seem like the news could get any worse, until things got worse for the news.
On Thursday, Warner Bros. Discovery announced that it’s shutting down CNN+, the current-affairs streaming arm of cable news stalwart CNN. The embarrassing about-face comes just weeks after the service launched. Its last day online will be April 30. | Broken Telephone Leads to Canceled Television | | As of today, CNN+ is a mere 24 days old. Its newly formed parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery, is even younger — having been formed just two weeks ago after WarnerMedia was spun out from AT&T and merged with Discovery. As it turns out, the merger drama may well have helped bring about CNN+’s swift demise.
CNN+ moved ahead at the behest of Jason Kilar, the former WarnerMedia CEO who until recently claimed the streaming service — with obviously huge ratings draws like Jake Tapper’s Book Club — was beating expectations. At the same time, David Zaslav, the former Discovery CEO who took over Warner Bros. Discovery, reportedly believed CNN+ was a bad idea from the start.
Apparently, Zaslav was none too happy that Kilar had launched the platform just prior to the merger, with development costs alone reaching $300 million. Thanks to laws preventing merger parties from operating as one unit prior to close, Zaslav was powerless to prevent the launch. Hence, the new boss ended up canceling CNN+ almost as soon as it started. The numbers speak for themselves: | • | | CNN+ only had about 100,000 subscribers, according to multiple reports, and Discovery executives thought the monthly $5.99 price tag was too much to ask for what ended up being a collection of soft public-affairs programming. | | • | | CNN+’s struggles included the fact that it was limited in the amount of CNN's popular live breaking news that it could show, due to its sister network’s relationships with pay-TV distributors. Meanwhile, Fox News’ rival service Fox Nation, which has a million subscribers, has seen greater success because it is allowed to stream the network’s popular news commentary shows like Tucker Carlson Tonight and Hannity. | | | | At Least Something Works: On Thursday, AT&T’s final earnings disclosure with Warner properties revealed that HBO and its HBO Max streaming service, now the property of Warner Bros. Discovery, added 3 million subscribers in the first three months of 2022, for a total of 74 million. Some CNN+ content will reportedly move to HBO Max — apparently because it has not yet underwhelmed enough viewers. | | | | | | Green Business | Researchers Claim Emissions at World’s Largest Meatpacker Rose 50% in Half a Decade |  | | In the world of meatpacking, there’s nothing wrong with beefing up your business. Just not like this.
The carbon footprint of Brazil’s JBS, the world’s largest meatpacking company, has grown over 50% in the past five years, according to a report released Thursday by the Minnesota-based Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy. This flies in the face of the company’s plan to go net-zero on carbon emissions. | An Unpleasant Meating | | In the last two years, investigations by Brazil’s Réporter Brasil, The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, The Guardian, Greenpeace, and Amnesty International have connected JBS to farms in the Amazon that practice deforestation. In 2020, Northern Europe’s largest wealth manager, Nordea Asset Management, dropped JBS from its $250 billion portfolio. In December, three major European supermarket chains — Sainsbury, Carrefour, and Ahold Delhaize — said they would stop selling many Brazilian meat products as a result of their environmental record.
JBS pledged to reduce its emissions to net-zero by 2040, but this latest controversy makes that promise sound rather like the faint din of a distant cowbell. The calculations by the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy use a framework developed by the UN that includes Scope 3 emissions — the indirect emissions occurring throughout a company’s supply chain. In this case, that means the emissions from a growing number of animals. Confronted with the evidence, JBS failed to offer a convincing response: | • | | The researchers determined that by processing 27 million cattle, 47 million pigs, and 5 billion chickens last year, JBS had increased its annual emissions to 422 million metric tons, up from 280 million metric tons in 2016. | | • | | JBS responded by claiming its total emissions in 2020 were a mere 6.8 million metric tons, but then acknowledged that its figures don’t account for animals in the company’s supply chain. | | | “Their model does a good job of accurately capturing most of the supply chain impacts that they’re describing here as Scope 3,” Matthew Hayek, an environmental science professor at NYU, told the Financial Times. “Emissions from animals certainly should be considered a part of any agrifood company’s supply chain.” Is that Kosher? On a related note, here’s one meat company that won’t have to deal with animal emissions. Upside Foods, a private company developing lab-grown meat by cultivating animal cells in a lab, raised $400 million on Thursday. The startup said it expects to soon sell “chicken” in the US, pending regulatory approval (see what Richard Branson thought of the taste here). Rabbis, meanwhile, are debating whether lab-grown pork, which is also in development, could be considered kosher. | | | | | | Sponsored by Wondrium | 5 Major Industries, 1 Massive Goal… | Lowering carbon emissions to net zero by 2050. It’s a monumental task, but the future of humanity depends on it – and you can see exactly what the worlds brightest minds are doing about it in Wondrium’s newest streaming series: “ Solving for Zero: The Search for Climate Innovation.” Inspired by the Bill Gates bestseller “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster,” this series highlights the most innovative and hopeful solutions in five major industries – as well as the gamechangers behind them – that may help protect the future of our climate. From the Oceanbird project, which uses wind power to cut emissions to massive cargo ships by 90%, to hybrid crops being developed by CIMMYT to resist droughts and pests, this series shines a spotlight on the kind of progress that should make us hopeful about the future. Ready to watch? Stream it with a free trial of Wondrium right here. | | | | | | Ecommerce | Amazon Enables Prime Perks to Third-Party Retail Sites | | Amazon is ubiquitous. Need groceries? Shop at Whole Foods. Feeling like a movie? Stream one on Amazon Prime Video. Need literally any household good? The Amazon delivery truck perpetually roving your neighborhood will drop it off in a day or two.
Now, even when you’re not shopping with Amazon, Amazon wants you to shop with Amazon. On Thursday, the company announced Buy with Prime, giving Prime subscribers access to membership perks (like extra speedy delivery) for some non-Amazon online purchases, and allowing merchants on non-Amazon retail sites to outsource fulfillment services to the ecommerce giant. | American Prime Story | | Like all the coolest parties, Buy with Prime will begin on an invitation-only basis. The first invitees: retailers who already pay for Fulfillment by Amazon, an existing service that grants merchants access to Amazon’s warehouses and shipping operations. Sites joining Buy with Prime — which will also be a paid service, with pricing dependent on various logistical factors — can entice the existing 200 million-plus Prime members with streamlined, Amazon account-linked checkouts and the staple, indulgent perks of free shipping, next-day delivery, and free returns.
By expanding the reach of the Prime program, Amazon aims to challenge its competitors across online retail as well as the shipping and logistics sectors: | • | | Through Buy with Prime, Amazon will directly encroach on the home turf of Shopify, the relatively small but mighty ecommerce company offering online merchants the tools to process ecommerce sales on their own sites (rather than list on Amazon or other ecommerce platforms). | | • | | Industry watchers have long speculated Amazon would seek to turn its massive, complex, and growing logistics and fulfillment network into a true competitor of UPS, FedEx, and the USPS, according to CNBC. Buy with Prime will allow Amazon to more directly compete with third-party shipping businesses. | | | | “If you think about it, one of Amazon’s most successful businesses was started as an internal tool,” Technalysis Research chief analyst Bob O’Donnell told CNBC, referring to Amazon Web Services. “They’ve built this huge logistics business initially for their own purposes and now what they’re starting to do is leverage that as its own service.” | | | | | | Extra Upside | • | | Good idea: the FAA will revoke the pilot’s license of a YouTuber who crashed his plane on purpose and posted a video of it. | | • | | Elon Musk laid out how he would finance his proposed Twitter acquisition. | | • | | Kevin O’Leary created an opportunity for individuals to invest alongside him in a consumer-focused financial technology startup. Why is he doing this? It will help spread the word about Beanstox, and its app for automated wealth building designed primarily for the 100 million Americans who have no investment account. Yes, you could become an investor in the business. This opportunity is ending in a few days, and already over 2,000 people have committed over $2.4 million. Read more about how you can invest now! Review the Beanstox opportunity here.* *Partner | | | | | | |  | Just For Fun | | | | | Written by Sean Craig and Brian Boyle. | Disclaimer | | | The preceding post was written and/or published as a collaboration between The Daily Upside’s in-house sponsored content team. Although the piece is not and should not be construed as editorial content, the sponsored content team works to ensure that any and all information contained within is true and accurate to the best of their knowledge and research. The Daily Upside may receive monetary compensation from the issuer, or its agency, for publicizing the offering of the issuer’s securities. This content is for informational purposes only and is not intended to be investing advice. This is a paid ad. Please see 17b disclosure linked in the campaign page for more information. https://beanstox.com/sedisclosures | | | | | No longer want to receive these emails? Unsubscribe here. Copyright © 2022 The Daily Upside, LLC., All rights reserved. 1230 York Avenue, Box 154, New York, NY 10065 | | | | |
