It's not a catastrophe. It's just the stupid pandemic stay-at-home economy prepping itself to return to it's normal stupid go-back-to-the-office economy:
Much of what made investors rich during the pandemic is crumbling. The value of Netflix dropped by $45 billion in one day. Peloton has halted production on some of its exercise equipment. Bitcoin has lost almost half its value since its November peak. The pandemic isn’t over, but the Leave Home market has begun.
Even before the Omicron variant started spreading with a vengeance throughout the U.S., Wall Street has been betting that the pandemic-era economy is in its end of days. Since the market crashed in March of 2020, the Dow Jones has doubled in value, pumped up by companies that made more money as people spent more of their lives at home. But as lockdowns eased and vaccines became more widespread, the writing has been on the wall. Zoom, the video-chat service that’s become the bane of work-from-home existence, is worth about a quarter of what it was worth at its October 2020 peak. Logitech, which makes headsets and webcams, has lost about half its value since June. This week’s twin cratering of Peloton and Netflix was just the most recent blow to the pandemic economy — and their sudden falls sent peers like Disney skidding, too, as the growth of streaming audiences is expected to slow.
Be some hiccups and interruptions this year but that's nothing new. There will be some casualties too but the smartest guys in the room won't give a shit about them any more than they've cared about anyone else who's gotten clobbered by any other transition in the market that's ever happened before. Other than that it's not anything like a recession kicking off. It's just the cycle of the most obscene thing the human race has ever created returning to it's regular & dull old depraved self. Like this is all anyone ever needs to know about market economics.....
It's really not too difficult to understand. Thank you so very much for your contributions, Professor Rothbard!
Yup. The loss in revenue is so bad that the subscribers have to pay extra so they can salvage the stock price and make up the difference. It happened because some executive at Netflix kept stealing the company's manhole covers to scrape up the cash to buy drugs for his trophy mistress.
Part of it too is the ridiculous expectations of the stock market. They only added 3 million more subscribers. So obviously the company is doomed. Wall St can go hang.
Overall this is a reckoning for Netflix. They are at long last understanding they are not a tech company but a media one. Sadly, the play for games will be a dud like apple arcade except Apple can take the hit experimenting, Netflix can't. They had to come to terms with their inflated subscription numbers because they were far to loose with sharing accounts. Rightsizing their numbers was a shock but a good thing like pruning a bush. Now they need content to keep people there and they need the free ad supported tier to allow users to keep subscriptions and allow advertisers a way to support them with revenue.
Netflix is an establish brand now, bloodied but it isn't going away. They need to just keep working at it.