> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.fridayfinance.co/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Bending Spoons, Zuckerberg's tax strategy, Buffet Math, India's Biggest IPO and Lab-Made Gold? - URL: https://www.fridayfinance.co/bending-spoons-zuckerbergs-tax-strategy-buffet-math-indias-biggest-ipo-and-lab-made-gold/ - Published: 2026-10-23T22:21:36.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-23T22:21:36.000Z - Author: Sam Perera - Tags: Friday Finance **53rd Edition** Greetings folks and a warm welcome to the 53rd Edition of Friday Finance, Scammers in Norway have found a new way to collect. According to Finans Norge, the country’s banking lobby, victims are being persuaded to buy gold as an investment, with a promise that “others will keep it safe while the value rises.” The gold is real. Victims buy it legally, usually from a local jeweller. Then the meeting to hand it over falls through, and they are told to leave it somewhere safe instead. **Somewhere safe turns out to be a forest.** Some have left it in public parks. Then it is stolen. Banks can block a suspicious transfer, but they can’t block a bar of gold under a tree. Cases have turned up in Oslo, Bergen and 2 other cities since the spring. Finans Norge says it doesn’t know how much has been lost. I am sure most people would be too embarrassed to admit that they randomly left gold in a forest. Let's get right to it. --- ## **Bending Spoons** > **TL;DR:** Berkshire has now put about $930 million into Bending Spoons, the Milan company that owns Evernote, Vimeo and AOL. It buys tired software brands cheap, cuts most of the staff and raises prices. Miro was once valued at $17.5 billion. Bending Spoons paid $1.36 billion. **Berkshire Hathaway has put another $330 million into Bending Spoons, a Milan company most people have never heard of.** It owns Evernote, WeTransfer, Vimeo, Eventbrite and AOL. Berkshire bought 10 million shares at $33 each, taking its stake to about 4%. It had already invested $600 million when the company listed on Nasdaq in July at $29 a share. The shares jumped about 41% on the news. They have since slipped to about $43, valuing the company at about $26 billion. Bending Spoons says it has never sold a business it bought. It buys software brands that have fallen out of favour, usually for a fraction of their peak value. This year it agreed to buy Airtable for about $1.3 billion and Miro for $1.36 billion. **Miro was once valued at $17.5 billion.** Then it cuts staff. Evernote’s entire team went after the 2023 deal, WeTransfer lost 75%, and Vimeo lost most of its employees, including the whole video team. Of 1,830 staff that came with AOL, Eventbrite and Vimeo, it expects only a few hundred to stay. Then it raises prices. Evernote’s personal plan went from $70 a year to $130. Revenue is heading for about $2.8 billion this year, more than double 2025\. Almost all of that growth is bought. Organic growth was about 3% last quarter. **The company hired 286 people last year from about 800,000 applications.** It has also borrowed to pay for the deals, about $4 billion net at the end of June, and its quarterly interest bill has roughly tripled. It told CNBC it has not been outbid on a target in several years. Private equity, the usual buyer of tired software, has mostly stepped back. If the pundits are right that about a bunch of AI companies will go bust in the next 2-3 years, Bending Spoons will be busy. Do you think Warren Buffett still uses his AOL account? --- ## **Paying Zuckerberg to Stay in California** > **TL;DR:** Zuckerberg told Meta’s board he might leave California over a 5% billionaire tax. Meta’s answer is a new class of non-voting shares that lets him sell about $20 billion without losing control, as long as he stays in California for 8 years. The tax looks at where you lived on January 1. **Last month Mark Zuckerberg told Meta’s board he was thinking of leaving California.** The reason was Proposition 40, on the ballot on November 3\. It would charge a one-time 5% tax on residents worth more than $1 billion. Zuckerberg is worth more than $200 billion, so his bill would be about $10 billion. The BBC says his effective California tax rate has been under 1% a year. He told the board a move “would be public” and would “raise questions” about how the company is run. A special committee of Meta’s board negotiated with him. The filing says the talks were “contentious” at several points. **Meta’s answer is a new class of stock.** Zuckerberg owns about 13% of Meta but controls about 60% of the votes. If he sells shares to pay a tax bill, he loses votes. So Meta is creating Class C shares, which have no votes. In January every shareholder gets 1 free Class C share for each share they own. It works like a 2-for-1 stock split. Zuckerberg can sell 20% of his new shares right away, which the board estimates is worth about $20 billion. The rest unlock at 2.5% a quarter for 8 years, as long as he keeps running Meta and lives in California. Meta calls it the “Founder Alignment Agreement.” Zuckerberg controls the vote, so no shareholder approval was needed. The deal stands even if the tax fails, and polls suggest it might. The tax counts anyone who lived in California on January 1, 2026\. The new shares also give Meta a way to raise money without touching Zuckerberg’s control. **It needs it. Meta expects to spend up to $145 billion on AI this year, and it just posted negative free cash flow for the first time in its 14 years as a public company.** Revenue rose 26% in the quarter to $64.6 billion. Its shares fell about 7% on Thursday, wiping more than $100 billion off its market value. Meta tried the same non-voting share idea in 2016\. Shareholders sued, and it dropped the plan days before Zuckerberg was due to testify. The tax would have been due regardless of whether Zuckerberg moved, so really this was about consolidating control. --- ## **All You Can Eat Math** > **TL;DR:** Golden Corral charges $15.99 to $18.99 for unlimited sirloin and spends about 38% of sales on food. It makes the math work by putting shrimp next to hush puppies, cooking in 15-minute batches and selling a $3.20 drink to almost everyone. No doggy bags. **Golden Corral is America’s biggest buffet chain, with about 350 restaurants.** Dinner with unlimited sirloin costs $15.99 to $18.99\. Beef prices hit records this year, diesel hit a record in September, and the Wall Street Journal reports that nearly every supplier now adds a fuel surcharge to the chain’s bills. Food already costs Golden Corral about 38% of sales, more than a typical restaurant. Labour is cheaper because diners serve themselves. Rent, utilities and other costs have to stay around 10%. Losing 500 diners a week can be enough to put a restaurant in trouble. Its chief executive, Lance Trenary, told the Journal, “We are trying to at least tread water.” Golden Corral serves about 150 items, and operators know what each one costs. The expensive dishes are grouped with cheap ones. **Shrimp sits next to hush puppies and fries.** Meatloaf comes with potatoes, gravy and green beans. To get people off beef, it added a fried pork chop that costs about 40% as much as the sirloin. It also watches what diners throw away. If a dish is badly made, people bin it and go back for something else. So restaurants cook in 15-minute batches and avoid holding food in warmers. Drinks cost extra, about $3.20, and most people buy one. You can’t take anything home. **The biggest US chains ran 150 all-you-can-eat deals in the first half of this year, about 4x as many as in 2021.** Olive Garden has brought back its Never-Ending Pasta Bowl. Applebee’s offered unlimited wings and shrimp. Red Lobster tried it in 2023 with $20 Endless Shrimp. Its largest shareholder said the deal lost $11 million, and the chain filed for bankruptcy in 2024\. Endless Shrimp is back on the menu anyway. Golden Corral, meanwhile, has started delivering 25 wings for $25. --- ## **Jio: India’s Biggest IPO** > **TL;DR:** Jio raised up to $3.2 billion in India’s biggest IPO, valuing it at about $108 billion. That’s only about 3% of the company, and investors bid for it about 22x over. Meta and Google bought in at about $65 billion in 2020. Mukesh Ambani is taking Jio public. Jio is India’s biggest phone company, with 524 million subscribers and about 60% of the country’s data traffic. Bidding closed on Friday on an offer of up to $3.2 billion, the biggest IPO in Indian history. At the top of the price range, Jio is worth about $108 billion. **That means Ambani is selling only about 3% of the company.** All the shares are new, and about 90% of the money raised will go to paying down debt at Jio’s phone business. Trading is expected to start next Wednesday. **The offer was subscribed about 22x over.** It was fully subscribed within 2 hours of opening. Large institutions bid for about 70x their allocation, and retail investors for about 2.7x. More than 12 million people applied, the most ever for an Indian IPO. That came in a bad year for Indian stocks: the Nifty 50 is down more than 12%. Jio is profitable. Revenue rose nearly 12% in the quarter to June, to about $4.1 billion, and profit rose 9%. **In 2020, during the pandemic, Jio raised more than $20 billion for about a third of the company.** Meta put in $5.7 billion and Google $4.5 billion, at a valuation of about $65 billion. Last year some bankers put Jio at up to $170 billion. It priced at $108 billion, below its smaller rival Bharti Airtel at about $128 billion. Meta and Google aren’t selling any shares. --- ## **Lab-Made Gold?** > **TL;DR:** A San Francisco fusion start-up backed by De Beers’ owner says it turned mercury into gold. It won’t say how much, and the gold may need 18 years in storage. Lab-grown diamonds cut diamond prices 90% to 95%. Gold has 222,600 tonnes already above ground. A San Francisco start-up says it has turned mercury into gold. Marathon Fusion designs fuel systems for future fusion power plants. It says it fires neutrons at mercury, turning it into an unstable form that decays into gold. It says it made 10x more gold last month than CERN’s record, about 29 picograms from the Large Hadron Collider. It hasn’t said how much that is, and nobody has verified it. **The gold also comes out radioactive. Marathon has said it might need to sit in storage for up to 18 years before it can be sold.** Its backers include Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy and Anglo American, the owner of De Beers. **Lab-grown diamonds are chemically the same as mined ones, and their wholesale price has fallen 90% to 95% since 2015.** Mined diamond prices fell with them. De Beers launched its own lab-grown brand at $800 a carat in 2018 and shut it last year. It lost $511 million last year, and Anglo is reportedly trying to sell it for about $1 billion. Canada has felt it. The 3 diamond mines in the Northwest Territories made up about 20% of the territory’s economy. Diavik stopped production in March. Ekati went into receivership in July. Gahcho Kué, part-owned by De Beers, is the last one running. **Almost all the gold ever mined still exists, about 222,600 tonnes.** Miners add about 1.6% a year. Marathon estimates a fusion plant could make about 5 tonnes a year, roughly $650 million at today’s price of about $4,060 an ounce. Even 100 plants would add only about 0.2% a year to the pile. Lab diamonds can be detected. Lab gold, once the radioactivity fades, can’t. None of this works until fusion plants sell electricity, and none do yet. --- A woman in Austin is suing Torchy’s Tacos for up to $250,000 after finding a cow tooth in her taco. Nohemi Castillo says she nearly swallowed it. The taco was the chain’s barbacoa (slow-cooked beef), which Torchy’s says is made from beef cheek. **Torchy’s has confirmed it was a cow tooth.** It said this “can occasionally happen when processing the meat, though it is quite rare.” Her lawyer says the chain only admitted it after local news covered the story, about 4 months later. The lawsuit was filed last week in Travis County. A jury would decide how much a tooth is worth. **“Price is what you pay; value is what you get.”** — Warren Buffett Have a fantastic weekend. I welcome feedback and please forward this if you see fit. Many thanks, Sam --- **Market Snapshots** ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/9e/cd/9ecdba3a-371c-45d6-888e-4690ee860243/content/images/2026/10/marketsnapshot_53-1.png) *Note: Meta’s results revived worries about AI spending. The Nasdaq fell 2.6% on Thursday, its biggest one-day drop since June. The Dow finished flat on gains in Procter & Gamble and Lockheed Martin. A Houthi attack in Saudi Arabia pushed Brent to about $113, near a 5-month high. Money moved into Treasuries, and the 10-year yield fell about 19 basis points, its biggest one-day drop since March 2023\. Gold fell 2.8%. In Canada the TSX lost 352 points, while the loonie edged up to 71.32 US cents. The Bank of Canada and the Fed both decide on October 28.* *1 USD = 1.402 CAD at Thursday’s close.* --- **Sources** Bloomberg, ABC Nyheter, Protos (opener); CNBC via CoinDesk, TechCrunch, Market Chameleon, The Next Web, MarketBeat, Wikipedia (Bending Spoons); BBC, SiliconANGLE, Forbes, Crypto Briefing, WIRED via Zetik, Baker Tilly, Wikipedia (Meta and Prop 40); The Wall Street Journal, FSR Magazine, Nation’s Restaurant News, Fortune, Wikipedia (Golden Corral); The Guardian, Reuters via Business Recorder, TechCrunch, The Tech Portal, HDFC Sky, Business Standard (Jio); Euronews, Futurism, Mugglehead, BNN Bloomberg, Cabin Radio (lab-made gold); Fox News citing KVUE, Wikipedia, QSR Magazine (closer); Yahoo Finance, TradingKey, BNN Bloomberg (market data). *Market data pulled Friday October 23, 2026 using October 22 closes. Meta’s closing price is approximate. Live items this edition. Jio’s subscription figures are a snapshot at the close of bidding, and listing is expected October 28\. Marathon Fusion’s gold claim has not been independently verified. Nohemi Castillo’s claims are allegations in a lawsuit. Prop 40 is on the November 3 ballot. Currency at Thursday’s close.*