🎙️ Best of the Best

🎉🥂 Happy New Year’s, everybody! What are your resolutions? My resolution in 2024 is to buy bitcoin in 2012.

Kidding aside, I’m looking forward to more reading, travel, exercise, and family/friends time in the new year — with less screen time and less scrolling.

As a team, we’ll keep studying the economy and great businesses in 2024. We’ll continue to learn about the fascinating markets that drive our world, and we couldn’t be happier that you’re alongside us in the lifelong pursuit of learning.

With our final edition of the year, we highlight some of our top weekend deep dives of the year.

— Matthew

QUOTE OF THE DAY

"The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers."

— Thomas Jefferson

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WHAT ELSE WE’RE INTO

📺 WATCH: Can AI help weather forecasting save lives?

🎧 LISTEN: The art of quality investing with Compounding Quality

📖 READ: How the Titanic’s gym forever changed fitness

QUICK POLL

TOP DEEP DIVES OF 2023

Well, that’s a wrap on 2023. We sent emails out virtually every single day, save for a few holidays, and each weekend featured one or two “deep dives” — longer stories on everything from Starlink to Jezz Bezos at Amazon to the world’s first stock market.

Below are some of the most interesting, well-received stories of the year. Which was your favorite? Let us know by replying to this email.

The Starlink story: We break down how Starlink brings billions for SpaceX, and how the company has transformed the aerospace industry, making cost-effective spaceflight achievable.

Making sense of numbers: Nuno Job, a serial entrepreneur, discusses “excel fear,” how to tell compelling stories with numbers, and his startup Decipad, which is trying to “change the world’s relationship with numbers.”

The first stock market: Although the New York Stock Exchange is the most famous, it wasn’t the first stock exchange. Understand the origins of modern stock trading with a fascinating look at the first stock exchange.

Computer geeks: Early stories from Bill Gates at Microsoft, including Gates’ dumpster diving, computer lab games, and other 1970s and 1980s Microsoft origin stories. Today, the company is worth about $2.79 trillion.

How AI could save education: Sal Khan, creator of Khan Academy, argues that artificial intelligence could save education. Each student, he predicts, will have an AI assistant to guide them on their education journey and empower learners of all kinds. “We’re at the cusp of using AI for probably the biggest positive transformation that education has ever seen,” he said.

The Everything store: Jezz Bezos, Amazon, and building one of the world’s most valuable companies. At 30, Bezos bet on himself, leaving a high-paying job at a New York hedge fund to launch Amazon, then just an online bookstore that sold books with quick, affordable shipping. “We are genuinely customer-centric,” Bezos has said.

Running a sports team profitably: Sports is big business. But running a sports team profitably? Not so easy. We analyzed the most profitably-run sports team in the world, FC Bayern Munich.

Swiftonomics: Taylor Swift. That’s it, that’s the tweet. In all seriousness, Swift might have had the best year of anyone, anywhere, in 2023, smashing all kinds of records and winning all sorts of accolades on her way to billionaire status. This is the story of Swift’s financial strength.

Inside Duolingo’s rapid user growth: Duolingo stock rose 220% this year, and its rapid user growth is the main reason why. It teaches over 40 languages, and over 20 million people use the app daily. When a great idea merges with stellar marketing, you have something special.

See you next time!

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