Colin Lewis

I know it's patently obvious but the crisis in Prem League teams is because they don't play for their clubs. They don't have to play for their fans. They just have to play for television. Money's made, myth propped up. Just a football content service industry.

Porsche’s disastrous EV bet tanked its profits 98%. But the headline is worse than reality. €4.7 billion of that decline is two accounting charges. A €2.7B goodwill impairment (VW admitting Porsche’s brand value is lower than they booked it) and €2.0B in costs from scrapping a dedicated EV platform they spent years building. The operating business? Automotive free cash flow actually went UP. €1.34B through Q3 2025 vs €1.24B the year before. Cash flow margin rose from 4.8% to 5.6%. The money machine still works. The accounting just caught up to a strategy that didn’t. Porsche bet sports car buyers would go electric. They stayed with combustion. China deliveries collapsed 26% to 41,000 vehicles. Revenue dropped 10% to €36.3B. Operating margin cratered from 14.5% to 0.3% in one year. And somehow, Porsche set delivery records in the U.S. and made zero profit on American sales. 15% tariffs ate every dollar of margin. Record volume, zero margin. That’s what happens when you build every car in Europe and export into a tariff wall. 4,000 jobs cut, more coming, sales still declining into January 2026, and the CEO who led the failed EV pivot walks away with a multi-million euro payout. Porsche was the most profitable automaker on Earth by margin 18 months ago. The 98% number is real but misleading. The actual story is a company that can still generate cash but burned five years and billions chasing an EV customer that doesn’t exist in the luxury segment.

Absolutely bonkers numbers. A single Formula One race generates 9 x the sponsorship value of an NFL game

The Irish people do deserve this! Cillian Murphy presents the BAFTA for Best Actress in a Leading Role to Jessie Buckley.

The French wine and spirits sector is going to hell. But it's only the beginning of a longer trend. Luxury will be the next European industry to fall, after the automotive one.

The Doorman Fallacy 'You have a five-star hotel and it has a doorman, welcoming incoming guests. McKinsey or Accenture will come in and say, “Your doorman currently costs you X thousand dollars a year. We have defined his or her function as opening the door. We’ll replace said doorman with an automatic door-opening mechanism and an infrared human detector and we’ll save you $30–$40,000 a year.” They walk away, and they take the credit for the cost savings. Two years later, the hotel’s a catastrophe ... because the doorman was doing multiple things, many of which were human and kind of tacit. Security would be one; there are no vagrants asleep in the doorway. Hailing taxis, dealing with luggage, recognizing regular guests, providing status to the hotel—there are loads and loads of value creation components to that doorman which aren’t captured in the open-the-door definition." It's easy to see the visible things, but the invisible things make the difference.

FanDuel sold for $465M in 2018. Founders got $0. Zero. - 10 years of 80-hour weeks. - Raised hundreds of millions. - Built a billion-dollar business. Liquidation preferences ate everything. Meanwhile, a FAANG principal engineer over that decade: $8-10M in total comp. 40-hour weeks. No board. No fundraising. No risk. The 'big exit' is a lottery ticket. W2 tech is the actual wealth path for most people.

my red eye flight protocol: - 6 pints in Spoons - draft angry tweets to Pret - 2 double G&Ts and a seafood platter - 3 double espressos so I'm alert enough to fly the plane