👋 ASB Partners Nuggets
This is a short weekly email that covers a few things I’ve found interesting during the week.
Interesting Links/Reads
Many links are sourced from Marginal Revolution (bold and italics are my own to highlight what I found particularly interesting)
A Chinese billionaire was seeking parental rights to at least four unborn children, and the court’s additional research showed that he had already fathered or was in the process of fathering at least eight more—all through surrogates.
When Pellman called Xu Bo in for a confidential hearing in the summer of 2023, he never entered the courtroom, according to people who attended the hearing. The maker of fantasy videogames lived in China and appeared via video, speaking through an interpreter. He said he hoped to have 20 or so U.S.-born children through surrogacy—boys, because they’re superior to girls—to one day take over his business.
Several of his kids were being raised by nannies in nearby Irvine as they awaited paperwork to travel to China. He hadn’t yet met them, he told the judge, because work had been busy…
Some Chinese parents, inspired by Elon Musk’s 14 known children, pay millions in surrogacy fees to hire women in the U.S. to help them build families of jaw-dropping size. Xu calls himself “China’s first father” and is known in China as a vocal critic of feminism. On social media, his company said he has more than 100 children born through surrogacy in the U.S.
Another wealthy Chinese executive, Wang Huiwu, hired U.S. models and others as egg donors to have 10 girls, with the aim of one day marrying them off to powerful men, according to people close to the executive’s education company.
…“Elon Musk is becoming a role model now,” said Zhang. An increasing number of “crazy rich” clients are commissioning dozens, or even hundreds, of U.S.-born babies with the goal of “forging an unstoppable family dynasty,” he said.
Here is the full WSJ article.
2.Markets in everything: “Wasp nests have become a surprisingly sought-after home décor commodity, with some priced at up to $250 per specimen.” (NYT) The shipping fees to get them can be pretty high.
At Berkeley, as recently as 2015, white male hires were 52.7 percent of new tenure-track faculty; in 2023, they were 21.5 percent. UC Irvine has hired 64 tenure-track assistant professors in the humanities and social sciences since 2020. Just three (4.7 percent) are white men. Of the 59 Assistant Professors in Arts, Humanities and Social Science appointed at UC Santa Cruz between 2020-2024, only two were white men (3 percent).
4."El Al stock’s low pricing is unjustified"
The bottom line is unfathomable: the market is currently pricing El Al’s main aviation activity, the core of the business, at zero or even negative value. It is difficult to find other companies with such a deep business “moat” and dominant positioning that are trading at such a pricing that makes no economic sense.
Podcast/Videos
Gaurav Kapadia has deliberately avoided publicity throughout his career in investing, which makes this conversation a rare window into how he thinks. He now runs XN, a firm built around concentrated bets on a small number of companies with long holding periods. However, his education in judgment began much earlier, in a two-family house in Flushing that his parents converted into a four-family house. It was there where a young Gaurav served as de facto landlord, collecting rent and negotiating late payments at age 10. That grounding now expresses itself across an unusual range of domains: Tyler invited him on the show not just as an investor, but as someone with a rare ability to judge quality in cities, talent, art, and more with equal fluency.
I hope you enjoyed it.
Adam
The wasp nest market is a fasicnating example of how aesthetic value can emerge in unexpected places. At $250 per speciman, it's basically arbitrage on what most people see as a pest problem. I wonder if the pricing reflects scarcity plus the labor of careful removal, or if it's purely driven by interior design trends. Reminds me of how driftwood became a luxury good once enough people saw it in the right context.