As Christmas lunch fast approaches, your local butcher is preparing animals for slaughter, but he is not the only one. Elon Musk’s Neuralink has reportedly killed 1,500 animals, including sheep, pigs, and monkeys. Musk insists that the company is moving far too slowly though and wants to begin human trials. Not for me – I would still prefer a chop in my stomach to a chip in my brain.

The lowdown

• 🧠 Neuralink under federal investigation after employee complaints relating to animal welfare.

• 📉 More SPAC deals fall apart in a sign that the craze has come to an end.

• 🇸🇦 Saudi Prince Mohammed bin Salman may take a stake in Credit Suisse, sending the stock price up.

Featured Stories

Duolingo slowly but surely increases paid subscribers

Birds can be annoying. They steal our food at the seaside, defecate on our cars and worst of all they make us feel guilty when we have not completed our daily language lesson on the Duolingo app. But perhaps it is this guilt which keeps users returning to and eventually paying for the app.

For years Duolingo has been impacted by the problem of free riders ($). When it went public in July 2021, at a valuation of nearly $5 billion, only 4.5% of users were paying for the app. It now has a market cap of just $2.7 billion but has steadily increased its paid subscribers (as a percentage of monthly average users) to 7.4% or 3.7 million.

The problem is that one way it has achieved the increase in paid subscribers is by reducing the cost of a premium subscription from $12.99 per month to just $6.99 per month. The company continues to lose money, with a net loss of $15 million in the last quarter.

Investors should not lose all hope, though. Spotify took 13 years to become profitable and now boasts a whopping 195 million paid subscribers. Duolingo’s most recent move to increase paid subscribers numbers was to acquire an animation studio. The company’s chief business officer Bob Meese stated that subscriptions rose when the company included an animated promotion inside the app. Does this mean we can look forward to a Duolingo Wrapped animation next year? It worked for Spotify.

The content we're consuming today

• The New York Times: Hans Neimann is the Bad Boy of Chess. But Did He Cheat? ($).

• FT: PwC targets rival EY in bid to expand partnership ($).

Off-balance sheet items

• I am honestly starting to worry about my job after seeing how good current internet phenomenon OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot is – create an account and prepare to be impressed.

The bottom line