Elon Musk is now the CEO of four companies, and you probably aren’t even the CEO of one. If Elon sent his Balance Sheet referral link to his four different company emails, then he would only need to refer one more person to get a free Excel shortcuts mug. And once he has those shortcuts handy, he could probably be CEO of a fifth company with all the time he would save. Please share this newsletter too, just not with yourself.

The lowdown

• 📈 The Fed increases rates by .75 percentage points and hints that future raise may be smaller.

• 🏦 The Bank of England will announce its own decision on rates later today.

• 🚗 Whistleblower questions sustainability of Uber’s business model.

Flex your finance muscle 💸💪

Returning to the VC term sheet, today we are looking at:

Drag-Along Rights 💰

A drag-along provision is a mechanism that prevents a minority shareholder from holding out on a deal when a majority shareholder is in favor of it. To put that another way, the majority shareholder can force the minority shareholder to join in the sale of a company on equal terms.

For example, Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion, but this included equity commitments from 19 other minority investors. If Elon decides to return Twitter to the public markets in the future or sell the firm to another private buyer, he may hold drag-along rights which prevent the minority investors from opposing the deal. Read about drag-along rights in detail here.

Featured stories

News Corp and Fox merger a gamble on sports betting?

A little over two weeks ago, News Corp and Fox formed special committees to consider the prospect of reuniting. 91-year-old Rupert Murdoch, who owns roughly 40% of the two companies through family trusts ($), is said to be behind the drive to unite the firms.

The rationale for the merger is unclear; some theorize it is motivated by succession planning, while the company argues that scale and an improved ability to be a player in sports betting are behind the deal.

Fox and News Corp are currently bit players in sports betting, though they have a clear ambition to be much larger. News Corp is a major investor in new Australian bookmaker Betr. The Australian sports betting market is more mature than in the United States, where it has only recently become legal.

Betr recently launched a promotion centered around the Melbourne Cup (Australia’s premier horse race). The promotion involved offering odds of 100-1 on all horses in the cup, including the favorite. Unsurprisingly at this point, Reddit and Twitter armies spread news of the promotion ($) and thousands of users signed up, with almost all betting on the favorite offered at odds of $3.50-1 elsewhere.

Faced with a much larger liability than anticipated, Betr was forced to sell some of its risk to other bookmakers($) to avoid a cataclysmic loss for the new company. After leading for a period in the straight, the favorite dropped off and Betr’s gamble seemed to pay off. Perhaps a merger will too.

The content we're consuming today

• The New Yorker: Was Jack Welch the Greatest CEO of His Day—or the Worst? ($)

Off-balance sheet items

• The trailer for Avatar: The Way of Water (the sequel to the 2009 film) has finally dropped and it looks amazing.

The bottom line