SAN FRANCISCO (KRON) – On today’s edition of Rob Black’s Winners and Losers, our financial expert Rob Black and KRON 4’s Mark Danon to talk about Tesla, Netflix and Facebook’s quest for world domination.
The recent hoopla around Tesla’s planned Model 3 might lead one to think electric-car sales are surging. They’re not. Tesla’s newest product, the $35,000 Model 3 sedan topped with 325,000 reservations. Pure electric cars such as those sold by Tesla – that is, not counting hybrids that use batteries and a conventional internal-combustion engine – totaled 71,064 last year. That amounted to only 0.4% of the record 17.4 million cars sold in the United States in 2015.
Customers enraged by Netflix’s $2 price hike likely weren’t paying attention two years ago. The fee hike, which starts for some users in May, was first announced in 2014, when Netflix bumped its monthly fee for users from $7.99 to $8.99. At the time, the company told members who were already signed up that they would get a two-year reprieve from the hike. Now Netflix is ready to collect.
Nearly one-fourth of the world’s inhabitants use Facebook. And if the social networking giant has its druthers, the rest soon will, too. That is the ultimate quest of Facebook, which opens the f8 developers conference Tuesday seeking more customers in developing countries. Facebook’s global ambitions are as huge as its audience of 1.6 billion people: Digitally connect the service around the world, especially in poor countries.