• Michael Burry stayed quiet, bet big on Chinese tech giants, and saw one stock wager pay off in 2024.
• The investor of "The Big Short" fame boosted his Alibaba and JD.com stakes and bought into Baidu.
• The RealReal stock has surged more than sevenfold since Burry invested in early 2023.

Michael Burry kept a low profile, plowed money into three Chinese tech giants, and saw a long-standing stock bet pay off in 2024.

Who is Michael Burry?

Burry is best known for predicting and profiting from the collapse of the housing bubble in the mid-2000s. His contrarian wager was immortalized in the book and film "The Big Short."

He's also famous in financial circles for predicting market crashes and recessions, investing in GameStop long before the video-game retailer became a meme stock. He also bet against Elon Musk's Tesla, Cathie Wood's flagship Ark fund, Apple, a microchip fund containing Nvidia, and the S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 indexes in recent years.

Burry goes by Cassandra B.C. on X — a nod to the priestess in Greek mythology who was cursed to utter true prophecies but never to be believed.

Staying quiet

In years past, Burry frequently shared his thoughts on the markets, economy, and other subjects using X.

For example, he warned of the "greatest speculative bubble of all time in all things" in the summer of 2021, and told buyers of meme stocks and cryptocurrencies that they were careening toward the "mother of all crashes."

Burry even caught Musk's attention with the Tesla and SpaceX CEO calling him a "broken clock" in late 2021. Moreover, the investor set alarm bells ringing on Wall Street in early 2023 with a one-word post: "Sell."

However, Burry didn't post at all last year, and hasn't shared anything with the 1.4 million followers of his primary account since April 2023.

Chinese trio

Burry's Scion Asset Management revealed in a first-quarter portfolio update it had boosted its bets on Alibaba and JD.com, two Chinese e-commerce titans. It also established a small position in Baidu, a search giant that's been dubbed the "Chinese Google."

The Scion chief added to both the Alibaba and Baidu positions in the second quarter while paring his JD.com stake, but then ramped up all three wagers in the third quarter.

In the 12 months to September 2024, Scion quadrupled both its Alibaba and JD.com stakes. It went from owning 50,000 Alibaba shares worth $4.4 million to 200,000 shares worth $21.2 million.

It raised its JD.com position from 125,000 shares worth $3.6 million to 500,000 worth $20 million. Starting from scratch, it also amassed 125,000 Baidu shares worth $13.2 million in the nine months to September.

Those three stocks accounted for 65% of the total $83 million value of Scion's portfolio, excluding options, at the end of September. Burry hedged his highly concentrated portfolio by purchasing put options against the three stocks with a notional value of $47 million in the third quarter.

Burry, a value investor who hunts for bargains, may have pounced on the trio because he views them as undervalued. Chinese stocks have been hit by regulatory threats, concerns about the country's slowing economy and real estate crisis, rising geopolitical jitters, and skepticism about the government's stimulus plans.

It's worth pointing out that quarterly portfolio filings only paint a partial picture of an investor's holdings. They exclude shares sold short, private investments, foreign-listed stocks, and non-stock assets like bonds and real estate. They're also only a snapshot of the portfolio on a single day in a three-month period.

Patience pays off

Apart from Alibaba and JD.com, the only stock that Scion held onto for all of 2024 was The RealReal, an online luxury goods marketplace.

The stock has featured in Scion's portfolio since the first quarter of 2023, when the firm owned about 684,000 shares worth about $862,000, or $1.26 each.

Scion still owned 500,000 shares at the end of September, worth nearly $1.6 million at that time. The stock has jumped from a little over $3 then to $8.73 at Wednesday's close.

The upshot is Burry has likely made several times his money on The RealReal, especially if he was still holding the stock when it surged last quarter.

• Mark Zuckerberg and Jensen Huang have jointly become $28 billion wealthier this year.
• Meta and Nvidia shares surged during the first three trading days of 2025 on fresh AI excitement.
• Zuckerberg and Huang's combined wealth rose by almost $150 billion in 2024.

Mark Zuckerberg and Jensen Huang have jointly grown $28 billion richer in just the first three trading days of this year, meaning they're worth $350 billion combined — more than Bank of America.

The Meta CEO has gained about $15 billion this year, while the Nvidia CEO's wealth has risen by about $13 billion. Their flying start has made them the biggest wealth gainers on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index so far in 2025, but other big names in tech aren't far behind.

Former Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao was up about $12 billion at Monday's close, followed by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos with an $8 billion increase, and Alphabet cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, up about $6 billion each. Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk was next on the list at $5 billion in the green.

Zuckerberg and Huang's combined gain of $28 billion accounts for nearly half of the net $61 billion increase for the world's 20 richest people in 2025. The pair's wealth jump reflects a nearly 8% advance in Meta stock and an 11% rise for Nvidia this year.

Meta shares benefited from Wall Street analysts raising their price targets. Nvidia climbed on signs of strong demand for microchips and anticipation for Huang's keynote speech at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on Monday.

The Nvidia chief revealed new chips and a $3,000 AI supercomputer named Digits. He also announced partnerships in robotics, self-driving cars, and more independent or "agentic" AI.

Zuckerberg and Huang's personal fortunes grew by about $79 billion and $70 billion respectively last year, trailing only Elon Musk's $203 billion gain by Bloomberg's estimates.

The world's 20 richest people grew a combined $702 billion wealthier last year, lifting their net worth to above $3 trillion — a figure that rivals Microsoft's market value of $3.2 trillion.

Tech leaders including Meta, Nvidia, Tesla, Amazon, and Alphabet have surged in recent years, supercharging the wealth of their biggest shareholders, as investors bet they'll play pivotal roles in the AI revolution and capture a big chunk of the profits generated.

• A friend of Charlie Munger's says Munger doubled his money on a contrarian bet soon before his death.
• The friend, Li Lu, gave an interview in which he discussed Munger's careful approach to investing.
• Li also described dramatically different approaches to risk tolerance between Munger and Elon Musk.

Charlie Munger was still sniffing out bargains and scoring big gains at age 99, says a close friend of the late investing icon.

Munger, Warren Buffett's business partner and Berkshire Hathaway's vice chairman for more than four decades, died in late November 2023, about a month shy of his 100th birthday.

In a rare interview marking the first anniversary of Munger's death, Li Lu told the Chinese social network Zhenge Island that one of Munger's last moves was a contrarian bet.

"There was a stock that everyone disliked, and it might not be particularly politically correct," Li said. But that didn't stop Munger from studying the company and buying its shares, continued the Himalaya Capital Management founder, whom Munger once described as the "Chinese Warren Buffett."

"The week before he died, this stock had doubled from the time he started investing to that time," Li said. It's unclear which stock he was referring to. Li didn't immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

Li said the wager showed Munger retained his passion for investing until the end and "could still go against the market consensus and live to see this stock double." He said the stock remained "in the Munger family portfolio" and was "still performing very well."

Li was the only person apart from Buffett who Munger trusted to invest his family's money. He introduced Munger to BYD, the Chinese EV maker that's been one of Berkshire's best investments over the past decade.

Describing Munger's careful approach toward investing, in his interview with Zhenge Island he also seemed to allude to a story Munger had discussed at Daily Journal's annual meeting in 2017, saying Munger "read Barron's magazine every week for 50 years and only made one investment."

"In 50 years I found one investment opportunity in Barron's, out of which I made about $80 million with almost no risk," Munger said in 2017. "I took the $80 million and gave it to Li Lu, who turned it into $400 to $500 million. So I have made $400 to 500 million out of reading Barron's for 50 years and following one idea."

Munger added further details, indicating that the stock was an auto supply company named Tenneco that Apollo Global Management acquired in late 2022. He said that he made 15 times his money on the stock in about two years and that it took him only 90 minutes of research to pull the trigger after reading about it.

Lunch with Elon Musk

Li recalled a lunch with Munger and Elon Musk in which he said the Tesla and SpaceX CEO tried to win Munger's investment. He said the discussion showed their similar thinking on subjects such as batteries and science but also their stark differences in risk appetite. While Musk was willing to do things with only a 5% chance of success, he said, Munger "may need more than 80% chance of success before he will do it."

Musk has previously discussed meeting Munger. Early in 2023 he posted on X that "Munger could've invested in Tesla at ~$200M valuation when I had lunch with him in late 2008." Musk's automaker went on to become one of the world's largest companies and is now worth about $1.3 trillion.

"I was at a lunch with Munger in 2009 where he told the whole table all the ways Tesla would fail," Musk wrote in another post. "Made me quite sad, but I told him I agreed with all those reasons & that we would probably die, but it was worth trying anyway."

Correction: January 7, 2025 — This story was updated to reflect that it wasn't clear from Li Lu's interview where Charlie Munger got the idea for the contrarian bet that Li said Munger made at age 99. The story also misstated when Elon Musk posted one of his comments about Munger. It was in early 2023, not early last year.

• There's been little movement in recent years, especially in the House, on banning stock trading.
• That could change this year, with a group of hardline Republicans now pushing the issue.
• "I need to put my foot on the gas a little bit," said Rep. Chip Roy. "Let's deal with it."

For years, lawmakers in both parties have tried to pass legislation to ban members of Congress from trading stocks.

It's popular with the American public. Both outgoing President Joe Biden and President-elect Donald Trump support it. A bipartisan group of senators came together around a single stock trading ban bill this past summer, and two years ago, the House almost took a vote on a bill hastily put forward by House Democratic leadership.

However, an actual floor vote in either chamber has long remained elusive. Now, some hardline House Republicans are hoping to change that.

"I'm tired of my colleagues sticking their heads in the sand on it. It needs to be dealt with, sooner rather than later," Rep. Chip Roy of Texas told Business Insider in a brief interview on Friday.

Roy and 10 other members of the House Freedom Caucus board sent a letter to Speaker Mike Johnson on Friday expressing their "sincere reservations" with his tenure. Many of those lawmakers initially withheld their votes for Johnson, only to relent out of deference to Trump.

In that letter, the GOP hardliners outlined a series of rule changes they wanted to see, along with policy items that they expected Johnson to put up for a vote. Among those items: Ending stock trading by members of Congress.

"If that's what it takes to gain some confidence by the public in the fact that members of Congress work ethically, then I think that's a small price to pay," Rep. Andy Harris of Maryland, the chairman of the House Freedom Caucus, told BI.

Roy has long been the leader GOP cosponsor of one of the leading bills to ban stock trading, the TRUST in Congress Act, and he told BI that it was his idea to add that demand to the letter. He also happens to be one of Johnson's chief critics, and could — in coordination with the other Republicans — threaten the speaker with a vote on his ouster if the House doesn't take up that legislation.

As of now, it's not clear whether that will happen. Roy said that banning lawmakers from trading stocks is "not as existential to the functioning of the average American family on a daily basis" as some of the other priorities laid out in the letter, including steep cuts to federal spending and enacting tough border security and immigration measures.

The Texas Republican did express frustration with the lack of progress on the issue over the last several years while hinting that this year could be different.

"It's been sitting out there for three or four years, we kind of keep dragging feet, and it's time to deal with it," said Roy. "I need to put my foot on the gas a little bit, and so I'm putting my foot on the gas."

As of now, Roy says that "foot on the gas" involves laying out the demand and talking with Johnson and other relevant committee chairs about moving the legislation.

Johnson, for his part, has not publicly expressed a position on a stock trading ban, and a spokesperson did not provide a position when contacted by Business Insider on Monday. His predecessor, former Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California, did express support for a stock trading ban.

"The perception of Congress, whether true or not, is that some may take advantage of insider information," Rep. Andy Ogles of Tennessee, another Freedom Caucus letter signatory, told BI. "This is a gesture to say, 'Hey, look, we're not treated any differently.'"

Despite widespread agreement on the principle, the details of an eventual ban aren't widely agreed upon, and different bills propose different things. Some legislation would ban the ownership of stocks altogether, but Ogles said that "active day-trading" is the real problem.

"It doesn't mean you can't own stock, so that you can't have mutual funds," Ogles said.

Meanwhile, some House Freedom Caucus members still trade stocks, and one — Rep. Byron Donalds of Florida — violated a federal law requiring timely disclosure of stock trades in the fall of 2024.

A September 2024 report from the Campaign Legal Center found that 44% of House members and 54% of senators own stock.

• Warren Buffett paid tribute to Charlie Munger and pared his Apple and Bank of America bets in 2024.
• Berkshire Hathaway hit a $1 trillion market value and its cash pile ballooned to more than $300 billion.
• Buffett donated some $6 billion to good causes and updated his plan for post-mortem giving.

Warren Buffett had a year to remember in 2024 as he sold two of his favorite stocks, built his cash pile to more than $300 billion, and led Berkshire Hathaway to a $1 trillion market value for the first time.

The 94-year-old Berkshire CEO and legendary investor also paid credit to his late right-hand man, gifted more than $6 billion to good causes, and updated his plan to give away his fortune following his death.

Here are Buffett's 6 highlights of 2024:

1. Paying respects

In his annual letter in February, Buffett paid tribute to Charlie Munger, his business partner and Berkshire's vice chairman for more than four decades, who died aged 99 in November 2023.

"Though I have long been in charge of the construction crew; Charlie should forever be credited with being the architect," Buffett wrote, calling himself the "general contractor" who carried out Munger's vision for Berkshire.

Buffett also dashed hopes for a transformative acquisition anytime soon. Berkshire's vast scale means only a few companies in the country could move the needle, he said, and all of them have been "endlessly picked over by us and others."

"All in all, we have no possibility of eye-popping performance."

The investor also called out a rise in "casino-like behavior" in markets and appeared to take aim at trading apps like Robinhood once again. "The casino now resides in many homes and daily tempts the occupants."

2. Pilgrimage to Omaha

Tens of thousands of Berkshire shareholders descended on Buffett's hometown in May to attend the company's annual meeting and watch the "Oracle of Omaha" hold court for several hours.

Buffett told the crowd he'd sold a chunk of his massive Apple stake in the first quarter. He also compared artificial intelligence to nuclear weapons, and took responsibility for a losing wager on Paramount.

The Berkshire boss said he regretted not listening to Munger and betting big on Costco decades ago. He also raised the alarm on the national debt and budget deficit, dismissed foreign threats to the dollar, and declared he could earn a 50% annual return on $1 million.

3. Stocks, cash, and buybacks

Buffett and his team sold $133 billion of stocks in the first nine months of 2024, and bought less than $6 billion worth. In comparison, they sold a net $24 billion of stocks in 2023, and purchased a net $34 billion of stocks in 2022.

They spent less than $3 billion on buybacks between January and September last year, with none in the third quarter, after spending nearly $70 billion on repurchases over the previous four years (almost $52 billion of that was in 2020 and 2021.)

Ramping up stock sales and curbing buybacks helped to nearly double Berkshire's cash pile in nine months from $168 billion to a record $325 billion (or $310 billion after subtracting almost $15 billion of payables for Treasury bill purchases in the third quarter).

Berkshire's cash pile now exceeds the total value of the company just over a decade ago, and accounted for a hefty 27% of its $1.15 trillion of assets at the end of September.

Buffett and his colleagues have said they're stacking cash because they're struggling to find bargains with valuations at historic highs, and they don't mind keeping money out of an ebullient stock market.

4. Selling sacred cows

Buffett and his investment managers, Ted Weschler and Todd Combs, made several striking changes to Berkshire's stock portfolio last year.

They pared Apple, their largest position, by 67% in nine months, reducing its value from $174 billion to below $70 billion. The sharp reduction shocked many as Buffett had showered praise on the iPhone maker for years, hailing it as "probably the best business I know in the world" and one of Berkshire's "four giants."

Buffett and his deputies also cut Bank of America, their no. 2 position, by about 26% between mid-July and mid-October, collecting more than $10 billion of proceeds. The sales lowered their stake from above 13% to below 10%, freeing them from having to disclose changes to the holding within a couple days. Their stake only dropped in value from $35 billion to $32 billion between January and September because the bank's stock price rose by around a fifth during that period.

Berkshire also revealed a near-$7 billion stake in insurer Chubb in its first-quarter portfolio update, trimmed holdings such as Capital One in the second quarter, and bought nearly 4% of Domino's Pizza in the third quarter while cutting several smaller holdings.

5. Giving billions

Buffett donated Berkshire shares worth $5.3 billion to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and four of his family's foundations in June.

He said those gifts meant he'd now given $55 billion to the quintet over the previous 18 years, based on how much the Berkshire shares were worth at the time of giving.

Buffett divvied up a further $1.2 billion stock donation among the four family foundations in late November, continuing a Thanksgiving tradition he started in 2022.

The latest donations reduced his number of A shares to a little more than 206,000, meaning he's given away almost 57% of his shares since pledging 99% of them to good causes in 2006.

6. Estate planning

Buffett unexpectedly published a near-1,500 word letter to shareholders alongside the news of his Thanksgiving gift.

In it, he reiterated his desire to pass along his incredible wealth to "others who were given a very short straw at birth."

Buffett revealed earlier in the year that he planned to put almost his entire fortune in a trust, and task his three children with distributing it to worthy causes after he dies. But in his mini letter in November, he acknowledged that his kids are in their late 60s and early 70s and might die before they can fulfill his vision.

The investor said that risk had led him to designate three potential successor trustees to be "on the waitlist" just in case.

Buffett also took stock of the astounding scale of wealth in America, where more than a dozen people including him are personally worth in excess of $100 billion.

"It has been mind-blowing — beyond the imaginations of Ford, Carnegie, Morgan or even Rockefeller," he wrote. "Billions became the new millions."

• Warren Buffett has long recommended a low-fee S&P 500 tracker fund to amateur investors.
• Chamath Palihapitiya says it's become riskier as a handful of stocks now dominate the index.
• Buffett mostly steers clear of tech names but Apple has been his no.1 stock for years.

Warren Buffett preaches that picking stocks and timing the market are fool's errands for the vast majority of people. He says their best bet is to simply invest in a low-fee S&P 500 index fund and hold it for the long term.

But a handful of technology stocks have become so incredibly valuable that owning the market capitalization-weighted S&P 500 is basically a concentrated bet on those risky businesses, not a wager on the stock market as a whole, Chamath Palihapitiya says.

"This needs to be fixed or it will end in disaster," the venture capitalist and cohost of the "All-In" podcast said in an X post on Saturday. He was reacting to a chart shared by Kevin Gordon, a senior investment strategist at Charles Schwab, which showed the 10 most valuable S&P 500 companies accounted for 39.9% of the benchmark index's total market cap on December 20.

Apple, Nvidia, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Tesla, Broadcom, Berkshire Hathaway, and Walmart are worth around $21 trillion together — a big chunk of the S&P 500's roughly $50 trillion market cap.

"Average Americans buy S&P 500 index ETFs, in part, because Buffett told them to," Palihapitiya said. "They were told they would pay very little and get diversification in the 500 best companies on earth to ride out storms."

But the Social Capital CEO and early Facebook investor said the outsize weighting of a few stocks means that "when you buy an index of 500 companies, you're really buying 10 companies with 490 others thrown in."

Palihapitiya said the lack of diversification means that if Big Tech stocks take a hit, investors could suffer huge losses as the pain to their portfolios won't be tempered much by other holdings. Amateur buyers face a "rude awakening if this isn't addressed," he added.

It's worth noting that Palihapitiya has been widely criticized for promoting high-risk special purpose acquisition deals (SPACs) during the pandemic and showing little remorse when their value cratered.

Buffett, a value investor who strives to remain within his circle of competence, has largely eschewed tech stocks throughout his career as they tend to be expensive and he lacks expert knowledge of what they do.

Yet he's counted Apple as Berkshire's largest position by far for the better part of a decade, despite paring that wager in recent quarters. The famed investor and Berkshire CEO has also hailed Alphabet and Meta as extraordinary businesses.

On the other hand, Berkshire is extremely diversified, owning scores of businesses including Geico, See's Candies, and Pilot Travel Centers. It also holds billion-dollar stakes in listed companies such as Coca-Cola and Bank of America.

Buffett has previously shrugged off shareholders' concerns about his stock portfolio being overly concentrated in Apple. But he might feel less comfortable now than in the past with amateur investors buying an index that's so dominated by a few Big Tech names.

• Reddit went public in 2024 and is a more popular, profitable site than ever in its 20-year history.
• BI spoke to 11 Reddit execs about how they've handled new challenges while maintaining a beloved culture.
• They shared everything from their favorite subreddit to what the IPO means to them.

2024 was a great year for Reddit.

The company went public in March with a $6.4 billion valuation and reported its first quarterly profit in October. Shares have soared 230% since its IPO.

And as BI's Emily Stewart recently wrote, Reddit has become more mainstream than ever. Its daily active users jumped 47% in the most recent quarter compared to a year earlier, thanks in part to an unprecedented number of people tacking "Reddit" onto their search terms — a demand the company will try to meet with "Reddit Answers," its new AI-powered search tool.

To find out what this year has looked like on the inside, BI asked 11 Reddit executives — or "Snoos," as Reddit calls its 2,000 employees — to share their favorite highlights behind the scenes of the "front page of the internet."

They described some career-defining moments and talked about managing through rapid change and a new level of pressure. Here's what they said.

What it meant to take Reddit public

"You can pretend that this all makes sense, and it's all business as usual for a little bit. But there are moments where I kind of zone out and realize the scale and how cool a moment I'm in. I guess the word to describe it is 'awe.'" — Serkan Piantino, 41, VP of product, New York City. Joined Reddit in 2022.

"There are always going to be individuals that say, 'Reddit is not what it used to be.' Of course, it's not going to be what it used to be. It's going to be what we make it in the future." — David Trencher, 43, senior managing director, large customer sales, EMEA & Australia, London. Joined the company in 2019.

"2024 has been maybe the highlight of my career at Reddit. We are so focused on starting with community. I think in '24 we've embraced that value more than ever," — Laura Nestler, VP of community, Seattle. Joined Reddit in 2021.

IPO day was 'so Reddit,' execs said

"Getting Snoo (the company's mascot) to ring the bell (rather than our CEO) was just so Reddit-y. It was a culmination of so many years of hard work to get here, and to see it all come to fruition in a very Reddit way was awesome." — Paulita David, Senior Managing Director, large customer sales in North America. Joined Reddit in 2021.

"We broadcast live globally, and I got to emcee the entire thing on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. We all got to see and feel what was happening." — Michelle Lozzi, 40, senior director of experience, San Francisco. Joined Reddit in 2017.

"It was so nice having our new Snoo mascot up there ringing the bell, symbolizing our employees and the community. There is a human in there. We cannot reveal who it is, but the only clue I can share is you have to be 5'10" to wear the suit." — Monica Benson, 38, head of brand operations and creative production, Los Angeles. Joined Reddit in 2020.

How execs managed through change and volatility

"The biggest change for us has been just the sheer volume of advertisers wanting to advertise on Reddit. It impacts my job pretty dramatically. With this increased demand, we're really embracing more automation." — David

"We run a lot of experiments, so failure is a day-to-day thing. Many of our experiments just don't pan out, and a lot of my job is to refine the idea and keep going or decide to work on something else. We're not a huge company. We still have limited resources, so we have to prioritize." — Piantino

"There's a balance of excitement and pressure that keeps me grounded. The fact that we have a real share price that we can use to measure our size adds somewhat to the pressure, but ultimately the excitement and enthusiasm outweigh it. Something we try to instill in our culture is to not get too high with the highs, and too low with the lows." — Jesse Rose, 38, head of investor relations, Massachusetts, Joined Reddit in 2021.

"I know what volatility looks like, and I know how much that can be a distraction for the team. I liked being a calming force and reminding people that, some days, they're going to say great things about you. Some days they're going to say bad things about you, but you are never as good or as bad as they say you are." — Piantino

"That (two-year pre-IPO period) helped us prepare our teams, which helped alleviate some stress. We were going into it knowing what we needed to do." — Trencher

"Some of our communities are growing really fast, and that can be a challenge. There are a bunch of tools that moderators can now use to handle moments of accelerated growth." — Nicole Heard, 36, UK country lead, London. Joined Reddit in 2022.

Execs say Reddit's culture hasn't changed

"When I came back from maternity leave, I wanted to know how the company culture had changed. It felt warm to come back to that authentic, community-building company, but the stakes are higher." — Benson

"People in our UK office genuinely like spending time with each other. Our office had some of the highest real-life visits this year — probably three days a week. The people and culture is what makes it an amazing place to work." — Sam Hughes, 33, senior client partner, London, Joined Reddit in 2021.

"When I joined in 2021, we had this really small kind of Harry Potter cupboard at a WeWork that sat three to five people. Then we got a bigger space with a whole floor, and now, earlier this year, we got an amazing new building." — Hughes

"We just hosted Mod World in our San Francisco office, which was where we brought in 60 of our moderators and made them feel like they're also a part of this. Because it's not just us building the product, it's them maintaining, operating and, breathing life into it." — Lozzi

"My team has grown from three to eight this year. What I'm looking for is people who understand the human interactions that happen on Reddit, and understand exactly what Reddit stands for in the social media landscape." — Alia Chikhdene, 30, head of community, international, Paris. At Reddit since 2021.

Favorite projects included offline community-building

"I was able to travel to countries all over and meet moderators in local markets. I recently got back from a trip to Manila to see the people in our community called Coffee Philippines. Seeing local communities start to thrive and build local ecosystems is really magical." — Nestler

"Our mods are now able to access community funds, where they can apply for funding to do something great with their community and create an impact. The mods of r/Eurovision got funding to go to this year's competition in Sweden to meet the artists and take AMA questions. This became one of the top five fastest-growing communities in the UK, Germany, and Spain. It was a really impactful initiative that helped connect that community to the artists they love." — Heard

Reddit employees shared their top Subreddits

r/skincareaddiction. "I'm always trying to figure out how I can address these wrinkles and get glowing skin." — Young

r/PhotoshopRequest: "You can send in photos, and the community will do an incredible job for you." — Lozzi

r/vosfinances: "This is a community that is really helping with financial literacy. You're one question away from building your future wealth plan." — Chikhdene

r/askmeuf: "This translates to 'ask women.' I'm incredibly grateful to the mods who have built this space and made it safe, vibrant, and inclusive, and making it culturally available to French women." — Chikhdene

r/moderatelygranolamoms - "I'm often looking for the most non-toxic, sustainable products and ways to raise my baby, and this is the perfect group for talking about that." — Benson

r/TrueOffMyChest - "It's a very vulnerable place where people can be anonymous and just share personal stories they wouldn't anywhere else." — Benson

• A secretary bought three shares of her company's stock for $60 each in 1935.
• Grace Groner reinvested her dividends for 75 years, and her stake ballooned to $7.2 million.
• Her employer, Abbott, shared Groner's story in a recent website post.

A secretary paid $180 in 1935 for three shares of her employer's stock. By the time she died in 2010, her investment had mushroomed to $7.2 million.

Abbott, a pharmaceutical company, gave a shout-out to the former employee in a recent post on its website.

"As we celebrate 101 years of dividend payouts, we're remembering one of the earliest Abbott investing success stories, that of Grace Groner, who worked as a secretary at Abbott for over 40 years," the post reads.

"In 1935, Groner bought three shares of Abbott stock for $60 each. She consistently reinvested her dividend payments and quietly amassed a $7.2 million fortune. Groner passed away in 2010, at the age of 100, and it was only then that her multimillion-dollar estate was discovered."

She gifted her entire fortune to a foundation she'd established in support of her alma mater, Lake Forest College. She earmarked the money to finance internships, international study, and service projects for students.

Groner hung onto her Abbott shares for over 75 years without selling a single one, despite several stock splits, and used her dividends to bolster her stake.

She was likely able to leave her nest egg intact for so long because of her simple lifestyle. She lived in a one-bedroom house, bought her clothes at rummage sales, and didn't own a car, the Chicago Tribune reported in 2010.

Her shares would be worth north of $28 million today, excluding dividends, given that Abbott's stock price has roughly quadrupled since 2010. The drugmaker's market value has risen to around $200 billion, meaning it now rivals Disney, PepsiCo, and Morgan Stanley in size.

• The Federal Reserve cut its benchmark interest rate to between 4.25% and 4.5% on Wednesday.
• The central bank also projected two cuts next year instead of four, sending stocks tumbling.
• Here's how analysts, economists, and other experts reacted to the Fed decision and market reaction.

The Federal Reserve cut its benchmark interest rate on Wednesday to a range of 4.25% to 4.5%, bringing its decline since mid-September to 100 basis points.

Wall Street usually celebrates rate cuts as lowering borrowing costs drives spending, investing, and hiring. Reducing rates also signals inflation is under control, and makes risk assets like stocks relatively more attractive by trimming yields on safer assets like Treasuries.

Yet stocks tanked because Fed officials projected two cuts next year, down from four previously. Fed Chair Jerome Powell also said the central bank expects to ease its monetary policy more slowly in the months ahead.

Here's a roundup of how analysts, economists, strategists, investors, and other experts reacted to the latest Fed decision in their morning research Thursday.

Matt Britzman, senior equity analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown

"US markets played the part of Scrooge on Wednesday, tumbling as the Federal Reserve's hawkish tone dampened holiday cheer.

Investors should see this as a healthy spot of profit-taking rather than an end to the party, after what's been a fantastic run for markets since the US election."

Russ Mould, investment director at AJ Bell

"Markets are normally good at reading the signs, but the sell-off on Wall Street last night would suggest investors had started on the Christmas sherry a bit early and were caught out by the Fed's announcement about where rates might go in 2025.

The 3% drop in the S&P 500 is a wake-up call that US markets are not a one-way ticket to the moon.

The fact futures prices are showing a rebound in the main US equities on Thursday would suggest we are not at the start of a full-blown market correction. Instead, it's more likely that investors are now sitting up and paying more attention to what could go wrong, rather than only focusing on the positives. That's long overdue and a healthy development."

David Rosenberg, founder and president of Rosenberg Research

"This is a Fed that really has no faith in its view at any time and is willingly reactive as opposed to proactive even though its actions affect the economy with long lags.

You would have thought that between the commentary and forecast changes that the world has changed dramatically since the jumbo rate cut just three months ago. It clearly does not take much to cause this Fed to swing its view around. I can guarantee that it will shift again."

Stephen Koopman, senior macro strategist at Rabobank

"'We had a year-end inflation forecast, and it's kind of fallen apart.'

Not exactly the confidence-inspiring line you'd expect from a Fed chair. But Jerome Powell's performance at yesterday's press conference wasn't his finest hour. In what might have been the most uncomfortable showing of his tenure, Powell ceded the stage to the hawks, visibly strained as he tried to sell a strategy he didn't fully appear to endorse.

Powell flagged inflation 'moving sideways' and 'higher uncertainty' around its trajectory. These admissions reveal a central bank increasingly unsure of its footing, with rates markets now expecting just one cut for 2025 (as we do), and with no real consensus on when that final cut would arrive."

Jamie Cox, managing partner for Harris Financial Group

"Markets have a really bad of habit of overreacting to Fed policy moves. The Fed didn't do or say anything that deviated from what the market expected — this seems more like, I'm leaving for Christmas break, so I'll sell and start up next year.

The good news is that this 10-day sell-off should lay the path for a Santa Rally leading into next week."

Chris Zaccarelli, chief investment officer for Northlight Asset Management

"Santa came early and dropped a 25-bps rate cut in the market's stocking but accompanied it with a note saying that there would be coal next year."

The market is forward-looking and ignored the good news of today's rate cut and instead focused on the paucity of rate cuts for next year."

Jochen Stanzl, chief market analyst at CMC Markets.

"What was heard last night from the Fed as an accompaniment to the interest rate cut is a showstopper for the stock market.

The Fed is sending a clear signal that it has almost completed the phase of interest rate cuts. The year 2025 will be a significant break in the Fed's rate-cutting cycle.

The Trump blessing could quickly turn into a curse. If the market expects yields to rise further, it is unlikely that the Fed will intervene against these forces. If inflation data continues to rise in January and February, then that could be it for the interest rate cuts."

Adam Turnquist, chief technical strategist for LPL Financial

"While the Fed is taking all the heat for today's sell-off, a reality check from overbought conditions, deteriorating market breadth, and rising rates was arguably overdue.

Overall, today's FOMC meeting brought back some unwanted clouds of uncertainty over monetary policy next year. At a minimum, market expectations have shifted toward a shallower- and slower-than-anticipated rate-cutting cycle. Technically, the near-term risk remains to the upside for 10-year Treasury yields, creating a likely headwind for stocks."

Jean Boivin, head of the BlackRock Investment Institute

"The Fed has poured cold water on already dwindling market hopes for generous rate cuts in 2025.

Given the risk of resurging inflation from potential trade tariffs and a slowdown in immigration that has been cooling pressure in the labor market, market expectations of only two more cuts in 2025 now seem reasonable.

We expected this policy outcome, so it doesn't change our recently upgraded view on US equities. US stocks can still benefit from AI and other mega forces, from robust economic growth and from broad earnings growth — and we see them outperforming international peers in 2025."

Isaac Stell, investment manager at Wealth Club

"With an economy that's going gangbusters and an incoming president with a fiscally loose agenda, you wonder why the Fed felt it necessary to cut.

Is this to curry favor with the incoming administration or is there a bump in the road the Fed can see that the rest of us are missing."

Michael Brown, senior research strategist at Pepperstone

"The FOMC delivered about as hawkish a cut as they could muster up yesterday, and market participants were not particularly pleased about what they heard.

It was, though, a little perplexing to see such a violent market reaction to Powell's remarks, particularly considering how 'every man and his dog' had been expecting this sort of a pivot in the run up to the meeting.

It feels, though, as if markets have overreacted to Powell's message, and that we may have reached something of a hawkish extreme here

Consequently, I'd be a dip buyer of equities here, as strong earnings and economic growth should see the path of least resistance continuing to lead to the upside, offsetting the fading impact of the 'Fed Put.'"

• President Joe Biden expressed support for a stock trading ban in Congress for the first time.
• "Nobody in the Congress should be able to make money in the stock market," he said.
• Lawmakers have been trying to enact a stock trading ban for years.

With just a few weeks left in his tenure, President Joe Biden expressed support for banning members of Congress from trading stocks.

"Nobody in the Congress should be able to make money in the stock market while they're in the Congress," Biden said in a forthcoming interview with More Perfect Union, according to the Associated Press.

It's the first time that Biden has expressed support for the idea, which has been a subject of debate on Capitol Hill for years.

In 2022, then-White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said that Biden "believes that everyone should be held to the highest standard," but that he would defer to Congress on the issue.

"I don't know how you look your constituents in the eye and know, because the job they gave you, gave you an inside track to make more money," Biden said in the More Perfect Union interview. "I think we should be changing the law."

Despite widespread public support for a stock-trading ban, it's unlikely to come to fruition during this Congress. Even so, there's been significant progress over the years, with a bipartisan group of senators passing a compromise stock-trading ban bill out of committee in July.

• Elon Musk is almost $200 billion richer than Jeff Bezos and worth more than Costco.
• His net worth hit $447 billion after Tesla stock jumped and SpaceX's valuation rose to $350 billion.
• Just five years ago, Musk was worth about $25 billion, and Tesla was valued below $100 billion.

Elon Musk is nearly $200 billion richer than Jeff Bezos, and personally worth more than Costco, after adding $63 billion to his fortune in a single day.

His net worth surged to $447 billion on Wednesday, per the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, after Tesla stock jumped 6% and SpaceX's valuation leaped to $350 billion based on employee share sales.

Musk's fortune has ballooned by $218 billion this year — a sum that exceeds the net worth of every other person on the rich list except Amazon's Bezos ($249 billion) and Meta's Mark Zuckerberg ($224 billion).

Musk is now more than twice as wealthy as Oracle's Larry Ellison ($198 billion), and more than three times as rich as Warren Buffett ($144 billion).

His one-day gain — the largest in the index's history — rivals the total wealth of Binance cofounder Changpeng Zhao, ranked 23rd with a $63.2 billion fortune. It also helped to lift the combined wealth of the 500 richest people on the planet to above $10 trillion for the first time, Bloomberg said.

Musk is now worth more on paper than the vast majority of US public companies, including Costco ($442 billion), Home Depot ($419 billion), and Netflix ($400 billion).

His wealth is largely made up of his roughly 13% stake and some contested stock options in Tesla, and his 42% slice of SpaceX. Musk's other businesses include xAI, Neuralink, The Boring Company, and X Corp, formerly Twitter.

Tesla shares have surged more than 70% this year to $425 at Wednesday's close, valuing the company at nearly $1.4 trillion. That figure comfortably exceeds the roughly $1 trillion market value of Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway and approaches the $1.6 trillion value of Zuckerberg's Meta.

The electric vehicle maker's shares have soared as investors bet it will harness artificial intelligence in revolutionary products such as self-driving cars and humanoid robots.

Musk's prominent role in Donald Trump's campaign, and his emergence as a close advisor to the president-elect who's tasked him with streamlining the US government, have also fueled optimism around his companies.

SpaceX is now valued at $350 billion based on the latest price paid by the company and its backers to buy shares from employees, Bloomberg reported Wednesday. The Starlink owner's valuation was previously $210 billion after a secondary share sale in June.

It's worth underscoring how dramatic Musk's wealth jump has been. He was worth less than $170 billion as recently as April, and only about $25 billion five years ago — around 1/18 of his net worth now.

Tesla was worth less than $100 billion during the Covid crash of 2020, or about 1/14 of its valuation today.