The economic recovery is in its 7th year, and unemployment has sunk to levels rarely seen in a generation. Retail sales are picking up, too, growing at their fastest pace in seven months. But you won't see these trends reflected in the performance of most well-known retailers, as department stores like Macy's close stores, and household names like Sports Authority go bankrupt altogether.
This raises a question: Where exactly are consumers spending their money if not at the shopping mall? One answer is Amazon, but it's not alone in avoiding the retail apocalypse: LVMH, the French conglomerate and owner of brands Louis Vuitton and Sephora, had a 15% rise in first-half 2017 revenue, and that did not come by running fire sales — profit was up 23%. Investors have responded enthusiastically, sending up its share price by 20% this year, outperforming retail and and luxury sector indexes.
Peter Thiel has made some shrewd bets in his lifetime: a half-million dollar wager as Facebook's first outside investor, earning him roughly $1 billion when he cashed out in 2012; and more recently, his contrarian political bet on Donald Trump.
Need more evidence to recommend Thiel's foresight? Check out this video from the 2007 Singularity Summit (ignore the erroneous year in the video title), in which Thiel suggests how to bet on the singularity, the inflection point when machines achieve super-human intelligence.
Linsen Li is a Chinese-born, 30-year-old specialist in advanced batteries — a postdoc in MIT's material science and engineering program. He received his Ph.D in chemistry from the University of Wisconsin, in all spending the last seven years in the U.S. His infant son, William, is an American citizen.
But he's reluctantly going home: Li tells Axios that, having received no teaching offers in the U.S., he's accepted a $65,000-a-year teaching slot at Shanghai's Jiao Tong University, along with the equivalent of a fat $900,000 in research funding, in addition to $250,000 to buy a house.
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