Booking: The shareholder friendly OTA king

You can listen to the Deep Dive here Booking’s modern identity as a dominant, European-centric travel aggregator obscures its chaotic origins as a quintessentially American dot-com darling: Priceline.com. The original company, founded by Jay S. Walker, launched in 1998 as Priceline.com. It was built on a strange,

The limits to our imagined vision of the future

A programming note: I hope to publish my Deep Dive on Booking Holdings tomorrow. Since this is my first year of publishing daily at MBI Deep Dives, I am still thinking about some vacation policy. I will let you know once I finalize something, but for now, I would like

Meta's biggest competitor(s)

FTC’s lawsuit against Meta may be a colossal waste of time for everyone involved, but it did have one silver lining. Thanks to this lawsuit, we got access to a lot of documents and research work (both internal and external) which helped investors understand the company a bit better.

Walmart and Target CY 3Q'25 Earnings

It is a bit strange co-incidence, but CY3Q’25 was the last earnings call for both the current CEOs of Walmart and Target. However, the backdrop in which they are passing down the baton to the next person perhaps couldn’t be any more different. In both cases, the new

The corporations of the future

Why do companies even exist? Why isn’t the economy just a vast collection of freelancers buying and selling services from each other in the open market? The answer, according to economist Ronald Coase, is “transaction costs.” These are the frictions and overhead involved in using the market. Every time

Some Portfolio Changes

I made a few changes in my portfolio yesterday which I will discuss behind the paywall. In addition to “Daily Dose” (yes, DAILY) like this, MBI Deep Dives publishes one Deep Dive on a publicly listed company every month. You can find all the 64 Deep Dives here. Subscribe

Messaging Opportunity and Group Chat Dynamics

OpenAI has started piloting group chats for ChatGPT, initially in Japan, New Zealand, South Korea, and Taiwan. It’s a simple idea with potentially big implications: bring multiple people and the model into the same conversation so the AI can search, summarize, draft, compare options, and keep a running context

The appeal of conversational commerce

First things first, let’s define “conversational commerce”. When you ask queries to an AI model or chat bot about something you want to buy, and based on the AI’s research you then take decisions and complete the purchase by ordering the product on the retailer’s website, that’

On the eve of Gemini 3.0

Prediction markets indicate Alphabet will release Gemini 3.0 next week. Sundar Pichai’s tweet also makes it all but certain that is indeed likely the case. At least my twitter or X timeline is increasingly filled with tweets from Alphabet employees with giddy excitement about the launch. It’s

The Great Concentration of Productivity

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the great decoupling of labor and capital in which I pointed out that today’s megacap tech companies achieved staggering revenue growth with progressively fewer incremental employees, a phenomenon well underway even before the advent of Gen AI. However, that was bit