People can spin elections. It’s much harder to spin the economy and signs are grim. Meta announces huge job cuts affecting 11,000 employees. “The company has had a rocky year, squeezed by both the rise of TikTok and the public (and expensive) failure of its push into the metaverse.”

+ As bad as things are when it comes to old fashioned money, crypto is even worse. “The cryptocurrency world was rocked on Tuesday as one of the largest exchanges for digital currencies, seemingly on the verge of collapse, was bailed out by a major rival in a deal that underlined the perils of the industry’s volatility.” How bad was it? “FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, who was worth $16 billion earlier this week, saw his fortune gutted by 94% to $1 billion on Tuesday. It marks the biggest wealth collapse a billionaire has ever taken in a single day.”

+ In addition to a falling stock price, Tesla recalled over 40,000 cars to address a power steering flaw. (Maybe Elon can have some Twitter engineers come in and take a look.) Meanwhile, Elon just sold another $4 billion of Tesla stock. Imagine being on the board of a company that has a CEO who is selling stock, running another company, and turning off prospective buyers by the millions … and still not batting an eyelash. Oversight has become an oversight.

+ Not all business is bad. Someone in California scored a Powerball ticket worth $2 billion.