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Punters winning more NFL bets are set to dent FanDuel owner Flutter’s profits

The house always wins — just a little less last quarter.

DraftKings’ biggest rival and the world’s largest online-betting company, Flutter Entertainment, is seeing a short-term hit to its bottom line from customers’ sweetest dream: gamblers are winning too much.

In a surprise trading update on Tuesday, the group (emphasis ours) detailed that:

The 2024/2025 NFL season to date has been the most customer friendly since the launch of online sports betting with the highest rate of favorites winning in nearly 20 years.

The “very unfavorable US sports results” are set to cost Flutter Entertainment some ~$390 million in revenue, with the company’s shares listed in London opening down 5% this morning — though the stock has since recovered all of that initial drop, with rival DraftKings also trading higher.

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It’s ironic that it should be the NFL — America’s favorite league to bet on — at the heart of Flutter’s current issues, as the Dublin-headquartered group has increasingly placed its own chips on the US market, including abandoning the London Stock Exchange to move its primary listing to New York last May.

Since first combining with FanDuel seven years ago, Flutter has grown rapidly, capitalizing on the changing regulatory landscape in America, which has quickly become the company’s most important region: revenues from the US market now account for 38% of its business, up from just 12% in 2020.

Elsewhere, sports results continued a “good momentum” in the UK and Ireland region (read: punters are still losing on the English Premier League).

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How Tesla quietly wound up owning a small piece of SpaceX

Tesla is converting its recent $2 billion investment in Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, into a small ownership stake in SpaceX — just months before the rocket maker’s highly anticipated IPO.

Here’s what happened: Tesla announced its xAI investment in late January, after a shareholder proposal to invest fell short last year. Several days later, xAI merged with SpaceX. All three companies are headed by Musk.

Now, regulatory filings with the Federal Trade Commission show Tesla converting that investment into a small stake in SpaceX, formalizing the financial link between the companies ahead of the rocket maker’s IPO. SpaceX is expected to go public this year at a valuation some speculate could top $1.75 trillion, potentially making it the biggest company to ever go public. (The current record holder, Saudi Aramco, went public at a more than $1.7 trillion valuation in 2020.)

While the size of Tesla’s stake wasn’t available, Bloomberg reports that the investment would equate to ownership of less than 1%.

While SpaceX and Tesla have engaged in related-party transactions over the years, Tesla had not previously disclosed an equity investment in SpaceX.

Now, regulatory filings with the Federal Trade Commission show Tesla converting that investment into a small stake in SpaceX, formalizing the financial link between the companies ahead of the rocket maker’s IPO. SpaceX is expected to go public this year at a valuation some speculate could top $1.75 trillion, potentially making it the biggest company to ever go public. (The current record holder, Saudi Aramco, went public at a more than $1.7 trillion valuation in 2020.)

While the size of Tesla’s stake wasn’t available, Bloomberg reports that the investment would equate to ownership of less than 1%.

While SpaceX and Tesla have engaged in related-party transactions over the years, Tesla had not previously disclosed an equity investment in SpaceX.

Southwest Airlines At San Diego International Airport

Southwest stopped fuel hedging a year ago. Whoops.

It’s been a year since Southwest said it would end its fuel-hedging program. Oil’s moves this year make that decision look like a mistake.

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