by Adam & Ramsay

From Crown to Clown: How LVMH Embarrassed Rolex at 400mph

Pole Position Pricing: LVMH's $1.5B Middle Finger to the Competition

We've all seen them... Their bags, their glasses, and now their Formula 1 cars?!

LVMH didn't just outbid Rolex for F1's global partnership... they obliterated the entire sponsorship ecosystem...

While Rolex was comfortable paying $50 million annually to hang their 'crown' around some podiums, Bernard Arnault walked into the room with a $1.5 billion chequebook and basically said, "Hold my champagne."

This is a 300% price increase that just reset the luxury sponsorship market overnight. We're talking about a 10-year, $1.5 billion commitment that makes most corporate marketing budgets look like lunch money. To put this in perspective: LVMH is now paying more for this single deal than most Fortune 500 companies spend on their entire global advertising over a decade.

The Luxury Arms Race:
​Here's where it gets interesting, F1's sponsor roster now reads like a billionaire's contact list. Aramco drops $460 million over their contract, Heineken shells out $600 million, and DHL pays $400 million just to be "logistics partners." The total F1 sponsorship pie hit $2.9 billion in 2025, which means we're watching the world's most expensive marketing experiment in real time.

But LVMH's genius move isn't just the money; it's the portfolio play. They didn't buy one brand's presence; they bought an entire luxury ecosystem. TAG Heuer becomes the official timekeeper, Louis Vuitton handles the VIP hospitality theatre, and Moët Hennessy owns every champagne spray moment on every podium. They didn't just sponsor F1; they colonized it.

The Cultural Acquisition:
​Here's what $1.5 billion actually buys you: 230 races of premium global attention from an audience that considers $100K watches reasonable impulse purchases. While other brands fight over Super Bowl ads targeting everyone, LVMH just purchased direct access to the demographic that treats luxury consumption as a lifestyle religion.

The math is brutal and beautiful all at the same time. F1's viewership averages 70 million per race, but more importantly, it's 70 million people who travel internationally for weekend entertainment. LVMH didn't buy advertising; they bought cultural real estate in the attention economy's most exclusive neighbourhood.

Most brands rent moments. LVMH just bought the entire venue.

BS of the Week: The Great AI Layoff Disguise

Google's offering 14-week voluntary buyouts while tightening office policies. They're calling it "workforce optimization." I call it what it is: AI replacing humans with a PR bow on top.

Here's the playbook: Offer voluntary exits first, then follow with "involuntary" layoffs later. The script never changes, just the department names.

The broader picture is fucking brutal. About 1.8 million Americans were laid off in February 2025 alone (this includes all employer terminations, not just tech). U.S. employers announced 172,017 layoffs for February, up 245% from January and the highest monthly count since July 2020. In tech specifically, total layoffs for 2025 are already sitting at nearly 75,000, representing a 35% year over year surge. Meanwhile, developers are coding 20 to 50% faster with AI, and Goldman Sachs' CEO brags that AI can draft 95% of an IPO prospectus in minutes, work that used to take six people two weeks.

But here's the BS part: Companies are spinning this as "strategic restructuring" and "efficiency gains" to impress Wall Street, not as the fundamental shift it actually is.

Let's be clear about what's really happening: This isn't fiscal responsibility. It's morally bankrupt. These companies are making record profits while destroying lives to juice quarterly numbers. They're throwing people away like defective inventory while executives collect bonuses for "successful digital transformation."

The real story isn't about quarterly earnings or cost optimization. It's about an entire generation of workers becoming obsolete faster than anyone wants to admit. While Google's parent company Alphabet sits on $95 billion in cash, they're nickel and diming people out of jobs to make shareholders slightly richer.

Bottom line: When companies offer you voluntary buyouts while investing billions in AI, they're not being generous. They're just letting you fire yourself before the robots do it for them.

Today's Kick in The Ass: You're Never as Good (Or Bad) as You Think

Your confidence is lying to you. In both directions.

That presentation you nailed last week? You're not the next Steve Jobs. That project that flopped? You're not unemployable either. Your brain is designed to trick you into extreme self-perception because nuance doesn't help with survival.

Here's the reality check: You're probably performing at exactly average most of the time, with occasional spikes up and down. The problem is we remember the peaks and valleys, not the vast plateau of competent mediocrity where most of life happens.

The Dunning-Kruger effect works both ways. When you're learning something new, you think you're terrible (impostor syndrome). When you get a little knowledge, you think you're an expert. When you actually become competent, you realize how much you don't know and feel terrible again.

This isn't philosophical BS. It's career-limiting behaviour. Overconfidence makes you stop learning and take stupid risks. Underconfidence makes you not take any risks at all.

Your homework: Pick one skill you think you're "bad" at and one you think you're "great" at. Get objective feedback on both. Ask someone whose opinion you trust and who has no reason to lie to you.
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​Then shut up and listen.​
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the end.

more next week ;)

the end.

more next week ;)

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