The image is called "barbieev."
There are some facts. At the LA Auto Show on Wednesday, a full-size mock up of a new toy Barbie car was displayed. The all-electric 500e was the inspiration for the mockup. After the early-morning losses, the stock of the toy company rebounded and finished the day in the green.
Are those things related? Probably not. Weirder things have happened recently. Tom Brady was hired to make commercials by Hertz and then Musk said the deal wasn't done. Rivian passed every automaker except for Toyota andTesla, which only shipped a few electric pickup trucks. Even though they won't sell cars until next year at the very least, startup companies like Canoo and Lordstown have raised billions of dollars.
We are not far off from a world where Barbie could be made and sold in a limited run. Some of the hardest work has already been done on the electric vehicle platforms that are meant to be easy to adapt to different cabins. Fisker Inc., which showed off its electric SUV a few hours before the Barbie car, is already doing this. It has taken an asset-light approach by outsourcing its manufacturing to Magna and will also do the same with Foxconn, and is instead focused on design and in-car experience.
If we have learned anything from the last two years of weird money news, it is that even if the technical and logistical barriers to an otherwise hard idea are now lower, there are still far easier ways to do some financial shenanigans. It's easy for companies to get caught up in a new stock price when it's higher than they expected.
I am going to spend the rest of the day thinking about what it would look like if the Barbie EV division was spun out and merged with the SPAC.
