Officials at Guinness World Records confirmed on Tuesday that they have opened a "formal review" into the "World's Oldest Dog" distinction it handed out in February last year to Bobi, a "31-year-old" Portuguese mastiff (sadly, Bobi passed away in October). The news comes after online snoops began questioning decades-old photos of Bobi, as well as a lack of formal government records. Sure, it's not the most important scandal in the world, but it's not puppy pictures, either, okay.
REAL ESTATE
Older Homeowners Are Staying Put, Freezing Out Young Families
Baby Boomers have figured out another way to torture millennials: instead of moving into smaller homes in their September years, as every generation does, they're enjoying their big homes and they're not going anywhere.
Amid high interest rates, expensive prices, and low inventory, empty-nest Boomers have been reluctant to sell their larger houses, which is making it hard for younger families to find starter homes, according to a report from real estate data firm Redfin.
I'm Not Leaving
It's no secret that the US housing market is in turbulent times.
The average rate for a 30-year mortgage, the most common type of home loan, is hovering around 6.6%, according to Freddie Mac — down from nearly 8% last October but still higher than where rates have been for most of the last 15 years. Median prices for single-family homes rose 2.2% year-over-year to $406,900 in the third quarter of 2023, the National Association of Realtors reported. And right now, there are only about 1.5 million homes on the market, a 7% dip from the same time last year.
You can't blame Boomers for staying put. Okay, blame them all you want, but they're not downsizing to a smaller home or condo:
Empty-nest Boomers own 28% of large homes (3 or more bedrooms), while millennials with kids own just 14% of them, Redfin reported. Gen Z families are barely a data point, owning just 0.3% of homes with three bedrooms or more. Millennial families are having trouble affording large homes in expensive coastal markets, but have found better luck in Midwestern cities.
Beyond financial incentives, Redfin's Sheharyar Bokhari told CNN boomers have no desire to put down stakes elsewhere. "They love their big homes," he said.
Mom and Dad's Money: When and exactly how quickly housing inventory in the US will stabilize is up for debate. While some see an impending "silver tsunami" — Boomers selling (or dying) on a massive scale — others, like Bokhari, expect more of a trickle.
Even in death, Boomers will make waves in housing. Douglas Elliman real estate agent Finley Behringer, who works in the mostly second-home/vacation market of New York's Hamptons, told The Daily Upside that inheritance is one of the big discussions in housing right now. "Millennials are about to inherit trillions of dollars over the next 20 years," he said. "You're already starting to see this 'unreachable Hamptons' suddenly in reach for many people. I've shown a $4.6 million listing three times this week."
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M&A
Chip Designer Synopsys Acquires Ansys For $35 Billion
This is not a simulation.
Semiconductor-design software maker Synopsys stepped into the Matrix on Tuesday to acquire Ansys, maker of powerful simulation software used by engineers and manufacturers. The price tag: a very real $35 billion.
Chip Off the Block
It may be a match made in Silicon heaven, and was a long time coming: The two companies have been R&D partners since 2017 and have sold software together since 2019. And it's easy to see why. Synopsys' software is used to design semiconductors and other pieces of expensive and extremely expensive hardware. More importantly, it's one of just two major players offering software that chip designers use to outline and test various ways that multiple chips can exist in the same circuitry. That means Ansys, whose software features a particularly useful physics simulator used for structural analysis, offers an almost perfectly complementary product.
"When you're stacking these chips on top of each other, the big challenge [chip-makers] are having is structural, mechanical stress," Synopsys CEO Sassine Ghazi told TheWall Street Journal, "It's like building a building." Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Niraj Patel labeled the deal a "strong strategic fit" for Synopsys. After Reuters first reported inklings of a possible tie-up last December, it seems the details have finally been settled:
Ansys shares will be valued at about $390, or about 35% above their 60-day volume-weighted average price as of December 21. That gives the company an enterprise value of about $35 billion; Synopsys will pony up about $19 billion in cash (including $3 billion in debt) in the cash-and-stock deal.
With Ansys in-house, Synopsys says it projects its total addressable market to grow by 50% to $28 billion.
Spirit in the Sky: It's hard for any multi-billion dollar deal to sneak by these days without even a glance from the newly re-energized antitrust regulators at the Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice. Ghazi, for his part, told the WSJ that leaders at both companies are "fairly confident" that gaining regulatory approval would be a manageable process. But M&A confidence only goes so far. Also on Tuesday, a federal judge blocked JetBlue's planned $3.8 billion acquisition of Spirit Airlines, saying a deal would limit industry competition and likely harm price-conscious consumers who like Spirit's cheap tickets. Fittingly enough for two airline companies, it seems this deal flew too close to Lina Khan's antitrust sun.
Written by Brian Boyle
INDUSTRIALS
Companies Keep Refueling the Corporate Jet
As CEOs try to force employees back to the office, their own commute is getting a whole lot cushier.
Both money and time spent on executive corporate jets are still climbing well past pre-pandemic highs, with S&P 500 companies hitting a total of $65 million on jets in 2022 and the trend looking set to continue once all the data for 2023 is in, according to aWall Street Journalanalysis published on Tuesday. While use of the corporate jet is still a very rare perk even at top companies, it looks like executives with the option are making the most of it.
Perking Up
Private jet use overall after 2020 has been on the up-and-up, with executives and celebrities spending more time in the sky than the average albatross. But companies appear to be increasingly footing the bill. The WSJ's report mainly focuses on figures from 2022, which show a sharp 50% jump in spending from 2019. It also found that the number of companies offering the perk has risen 14% during the same time. While we don't yet have the complete data for 2023, the WSJ said that 10 out of the 15 companies that have already reported spending on jets have increased their spending — so there's good reason to think executive jet usage is still ramping up.
Only 216 companies offer corporate jet travel to their executives, per the WSJ, so that's less than half of the S&P 500. But the companies that do offer it are deepening their pockets:
Meta spent 55% more on private jet travel for Mark Zuckerberg and then-COO Sheryl Sandberg in 2022 compared to 2019. PepsiCo also paid out twice as much on air travel over the same period for five of its executives.
There was an outlier in the data, however. Match Group — the conglomerate behind dating apps including Tinder and Hinge — reported zero spending on personal air travel from 2020 to 2022, per the WSJ's analysis.
That's One Way to Avoid Traffic: Not all the trips are necessarily the exotic kind of corporate travel glamorized by shows like Succession. Rather than flying off to spar with rival billionaires in Italy or Norway, some executives are using jets for their morning commute, as a Wall Street Journal report last year found that Boeing's CEO David Calhoun has been flying from his two homes to the company's headquarters in Arlington, Virginia.
Mom and Dad's Money: When and exactly how quickly housing inventory in the US will stabilize is up for debate. While some see an impending "silver tsunami" — Boomers selling (or dying) on a massive scale — others, like Bokhari, expect more of a trickle. 
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