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Plus: Why One Entrepreneur Thinks Millions Will Spend $25 On His Personalized Shampoo Prose

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Top Take-Aways

Tesla shares have spiked 11.2%, boosting Elon Musk’s net worth to $83.6 billion. The hefty stock gain makes the 49-year-old entrepreneur the fifth-richest person in the world, pushing ahead of Indian oil and gas tycoon Mukesh Ambani and investing luminary Warren Buffett.

Legal immigration is veering towards a halt. USCIS, the federal agency tasked with issuing citizenship, green cards and visas, is expected to furlough about two-thirds of its workforce at the end of month without additional emergency funds from Congress.

The Department of Interior approved plans to open up part of Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for oil and gas drilling. After decades of debate, the market may have the final word: drilling won’t be cheap, easy, assured—or worth the nightmare PR and legal battles.

Bitcoin surged to a new 2020 high of $12,486, posting a 73% year-to-date return on investment. What is driving bitcoin’s price?

The University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill is calling off in-person classes. The site of a coronavirus outbreak, positive test rates have more than quadrupled just one week into the fall semester, rising from 2.8% on Aug. 10 to 13.6% on Sunday.
MORE: Notre Dame reports 54 new cases in one week, but the campus is open—for now.

For female athletes out to get rich from their dominance, tennis is the go-to sport. Nine of the world’s ten highest-paid female athletes make their living with a racket—including Naomi Osaka, who landed at No. 1 with $37.4 million—with the only exception being Alex Morgan, co-captain of the U.S. women’s national soccer team, who lands at No. 10 with $4.6 million.

Today's Must-Read

Arnaud Plas, the cofounder-CEO of Prose, is anxiously awaiting the arrival of a 60-foot, 10-ton bespoke machine from France that will let him scale his ultra-luxe shampoo company by churning out up to 30,000 custom-mixed bottles a day. Each will cost $25 for 8.5 fluid ounces, around 10 times the cost of the equivalent amount of Pantene.

Plas thinks he can sell all that pricey shampoo—and more. Prose is on track to hit $50 million in revenue this year, more than triple last year, and expects to be profitable for the first time next year. The company, which has raised $25 million in venture funding, is worth an estimated $350 million.

“We knew that [without the machine] we were a boutique hair-care brand, which was not the ambition of the company,” says Plas, who previously worked at L’Oréal. He’s out to be a major player in the $850 million high-end hair-care market.

That’s not out of the question. “Prestige hair has been on fire,” one insider tells Senior Editor Amy Feldman.

Super-premium products are only a sliver of the roughly $13 billion hair-care industry, but the segment has been growing by double digits and held steady during the pandemic. After all, hair flows freely even from behind a mask, and during lockdown people have gravitated to little luxuries they can order online.

Plenty could go wrong. There could be problems with Plas’ machine—or fickle consumers decide to move on to the next “it” product. He originally pitched the idea at L’Oréal. “They basically told me, ‘Arnaud, you’re not here to disrupt the industry,” he says. Anything but.

See the full story here.

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