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Senior baseball: Varadkar gives it Sox on guided tour of Boston ground

Planet Business: Lego’s outperformance, Reddit’s imminent IPO and the highest-paid actors of 2023

Taoiseach Leo Varadkar during a visit to the home of the Boston Red Sox at Fenway Park in Massachusetts during his visit to the US for St Patrick's Day. Photograph: Niall Carson/PA Wire

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Laura Slattery
Sat Mar 16 2024 - 06:15

Image of the week: Striking out

Taoiseach Leo Varadkar had good luck and bad luck during his pre-St Patrick’s Day visit to the home of the Boston Red Sox at the city’s Fenway Park earlier this week.

The good luck was that no baseball whizzed past his head, in contrast to US president Joe Biden’s “near miss” with a sliotar while he and Varadkar watched a camogie game near Farmleigh House in Dublin last April. (The best thing about this was that one young player earned the moniker “Lee Hurley Oswald” as a result.)

The bad luck was that having declined to pitch a baseball – reportedly telling journalists present that he was aware they were hoping for an embarrassing photograph – Varadkar duly obliged on that score anyway by posing between the “ball”, “strike” and “out” indicator signs at Fenway Park, creating an image that his political opponents might deem, well, reusable.

The Taoiseach – who was visiting the stadium to announce an investment by Irish sports data company Output Sports – was being shown the park’s “Green Monster” at the time. This is the nickname of one of the highest field walls in Major League Baseball, apparently, and not a reference to a St Patrick’s Day industrial complex.

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In numbers: Another brick

15

Last year’s toy market was “the most negative” in more than this number of years, Lego chief executive Niels Christiansen said this week, with the overall market estimated to have contracted 7 per cent.

5%

Fall in both operating and net profits at the Danish toy bricks maker in 2023, with its earnings knocked in the first half as the pandemic-era boom in demand faded away.

1

Lego remains the biggest toymaker in the worldwide. Indeed, it actually solidified its position after a Christmas rebound meant it managed to grow sales over 2023 as a whole. So, painful times, but not as painful as, say, standing in your bare foot on a piece of Lego.

Getting to know: RDDT

RDDT is the imminent stock market ticker for self-styled “front page of the internet”, aka Reddit, which is finally poised to go public. The company and some existing shareholders/employees are seeking to raise as much as $748 million (€684 million) by selling 22 million shares for $31 to $34 each, it disclosed this week.

Some 8 per cent of the initial public offering (IPO) shares, meanwhile, will be set aside for Reddit users, moderators and various family members who created accounts before January 1st. These won’t be subject to a lock-up, meaning they can be sold on the opening day of trading. What could possibly go wrong?

The other element of intrigue here is personal: the IPO project is being led by chief executive Steve Huffman, who co-founded Reddit with Alexis Ohanian in 2005. The pair sold the company to Condé Nast in 2006 for a mere $10 million and departed three years later.

Ohanian, who is married to tennis champion Serena Williams, was once the more public face of Reddit. But that role is now played by Huffman, who returned as CEO in 2015, while Ohanian abruptly quit the board in 2020 after calling for a crackdown on hateful content. He likely won’t be rocking up to the New York Stock Exchange to ring the opening bell.

The list: Highest-paid actors

Awards are nice, and if you’re in the acting profession and they come in gold statuette form, so much the better. But you know what’s also nice? Money. According to Forbes, these were the five best-paid actors in 2023.

Joint 4. Ryan Gosling: The real winner of the Oscars, Canada’s finest is estimated by the publication to have earned $43 million last year thanks to his scene-stealing supporting role in Barbie. So not “just Ken” after all.

Joint 4. Matt Damon: In joint fourth was Damon, who appeared in best picture winner Oppenheimer and took a small slice of its profits, while his film project Air was sold to Amazon for an estimated $130 million, well above its budget.

3. Tom Cruise: Hollywood and best-paid list veteran Cruise coined it in from the release of the seventh Mission: Impossible film and streaming profits from Top Gun: Maverick. Another year, another $45 million.

2. Margot Robbie: As both the star and producer of box office smash Barbie, the Australian actor cashed in on about 12.5 per cent of all back-end profits, helping her to a $59 million payday. Her production company LuckyChap was also behind Barry Keoghan-starrer Saltburn.

1. Adam Sandler: Barbie’s big ker-ching will keep ringing for Robbie for years to come, but in 2023, the highest-paid actor by some margin was Sandler, according to Forbes. He took home an estimated $73 million, mostly courtesy of his lucrative deal with Netflix.

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