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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

If we are what we watch, then this column was written by Jerry Seinfeld, or maybe Tony Soprano. Or a combination of the two, although I’m not sure Tony Seinfeld sounds menacing enough to cut it in the New Jersey mob.

People have always perceived social cachet in their cultural choices. So what do your viewing and subscription habits say about you? To be clear, we are talking about mainstream channels here. You know what your OnlyFans sub says.

So who are you? Are you a Paramount Plus type? Or maybe a Disney devotee. Perhaps you’ve kept that Sky subscription because you are only on season 13 of Grey’s Anatomy and still have another 700 episodes to get through.

There is no longer the same unified community of television that existed when there were only a handful of channels. You could once be confident that almost everyone like you watched the same shows and understood the same references. This is why a generation of Gen X or boomer men will offer entire renditions of Python sketches the moment a keyword is uttered. Anyone foolish enough to observe that they did not expect the Spanish Inquisition will immediately deserve to be tortured with the reminder that its main weapons are surprise and fear, oh and ruthless efficiency — see what I mean?

Perhaps you’ve kept that Sky subscription because you are only on season 13 of ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ and still have another 700 episodes to get through

Today word of mouth, or word of TikTok, is even more essential. But how many streaming services are you prepared to pay for? It is fairly easy to join up and cancel once you’ve watched the show that interests you. But it is also fairly easy to forget to cancel.

So what do your choices say about you? Netflix says relatively little except that for some reason you carry on paying even though you sit there night after night complaining that there is never anything you want to watch, aside from reruns and the movies of Jason Statham.

An Amazon Prime subscription probably means you paid for the free priority postage so thought you might as well take a look. You also like being able to watch only one leg of European football matches.

Disney+ means you have small children or essentially still are a small child. Adults with Disney+ and no children are obsessed with spin-offs from the superhero series or Star Wars. You are absurdly excited by the new Avengers movie. Alternatively you once nicked a password from a friend to watch the Beatles documentary and have hung on to it, telling people you only keep it so you can watch The Bear.

A commitment to Paramount Plus means you are a sucker for soap operas about grizzled, old, salt of the earth no-nonsense ranchers. Or perhaps oilmen who are fighting back against bureaucrats, regulators, lawyers and environmentalists who are threatening their way of life — and whose wives spend all day shopping and glamming up for when they get home. Maybe that’s slightly unfair. There are also series about good old salt of the earth gangsters whose way of life is threatened too. Paramount Plus is a channel for men who miss westerns. It is essentially the GB News of light entertainment, the channel for everyone thinking of voting Reform at the next election and who suspects that Jeremy Clarkson is secretly a bit of a leftie.

Now TV is for people who did not want to shell out for a Sky subscription and haven’t realised it would have in fact been cheaper to have done so.

You got Apple TV+ during the pandemic and are prevented from cancelling by the fact that its four good shows are evenly distributed throughout the year.

Discovery Plus has a bit of everything you like, especially cycling, but not enough to justify a subscription so it’s primarily for those who don’t care how much they are spending. Channel 4’s is the saddest service since it exists solely for those who want to rewatch programmes from when Channel 4 was still good.

ITVX is primarily for those who feel short-changed by only two hours of Love Island content. As for iPlayer, well, it’s the BBC and you’ve probably paid for it anyway so you might as well give it a quick skim, if only to annoy The Telegraph.

Oh, and if you actually watch any of these on your TV, I regret to inform you that you are no longer young.

Email Robert at magazineletters@ft.com

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India is set to reach a record year in initial public offerings and Big Pharma is facing a wave of patent expiration dates. Plus, Meta goes to trial over who to hold accountable for corporate scandals.

Mentioned in this podcast:

India on track for record IPO year

The looming ‘patent cliff’ facing Big Pharma

Today’s FT News Briefing was produced by Sonja Hutson, Katya Kumcova, Henry Larson and Marc Filippino. Additional help from Kelly Garry, and Michael Lello. Our acting co-head of audio is Topher Forhecz. Our intern is Michaela Seah. The show’s theme song is by Metaphor Music.

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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

Here we go again. That must have been the first thought on the minds of many Tesla shareholders this week as Elon Musk waded back into the political fray, declaring his intention to launch a third party to rival the Republicans and Democrats.

It is less than two months since Musk’s moonlighting for Donald Trump’s administration led a group of Tesla shareholders to call for their chief executive to devote at least 40 hours a week to his day job, and the latest distraction wiped 7 per cent from the stock price on Monday. Musk was unmoved. He told one analyst who suggested the board should tie his pay to the time he spends at work to “shut up”.

But at a time when Tesla is facing sagging sales and mounting competition, anxiety is on the rise and activists are again urging the company’s board to hold its CEO to account. The financial squeeze has raised a question over the carmaker’s heavy investments: Despite a severe cut to capital spending in the latest quarter, free cash flow still amounted to only about half its quarterly average over the previous three years.

Viewed through the lens of the company’s stock price, however, Tesla’s shareholders would seem to have little reason to feel blue. True, much of the euphoria that pumped up the shares following Trump’s re-election has leaked away. But they are still up 15 per cent since the election, handily outperforming the wider market. Tesla’s market cap still dwarfs the rest of the car industry, even though it only accounts for about 2 per cent of global auto sales.

The Musk effect still underpins Tesla’s market cap. The shareholders who have pumped up its stock price are fixated on the technology future that he has conjured up, not the electric car business that is the company’s bread and butter today.

Morgan Stanley, for instance, estimated Tesla’s auto business accounts for less than a fifth of the company’s potential value. Most of the rest depends on its cars achieving full autonomy: After that, it can start to rake in fees from running a network of robotaxis, while also cashing in on the software and services the company’s customers will use once they no longer need to keep their attention on the road.

Full autonomy has been a long time coming. It is nine years since Musk first laid out his robotaxi plans. But he knows how to keep the futuristic vision alive — and make it one that only he can deliver. This week, for instance, he promised that Grok, the large language model from another of his companies, xAI, would soon be embedded in Tesla vehicles — a taste of things to come, when artificial intelligence transforms the experience in robot cars.

Could anyone else persuade investors to suspend their scepticism for so long? The huge Musk premium in Tesla’s shares is an extreme version of Silicon Valley founder syndrome, the belief that only a company’s founder has the vision, and the authority, to pursue truly groundbreaking new ideas (Musk wasn’t around at Tesla’s actual founding, though he was an early investor and became a member of the board soon after). 

Rubbing more salt into the wounds of shareholder activists this week was the revelation that Tesla had failed to meet a legal requirement to hold its annual shareholder meeting on time. The event will now take place in November, nearly four months late.

For boardroom experts such as Nell Minow who have long complained about Musk’s approach to governance and the response of Tesla’s board, this amounted to open contempt for normal corporate transparency: “This is one where he’s really backed himself into a corner. The requirements are very clear.”

Musk told Tesla shareholders before news of his plans for a third party broke that he would give the company much more of his attention. But there are other things that Tesla’s directors could be doing to assuage investor’s worries. One would be to work with him to rebuild Tesla’s executive ranks, which were depleted by another senior departure last week, as well as laying out a long-term succession plan.

Another would be to solve the mess caused by a Delaware court’s rejection of Musk’s $56bn stock compensation plan. Musk has warned he might lose interest in Tesla if he is not given a larger ownership stake.

Who knows, maybe Tesla’s directors could manage to organise annual meetings on time in future. The one thing they will probably never do, though, is prevent their CEO from blindsiding his own shareholders the next time he gets carried away with an idea that has nothing to do with electric cars.

richard.waters@ft.com