Latest news with #JohnLarson
Yahoo
17-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
GOP Tax Bill Breaks Trump's Social Security Tax Pledge, Still Hits 25 Million Seniors While Elon Musk's Stock Wealth Skirts FICA
During the marathon Ways and Means Committee meeting scrutinizing the new Republican tax bill, Rep. John Larson (D-Conn.) asked Joint Committee on Taxation Chief of Staff Thomas Barthold about key details, focusing on whether the bill lives up to President Donald Trump's promise of no taxes on Social Security. What Happened: Larson asked how many individuals would still be taxed on their Social Security income after accounting for the new "senior deduction." Barthold stated that under current law in 2026, approximately 56 million tax units will report Social Security benefits. Of those, 32 million will include the benefits in their adjusted gross income (AGI), and about 27 million will owe some tax. Trending: Maker of the $60,000 foldable home has 3 factory buildings, 600+ houses built, and big plans to solve housing — Under the GOP proposal, approximately 25 million returns would still include Social Security benefits in AGI and owe tax, mainly because of other income sources. Around 24 million would see those benefits surpass the proposed $4,000 senior deduction and still owe tax. Why It Matters: After receiving these clarifications from Barthold, Larson pointed out that the bill seemingly does not live up to Trump's earlier claims. "So essentially, this bill doesn't do as President Trump promised—to eliminate taxes on Social Security—because some seniors will receive no benefit or less than full benefits from the additional senior deduction from this bill", he said. He then turned to questions of fairness in payroll tax contributions. "Mr. Bartold, at what income amount does someone stop paying FICA [Federal Insurance Contributions Act] contributions to Social Security?" Larson asked. Barthold replied, "For the present year, it's $176,100."Larson continued, "Someone who's making, let's say, $2.5 million in annual wages... will they pay FICA throughout the year?" Barthold answered that FICA is halted once the income cap is reached, meaning high earners contribute only up to the threshold. Larson concluded by asking how much someone like Tesla Inc. CEO Elon Musk—who is anticipated to recive over $50 billion in compensation from Tesla through stock awards rather than a traditional salary—would contribute to Social Security annually. In response, Barthold explained that income from capital gains and stock-based compensation typically isn't subject to FICA taxes. The bill, which proposes a major health-care revamp that reduces Medicaid funding by an estimated $880 billion in order to help fund $4.5 trillion in newly proposed and extended tax reductions, has been a source of major controversy since it was introduced. Democrats have called on GOP leaders to discard Medicaid cuts and instead address Medicare Advantage 'upcoding' to tackle federal waste. Read Next: Hasbro, MGM, and Skechers trust this AI marketing firm — Invest before it's too late. Deloitte's fastest-growing software company partners with Amazon, Walmart & Target – Many are rushing to grab 4,000 of its pre-IPO shares for just $0.30/share! Image Via Shutterstock Send To MSN: Send to MSN Up Next: Transform your trading with Benzinga Edge's one-of-a-kind market trade ideas and tools. Click now to access unique insights that can set you ahead in today's competitive market. Get the latest stock analysis from Benzinga? This article GOP Tax Bill Breaks Trump's Social Security Tax Pledge, Still Hits 25 Million Seniors While Elon Musk's Stock Wealth Skirts FICA originally appeared on Sign in to access your portfolio
Tom's Guide
15-05-2025
- Business
- Tom's Guide
This new Solo cooler just won summer — it chills everyone off with an A/C mist
Solo Stove, known for its smokeless fire pits, just announced its entry into the crowded cooler market with the new Solo Windchill 47 cooler. So, what makes this new cooler stand out and will it be enough to make our list of the best coolers? How about a built-in A/C unit and mister, which Solo Stove pitches as the "first cooler that actually cools you." "We're thrilled to launch our first-ever cooler, an exciting new chapter that reflects our commitment to innovation and evolving with our consumers," CEO John Larson said in a press release. The Windchill 47 features a 47-quart cooler that is "premium" foam-insulated and can be stocked with up to 65 cans. At 42 pounds, it's not light, but the cooler does come with wheels and a telescoping handle. It also has a built-in bottle opener, and you can purchase a cup holder, a side table or extra battery accessories to hook onto the cooler. Near the A/C controls are a USB-C and USB-A port for charging devices, which has a cover to protect it from the mist. Get instant access to breaking news, the hottest reviews, great deals and helpful tips. The A/C unit is built into the lid with a heat exchanger, high-powered fan and a misting pump. Additionally, there is a vent hose stored under the lid, which attaches to the external vent and can be used to direct air flow. There are two versions of the Windchill 47 to power all those electronics, one with a 10Ah battery and a model with a slightly larger 17Ah battery. Solo Stove claims the 10Ah size will get you three hours of "superior cooling" while the 17Ah battery will last longer at just over 4 hours. Outside of the different-sized batteries, there are no differences between the two models. The 10Ah battery cooler will set you back $650 while the 17Ah model costs $700. The cooler comes in two colors: tan and green. Unfortunately, the Windchill 47 won't ship in time for your Memorial Day cookout, but the rest of your summer should be set up when it ships on June 15.
Yahoo
14-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Solo Stove expands into Coolers with latest innovation, the Solo Windchill 47 Cooler
The outdoor brand introduces the next generation of new products with the expansion into a new category GRAPEVINE, Texas, May 14, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Solo Stove, the leading outdoor lifestyle brand within Solo Brands (NYSE: DTC; OTC: DTCB) and creator of the world's best-selling smokeless fire pit, officially steps into the Cooler category with the launch of its new Solo Windchill 47 Cooler. Packed with cutting-edge technology, this is the first cooler that actually cools you. Featuring an innovative on-the-go air conditioner, paired with fine misting, it's the ultimate summer necessity, designed to deliver serious relief on the hottest days. Created with the Solo Stove community in mind, this new launch is an outdoor essential for everyone, from weekend adventurers and tailgaters, to camping and fishing enthusiasts. The Solo Windchill 47 is the only cooler that offers three different ways to chill, all without compromising on space or performance: it keeps drinks and food cold for days with premium foam insulation, features a portable air conditioner built right into the lid, and turns melted ice into mist for that immediate refresh needed during a long day in the sun. "We're thrilled to launch our first-ever cooler, an exciting new chapter that reflects our commitment to innovation and evolving with our consumers," said John Larson, CEO. "This is just the beginning of the next iteration of Solo, as we continue to deliver quality products that are designed to elevate your outdoor experience and spark unforgettable moments with friends and family." The new Solo Windchill 47-quart cooler can be stocked with 65 cans and guarantees over three hours of active cooling power on one single charge. In addition to superior cooling technologies, the new launch features accessory attachment systems, integrated bottle opener, charging ports, all-terrain wheels, a rear-facing drain, telescoping handle, and more. The Solo Windchill 47 is the first of many new innovations under the evolving Solo brand. It will feature the new logo, which is a reflection of the brand's evolution beyond fire and expansion into new categories, as well as Solo Stove's commitment to designing products that elevate outdoor living in all forms. The innovative Solo Windchill 47 Cooler will launch in two colors at $649.99. It will be available for pre-order starting May 14th and will begin shipping in early-June. Consumers can head to where it is exclusively available for purchase and follow the brand on social @solostove to stay up to date on future launches and brand news. Solo Brands, headquartered in Grapevine, TX, is a leading omnichannel lifestyle brand company. Leveraging e-commerce, strategic retail relationships and physical retail stores, Solo Brands offers innovative, premium products to consumers through five outdoor lifestyle brands – Solo Stove and TerraFlame, known for the world's most popular smokeless fire pits, pizza ovens, accessories, and more; Chubbies, a premium casual apparel and activewear brand; ISLE, maker of inflatable and hard paddle boards and accessories; and Oru Kayak, innovator of origami folding kayaks. Contact: View original content to download multimedia: SOURCE Solo Stove Sign in to access your portfolio
Yahoo
13-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Q1 2025 Solo Brands Inc Earnings Call
Mark Anderson; Senior Director of Treasury & Investor Relations; Solo Brands Inc John Larson; Interim President and Chief Executive Officer; Solo Brands Inc Laura Coffey; Chief Financial Officer; Solo Brands Inc Operator Good morning, and welcome to the Solo Brands's fourth-quarter in fiscal year 2024 financial results conference call. (Operator Instructions) Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Mark Anderson, Senior Director, Treasury, and Investor Relations. Please go ahead. Mark Anderson Thank you, and good morning, everyone. We appreciate you joining us for the Solo Brand's conference call to review fourth-quarter and full year results for 2024. Joining me on the call today are the company's Interim President and Chief Executive Officer, John Larson; and Chief Financial Officer, Laura call is being webcast and can be accessed through the Investors portion of our website at investors@ Today's conference call will be recorded. Please be advised that any time sensitive information may no longer be accurate as of any replay or transcript reading date.I would also like to remind you that the statements in today's discussion that are not historical facts, including statements about expectations, future events, financial performance, turnaround efforts, strategic transformation goals, and future growth, are forward-looking statements and are made pursuant to the Safe Harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of statements by their nature are uncertain and outside of the company's control. Actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied. Please refer to today's earnings press release for our disclosures on forward-looking statements. These factors and other risks and uncertainties are described in detail in the company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Brands assumes no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements. Management will refer to non-GAAP measures and reconciliations to the nearest GAAP measures can be found at the end of our earnings release. Finally, the earnings release has been furnished to the SEC on Form I'd like to turn the call over to John Larson. John Larson Good morning, and thank you all for joining us to review Solo Brand's strategic plan and financial results. During today's call, we intend to level set everyone on recent news, review our 2024 financial results, and share our turnaround work for the fourth quarter, the board and management team engaged in developing an aggressive turnaround plan for 2025. As part of our transformation plan, we hired external financial advisors to help us go through every line item of the business. They have been an integral part of helping to develop and quantify 30-plus value accretive most of you know, Chris Metz notified the Board in mid-February of his decision to resign. Given that the board and management team were closely involved in the 2025 turnaround plan, we felt it was critical not to lose momentum. I was immediately appointed as Interim CEO and in the office the following Monday stepping into the role, I along with the leadership team and board, have taken actions to accelerate and amplify the company's transformation plan. I plan to continue serving on the board and remain interim leader on site until the right person to lead solo brands is believed that we lost no time or momentum with the management change. We are now aggressively working through 30+ value creative initiatives to return solo brands to profitable and sustainable growth. Notwithstanding challenging results, we believe Solo Brands has a solid foundation for success, including great enthusiast brands, a pipeline of new products, and highly loyal customers. I am encouraged by what I see board and management team are fully aligned and taking thoughtful steps to improve the near-term and long-term business trajectory. We do not plan to take questions after our prepared remarks. This decision was not taken lightly, but I hope that Laura and I answer most, if not all, of your immediate questions during these prepared Laura walks through the financial results, I will come back to discuss in more detail the key strategic initiatives. Laura? Laura Coffey Thank you, John, and good morning, everyone. We finished 2024 with total net sales of $455 million down 8% from the prior year. We strengthened our adjusted gross profit margin to 61.7%, and we ended the year with an adjusted EBITDA of $32.6 million or 7.2% of net recognize the challenges ahead, and we are committed to transforming our business by stabilizing operations, optimizing efficiencies, and building scalable processes and platforms to drive sustainable growth. Turning to our fourth quarter results, net sales were $143.5 million, down 13.2% from a year ago. This was driven by declines in retail and direct-to-consumer channels within the Solo Stove segment, partially offset by increased net sales in the Chubbies are carefully evaluating the effectiveness and return of our marketing spend. Although the Snoop ads created good brand awareness last year, we are working to better position spend to be more efficient and tied to the outcomes that align closer to our goals. Our gross profit for the quarter was $87.8 million compared to $96.4 million in the prior reported gross profit margin grew to 61.1%, up 280 basis points compared to 58.3% in the year ago quarter. Selling general and administrative expenses for $81.8 million in the quarter, down from $84.3 million in the prior improvement in SG&A expenses were mainly due to the early termination of a legacy advertising agreement. The fourth quarter's net loss was $58.2 million and adjusted net income, excluding after-tax restructuring charges and other non-recurring or non-cash charges resulted in positive earnings of $2.3 million and adjusted EPS of $0.03 per EBITDA for the quarter was $6.3 million with a margin of 4.4%. Turning to the full year results, 2024 net sales were $454.6 million, down 8.1% from the prior year. Our reported gross profit margin for the year was 57.3%, and excluding inventory charges related to restructuring and consolidation and other non-cash items, our adjusted gross profit margin was 61.7%, up 30 basis points from the prior company reported a GAAP net loss of $180.2 million, an improvement versus a net loss of $195.3 million in 2023. Adjusted net income was $11.4 million or EPS of $0.12, and our adjusted EBITDA was $32.6 million or 7.2% of net sales for the full year in refer to our earnings release for reconciliation tables to the most comparable GAAP measures. In early 2025, we continued implementing corporate restructuring and cost optimization initiatives to re-baseline expenses and right size of the business based on expected sales this have examined the company's marketing effectiveness and have a multi-step plan to improve efficiencies and address spend, which John will discuss in a few moments. We have begun creating better performance management metrics and are evaluating talent at every level. I want to give you a few examples of actions that we have taken thus far after careful consolidated two distribution centers and are looking to sublease those facilities. We believe this is necessary to maintain operating leverage across our fulfillment network. We are continuing to evaluate and make strategic decisions to lower costs and respond to business successfully renegotiated freight contracts for the organization in mid-2024 and are currently exploring other opportunities to reduce our spend in this area. After the holiday period, we decided to take an action on a reduction in force primarily to streamline our Solo Stove segment marketing and operational also rationalize certain operations, reduced overhead costs, and re-baseline cost to better align with the sales going forward. We have decided to pause, our financial guidance based on the challenging and uneven consumer environment anticipated this year, and uncertainty with we are targeting improving profitability compared to a year ago, especially as we expect our major initiatives to ramp up in the second half of the year. Regarding tariffs, we are actively addressing the impact on our some instances, we have proactively shifted production to alternative countries to avoid China-specific impacts while exploring mitigation tactics to even further reduce tariff headwinds. Although there continues to be uncertainty regarding the operation and duration of tariffs, we are currently estimating the impact to be significant to our operations before planned mitigation to the company's balance sheet and cash flow position, we ended the quarter with $12 million in cash and cash equivalents. We continued to manage working capital closely, and we ended the quarter with inventories of $108.6 million, down from a year ago and up $1.8 million from September company's cash provided by operating activities was $10.5 million for the year, and the full year capital expenditures were $14.5 million. We are working to maintain a disciplined and conservative capital allocation strategy, which includes careful cash management, and we have no M&A plan for in product innovation is essential, but we will be judicious with our cash. As of September 31, 2024, revolver borrowings were $69 million. The term loan outstanding was $83 million and our borrowing capacity on the revolver was $350 of December 31, we were in compliance with all financial and operational covenants. Subsequent to the end of the year, we drew down $277.3 million on the revolver, which matures next year on May 12, 2026. More information will be available on our 10-K filed this morning, but due to uncertainty in the business and our expected level of indebtedness, without the application of successful mitigating strategies, we expect to experience difficulty remaining in compliance with the financial covenants in our credit 10-K also includes disclosures about the company's ability to continue as a going concern. We are evaluating strategies to refinance our existing debt, and our plans are focused on improving our results in liquidity as we are discussing that, I would like to turn it back to John. John Larson Thank you, Laura. As I mentioned in the opening, I am laser focused on accelerating and amplifying the restructuring plan that was already underway and ensuring the company maintains the momentum of these critical initiatives. My focus is 100% on optimizing the bottom line and preserving cash. We have implemented surge teams to focus on the key areas of most critical initiatives for our strategic turnaround plan include Number one, resetting the organization's cost structure in line with our sales and profit profile. We are working closely with our financial advisors to walk through every line item on our income statement and balance sheet, and have developed an extensive list of initiatives to drive bottom line results starting this focusing on profitability by channel, by product for each division to drive the business to where we believe, we can provide stronger margins. Three, resetting our marketing approach, our single biggest line item of you may know, Liz Vanzura recently joined Solo Brand's Board and has now agreed to serve as the company's Interim CMO. This is a former colleague and highly awarded marketing rock star. She has a successful track record as CMO and Head of Brand strategy for companies like Cadillac and Hummer, and has worked at agencies for many also earned the Ad Age's Marketer of the Year award and was inducted into the AAF Advertising Hall of Achievement. We are excited to leverage your strategic ability to lead our marketing efforts, identify the appropriate partners and leading edge AI tools, with the potential to increase efficiency dramatically and reignite our four, executing a complete review of our product lineup, simplifying our current product offerings, and strategically repricing our portfolio of offerings. We believe there are significant pricing opportunities to provide clarity for our consumers and to achieve stronger are fortunate to have a cohesive collection of premium brands with deep customer following, and we expect that being less promotional will help avoid channel conflicts between our directed consumer and retail five, accelerating and amplifying new product launches to drive further momentum in the latter half of the year and identifying new product opportunities. Our team of entrepreneurs already has an innovative mindset, and we know that Solo Stove and Chubbies are exceptionally positioned with strong brand recognition and loyal customers to these that we consolidated ISLE paddle boards and Oru Kayak into a new water sports division to create a more profitable, scalable platform. We are actively working on a product roadmap for outdoor lifestyle spaces designed to positively impact people's lives as they enjoy leisure time outdoors. Finally, we are creating a metric focused culture and reporting system to track performance in real believe that tying key performance indicators to our actions and providing simple dashboard reporting will allow our culture to align, engage, and succeed. Also developing repeatable processes that enhance operational efficiency and consistency is plan to track our wins, collect feedback, and analyze failures and successes. Our strategic transformation plan initiatives are tracked and reviewed weekly, and we expect that our quarterly financial results will be the measure of our accomplishments. Regarding tariffs, as we are seeing in similar industries, we now have the impact of tariff Laura mentioned, we are proactively managing this dynamic situation with a broad range of mitigation plans. To summarize, the company is resetting the organization's cost structure, identifying the key performance drivers in our portfolio, revamping our marketing approach, overhauling our pricing and promotion strategies, accelerating and amplifying our new product launches, and creating a metric-based culture to track performance in real line, we have great brands and products with best in class reviews. We have the foundation. We are resetting our business approach to deliver and improve results. And as we execute our value accretive initiatives this year, we expect the performance upside will be more visible in the back half of the you for your continued interest in the company. We look forward to providing updates when we report first quarter results in May. Have a great day. Operator The conference is now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.
Yahoo
20-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
'The plan is to scuttle the agency': Democrats demand answers from Musk on Social Security cuts
New changes to Social Security being implemented at the end of March are seen as a way of degrading services and dismantling the agency without technically implementing "cuts" in payments. Rep. John Larson talks with Rachel Maddow about the upset he hears from constituents over concerns about Donald Trump's threat to Social Security, and demands Democrats in Congress have made to hear directly from Trump officials, including Elon Musk, on proof of the "waste, fraud and abuse" that is supposedly
