That’s amusing. Although, Monster had explosive growth in its first few years (starting from nothing). Do it over 17 years and NVidia wins.

That and construction slowing down. I see a lot of construction guys downing Monster energy drinks. TBH I'm always a little surprised -- but it does give you energy when you need it.

Aside from the caffeine boost the bigger issue is just that They burn through calories.

Monster is a classic "capital lite" business model with a large and growing addressable market, and management has been extremely successful reinvesting the substantial free cash flow generated by the business into organic growth and acquisitions. There are really only a handful of businesses of that calibur in the entire public market. Of course, people have realized all of this by this point, so Monster stock trades a large multiple of earnings (nearly 40x), while prospective growth will never match what they did historically from inception, otherwise they'd end up the largest company in the world after not too long!

I mean, look at private ones like AriZona iced tea that still sells cans for $0.99 and the owners are multi-billionaires.

What do think the manufacturing cost for a can of it is? Maybe ten cents?

It's a high-margin business!

It’s too bad that most business owners care more about power than profits. Otherwise, we’d see far more occurrences of successful businesses like this.

Celsius is also growing like crazy. As I said, there's more money to be made in energy drinks, I don't understand the big hype.

Monster energy drinks net income is ~$1B. Intel/TSMC/etc have or have had net incomes many multiples of that.

Is there that much more potential left for energy drinks?

I would hope not for the sake of people’s health.

Check Celsius out, it contains less sugar, more caffeine, they've been growing +100% YoY($CELH). There's more space than you could imagine.

I don’t see why a startup would be indicative of potential profits in this space, especially a miniscule business where it is expected to grow 100% YoY.

Coca Cola and Pepsi each seem to have profits in the $5B to $10B range, which can be a proxy for how much profit there exists in the space because everyone else is much smaller.

Maybe if these energy drinks displace all of coffee and tea, but I would be surprised. How much more caffeine will (or should) consume?

> Is there that much more potential left for energy drinks?

President Camacho has yet to come to power to authorize energy drinks for irrigation (because it's got electrolytes), so I'd say yes, there's still a ton of potential.

And then the become the central part of the economy.

Energy drinks are addictive and the inputs are cheap.

I suspect that to some degree individual drinks will be boom -> bust, as newer brands cannibalize the market by having (or advertising) superior energy, more caffeine, better comedowns, etc., and with older drinks having a higher likelihood of bad publicity simply on account of having been around longer. MLMs like Herbalife are also operating in the space (all "loaded tea" shops are MLM), so obviously in cases like that there's a ton of pressure producing early growth.

So are the inputs of GPU cheap.

Upgrading GPUs is addictive too - I haven’t been able to stop ever since I got my first one!

Selling sugar water that costs pennies to make for dollars per can is a business with excellent margins. The hardest part is figuring out how to market it.

"Liquid Death" is even better. Dollars per can of just water, no sugar. Of course, all of it is marketing, and they are really, really good at it.