It’s easy to play the hindsight game with stocks. If only you’d bought shares in Apple, Google, or Tesla in their early days. If you did, you might be doing as well as someone who invested early in a less obvious name: Monster Beverage.

Monster Beverage beat consensus analyst estimates every quarter last year. Last week, it reported record net sales of $1.2 billion in Q4, up 17.6% year-over-year. Its subsidiaries include Monster Energy, Nos, Full Throttle, and several other energy drinks.

Most of Monster’s growth came after it sold off the Hansen’s part of the business to Coca-Cola in August 2014. From there, Monster built its brand into a lifestyle centered around high-octane sports. It currently has a 39% slice of the energy drink market, second only to Red Bull’s 43%.

• Monster Energy is well-known for its sponsorship of sports like drag racing, wakeboarding, motocross, and many other competitions across water, snow, and land.
• Tiger Woods has played out of a Monster Energy bag since 2016, and NASCAR’s premier series was named the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series from 2017 to 2019.
• Monster also sponsors esports teams and has a development program for young athletes in outdoor sports.

Known then as Hansen’s, Monster went public in 1990. The juices and sodas it sold cost more than a share of the company, which was less than a dime per share until 2003. One hundred dollars of those shares would have sold on Friday for $87,740.

As of Dec. 31, 2020, Monster Beverage is holding $1.18 billion in cash and cash equivalents, along with $881.4 million in short-term investments, and $44.3 million in long-term investments.

Liberty Media has faced its fair share of struggles during the pandemic, a reality confirmed by the release of its Q4 and full-year 2020 earnings reports this week.  

Forbes named Liberty Media 2021’s world’s most valuable sports empire at $13 billion, but the mass media company that owns the Atlanta Braves, Formula One, and SiriusXM saw a plunge in revenue across its sports holdings.

The Braves Group recorded $178 million in revenue for 2020, down from $476 million in 2019.

“The decrease in baseball revenue for the full year was primarily driven by fewer games held without fans, which led to lower ballpark operations revenue,” the company said. “Fewer games also negatively impacted broadcasting revenue.”

Formula One Group also reported a significant decrease in revenue — from $2 billion in 2019 to $1.1 billion in 2020 — but the racing giant isn’t slowing down.

“We are planning a record-setting 23-race calendar in 2021 and continue to work with governments, promoters, and local organizations as we navigate COVID-19 protocols,” said Stefano Domenicali, president and CEO at Formula One.

Despite the setbacks in sports, Liberty was able to lean on SiriusXM. Live Nation — a part of Sirius XM — saw a 3% increase in revenue to over $8 billion from its 2019 fiscal year revenue of $7.8 billion, thanks to alternative events it offered.

Last month, Liberty Media’s SPAC went public through a $500 million IPO. Shares rose 27.5% on its first day of trading.

Professional disc golfer Paul McBeth is making history in the sport.

Already No. 1 in the PDGA’s most recent world rankings, the 30-year-old recently signed a 10-year, $10 million endorsement contract with Discraft — disc golf’s biggest endorsement deal ever. 

McBeth has racked up 130 career wins and $510,680 in career earnings. The Discraft deal is an extension of a four-year contract signed in 2019.

“We outgrew the first deal — the four years — we outgrew that in a year, and we started discussing that we need to restructure things and make it long-term,” said Bob Julio, Discraft team manager. 

McBeth joins Patrick Mahomes and Fernando Tatis Jr. in making contract history over the last year.

• Mahomes signed a 10-year, $503 million deal with the Kansas City Chiefs last summer — the biggest in NFL history.
• Tatis signed a 14-year, $340 million deal with the San Diego Padres this month — the longest in MLB history.

Disc golf rose in popularity last year when many indoor sports were shut down due to the pandemic. The sport saw an 84% jump in press coverage between January and April 2020 alone.

Sometimes, you guess wrong — but Comcast-owned NBCUniversal doesn’t want it to become a habit.

NBCU bought $500 million worth of Snap stock at its IPO in 2017 and roughly broke even when it later sold those shares — saying it had lost $268 million on the investment in 2018, then gained $293 million in 2019.

If only NBCU had held on: Snap has more than quadrupled in price as of Friday from the start of the year. Selling those same shares today would have brought in around $2 billion.

It’s a similar story with Peloton. Just seven months after the connected fitness company went public in September 2019, NBCU sold half its stake in Peloton for $178 million. In July 2020, an SEC filing revealed that NBCU had sold the rest of its stake.

Peloton’s stock price has roughly quadrupled since the sale, even after a recent two-week slide. NBCU sold all of its Peloton stock for just under $400 million, per securities filings. Those shares would have been worth around $1.6 billion when a share of Peloton hit $154 last month.

NBCU remains connected to Snap, continuing to partner on content, as it did for the 2016 and 2018 Olympics, and maintaining a shared studio to produce original content.

Looking ahead, NBCU is aggressively pursuing streaming, and making live sports a key part of the strategy. Its Peacock service recently acquired exclusive rights to WWE content. The five-year deal is valued at more than $1 billion, according to The Wall Street Journal.