Morning Brew Daily - Musk Wins His $1 Trillion Pay Package & October Layoffs Hit 22-Yr High

Episode Date: November 7, 2025

Episode 709: Neal and Toby discuss a report that showed October was the worst month for layoffs in over 20 years. Then, Elon Musk prevails in the battle over this $1 trillion pay package. Meanwhile, ESPN drops Penn Entertainment as its sports betting partner and brings in DraftKings. Plus, Snap announces a partnership with Perplexity AI to AI-ify its search engine, sending shares up 8%. And, Duolingo, Celsius, and E.l.f. Beauty join the 20% club…with each of its shares falling by at least 20%. Finally, an update on the FAA’s plans to cut flights and how it may affect you.  Learn more at usbank.com/splitcard  Get your MBD live show tickets here! https://www.tinyurl.com/MBD-HOLIDAY  Subscribe to Morning Brew Daily for more of the news you need to start your day. Share the show with a friend, and leave us a review on your favorite podcast app. Listen to Morning Brew Daily Here:⁠ ⁠⁠https://www.swap.fm/l/mbd-note⁠⁠⁠  Watch Morning Brew Daily Here:⁠ ⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@MorningBrewDailyShow⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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pwc.com slash US slash brew AI. That's pwc.com slash us slash brewAI. Good morning brew daily show. I'm Neil Fryman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, Elon Musk officially begins his trillion dollar quest. Then we just had the worst October for layoffs in over two decades. It's Friday, November 7th.

Let's ride. Good morning and happy Friday. You got to hear about this museum tour over in Dusseldorf, Germany. At the city's Kunstpalas Museum, they run a tour twice a month. where a guide, Joseph Langelink, constantly berates you for being dumb and not knowing about art. According to The Guardian, the 70-minute tour costs 7 euros and is described in marketing materials as grumpy and highly unpleasant. It's also ridiculously popular. Every single grumpy tour has been sold out since May and their book solid through the end of the year. The concept

was invented by performance artist Carl Brandy, who was convinced people enjoy the emotional roller coaster of hanging out with an aggressively rude person, playing the role of Langelink, he says, I never insult visitors directly based on their personality or their appearance, but I insult them as a group. My contempt is directed at an inferred ignorance that may not even exist, but I try to make them feel as ignorant as possible. Toby, I think this is genius and other museums are going to copy it. There's so many little nuances as to why this works specifically in the museum. It's not a comedy club, so there's no separation between the audience and the person doing the insulting, so it feels more intimate. Plus, it's not a place where you normally get insulted

or laugh in general, museums are not those types of institutions. Also, there's this undercurrent that museums hold all the power. They're putting the art out. They're putting whatever out for you to see. There is a little bit of that perceived ignorance. I walk into museums and you look at something like, I don't really know what's going on there. So I think all of those layers just make it a really fun and, you know,

diverse experience with so many different angles as to why you're saying, why do I like this guy yelling at me? So booking my trip over to Dusseldorf right now because it seems like a good time. I don't think you'll have to because I think a lot of museums are going to start to copy it because they're trying to get people in their doors and they're saying, oh wow, this grumpy tour is sold out from May through December. I should probably get on that. And now a word from our sponsor, US Bank. If your laptop is starting to slow down and freeze up, it's probably time for an upgrade. But instead of breaking the bank and paying out of pocket, you can pay later with the U.S. Bank

split card. Introducing the U.S. Bank Split World MasterCard, a new type of card that lets you pay later on every purchase. With a split card, all purchases are automatically divided into three payments and placed into a payment plan to be paid back over three months, so you don't have to worry about going off budget. And if you're looking for additional flexibility, any purchase over $100 can be extended to $6 or 12 months with equal monthly payments for a low monthly fee. No matter what you're paying for, pay later on every purchase with the U.S. Bank split card. Learn more at usbank.com slash split card. That's usbank.com slash split card. Wireless can feel like a world of traps, but not with Visible.

It's one-line wireless with unlimited data and hotspot, powered by Verizon for $25 a month, taxes and fees included. Plus, for a limited time, new members pay just $20 a month for one year on the Visible plan, using the code Fresh Start. Refresh your wireless with Visible. Tap the banner to switch today. Terms apply, limited time offer subject to change. See Visible.com for plan features and network management details. In the most highly anticipated shareholder vote in, well, ever, Tesla investors approved CEO Elon Musk's historic pay package with over 70% voting in favor.

If Musk hits aggressive targets over the next 10 years, he will gain potentially $1 trillion in stock, making him the world's first trillionaire and then some. We've never seen anything like this pay package in corporate America before, and we may not again until Elon clones himself. What we're about to embark upon is not merely a new chapter of the future. of Tesla, but a whole new book, Musk said. I guess what I'm saying is, hang on to your Tesla's stock. So why did Tesla offer it to him? Well, a little backstory is in order. Last year, a Delaware

judge blocked Musk's existing pay package at Tesla worth up to $56 billion, finding the board was under too much of his influence when it approved the deal. Outraged over that decision, Tesla shuffed up a new one worth a lot more and presented it to shareholders for their approval, and they did. Not that the outcome was ever in doubt. It was as inevitable as an alphemy, Kuras Center Grand Slam final. Musk ratcheted up the stakes in recent months saying that if he didn't receive this pay package, he would ditch the company to build AI products elsewhere. To most investors, the prospect of Musk leaving Tesla would be unfathomable. They are one in the same. The majority of Tesla's $1.5 trillion valuation is tied not to its car business, but to Musk's vision

of a Tesla 2.0 that sells millions of optimist humanoid robots a year and operates a globe-splanting feat of self-driving taxis. They're betting $1 trillion is enough to keep his eye on the prize. This has just been the trillion dollar saga because this was a follow two months of very aggressive campaigning by Tesla, which is not something you normally see when it comes to a shareholder vote. I mean, Tesla ran ads for this. Tesla doesn't even run ads for their own cars. So it just shows you how much they thought that this was an existential vote and needed to go the way that they wanted it to. Tesla chair, Robin Denholm, said that the board isn't actually concerned with how Musk is splitting his time. She said,

other CEOs might like to play golf. Elon doesn't play golf. He likes to create companies. Basically, they're saying we're making peace with Elon having his attention very fractured, but we still need them. And then you have the psychologists get involved here because what is the difference between a $56 billion pay package versus a trillion dollar pay package? And to them, they say it doesn't actually make much of a difference.

Once you reach a certain level of wealth, any incremental gains beyond that is something that doesn't necessarily change your daily life. Is he going to buy more coffee? Is he going to make his coffee at home? No, it doesn't change anything about his life. And also, some MIT Nobel laureates have looked into this idea of diminishing returns when it comes to financially incentivizing leaders of companies. A study of the 10 most valuable NASDAQ firms from 2017 to 2022 found no link between CO pay

and stronger stock performance. And then another study of 429 companies showed that firms were CEOs were underpaid relative to peers, actually delivered. higher shareholder return. So it is interesting that maybe this entire concept of motivating Elon Musk doesn't have much basis in research. So why did Musk want this so badly? Why did he want this pay package? And if he didn't get it, he was going to leave. I think the answer lies not in wealth, even though that may play a small part. It lies more in control, influence, and power. He wants what Mark Zuckerberg has. Mark Zuckerberg has 61.1% of the vote of meta because of that

dual class voting structure. Elon Musk currently owns 13% of Tesla, and this pay package would bump him up to 25% should he hit these targets. He said on a podcast recently, if we build this robot army, which he wants to do at Tesla, do I have at least a strong influence over that robot army? I don't feel comfortable building that robot army if I don't have at least a strong influence. I think you can read what's going on in Elon's mind right there.

It's not about the money. It's about power and control like we've seen him going. went to DC earlier this year. It's about exerting his influence on the highest echelons of society. And then let's dive into the actual tranches of this pay package. Is he going to reach them? If terms of the product milestones, he needs to deliver 20 million EVs. Right now, he delivered eight and a half million, so more than double. He needs full self-driving subscriptions to reach 10 million. He needs robotaxies to reach a million in operation, and he needs to deliver a million optimist robots. Those hypothetically, you could see how he could get to.

it's the financial goals and the EBITDA targets that have people saying he's probably not going to reach the upper echelons of these tranches because tronch, one, is they need to reach an annual EBITA target of $50 billion. Last year, Tesla posted $16 billion in earnings, so it's not necessarily something that's too close by. And if he wants to reach the full payout threshold, he needs to get Tesla to $400 billion in the EBITA. Right now, the most profitable company in the world is Apple. They brought in $1,4,000. $45 billion so orders of magnitudes larger than anything we see at Tesla but also in corporate America at writ large. Moving on, as fall took full effect in October, trees were shedding leaves and businesses were shedding jobs. October layoffs were historic in all the wrong ways. US companies announced 153,000 layoffs in the month, nearly triple last year's total, marking the worst October since 2003 and the highest single month total in Q4 since 2008.

to data from Challenger Gray in Christmas. If you look at the cumulative damage, there's been over a million job cuts so far in 2025, the most outside of the pandemic since 2009. Many firms are courts correcting after the pandemic era of overhiring, especially in sectors like logistics or e-com where demand has normalized. Warehouses were the biggest job cutters last month with 48,000 layoffs, followed by 33,000 in tech. Amazon, UPS, Paramount, and Target were some of the big corporate names that announced

layoffs last month. There's also AI, which is either a structural issue facing workers as it remakes the workforce or a convenient cover execs are using to positively frame their downsizing. What makes this past October especially jarring is that companies typically avoid announcing layoffs in Q4 wary of bad optics around the holidays. So this surge, despite the reputational risk, so just how intense these corporate cost-cutting efforts have become. With the federal government being shut down, we haven't had an official jobs report since August. So investors have turned to these private readings in the meantime. And these readings are scary right now. Yeah. So for months, we've been in what economists have called a low,

higher, low fire environment. The job market was essentially frozen over. No one was bringing new employees on board. But at the same time, you had pretty good job security because there weren't a lot of layoffs either. That is all changing as we go into the fall. They're calling it low, higher, more fire. And the question really is for economists, the Federal Reserve, People like us, anyone who cares about the economy is why is this happening? Is there a through line through this all? Is it individual belt tightening from companies based on unique circumstances, the names that you mentioned UPS Amazon? Or is it, you know, a broader theme that there are serious cracks forming in the job market? I'm just going to run down a little bit why these companies

are saying that they're getting rid of employees for Amazon, which did the biggest layoffs in its history. Andy Jassy, the CEO, said he was responding to a culture issue inside the company that had a lot more layers that led to slower decision-making. So he's blaming bureaucracy, which a lot of companies have blamed. You go to UPS, it shed 34,000 employees over the past year. It's saying it has a lot of automation gains and productivity gains, and that's why it just doesn't need as many employees. And then others are blaming tariffs, the children's clothing brand. Carter's is cutting 15% of its workforce, and it said explicitly that it is because of higher cost of tariffs. So if you're trying to chalk this up to an AI chat GPT wipeout, the data and

evidence doesn't exactly show that seems to be for a myriad of reasons. And actually, one of the highest cited, actually the highest cited reason that people lost their jobs in this Challenger Gray and Christmas report was Trump administration's doge cuts impacting people. So again, we haven't had, you know, public payroll data for a while, because, the government shut down. ADP data can only give us private payroll, so we haven't been able to see that. But this Challenger Gray and Christmas report pulled people. And remember, the government cut a ton of jobs this year. So maybe that is reflecting in the October numbers as well. We were supposed to get the jobs report this morning. So that's two that we've missed. This one would be for October.

You get it the first Friday of the next month. So it would have come out in two hours. So we are in a fog just like a lot more important people like Jerome Powell. Moving on, ESPN's bet on betting didn't pay off. Yesterday, the worldwide leader in sports in Penn Entertainment announced they are cutting short their supposed decade-long agreement after less than two years together. The move comes after ESPN bet failed to make a dent in an industry dominated by the duopoly of Fan duel in draftings, languishing in seventh place with less than 3% market share. For ESPN, it's not the end of the world as just hours after things ended with Penn.

It announced a new partnership with draftings, though. more limited in scope. For Penn, though, it's another embarrassing failure. Breaking off this deal represents its second failure at trying to make the media sports betting model work, the first attempt being a $551 million deal for Barstool Sports, which ended up as an $850 million write-off. As it does from this latest fallout settles, investors are not pleased. One prominent Penn investors, H.G. Vora Capital, wrote earlier this year that Penn has executed a string of transactions that, in our view, stand among the worst in the industry's history in reference to both the ESPN and Barstool deals.

Neil, on the surface, these kind of tie-ups make sense. ESPN and Barstool have large audiences of sports fans that you could hypothetically turn into gambling customers. But in reality, the marriage just never quite drove enough customer acquisitions to justify the financial outlays. Yeah, I want to talk about Penn first because this was a series of historically awful business move. So Penn is a regional casino operator.

They own properties like Boomtown Casino Biloxi, America Star Casino, Hotel Vicksburg, Hollywood Casino, and Bangor, Maine, and Cactus Peets Resorts Casino in Nevada. So that has been their business model for a long time. Now, they're looking at these gambling apps becoming so popular, and they're saying, oh, we want in on the action. We want to build our business in this way. So they go to Barstool and they say, hey, you have a huge audience. You make amazing content for the types of people that we want to bring on to this platform.

Let's create an app together. that did not work out. Then they go to ESPN. They say, oh, you have an even bigger audience than Barstool did. Why don't we work together to make an app together? That did not work out as well. So it's been a huge egg in the face for the CEO and executive leadership at Penn that has been facing a lot of activist investor pressure to grow. They said that they wanted a 20% market share in the sports gambling space and they never achieved above 4% through the past five years. So a series of historic missteps. In a way, I think ESPN is a little really. believed here because there was always a lot of trepidation of tying the media arm of ESPN to the

gambling arm of ESPN bet because these reporters are supposed to be objectively reporting on the very thing that they want people gambling on. And the thing it came to a head, that optics came to a head when we were talking about the Terry Rozier and Chauncey Billups gambling scandal that just broke a few weeks ago. And literally as ESPN was talking about it on their core programming, a ad for ESPN bet came up on the bottom that they did. quickly took off screen, just showing how this was always just a little bit of an unhappy marriage. So now the ESPN bet is going away. It's going to be rebranded as score under Penn's umbrella.

ESPN is going to keep ESPN bet as a content brand, but no longer an actual sportsbook. And Draft Kings is just going to kind of dodge and weave throughout all of ESPN's properties. People are a little bit more open to seeing Draft King's name pop up because it's just been a name in the industry for a while. Apparently, they're actually getting more money from Draft Kings than they everywhere, for Penn. So I think it's one of these things where ESPN said, fine, this did not work and actually were better off for it because it just doesn't lead to the uncomfortable optics that the other arrangement did. So bottom line here, I think, if we survey the sports gambling landscape, it's that no one has been able to challenge Fandul and Draft Kings so far. Together, they own

roughly two-thirds of the U.S. market. Penn tried a couple of times, and they absolutely failed. But they are playing defense against one particular upcomer, and that is prediction markets. draft kings just bought a prediction market startup Railbird to kind of get into this industry because that is what scares them at night prediction markets like calcium and polymarket not anything that penn is doing all right we're going to take a quick break and come back with our stock in dog of the week it's time to refresh your yard during spring backyard days at the home depot get low prices guaranteed on propane grills starting at $179 like the next grill three burner gas grill or get $50 off a select Weber Spirit Grill and bring big flavor to your backyard.

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30 minutes so you can feel confident it's what you ordered. Fresh groceries, your way with Ralph's delivery and pickup. Get free delivery during online deal days plus $30 off your first online order. Ralph's, fresh for everyone. Welcome to Stock of the Week, Dog of the Week, the segment where Toby and I pick one stock whose phone got fully charged overnight and another that's sweating it out at 3%. I won the pre-show game of Simon Says, so I get to go first. And my, stock of the week is Snapchat, and the reason why isn't very perplexing. Snapshares gained nearly 10% yesterday after the social media company announced a deal with AI startup perplexity. Perplexity is going to pay SNAP $400 million in cash and equity for prominent real estate

in the app, something investors see as boosting user growth and engagement on Snapchat. What does that look like? Here's Snap CEO and meta head of product, Evan Spiegel. Starting in early 2026, perplexity will appear in our chat interface for Snapchatters around the world. Through this integration, Perplexity's AI-powered answer engine will let Snapchaters ask questions and get clear conversational answers drawn from verifiable sources all within Snapchat. I should note here that Perplexity is being sued by news organizations like the New York Post in Dow Jones for copyright infringement, and it's also being sued by Reddit for alleged illegal scraping of content for commercial gain. Nonetheless, Snap thinks its users will enjoy

gabbing with a chat pot on its platform, plus it adds a new revenue stream to support an ad business that's never really been competitive against the giants in the industry. Still, Snap is chugging along, putting up 15 and 8 in the social media G League. It increased its sales 10% year over year and grown its daily global user base to 477 million people. Yeah, previously Snap worked with OpenAI and Google for this My AI chat bot that it was trying to integrate into its platform, but those are companies that have relationships with larger companies. I mean, Open AI and Microsoft are pretty tied up. Google is Google itself. So it was looking around at kind of the AI speed dating landscape and going, hmm, who's the only uncoupled person here? Who's the only major independent

AI vendor that we could work with? Perplexity's name came up. Perplexity is the name you see thrown around a lot too. Apple was rumored to it by them for a while because to ramp up its AI effort. So I think when you're looking for someone who is independent and who could give you the capabilities, Perplexity is the logical name that you land on. And I, I think it makes sense. I mean, for Snapchat, they can stay in the AI race. They don't need to develop it in-house with much fewer resources than any of these other social media companies.

For perplexity, you get access to a 400 million person user base. I mean, Snapchat, for all its faults, still is a very large social media company in general. So it's a great place to real-world test your models out. So I think overall, this is just a marriage that makes a lot of sense on the surface. We'll see how it actually, like most marriages, how does it actually? play out in reality when they have to actually get down to the nitty gritty of it, but good wins for both companies, it seems on the surface. My dogs of the week are members of what I am christening the 20% club, Duolingo Celsius and Elf Beauty, companies that literally have no connection other than

the fact that they declined in value. The 20% club is more like a sticky frat basement actually, aka not a place you want to find yourself. But the first entrance that made it past the bouncer is a Duolingo, which fell 25% yesterday after the company shifted their focus to user growth instead of focusing some more on near-term profitability that investors wanted to see. Duolingo's revenues still grew 41% during the quarter, but some soft guidance was all investors could see granted to get access to the 20% club, Neil, with room to spare. Yeah, it's been quite a roller coaster year for Joe Lingo. They started out the year at around $325 a share. They went up to $544 in May, but they, before,

even before yesterday when they joined the 20% club with that huge plummet, the shares were trading down 20% for the year. They had a big PR crisis a few months ago when they said they were going to really lean into AI, which kind of blew up in their face. But things seem to have smoothed over. And now, as the CEO said, they're experiments that put monetization and user growth at odds. And part of my job has been arbitrating between these two. It looks like he's prioritizing user growth, long-term vision over monetization at the moment. Investors don't really like that because they want to see some cash flow, and that's why you saw the stock plummet. Next in line at the club is the energy dream company's Celsius, which fell 26% yesterday on fears

that a distribution change would interrupt sales of the hot new brand that recently acquired Alani New. Despite third quarter revenue rising 173%, the fact that it's going to take a few quarters to fully roll out Alani New made investors pause and almost sent them to the 30% club, Neil. Similar, you said there was nothing that these companies had in common, but I see shades of what with Duolingo with Celsius by they're doing some short-term turbulence in order for long-term games. So Pepsi does own 11% of Celsius now, and one of the big parts of that investment is allowing Celsius and whoever Celsius buys like Alani knew to use their distribution network. And Pepsi has obviously one of the best distribution networks for any beverage company.

So that's what's going on here. Overall, though, the energy drink market seems to be booming monster beverage reported earnings after the bell yesterday. they're a competitor with Celsius and CEO said overall the global energy drink category remains healthy with robust growth. Coffee prices are skyrocketing. People are getting their caffeine fixed from places other than soda and now coffee because it's getting so expensive. So overall, it looks like this industry is expanding at a rapid clip. But again, investors don't like when you see some short-term uncertainty, which is why Celsius stock vomited yesterday.

Finally, in line at the club is Elf Beauty, which actually fell 34% yesterday after the company warned of tariff-related headwinds and voice worries about the health of the American consumer. In a presentation, the company showed how every 10% tariff increased its cost of goods sold by $17 million, which is not something investors jive with. This company is not doing well right now, Neil. It's not, but it has an ace in the hole because it recently acquired Haley Bieber's cosmetics and skincare line road. And it's going to forecast that this company, or road specifically, this brand will bring in $200 million in sales this fiscal year. The CEO is chalking this up to uncertainty around guidance because for the past two earnings calls, they weren't able to issue

guidance because they would have no idea what the tariff hit would be. Now, the first time they're issuing guidance and investors are like, well, that's a little lower than we thought. But it's been a bit of a black hole for most of the year now for Elf Beauty. So I guess if we had to tie all of these companies together, which I know it's kind of hard, is that they are taking some short-term hits, are overall optimistic in the long term, but still, all that uncertainty has spooked investors, and they gained entrance to the 20% club. It was almost the 30% club, actually. If some of these companies, it was hanging around that line for a while, but right now it's just the 20% club, which, again, not a place that you want to find yourself. All right, let's sprint to the finish

with some final headlines. If you're flying this weekend out of a major airport, check your email for any updates on your flight because it could be affected by the government shutdown. A 4% reduction in air traffic goes into effect today as a preemptive measure by the Federal Aviation Administration in light of the unpaid air traffic controller absences. Traffic will be lowered by 10% at 40 major airports by next week should the shutdown continue. As many as 1,800 flights could be impacted today across some of the busiest airports in the country, including New York's J.F. K and Newark, L-AX, Atlanta, Chicago, Hare, Denver, San Francisco, Miami, and a lot more. For those traveling internationally, you should be okay.

And the same goes for travelers between big hubs, since airlines have leeway in which flights they'll cut. They're expected to take off more regional routes first. Toby, I'm literally heading to Newark in a few hours. We'll give a report from the ground. I know. I'm praying for you and that your flight gets off. Okay.

So this is going to be annoying if you have travel plans, but I do just want to put it into context for everyone. If we go back to 2022, which is when they had a lot of weather issues in Southwest actually canceled 17,000 flights during that period. We are not reaching that levels of disruption. For instance, Delta canceled 170 flights today. United, it's canceling around 200 flights. So it's just not going to be the size or the scope of a massive disruption like that because they did have prior notice. Some of the flights that they are choosing to cancel are voluntary.

so it's just not going to be as large in scale. Again, if you are flying as my boy, Neil is here today, you are going to be a little trepidation. And some CEOs have said, buy a backup ticket. They also give refunds for normal economy seats. So they are trying to work with people here. But again, just to put it in perspective, this is not going to be one of the largest, you know, travel disruptions we've seen in recent memory.

But it will get worse as it goes on because it's a 4% cut today. And Duffy, who is the Transportation Secretary, Sean Duffy, said that by next week it's going to get up to 10%. So again, we say this about the government shutdown in general. The longer it goes on and it's got on for a record amount of time, the worst it gets for the economy and for everyone involved here living in the United States. All right, finally, it's that time of the year when online dictionaries roll out their words of the year to see who can best encapsulate 2025 in a single word or phrase. Yesterday, Collins Dictionary planted its flag.

It said that vibe coding was its word of the year, coined by a co-founder at OpenAI, vibe coding is, quote, the use of artificial intelligence prompted by natural language to assist with the writing of computer code. Or this time in English, basically telling a machine what you want rather than painstakingly coding it yourself. Vibe coding has the potential to upend computer programming by letting any bozo crank out a website by simply telling a machine, build me a website. It saw a huge increase in usage since its first appearance in February, and according to the managing director of Collins, perfectly captures how language is evolving alongside technology. So Toby Collins is going with vibe coding.

We had dictionary.com come out last week and say their word of the year is 6-7, that gen alpha meme that means literally nothing. Do you think either got it right? I think it's all right. The word of the year that I think is actually better. I'm actually just going to go through Collins' shortlist because it had some good ones on there.

They had clinker, which is pretty tapped into the culture because that's kind of the derogatory slang term people are using to describe AI right now. comes from Star Wars. So it's like almost the thing that you're like, ah, that's the, I can see a clinker made this art piece or something like that. Then we also have things like biohacking, a coolcation, glaze was another one, and then aura farming. I think aura farming probably was top of the list for me, which is just when a charismatic person is doing something deliberately to look cool like that. I've heard of you say that. So if it makes it into your lexicon, I think it's

fully penetrated. I haven't heard you say vibe coding as much. So that's, kind of my barometer here is if Neil Fryman would use one of these words. It does feel like the words of the year always are driven by people under the age of 25. People over 35 have absolutely no say in words of the year because they're driving the culture and we're just sitting here watching trying to sound not super cringy when we say that. Well, that's the thing. You would never say six, seven or you would never do it on purpose, but you have started to use oil farming in your normal lexicon.

And then vibe coding, that's just not necessarily the industry. in. So that's why I'm kind of zero in on Oro farming here. My pick is slop. Slop. I think it's similar to Clinker, but I think a lot of people, you know, are using the word slop to describe this very low quality output of AI. Just hear that all the time. I use it. You use it. Everyone I hear is using it. I feel like that may be best encapsulates 2025. So Slop, bank on it. That is all the time we have. Thanks for starting your morning with us. Have a wonderful Friday and an even better weekend. The rumors are true. I'm going on vacation

through next week and we'll miss you all dearly because I can't resist a game. If you want to guess where I'm going, leave a comment and Toby will reveal it on Monday's show. Here's a hint. A couple hundred years ago, it was the world's richest country. For any feedback on the show, send a note to Morning Brew Daily at Morningbrew.com or DM us on Instagram at MB Daily Show. Let's roll the credits. Emily Milliron is our executive producer. Raymond Lue is our producer. Our associate producers are Olivia Graham and Olivia Lake.

Hair and makeup is trying to stay out of the 20% Club. Devin Emery is our president and our show is a production of Morning Brew. Great show today, Neil. I wish you all well.