Morning Brew Daily - Twitter Rebrands to 'X' and 'Barbenheimer' Makes $230+ Million On Opening Weekend

Episode Date: July 24, 2023

Episode 109: Neal and Toby explain why Elon Musk has decided to rebrand Twitter as, 'X'. Plus it looks like 'Barbenheimer' surpassed expectations after making history at the box office, raking in over $230 million. Also, how power grids across the country are holding up against record hot temperatures and who won the weekend? Finally, what to expect from the Nasdaq rebalance and what Neal and Toby are watching this week. Listen to Morning Brew Daily Here: https://link.chtbl.com/MBD 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. On today's pod, movie theaters had a historic weekend thanks to amateur nuclear physicists and millennials reliving their childhood. Plus, Jamaica has a woman's soccer team and they have quite a story.

Then Twitter.com first of its name is no more. As Elon has decided to rename and rebrand his expensive pet project, plus it's been an absurdly hot summer, but power grids refused to go down without a fight. It's Monday, July 24th. Let's ride. All right, Neil, thanks for tag teaming the show with Kelsey on Friday. I was in McCall, Idaho, as recently as last night, actually. And my biggest takeaway is don't forget you're at 5,000 feet of elevation when you're at 5,000 feet of elevation. In terms of running a marathon? No, it affected everything. I got sunburned quicker than I expected. I got out of breath a lot

quicker. I played golf and even pickleball and the ball travels further when you're playing these racket sports in golf. So I was just surprised that one, that I was at elevation and two, just how much it was affecting me. Elevation doesn't affect me. Oh, you're built different. I'm built different.

It has to be over like 10K. Try going to Breckenridge where it's 9,000 feet or a telryad. Let's do a little... 5,000 is basically sea level. I know, but I swear, like the ball was just floating on me. So that was my excuse. You're more in tune with your sport. Yeah, exactly. That's what I'll say. All right. Now, let's get into our first story. There's actually a line from Romeo and Juliet where Juliet asked her star cross lover, what's in a name? Well, Elon Musk must have been brushing up on his Shakespeare this weekend because as of this morning, Twitter is officially

ditching the iconic Bluebird and the Twitter name to rebrand as simply X. So why the left better X. Well, Elon is obsessed with it. X.com was the original name of PayPal, which he co-founded. Elon is also the founder of SpaceX. There's the Tesla Model X. He has lots of X-wives and girlfriends. Plus, the business entity of Twitter was already renamed X-Corp earlier this year, even if the company branding didn't change until this morning. Clearly, he has a thing for X, and has long harbored this desire to create an everything app called X. It's a company. since the PayPal days. But Neil, this is obviously a bold strategy to ditch 17 years' worth of brand recognition

for this higher esoteric pursuit of an everything app. What do you make of it? Headscratcher. Definitely a head scratcher. I mean, the company on its website literally calls the bird its most recognizable asset. And just because of his obsession with the letter X to ditch your most recognizable asset is, you know, people are very pro. to criticize Elon Musk's every move with Twitter. Whatever he does, people are going to say it's an idiotic decision.

Yeah. This is up there with the top one. Oh, absolutely. I just want to talk about the rollout for a second. So obviously, this all happened in real time on Twitter over the weekend. So we tweeted out on Saturday, as soon and soon we shall bid adieu to the Twitter brand and gradually all the birds. So that was on Saturday.

Then he tweeted, if a good enough X logo is posted tonight, we'll make go live worldwide tomorrow. That was on Saturday. And then he tweeted that X.com now points to Twitter.com. And then finally he posted this interim X logo that came from someone's old podcast. I'm literally not making it up. Someone just replied to him and said, hey, we don't have this podcast anymore. Do you like this X logo?

Now it's the literal worldwide brand of Twitter. It's pretty bare bones. He's the richest person in the world. He can't pay someone, you know, a decent amount of money to make a good looking X logo. There was this discourse, though, of usually corporate rerans take a lot of time, a lot of money. And everyone, again, Elon has this sick of fans, and they say, like, well, look it. He did it in 24 hours, and it costs zero money. But if we do want to talk a little bit about the Everything app, like, this has been on his mind since he started founding companies.

And basically, he wants to recreate, like, WeChat in China, which is this app that you can order a car or you can pay your friends or pay. pay your bills, you can even message each other and buy flights on it. So he has this idea for this big kitchen sink worth of an app. And he's going through with it. Like Twitter is no more. We literally woke up this morning. Someone in Emily, our producer, refreshed Twitter and was like, oh my gosh, it's X now. So this is really happening.

Also, the funniest thing about this in terms of the Everything app is Linda Yakorino, who's the CEO of Twitter slash X or whatever, put out this absolute word-sableness. of a tweet trying to justify why they're doing this. And she wrote, X is the future state of an unlimited interactivity, centered in audio, video messaging, payments, and banking, creating a global marketplace for ideas, good, services, and opportunities. Here we go.

Powered by AI, X will connect us in all the ways we are just beginning to imagine. For many people that reminded them of a scene in succession, where one of the kids is talking about their new media company, and they called it Substack meets Masterclass, meets the economist meets the New Yorker basically a meaningless a meaningless jumble of words I'm not sure in the end the name is gonna matter but it's probably stupid to ditch the bird which is a beautiful logo that people recognize all over the world for something so generic like an X just because you have a

particular fascination with it and you name your kids after X so I don't think this is gonna matter in the long run what will really matter if he can stop people from going to meta's threads and keep people on I was about to say tweeting on the platform but I guess we don't say tweeting anymore are people going to say I have not are people not going to call this Twitter that's my question that's what I'm wondering a lot of people have been openly wondering is it Xing now like what do you what do you expose I don't know it's a very it's a weird time here's another problem you don't really want to put X in your URL bar oh there are a lot of reasons why you, and I'll let the audience figure out, why you don't want to, like, have a

website that starts with the letter X. I didn't even think about that one. This is good. We need to be hired as brand consultants, Neil. Final note on the Twitter logo, because there is some interesting lore about it. The one of the Twitter co-founders, Bidsstone, Bizz Stone, he's from Boston, and he named the bird Larry T. Bird after Larry Bird. I didn't know that. That's good. That's good Lord too as well. I guess there's not as much lore going on with this this X logo. Yeah. It's just so generic. We'll see. It's very easy to bash on Elon for these head scratching moves. I think in the end it's not going to really change anything. It's more him putting a stamp on the company saying this is this is mine. I want you to forget everything that Twitter was. It's

its former management. This is my app. So I think so I think his loyal fan base will continue to gravitate towards the app while the people in the middle will maybe stay there because Threads is not doing so hot anymore after a hot start. All right, let's move on. For the past few weeks, we've been wondering whether Barbenheimer's virality on social media would translate to ticket sales at the box office. We have our answer. Hell yeah. The most type movies of the year, Barbie and Oppenheimer, gave North American movie theaters their best weekend since Avengers Endgame arrived four years ago. Both movies dismantled everything. expectations and put up historic numbers. Greta Gerwig's Barbie pulled in 155 million in North

America, good for the best opening of the year and the best domestic opening for a woman director in history. Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan's saga about the father of the atomic bomb, grossed 80.5 million. That is a remarkable number given that it's rated R and is a three-hour period drama. The $80 million haul crushed projections for the film by 66%. So in the end, we learned that at least when it came to these two movies, one plus one equals three, they weren't really competitors, they were teammates, and the hype contributed to the hype for the other. About 200,000 moviegoers bought tickets to see Barbie and Oppenheimer on the same day, meaning they did a double bill.

I know, Neil, I just want to run down through some of the stats that came out from this weekend, just so people can truly wrap their head around how big of an event this was. So first off, as you mentioned, Barbie was the biggest opening weekend for a female director. ever surpassing Captain Marvel. And then this is the first time in box office history that two movies opened to over $80 million each. First time ever, I said. Barbie had the biggest opening weekend of all time

without a single IMAX screening beating Twilight's New Moon, interestingly enough. Did you see that in IMAX? I did not. No, no. The biggest opening was out in IMAX. Oh, it's out in I? Yeah, so kind of a narrative.

It's often a hyper took over all. Right. It's a little bit of a narrative violation because we've been saying that IMAX has been driving sales. And then Barbie had the fifth biggest opening of all time if you don't include sequels and prequels. And I actually want to talk about that for a second because thank God, this feels like the

end of the prequel sequel, sequel, reboot era, where all we got was just remakes of old films. And the reason why people are saying that is because the fifth Indiana Jones movie came out, that disappointed at the box office. Mission Impossible, the seventh Mission Impossible came out. That also kind of disappointed at the box office. And so here you had these two kind of novel, new creative approaches. Obviously, Barbie is based off of preexisting IP, but the movie itself was so original and weird,

even though I have not seen it yet. I'll have to do that as an asterisk. People are saying, like, this is a new creative approach to filmmaking. And then obviously, Christopher Nolan does something new every time he takes the screen. I get that. I think it's just new. I think it's that particular IP has been tapped out. The fast and the Marvel.

I mean, even Disney CEO, Bob Eiger was like, where we have to pull back on Star Wars and Marvel. We've literally squeezed all of the juice that we could. But what did Barbie pass in ticket sales as number one movie this year? Super Mario Brothers. Right. So this is not exactly, you know, Greta Gerwig coming up with this new fantastical idea.

It's tapping IP that already exists. Same with the other video game or same with Super Marvel. which was a video game adaptation. Yeah. And only two of the top 20 movies this year are quote unquote original films. Yeah. And the others are sequel. So I don't think it's, you know, it's pretty easy to say this is the end of the sequel

franchise thing. But I don't think it is. But we may be flipping a page to a new chapter. I guess the big question is, how much is this a flash in the pan? Or, you know, is this a new era of filmmaking? Or is this kind of just a blip on the radar? because movies, I mean, the greater movie industry right now is going through some rough times. This is going to be the biggest weekend in months and perhaps years because of the writer's strike and actor strike that's going on.

Yeah. Well, and I was also just looking at it as kind of a book end to the pandemic era of Hollywood. If you look at the pandemic box office halls, you see these massive spikes for Avengers endgame for Spider-Man, No Way Home. And then the rest of it is like super muted until Barbenheimer. So it also comes up as like this huge heart. Outlier. It's going to be an outlier. Before we move on, we have to go back to our predictions. Oh, yeah.

Which I don't really want to remind you of because we didn't do well. But we said Mission Impossible won Barbie 2, Oppenheimer 3. And it looks like Barbie came in number one with 155 million. That's by far the most. And then Oppenheimer, 80.5 million. And Mission Impossible had five days over the holiday weekend. and it only brought in 80 million. So here's the deal.

I get it completely wrong. So what do I get? I literally got everything inverted. So I guess the hair is going pink after my wedding. So that's what I'll say. All right, Neil, let's move on to our next story. Getting married? No, not my wedding, but I do have another wedding coming up.

We both know it has been hot as heck recently. We're talking hottest days ever recorded on Earth hot. And one of the multitude of side effects we kept an eye out. for during this heat wave was how power grids across the globe would hold up. Hot days mean people run their ACs a lot more frequently, which puts a ton of strain on the power grids, especially in the likes of ultra-populated states with fragile energy infrastructure like Texas and California as well as over in Europe. Well, it turns out that those three problem children are doing surprisingly okay. California hasn't had any rolling blackout so far.

the Texas power grid that imploded during that freak winter storm in 2021 has held up all right. So what's the secret sauce? For California, it's been hydropower. For Texas, it's been solar. And for Europe, it's been a bit of a mixed bag. We'll get into that. Neil, which grid do you want to talk about first? Which grid do I want to talk about?

So exciting. No, the first thing I want to mention is that, does this happen to you when you run your AC and then you go outside and you hear the thrum of ACs? And you're like, I just all, first thing I think about is the power. I'm like, can it handle this? It boggles my mind. Everyone is cranking this air into their houses right now because it's so dang hot. I guess the first one I want to talk about is California because that one is kind of the simplest

explanation, which is it snowed so much this winter over there. And what was great for ski slopes is also great for hydropower because all that water runs up and creates all this energy. And hydropower produced more electricity in May in California than any month. in the last three years. So not only is this snow and water in this super wet summer or super wet winter helping ease the drought, which it has, but it's also leading to an incredible rise in hydropower generation. Yeah, no, I actually, I remember looking at those pictures of the record snowpack that hit.

And then it's kind of been this beautiful thing where it's melting over time, powering California, 14% of California's electricity this year is going to come from hydropower. that's up from 9% last year. So you know what we were talking about like Lake Mead and Lake Powell getting below the line where they could produce any hydro power. Right. And so what a turnaround for California. And then Texas has been leaning on renewable power too.

So Texas's power grid has more than double the amount of solar capacity this year compared to last year. So it kind of was one of those things where Texas had that really, really horrible 2021 storm that put so much strain on. the power grid and they doubled down on solar and wind to kind of make up the, I didn't know this, but Texas actually produces more, has more wind capacity than any other state in the nation. People don't know that because they think of Texas as this very conservative Republican state

with it with, well, I mean, Houston's the oil capital of the world and, you know, they rely on natural gas, but they're also just a renewable energy powerhouse. Yeah, 40% of their power capacity comes from winds and solar, which, yeah, again, it feels like a narrative violation. Yeah, Texas, doing well. All right, Neil, before we jump into our next story, we're going to take a quick break. 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,

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ends June 30th, terms at AKA.m.m.m.m.com slash college PC. All right, Neil, it's time for our Monday segment winners of the weekend where we sift through the news to find someone or something that had a particularly good past two days. I'm up first, Neil, and I want to talk about the lottery again. So remember last week we got confirmation on Thursday from the California lottery that the winning ticket for the $1.08 billion powerball jackpot had been sold at a Las Palmitas mini market near L.A. I've been there. It's a good place.

Then over the weekend, we finally got our first look at the winner of that jackpot. An unnamed woman came into the Las Palmitas mini mart and told a reporter there that she was the winner of the ticket. She hugged some people, started crying, and generally celebrating. her life-changing victory. So we're glad that the ticket went to someone who was clearly excited about it, right? Well, it turns out she made the whole thing up.

The store owner said that they had never seen the woman there before and certainly didn't sell her the ticket and that the real winner had not come forth yet. The granddaughter of the store said that she thinks the woman just wanted to be on TV for a little bit, which is actually why I'm declaring her a winner in my book. Listen, you only get so many chances at your 30 seconds, a one minute of fame.

So I respect the heck out of her just going into the store and saying, listen, it was me, everybody. Like, congratulations to me. So kind of a ridiculous winner over the weekend, but it was, it made for a funny viral video. Does this happen every lottery? It doesn't, I don't think it does because it's actually not that beneficial to declare yourself the public winner of the lottery because then you'll get a lot of increased attention. Some people might be a little dangerous towards you going forward. So I really think she was just after the fame. Maybe your winner should have been the store itself.

The store itself, yes, that was my next point. The store actually nets $1 million for selling the winning ticket. And the store owner, Navar Herrera, says that he'll use that money to take his family on a luxury vacation and start a college fund. So I think he's the real winner here. So the Powerball has not been claimed yet. By, or by, there's no winner. It's been sold, but no one's come forth to claim it yet. So it's not us, though.

All right. My winner is the reggae girls, which is what the Jamaican women's national team calls itself. Over the weekend, the team held France, who's ranked 38 spots above them to a scoreless draw at the World Cup in one of the bigger shockers of the tournament so far. It was Jamaica's first ever point at the World Cup. But even getting to the World Cup has been a journey for Jamaica, who's accused its Soccer Federation of being extremely disorganized and sometimes not even paying them what they're owed. They wrote a letter to the organization expressing their utmost disappointment at the subpar support for them. But unlike the Jamaican bobsled team, they don't need John Candy to help. One of the midfielder's moms started a go-fund me to help support the team financially, which raised $50,000 and another campaign raised $45,000.

These girls are plucky, and if you're looking for an underdog to get behind at the World Cup, think the reggae girls are the way to go. And I just want to talk about the team itself. this is their second World Cup in a row. They're ranked 43 in the world, but, like, France is a pre-tournament favorite, and so they did really, really well. Unfortunately, they picked up a red card right at the end of the game. It was, like, a really soft second yellow. So, but I love this story.

Obviously, yeah, people are going to make the cool running parallels, but, like, this is a legit federation. They're doing really well. They have some NWSL players who were drafted highly, so. And a Manchester City striker. She's the one who got the red card, right? Yeah, I think her name is Bunny. It was a bit of a bummer, but yeah, just a feel-good story. And you love that, yeah, the moms come forth and just say, listen, let's get our girls there.

It's a feel-good story, but it's also frustrating that it shows just how disorganized and the lack of support that women's teams get in certain countries. Jamaica's super pissed at theirs for being incredibly incompetent. And Canada is also mad at their own federation for not paying them equally as the men's. Obviously, the U.S. women put on this full-core press to get, you know, what they're owed. Come on, Concord, Calf. It kind of exposes a lot of the problems that are happening in this sport. But MBD, we're putting our... We are reggae girls supporters.

Okay, Neil, let's move on to our next story, where the NASDAQ is undergoing a special rebalance because just like us, after hitting the gym too much, it's looking a little top-heavy. So a special rebounce is triggered whenever the aggregate weight of companies that make up 4.5% of the index, tops 48%. So put another way, Microsoft, Apple, Nvidia, Amazon, and Meta are doing way too much

heavy lifting right now. Neil, this is not an abnormal thing, but it's not super frequent either. It's only happened twice in 2011 and 1998, but it kind of goes to show what an absurd rebound big tech had this year. Yeah, there's these magnificent seven stocks, which has replaced Fang acronym as sort of these mega-cap tech companies, meta, Apple, and, and, you know, and, you know, Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, Tesla, Nvidia. And the problem was when we were saying the NASDAQ went up 2% today, the NASDAQ fell 1% today. We were literally just talking about like three or four companies. We're driving outsized gains or losses in this particular index.

So it's something that needs to happen. What is going to, you know, are you going to open up Robin Hood or your brokerage this morning and see havoc and tech companies? Not really. Analysts don't really expect this to have a meaningful impact on stock prices. but investment firms that offer funds that track the NASDAQ 100 will have to sell and buy particular stocks to make up for these rebalancing and have their weighting equal what it looks like in the NASDAQ. Yeah. So that is how it's going to affect the everyday investor is that whatever your concentration is in big tech is going to change a little bit because, yeah, these indexes like the Investco QQ, which is actually the second most traded ETF on U.S. of stock exchanges. So a lot of people have like a little bit of money in the in the QQQ. And basically what it's going to do is reduce the concentration in top tech company.

So if you want to remain as highly concentrated, then you got to buy a little bit more of, yeah, that magnificent seven. One final note, the NASDAQ 100 that's doing the rebalancing is not the same as the NASDAQ composite. So when we say the Dow, the NASDAQ, and the SMP 500, when we say the NASDAQ, we're talking about the NASDAQ composite, which is basically all of the stocks that are traded on the NASDAQ exchange. The NASDAQ 100 is just the top 100 non-financial companies within the NASDAQ composite. So it's a little confusing, but this is just a narrower slice of the NASDAQ that we talk about. That's made up of a lot of big tech companies.

Love getting into the nitty-gritty of the stock market sometimes. Not financial advisors. Not financial. You don't have to remind people. They know. All right, let's get into our week ahead, what you can expect over the next couple days. A lot of earnings, a lot of earnings. I think 166 S&P 500 companies are going to report.

That's one-third of the entire index, just did that math in my head. We got meta, alphabet, Microsoft, McDonald's, Coca-Cola, Exxon Mobil. Any ones you're particularly looking forward to? I mean, any time big tech reports, like you got to pay attention to it a little bit. I'm also just curious about McDonald's because remember the grimace shake phenomenon that we talked about. I want to know how much like a social media trend actually contributes to any sort of bump in sales.

Well, Arbenheimer was effective. I hope they mentioned the grimace shake on a herding's call. And Tripoli is reporting too, so I'm curious about how burrito season went. Oh, yeah, it was burrito season. I did not partake. What? Okay. What else is going on?

Maybe the final Fed rate hike of the cycle, Jerome Powell and his buddies will meet. on Tuesday and Wednesday. They've been hiking interest rates for 16 months. I don't have to tell anyone who's paid a loan recently. Yeah. So they, you know, with inflation coming down to 3%, obviously, that's still a little bit higher than the 2% target, but it's come down from 9%. And the expectations are that this could be the final rate hike of the cycle. We'll look for any guidance from Fed Chair Jerome Powell to see whether he's going to leave the door open for another one. That I think would upset upset stocks.

We also have the Women's World Cup going on in Australia and New Zealand. It's at really weird times. The U.S. women won Friday night and they're playing again Wednesday night against the Netherlands, so that'll be something we're going to watch. It's a rematch of the last World Cup's finals, actually.

And the Netherlands knocked the men out. Yeah, from the previous world cup. We got some beef with the Netherlands. When are the reggae girls playing again? We have to find out. We're bad fans. All right, what else is going on? Futurama return.

after a really long break. That's obviously from Matt Groneg, the Simpsons creator. Even if you don't know the show, you know the memes. I've seen the memes. I've never seen the show, but you cannot escape them. We know that someone won the billion dollar powerball jackpot last week. We don't know who, but the mega millions is up over 800 million right now. And that drawing is on Tuesday.

Let's go to California because the last two giant powerball lotteries have been won in California. So clearly, it's not moving west of the Mississippi. so let's go do a road trip. And then finally, it is Shark Week. And a wise man, Tracy Jordan once said, live every week like it's Shark Week. But it's Shark Week, so you got to turn up. I know.

And Jason Momoa is hosting it. I love Shark Week. It's just, it's a bastion of my childhood. It's always a summer thing that you watch. All right, that is our show. Let's wrap it up there. Hope everyone has a wonderful Monday. Great starts of the week.

If you want to write in and let us know what you think, which movie you saw this weekend. Our email is Morning Brewed Daily. at MorningBrew.com. Emily Milliron is our editor and producer. Samantha Vela's and Raymond Lue are our associate producers. Eugenwa Ogu is our technical director. Billy Minino is on audio.

Hair and makeup is off for Shark Week. Devin Emery is our chief content officer and our show is a production of Morning Brew. Great show today, Neil. Let's run it back tomorrow. Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel is California's number one entertainment destination for today's superstars.

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