Morning Brew Daily - US-China Reach Deal for TikTok & No More Quarterly Earnings?

Episode Date: September 16, 2025

Episode 671: Neal and Toby chat about the US and China reaching a framework deal on TikTok. Then, President Trump wants quarterly earnings reports to go away. Also, Alphabet surpasses the $3T market cap milestone. Elon Musk buys back $1B of Tesla stock. Convenience stores are stealing customers away from fast-food joints for breakfast. FTC takes aim at Ticketmaster. Apple’s Liquid Glass is here. Finally, Mondo Duplantis reaches new heights.  Check out https://www.indeed.com/brew for more 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 U.S. slash brew AI. That's pwc.com slash us slash brew AI. Good morning brew daily show. I'm Neil Fryman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, bad news for your screen time. Good news for amateur restaurant critics.

TikTok is being saved. Then why is Trump pushing corporate America away from issuing quarterly earnings reports? It's Tuesday, September 16th. Let's ride. Good morning. Hope everyone is having a great start to their Tuesday. We're counting down the.

until our next monthly trivia night this evening in Manhattan. A ton of you have signed up to come and we can't wait to stump you all and meet you, of course. For those of you who can't make it, here's a little taste of what your fellow MBD listeners will be up against. There's a before and after round that asks you to find a single phrase that connects two clues by a single word. For example,

if I said Walt Whitman poem about a Marvel character known as the first Avenger, the answer would be, oh, captain, my captain, America. Neil Fryman, that was good right there. But some details if you signed up, check your email for details on location. New location this time, we kind of ran out of space at our last one. So we have a bigger and better spot for you today so we can fit more of you in. So get those brains warmed up, guys, try and develop that prefrontal cortex before age 25 by tonight, if possible. Girls, you're already there.

and we'll see all of you there at 6 p.m. tonight. And now a word from our sponsor, Indeed. Neil, you've been at Morning Brew so long, you've practically hired half the company. Oh, yeah, I found myself neck deep in resumes, a time or 16. Sometimes it's overwhelming, though. You put out an application for a new writer position

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Tickets on sale now at yamava Theater.com, only at Yamava Resort and Casino, celebrating its 40th anniversary. UN must be 21 to enter. President Trump proposed something that most middle schoolers with poor grades would agree with. He wants companies to reduce the frequency of their performance reports. Yesterday, Trump suggested that quarterly earnings reports should be a thing of the past on Wall Street,

and that companies should report on a once-every-six-month schedule instead. His logic, this will save money and allow managers to focus on properly running their companies, he posted on True Social. China has a 50-to-100-year view on management of a company, he continued, whereas we run our companies on a quarterly basis, question mark, question mark, question mark, not good. The quarterly schedule has been around ever since the SEC required it back in 1970, which is about how long the debate around that cadence has simmered in the background.

Trump floated the idea of breaking away from the quarterly system in his first term, while both Jamie Diamond and Warren Buffett have called for an end to quarterly guidance, which they think fosters market short-termism. The main thrust of any argument to move away from a quarterly system is that it makes companies focus too much on maximizing short-term performance, sometimes at the expense of long-term plans. Plus, it's just a headache to go through the process of preparing quarterly reports every three months, which can often be an expensive burden, especially for smaller

companies. So, Neil, an interesting can of worms that has once again been reopened, but still a long way to go to see if the SEC heeds Trump's call. Yeah, it sounds like a small mechanical thing going from three months to six months, but it could have a massive effect on the economy. Although publicly owned companies account for just about 3,700 of the United States has 28 million businesses, they are responsible for a third of all private sector employment, half of all business capital spending. So if this move to a bi-annual reporting structure, results in changes in business strategy could have huge impacts on how companies hire and deploy resources, plus it would lead to changes in your portfolio via your 401K, which is invested in all these

companies. Yeah, and a lot of advocates for this change has said that going to that quarterly system has actually made led to fewer IPOs and fewer public companies in general. The number of U.S. listed public companies plummeted from 7,500 in 1997 to just around 3,700 today. So again, it is just this onerous system that they are under. It takes a lot of effort to prepare these quarterly reports. And again, the long-term thinkers out there are saying, why do we have a system that will make people potentially skimp back on hiring because they don't want their, you know, to take a hit in the short term when they really should be thinking on a much longer term horizon. It's a pretty common practice in other places in the world.

Ironically, even though Trump mentioned China, they still do have quarterly reports and they do issue quarterly reports. But in the UK and in some places in Europe, they don't have to do it. And so it is not necessarily a brand new idea. There's definitely countries out there that already encourage this sort of system. But there is a powerful case against as well. these reports are important for a lot of people, including shareholders, economists, retail traders, because without these quarterly reports, if it goes to a longer time horizon, then we just don't

know what's going on with particular companies that we want to invest in. We don't know necessarily what's going on in the economy. Imagine if Delta sees a huge uptick in demand for travel in the summer, but they don't report until the fall. Like, how would we know what's going on in terms of the travel industry, just apply that across the board. Retail traders particularly don't like it. One of the most popular posts in Reddit's like stock market subforum yesterday was so less transparency and accountability. Sounds like a great idea, wrote one user. And obviously that was very sarcastic. Got nearly 2,000 upvotes. So the individual investors who are don't have access to much information at all besides what these companies are saying every three months on these

conference calls is critically important. So, you know, the case against would be this just reduces transparency and accountability across the board. Yeah, the CFA Institute actually did an impact. They studied if the UK ending its quarterly reporting systems in 2014 did anything to affect companies. And it didn't really affect how much companies invested, which was, again, kind of the thrust of this. Like, they should be thinking more long term with their investments. But what it did do is reduce the accuracy of analyst forecasts, which, you know, becomes this information delta between retail traders and Wall Street itself. So I do think that technically you can see both sides, but it's a double ed sword, whatever you sacrifice in transparency. Maybe you make up in long-term

investment, but it also works vice versa as well. Yeah, it's a really interesting debate and there's good arguments on both sides. It looks like it's essentially a coin flip as to whether the SEC takes Trump up on this particular proposal. It looks like TikTok isn't going anywhere after all. Yesterday, a year's long drama appeared to reach its final chapter after U.S. officials said they had reached a framework deal for TikTok's Chinese owner bite dance to hand over ownership to an American entity. The framework will be finalized on Friday when President Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping speak over the phone to give it their official blessing. Until then, we are left with few details. Treasury Secretary Scott Besson said, we're not going to talk about the commercial terms of the deal. It's between two private parties, but the commercial terms have been agreed.

agreed upon. So I would suggest heading to Polymarket if you want to find out which American company is most likely to be involved. The deal for TikTok, which was hammered out over negotiations in Madrid, may wrap up a saga that began all the way back in President Trump's first term in 2020. Five years ago, Trump aimed to ban TikTok over national security concerns that China would use the hugely popular app to snoop on American citizens and influence opinion. That effort didn't go anywhere, but in 2024, Congress took up the mantle and passed a law that requires bite dance to sell TikTok to an American owner or else be banned in the U.S. Once Trump got into office, he softened on TikTok and delayed the law's enforcement several times.

And now here we are with a deal on the table. So it seems like the only way TikTok will be removed from your phone is if you delete it yourself because you were too addicted, which we've all been there. We have all been there. One of the interesting sentiments from this negotiation is that Scott Bassett has said that China, was very interested in keeping Chinese characteristics of the app, which they think are soft power. He literally said the words soft power out there. And I do think that is one aspect of this saga that China does want to hang on to. There's a national security angle.

Obviously, Congress saw TikTok as a national security threat. But then Beijing clearly cares about TikTok as cultural leverage of some point. I don't really know what Chinese characteristics necessarily mean. But Sam was kind of brushing it off as this superfluous thing that they were trying to get added to the deal, but it's clearly not just a financial thing for TikTok and for Biden's and for China. They do think that there is some sort of credibility to having, you know, one of the largest social media apps in the world. And then obviously there's the political angle as well. Trump has flip-flopped on it multiple times, kind of going wherever the political winds were

blowing. He wants to curry favor with the youth, use it as leverage saying, hey, I'm fighting for this app that you all love. So a lot of different angles here, but it is fascinating that China is kind of doubling down on this soft power aspect. Yeah, what's interesting is that China for many months showed very little appetite to make a deal for TikTok. They had dug in their heels. So what changed? It seems like they are very keen on President Trump visiting China for a summit with Xi Jinping and the United States perhaps conceded to that agreement. They're going to send Trump over to Beijing to meet with Xi in exchange for China allowing TikTok.

to be sold. We'll probably find out more details after this call on Friday. They could announce a summit of Trump heading over there. The question now for people interested in American companies is who is going to buy it? Well, I did look at Polly Market. I told you all to look, but I did a little bit of the legwork. And the frontrunner in this race is not a surprise. Larry Ellison and Oracle, they have a 53% chance of acquiring TikTok. They have very close ties to the Trump administration. They've already had this server deal with TikTok dating back to 2022 to host U.S. user data on Oracle's servers. So they are by far the leader to be the acquirer of TikTok. And that would be, you know, another huge win behind the sales of Oracle, which, you know,

recently made Larry Ellison briefly the richest person in the world and has had a huge stock jump recently. In second place, which is 9% is meta. And then you have Amazon and Elon Musk X in Twitter or Apple of in Microsoft, Walmart. These are all names that are thrown around. But looks like Larry Arleson and Oracle are the leaders in the clubhouse. What isn't he the leader in the clubhouse right now? It feels like every single story has Larry Ellison smack dab in the middle. Of course he's buying TikTok.

Some big companies hit some big milestones yesterday. So everyone raise your glass as we make a toast to the creation of shareholder value. First up, Alphabet became the fourth company to reach $3 trillion in market cap, joining Nvidia, Microsoft, and Apple in a club harder to get into than Berguine. The milestone comes about 20 years after Google IPOed in just over 10 years since Google reorganized into a holding company, Alphabet. And Google is making it look as easy as the ABCs. Shares are up more than 30% this year, doubling the NASDAQ's 15% gain, as investors feel

confident it'll successfully fend off upstarts like OpenAI coming for its search crown. More recently, the stock got a big boost a few weeks ago, after a job. after a judge gave it a slap on the wrist as punishment for being a monopoly. Clearly, Google's feeling lucky. Everything is coming up for Google right now. I just looked at the Apple App Store and Gemini's Chatbot overtook. ChatGBTGBT has the most popular free app on the Apple App Store as of today. Then also, we were cruising around Colise,

cruising around the Polymarket the other day. And one of the questions we saw was which company will have the best AI model at the end of the year? And Google is in the lead at nearly 70% opening eye. second at just 12%. It feels like they've come a long way from having a derpy little chat bot that actually screwed up during a live demo and tanked their stock. Now it's the de facto leader in the AI Clubhouse. And oh yeah, did we forget to mention that search is still one of the most profitable businesses in the world. So all of a sudden, it seems like once that antitrust scrutiny kind of went to the wayside, investors woke up and said, wait, Google is way undervalued

compared to the rest of the Magnificent Seven. And the race to $5 trillion in market cap is on in Vidia right now is 4.3 trillion. It's the most valuable company in the world. Microsoft 3.8. Apple 3.5 Alphabet just hit three. And when you add in Amazon, the five largest U.S. companies have a combined market cap of over $17 trillion, which would be the second largest stock market all on their own. Another company that achieved a breakthrough yesterday is Tesla, whose stock has now turned

positive for the year. It was for good reason. CEO Elon Musk bought about one billion worth. of Tesla stock the first time he purchased shares on the open market since 2020 and a sign he's committed to leading the automaker for the long haul. Tesla stock popped 3.6% on the news and is now in the green for 2025, rebounding all the way from a 45% decline as of early April. The stock purchase could also be seen as a really expensive gesture by Musk after the Tesla board proposed a compensation plan that would make him the world's first trillionaire if he hit

certain business targets in the next decade. Toby, this is the corporate. equivalent of Taylor proposing to Travis. Two lovebirds, Elon and Tesla, are now attached at the hip. You say that it's a very expensive commitment, but a billy is quite affordable for the planet's richest person. In fact, actually, if you factor in the stock rise that they got on the news from Musk plowing a billion dollars into Tesla, he actually added almost $6 billion to his net worth, so he'll take that math any day of the week. It's crazy. This stock is up now 70% since Musk officially left DC, left the Doge world behind. It's up 25% the last three months.

So it is just pretty crazy how this has rebounded. And it looks like Elon has committed himself to, you know, this future of AI and robots. Again, you look at the vehicle business and you're like, there's absolutely no way you can justify this sort of valuation level. But he says that Tesla will eventually drive 80% of its value from its robots. He's called Optimus, which is their humanoid robot, the greatest product in the history of humanoid. humanity. So clearly he thinks that his future is at Tesla. His future is in robotics and AI, and the market's pretty happy to see him, you know, back with his full focus on Tesla. There's still a long way to go for Tesla to hit the targets for Elon Musk to become, to achieve that trillion dollar

compensation package. So even after that big stock run up, Tesla stock is worth $1.3 trillion as of Monday's close to get that full trillion dollars. Elon Musk needs to have Tesla hit an 8.5 trillion dollar market value. So there's a long way to go. He's got 10 years to do it. We'll all be watching. Let's take a quick break and come back with some Toby's trends. We're the Hartford, with decades of experience ensuring millions of unique small businesses. When it comes to your small business insurance.

Thank you. One size, absolutely does not fit all. Get a quote or find an agent today at thehartford.com slash small business. Chronic migraine. 15 or more headache days a month, each lasting four hours or more, make me feel like a spectator in my own life. Botox, Onabachycinin A prevents headaches in adults with chronic migraine. It's not for those with 14 or fewer headache days a month.

It's the number one prescribed branded chronic migraine preventive treatment. Prescription Botox is injected by your doctor. Effects of Botox may spread hours to weeks after injection causing serious symptoms. Alert your doctor right away as difficulty swallowing, speaking, breathing, eye problems or muscle weakness can be signs of a life-threatening condition. Patients with these conditions before injection are at highest risk. Side effects may include allergic reactions, neck and injection site pain, fatigue, and headache. Allergic reactions can include rash, welts, asthma symptoms, and dizziness. Don't receive Botox if there's a skin infection.

Tell your doctor your medical history, muscle or nerve conditions, including ALS-Lugherics disease, Myasthenia Gravis or Lambert Eaton syndrome, and medications, including botulinum toxins, as these may increase the risk of serious side effects. Why wait? Ask your doctor. Visit Botox Chronic Migraine.com or call 1-800-44 Botox to learn more. Welcome back to another edition of Toby's trends, a segment where I take a deep dive into the business world to emerge with the trend that you can use

to impress your hot date tonight. And today's trend goes out to all my gas station cuisine lovers because you're not alone in your lust for sad donuts and soggy breakfast sandwiches. Convenience stores like Wawa's and Casey's General are increasingly stealing market share from fast food giants like McDonald's. Visits to fast food chains during the morning meal period

rose just 1% in the last 3%. months ending July, while traffic to so-called food forward convenience stores jumped 9% over the same stretch, according to Sircana data seen by CNBC. What is a food-focused convenience store? I'm just going to toss some names out there so you get the vibe. In addition to Wawa's and Casey's, Sircana also classifies buckies in sheets under the umbrella, an umbrella that might be growing soon, though. 7-11, the biggest convenience chain in the U.S.

is planning to bring some of the food-focused vibes from his Japanese stores to the U.S. while Racetrack announced last week that it's buying the sandwich chain pot bellies signaling its interest in joining the food game as well. Convenience stores' gains appear to be fast foods losses. You over a year morning traffic to fast food chains has fallen every quarter for the past three years. And in the second quarter, breakfast visits fell by nearly 9% according to data from revenue management solutions. So, Neil, it's looking like more gas station burritos and less McMuffins. What does your refined palate have to say about this trend?

Well, why is this happening? There's a few reasons. One is convenience stores are actually very convenient. You are there in the morning rush hour to fill up your tank of gas. And while you're there, you can pop in and get some food. And while you're in the store, you know, unlike a fast food restaurant, you have a much wider variety of options. You can get a sandwich, like a prepared sandwich. You can maybe get a food.

Maybe you can get a sandwich that's prepared to you freshly. But at the same time, you can walk around the store and maybe pick up. an energy drink, a granola bar, or a banana. It's something that you can't do, say, at a comparable McDonald's location. And then the final thing is value. We know that consumers are really looking for value. There's a perception that these convenience store options are good bang for your buck. They might not be, you know, incredible food, you know, some of us who've been on a roadship

and you walk in to a gas station and pick up a little breakfast sandwich on a biscuit. I mean, it's, you know, sometimes it's not very good. But it is cheap, and that's what we're looking for in 2025. But I do think that fresh food, that good fresh food is what is creating winners in this space. I mean, just look at Wawa's, which makes these delicious sandwiches. It's seen its customer growth or customer base grow by 11.5% since 2022. In the meantime, chains like McDonald's, Bergen King and Wendy's have seen their combined customer base shrink 3.5% over the same time. Casey's General Store makes this breakfast pizza that has this just cult falling.

They make pizza in general that's very good. So I think that more people are seeing those types of places as viable alternatives to popping into McDonald's or popping into Burger King because you're going to actually get similar quality there and maybe better quality, all my Wawa stands out there. CNBC actually asked 1,100 respondents if they have purchased a made-to-order breakfast from a convenience store in the morning over the past three months. And 48 respondents said that they have done that, which means that's 48% of respondents that are probably not opting for something like a McMuffin. So again, it's not necessarily something that they're still indulging in breakfast at a fast food place. They are replacing that breakfast sandwich with maybe a better one at a convenience store. And these convenience stores just have such great regional flair. Every region has their convenience store that they love going to.

I just wish New England was a little bit better. We have Cumberland Farms. It's okay. It's nothing like Waba or Sheets or Casey. So New England, Cumberland Farms, let's go. Up your game. Now let's spin to the finish with some final headlines. The FDC is in the late stages of the probe into Ticketmasters handling of bots,

investigating whether the company has done enough to comply with the 2016 law, which bans automated ticket resales. The investigation has gained momentum under the Trump administration after an executive order in March directed the FTC to look deeper into Ticketmaster's practices following public outrage from a lot of angry Swepties after some of those eras to her ticketing fiascos. Ticketmaster denies any wrongdoing saying it has invested more than anyone in financial scalpers while also criticizing what it calls the FDC's overly expansionist interpretation of the law. But Neil, this probe into bots, I'm going to guess it's going to be a popular one because bots,

frankly, stink. They're annoying, and we're all learning about this as we try to get World Cup tickets. So Ticketmaster is not involved in this. But yeah, it just feels like hand-to-hand comment every single time you buy a ticket. And the government is certainly looking into this. Besides this particular probe, Ticketmaster is facing a FECMASTER. is facing a FTC loss or a DOJ lawsuit that combined with tons of state attorneys general seeking to break it up from Live Nation into Ticketmaster, which was that merger that created

an alleged monopoly. There's also a criminal antitrust probe also by the DOJ into Ticketmaster. It's been under scrutiny all the way back since the 1990s when Pearl Jam tried to bypass it for a U.S. tour. This company has just been under the microtope for Skow long because buying a ticket is such an arduous process. It's just the worst. Apple has officially released iOS 26, marking its biggest software jump in a minute, as it aligns version numbers across all Apple operating system

and aligns them to reflect the year of use. So as we head into 2026, we'll be rocking iOS 26. The standout feature is the new liquid glass design, a translucent glassy interface inspired by Vision Pro. It has already seen multiple tweaks in betas, as many users took some time to adjust to what were some readability issues. Beyond that, other updates include a call screening assistant for when Neil is blowing up my phone,

a redesigned messaging app with WhatsApp like features for when Neil is blowing up my phone, and improvements to maps, camera, and wallet. Overall, iOS 26 represents Apple's most ambitious visual overhaul, and aren't you glad you have an iPhone now, Neil, so you know what the heck I'm talking about? Well, I am glad I have an iPhone, but I was very upset about the amount of spam calls that I got compared to my Android day, so I'm very excited about this call screening feature. Apple is way worse than Android when it comes to screening phones. Yeah, if you have an iPhone go into your settings and see if you can download iOS 26.

It was made available yesterday and let us know what you think. I'm excited for live translation, which is what we talked about yesterday coming to not just the AirPods Pro 3, but through this update. If you have the AirPods Pro 2, which I think we have and the AirPods 4, you can get this live translation feature through this new app update. There's one problem that reviewers have identified, a very confusing part of the update, is that the buttons used to bring up the on-screen visual intelligence is the same as the screenshot button. So if you're trying to take a screenshot, there's an extra step involved. And I'm a big screenshot, guys, so I'm not necessarily looking forward to that.

But one final feature you may want to know about is if you're a big snoozer, you're very particular about your snoozing. You can be very detailed and meticulous about how long your snooze is. you can now set different snooze times for alarms from one minute to 15 minutes. A one minute snooze is diabolical. That's horrible news for me, though, because if I start extending that snooze a little bit, then we might not have a show in the morning. Finally, the most electrifying man in sports is at it again.

Nope, not Daniel Jones. Mondo Duplantis, the pole vaulter you may remember from the Paris Olympics. Yesterday in Tokyo, DuPlanthus won his third straight gold medal at the World Athletics Championships, but more impressively set his 14th world. record clearing a bar 6.3 meters high or about 20 feet. Now it's hard now it's hard to wrap your head around this achievement because very few of us know how to pull a vault. So for some context, fewer than 30 people have ever in history cleared six meters and Mondo's done it 14 times this year. And Toby, the best part is he's figured out to get really rich while breaking all these records.

Yeah, he's definitely in the conversation for best field athlete ever. But I might say he's the best businessman ever. He has now set 14 consecutive world records. raising the bar from 6.17 meters to 6.3 meters now. That means, yes, he has raised it by a single centimeter every time. And he does this because he gets a monetary bonus from World Athletics. Every time he sets a new world record, it's worth $100,000 if he does it at a world championships like he just did. He also gets money from his sponsor, Puma.

So people have literally called this an infinite money glitch because the dude has won 97 out of 100 in a one event finals since 2020. He set 14 consecutive world records. He probably could have raised it by more than a centimeter at some point over that, but why? Clearly the best in the world, might as well just bump it up one centimeter each time. It is an infinite money glitch. I mean, if you are a very good pull vaulter like he is. So I guess the next time we'll try to set a world record will be 6.31 meters, just one centimeter taller than he vaulted over yesterday in Tokyo.

That is all the time we have. Thanks so much for starting your morning with us. Have a wonderful Tuesday. And we're super excited to see a bunch of you at trivia tonight. If you have any thoughts or feedback on today's show, send a note to Morning Brew Daily at Morningbrew.com. 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 driving to the nearest Casey's, which is in Fairborn, Ohio. Kind of far away. Devin Emery is our president and our show is a production of Morning Brew. Great show today, Neil.

Let's run it back tomorrow.