The Rundown - U.S. Economy Loses Jobs in July, Airbnb Posts Best Quarter In Years

Episode Date: August 7, 2026

Market update for Friday August 7, 2026Check out the Public app for incredible investing tools and to support the show (LINK)Follow us on Instagram (@TheRundownDaily) for bonus content and instant reactions.In today’s episode, Zaid covers:The surprisingly weak July jobs report and what it could mean for the FedAirbnb’s strong earnings and why Brian Chesky says AI is transforming the companyGoogle’s major AI leadership shake-up as longtime chief scientist Jeff Dean leavesAtlassian surging as investors warm back up to software stocksDraftKings slips after bettors won too muchSpaceX and Tesla’s enormous new Terafab chip factory planned for Texas

Public.com presents the rundown. Your daily market update in 10 minutes. My name is Zadadmani, and today is Friday, August 7th. In today's episode, we'll break down a surprisingly weak jobs report and what it means for the Fed. We'll also recap Airbnb's earnings and tell you why the company says that AI is the best thing to ever happen to its business. We'll also take a look at the major AI shakeups happening inside Google and what it means for the company. Then stick around to the end of the show to find out how big Elon Musk's new Texas chip factory is expected to be. We got a great show for you today.

Let's go. Thursday was kind of a boring one for the markets. The S&P 500 fell 0.2%, and the NASDAQ was basically flat down less than 0.1%. The main thing weighing on the markets yesterday was oil. Oil prices jumped roughly 3% as investors started to question whether the trade of poor moves is actually going to reopen anytime soon. I mean, you guys know the drill at this point. The oil markets flip-flop back and forth

in a high-stakes game of deal or no deal with Iran. But, you know, all of that is a footnote today because this morning, we got the July jobs report, and it was a shocker. The U.S. economy lost 23,000 jobs for the month of July. Economists were expecting the economy to add 83,000 jobs. And the news gets worse. May and June were revised down by a combined 103,000 jobs

And then not to mention wage growth was at the slowest it's been in more than five years. Now the unemployment rate did fall from 4.2% to 4.1%, but that wasn't because more people found jobs. It was because more Americans stopped looking for work altogether. The labor force participation rate fell to 61.4%, which Bloomberg says is the lowest level since the 1970s, excluding the pandemic, of course. So yeah, this is a pretty dramatic miss and it kind of changes the conversation on what the Fed could do with interest rates moving forward. A weak labor market means that the Fed has less room to hike rates because hiking rates could make the job market even worse. You know, Fed chair Kevin Warsh has been talking

tough on inflation since he took over the role earlier this year. That's why the markets were pricing at a potential rate hike this year, but it's much harder to justify raising rates when the economy is actively losing jobs. So this is going to put the Fed in a difficult spot here, but the stock market is rallying this morning despite the poor jobs report. I'm recording this right at the open and I'm seeing green across the board. So this is a case of bad news being good news for the stock market. Now, I don't want to overreact to just one jobs report, but when you combine this report with the huge downward revisions for May and June, the labor market might not be as strong as we thought. So we'll see what the Fed decides to do moving forward. This just got a lot

more interesting. We're going to be staying on top of everything, including all the macro developments, all the earnings, everything else happening in the market. So definitely get subscribed to the podcast if you haven't already and tune in every day to stay in the loop. Let's run through some headlines, starting with Airbnb. Airbnb reported earnings last night, and it was one of their strongest quarters in years. Revenues jumped 17% to $3.6 billion. That beat expectations, and profits climbed to $816 million. That was up from the $642 million last year.

On top of that, gross bookings, which is the total dollar value of every trip booked on the platform, increased by 16% to $27.2 billion that also came in higher than expectations. Other than the big takeaway here is that people are still traveling, nights and experience booked increased by 10% to $148 million. And Airbnb said that growth actually accelerated in major markets, including the U.S., France, the UK, and Australia. In fact, North America had its fastest booking growth in almost three years. So despite all the concerns around consumers pulling back on spending,

demand continues to look pretty resilient. We also saw this with Disney's earnings when we talked about them yesterday. Looking ahead, Airbnb raised their full year revenue outlook for the second time this year. They now expect growth of at least in the mid-teens. So the market like what they heard from Airbnb and the stock is up around 8% this morning at the time of this recording. You know, digging into Airbnb's earnings, there's a couple of things that stood out to me. One is that they're slowly becoming less dependent on people just renting out their homes and condos. The company continues to add boutique hotels and tours and local experiences and services. Now, hotels are still a small part of the business, but hotel bookings are growing roughly three times faster than Airbnb's

core home rental business. And I think this is a smart move because long-time listeners know I'm an Airbnb hater. Okay, I prefer staying at hotels. So I think it's smart for Airbnb to start putting hotels on their platform. I think long term, Airbnb strategy is to be more like booking.com or expedia. Fun fact, booking.com is actually worth more than Airbnb. Booking has a market cap of $150 billion, while Airbnb is worth around $90 billion. So Airbnb is slowly pivoting their business. Now, the other part of this report that stood out to me

was what the company said about AI. CEO Brian Chesky said that Airbnb has basically rebuilt the company to become AI native, and he straight up said that AI is the best thing to ever happen to Airbnb. Airbnb said they're using AI behind. the scenes to ship products faster and personalized search results and improve listings and also automate customer service. That last part I don't like so much. But yeah, in the near future, it looks like Airbnb is setting themselves up to be a full-blown travel super app and it might

have some cool features like a built-in AI agent or something. Personally, I still prefer booking hotels directly from the hotel's website, but I do like the fact that Airbnb is pivoting a bit. Let me know in the comments on what you guys think. Do you like the fact that Airbnb is adding hotels to their platform? Or do you prefer they just keep it old school and just stick with homes and condos? I got to say, Airbnb stock has been a sneaky good performer over the last year. It's up more than 30% in the last 12 months. Let's shift gears and talk about Google because they just had a pretty massive leadership shakeup inside their AI division this week. There was two big moves that happened on the same day. First, Jeff Dean, Google's longtime chief scientist, said that he was

leaving the company after 27 years. Dean was literally employee number 30 when he joined Google back in 1999. So he's been there from the very beginning. He helped build the infrastructure that powered Google search. He also co-founded Google Brain in 2011. So he's basically been at the center of Google's AI efforts before AI was cool. Jeff is leaving Google to start his own AI company called Discovery Loop, which he is co-founding with three other former Google employees.

And their goal is to build AI that can automate scientific research, which sounds pretty awesome. So that was the first big bombshell. The other big news from Google to drop this week was that Demis Hasabas, a Nobel Prize winner who was running Google's deep mind, is stepping down from his day-to-day role to become chairman and also Google's chief scientists. So this shakeup is coming at a pretty sensitive time for Google. The company seems to be falling behind on their AI tech compared to OpenAI and Anthropic. They still haven't released their Gemini 3.5 Pro model, which keeps getting delayed, and they just keep continuing to lose high-profile AI researchers. You know, what my theory here is that Google is prioritizing their cloud business growth internally over building the best AI models.

Now, we know from Google's latest earnings report a couple weeks ago that Google Cloud grew 82%. We know that Google has signed major deals with Anthropic and other big companies for that matter to provide them with compute, which is leaving less compute available internally for the AI researchers to train the best models. So I think that lack of compute might be upsetting many of the AI researchers leading to their departure. That's just my theory, though. I could be way off here, but it does seem like the vibes coming out of Google aren't great. As an investor, though, it might not matter

because Google Cloud continues to put up monster growth numbers. Let me know in the comments on what you guys think, especially if you're a Google investor. Are you worried that Google continues to lose their best AI researchers? Or are you more focused on their cloud growth? Drop your thoughts on Spotify and YouTube. Let's talk about some stocks making moves today. Shares of at last.

are absolutely ripping this morning after the software company reported a blowout quarter. Atlassian makes workplace software like Jira, Confluence, and Trello, and revenues for the quarter jumped 28% to $1.77 billion. That was well ahead of estimates, and the company also reported a $139 million profit. So that was a surprisingly big beat, and Atlassian stock is up more than 30% this morning at the time of this recording. If this rally holds for the rest of the day, it would be the biggest, one day gain for Atlassian since they went public back in 2015. And you know, I think the big picture

takeaway for me is that the software sell-off might fully be over now. Remember, earlier this year, we had the SaaSpocalypse where investors were dumping software stocks because of fears that AI would basically destroy the traditional SaaS business model. Atlasian was one of the companies that got hit hard. Their stock was down 32% this year heading into this earnings report. And now the stock is pretty much back even for this year. You know, I always thought the software sell-off was a bit overblown. In fact, I always believe that AI would help software companies improve their products and offer more features, and we're starting to see that now. Atlassian, for example, says that more than 80% of the Fortune 500 companies use their AI-powered rovo product. And Atlassian isn't alone, we've seen several beaten down software names rip higher this earning season after reporting strong numbers.

And if you look at the software ETF IGV, it's up more than 30% from its lows this year. So shout out to everyone that bought the software dip. Moving on, let's talk about Draft Kings. Their stock is taking a hit this morning after reporting a surprise quarterly loss. Revenues for Q2 fell about 5% to $1.44 billion. That missed Wall Street estimates. And the company reported a loss of $67.6 million. The market was not expecting that, especially because the company made a $158 million profit in Q2 last year.

Now, the company said the reason for the loss in Q2 was that sports betters won too much. Draft Kings blamed what it called a customer-friendly sport outcomes for the loss. Basically, during the World Cup and NBA Finals, a greater than expected number of customers made winning bets. So Draft Kings obviously had to pay them out, resulting in a loss for the company. What that tells me is that a lot of people bet on the NICS and Spain to win the World Cup. Now, on top of that, Draft Kings also spent heavily in the quarter on promotions to bring in new betters, which did work.

Monthly users did increase 9% to 3.6 million. but the average revenue per user fell by 13%. As a result, Draft King stock is down around 3% at the time of this recording. And if you zoom out, the stock has lost over 35% this year because of competition from prediction markets, which have turned into full-on sports betting platforms at this point as well. Let's wrap the show with the fun fact. Elon Musk's SpaceX and Tesla just announced a joint partnership to build a chip factory in Texas called TerraFab, and this thing is going to be massive.

This factory is expected to be more than 100 million square feet. Just for some context here, that would make it almost three times the size of Central Park. So this is going to be the biggest building in the world. The first phase alone is going to cost $16.8 billion, with the full buildout estimated to cost over $110 billion. The goal of TerraFab is to make package and test advanced chips all under. one roof, basically trying to vertically integrate the entire process. And the chips being made at this factory would eventually go into Tesla's optimist robots

and cybercabs along with SpaceX's data centers in space. So this is going to be a big and ambitious project and it's being built like 90 miles from where I live. So stay tuned. There might be a TerraFab deep dive coming in the near future. Well, all right, guys, that's the rundown for today. That's the rundown for this week. Hope you guys enjoyed today's episode.

By the way, no deep dive or interview this weekend. You know, Mike plays a huge role in getting those done. With him out this week, we decided to take a break. But Mike is coming back next week, so we'll be back to our regularly scheduled program. Thank you guys for understanding. And of course, thank you so much for listening, watching, and commenting. Shout out to V and Kevin for all the work behind the scenes. And we'll see you guys back here on Monday.