You know we might be in a bubble when you read through the SpaceX S-1 filing.

Scott Galloway has a history of calling out ridiculous IPOs and S-1s . . . remember WeWork? Galloway takes a look at the SpaceX S-1 and points out some amazing valuation claims. Galloway argues the proposed valuation is disconnected from current financials. At the low end of the reported target, SpaceX would trade around 94x sales, above even very high-multiple public tech names; his sum-of-the-parts math gets closer to $1 trillion, not $1.75–$2 trillion. He also criticizes the pitch’s huge $28 trillion TAM, including assumptions like near-universal Starlink adoption and enterprise AI markets far larger than today’s enterprise software market.

Galloway is basically explaining that the IPO asks public investors to pay today for a best-case, multi-decade outcome for SpaceX. Basically, investors will be funding Elon Musk’s grandest ambitions. And yes, Elon has done some amazing things with SpaceX and Tesla. And, Galloway has been famously wrong (as he admits repeatedly) about Tesla’s valuation. But the numbers are clear. Musk is making a massive bet, and the upside is already baked in here.

We’ll see if this has any impact on the IPO. Other analysts are making the same case when they drill down into the numbers.

After four years, billions of dollars, and an ugly civil war in professional golf, Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund has decided it has seen enough. LIV Golf, the tour that was supposed to shake the foundations of professional sport, is now scrambling for survival after its sovereign backer walked away. The story of how it got here raises an uncomfortable question that was always lurking in the background: was LIV Golf ever actually meant to be a business at all?

The answer, increasingly, looks like no. And that realization carries implications far beyond golf.

Sportswashing: The Quiet Business Plan

To understand what LIV Golf really was, you have to understand sportswashing, a term that entered mainstream conversation largely because of this saga. Sportswashing is the use of high-profile sports investments to rehabilitate or reframe a country’s international reputation, diverting attention from human rights abuses, political repression, or geopolitical aggression. Saudi Arabia had compelling reasons to pursue it.

The 2018 murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul had put Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman under sustained international scrutiny. Saudi Arabia’s conduct of the war in Yemen had drawn condemnation from human rights organizations worldwide. The Kingdom needed a reputational reset, and sports offered a proven playbook. The UAE had used Manchester City to spectacular effect. Qatar was building toward a World Cup. Formula 1 had a race in Jeddah. The logic of adding a global golf tour was straightforward: buy proximity to beloved institutions, familiar faces, and weekend leisure, and slowly launder the association.

From this vantage point, spending $5 billion on a golf tour is not irrational at all. It is actually quite cheap for a nation-scale PR campaign running over four years. No conventional advertising or lobbying effort could have generated the volume of international media coverage, the debates on prime-time sports television, or the association with superstar athletes that LIV produced. The fact that those debates often centered on the ethics of the Saudi investment was almost beside the point. The name “Saudi Arabia” was in hundreds of millions of conversations it would otherwise never have entered.

LIV’s architect, PIF governor Yasir Al-Rumayyan, was not building a sports business. He was buying a seat at the table of global sport, and for a time, it worked.

The Numbers That Never Made Sense for a Real Business

Here is the thing about genuine sports businesses: they are built to eventually make money. The economics of LIV never remotely pointed in that direction.

The tour failed to secure Official World Golf Ranking recognition, which made it irrelevant to players focused on major championship qualification. It could not attract meaningful television audiences. Ticket sales at many events were underwhelming. No significant media rights deals materialized. Yet the spending never stopped. Losses ran an estimated $500 million to $600 million per year, with total investment from PIF exceeding $5 billion over the tour’s lifespan.

A rational private investor walking into those numbers at any point in LIV’s history would have demanded a credible path to profitability or pulled out immediately. PIF showed no such discipline, because the financial return was never the primary metric. The return was geopolitical. When geopolitics changed, the rationale evaporated overnight.

The cracks went public in late 2025. Brooks Koepka, one of LIV’s flagship signings, left a year before his contract expired and returned to the PGA Tour. Patrick Reed followed. By April 2026, multiple outlets including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, and The Athletic all reported the same conclusion: PIF was withdrawing its funding after the 2026 season.

LIV CEO Scott O’Neil initially pushed back, insisting the league was “fully funded through the end of the year” and would continue “at full throttle.” But when pressed about 2027 and beyond, his language revealed the reality. An interview in which he said he had to “work like crazy to keep it going” was deleted from social media within hours. Events were postponed. Al-Rumayyan stepped down. Reports emerged that players and vendors had not been paid. The league announced it was seeking outside investors, which is the corporate equivalent of a going-out-of-business sign.

The Sportswashing Calculation Collapsed With the Region

Timing matters here. Saudi Arabia did not walk away from LIV because the league was losing money. It was always losing money. PIF walked away because the geopolitical utility of the investment had expired, and because the financial environment in which PIF operates had deteriorated sharply.

The Iran war changed everything. A conflict that shattered the carefully curated narrative of a stable, modernizing Middle East cannot be offset by a golf tour. When luxury hotel bookings in the Kingdom dropped an estimated 45% in the first two weeks of March 2026, when more than 23,000 regional flights were cancelled, when potential tourists and foreign investors began visibly retreating, the soft-power calculation underlying LIV became almost absurd. No amount of Bryson DeChambeau content was going to move the perception needle when missile strikes were disrupting Dubai’s airport.

At the same time, PIF’s own balance sheet was under genuine pressure. Saudi Arabia’s public debt reached $405 billion at the end of 2025, up from $324 billion the prior year, a debt-to-GDP ratio six times higher than it was in 2015. Aramco, the fund’s primary income source, has seen profits fall for 11 consecutive quarters. PIF’s cash reserves had hit their lowest level since 2020. Against that backdrop, $500 million per year on a geopolitically useless golf tour became genuinely indefensible.

But LIV Is Not the Whole Story. It Might Not Even Be the Biggest Story.

What LIV’s collapse signals is something far larger than professional golf. It is one visible data point in a broader pattern of Saudi Vision 2030 overreach that is now being forced into a painful reckoning.
Consider the portfolio of projects that shared LIV’s underlying logic, namely the idea that you can build destination, prestige, and demand through sheer force of sovereign capital:

NEOM’s “The Line,” a $500 billion, 170-kilometer linear city in the desert, was supposed to redefine urban civilization. Satellite images from mid-2025 showed a vast scraped corridor and not much else. Construction was suspended and the project was not mentioned in the 2026 Saudi budget. PIF recorded an $8 billion writedown across its giga-project portfolio over just three years.

The Red Sea luxury resort project aimed to attract one million tourists annually and transform Saudi Arabia into a rival to the Maldives. A senior executive at Red Sea Global stated plainly that “current operating costs exceed revenues in a way that has become unsustainable.” Sources confirmed that construction will halt at the end of 2026, with Phase One now being treated as a “proof of concept.” The Iran war then accelerated the collapse of demand the project was already struggling to generate.

NEOM pulled out of hosting the 2029 Asian Winter Games at Trojena, its under-construction ski resort in the mountains, after reported construction problems. The value of construction contracts awarded by Saudi authorities plunged 72% year on year in the second quarter of 2025.

These are not minor setbacks or ordinary project delays. They represent a systemic failure of a specific investment thesis: that global demand for luxury tourism, world-class sport, and futuristic urbanism can be manufactured in a geopolitically volatile region through top-down capital deployment, on an accelerated timeline, without organic demand to underpin it.

One government source, quoted anonymously, cut to the heart of it: “The consensus is that it’s impossible to work on all these projects at the same time.”

The Deeper Flaw in the Model

There was always a foundational problem with Vision 2030’s most ambitious bets that LIV Golf illustrates perfectly. You cannot create demand from the supply side alone. Golf fans did not want a new circuit without world ranking points. Luxury tourists do not choose destinations because a sovereign wealth fund has built hotels there. They choose destinations because the destination has earned its appeal over decades, because it feels safe, because the culture invites them, because the brand is real and not constructed.

Dubai took 30 years to build its global brand, and it had geography, a genuine trade hub, and sustained political stability working in its favor. The Saudis attempted to compress that journey into a decade while simultaneously carrying the reputational weight of Khashoggi, Yemen, and now a regional war.
As one analysis noted, the scaling back of Vision 2030 giga-projects “amounts to an acknowledgment that the Kingdom had promised more than any nation could actually deliver.”

The Pivot and What It Reveals

Saudi Arabia’s response to these failures has been a sharp pivot toward AI infrastructure, through a new venture called HUMAIN, with major partnerships announced with NVIDIA, Amazon Web Services, and Blackstone. This is a smarter bet on paper: data centers produce returns within 12 to 18 months, do not require tourists to feel safe flying into Riyadh, and do not depend on building cities in deserts.

But the pivot itself is revealing. A sovereign wealth fund managing nearly $1 trillion in assets should not need to make emergency course corrections of this magnitude. The scale of the retreat from LIV, from NEOM, from the Red Sea project, and from a long list of other giga-projects suggests that the original Vision 2030 strategy was constructed more around MBS’s ambition and the Kingdom’s image needs than around disciplined investment analysis.

LIV Golf was the most visible expression of that problem. A real business does not lose $500 million a year for four years without a plausible path to recovery and call it a strategy. A sportswashing operation does. The difference matters now, because the bills are coming due, the region is at war, the oil price required to balance the Saudi budget is well above where markets have priced it, and the $8 billion writedown on giga-projects is almost certainly not the final number.

It also highlights the challenge of having too much money, and having it in the hands of a corrupt regime where the decision-maker rose to power through his family connections and ruthless purging of rivals. Is anyone suprised they’re screwing this up?

What the Golf World Can Take From This

The PGA Tour emerges from this period stronger than it entered it. Forced to compete with unlimited capital, it raised purses, restructured its schedule around premium events, and secured private investment. It is more commercially sophisticated today than it was in 2021.

LIV’s players face a far more uncertain future. Koepka returned and was welcomed. Others face a PGA Tour that has made clear the window for easy re-entry has closed, and that future reinstatement will happen on the Tour’s terms. Jon Rahm and Bryson DeChambeau passed on the Returning Member Program and now find themselves holding contracts with a tour that may not exist in meaningful form beyond 2026.

The larger lesson, though, belongs to anyone studying sovereign investment strategy. Sportswashing has a shelf life. It works until the geopolitical problem it was designed to paper over becomes too large for any sports investment to contain. At that point, you are left with the financial residue of a strategy that was never really about returns, in a fiscal environment that suddenly requires them.

When the checks stop, so does everything else. Saudi Arabia is finding that out in golf. The harder question is how many of its other $840 billion in Vision 2030 investments are built on the same fragile foundation.

We’ve all heard about how the exploding use of GLP-1 drugs has impacted restaurants and the food industry. People are eating less, and that’s rippling through the economy.

Now we’re seeing other impacts for businesses beyond the food industry.

Planning a wedding is stressful enough without unexpected complications. But for brides using GLP-1 weight-loss medications like Ozempic or Mounjaro, finding the perfect dress has become even more challenging. Some bridal shops are now requiring customers to sign legal waivers before purchasing gowns that do not currently fit, protecting the business from returns and alterations caused by rapid weight loss.

Nicole Hamilton, a New York product designer, experienced this firsthand. She started GLP-1 medications to feel healthier ahead of her wedding. As the pounds came off quickly, she chose an A-line gown with a waist about three inches smaller than her size at the time of purchase. Before she could take the dress home, the shop asked her to sign a waiver acknowledging that it did not fit yet. “The size stuff definitely made it stressful in a way that it wouldn’t have been otherwise,” Hamilton said. Still, she enjoyed most of the process.

Why Bridal Shops Are Taking These Steps

The bridal industry traditionally works on a six- to nine-month timeline. Brides order dresses well in advance, with fittings scheduled closer to the big day. GLP-1 drugs have disrupted that model. These medications can lead to significant and sometimes unpredictable weight loss, especially around the midsection. Shop owners report that former “apple-shaped” brides may suddenly have much smaller waists, making standard alterations difficult or impossible.

David’s Bridal CEO Kelly Cook explained that stores must now take on more inventory risk and show greater flexibility. “You’re changing an industry that’s always operated on a six- to nine-month timeline,” Cook said. Smaller boutiques face even tougher challenges. Houston bridal shop owner Natalie Harris noted that she cannot afford extra inventory and has begun recommending adjustable backs and forgiving silhouettes for brides on these medications.

Some shops worry about costly returns, refunds, or negative reviews if a bride loses too much weight after purchase. Pennsylvania bridal co-owner Wendy Ianieri-Salerno described the situation as “scary” but often agrees to exchanges to maintain good customer service.

The Growing Trend Among Brides

This shift reflects a broader reality. Recent data from Zola shows that 10 percent of couples planning 2026 weddings are already using a GLP-1 medication, with another 10 percent considering it. Among those taking the drugs, about 21 percent cite weight loss for the wedding as their main goal, while 33 percent see the wedding as one of several motivating factors.

Many brides view GLP-1s as a helpful tool for feeling confident and healthy on their big day. However, the trend creates new friction between personal goals and the practical realities of wedding planning.

What This Means for Future Brides

If you are planning a wedding and considering or already using GLP-1 medications, here are a few practical tips:

• Shop closer to your target weight if possible, or choose styles with built-in flexibility.
• Communicate openly with your bridal consultant about your medications and expected changes.
• Ask about the shop’s policies on alterations, exchanges, and waivers early in the process.
• Consider working with a tailor experienced in significant weight-loss adjustments.

The rise of GLP-1 drugs is bringing real health benefits to many people, but it is also reshaping industries like bridal retail in unexpected ways. For brides, the dream dress experience now sometimes includes legal paperwork alongside the excitement of saying “yes” to the dress.

Broader Implications

This is just a minor example of how the GLP-1 craze is affecting businesses. We’ll see how this impacts other retailers in this space. It may help some as people losing weight tend to buy more clothes!

Sadly, we have an idiot running the country.

In a fresh twist on U.S.-Venezuela drama, President Trump is clashing with Exxon Mobil over his ridiculous push to revive the country’s massive but battered oil sector following the U.S.-backed ouster of Nicolás Maduro.

At a White House meeting on Friday with top oil executives, Trump pitched big incentives: unspecified U.S. security guarantees for companies willing to invest heavily in fixing Venezuela’s crumbling energy infrastructure. He envisions U.S. firms (and others) pouring in billions to boost production, lower global energy prices, and deliver economic wins back home.

But Exxon CEO Darren Woods wasn’t buying the hype. He bluntly called Venezuela “uninvestable” right now, citing the need for major overhauls to commercial frameworks, the legal system, investment protections, and hydrocarbon laws. Exxon has painful history there—assets nationalized twice (most notably in 2007 under Chávez/Maduro), leading to a long arbitration battle where they recovered only a fraction of the claimed $12 billion. Woods said any return would require “pretty significant changes” from past conditions, though he left the door open for a technical team to assess assets soon.

Trump didn’t take the caution well, and of course he’s acting like a child. On Sunday aboard Air Force One, he told reporters: “I’ll probably be inclined to keep Exxon out… I didn’t like their response. They’re playing too cute.” He claimed other companies are eager to jump in and dismissed past losses, saying, “We’re not gonna look at what people lost in the past. You’re gonna make a lot of money, but we’re not going to go back.”

Similar hesitancy came from ConocoPhillips (also burned for billions in 2007 nationalizations) and even Chevron (the only major U.S. player still active there), which offered modest ramp-up potential but no huge commitments.

This episode exposes the gap between Trump’s authoritarian delusions and corporate pragmatism. Trump seems to assume that toppling a regime and waving security promises is enough to get Big Oil marching into Venezuela’s fields like it’s a surefire gold rush. Yet executives remember the expropriations, outstanding debts, political instability, and the massive capital needed to revive dilapidated operations—risks that don’t vanish overnight with presidential assurances.

The result? A public spat where the president threatens to sideline the largest U.S. oil company from his own “America First” energy vision. It’s a stark reminder: oil isn’t pumped by fiat. Even with military-backed regime change, companies won’t ignore billions in past losses, legal uncertainties, or the need for durable protections just because a president says “come on in.”

This is another pathetic example of Trump’s foolishness, thinking you can conquer a country, seize its oil, and have corporations line up like it’s a government contract. Reality check: Exxon isn’t a branch of the military; it’s a business that learned the hard way Venezuela isn’t a reliable partner.

Also, there’s the reality US oil companies have strong incentives not to support (or eagerly participate in) a rapid flood of cheap Venezuelan oil onto global markets. These companies are heavily reliant on fracking, particularly the independent shale producers in places like the Permian Basin. Frackers don’t want to fund competition that tanks their margins in an already oversupplied world. Trump’s vision of cheap Venezuelan oil as an “America First” win ignores how it could hurt the very US energy sector he champions, highlighting yet another gap between idiotic political bravado and market reality.

Donald Trump has created a mess with his tariffs, and we’re starting to see evicence across various industries.

The spirits industry in the U.S. is facing all sorts of challenges. Young people are drinking much less alcohol. The post-Covid booze boom has subsided. And there’s a ton of supply. One executive in the beer business told me this is the worst year of his 35-year career.

The recent news from Jim Beam has certainly rattled people. The company is pausing production of its flagship bourbon product for all of 2026! That’s a real punch in the gut.

The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board doesn’t mince words as they place blame squarely and Trump an dhis tariffs. Even as some tariffs are lifted, the damage has been done. Canadians hate him and gleefully avoid American products. So it’s much more than a simple cost issue. It’s a destruction of the American brand. It will be interesting to see how this starts to manifest in other industries.

This post highlights a serious problem facing Starbucks – consumers are spending less time in their stores, and this trend continues to get worse.

Starbucks’ once-dominant model involved packing urban corners with cozy cafés for work and socializing. But this relied on full offices and daily commutes. Remote work changed everything, erasing weekday rushes and gutting downtown profits.

This had led to closures of many Starbucks locations. A third of recent LA shutdowns were in the city-center, with similar trends in Chicago, New York, and Seattle.

The other problem involves the flood of mobile orders, which optimized speed but killed ambiance. Starbucks stores now feel much more transactional: order, grab, go. We see the long lines both at the drive-through and inside the store. When I want to meet someone for a coffee, whether for business or socializing, Starbucks is no longer the top option. I’ll try to find a Panera or a local brand coffee shop, as I know the Starbucks experience isn’t what it used to be.

The key metric of customers lingering 10+ minutes has fallen over a year, even with changes implemented by new CEO Brian Niccol. Stayers drive revenue with second drinks, snacks, repeat visits, etc.

We’ll see if Niccol can find a way to reverse this trend. It doesn’t help that we’re facing an economic slowdown, and expensive coffee drinks will be a luxury that many consumers won’t be able to afford.

You probably saw this amazing ad created by PJ Ace for Kalshi during the NBA Finals. It was a massive success for the Kalshi brand and generated a ton of buzz.

And it was created completely by AI.

For small companies and less well-known brands, generative AI offers an amazing tool if used propoerly with the assistance of creatives like PJ Ace, who has built an ad agancy that makes AI commercials for clients.

But for bigger and well-known brands, they need to be a bit more careful. Using AI in a way that’s not perceived as authentic can harm a valuable brand. The scruntiny is much greater, and you may risk a backlash.

This article offers some useful guidelines for marketing departments as they grapple with these issues, with a focus on the beauty industry.

As the beauty industry continues to evolve, brands are under increasing pressure to innovate while maintaining their audience’s trust. Generative AI has emerged as a powerful tool for ideation, content creation and campaign design.

But while generative AI’s potential is undeniable, the way it’s used in advertising demands careful consideration. Missteps can compromise a brand’s authenticity, damage brand values and erode consumer trust — outcomes that no brand can afford.

There’s some great stuff here, with warnings on avoiding “AI slop” and creating ads perceived to be “AI sterile.” Transparancy is key, and the author argues for a hybrid approach where real actors are used in addition to AI tools.

Meanwhile, if you’re a new or smaller branded, you caan afford to take more chances and make bold statements using AI. So give PJ a call . . .

As businesses make more investments in AI, we’re going to start seeing more “custom AI” builds. “Custom AI” is the practice of taking a general foundation or large-language model (LLM) and adapting it so that it better reflects a particular organization’s needs. It all start with using that organization’s date, and then emplying tactics such as fine-tuning, continued pre-training, model-distillation, domain‐specific training, etc. to provide the most relevant and useful output. Think of a law firm using their own contracts to train their proprietary model, or a company using all of their own product specifications in the AI used for customer services.

Amazon AWS details this in a recent release: “Custom Intelligence: Building AI that matches your business DNA.” It outlines how they help customers create custom models and how these models can be fine-tuned over time.

Job losses tied to AI are accelerating.

In a move that underscores the relentless pace of technological disruption, Amazon announced on October 31, 2025, plans to eliminate approximately 14,000 roles across its corporate workforce. This latest round of reductions, detailed in an internal memo from HR SVP Beth Galetti, continues the e-commerce giant’s efforts to streamline operations amid explosive growth in artificial intelligence. While Amazon frames the changes as necessary for agility and customer focus, they highlight a stark reality: AI is not just augmenting jobs—it’s eliminating them in the short term, forcing companies to rethink workforce structures in ways that prioritize speed over scale.

Trimming the Bureaucracy

Amazon’s cuts target layers of middle management and administrative functions, building on similar actions from 2023 and 2024 that trimmed over 27,000 positions overall. Galetti described the reductions as “a continuation of this work to get even stronger by further reducing bureaucracy, removing layers, and shifting resources to ensure we’re investing in our biggest bets and what matters most to our customers’ current and future needs.”

Unlike broad-based slashes, these cuts are being explained as surgical: affected teams will receive direct communications from leaders, with the majority of roles in non-customer-facing corporate areas. The timing is telling. Amazon’s core businesses, e-commerce, AWS cloud services, and advertising, reported robust Q3 2025 earnings, with revenue up 11% year-over-year to $158 billion. Yet, as Galetti noted, “We’re convinced that we need to be organized more leanly, with fewer layers and more ownership, to move as quickly as possible for our customers and business.”

AI’s Double-Edged Sword

At the heart of Amazon’s rationale lies the emergence of AI, which Galetti called “the most transformative technology we’ve seen since the Internet, and it’s enabling companies to innovate much faster than ever before.” Generative AI tools are automating routine tasks (data analysis, report generation, and even code debugging) that once required human oversight. In Amazon’s case, AI is powering everything from personalized recommendations to warehouse optimization, allowing the company to do more with less.

This isn’t unique to Amazon. In the short term, AI adoption is accelerating job displacement across tech. A 2025 McKinsey report estimates that 45% of work activities could be automated by generative AI, with corporate functions like HR, finance, and operations hit hardest—precisely the areas Amazon is targeting. We’ve seen echoes in Google’s 2024 cuts of 1,000+ roles in ad sales and recruitment, and Microsoft’s reduction of 1,900 in gaming amid AI investments. The pattern is clear: as AI handles the “grunt work,” companies reallocate human talent to high-value innovation, but the transition leaves thousands in limbo.

And we’re just getting started. AI can help knowledge workers handle anaysis and strategy, we will likely see job losses beyond workers that handle routine tasks.

For workers, the short-term pain is acute. Entry- and mid-level roles, often held by recent graduates or specialists in administrative tools like Excel or legacy software, are vanishing fastest. Amazon’s memo acknowledges this, committing to a 90-day internal job search window for most affected employees, with recruiting teams prioritizing internal candidates.

A Wake-Up Call for the Workforce

Amazon’s actions signal a seismic shift beyond Big Tech. In retail, manufacturing, and services—sectors employing millions—AI chatbots are supplanting customer service reps, while predictive algorithms optimize supply chains, reducing the need for planners. The World Economic Forum’s 2025 Future of Jobs report projects 85 million jobs displaced globally by 2027 due to automation, outpacing the 97 million created in emerging fields like AI ethics and data curation.

The short-term elimination of jobs isn’t malice; it’s math. AI delivers 20-30% efficiency gains in knowledge work, per Gartner, allowing firms to cut costs without sacrificing output. For Amazon, this means redirecting savings to “bold bets” like Project Amelia (an AI coding assistant) and Rufus (a shopping AI), which promise to redefine e-commerce. Galetti emphasized Amazon’s breadth: “I don’t know of any other company with the breadth of Amazon, the number of exciting bold bets we’re making, and all the ways we can make customers lives better and easier around the world.”

Looking Ahead: Short-Term Losses, Long-Term Reinvention

Amazon plans to hire aggressively in 2026 for strategic areas like AI development and customer experience, even as it hunts for more efficiencies. This duality—cuts followed by targeted growth—mirrors the AI economy’s trajectory: destruction before creation. For now, the short term favors the adaptable. As Galetti put it, Amazon aims to “operate like the world’s largest startup,” betting that a leaner, AI-powered machine will outpace competitors.

Lessons for Workers

If you’re a knowledge worker, learn how to use AI to be more efficient and effective. The reality of the job market is changing fast and you have to adapt.

The latest news from Chipotle is crushing the company’s stock, but it’s even worse news for the economy. Here’s a quote from the CEO:

“Earlier this year, as consumer sentiment declined sharply, we saw a broad-based pullback in frequency across all income cohorts. Since then, the gap has widened, with low to middle-income guests further reducing frequency. We believe that this guest, with household income below $100,000, represents about 40% of our total sales, and based on our data, is dining out less often due to concerns about the economy and inflation. A particularly challenged cohort is the 25 to 35-year-old age group. We believe that this trend is not unique to Chipotle and is occurring across all restaurants, as well as many discretionary categories.”

We’re hearing this from many companies, but here it’s even more explicit. The middle and lower classes are getting hurt by inflation and a slowing economy. And this suggests that it’s going to get worse. We’ll see if this leads to a recession.

Now we do have to put this in context. Chipotle has its own problems as it doesn’t seem to know how to cater to this younger demo in this environment. One use on X put it simply:

i could fix chipotle in 1 day as ceo. You just introduce a half priced burrito that isn’t the size of a newborn. Instead of 1500 calories, maybe you only eat 700. It’s under $10. There would lines would be out the door

This hit’s home.

So we may have a combination of factors here, but it’s difficult to deny the economic slowdown. We’ll be posting more examples.