Twitter Rebrands to 'X' and 'Barbenheimer' Makes $230+ Million On Opening Weekend

0:28The best B2B marketing gets wasted on the wrong people.

0:33good morning brew daily show i'm neil freiman 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 women's soccer team and they have quite the 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 refuse to go down without a fight. It's Monday, July 24th. Let's ride.

1:11All 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 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 it has to be 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 telly ride.

1:55Let's do a little. 5 ,000 is basically sea level. I know, but I swear, like the ball is 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-crossed 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 blue bird and the Twitter name to rebrand as simply X. So why the letter X? Well, Elon is obsessed with it.

2:32X.com was the original name of PayPal, which he co-founded. Elon is also the founder of Space X. There's the Tesla Model X. He has lots of ex-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 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?

3:11A head scratcher. 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 prone 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 he tweeted out on Saturday, and soon we shall bid adieu to the Twitter brand and gradually all the birds.

3:52So 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 a decent amount of money to make a good-looking X logo.

4:28There was this discourse, though, of usually corporate rebrands take a lot of time, a lot of money. And everyone, again, Elon has this sycophance. And they say, well, look it. He did it in 24 hours. And it costs zero money. So, 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 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.

5:06And 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 Iaccarino, who's the CEO of Twitter slash X or whatever, put out this absolute word salad 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, goods, services and opportunities.

5:44Here 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 jumble of words. I'm not sure in the end the name is going to matter. 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.

6:22So I don't think this is going to 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 X? 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 X-ing now? Like, what do you call it? Exposing? 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 it out right there.

7:01Why you don't want to like have a 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. Final note on the Twitter logo, because there is some interesting lore about it. One of the Twitter co-founders, Biz Stone, he's from Boston, and he named the bird Larry T. Bird after Larry Bird. I didn't know that. That's good lore, too, as well. I guess there's not as much lore going on with this X logo. 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.

7:38It's more him putting a stamp on the company saying, this is mine. I want you to forget everything that Twitter was. It's former management. This is my app. 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 hyped movies of the year, Barbie and Oppenheimer, gave North American movie theaters their best weekend since Avengers Endgame arrived four years ago.

8:18Both movies dismantled 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.

8:55They 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.

9:31Barbie 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 went out in IMAX. Oh, it's out in IMAX. Yeah, so kind of a narrative. It's off and a hybrid took over all time. 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, reboot era where all we got was just remakes of old films.

10:08And 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. is obviously barbie is based off of pre-existing ip but the movie itself was so original and weird even though uh i have not seen it yet i'll have to do that as 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 i get that i think it's just new france i think it's that particular ip has been tapped out the 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.

10:58We've literally squeezed all 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 Mario's, which was a video game adaptation. Yeah. And only two of the top 20 movies this year are quote unquote original films. And the others are sequels. 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.

11:35But 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's strike that's going on. Yeah, well, and I was also just looking at it as kind of a bookend 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.

12:14So it also comes up as like this huge heart outlier. So 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 1, 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.

12:53So 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.

13:33Well, 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? This is 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?

14:08And you're like, I just, first thing I think about is the power grid. 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.

14:54Yeah, 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. You know what we're talking about? Like Lake Mead and Lake Powell getting below the line where they could produce any hydropower. 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.

15:33So 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. Well, I mean, Houston's the oil capital of the world, and they rely on natural gas, but they're also just a renewable energy powerhouse. Forty percent of their power capacity comes from winds and solar, which, yeah, again, it feels like a narrative violation.

16:16Yeah, Texas doing well. All right, Neil, before we jump into our next story, we're going to take a quick break. My name is Percy Jackson. Getting in trouble is like breathing for me. The hit series returns to Disney Plus and Hulu. The danger the camp is under is greater than you can possibly imagine. For the key to our survival, three of you must quest to the sea of monsters. Let's go do the impossible. Percy! Percy Jackson and the Olympians. New season two-episode premiere December 10th on Disney Plus and Hulu. Learn more at DisneyPlus.com slash What's On. Lemu, Lemu! And Doug. Here we have the Lemu, Lemu in its natural habitat, helping people customize their car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual.

17:08Fascinating. It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug. Uh, Lemu? Is that guy with the binoculars watching us? Cut the camera! They see us! Only pay for what you need at LibertyMutual.com. Liberty, Liberty, Liberty, Liberty. Savings vary. Underwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and affiliates. Excludes Massachusetts. 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 LA.

17:54I've been there. Oh, 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 celebrated her life-changing victory. so we're glad that the ticket went to someone who was clearly excited about it right well 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.

18:39So 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 of 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 one million dollars for selling the winning ticket and the store owner uh navar herrera says that he'll use that money to take his family on a luxury vacation and start a college fund so i guess there's i think he's the real winner at here so the power Powerball has not been claimed yet by or by there's no it's been sold, but no one's come forth to claim it yet.

19:37So 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. And 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.

20:11But unlike the Jamaican bobsled team, they don't need John Candy to help. One of the midfielder's moms started a GoFundMe 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, I 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 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.

20:44It was like a really soft second yellow. But I love this story. Obviously, yeah, people are going to make the cool runnings parallels. But this is a legit federation. They're doing really well. They have some NWSL players who were drafted highly. 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.

21:20Jamaica is 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 court press to get, you know, what they're owed. So 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. I love that. 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 rebalance is triggered whenever the aggregate weight of companies that make up 4.5 % of the index tops 48%.

22:05So 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, 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're literally just talking about like three or four companies.

22:44We'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 Robinhood or your brokerage this morning and see havoc in 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 100. Yeah. So that is how it's going to affect like the everyday investor is that the whatever your concentration is in big tech is going to change a little bit because, yeah, these indexes like the Invesco QQQ, which is actually the second most traded ETF on U.S.

23:32stock exchanges. So a lot of people have like a little bit of money in the QQQ. Yeah. And basically what it's going to do is reduce the concentration in top tech companies. So if you want to remain as highly concentrated, then you got to buy a little bit more of that magnificent seven. But 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 S &P 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.

24:11So it's a little confusing, but this is just a narrower slice of the, you know, 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, ExxonMobil.

24:48Any ones you're particularly looking forward to? I mean, any time big tech reports, you got to pay attention to it a little bit. I'm also just curious about McDonald's because remember the grimace shake that we talked about? I want to know how much 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 an earnings call. And Chipotle 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.

25:28They'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 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.

26:03women 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 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 returns after a really long break. That's obviously from Matt Groenig, 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.