‘X’ CEO Steps Down After Two Years & McDonald’s Revamps Their Menu

0:00This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Fiscally responsible. Financial geniuses. Monetary magicians. These are things people say about drivers who switch their car insurance to Progressive and save hundreds. Visit Progressive.com to see if you could save. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states or situations.

0:30Good Morning Brew Daily Show. I'm Neil Freiman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, Linda Yaccarino is out as CEO of X. Was it something Grok said? Then at long last, the McDonald's snack wrap is back. It's Thursday, July 10th. Let's ride.

0:50Just one week after fireworks, we could be in for another treat in the night sky without the need for man-made pyrotechnics. Tonight, look to the eastern sky shortly after dark. That's about 853 in New York. And you'll see this month's full moon known as the Buck Moon rise above the horizon. It's expected to be a spectacular show with the moon appearing far larger than it actually is. Thanks to the moon illusion, which is when our brain dupes us into thinking the moon is bigger near the horizon than it is overhead. Toby, what does this mean for my horoscope? I'm Aliyah. This means that you should definitely go moon watching because this effect is super strong in 2025, specifically due to this rare event called a major lunar standstill.

1:33This happens once every 18.6 years or so. And it's when the moon's orbit is tilted at its most extreme angle. Typically, the moon's orbit is around five degrees compared to the Earth's orbit around the sun. And over time, this tilt wobbles just because it's got the sun pulling on it, the earth pulling on it, which causes the moon's path in the sky to slowly shift. It's not a big shift, but when that wobble is at its peak, which it is right now in 2025, the moon's daily path reaches extremes both on the high side and the low side. So it is appearing lower in the sky than usual during its full and new phases.

2:08So this July, you're seeing both the seasonal effect because it's summer and the moon already is at its extremes. And you're seeing this rare lunar tilt, which is why this makes this moon look really, really big. So go get your picture. Go get the – I don't know how it affects your horoscope, but it's definitely going to look good on your Instagram. It will be cool. I'm going to check it out. Pretend I'm in Star Wars. And now a quick word from our sponsor, Mortgage Matchup. Toby, when was the last time you saved thousands of dollars? Well, I very nearly invested in this ill-fated music festival on an island.

2:40Okay, well, if you fell for that, I have a very exciting opportunity to chat with you about after the pod. But what you should know right now is Mortgage Matchup powered by United Wholesale Mortgage can help you save thousands. They connect you with a licensed professional who can shop on your behalf and give you access to more home loan options like conventional 1 % down purchase, VA loans, jumbo, and more. They can often offer the ability for borrowers to sign some or all of their documents at home, meaning a simpler and sometimes completely virtual closing process. They also offer a loan process that's optimized for a faster clear to close.

3:13So check out MortgageMatchup.com to speak to a home loan expert. That's MortgageMatchup.com. Disclaimer, United Wholesale Mortgage LLC, Equal Housing Lender NMLS, number 3038, licensed in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Ex-CEO Linda Yaccarino is now an ex-CEO after stepping down yesterday from the platform she helmed since 2023. In a post on X, she thanked Elon Musk for the opportunity to run what she called the global town square, but stopped short of providing a reason for her departure. Yaccarino did step down mere hours after Grok, X's AI chatbot infused in the platform, went haywire, praising Hitler and spouting off racist remarks, though Yaccarino was reportedly already set to depart before the incident.

3:58Grok's episode was far from the only tumultuous period Yaccarino oversaw at the company. After taking over what was then called Twitter, Yaccarino faced an advertiser exodus, mass layoffs, and loosening content moderation policies. Monthly ad revenue from Twitter's top 1 ,000 advertisers fell from$127 million in October 2022 to just$48 million by January 2023. Despite those challenges, she leaned on her 11 years at NBCUniversal, as well as some legal threats to woo back advertisers. And it worked. eMarketer is forecasting ad revenue growth for the first time since the takeover this year. But despite stabilizing the business, Yaccarino's position was tenuous.

4:40After Elon fused X with his artificial intelligence company XAI this past spring, the higher growth potential of AI took the driver's seat over the lower margin and lower growth social media business. Thus, despite ushering in some improvement to X's finances, Yaccarino was an ad dollar-shaped peg for an AI-sized hole and is now on the outs. This was one of the most unique CEO roles in all of corporate America. It often felt like Yaccarina was driving a car whose controls could be overridden at any point by Elon Musk and forcing her to swerve and reverse and go in different directions. Seemingly at any point, I mean, you could see this a few months into her tenure at the Dealbook Conference in 2023.

5:26Musk got on stage talking with Andrew Rostorkin and then told advertisers who were leaving X to go F themselves, prompting Yaccarino to do this massive cleanup because she was brought in there to woo advertisers back. That kind of threw a major wrench in her plan. It seems like she did the best she could, given the circumstances, using carrots, using sticks and legal threats to bring advertisers back. You mentioned that revenue will grow for the first time since 2021, but revenues are still about half what they were before Elon bought the company. Still, if you go back to where X was when Yaccarino first stepped in, it was not in a good place.

6:05X's valuation was at an estimated$10 billion, which is far below the$44 billion that Elon initially bought it for. But it has now climbed back to$44 billion, just north of what he bought it for in 2022. And that happened because she did improve ad revenue. And it also just brought back the investors in this deal whole again, because for a while they were deeply underwater. So it did look like she improved the bottom line, which is what you want a CEO to do. People are saying now, too, that it is vital for anyone who comes in and replaces Linda Yaccarino to have the credibility and respect of the advertising market, which Yaccarino worked so hard to build back up.

6:50But in the end, it's just this merger kind of really hamstrunger because AI became much more important for the company. Grok has been shoved into every nook and cranny of this platform at this point. So Yaccarino just wasn't necessarily the right person for the role. And who knows who the right person for the role is? Because as you said, it is very difficult being a CEO under Elon Musk. Yeah, we'll see what happens. I'm sure Tesla shareholders who have watched Elon Musk kind of take a lot of time spending in government away from Tesla as Tesla share price has declined are very much watching how much time Elon Musk is going to spend on the CEO search and whether he's going to spend more time on actual X business.

7:28It didn't seem like he was spending all that much time on X instead of Tesla. He was spending more time in the government. So Tesla shareholders are probably thinking, here we go again. And another distraction for Elon didn't seem like that hurt Tesla share price at all. The search for a new XCO is on. Of all Trump's tariff threats issued this year, and there have been many, one is spooking American businesses more than any other. And the target may surprise you. Copper. In off-the-cuff remarks on Tuesday, Trump said that the U.S. will place a 50 % tariff on copper imports and followed that up last night by confirming they'll go into effect on August 1st.

8:05The announcement sent the U.S. copper market into a tizzy, with prices skyrocketing 13 % on Tuesday for their biggest one-day gain on record. Prices calmed down a bit yesterday, but are going right back up this morning. Why is copper such a big deal, and what does it mean that it's getting more expensive? To put it simply, copper is the most important industrial metal in the world, used in sectors spanning housing, transportation, construction, electricity generation, and AI data centers. It's been called the metal with a PhD in economics because its price is closely correlated with global economic growth.

8:40If people are building pretty much anything, they need copper. Trump said that tariffs are necessary to build up American capacity in the name of national security. As the second most used material by the Department of Defense, copper is an ingredient in aircraft, ships, ammunition, missile defense systems, and more, Trump mentioned last night. But those long-term goals of self-sufficiency are clashing with short-term reality. Right now, the U.S. imports about half of its copper needs, and it'll take years, if not decades, for American producers to meet the country's demands. In the interim, American factories making refrigerators, cars, air conditioners, what have you, will need to pay higher prices for their copper and are expected to pass about 40 percent of those extra costs onto consumers, according to Goldman Sachs.

9:22Toby, The Wall Street Journal predicted this would be one of the most influential trade moves Trump has made since taking office earlier this year. Yeah, because copper is just the MVP when it comes to metal. Get you a metal that can, you know, be in the pipes of your housing and bring plumbing to your sink and your kitchen, but also power the AI and clean energy revolution. It just really is in everything. And demand is forecast to keep on rising over the coming years. Glencore, a really big copper producer, estimates that global supply must grow by 1 million metric tons a year through 2050 to meet rising demand.

9:55That would require adding the equivalent of the world's largest copper mine every single year. And that is not an easy thing to do because on average, it takes decades for mines to move to production. Not years, decades because of all the work you have to do, the regulatory work you have to do. So it is not a quick process to scale up copper production. So if copper is becoming more expensive, it just constrains everything. It's like a global boa constrictor that is just hurting everything from, you know, domestic manufacturing to overseas manufacturing. Just anything that involves making anything, copper is somehow at play there.

10:34And if you are looking closely at the copper market, which, you know, maybe you are, maybe you're not, something very interesting has happened over the past few days. Contracts on the COMEX exchange, which is in New York, are now at an unprecedented 25 % premium over London metal exchange prices. So copper, if you buy it in New York, is going to cost 25 % more than if you buy it in London. There's this crazy imbalance that's been happening between the American copper market and the copper market in the rest of the world. And that is directly due to tariffs. There's been, over the past few months, an incredible surge in imports by American factories to bring over copper in anticipation of these tariffs.

11:18They were floated back in February. No one knew exactly when they were going to go into effect. It looks like August 1st. So there's been this huge import surge of copper into the United States, which has driven up prices now to 25 % greater than in London. And that means, according to Benchmark, that U.S. consumers could be paying around$15 ,000 per metric ton for copper, while the rest of the world pays around$10 ,000. That's the consolation, though, is that because traders saw this coming, they did import all this copper. So there is a lot of copper in the U.S. right now. There's actually more in the U.S.

11:51than over in London, which is the global kind of standard. And so that's the consolation prize. You have a lot. But the bad news is that it just costs more. It's trading at this massive premium to copper compared to the rest of the world. So you got it, but you're going to have to pay for it. Like the Backstreet Boys and Crocs, the McDonald's snack wrap is so back. The beloved item made its triumphant return to menus as the fast food giant tries to turn around sales limper than a forgotten fry at the bottom of a takeout bag. Along with bringing the snack wrap back, McDonald's also introduced a spicy McMuffin to its breakfast menu to try and move over spice-loving Gen Z.

12:31The idea is to shift consumer focus away from the chain's frustratingly high prices and back towards a flurry of new menu items. After 15 straight quarters of rising same-store sales coming out of the pandemic, things have taken a turn for the worse. McDonald's has reported negative sales growth in three of the past four quarters. its worst four-quarter stretch in a decade. So it's tried to innovate itself out of a corner, including adding McCrispy strips to its menu recently, the first new permanent item in four years, and the same strips you'll find in the snack wrap. McDonald's hopes that the lore of the snack wrap, an item that left national menus back in 2016 that people have been begging for ever since, combined with its affordable$2.99 price point, will lead to a bump in foot traffic.

13:18And I tell you what, Neil, I will likely be contributing to the bump because I got to see if the snack wrap still slaps. I'm sure it does. Very interesting strategy by McDonald's here. In one way, they are looking back to the snack wrap, which left in 2016 and playing on consumers' nostalgia. In other ways, they are looking forward with innovation and taking this 50-year-old breakfast sandwich, the McMuffin, and putting this very 2025 twist on it, which is making it spicy, which a lot of younger consumers want right now. And it is trying to shift the narrative away from everyone saying how expensive McDonald's has gotten.

13:56And people, their gripes are well documented. Over the past decade, the average price of a McDonald's meal has more than doubled, which is the biggest price hike among a dozen fast food chains examined by Chaken Analytics. And it's over triple the broader inflation rate. So everyone who's been complaining about McDonald's prices and saying I'm paying over$10 for this Big Mac meal, you know, they have every right to complain. McDonald's prices have been soaring with these new introductions. McDonald's does not want you to talk about its price and saying, hey, look, a$2.99 snack wrap. Go get it.

14:27Go get it. But also, if you look back to its launch price in 2006, it's more than a double it. When the snack wrap debuted back then, it was$1.29. but it's, you know, adjusting for inflation, that does sound a little bit better there. McDonald's fans, actually, if you sorted through McDonald's Reddit, they thought it was going to debut at$4. So people's expectations were totally warped on this. So McDonald's is coming in a little bit lower than people thought, which McDonald's is hoping will bring those people out. In general, people are just not eating out as much. Spending at restaurants declined almost 1 % in May, had a little bit of a jump back in June.

15:05But foot traffic is just down in general as people feel a little bit more squeezed here. So McDonald's is hoping that this is coming in at the right time, at the right price point to try to woo back these people who have just been shunning it because McDonald's feels too expensive these days. Up next, talking about numbers, we got Neil's Numbers. Welcome to Neil's Numbers, the segment where I share three stats from the week's news that will send you down rabbit holes deeper than light can penetrate. For my first number, Scarlett Johansson, take a bow, or at least take a very expensive vacation, because you are now Hollywood's highest-grossing lead actor of all time.

15:45Movies in which Johansson plays the lead or is a lead ensemble member have raked in$14.8 billion at the global box office, putting her ahead of number two Samuel L. Jackson and number three Robert Downey Jr. Johansson claimed the title this week thanks to the lucrative opening of her Jurassic World Rebirth, which has already brought in$334 million seven days after the premiere. But the bulk of Johansson's box office earnings have come from another long-running franchise, the Marvel Cinematic Universe. When you are a key player in the MCU, as she is having played Black Widow, you are frequently in movies that are among the highest grossing of all time.

16:24Avengers Endgame brought in$2.7 billion, Avengers Infinity War,$2 billion, The Avengers,$1.5 billion, Avengers Age of Ultron,$1.4 billion, Captain America Civil War,$1.1 billion, and so on. That's another reason why you shouldn't be surprised to see Samuel L. Jackson and Robert Downey Jr. near the top of the leaderboard. They are also frequent stars in Marvel films. But one thing Johansson has that they don't is efficiency. She is the highest grossing lead actor with just 36 films under her belt. compared to Downey Jr.'s 45 and Jackson's 71. I just want to give some respect to Scarlett Johansson, too.

17:00Outside of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, she's also had other bangers. The Jungle Brook brought in nearly a billion dollars. She was in that. Sing, which is an animated film, brought in$630 million. And then Lucy, which was this kind of sci-fi thriller, brought in nearly half a billion dollars as well. So she does have range. And she also is a huge Jurassic Park fan. So that is why it's very poetic that she rode Jurassic World latest movie to this title. She said she wanted to get in the franchise so badly that she told the directors, I will die in the first five minutes. I can get eaten by whatever.

17:34I'll do whatever you want. Just get me in this film. And then the final shout out I need to make for this list is obviously it's populated very heavily by Marvel Cinematic Universe people. In fact, nine out of the 10 people on the top grossing actors of all time list do appear in MCU films, except for one, and that is Tom Cruise, the movie star himself. He never drank from the chalice of the MCU. He never drank from Disney's chalice. He might have drank from - He created his own MCU. Yes, he did. He might have drank from some other chalice, but Tom Cruise, you stand alone on this list of MCU movie stars.

18:08And I'm sure people are curious about the top 10, so I'll run them down real quick. So you know the top three. Number four, Zoe Saldana. Five, Chris Pratt, then Tom Cruise, then Chris Hemsworth, then Vin Diesel, then Dwayne Johnson, then Chris Evans. My second number is 749 miles, which is the distance a Lucid Air Grand Touring electric vehicle drove on a single charge. If that sounds like a heck of a long way without a battery fill up, it is. The drive was recently crowned the longest journey by an electric car on a single charge by Guinness World Records. Lucid is a high-end EV maker known for its technological prowess and push for efficiency, so it's always going after these records to show off its chops, and it certainly knows how to design the right conditions to pull them off.

18:53For example, this record-breaking drive began in St. Moritz, Switzerland, and ended in Munich, Germany. Now, for my Central European geography nerds out there, what can you tell me about those two cities? That's right, they're very different in elevation. St. Moritz sits at about 6 ,000 feet above sea level, while Munich is located 4 ,300 feet below it at 1 ,700 feet above sea level. So this car was cruising downhill much of the time, drastically improving its battery efficiency. On top of that, you can do this drive in around 220 miles on normal routes, while Lucid took nearly 750, which suggests they took a roundabout route that had a gradual descent the whole way.

19:34All that being said, auto experts are very impressed by this feat, but the big question is, can Lucid translate range to sales? Yeah, they can't really. They delivered 10 ,241 vehicles in 2024, which isn't bad for a startup. And these vehicles are on the premium end, often costing well into the$100 ,000 range. So yeah, it is impressive to have this world record. And Lucid's always wanted to be the king of range, which is why they do stuff like this. A reason why it is so good, not only is it a very efficient car, they say they have a seven-year efficiency lead on all automakers when it comes to their battery packs, but it's also an insanely aerodynamic car.

20:12It has a drag coefficient of just 0.197. That is the lowest in the world. Actually, it was just passed by a Chinese maker last year, 0.195. So it is this very low to the ground, very slippery car that cuts through the air efficiently as well as has an efficient battery pack. So those two things combine to create the king of range, even though it was kind of rolling downhill for a lot of this drive. I mean, the official estimates from the EPA say the Air Grand Touring's range is 516 miles and it got 749. So they certainly did some tweaking to juice it by over 200 miles. But yeah, really cool. All right.

20:56My final number will hopefully inspire you to take the initiative and arrange a hangout with people this weekend because partying is a dying art. According to the census's latest American Time Use survey published last month, the amount of time that Americans spent attending or hosting a social event declined by an astonishing 50 % between 2003 and 2024. And the stats for young people will drop your jaw even further. Americans aged 15 to 24 spent 70 % less time at parties than they did in 2023. In his newsletter contextualizing these numbers, the writer Derek Thompson declared that Americans spend more time alone today than in any period in recorded history.

21:35He noted that men who watch TV spend seven hours in front of their screens for every hour they spend hanging out with someone outside their house. And the typical female pet owner spends more time with their pet than in face-to-face contact with other humans. The decline in socializing is not a new phenomenon having started in the 1970s, but it's accelerated dramatically in recent years to the point where health officials are calling our isolation from others an epidemic of loneliness. Toby, it's sad to think that if I invited a 21-year-old to a game of beer pong, they may not know what I'm talking about.

22:07These stats were brutal to look at, but there's a lot of factors that play into it. I know the first thought is, oh, it's the phones. It's the phones, which obviously the phones play a role. But Derek Thompson also pointed at things like labor economics, family dynamics, consumer technology, and then also just modern psychology. One example of that family dynamics that he spoke about is that parenting norms have changed a lot. Americans used to have a lot of kids who they watch less. Now they have fewer kids that they watch more. And he talks about how parents are basically their managers of their kids.

22:38They want to get them into colleges. So they're driving them all around to their extracurriculars that they kind of sign them up for, which makes it very hard for those kids to party. And then also for adults to party as well, because this family dynamic has just totally shifted as well. And then, yes, of course, there are the screens all the way back to the 1980s when the television was kind of coming into every American home. People just started doing everything less with other people and spending more time in front of the TVs. Now smartphones are the new screen that people have their attention drawn towards.

23:08So a lot of these middle ring of social connections have atrophied over time, replaced by these distant connections online or these, you know, immediately nuclear family units. So just a lot of different factors combining to make it so no one's partying anymore these days. So throw a party, Neil. Throw a party if you're listening to this. Get people together. And one reason is parties may not be that fun if you're not drinking and no one is drinking. I mean, as recently as 1989, the share of high schoolers who said high school seniors who said they'd ever have a drink of alcohol was higher than 90 percent.

23:41Today, it's fewer than 50 percent. Eighth graders in the 1980s were more likely to say they had a sip of alcohol in the previous month than today's high school seniors. So that's been a decline that has certainly contributed to the lack of partying. Now let's spin to the finish with some final headlines. Amazon expanded its annual Prime Day summer sale to four days this year. but I think the math gods are punishing them for trying to make Prime Day a non-Prime number by dragging down their sales. The early results are in and things are not looking good. One retailer who manages sales for 50 brands across a variety of product categories said their Amazon sales are down 41 % compared to the same day of Prime last year.

24:23The brand's CEO said that consumers are still actively browsing and putting stuff in their carts, but many are delaying purchases in hopes of finding a better deal later. A shorter two-day Prime Day sale leads to more urgency for shoppers, while a four-day sale might lead to some extra shopping around. Amazon does dispute the third party's findings, and investors were relatively unconcerned by the figures sending Amazon stock green yesterday. But Neil, everything hinges on the four-day approach being a success, with a sacrifice on day one being made up by more purchases over the long run. I mean, consumer psychology, everything revolves around urgency.