October 20, 2026

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Well, hello. In disappointing news for aviation history enthusiasts, researchers who traveled to a remote Pacific island in search of the remnants of Amelia Earhart’s plane concluded that the mysterious object that brought them there was most likely just a clump of trees. It’s being called the biggest confusion caused by trees since Macbeth.

—Dave Lozo, Sam Klebanov, Molly Liebergall, Matty Merritt, Neal Freyman, Abby Rubenstein

In today’s newsletter, we’ll get into:

Big donations promised by Anthropic and Elon Musk
Fighting in the Middle East disrupting “Davos in the Desert”
The Supreme Court mulling whether you can make your own whiskey

Markets

Nasdaq

26,430.89

+1.11%

S&P

7,690.73

+0.41%

Dow

51,966.03

-0.07%

10-Year

5.136%

+4.0 bps

Bitcoin

$81,995.7

+1.08%

Nvidia

$217.09

+1.38%

Data is provided by

*Stock data as of market close, cryptocurrency data as of 5:30pm ET. Here's what these numbers mean.

Markets: Like Steve Jobs returning to Apple, tech stocks staged a comeback yesterday, rising after taking a hit last week amid investors’ fears about AI financing. Chip makers, including Nvidia, AMD, and Intel, led the way up.

IT’S GIVING

Anthropic, Musk vow billions in charitable donations

Illustration: Morning Brew Inc., Photos: Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images, Finn Gomez/Getty Images

Anthropic announced it with a blog post on Sunday. Elon Musk did it with a tweet yesterday. No matter the platform, the news is the same—AI giants are promising to donate billions at a time when people are wary of the rapidly expanding technology.

Musk said: “Next year, I will give one of my SpaceX shares to every kid in America.” He provided no further details, although Bloomberg reported he intends to use Trump Accounts to disperse the shares. Based on today’s share price, the SpaceX CEO would be on the hook for $10+ billion in stock to 73 million children.

Meanwhile, Anthropic offered more specifics about its plan:

The company is pledging 5% of its stock toward what it calls a Public Benefit Fund. Anthropic is planning an IPO next month that values the company at $2 trillion, making that an estimated $100 billion commitment.
The fund will be a wholly owned LLC, which the company said will allow for flexibility to make “large donations to traditional nonprofits or direct distributions to specific populations.”

This is on top of Anthropic’s co-founders’ earlier vow to give away 80% of their equity, as well as an employee equity match program that the company says puts a combined ~20% of its shares toward “public good.”

There’s plenty of skepticism

Questions about Silicon Valley leaders becoming the epicenter of charity go beyond wondering if Musk, who backed away from his 2021 offer to donate $6 billion to end world hunger, will follow through on his promise.

Speaking about Anthropic’s announcement, Anduril cofounder Palmer Luckey wondered who gets to define “public good.” AI analyst Andrew Curran said it appears to be a step toward the company’s own form of universal basic income. And Gary Marcus, an emeritus professor at NYU and self-proclaimed AI skeptic, said the company is trying to “curry public favor.”

AI as a whole can use some image enhancing. There’s no shortage of polls (Pew, CNN, NBC) showing most Americans find AI about as appealing as picking up a hitchhiker.—DL

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World

Tour de headlines

Man walking down street in Paris past burnt out cars

Kiran Ridley/Getty Images

🇫🇷 France imposes curfews after weekend riots. Heeding French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu’s call for “localized” curfews, police in Paris and other cities issued them yesterday in response to protests over the cost of living and school conditions that turned violent this weekend. The government estimated that more than 3,000 businesses nationwide had been looted. France’s interior minister said police had been unprepared and that he’d offered his resignation, which President Emmanuel Macron did not accept. Other countries in Europe have also seen protests over the heightened cost of living recently, with some also erupting into violence, including in Italy and Brussels. Italy’s government said yesterday it was preparing to crack down following looting in Milan this weekend.

📺 Christiane Amanpour to leave CNN after 43 years. The foreign correspondent and news anchor, who became a household name for her bravery in reporting from war zones, said yesterday she’ll be scaling back her work at the news network over the next several months and depart entirely in June. Amanpour didn’t give a reason for her departure, and CNN CEO Mark Thompson simply called it “the right time for her, both personally and professionally.” But Rory Gilmore’s professional role model’s decision to sign off comes as CNN gets a new parent company in David Ellison’s Skydance after its takeover of the network’s former parent Warner Bros. Discovery—a change Amanpour had previously expressed concerns about.

🚀 Japan sends a mission to get soil from a Mars moon. It won’t answer Bowie’s question about life on Mars, but Japan’s space agency launched a rocket yesterday, commencing a five-year mission aimed at landing a rover on Phobos, one of the planet’s two moons. The goal is to bring samples from the moon back to Earth. If successful, it’ll be the first mission to land on a Martian moon. Five countries’ space agencies are participating in the $578 million mission known as Mars Moons Exploration mission, or MMX. Scientists are hoping the samples, which are due to land in Australia in 2031, will help explain how the moon formed and by extension shed light on the origins of other moons and planets.—AR

LET’S TRY AGAIN NEXT YEAR

Saudis postpone ‘Davos in the desert’ amid attacks

Legs walking across a blue carpet that says Future Investment Initiative

Fayez Nureldine/Getty Images

Saudi Arabia is delaying its flagship event for wooing investors from next week to 2027 amid safety concerns, organizers said yesterday. The Future Investment Initiative summit—aka “Davos in the desert”—held yearly in the capital of Riyadh got rainchecked after attacks by Iran-backed Houthi militants on the city’s airport killed 18 people this month.

The venue deposit isn’t the biggest loss

The scrapping of the summit, which is typically attended by foreign finance VIPs and heads of state, is a hit to the Kingdom’s quest to fashion itself as a global hub for investment, AI, and tourism:

The event brought $50 billion in deals last year and has yielded $250 billion of commitments since its inception in 2017, per Saudi’s investment authority.
This year’s attendees were supposed to include a long list of Wall Street leaders, including JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon and Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon.

But…escalating Houthi attacks on Riyadh and other parts of the country had financiers questioning the wisdom of attending. Some CEOs reportedly canceled meetings, while other executives contemplated whether pulling out would offend the hosts.

The country could use foreign cash: The Iran war is disrupting Saudi Arabia’s oil exports, while the Houthis are targeting its cities after fighting between the militant group and Yemen’s Saudi-backed government resumed in July. Saudi’s economy is projected to shrink 3.6% this year.—SK

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DRINK OR DRAIN

Supreme Court to rule on bathtub alcohol

Illustration showing the Supreme Court building with home brewing supplies set up behind it.

Nick Iluzada

Nearly 160 years ago, the US government decided that you aren’t allowed to make hard liquor at home. Yesterday, the Supreme Court said it would reconsider your right to get twisted off basement whiskey, agreeing to hear a suit from a group of would-be home distillers from Texas.

For some quick drunk history, the federal government started taxing distilled spirits in the late 1700s to pay for the Revolutionary War (this was the first nationwide internal revenue tax). In 1868, the government banned home distillation altogether, arguing that the majority of home spirit-makers were evading taxation.

As anyone who’s tried their friend’s cousin’s moonshine knows, the ban didn’t fully stop DIY distillers, but it did put them at risk of $10,000 fines and up to five years in prison. With the SCOTUS case…

Home-distillery advocates hope to see these criminal consequences go away.
If the ban is overturned, spirit-makers would still have to pay a tax on what they distill, even if it’s for personal consumption.

The fate of the ban is unclear: In the Texas case, a federal appeals court deemed the home-distillery ban unconstitutional. But another federal appeals court upheld the law after hearing a similar lawsuit. The Supreme Court is expected to rule on the issue by next June.—ML

Reader Poll

Have you ever distilled your own liquor?

Yes, but don’t tell the feds.
No, but I might try if it were legal.
Nope. I have brewed my own beer.
Nah, I’ll stick to just mixing my own cocktails.
I don’t drink liquor.

Matty’s work-life balance

The home of cringe posts wants to curb the cringiest

Short animation of a mouse cursor pressing a blue button that says

Shannon May

On Tuesdays, the Brew’s Matty Merritt brings you the news you need to make life a little easier during your 9–5, 5–9, or OOO.

LinkedIn Editor-in-Chief Dan Roth has some advice for your next post: Don’t outsource it to ChatGPT. “I know you think you’re doing the right thing with your perfectly bulleted list and your hook at the top, and you followed all the advice from LinkedIn advisors across the internet,” Roth told CNN this week. “But what works is being human.”

In August, LinkedIn introduced the “seems like AI slop” button for users to flag egregious examples of AI-generated posts in their feeds.
The platform said the button was clicked more than 1 million times in the first two weeks alone. LinkedIn said its efforts decreased views of AI-classified content by 40%.

What’s going on over there? It seems as though LinkedIn’s classic “what B2B sales has taught me about X…” is pretty easy to churn out with a bot. Before the AI slop button’s release, a report from research firm Pangram found that over 40% of long-form posts on LinkedIn were generated by AI, compared with around 30% of content on X and Medium.—MM

NBA trivia

The NBA regular season tips off today, months after the New York Knicks won their first title in 53 years.

Which NBA team has won the most championships of all time?

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Answer

Boston Celtics with 18 (followed by the Los Angeles Lakers with 17).

Correction: Yesterday’s trivia question asked you to name the seven airports in the world that fly to every continent, but as many eagle-eyed readers pointed out (thank you!), we said every continent except Australia when we meant to say except Antarctica. We assure you that no kangaroos or penguins were harmed in the making of this error.

Word of the Day

Today’s Word of the Day is: remnants, meaning “traces that are left over after the main part has been used, destroyed, sold, or has disappeared.” Thanks to Julia from Albuquerque, NM, for a suggestion that stuck with us. Submit another Word of the Day here.

Written by Abigail Rubenstein, Dave Lozo, Sam Klebanov, Molly Liebergall, and Neal Freyman

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☕ A time to give