October 21, 2026

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Happy Hump Day. Do you know why it’s called Wednesday? The name is derived from the Old English Wōdnesdæg, which means “Woden’s Day.” Woden was the Anglo-Saxon equivalent of the Norse god Odin.

Over centuries, Wōdnesdæg evolved into Wednesday, which may be easier to pronounce, but, for some, still not any easier to spell.

—Matty Merritt, Sam Klebanov, Dave Lozo, Adam Epstein, Neal Freyman

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

The priciest holiday travel season in years
Whether business schools should be abolished
Jay-Z picking Jay-Z for the Super Bowl halftime show

Markets

Nasdaq

26,424.82

-0.02%

S&P

7,712.57

+0.28%

Dow

52,495.88

+1.02%

10-Year

5.117%

-2.0 bps

Bitcoin

$82,681.14

+0.94%

$77.09

-6.84%

Data is provided by

*Stock data as of market close, cryptocurrency data as of 5:00pm ET. Here's what these numbers mean.

Markets: Stocks were mixed yesterday as investors awaited several big earnings reports (more on those later). What wasn’t mixed was the market’s reaction to GM’s Q3 financials. Despite beating Wall Street’s revenue expectations, the Corvette maker fizzled because it tightened its full-year outlook amid fuel costs pressures.

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DECK YOUR OWN HALLS

Holiday travel could be the priciest in a decade

Illustration of two roller bag suitcases sitting in the middle of a snowstorm with snow piling up on them. Dollar signs are mixed in with the flurries of snow falling down.

Nick Iluzada

Everyone is getting coupon books for Secret Santa this year. Holiday air travel is shaking out to be its most expensive in 10 years, according to Hopper’s 2026 Holiday Travel Index. The average domestic round-trip flight for Thanksgiving is hovering around $402, a 31% jump from last year, while Christmas flights cost $452, up 23%.

What’s causing the surge? The biggest culprit is the ballooning cost of jet fuel. The Iran war has rapidly driven up energy prices: The average monthly spot price for jet fuel is at $4.50 per gallon, a 91% increase from February, before the US and Israel launched attacks on Iran. United Airlines cut its profit outlook yesterday for this year because of fuel prices.

Airlines are betting that you’ll still pay

Delta CEO Ed Bastian told analysts this month that there has been “limited amount of resistance” to price increases, likely because the top 40% of US households (most of Delta’s customers) have more money than they did a few years ago.

There are a few things you can do to try and protect your wallet during the holidays besides the old hack of buying flights in incognito mode. (And AI assistants may cause more grief than they’re worth.)

Book flights three to five weeks in advance, so for Thanksgiving, that’s…now. Travel site Kayak found that airfare jumped 16% the week before Thanksgiving and 21% during the week of Turkey Day.
Avoid high-traffic days if you can, or even fly on the holiday itself. Sunday, Nov. 29 is expected to be one of the busiest and most expensive travel days of the year: A round-trip flight returning Sunday averages about $604 but drops to $473 with a Monday flight home.
Flying direct and booking a flight departing before 9am can also decrease the chance of expensive delays and last-minute changes.

It could continue into 2027. Ryanair’s CEO warned yesterday that fuel costs could push European fares up by another 20% over the next year. —MM

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World

Tour de headlines

Photo illustration of an old CRT TV with a view of a big Netflix sign on the screen with CRT glitches.

Morning Brew Inc., Photos: Adobe Stock

📺 Things are not so chill at Netflix right now. Days after announcing sweeping layoffs and axing top content executives, Netflix reported Q3 earnings yesterday, and the news didn’t get much better. The streaming giant posted its slowest revenue growth in three years and projected that growth would continue to wane for the fourth quarter in a row. In a letter to shareholders, the company acknowledged investor concerns about declining viewer engagement, but said the metric “remains healthy” and it’s “confident” it will reaccelerate user viewing time on the app. Worries over engagement and increased competition have shed 44% off Netflix’s stock price in a year, though it remains the biggest streaming platform in the world with more than 325 million global subscribers.

🏚️ Pending home sales plummet to a record low. It’s a day that ends in “Y,” so that means there’s more bad housing news. Pending home sales, which measures the number of homes under contract, fell to the lowest level since records began in 2001, according to the National Association of Realtors. Meanwhile, homebuilder sentiment plunged to its lowest reading since 2012, the group said. The new data arrives as mortgage rates and building costs continue to rise: As of last week, the average 30-year fixed mortgage rate was 7.4%, per Freddie Mac. Goldman Sachs projects that the already frigid housing market will freeze even more in 2027 as inflation and the Iran war push up borrowing costs.

🚀 SpaceX had an eventful earnings day. The aerospace manufacturer, which also owns xAI and operates Starlink satellites, beat Q3 revenue expectations and posted its first profit as a public company. SpaceX also said it spent slightly less than Wall Street’s expectations on AI (which the company is now calling “Super Intelligence” in accordance with President Trump’s wishes). During the company’s earnings call, Elon Musk said SpaceX and Tesla had formed committees to discuss the possibility of a merger. He said a tie-up of his two companies was not guaranteed but that he sees “a lot of merit in combining the companies.” Right before the call, the Wall Street Journal reported that Musk ordered last week’s slowdown of Starlink technology inside Ukraine that the country said weakened its ability to conduct military operations against Russia.—AE

NONE OF THEIR BUSINESS

B-school prof says it’s time to abolish b-schools

Exterior of Judge Business School at University of Cambridge with gate in foreground

Education Images/Getty Images

Chomping down on the hand that feeds him, Cambridge University business school professor Chris Marquis argued that business schools shouldn’t exist, in a New York Times op-ed published this week.

Marquis, who has also taught at Harvard and Cornell, claims that unlike law or medical schools, which teach students to maximize social good, MBA programs prioritize minting high-paid managers singularly focused on profit.

He cites research from Nobel-winning economist Daron Acemoglu suggesting that firms run by MBAs tend to redistribute profits from workers to shareholders, while not growing faster.
Marquis slammed b-school case studies, saying they oversimplify reality and omit negative facts about companies, while promoting buzzy management fads rather than evidence-based insights.

He proposed replacing MBAs…with multidisciplinary business programs that examine issues through a broader lens, incorporating “questions of history, democracy and ecological limits.”

There’s plenty of pushback

For instance, Copenhagen Business School professor Nicolai J. Foss seconded many of Marquis’s b-school criticisms, but argued that it might not be realistic to teach managers to prioritize social benefit, which is difficult to define and measure. He also questioned the op-ed’s implication that profit-seeking activities are divorced from producing societal value.

Regardless…the financial return on investment from many MBA programs (based on tuition and the pay bump graduates can expect) has declined over the past year, per Bloomberg’s calculations.—SK

Reader Poll

Should business schools be abolished?

No, they’re still valuable.
Not abolished, but they need reform.
Don’t care. Leave me out of it.
Yes. MBAs, begone!

Bad timing

Trouble came despite the company’s ballooning sales and strong IPO expectations:

Elice’s revenue tripled for the first half of 2026, compared with the same period a year ago.
The oversubscribed IPO raised $150 million for plans to build modular data centers for AI.

But Elice’s debut stock price was set before revenue growth slowed at AI labs and concerns about heavy borrowing got investors to dump shares of debt-saddled data center upstarts like Coreweave. Analysts say this could mark the end of the optimistic era when even a sneaker company pivoting to AI saw its stock soar.

Some said nevermind: The rout in recent weeks got several AI hardware firms to postpone their IPO plans, including Nvidia-backed Firmus and Blackstone-backed AirTrunk.—SK

Music trivia

According to a 2021 analysis, what is the most popular song on “Halloween” and “spooky” Spotify playlists?

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Answer

“Monster Mash” by Bobby Pickett

Word of the Day

Today’s Word of the Day is: laments, meaning “to express sorrow or deep regret.” Thanks to Matt from Fort Belvoir, VA, for the suggestion. Submit another Word of the Day here.

Written by Adam Epstein, Matty Merritt, Sam Klebanov, Dave Lozo, and Neal Freyman

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