Daily Brew // Morning Brew // Update

May 20, 2026

Happy Hump Day. ICYMI, Founder Brew has arrived. Morning Brew’s newest newsletter gets into the nitty-gritty of building a great company: the tough calls, the trade-offs, and the lessons that don’t make the highlight reel. If you’re a founder, aspiring founder, startup investor, or just like reading about them, this newsletter’s for you. Subscribe here.

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

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

Morale at Meta reportedly in the gutter as layoffs loom
Your old Kindle losing Amazon’s support
Pizza Hut going full nostalgia mode

MARKETS

Nasdaq

25,870.71

-0.84%

S&P

7,353.61

-0.67%

Dow

49,363.88

-0.65%

10-Year

4.667%

+4.0 bps

Bitcoin

$76,858.79

+0.01%

Nvidia

$220.61

-0.77%

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 did an impression of your heart after the twist at the end of Arrival and sank yesterday, as inflation worries continue to weigh on markets. Even Nvidia was down for the day, ahead of the chipmaker reporting earnings today.

JUDGEMENT DAY

Meta workers are straight up not having a good time

Josh Edelson/Getty Images

The vibes at Meta headquarters right now aren’t just bad, they are downright rancid. Starting this morning, waves of emails will start arriving in nearly 8,000 employees’ personal inboxes, informing them that their jobs are terminated. Workers had been dreading the mass culling since it was first leaked by The Information in March, but Meta didn’t address the layoffs with staff until last month.

What’s the damage? The layoffs affect about 10% of the ~78,000 workforce. Earlier this week, the company said in a memo that it would also move 7,000 employees to AI-related initiatives and close 6,000 open roles.

Morale at the Facebook parent company is reportedly at an all-time low:

Things have gotten so bad that some employees are begging for the virtual pink slip and the 16 weeks minimum of severance, Wired reported.
An employee who worked at the company for over a decade told the San Francisco Standard, “I tend to cry in the shower.”
Another worker said large empty boxes began arriving at a few of the Menlo Park offices before today’s layoffs, and no one could give employees an answer as to why.

Layoffs are just the tip of the AIceberg

CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in 2022 that the layoffs were a correction to Covid-era overhiring, but the recent rounds are meant to free up funds for AI spending. The tech giant has pledged to spend as much as $145 billion this year on artificial intelligence.

In April, Meta rolled out a new program internally that tracks employees’ every move on their computers. The company said it would use the data to train AI models on “how people actually complete everyday tasks using computers.”

Big picture: Many Meta workers have pushed back, with some launching a petition urging execs to end the tracking program, and UK workers attempting to unionize. Meta, meanwhile, is reporting record profits.—MM

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WORLD

Tour de headlines

Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

Acting AG Blanche grilled by Senate over Trump’s $1.8 billion fund. Senators on both sides of the aisle probed acting Attorney General Todd Blanche with questions about President Trump’s plan to use tax dollars to pay people who claim they were victimized by the Biden administration. Joining Democrats in their criticism was Republican Sen. Susan Collins, who called the fund “highly irregular” and demanded more oversight. Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski said Blanche’s testimony raised more questions than it answered. Blanche said he would not rule out paying Jan. 6 rioters, including people convicted of assaulting police officers. “Anybody in this country can apply,” Blanche said.

Google announced a ton of new AI features. At Google’s annual developer conference yesterday, the tech giant revealed…*deep breath* a new 24/7 personal AI assistant called Gemini Spark; Docs Live, which allows users to generate documents with their voices; a new Gemini model called Omni that has advanced video generation abilities; another new, faster Gemini model; and a new AI-powered search box that the company says is the biggest change to its search function since it debuted 25 years ago. Got all that? CEO Sundar Pichai also said the company’s Gemini app now has 900 million monthly active users, more than double from a year ago.

An OpenAI co-founder is joining Anthropic. In what is essentially the nerd version of Kevin Durant leaving the Thunder to join the Warriors, OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy announced that he’s joining rival AI giant Anthropic to “get back to R&D.” In addition to doing two stints at OpenAI, Karpathy also worked at Tesla, where he led a team for its Autopilot system. It’s the latest splashy hire for Anthropic after the company poached a founding member of Elon Musk’s xAI earlier this month.—AE

CLOSED CHAPTER

Kindle users get crafty as old models stop working

Niv Bavarsky

Paperback diehards who claim to love lugging around Ron Chernow doorstoppers are getting vindicated. Today, Amazon is ending support for Kindle e-readers released before 2013—which prompted some users to load up on books or alter their devices.

While the titles already loaded on the gadget your parents gifted you in 2010 aren’t going anywhere, the owners of the ~2 million older Kindles still in use won’t be able to acquire new books from the Kindle Store.

The change affects more than a dozen models, including some Kindle Fire tablets, the Kindle Paperwhite 1st Generation, and the Kindle Touch.
Amazon is offering a 20% discount on new Kindles and a $20 credit for e-book purchases to those trading in qualifying older models.

But some aren’t rushing to Amazon.com

Many scrappy bookworms are now sidestepping the Amazon ecosystem by sideloading titles onto their vintage Kindles from designated apps on their computer.

Others are altering their Kindle’s software—a more technically involved process known as jailbreaking that may violate Amazon’s terms of service (though not always the law). This allows them to install alternative reading apps with more features and download books in formats that aren’t compatible with ordinary Kindles. You can see how people are doing it here.

Many users are angry…accusing Amazon of practicing planned obsolescence and exacerbating the issue of e-waste, with some saying they’ll switch to competing e-readers. Amazon currently controls 72% of the e-reader market.—SK

Letterboxd trivia

Movie reviews on the social platform Letterboxd are sometimes unhinged and often hilarious. See if you can figure out which movie is being discussed from the reviews below:

“Incredible how emily blunt plays a character called emily whose main characteristic is ‘blunt’”
“S(he’s) bro(ken)”
“Imagine being a kid at that orphanage and someone picked a talking mouse over you”
“Accidentally became important at work and it’s ruining my life” (Hint: It came out this year.)
“This happened to my buddy Eric”

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ANSWER

The Devil Wears Prada
Barbie
Stuart Little
Project Hail Mary
Joker

Word of the Day

Today’s Word of the Day is: nitty-gritty, meaning “the basic facts and important details.” Thanks to Faith from Charlotte, NC, for the suggestion. Submit another Word of the Day here.

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