July 10, 2026

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Happy Friday. Yesterday, Hasbro launched “Blooms by Play-Doh,” which is not an elaborate 30 Rock joke but rather a real thing the toymaker is selling to cater to adults. Using the same compound you used when you were five to construct rainbow turds, Blooms is instead “an elevated way to craft realistic floral arrangements,” the company said.

Finally, a way to apologize to your partner for breaking their Easy-Bake Oven.

—Sam Klebanov, Molly Liebergall, Dave Lozo, Adam Epstein, Holly Van Leuven

Markets

Nasdaq

26,206.89

+1.30%

S&P

7,543.64

+0.81%

Dow

52,487.41

+0.27%

10-Year

4.539%

-3.0 bps

Bitcoin

$63,150.87

+1.76%

AstraZeneca

$178.4

-5.75%

Data is provided by

*Stock data as of market close, cryptocurrency data as of 4:30pm ET. Here's what these numbers mean.

Markets: Stocks jumped yesterday, as investors awaited the US trading debut of South Korean chipmaker SK Hynix (more on that below). But AstraZeneca couldn’t get in on the fun after a clinical trial for a heart disease drug missed its targets.

DOWN MEMORY LANE

Get ready to learn SK Hynix, buddy

Morning Brew Inc., Photos: Adobe Stock

Wall Street AI bulls are more hyped than a teen who is about to see BTS perform live. Americans are getting the ability to invest in South Korea’s second-most-valuable company today as SK Hynix, a $1 trillion memory chipmaker, lists on the Nasdaq, seeking to amplify the windfall from its central role in the AI supply chain.

Though memory chip stocks (including SK Hynix’s shares listed in Korea) have dipped in recent days, its stock is still up more than 600% in the past year. Bloomberg reported that preliminary orders for its shares exceeded supply by seven times, a sign that many US investors are bullish on its growth spurt.

Memory manna

SK Hynix’s bread and butter is supplying advanced memory chips—a vital ingredient in AI data centers—to customers like Nvidia. Because the scramble for advanced memory chips has also pushed up prices for its more basic products used in smartphones and PCs, SK Hynix’s profits surged almost fivefold in the first quarter of 2026.

While analysts say memory chip demand booms are prone to busts, they expect the memory crunch to persist until at least 2027. And access to the deep pockets of American investors will give SK Hynix financial fuel to keep growing supply:

The company is looking to raise around $28 billion for aggressive expansion in South Korea and the US, including the construction of a chip factory in Indiana.
But analysts warn that it might take years for the new factories to start churning out chips.

The IPO gives Americans another option on the memory menu besides SK Hynix’s stateside competitor, Micron, and its biggest South Korean rival, Samsung. Some analysts note that SK Hynix’s initial stock price may be lower than Micron’s, given the different expected earnings of the two companies.

Looking ahead...SK Hynix’s fortunes are expected to be a mirror for the AI boom overall. The listing will also gauge interest for other major upcoming IPOs, like those of Anthropic and OpenAI.—SK

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World

Tour de headlines

funeral procession for Ayatollah Ali Khamenei

Atta Kenare/Getty Images

🇮🇷 Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei buried in his hometown. The burial in Mashhad, Iran’s second-largest city, took place early this morning local time, marking the conclusion of processions that began on Saturday. The US and Iran were expected to engage in talks toward a final deal after Khamenei’s funeral. While this week’s incidents between the two nations led President Trump to say the ceasefire was “over,” he also said he would allow negotiations to continue. Iran’s foreign minister said in a post on Telegram that he had held a phone call with Pakistan’s army chief, who is one of the war’s main mediators.—HVL

💻 Meta says its new AI model is really good at coding. In a bid to catch up to Anthropic and OpenAI, Meta announced Muse Spark 1.1, an AI model that “improved substantially” on coding performance vs. the previous version, the Facebook parent company said. CEO Mark Zuckerberg told Bloomberg that pricing for the model will be “very aggressive and attractive,” calling the cost of rival products “very extreme.” Elsewhere in the AI-verse, Anthropic launched its version of Spotify Wrapped for Claude, and OpenAI released GPT-5.6.—AE

🏚️ Home sales unexpectedly fell in June. Sales of existing homes in the US slipped 2.4% despite economists projecting a 0.7% increase, the Wall Street Journal reported. The national median home price also rose to $440,600—an all-time high. The data puts a damper on what had been a relatively strong spring for the housing market, with easing mortgage rates from the winter suggesting that it was emerging from a yearslong slump. But the war in Iran has contributed to rates once again surging. Economists have now adjusted their 2026 forecast down from 4.13 million home sales to 4.10 million, though that’s still a 1% improvement from last year.—AE

GOING UP?

A near-collapse looms over the office-to-apt boom

Pfizer building in NYC that nearly collapsed

Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images

An increasingly popular way to ease the housing crisis just developed some cracks. Some financiers are rethinking their involvement in office-to-apartment conversions after the largest US project of this kind risked partial collapse earlier this week, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Officials stabilized the former Pfizer headquarters that gave midtown Manhattan a major scare, but enthusiasm for future conversion projects could be on shakier ground. The WSJ spoke with infrastructure- and real estate experts, who now expect to see:

More expensive builders’ insurance and stricter regulatory reviews, which could cause monthslong project delays.
Softer appetites for complex office conversions. With the lead developer planning to add floors, a rooftop pool, and other expansions to the Pfizer building, its steel beams buckled under the added weight from the widening of ~15 upper levels, the developer told the WSJ.

That being said…one of the project’s main lenders is still “very bullish” on office-to-residential conversions, he told the WSJ. Similarly, others consider the near-collapse to be a mere anomaly that won’t foil future conversion plans.

Zoom out: The US started this year with ~90,000 new units in progress from office-to-apartment conversions—a 28% increase from last year, according to RentCafe. New York City commands the biggest share of that pipeline.—ML

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MORE LIKE CHEAT GPT

Did students at Brown use ChatGPT to ace tests?

A student walks on the campus of Brown University.

Getty Images

In the scandal heard ’round the Ivy League, Brown University economics professor Roberto Serrano accused his students of using AI to cheat on a take-home exam, and said the school was “meek” when presented with evidence.

And that evidence includes an abnormally large number of students with a masterful understanding of welfare economics and social choice theory:

Serrano’s class swelled from the usual 30 pupils to 86 after announcing his course would have take-home exams.
The average score on the take-home midterm was 96%, when it typically fell between 65%–80%.
Serrano alerted students to his AI suspicions and decided to make the final in-person and worth 80% of the final grade.
The average score on the final was a “historic low” of 48.6%.

A university spokesperson told Inside Higher Ed that Serrano still “has not provided the necessary details” for the school to take action.

Serrano decided to administer the take-home tests in response to students expressing anxiety over being in a classroom following a mass shooting on campus during finals week last December.

A worrying trend: In a recent survey, 29.9% of Princeton students admitted to cheating with AI on an exam or assignment. A New York Times essay from a recent Stanford graduate said AI has become a “fact of life” at the school.—DL

Reader poll

Be honest, have you ever cheated on a test?

Yep.
Can’t remember, but probably at some point.
I don’t think so.
Never!

Dave’s sports desk

Yahoo is launching college fantasy football

Nick Iluzada

On Fridays, the Brew’s Dave Lozo looks at a sports business story that says a lot more than just the final score of a game.

Starting this fall, everyone can have a fresh reason to root against Notre Dame. Yahoo Sports announced yesterday that it’s launching a version of fantasy football with college teams and players.

The new way to get mad at college students comes after Yahoo reported a record number of fantasy football users last season. The college format will have slight differences compared to the NFL version:

Only schools from the Power 4 conferences (Big 10, SEC, Big 12, ACC) and independent Notre Dame are eligible.
You can draft an entire team’s offense and rack up points with Georgia when they play nobodies the first two weeks.

There isn’t an official gambling aspect to Yahoo’s offering, as individual player props on NCAA athletes are restricted in most states. But nothing prevents users from playing for prize money with friends.

More ad revenue: Yahoo said that Coca-Cola will be integrated “throughout the experience.”—DL

Friday trivia

Move a single letter from one word to the other to make a pair of synonyms (or near synonyms).

1. Rode / Can

2. Font / Farce

3. Tory / Stale

4. Self / Shill

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Answer

Rod / Cane
Front / Face
Story / Tale
Shelf / Sill

(Source)

Word of the Day

Today’s Word of the Day is: sill, meaning “a flat, horizontal piece, usually of wood, forming the base of the frame of a window.” Thanks to Faj from Chicago, IL, for the suggestion. Submit another Word of the Day here.

✢ A Note From Chase

Disclaimers:

Home lending products provided by JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A. Member FDIC. Equal Opportunity. For full product disclosures, visit chase.com/afford.

Written by Adam Epstein, Sam Klebanov, Molly Liebergall, Dave Lozo, and Holly Van Leuven

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