In today’s newsletter I discuss how there’s a disconnect between the stock market and the economy, Tesla is spending more than ever on R&D and the buildout of their production facilities, Christopher Nolan‘s IMAX film “The Odyssey” opened HUGE, President Donald Trump's social networking company Truth Social just announced plans to sell access via its API to Wall Street clients, Jack Dorsey just launched a Slack and Teams group chat platform competitor for teams and their AI agents called Buzz, it just got cheaper to rent a yacht in the Mediterranean this Summer, lawmakers might be one step closer to getting rid of daylight saving time, and the PGA is finally making changes to the most boring games in the world IMO.

Let’s get into it!

If you’ve been following the stock market over the last year or so, you’d think the economy is doing great, but the two aren’t exactly related, and, as you can probably guess, their relationship status is complicated. Over that same time period, a growing disconnect has appeared, and now it’s weighing on both investors and consumers’ thoughts as the divide grows ever greater.

Hold on tight, because I’m about to get all economic on you. If you enjoy that sorta thing, feel free to geek out with me. If not, then you might want to skip ahead.

You see, the stock market and the broader economy measure two very different things. The stock market looks forward to future corporate profits and global revenue streams. Corporate profits expand quickly while broader economic indicators, like household savings or wage growth, remain flat. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) looks backward at output, wages, and local business transactions. The combined value of equity indexes, like the S&P 500, is nearly $75.3 trillion dollars. GDP measures the total value of all final goods and services produced inside a country, which in the U.S. is currently around $32.38 trillion dollars in annual economic output.

Does that clear things up? No, I didn’t think so. I’m guessing my explanation is about as clear as mud, right?

Well, let’s defer to an expert on the subject, and one of my journalistic idols, Kai Ryssdal, who popularized the phrase “The stock market is not the economy” just before the 2008 Financial Crisis. Kai Ryssdal can frequently be heard uttering that quote on the radio/podcast show Marketplace, which he’s hosted for the last 21 years. He uses the quote to explain how the broader economy measures actual past data like jobs, Gross Domestic Product, and consumer spending, while the stock market prices in future corporate earnings and investor expectations. This is Kai Ryssdal’s not-so-subtle way of pushing back against financial pundits who treat the daily ups and downs on Wall Street as an indicator of the financial health of everyday workers, small businesses, and households. Simply put, the stock market is composed of giant publicly traded companies that don’t represent every sector of Main Street, and therefore don’t represent the financial status of all Americans.

Paul Krugman, an American economist and 2008 Nobel laureate in Economic Sciences, once said "The relationship between stock performance—largely driven by the oscillation between greed and fear—and real economic growth has always been somewhere between loose and nonexistent."

That’s such a great quote! I so wish I had said that, but that’s why he’s Paul Krugman, and I’m a lowly content creator.

Today, too many people are looking at the stock market hitting record highs, thanks in large part to the AI boom, and are wondering why their personal finances, paychecks, and how they feel about the economy are so different from the market exuberance they hear on TV. They reckon they should be feeling enthusiastic and walking around feeling high every time the stock market is up, but that’s not how economics works. More people need to listen to Kai Ryssdal when he says “The stock market is not the economy,” and stop listening to financial pundits who are blowing sunshine up their butts telling them the economy is soaring just because the Dow Jones Industrial Average hits a new all-time high.

Tesla's push into robotaxis, AI, and humanoid robots isn’t cheap. Their capex spending more than doubled to $5.8 billion dollars for the 2nd quarter of 2026 as they expand their infrastructure investments. Total revenue topped analysts’ expectations at $28.24 billion dollars on the delivery of 480,126 vehicles. Tesla’s adjusted earnings per share dropped to $0.33 dollars per share against Wall Street targets of $0.49 dollars per share, and the stock sank $54.32, or -14.52%, during regular trading on Thursday, July 23.

Since I’m an early investor in Tesla, I don’t usually follow the stock's day-to-day moves, but this one hurt!

Tesla’s operating expenses surged 47% to $4.35 billion dollars to fund all their side projects I mentioned earlier, like robotaxis, AI, and humanoid robots. All this spending pushed Tesla’s free cash flow into negative territory, with a cash burn of $1.1 billion dollars during the 2nd quarter. The good news is that Tesla’s cash reserves stand at $43.52 billion dollars, so at least they still have money in the bank.

Elon Musk has said Tesla plans to spend over $25 billion dollars on manufacturing expansion, autonomous Cybercab production, and Optimus humanoid robot development. According to Tesla’s projections, they believe the automated taxi market could be a $1 trillion dollar market, and they anticipate the humanoid robot market to grow from $6.24 billion dollars in 2026 to over $165 billion dollars by 2034.

Tesla has also been busy scaling up their in-house battery manufacturing and solar panel production, and are confident in their decisions given that the global battery market is estimated to be $210 billion dollars in 2026, and is expected to grow to $469.49 billion by 2031. Tesla is also expanding their solar panel manufacturing capacity to tap into the current $616 billion dollar solar panel market as of 2026, which is estimated to grow to over $1.5 trillion dollars by 2034.

If Tesla is going to continue investing in robotaxis, AI, and humanoid robots, it's going to need every penny, and then some, of that $43.52 billion dollar cash reserves. Did someone say SpaceX merger?

In its opening weekend Christopher Nolan‘s “The Odyssey” brought in $124.50 million from 3,919 domestic theaters, and $139.6 million dollars from 73 international markets for a worldwide haul of $264.10 million dollars.

According to Variety “The Odyssey is “Adapted from Homer’s 3,000-year-old epic poem, “The Odyssey” stars Matt Damon as Odysseus, the king of Ithaca, and chronicles his seemingly eternal, perilous voyage home after the Trojan War. Damon leads the all-star ensemble of Tom Holland, Anne Hathaway, Robert Pattinson, Lupita Nyong’o, Zendaya, Charlize Theron, Elliot Page, Jon Bernthal and John Leguizamo. “The Odyssey” was written and directed by Christopher Nolan.”

‘The Odyssey’ marks Matt Damon’s 4th movie where he’s trying to get home, including ‘The Martian’, ‘Interstellar’, ‘Saving Private Ryan’, and now ‘The Odyssey’. It’s basically become its own genre for some movie fans.

My guess is “The Odyssey” will go on to make over $1 billion dollars worldwide when all the receipts are added up. This is probably one of the biggest and most defining movies of Matt Damon’s career, and it’s a pretty good bet Matt Damon and many of his castmates receive Oscar nominations - or at least they should!

This has “conflict of interest” written all over it. President Donald Trump's social networking company Truth Social just announced plans to sell access via its API to Wall Street clients for around $100,000 dollars a month via its Truth API, which will give institutional investors access to the President's messages milliseconds before others have access to the same information through normal channels. Not only does that give some market participants unfair access to information that the rest of the market doesn’t have, but it's also self-enrichment or profiteering, and is a constitutional violation of the Emoluments Clause, which bars the president from taking gifts, profits, or extra financial gains from domestic or foreign governments.

So yea, owning your own social network with an estimated 6.3 million users, and then charging investors on Wall Street $100,000 a month for split-second notification of your messages would seem to be a direct violation of the Emoluments Clause by President Donald Trump, but that doesn’t mean there’s any legal way to stop it. Also, in a laissez-faire free-market economy if there are institutions on Wall Street that want to pay $100,000 a month to get instant notifications of President Donald Trump’s messages, or “truths”, then people should be allowed to pay whatever they want for that access.

Does it feel a little sleazy and self-dealing? Yes. Is it illegal? Tough to say, but I’m guessing lawmakers and the courts will have something to say about this in the near future.

Jack Dorsey, a co-founder of Twitter and current CEO of Block, is taking on Slack with a group chat platform for teams and their AI agents called Buzz. This new product launch comes hot on the heels of the recent downsizing at Block, where he cut over 4,000 jobs, reducing the company’s headcount from a little over 10,000 employees to now just under 6,000 employees. Want to guess the reasoning for the job cuts? If you guessed “AI”, then you get a gold star!

Jack Dorsey aims to disrupt both tools by letting human employees work alongside digital agents that hold unique cryptographic identities.

Block’s Head of AI Capabilities, Bradley Axen, said their teams require open platforms where humans and software agents can collaborate with total data control that gives users full ownership. Block’s new software Buzz was built on the Nostr protocol, which Jack Dorsey himself donated 14 Bitcoin to in December 2022 in December 2022, which at the time were valued at around $245,000 dollars.

A recent industry research report showed that 31% of corporate leaders now treat AI as if it were a teammate, while nearly 25% of enterprise organizational charts officially list digital agents as part of their team. Agentic software adoption in the services industry expanded from 4.3% to 25%, while technology firms saw adoption rise to 30.8%.

It isn’t clear if Block’s Jack Dorsey is looking to compete directly with the undisputed industry leader Slack, which is owned by Salesforce, or Teams which is owned by Microsoft. I think it’s more of a situation where Jack Dorsey, a hacker at heart, saw an opportunity to build what he believes to be a more open team chat product, and he jumped at the opportunity because that’s who he is.

Good news for the rich! It just got cheaper to rent a yacht in the Mediterranean this Summer, and you can thank the War in Iran. This Summer’s rental bookings have dropped between 20%-30%. Some last minute renters are getting even bigger discounts by being patient and praying on anxious yacht charter companies who don’t make a dime if their ships don’t sail with wealthy customers onboard. So if you’re in the market for a $250K a week yacht charter this is the Summer for you!

Let me get this off my chest before I get into it: I hate daylight saving time. There, I said it. And I’ve been saying it for years.

Now, in a rare bipartisan act the U.S. House of Representatives has passed the Sunshine Protection Act by a vote of 308 to 117 to make daylight saving time permanent across the United States. President Donald Trump has said he fully supports the legislation, so here’s to hoping the Senate will also vote to end this insanity which is daylight saving time.

The bill hopes to stop the changing of clocks twice a year, which by all accounts costs the United States hundreds of millions of dollars each year. And it’s not just money that daylight saving time is costing us. Health studies show that clock adjustments increase heart attack risks by 24% during the spring transition, while national polls reveal that 56% of American adults prefer keeping the extra hour of evening light year-round.

The origin story of daylight saving time is a little muddled, with various people throughout history making the suggestion, either jokingly or in all seriousness no matter how absurd their rationale was. Benjamin Franklin wrote in a 1784 satirical essay, suggesting that Parisians could wake up earlier to save money on candles. It was William Willett who first campaigned for seasonal clock changes to preserve evening sunlight. And entomologist George Hudson, who studied bugs, wanted daylight saving time so he could collect bugs after work. You can’t even make these things up!

Germany became the first nation to enact daylight saving time on April 30, 1916, alongside Austria-Hungary, to save coal during World War I. The U.S. then said “hold my beer” and adopted daylight saving time in 1918 through the Standard Time Act, primarily as a wartime energy-conservation measure during World War I to save fuel and coal, which were both used for artificial lighting. It’s estimated that daylight saving time costs the U.S. economy approximately $672 million dollars a year due to health emergencies, workplace injuries, and traffic accidents tied to lost sleep.

If the Senate passes this bill, it would be the death blow to daylight saving time that we’ve all been waiting for, and we can finally move forward from this outdated 20th-century nonsense.

The golf world has been through a lot of ups and downs in the last few years, with the rise (and now possible fall) of LIV Golf, and golf enthusiasts’ changing attitudes toward the game. The PGA has been listening, and under the leadership of their CEO, Brian Rolapp, they’re finally making some changes. Starting in the 2028 season, the PGA will introduce a two-track system, with Track 1 featuring a 24 tournament calendar with a 120 player field that includes cuts, where elite golfers compete in 8 signature events that feature purses of $20 million dollars each alongside the major championships. Then there is Track 2 which includes 20 tournaments that feature 13 events played simultaneously with Track 1 and 7 standalone events. Confusing, I agree, but it’s the PGA’s attempt to offer more tournaments and events in more major markets. The end result should be bigger purses for more players in more markets than the PGA currently plays in.

As of 2026, the PGA is averaging between 3.44 million to 3.59 million viewers for their Sunday rounds thanks to a 15-20% year-over-year viewership increase. And this has had a knockon-effect that has contributed to a 41% increase in the number of people golfing nationwide since 2019.

By expanding into major markets like New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia, the PGA is hoping to increase not only their TV viewership, but also their market cap, which currently stands at $12 billion dollars.

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The Business Behind The News is written, edited, and published by Chris Thompson.