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The Ascent

Good morning. Kiss/marry/kill: summer stone fruit edition.

  • Kiss: Peaches, obv
  • Marry: Rainier cherries
  • Kill: Any plum that doesn’t have red on the inside

Neal Freyman, Matty Merritt, Jamie Wilde

MARKETS

Nasdaq

12,059.61

S&P

3,998.95

Dow

32,036.90

10-Year

2.881%

Bitcoin

$23,199.73

Tesla

$815.12

*Stock data as of market close, cryptocurrency data as of 9:00pm ET. Here's what these numbers mean.

  • Markets: The planet may be getting hot, but so are stocks—the S&P posted its biggest three-day gain since May with a little help from Tesla’s big earnings beat on Wednesday.
  • Economy: All those layoff announcements are starting to show up in the economic data. Initial jobless claims rose last week to their highest level since November, showing that the Fed’s interest rate hikes are starting to put a chill on the labor market.

HEALTH

Amazon aims for 1-click checkup

Amazon pharmacy: Pill bottle labeled with Amazon signage Francis Scialabba

Amazon turned and coughed up $3.9 billion to buy One Medical, a primary care provider, in its biggest push yet into health care. It may not be long until your Prime membership comes with a complimentary physical.

What’s One Medical? A company that operates more than 180 medical offices across 25 US markets, offering both in-person and virtual medical services. When it went public as a unicorn in January 2020, it followed a similar trajectory of other high-flying startups: A huge spike when telehealth was in feverish demand, then an equally huge crash to fall well below its IPO price.

The deal for One Medical represents Andy Jassy’s first major acquisition as CEO of Amazon, showing that he’s willing to make bets on growth in certain areas even as he reins in costs in others.

So why is health care a priority?

As you know all too well from every time you pay a medical bill, health care is a massive industry. With a market size of $4 trillion, it accounts for about 20% of the entire US economy. And as Amazon looks to grow outside of its core areas, it sees potential in sending a digital shockwave through a medical industry that’s entangled in a complex web of insurance companies and government regulations.

Not that it’s even clear what a “core” area of Amazon is anymore. Besides its e-commerce marketplace, Amazon has tentacles in cloud services, grocery stores, entertainment, and many other sectors. Basically, we’re about to live in a world where one company owns the James Bond franchise…and also medical clinics.

But Amazon’s infatuation with health care isn’t new. It acquired the online pharmacy PillPack in 2018, and launched its own on-demand health care services one year later. Some projects, like its buzzy joint venture with Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan, collapsed, illustrating the challenges for anyone—even Bezos and Buffett—to break into the medical realm.

Those stumbles won’t stop Amazon, or Big Tech in general, from trying. Just this week, Apple released a 60-page report outlining why health care will be a major focus for the company going forward.—NF

        

TOGETHER WITH THE ASCENT

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Don’t believe us? Take a gander at these deets:

It’s no wonder this card was called “easily one of the best credit cards I’ve ever seen in my 15 years of finance by one of The Ascent’s expert analysts. 

Get yourself some of that cash back. Apply here

WORLD

Tour de headlines

Jan. 6 committee hearing Alex Brandon-Pool/Getty Images

Jan. 6 hearings wrap up for the summer. The House committee investigating the attack on the Capitol in January 2021 held its second prime-time hearing last night, which is intended to be its final hearing of the summer. The hearing focused on former President Trump’s inaction in the 187 minutes during which the riot took place, and his reluctance to declare the election “over.” At least 20 million people watched the first evening hearing in June.

Covid goes 2/2 against US presidents. President Biden tested positive for Covid-19 on Thursday, per an announcement from the White House. The 79-year-old commander in chief, who is twice vaccinated and twice boosted, is also receiving the antiviral drug Paxlovid that minimizes Covid symptoms. (Notably, when former President Trump got Covid in 2020, none of those medical interventions were available.) Biden tweeted that he was “keeping busy” and “doing great.”

The ECB joins the rate hike party. The European Central Bank just took a step it hasn’t made in more than a decade—it hiked interest rates. Saying it was the bank’s “time to deliver,” ECB President Christine Lagarde announced a rate increase of a half percentage point, which was more than expected. Inflation in the eurozone, the group of 19 European countries that use the euro as currency, hit 8.6% in June, a startling overshoot of the ECB’s 2% target.

CRYPTO

Insider trading is still insider trading on the blockchain

Seinfeld gif about pleading ignorance Seinfeld/Sony Pictures Entertainment via Giphy

A former Coinbase employee, his brother, and a friend were charged with wire fraud on Thursday in what prosecutors are calling the first cryptocurrency insider trading case.

How it went down: As a product manager on Coinbase’s asset listing team, Ishan Wahi knew when Coinbase would announce the addition of different cryptocurrencies to its exchange, which would cause those coins to surge in value. So Wahi allegedly tipped off his brother, Nikhil Wahi, and buddy, Sameer Ramani, to buy those coins before Coinbase’s announcement. Lather, rinse, and repeat for 14 listings and 25 assets, and the trio allegedly reaped at least $1.5 million.

To try to get away with it, Nikhil Wahi and Ramani made trades with accounts under other people’s names and stored funds in multiple anonymous wallets. But while the blockchain is anonymous, activity on it is publicly viewable, and savvy users notice unusual trades. In April, a popular crypto Twitter account posted a screenshot showing that someone had bought hundreds of thousands of a particular token a day before it was listed on Coinbase.

Zoom out: Federal prosecutors are holding the Wild West of crypto to the same legal standards as Wall Street. Just last month, a former employee at the NFT marketplace OpenSea was charged for using his insider knowledge of when NFTs would be listed on the platform’s homepage to profit.—JW

        

SOCIAL MEDIA

Facebook wants to be TikTok so badly

Facebook Illustration: Dianna “Mick” McDougall, Photo: Getty Images/oxygen

If your great-aunt wants her garden photos at the top of your feed, she’s going to have to learn Adobe Premiere Pro. That’s because Facebook announced a major makeover of its feed yesterday in order to capture a chunk of the burgeoning creator economy and its younger audience. Like every other social media company, it wants to grab the TikTok magic.

Users’ “Home tab” will now prioritize short-form, algorithmically recommended video content from creators, while family and friends’ posts will appear in a separate “Feeds tab.” Instagram is also adding more TikTok-like features to Reels, which already was the app’s TikTok clone.

That basically signals the end of the News Feed, reflecting a hard shift from Zuck’s dream of being a news hub. Since 2019, Facebook has paid $10+ million a year to news orgs for content without paywalls. But on Tuesday, Facebook’s parent company Meta told employees that it would be reallocating resources from Facebook News and Bulletin, its independent creator newsletter platform that was just released last year, to new video-focused creator products.

Bottom line: Facebook is working to transform its leaking core social media platforms while it waits for Zuck’s VR glasses to get better. The company reported its first daily user loss in its history (18 years) last February.—MM

        

GRAB BAG

Key performance indicators

Freddie Mercury Fox Photos/Getty Images

Stat: Queen just became the first musical act to sell 7 million copies of an individual album in the UK. That record, the band’s first Greatest Hits collection released in 1981, is now owned by one in every four UK households, according to the Official Charts Company. Honestly, for an album with “Another One Bites the Dust,” “Don’t Stop Me Now,” “Bohemian Rhapsody,” and “We Are the Champions” on it, that still feels low.

Quote: “Harry Styles and the Cult of Celebrity: Identity, the Internet, and European Pop Culture”

That’s the name of a course being offered next spring by Texas State University Honors College. By exploring the singer’s meteoric rise on the back of vanilla music, the students will try to “understand the cultural and political development of the modern celebrity.”

Read: Can pickleball save America? (New Yorker)

QUIZ

Short quiz summer

Weekly news quiz

The feeling of getting a 5/5 on the Brew’s Weekly News Quiz has been compared to saying your friend’s joke louder and everyone cracking up.

It’s that satisfying. Ace the quiz.

BREW'S BETS

Really good eats: Check out the 50 best restaurants in the world. (No. 1 is located in a soccer stadium.)

The Office easter eggs. Last week, Lego announced a new set based on The Office. Here are all of the sneaky references to the show included in the set.

Last call: Piestro’s robotic kiosks serve artisanal pizza 24/7, in under three minutes. What’s amore? They help brands in the $155b pizza industry triple profit margins by cutting costs. Invest before the opportunity ends 7/28.*

We wanna set you up: To help you connect with your ideal audience, you need the ideal marketing solution—and we partnered with StackAdapt to make it happen. Explore our interactive dating experience to see who your perfect match is. Click here to be swept off your feet.*

Money on your mind? Season 3 of Fresh Invest, our podcast with Fidelity®, drops soon, and we want to answer all your investing-related questions. Share your thoughts in this quick survey and you may win a $250 gift card.*

*This is sponsored advertising content.

WHAT ELSE IS BREWING

  • Snap shares plunged 25% in post-market trading after it delivered dismal Q2 results. Due to a deteriorating digital ad market, the company’s quarterly sales grew at their slowest pace since it went public in 2017.
  • A young man in Rockland County, NY, was confirmed as the first US polio case since 2013.
  • The House passed a bill to protect access to contraceptives. It’s another move intended to enshrine rights into federal law should the Supreme Court revisit old rulings.
  • A music venue in Minnesota canceled a stand-up show by Dave Chappelle over his previous controversial comments, and said another venue would host it instead.
  • Mattel will make rocket ship toys in a partnership with SpaceX.

FROM THE CREW

The only newsletter finance professionals need

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If you work in finance, you know how quickly the industry can change. Good thing that staying on top of new trends is our specialty. Introducing CFO Brew, a biweekly Morning Brew newsletter focused on global finance. Subscribe here.

GAMES

The puzzle section

Can’t believe we’ve waited this long to unleash the famous “Zebra Puzzle” on you. First appearing in Life International magazine in 1962, it’s often attributed to Albert Einstein or Lewis Carroll, but just as likely is that it was created by neither.

Anyhoo, the puzzle starts off with 15 facts:

  1. There are five houses.
  2. The English person lives in the red house.
  3. The Spanish person owns the dog.
  4. Coffee is drunk in the green house.
  5. The Ukrainian person drinks tea.
  6. The green house is immediately to the right of the ivory house.
  7. The Old Gold smoker owns snails.
  8. Kools are smoked in the yellow house.
  9. Milk is drunk in the middle house.
  10. The Norwegian person lives in the first house.
  11. The person who smokes Chesterfields lives in the house next to the person with the fox.
  12. Kools are smoked in the house next to the house where the horse is kept.
  13. The Lucky Strike smoker drinks orange juice.
  14. The Japanese person smokes Parliaments.
  15. The Norwegian person lives next to the blue house.

What you have to figure out is: Who drinks water? And who owns the zebra?

Some things to note: The houses are all painted different colors and lived in by a person of a different nationality. These people own different pets, drink different beverages, and smoke different cigarettes.

Office Influencers | ‘Good Work’

Office Influencers | ‘Good Work’

How can companies diversify their revenue streams during a recession? With views, likes, and engagement, of course. How do you achieve this? Easy, make all of your employees influencers. Watch now.

For more from the Brew:

Angie Nwandu started The Shade Room in 2014 with nothing but an Instagram account and a love of celebrity gossip. Today, it’s a media empire that covers culture, politics, television, and more. Listen to or watch our interview with Angie.

Need tips on making the perfect TikTok? Future Social explains what you can learn from this video about...tomato sauce?

ANSWER

Answer: The Norwegian person drinks water and the Japanese person has a zebra. Here’s a solution.

✤ A Note From Fidelity Investments

Disclosure: Fidelity is a registered trademark of FMR LLC

         

Written by Neal Freyman, Matty Merritt, and Jamie Wilde

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