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|  |  | Wednesday, October 22, 2025 | |  | | Angel Garcia/Bloomberg via Getty Images | Good morning, Quartz readers! It’s Shannon Carroll with the Daily Brief. Today, gold and silver have lost their sparkle, GM’s trucks kept guidance in gear, Tesla’s balance sheet will get a road test, and Walmart is carving up a Thanksgiving headline. | | HERE'S WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW | Netflix’s margins took a hit, but the story
didn’t. Ad sales doubled, pricing held, and free cash flow jumped, but a Brazilian tax bill stole the scene and reminded investors that even blockbuster margins can be rewritten. | GM’s old engine still purrs. Gas-powered trucks remain the company’s profit driver even as EV bets misfire, helping the automaker steer past tariffs and one-time charges to earnings that were higher than forecasted. | Less pop, more profit for Coca-Cola. Revenue rose 5% to $12.5 billion on the back of price hikes and Coke Zero’s 14% surge, masking the
fact that consumers in the U.S. and Asia are quietly tightening their wallets. | Hollywood’s latest drama stars Warner Bros. The company confirmed that it’s fielding unsolicited takeover interest from multiple bidders, sending shares up as Wall Street imagines a sequel to the Paramount proposal. | | | Sponsored |  | Finally, Better Hearing for Under
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| | THE MARKET'S GILT TRIP | After a year of gilded returns, the metals trade is finally losing its shine. Gold and silver — 2025’s favorite
hedges against uncertainty — crashed back to earth this week after a record run that turned old-fashioned hedging into a speculative frenzy. Gold had soared nearly 60% this year, silver more than 75%, before both fell hard on Tuesday as Shanghai raised margin requirements and investors rushed to bank profits, forcing rapid sell-offs that ricocheted across markets and sent gold down 6% and silver down nearly 8% in a day. Safe haven or not, the sell-off looked less like a panic and more like an overdue exhale from a market high on its own
security.
The spark may have come from Asia, but the fuel was everywhere. Commodities desks had been warning that the rally was “running a little hot,” a polite way of saying everyone was in the same trade. With inflation still sticky and global debt still absurd, gold became shorthand for caution — and then, paradoxically, for risk appetite itself. The stampede into bullion was so crowded that the first tremor set off a chain reaction, shaking loose the weakest hands and turning
hedgers into sellers.
Silver’s retreat mirrored gold’s, only flashier. The physical shortage that helped drive its rally remains unresolved, but traders no longer care about supply when price action tells the story. Hedge funds that built gold-and-silver exposure as a safety valve are now trimming both, a reminder that even “defensive” trades have a volatility curve. The case for precious metals hasn’t collapsed — geopolitical stress, dollar weakness, and central-bank buying still
underpin demand — but the myth of unshakable safety has. In 2025’s market, even fear trades like a growth stock. Quartz’s Brian O’Connell has more on the
gold rush that turned into a group chat panic. | | TESLA'S MODEL WHY | Tesla’s story has never been just about cars — it’s about convincing Wall Street that every sedan is a stepping-stone to
sentience. As it reports earnings after the bell on Wednesday, investors want less poetry and more math. Deliveries hit a record 497,000 in Q3, but margins, cash flow, and efficiency are the real scoreboard. A quarter built on tax-credit deadlines and price cuts might keep the assembly lines humming, but it doesn’t prove the company’s economics can drive themselves.
The bigger narrative, of course, is Musk’s: robotaxis, humanoid robots, and “physical AI” that turns factories into
algorithms. It’s a grand vision, but the market wants receipts. Free cash flow has fallen more than half since last year, and credit sales are fading. Tesla’s Europe business remains stuck in neutral, and in China, the company is steady but hardly soaring. Energy deployments are surging, but unit economics remain a mystery that investors will want spelled out. Even Tesla’s “cheaper” trims look more like cost control than accessibility. And the Cybertruck, meanwhile, is a sculpture of potential that few people are actually buying.
Still, analysts like Wedbush’s Dan Ives are holding out faith in a trillion-dollar future built on autonomy and Optimus. Others, who are less charitable, see this as a “show-me” quarter. With Musk pitching a robotaxi rollout and investors tallying cash, Tesla is once again stuck between revolution and revenue — a company trying to prove that you can build tomorrow’s dream without mortgaging today’s margin. Musk can say that Tesla is building the future, but investors still want to
know what it’s earning in the present. Quartz’s Shannon Carroll has more on how “physical AI” meets fiscal reality. | | | Sponsored | | Finally, Better Hearing for Under
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