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|  |  | Thursday, October 23, 2025 | |  | | Photo by John Keeble/Getty Images | Good morning, Quartz readers! It’s Shannon Carroll with the Daily Brief. Today, Hilton and Delta are living the high life, pawn shops are cashing in on the economy, the foundation is cracking in Barbie’s dream house, and Sam Adams brewed a beer the law can’t stomach. | | HERE'S WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW | Tesla beat on sales but missed on
substance. Record deliveries lifted revenue, but margins slid to 18% as discounts, weaker credit sales, and rising costs left investors wondering what’s next. | Barbie’s world is boxed up. Mattel’s sales slipped and inventories swelled as Walmart and Target delayed shipments, a preview of how tariff jitters and tighter budgets could leave less room for a merry fourth quarter. | Apple is one good quarter from $4 trillion. With iPhone 17 demand running 14% ahead of last year and Services still compounding, the
company enters earnings week carrying both momentum and the burden of perfection. | Microsoft’s CEO just got a $96 million payout. Nadella’s 22% raise coincides with job cuts and restructuring, reinforcing the pattern of an AI-fueled cycle where cost discipline and executive rewards move in lockstep. | | | Sponsored |  | The “What’s for Dinner?” | If you’ve ever tried eating better, you know it’s not exactly easy. From buying expensive organic ingredients and oils to prepping, cooking, plating, and tracking, so much goes into a high-quality healthy meal that it can all be a little overwhelming – unless you have Forkful. Forkful offers the best of both worlds: A wide variety of
restaurant-quality meals fit for any diet, that are also made with the finest ingredients (think grass-fed beef, organic produce, and avocado oil). Add to that the fact that every dish is fresh, never frozen, prepared by chefs, and only takes 2-3 minutes to prepare, and you’ve just discovered your newest healthy eating hack. Ready to start eating better? | | |
| | SIGNS OF THE TIMES | The U.S. economy is having a Schrödinger moment — both thriving and on life support, depending on whether you believe
the spreadsheets or the pawn slips. On paper, GDP is humming, unemployment is near record lows, and investors are still flying high on AI euphoria. But with the government shutdown freezing reports on jobs and inflation, the official narrative has gone mute — and the unofficial one is getting loud. America’s real-time dashboard is now built from repo lots, pawn counters, and GoFundMe pages. Forget regression models; this is recession modeling.
Subprime
auto delinquencies are near record highs, a few lenders have already gone under, and the nation’s biggest pawn chains say business is booming. Gold has blown past $4,000 an ounce, and GoFundMe says campaigns for “essentials” such as rent and car payments have soared. Even the labor market’s glow is fading: Nearly half a million women have left the workforce this year under the strain of child care, layoffs, and return-to-office ultimatums. Economists may call all that anecdotal evidence, but everyone else calls it being
broke.
Every indicator that used to live in a spreadsheet now seems to have a human face. The stock charts say “expansion”; the people inside them say exhaustion. The shutdown will end and the data will return, but the story won’t change much — the U.S. economy is both fine and frayed, a prosperity propped up by optimism, overdrafts, and GoFundMe links that read like receipts. The economy is starting to feel less like a soft landing and more like a layaway plan for the American
dream. Quartz’s Alex Daniel has more on why people feel like they’re living paycheck to pawn
slip. | | A SUITE ESCAPE | Hilton’s profit is up, Delta’s seats are full, and the middle class has been permanently rebooked to standby. The travel boom is thriving, just not democratically. Both companies posted blockbuster third-quarter results,
driven not by a surge of budget travelers but by the enduring appetite of people who can still treat travel as leisure instead of logistics. What began as a broad post-pandemic rebound has quietly evolved into something narrower and more revealing: a premium economy with no economy attached.
Hilton’s quarter came with a record pipeline of new rooms, soaring profit, and a clear direction: upmarket. The company is adding high-end properties at a dizzying clip and reviving icons such
as the Waldorf Astoria for travelers who don’t blink at $20 cocktails. CEO Chris Nassetta calls it a “super-cycle” for premium demand, and he’s even found a strange bedfellow in AI: not the tech itself, but the infrastructure boom behind it. Every new data center and chip plant brings armies of engineers and consultants — and Hilton is betting they’ll all need somewhere plush to crash.
Delta’s story lands the same way. Premium seats and business travelers now make up 60% of its
revenue, up sharply from before the COVID-19 pandemic. The airline has become less of a people mover and more of a loyalty-and-AmEx machine for the upper crust. Both companies are minting money while mid-tier consumers stay grounded, mirroring a broader economy where those on top keep boarding first. The skies are clear for those at the top, the suites are full — but the rest of the country is still waiting at the gate. Quartz’s Catherine Baab has more on the high-end hustle. | | | Sponsored | | The “What’s for Dinner?” | If you’ve ever tried eating better, you know it’s not exactly easy. From buying expensive organic ingredients and oils to prepping, cooking, plating, and tracking, so much goes into a high-quality healthy meal that it can all be a little overwhelming – unless you have
Forkful. Forkful offers the best of both worlds: A wide variety of restaurant-quality meals fit for any diet, that are also made with the finest ingredients (think grass-fed beef, organic produce, and avocado oil). Add to that the fact that every dish is fresh, never frozen, prepared by chefs, and only takes 2-3 minutes to prepare, and you’ve just discovered your newest healthy eating hack. Ready to start eating better? | | |
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