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Big tech’s scary week, plus more scary stories for your weekend! 
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Hey there, welcome to the Halloweekend. We’re covering spooky jobs, giant skeletons, candy eek-onomics and more in today’s newsletter, but first we have to talk about a very scary day for tech stocks.

Alphabet saw its biggest-ever single day loss this week, and its peers fell too over concerns about artificial intelligence spending. Intel shares were among the worst hit, they’re down more than 28% today.

It’s a stunning drop, and one that concerns you: Remember, the government took a 10% stake in Intel last year, and most Americans’ retirement accounts are exposed to big AI players. Marketplace’s Caleigh Wells explains what’s going on. — Tony Wagner, newsletter editor
A stock trader slaps his forehead.
Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
What’s driving this week’s tech selloff?
Investors are getting jittery about how much Alphabet, Meta and others are worried about AI spending and how other parts of their business are supporting it.
It was a bad week for Big Tech.

Google’s parent company, Alphabet, lost $500 billion in market value on Thursday following a rough third quarter earnings report.

More tech giants followed today: Meta reported a negative free cash flow, and its stock dropped, along with Microsoft and Amazon. It was Intel’s worst day on the stock market since 1974.

What struck Daniel Newman, CEO of the Futurum Group, was just how fast these companies took a turn for the worse.

“Monday, Tuesday, everyone was smiling,” he said. “Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, everybody was crying.”

Newman said that all these companies invest a lot in AI — but that wasn’t the problem.
“SpaceX, Meta, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, all actually performed extremely well inside their cloud businesses,” he said, “but interestingly enough, we started to see some cracks inside other parts of the businesses.”
READ MORE


 
News you should know
Let’s do the numbers
  • So, yes, Wall Street had its worst day in months thanks to this tech selloff. The S&P 500 closed 1.8% lower today, the Dow lost 1.1% and the tech-heavy Nasdaq composite tanked 2.9%.

  • We didn’t get into it above, but Reddit had a bad day too. Shares fell 29% after the “front page of the internet” reported a dim earnings outlook, and said it will close itself off to prevent AI scraping.

  • Hackers stole $6.3 billion from the crypto exchange Binance, the biggest heist of its kind ever recorded. Some issuers were able to freeze the funds, and Binance has frozen withdrawals. 
The labor market
  • The cost of employing a worker rose 0.8% during the third quarter, according to new data released this morning, a slight deceleration from Q2. Wage growth is down, while healthcare premiums are way up.

  • Microsoft offered buyouts to about a quarter of its workforce, 60,000 people, this week as it cuts costs for AI. Asking employees to leave, rather than cutting positions, has its pros and cons for both sides.
A woman with a flashlight shining up on her face tells a
Click hear our producer Alice’s money horror story.
 
🎃 Happy Halloween!
  • Our podcast “This Is Uncomfortable” has a whole series of money horror stories: We’ve got sleep-shopping, spooky scams and more. Listen if you dare.

  • We’ve also interviewed people with some eerie jobs: A ghost tour guide, a graveyard groundskeeper and the tech guy for haunted houses.

  • Horror is big business for the film and book industries. It’s also big business for Home Depot: The store’s 12-foot skeleton has become a bone-afide Halloween tradition, selling out every year despite scary tariffs, quadrupled production and a gang of imitators. 
No paywalls, no clickbait, no AI summaries
Just the best business journalism, free for all. If that matters to you, please help support our work.
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A man looks at an apple orchard.
Brian Smith started Solebury Orchards in 1985. This is the first time in 41 years that he’s lost nearly his entire apple crop. (Samantha Fields/Marketplace)
QUOTE OF THE DAY
“It was a devastating year. The apple crop was pretty much 100% gone … The peach crop, I think across 10 acres, we saw actually two peaches.”
— Brian Smith of Solebury Orchards in New Hope, Pennsylvania
Temperatures whipsawed from 80-some degrees down to below freezing last April, an unseasonable shift that killed off fruit across much of the mid-Atlantic, Northeast, and Midwest. Pennsylvania was hit particularly hard, and farmers like Smith are paying for it now, when tourists come to pick their own apples and leave disappointed.
HEAR MORE


An info graphic shows how much united prices of candy corn, skittles and Starburst have changed since 2020. 100% for candy corn and 64% for fruit candy.
Check out more numbers on our Instagram.
Final note
Scary-high inflation
Candy and gum prices have grown 47% since the pandemic, outpacing the consumer price index. But depending on what you buy, you might be getting an inflation/shrinkflation double-whammy: A more expensive bag with way less candy in it.

We spot-checked a few prices for you, and asked experts what’s been going on with candy prices these past six years. And yes, the Strait of Hormuz plays a role. Boo!
READ MORE
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