(NEW YORK) — Greta Gerwig’s Barbie defied a sluggish pandemic recovery at movie theaters to rake in $155 million domestically over its opening weekend.
The haul made it the highest-grossing debut of 2023 and the top contributor to the fourth-largest weekend at the box office in the U.S. of all time.
At first glance, a comedy based on a children’s toy and bathed in pink may not fit the mold for a blockbuster at a time when superhero movies reign.
However, the longstanding and widely appealing resonance of the toy offers a unique advantage for a film that capitalizes with a fresh perspective from Gerwig and an immense marketing campaign promising summertime escape, analysts told ABC News.
“It’s the right movie at the right time,” Daniel Loria, editorial director and senior vice president of content strategy at BoxOffice.com, told ABC News.
A top reason, analysts said, is the cultural prominence of the 64-year-old “Barbie” brand, which transcends generations and geographies. According to Mattel, “Barbie” has 99% brand awareness worldwide.
“This is one of those movies that a grandma, mother and daughter can all go to together and enjoy,” Ayalla Ruvio, a professor of marketing at Michigan State University’s Broad College of Business who studies consumer behavior, told ABC News.
“The brand has strong nostalgic value,” she added. “It doesn’t matter how old people are — 30, 40, 60 — they all think the movie is targeted toward them.”
The mass appeal of the intellectual property, or IP, risked giving rise to a “generic film” but movie studio Warner Bros. realized the work needed to “have something to say to bring in an audience,” Loria said.
By choosing Gerwig, Loria added, the studio drew upon the creative artistic vision she displayed in previous independent films, such as Lady Bird.
“Audiences are willing and happy to go see IP films as long as they have some creative touch from a filmmaker behind them,” Loria said. “That’s precisely what Barbie and Greta Gerwig were able to do.”
On top of that, the movie benefited considerably from a relentless marketing campaign that began months before the film’s release, analysts said.
Barbie took part in more than 100 crossover product advertisements, allowing the brand to reach consumers of everything from Xbox to yogurt, Sheri Lambert, a marketing professor at Temple University, told ABC News.
While some of that blitz was likely lost in “clutter,” it contributed to an engaging, multi-pronged outreach campaign that made the brand nearly inescapable in the lead-up to the release, she added. Many consumers welcomed the pull toward Barbie, she added.
“We know from all of our marketing textbooks that emotion sells,” Lambert said. “It’s goofiness, it’s fun. It takes you back to your childhood and playing with things.”
To Lambert, the standout marketing tactics included selfie filters, pop-up activities featuring human-size Barbie boxes and pink double-decker buses in London.
Barbie was not the only high-profile debut over the weekend. Christopher Nolan’s R-rated Oppenheimer pulled in $80.5 million at the domestic box office, making it the first weekend in U.S. movie history with one film at more than $100 million and another over $80 million, Loria said.
The twin releases helped create a sense of destination viewing at theaters over the weekend, softening consumer habits hardened during the pandemic that treat the trip to the theater as a rare outing for individual, sought-after films.
“What we saw with Barbie and Oppenheimer this weekend was people talking about going to the movies rather than a movie,” Loria said.
Still, the top performer made itself known, Lambert said, referencing a plot point in Barbie in which she travels away from home and into human society.
“She’s coming out into the human world while we are definitely going into Barbie Land now,” Lambert said.
Rafael Henrique/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
(NEW YORK) — The signature blue bird perched atop social media platform Twitter vanished on Sunday as part of a company rebrand under a new name: X.
The revamp marks the latest change enacted by billionaire owner Elon Musk, who stepped down as CEO last month but retained a prominent role in the company.
Promising an AI-fueled expansion of the site’s capabilities, X aims to follow the logo change with an ambitious foray into online banking and video messaging, among other areas, CEO Linda Yaccarino said on Sunday.
“It’s an exceptionally rare thing — in life or in business — that you get a second chance to make another big impression,” tweeted Yaccarino, who previously worked as an advertising executive at NBCUniversal.
“Twitter made one massive impression and changed the way we communicate,” she added. “Now, X will go further, transforming the global town square.”
Here’s what to know about X, what makes it different from Twitter and the role of Musk in the rebrand.
What is new about X?
For now, X is a rebranded Twitter — but the company on Sunday revealed plans to offer users a one-stop shop for many of their online needs.
The aspiration was made public as long ago as last year. Days after acquiring Twitter, in October, Musk tweeted: “Buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the everything app.”
Taking a step closer earlier this month, Musk launched an artificial intelligence company called xAI, vowing to develop a generative AI program that competes with established offerings like ChatGPT.
Describing X’s goal as “unlimited interactivity,” Yaccarino said on Sunday that the company plans to become a hub of online messaging and commerce.
“Powered by AI, X will connect us all in ways we’re just beginning to imagine,” Yaccarino said.
The best example of what Musk means by an “everything app” is WeChat, a highly popular app in China that serves not only as a messaging and media-sharing platform but also a versatile tool in which users pay friends, purchase products and book reservations, among other uses, analysts previously told ABC News.
Why did Twitter rebrand as X?
The rebrand arrives at a transition period and self-admitted financial difficulty for the company.
Last month, Yaccarino took over as CEO, elevating her as a visible leader alongside Musk, who remains executive chairman and chief technology officer. Musk also serves as CEO of Space X.
Meanwhile, the company has lost 50% of its advertising revenue and faces a negative cash flow, meaning there is more money being spent on expenses than brought in through revenue, Musk tweeted earlier this month.
Prior to its acquisition by Musk, Twitter made the vast majority of its revenue through advertising but many large companies have pulled ads from the platform amid what some have described as a rise of explicit and hateful content.
In addition, X faces a new threat from ascendant social media platform Threads, owned by Facebook parent-company Meta. Threads reached 100 million users within five days, achieving a record as the fastest app ever to do so.
By comparison, Twitter boasted 238 million users before Musk took the company private in October, the company said in an earnings report last year.
What role did Musk play in the rebrand?
Musk’s interest in the letter “X” traces back more than two decades.
In 1999, Musk launched an online payments and banking company called X.com, which later merged with PayPal.
Musk repurchased the URL “X.com” in 2017. Now, the domain directs visitors to Twitter.
“Not sure what subtle clues gave it away, but I like the letter X,” Musk said in a Tweet on Sunday alongside a photo of him crossing his arms to form the letter.
“And soon we shall bid adieu to the twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds,” he added.
(NEW YORK) — Netflix revealed blockbuster subscriber growth in a quarterly earnings report this week, but since then the company’s shares have plummeted more than 20%.
The reaction on Wall Street marks the latest indication of a profound shift in investor priorities away from subscriber growth and toward the bottom line, which holds implications for striking writers and actors as well as the shows and movies that end up on screen, experts told ABC News.
“The tide has turned,” Jessica Reif Ehrlich, an entertainment industry analyst with Bank of America, told ABC News.
Netflix did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Here’s what to know about what the earnings report said, why the stock price fell and what it means for Hollywood.
What did Netflix earnings reveal about the company?
Netflix shared a lot of good news in its earnings report on Wednesday, Reif Ehrlich said.
A password-sharing crackdown helped the streaming platform add 5.9 million subscribers over the three months ending June, which marked a staggering improvement from the same period a year ago when the company lost nearly 1 million subscribers, Netflix said.
In all, Netflix said it boasts about 232 million subscribers, far outpacing its nearest rival Disney+, which reported just shy of 158 million subscribers in May. (The Walt Disney Company is the parent company of ABC News).
Meanwhile, Netflix’s free cash flow — a measure of how much money is available to a company after it pays for operating expenses — grew by $1.5 billion to a total of about $5 billion, the company said.
The company, however, failed to meet expectations for revenue, which rose 2.7% from a year earlier to $8.2 billion. Analysts expected $8.3 billion.
Why did Netflix’s stock drop?
The miss on revenue — which Reif Ehrlich called a “modest disappointment” — was enough to send the company’s stock tanking.
The subscriber growth, while strong, is poised deliver less than it appears because many of the consumers live in international markets where the company reaps less revenue per customer, she added.
On Thursday, a day after the report, Netflix shares fell more than 8%. In afternoon trading on Friday, the stock had dropped roughly another 11%.
Despite the recent losses, Netflix stock has climbed roughly 44% this year — a sign that the investor reaction this week suggests a judgment about an overvalued stock rather than an unhealthy company, Luis Cabral, a professor of economics and international business at New York University who focuses on the entertainment sector, told ABC News.
“From the beginning of the year, it’s actually doing quite well,” Cabral said.
Still, the stock falloff is the latest sign of an industry-wide shift away from the breakneck subscriber growth that marked an early phase in the sector as companies jockeyed to accrue a large customer base that could shoulder out competitors, he said. Now, he added, companies like Netflix need to show that they’re actually making money and delivering profits.
What does Netflix’s stock decline say about the streaming industry?
The focus on bottom-line performance means streaming companies like Netflix are increasingly attentive to minimizing costs and enhancing the revenue derived from viewers, Reif Ehrlich said.
That means the companies are less likely to bankroll expensive shows or movies, she added. Some firms, including Netflix, have even imposed layoffs going back to last year as a means of cutting costs.
The ongoing strike among writers and actors adds an additional layer of financial uncertainty, she added.
“Given the strikes and the focus of the market on profitability, they’re really going to have to think about content costs, marketing costs, overhead,” Reif Ehrlich said.
Viewers should expect a smaller selection of shows even after the calendar returns to normal following the strikes, she added. “There was this rush to drive content over the last three to five years,” she said. “Everybody is going to pull back.”
(NEW YORK) — Just two days after a winning ticket was sold for the $1 billion Powerball, another lucky person has a chance at a mega-lottery drawing Friday.
The Mega Millions jackpot has grown to an estimated $720 million — marking the lotto game’s fifth-largest top prize in its history.
There have been no jackpot winners in 26 consecutive drawings, since the grand prize was last won on April 18. Players must match all six numbers to claim the jackpot.
The cash option of the jackpot is an estimated $369.6 million — offered as a one-time, lump-sum payment. Otherwise the winnings can be paid out as one immediate payment followed by 29 annual payments, with the annuity option.
The odds of winning the top prize are 1 in 302.6 million.
The estimated $720 million prize marks the fifth time the Mega Millions jackpot has surpassed $700 million. The previous four times that occurred the top winnings continued to grow past $1 billion, with billion-dollar winners in 2018, 2021, 2022 and January 2023.
Mega Millions is played in 45 states, Washington, D.C., and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Tickets are $2 for one play. Friday’s drawing is at 11 p.m. ET.
On Wednesday, a winning ticket for the $1 billion Powerball jackpot was sold in Los Angeles. The jackpot — the third-largest in Powerball history — has a cash value of $516.8 million, before taxes.
The prize had yet to be claimed, a California Lottery spokesperson said Thursday, adding that it entails a thorough vetting process to verify it’s their ticket.
Winners are also advised to hire a team of advisers when claiming such a large sum.
The winning ticket marked the second billion-dollar-plus Powerball jackpot claimed in Southern California in eight months.
(NEW YORK) — When Justin Harrison suffered a nasty bout of strep throat two weeks ago, he said he received a barrage of text messages from his mom urging him to take better care of himself — even though his mom is dead.
Harrison, who founded an AI company called You, Only Virtual in 2020 that creates chatbots modeled after deceased loved ones, was getting reprimanded by a digital version of his mom in the same way its real-life counterpart would have done so.
“I’ve got a virtual mom talking to me ad nauseam about more rest, asking why I’m not hydrating,” Harrison, 40, told ABC News. “I was getting yelled at.”
Harrison, who has communicated with the digital reproduction of his mom on a daily basis since she died in October at age 61, believes AI-driven chatbots will redefine how some deal with grief.
The industry faces formidable obstacles to building chatbots that accurately mimic a dead person and questions remain over issues like privacy and consent, experts said.
Moreover, generative AI tools like ChatGPT — which scan text from across the internet and string words together based on statistical probability — have displayed a propensity to share arbitrary, false or hateful speech, raising alarm about the personal and societal effects of noxious words delivered with the intimacy and authority of a deceased loved one, some experts added.
“You will not be reincarnating a relative with GPT-4,” Gary Marcus, an emeritus professor at New York University and author of the book ”Rebooting AI,” said in reference to the latest version of Chat-GPT. “These systems make stuff up all the time.”
Still, the emergence of sophisticated AI-driven conversation programs brings a life-like product within closer reach, experts said.
For years, advances in the reproduction of audio and video have made digital copies of deceased people possible, said Mark Dredze, a professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University who helped create a finance-oriented AI language model called BloombergGPT. He pointed to big-budget movies and TV shows that feature impeccable computer-generated images.
In recent seasons of the TV series, The Mandalorian, for example, the creators depicted a youthful Luke Skywalker by digitally de-aging Mark Hamill, the actor who played the character in the 1970s Star Wars films, Dredze added. (The Walt Disney Company, the parent company of the studio that made The Mandalorian, is also the parent company of ABC News.)
“That technology will eventually become cheaper and easier,” Dredze said.
The remaining technical challenge, however, is the authenticity of the words coming out of a digital person’s mouth — something that newly improved conversation bots like ChatGPT can help create, Dredze said. “Is it the person?” he added. “Is this something that they would say?”
AI experts who spoke with ABC News said that success or failure on that score hinges upon the volume of data about the deceased loved one that the user enters into a given chatbot, keeping in mind the possibility that a chatbot could still offer up arbitrary or inaccurate information, regardless of the scale of training data.
“If you have massive amounts of text that somebody has produced, you can train a system on that and you’ll capture in some sense someone’s voice,” Kristian Hammond, a professor of computer science at Northwestern University who studies AI, told ABC News.
The chatbot would still struggle to respond to novel or complicated topics, however, Hammond said. “It’s a thing that looks like, sounds like and speaks like a loved one, but it doesn’t have enough in the way of data to capture the point of view and the values of that loved one,” he added.
You, Only Virtual addresses this challenge by focusing on communication between an individual living person and the deceased, thereby attempting to recreate their specific one-on-one dynamic, Harrison said.
“When you start thinking about the nuances of a holistic human being, it gets out of control,” Harrison said. “I stared at five years of messages and recorded phone calls with my mom — 3,800 pages. The amount of consistency through the entirety of it was staggering.”
After scanning communication records such as text messages, emails and phone calls, You, Only Virtual says it creates a chatbot that can utter original responses in conversation with a user either through written chats or audio responses that mimic a deceased relative’s voice, Harrison said.
The company, he added, aims to offer video-chat capability later this year and ultimately provide augmented-reality that allows for interaction with a three-dimensional projection.
Harrison rejected possible privacy concerns raised by the use of personal correspondence to build a chatbot without the consent of the deceased, noting that the user of the chatbot is the same person to whom the communications were initially sent.
“You absolutely don’t need consent from someone who’s dead,” Harrison said. “My mom could’ve hated the idea but this is what I wanted and I’m alive.”
The early-stage startup, which has eight employees, is poised to grow in part through improvements in generative AI, Harrison said.
“Everything that happens with helping the program get better at learning and quantifying information is good for us,” Harrison said.
StoryFile, a company that says it has 40 employees and $10 million in annual revenue, offers an interactive version of deceased relatives by recording an hourslong question-and-answer session with the individual before his or her death, and in turn, attempting to create a reproduction that responds to prompts.
In this case, the virtual reproduction utters pre-recorded content in a real-life manner, said Stephen Smith, the CEO of StoryFile. If a topic falls outside a set of established discussion areas, however, the reproduction cannot respond. Currently, users speak with the digital loved one through interactive video but the company is developing the capacity for conversation with a 3D likeness, Smith said.
The company holds a “hard line” against the use of AI for generating original spoken content, which Smith said he finds “creepy and weird.” (In response, Harrison defended such use of the technology. “By using natural language processing and generative AI, you’re able to keep the process moving forward so it’s relevant, it’s topical and it’s fresh,” Harrison said.)
Instead, StoryFile deploys an AI chatbot as the interviewer during the question-and-answer sessions, allowing the conversation to probe a vast range of topic expertise, said Smith, who previously led the University of Southern California’s Shoah Foundation, which established an archive of oral testimony about the Holocaust.
“I’m an oral historian going, ‘Jeez, I’ve wasted the last 30 years of my life,'” Smith said. “ChatGPT can do it as well as me.”
To be sure, some experts doubted the progress for this industry afforded by language models like ChatGPT and warned of potential risks.
“They’re trying to do the impossible,” said Marcus, of New York University.
Generative AI sometimes responds to prompts with arbitrary or inaccurate information, Marcus added, posing a risk to users who may struggle to fully understand the limits of the technology when it performs as a reproduction of a deceased loved one.
“These models are good at tricking people that they’re people but they’re not,” Marcus said. “It’s kind of like a party trick doing some imitations but certainly not the real thing.”
Meanwhile, the mental health effects of such products are being examined. Smith, of StoryFile, acknowledged that the immediate aftermath of a death may be too early for some people to see a virtual reproduction of a loved one, adding that the product preserves the legacy for ensuing generations.
You, Only Virtual says it works with a team of clinical psychologists and offers alternate resources on its website for people in a mental health crisis, Harrison said.
Elena Lister, a professor of clinical psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College, said digital reproductions of the deceased could cause harm if they push a grieving individual to withdraw from his or her life. However, she added, the grieving process varies widely.
“When someone dies in your life, you are just so hungry for more of them,” Lister told ABC News. “This is an attempt to bridge that gap.”
“When it comes to grieving, there is very little that is right or wrong,” she added. “If something provides you with comfort, I would in no way say there’s something bad about it.”
Going further, Harrison said he hopes people no longer have to feel grief at all. He wishes he could’ve avoided the painful emotions that have accompanied the death of his mom, he said, even if the experience has brought about some personal growth.
“Have I learned to be more reliant on myself? That’s good,” Harrison said. “Was it worth losing my mom? No.”
(NEW YORK) — While experts disagree about whether AI poses an existential threat, Dan Hendrycks, a researcher and the director of the Center for AI Safety, or CAIS, is among those who believe the technology could destroy humanity in a variety of ways.
A bad actor could gain possession of a future version of generative AI, ask it for instructions on how to make a biological weapon and set off devastation, he told ABC News. Or, he added, the efficiency delivered by AI could force widespread business adoption, leaving the global economy in its thrall; alternatively, it could also worsen the spread of misinformation and disinformation.
The end of humanity, Hendrycks said, is hardly a remote possibility. “If I see international coordination doesn’t happen, or much of it, it’ll be more likely than not that we go extinct,” he added.
Experts who lend credence to the threat told ABC News that the massive potential risks require urgent attention and stiff oversight; while skeptics warned that grave forecasts fuel a misunderstanding about the capabilities of AI and distract from current harms caused by the technology.
In recent months, dire warnings about the massive threat posed by AI have ascended from the corridors of computer science departments to the halls of Congress.
An open letter written in May by CIAS warned that AI poses a “risk of extinction” akin to pandemics or nuclear war, featuring signatures from hundreds of researchers and industry leaders like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Demis Hassabis, the CEO of Google DeepMind, the tech giant’s AI division.
Altman, whose company developed the viral AI sensation Chat-GPT, in May told a Senate subcommittee: “If this technology goes wrong, it can go quite wrong.” In an interview with ABC News, in March, Altman said, “I think people should be happy that we are a little bit scared of this.”
OpenAI and Google did not immediately respond to ABC News’ request for comment.
Other AI luminaries, however, have balked. Yann LeCun, chief AI scientist at Meta, told the MIT Technology Review that fear of an AI takeover is “preposterously ridiculous.” Sarah Myers West, managing director of the nonprofit AI Now Institute, told ABC News: “A lot of this is more rhetoric than grounded analysis.”
The divide over the existential threat posed by AI looms over recent advances in the technology as it sweeps across institutions from manufacturing to mass entertainment, prompting disagreement about the pace of development and the focus of possible regulation.
“We’re looking to experts to tell us,” Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a professor of management at Yale University who convenes gatherings of top CEOs. “But experts are split on this.”
As AI develops, however, an imperative for onlookers is clear, he said: “We can’t sit on the sidelines.”
Concern about the risks posed by AI have drawn greater attention lately in response to major breakthroughs like ChatGPT, which reached 100 million users within two months of its launch in November.
Microsoft launched a version of its Bing search engine in March that offers responses delivered by GPT-4, the latest model of ChatGPT. Rival search company Google in February announced an AI model called Bard.
“AI in previous instantiations was a largely invisible system,” Myers West said. “It wasn’t something we interacted with in a tangible way. This has had a really visceral effect on the broader public in that it’s contributing to this wave of both excitement and a tremendous amount of anxiety.”
Doomsday forecasts, however, lack granular specifics and overstate the potential for self-awareness to form within generative AI like ChatGPT, which scans text from across the internet and strings words together based on statistical probability, Myers West said.
“At present, essentially the way these systems work is akin to applied statistics, so they don’t have any capacity for deeper understanding, don’t have any capacity for empathy and certainly not sentience,” Myers West added.
But the risk posed by AI stems from its potential to exceed human intelligence rather than mimic it, Stuart Russell, an AI researcher at the University of California, Berkeley who co-authored a study on societal-scale dangers of the technology, told ABC News.
“If you make systems that are more intelligent than humans, they will have more power over the world than we do, just as we have more power over the world than other species on earth,” he said.
Acknowledging a lack of specifics in some prominent messages about the extreme risks, such as the open letter released by CAIS in May, Russell said: “Once you get into specifics, you end up with arguments about which is the most plausible.” Hendrycks, of CAIS, added: “Since AI touches on many aspects of society, we end up finding there are many, many risk sources.”
Key remedies, such as robust government oversight and liability for AI developers, can help deter a range of catastrophic scenarios, Hendrycks said. “We don’t need to know exactly what’s going to happen to make interventions to reduce risk,” he said.
To be sure, while acknowledging the risks of AI, experts heralded its potential benefits. Proponents of AI say the technology could increase productivity, automate unpleasant or mundane tasks and afford the opportunity to focus on creative and innovative endeavors. AI has been touted as an aid for endeavors ranging from the fight against climate change to the diagnosis of cancer.
Senate Majority Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., released a framework last month outlining four pillars that he hopes will guide future bipartisan legislation governing AI: security, accountability, protecting our foundations and explainability.
The framework is not legislative text, and it’s not clear how long it will take for Congress to begin putting together legislative proposals. There has not yet been any comprehensive legislation introduced in Congress to deal with regulating AI, though a bicameral group of lawmakers introduced a proposal last month that would create a blue-ribbon commission to study AI’s impact.
“We have no choice but to acknowledge that AI’s changes are coming, and in many cases are already here. We ignore them at our own peril,” Schumer said last month in prepared remarks at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
President Joe Biden, meanwhile, appeared last month at a roundtable event focused on AI in California, describing artificial intelligence as something that has “enormous promise and its risks.”
An effort to ward off hypothetical long-term dangers could distract from present-day damage caused by AI, said Isabelle Jones, campaign outreach manager for Stop Killer Robots, which aims to establish an international agreement prohibiting the use of autonomous weapons.
“I think that to purely focus on the future is to the detriment of the existing harms that are coming about or that there’s an immediate risk of,” Jones told ABC News.
Policymakers can address current and future dangers at the same time, Russell said, just as they do in combating climate change. “I think the narrative that you can either do one or the other but can’t do both is actually poisonous.”
Regardless of whether they believe or question forecasts of extreme risk, experts who spoke with ABC News called on the government to regulate the technology.
“My biggest thing is regulation and international coordination,” Hendrycks said. Jones cited international accords on issues like nuclear proliferation as a model for reigning in autonomous weapons.
Still, Myers West said, differences could again arise on the issue of specifics. “The devil is in the details,” she said.
(NEW YORK) — As long-standing recession alarms continue to blare from some forecasters, investors don’t appear to hear them.
The S&P 500 — the index that most people’s 401(k)s track — has climbed more than 18% since the start of this year, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq has jumped a staggering 35%. The Dow Jones Industrial Average, which has jumped some 6% this year, notched its eighth consecutive day of gains on Wednesday, the longest such streak since 2019.
The blockbuster stock market performance this year owes much to a significant cooldown of inflation that has bolstered expectations that the Federal Reserve can bring price hikes to normal levels without causing a severe downturn, analysts told ABC News.
Those analysts also noted that enthusiasm about artificial intelligence has provided a boost for major tech stocks that are disproportionately reflected in the gains of major indices weighted toward the biggest firms.
Analysts differed, however, in their opinions regarding whether the strong performance will last. Some said that in the coming months, investors will sour on the sky-high stock prices, while others said room for growth remains.
“It’s pretty amazing that we’re seeing such robust market returns this year, especially in the face of a looming recession,” said Amanda Agati, chief investment officer at PNC Financial Services. “You have to claim victory and be thrilled.”
The U.S. economy has proven more resilient than many expected amid an aggressive series of interest rate hikes at the Federal Reserve that are intended to fight price increases by slowing the economy and slashing demand, analysts said.
Consumer prices rose 3% in June compared to a year ago, marking a significant slowdown from a peak inflation rate last summer of more than 9%, data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics showed.
Some key economic indicators, meanwhile, have demonstrated robust performance. A jobs report earlier this month showed that the labor market slowed but still grew at a solid clip in June, adding 209,000 jobs.
The growing possibility of a ”soft landing” has cheered markets, John Stoltzfus, managing director and chief investment strategist at Oppenheimer Asset Management, told ABC News.
“What we think is happening here is primarily recognition by the market that indeed the Fed is having real progress against inflation,” Stoltzfus said.
Meanwhile, an upswell of optimism about the benefits of AI has compounded that positive market outlook, Edward Moya, a senior market analyst at broker OANDA, told ABC News.
“It has been resilient because of the AI movement,” Moya said. “There needed to be a fresh catalyst.”
Major indices like the S&P 500 are weighted proportionately toward the largest firms, made up mostly of big tech companies, which have delivered better-than-average returns amid the ongoing AI fervor and consequently buoyed the performance of the overall indices, Moya added.
Shares of Google, which unveiled its generative AI product, Bard, in February, have climbed roughly 36% in value this year. Microsoft, which owns a major stake in ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, has seen its share price jump 46%.
“There’s been a huge disconnect between the top 10 biggest names driving price returns and what everybody else is doing,” Agati said, noting that performance of the S&P 500 this year, when excluding the ten largest companies, stands at single-digit gains.
Looking ahead, Agati and Moya said they expect the stock market to decline over the remainder of the year, ending 2023 with positive but modest returns. The full economic cooling-off effects of central bank rate hikes have yet to take hold, they said, adding that inflation may not return to normal levels as soon as investors hope.
“The rally will stall out here,” Moya said.
Stoltzfus, however, said there’s a “good chance” the stock market will end the year higher than it currently stands.
“We have maintained a fairly bullish posture,” he said. “Where the market is trading right now would suggest to us that it has further to go this year.”
(NEW YORK) — A winning ticket for the $1 billion Powerball jackpot was sold in California.
The winning numbers in Wednesday night’s drawing were 7, 10, 11, 13 and 24, and the Powerball was 24. The jackpot ticket was sold at the Las Palmitas Mini Market in Los Angeles, the California Lottery said.
The jackpot has a cash value of $516.8 million, before taxes.
Three tickets sold in Florida, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island won $2 million, Powerball said. There were also several Match 5 winners in California (seven), Connecticut, Florida (four), Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Massachusetts (three), Maryland (two), Missouri, New Hampshire, New Jersey (two), New York (five), Ohio, Texas (four), Wisconsin and West Virginia. Each ticket won $1 million.
The Powerball jackpot is now reset to $20 million.
The Powerball, which was last hit on April 19, had 38 consecutive drawings without a winner.
The winner has the choice between annual payments over 30 years, which increase by 5% each year, or a lump sum payment.
“This has turned into a historic jackpot run; this is only the third time in Powerball’s 31-year history that a jackpot has reached the billion-dollar threshold,” said Drew Svitko, Powerball product group chair and Pennsylvania Lottery executive director. “It only takes one ticket to win this massive jackpot or any of Powerball’s other cash prizes. If you win the jackpot, sign your ticket, put it somewhere very safe, and reach out to your local lottery.”
The biggest jackpot in Powerball history was a $2.04 billion prize claimed by a man in Altadena, California, in November 2022. The only other time the Powerball jackpot crossed a billion was when three tickets won a $1.586 billion prize in January 2016.
The odds of winning the jackpot are 1 in 292.2 million, according to Powerball.
Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
(SCOTTSDALE, Ariz.) — Face masks that were in during the COVID-19 pandemic will officially be out at some In-N-Out Burger locations across five states, according to a company memo.
Earlier this year, the Biden administration declared the U.S. is no longer officially in a COVID-19 emergency for the first time since the pandemic began three years ago.
The popular West Coast burger chain released an internal memo last week notifying employees in Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, Texas and Utah of a mask policy update “to show our Associates’ smiles and other facial features while considering the health and well-being of all individuals.”
The memo, obtained by ABC News from a Scottsdale, Arizona-based employee, stated that “No masks shall be worn in the Store or Support facility unless an Associate has a valid medical note exempting him or her from this requirement.”
Employees who do wear a face mask for a medical reason will be required by In-N-Out to “wear a company-provided N-95 mask,” according to the memo. “A different type of mask may only be worn with a valid medical note exempting the Associate from the N-95 mask requirement.”
There are also exemptions to the policy for employees “who are required to wear masks or other protective gear as part of their job duties (e.g., patty room Associates, lab technicians, painters, etc.).”
According to the memo, employees who fail to comply with the updated policy may face “appropriate disciplinary action, up to and including termination of employment, based on the severity and frequency of the violation.”
In-N-Out did not immediately respond to ABC News’ request for comment.
The company plans to review this “periodically to ensure its effectiveness and compliance with evolving health guidelines,” according to the memo.
The rule will take effect August 14, the memo says.
(NEW YORK) — The Powerball jackpot has grown to $1 billion for Wednesday night’s drawing, the game’s third-largest prize ever.
The jackpot has a cash value of $516.8 million, before taxes.
The Powerball, which was last hit on April 19, has now had 38 consecutive drawings without a winner.
The winner would have the choice between annual payments over 30 years, which increase by 5% each year, or a lump sum payment.
“This has turned into a historic jackpot run; this is only the third time in Powerball’s 31-year history that a jackpot has reached the billion-dollar threshold,” said Drew Svitko, Powerball product group chair and Pennsylvania Lottery executive director. “It only takes one ticket to win this massive jackpot or any of Powerball’s other cash prizes. If you win the jackpot, sign your ticket, put it somewhere very safe, and reach out to your local lottery.”
The biggest jackpot in Powerball history was a $2.04 billion prize claimed by a man in Altadena, California, in November 2022. The only other time the Powerball jackpot crossed a billion was when three tickets won a $1.586 billion prize in January 2016.
The drawing will be held just before 11 p.m. ET.
The odds of winning the jackpot are 1 in 292.2 million, according to Powerball.
