🌎 X marks the chatbot

Good morning, Quartz readers!

Here’s what you need to know

Elon Musk has a chatbot. Its name is Grok, it’s inspired by The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and it’s being billed as a competitor to OpenAI’s ChatGPT that will eventually be available to paying X users.

OpenAI is having its first developer’s conference today. Software engineers and entrepreneurs are gathering in San Francisco for the ChatGPT maker’s Silicon Valley rite of passage.

Singapore’s prime minister is stepping down before the country’s 2025 election. Lee Hsien Loong will bow out—a plan that was in the works before the covid pandemic shelved it—and hand the job over to his deputy Lawrence Wong late next year.

Maersk is cutting another 3,500 jobs. That brings the total layoffs from the global shipping giant to 10,000 roles this year as it faces plummeting profits.

How legendary investors caught the interest rate break

Rising rates are no good for bond traders. Each time the US Federal Reserve hikes its benchmark rate, older bonds with lower rates become less valuable, forcing arbitrageurs to search for higher yields. But the Fed’s Nov. 1 decision to hold interest rates steady, along with the latest economic data, have some loud-mouthed investors, like Bill Ackman and Bill Gross, talking.

First, Gross, the “Bond King,” said he thought the yield curve would go positive by the end of the year—that yields on short-term debt would finally fall below those for long-term debt after 14 months of inversion. Then Ackman, a hedge fund manager known for his boardroom activism, said that he had covered his long-term bond short—that is, he stopped betting that the price of the debt would fall.

Lo and behold, it appears they are right—for now.

Quotable: Billionaires won’t drop the recession narrative

“I am not predicting something worse than 2008. It’s just naive not to be open-minded to something really, really bad happening.” —Duquesne Family Office founder Stanley Druckenmiller to investors at the 2023 Sohn Investment Conference on Oct. 31

With mixed signals from the US economy, and the Federal Reserve in a wait-and-see mode, America’s billionaires are decidedly more panicked. It makes one ponder if there is something they know that other investors don’t. Not everyone is buying that though, and some think what the richest people in the US are really saying is, “don’t break our business models.”

The 10 US companies emitting the most carbon

Out of the 6 billion metric tons of CO2 that were emitted in the US in 2020, over half a billion metric tons of those emissions came from facilities owned by just 10 companies.

Many of these firms supply electricity for utilities, including Vistra Energy, Duke Energy, Southern Company, and Berkshire Hathaway. But that’s not all they have in common: most also don’t hold up well when it comes to environmental justice.

Quartz’s most popular

🤑 Jeff Bezos is moving from Amazon’s birthplace to Miami’s “Billionaire Bunker”

💸 Walgreens staff is paying the price for the company’s financial health struggles

💼 How to lengthen the stay of boomers at retirement age

🎸 The Beatles new song “Now and Then” used AI to lift out John Lennon’s voice

💉 A huge quarter for Ozempic and Wegovy maker Novo Nordisk is masking a longer-term challenge

☕ Starbucks is slowly but surely climbing out of its sales slump in China

Surprising discoveries

A sheep stranded for two years on a remote Scottish beach was rescued. Fiona isn’t Britain’s loneliest sheep anymore.

A new hydrogel could change how human tissue is grown in labs. The self-healing and antimicrobial material could be used in medical procedures.

If you’ve ever wondered what our Sun’s birth looked like, the James Webb telescope has a new photo for you. It involves some brilliant pinky-red jets.

Rats may have an imagination. We’ll wait for that live action Ratatouille.

California has an invasive fruit fly problem. It’s dumping millions of sterile male flies on Los Angeles to stop the population from growing.

Our best wishes for a productive day. Send any news, comments, happy sheep, and imaginative rats to [email protected]. Today’s Daily Brief was brought to you by Morgan Haefner.