Brew Review // Morning Brew // Update
Celebrating a decade of our humble newsletter...
An office party celebrating Morning Brew's 10th birthday

Kaitlin Brito

 

EDITOR’S NOTE

 

Good morning. Ten years ago, Alex Lieberman, a college senior who needed to follow business news to prepare for job interviews, was sending out a newsletter called “Market Corner,” summing it all up for his classmates in a fun-to-read style. Then-sophomore Austin Rief offered to help, and together, they refined the newsletter and changed its name to…Morning Brew. (You can hear all about their journey building the company here.)

Today, that newsletter has over 4 million subscribers, and we have jobs. Plus, there’s a whole Brew universe of newsletters, podcasts, events, and social and video channels. To celebrate, we’re bringing the party right to your inbox with today’s special 10th Anniversary Edition. The first official Morning Brew newsletter went out in March 2015, but we’re celebrating in July, when the weather is better and there’s more daylight. Thanks for being a part of it!

 

PERSPECTIVE

 
A reveler wearing 2015 glasses on New Year's Eve in New York's Times Square

Cem Ozdel/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

A lot has happened in the 10 years since Morning Brew launched its inaugural newsletter, and we’ve worked hard to keep you informed about all of it.

So, today, let’s take a look at what’s changed—and what’s stayed the same—since the first issue went out in March 2015.

In markets (March 2015 vs. March 2025)

S&P 500

3/1/15: 2,104.50

3/1/25: 5,954.50

Dow Jones Industrial Average

3/1/15: 18,132.70

3/1/25: 43,840.91

If you invested $100 in each of these companies on March 1, 2015, on June 27, 2025, it would have been worth…

Tesla: $2,459.19

Microsoft: $1,180.61

Amazon: $1,158.20

Facebook (now Meta): $923.74

Apple: $648.09

Alphabet: $629.27

GameStop: $130.17

AMC Entertainment: $15.89

Bitcoin

3/1/15: $244.22

3/1/25: $83,592.75

Gold

3/1/15: $1,214.00 per ounce

3/1/25: $2,857.67 per ounce

In entertainment

Highest grossing movie

2015: Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens ($2.07b)

2025: Ne Zha 2 ($1.9b, so far)

Most watched TV show

2015: The Big Bang Theory (21m viewers on average)

2025: Squid Game (27.1m)

The Oscar winner for best picture

2015: Birdman

2025: Anora

The Razzie winner for worst picture

2015: Kirk Cameron’s Saving Christmas

2025: Madame Web

Grammy winner for album of the year

2015: Taylor Swift’s 1989

2025: Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter

Is there a GTA 6?

2015: No

2025: No

Did Katy Perry go to space?

2015: No

2025: Yes

Has George R. R. Martin finished The Winds of Winter?

2015: No

2025: No

In tech

Market cap of biggest company

2015: Apple ($725b)

2025: Nvidia ($3.8t)

Netflix subscribers

2015: 62.7 million

2025: 301.6 million

Apple Pay users

2015: 25.73 million

2025: 744 million

Gmail users

2015: 900 million

2025: 1.8 billion

Was Bryan Johnson draining his son’s plasma in a desperate attempt to cling to youth?

2015: Not yet

2025: Yes

In life

Federal minimum wage

2015: $7.25 per hour

2025: $7.25 per hour

Average cost of a home in the US

2015: $366,000

2025: $503,800

Most popular baby names

2015: Noah/Emma

2025: Noah/Olivia

Average cost of a gallon of gas

2015: $2.43

2025: $3.22

Blockbuster locations

2015: 22

2025: 1 (in Bend, Oregon)

And finally, in memoriam: Since 2015, we’ve said goodbye to some great apps, like Vine and Quibi. Technological advancements like the Juicero and Humane AI pin are no longer with us. Businesses like Toys R Us and Theranos have closed their doors. Oakland lost two sports franchises. And many Forbes 30 Under 30 members have lost their freedom but gained prison uniforms.—DL

 

Q&A

 
Neal Freyman

Morning Brew

We spoke with Executive Editor Neal Freyman, who has written, edited, and overseen the newsletter since 2017, when it was still in its infancy.

While he’s stepping away from being our newsletter overlord this summer to focus on co-hosting the Morning Brew Daily podcast (and hopefully getting more than four hours of sleep a night), for us writers, listening to Neal’s lore from the early days of the Brew is like hearing your parents reminisce about their wild teenage years. We think you’ll enjoy it, too.—SK

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity. A longer version can be found on our website.


Sam: What is your Morning Brew origin story?

Neal: I was working at an economic development nonprofit in Princeton, New Jersey. I don’t know if I loved it. So, I was very casually looking for other things. I was just scrolling on LinkedIn and I saw that this guy named Alex Lieberman had posted a job opening. It wasn’t for a writer, it was for a “content creator,” which wasn’t even a thing in 2017. So, I was confused about what that was.

I knew the current writer through friends. I called him up and he was like, “Dude, I think this is gonna go to the moon. I’m literally working ’til 3am, I’m sleeping on this sofa in New York City, I am going crazy. I need you to come and help me write this so I can, like, sleep for three hours.” At the time, Morning Brew only had about 30,000 readers.

I’ve always loved news, and one of my heroes is Stephen Colbert, who’s able to break things down in a simple and funny way. So I read Morning Brew as it was and thought to myself, “I could just do this a little bit better than it is now.” But I didn’t know anything about business. I didn’t know why Warren Buffett was famous, or what an IPO was. So, it was going to be a learning curve.

Sam: How has the newsletter changed over the years?

Neal: I feel like the bones and the concept are the same. There’s a greeting at the top, a market snapshot, a summary of the day’s business news, a quick links roundup section, lifestyle and career tips, and a puzzle at the end. Those have evolved over the years, but, at its core, it’s very much the same product I think.

The only significant change is maybe in the breadth of coverage. Because back when it started, Morning Brew was really geared toward finance bros who were studying to be junior bankers in New York. And so, more of the coverage was focused on big-shot investors like Bill Ackman and Ray Dalio.

We’ve shifted to cover the intersection of business and politics, culture, sports, et cetera.

Sam: Can you talk about something that didn’t go according to plan in the early days?

Neal: There were some high-profile mess-ups. We took getting everything right so seriously. If we had one mistake, no matter how small it was, it was like a death in the family. We once wrote “Logan Paul” when we meant “Jake Paul,” and readers were writing in every five seconds, telling us we were the worst people on Earth. I remember no one talked in that office for hours because we thought it was the end of the world.

Sam: Did you start getting reader feedback early on?

Neal: Yes, and it was a key part of our strategy to reply to every email that came in. One of the great and bad things about email is that people can literally just hit reply. So, the first few hours of every day, we would reply to emails, and I thought that was invaluable to establishing a relationship with them. Once you reply to somebody, they become a reader for life.

Sam: Was there a point where you were like, okay, we’re a real media company now and not just a nascent newsletter startup?

Neal: One of the most validating things was when other people in the industry said they were readers. I remember one of the Freakonomics guys, Stephen Dubner, was an early reader. I went up to Andrew Ross Sorkin at the New York Times Dealbook conference after he interviewed Bill Clinton. And he was like, “Oh yeah, of course I know Morning Brew. I read it every morning before I go on CNBC.”

Sam: Is there a favorite joke or just anything that you’re really proud of?

Neal: The headline “President Trump: I’m in love with the state of U” for an article about his first State of the Union. I think I was also one of the first people to do the “Xi said, she said” joke about Chinese leader Xi Jinping, which is now cliche.

Sam: You’ve referenced Lorne Michaels before when brainstorming jokes for the newsletter. What do you think Morning Brew has to do to achieve SNL longevity?

Neal: I mean, SNL has kept the same structure for, like, 50 years now. And as we’ve talked about, Morning Brew has had the same structure for 10. I don’t see any reason to change that, because it fulfills a very deep need for people, which is to stay informed and not look stupid at work, and so there should never be any deviation from that.

 
 

HOW IT STARTED

 
The first market corner

We think we’ve come a long way…

 

COMMUNITY

 

This week, we asked for interesting stories about reading the Brew, and y’all really melted our hearts. Here are a few of our favorite responses:

  • “Beach? Orcas? Kind of. I read the Brew on a treadmill at McMurdo Station, Antarctica, where 268 of us are wintering over in 24/7 darkness until August. McMurdo is located on Ross Island and the station is at the edge of the Ross Sea so, yeah, I’m at the beach…It’s just frozen over!”—Annemarie from Lovettsville, VA
  • “I couldn’t care for newsletters but my partner told me there was a newsletter that not only had really great content, but cracked both basketball and HBO show jokes all the time, so I had to take a look. That was 5 years ago and now I am marrying him.”—Jacqueline from Toronto, ON, Canada
  • “MB comes out late morning here in Western Norway, so I read it with my afternoon coffee from my office’s roof garden overlooking the fjords and islands.”—Jan from Western Norway
  • “On October 10, 2024, I read a Morning Brew story that changed my life. It was titled How Tampa General withstood two hurricanes, about how Tampa General Hospital, the only Level 1 trauma center in its region, withstood two hurricanes thanks to a flood barrier system called AquaFence. As a government consultant at the time, I was feeling increasingly disenchanted with my work—but that article lit a spark. I was so inspired by the product and its impact that I immediately reached out to the company, offering to invest or help in any way I could. Fast-forward: I started as a Technical Sales Manager at AquaFence on February 1st and haven’t looked back. Every day, I get to work with an innovative team solving real-world problems—and I have Morning Brew to thank for helping me find that purpose!”—Ben from St. Louis, MO
  • “Not necessarily an interesting story, but when I was up all night with my newborn baby, I would count down the hours until 2:30am (I’m on PST) when MB popped into my inbox. It was something small to look forward to that got me through those long sleepless nights.”—Kelsey from Portland, OR
  • “When I was an intern, I would send the Thursday puzzle to another intern I had a crush on to strike up some non-work-related conversation. It was an awesome way to break the ice, anyways now we are dating!”—Nicole from Toronto, ON, Canada
  • “I shared the Brew with my dad during COVID. He got my mom turned on to it and during quarantine, it became our morning coffee tradition to chat after reading the Brew. When COVID ended, our tradition stayed. My dad and I would talk in the mornings and if I was driving, he would catch me up. I gave him my mug that I earned from sharing. He bought a sweatshirt because he didn’t refer enough people to win it, but he loved the Brew and always shared it, even if people didn’t subscribe. My father passed away in December of last year from MDS, and my mom, sister, and I share his sweatshirt. Reading the brew in the morning reminds me of our calls. Thank you for being our tradition, and for giving me his memory every morning. Even on days he couldn’t get up, he read the Brew.”—Shelby - in memory of Peter A. Kalman
 
 

LIFESTYLE

 
old photograph of man waking up

Bettmann

Saratoga spring water. Ice baths. Bananas. You will find none of that here, in a place where the pre-work morning routines are as raw and real as Love Island contestants when they forget about the cameras.

So, if you want to wake up like this newsletter’s writers, here’s how:

Matty Merritt: Attempt a 6am yoga class once a week. Make an iced oat milk latte. Blow-dry your bangs because you made the dumb decision to get bangs. Call your sister and catch up on family gossip before clocking in.

Sam Klebanov: Read on the subway to work, feeling like a monocled intellectual. Get a blueberry scone at the Union Square Farmer’s Market, where you suddenly begin to yearn for a simpler life in the countryside…until you remember that you haven’t touched grass in four years.

Molly Liebergall: Water your roof plants. Admit to yourself that health influencers are right about the benefits of morning sunlight. Think about stretching. Forget to stretch. Watch strangers’ social media feeds over their shoulders on the subway.

Dave Lozo: Grab a large iced coffee from Dunkin’ but never let them know your next move (cycle between unsweetened vanilla, hazelnut, or toasted almond each day). Ask for “as much whole milk as they can legally get in the cup.”

Brendan Cosgrove: Get woken up at 6:45am by your children, who demand no less than 25 frozen mini pancakes. Let the dog out. Trip over the cat. Drink water for health; coffee for survival.—ML

 

QUIZ

 

Test your knowledge of all things Brew with the questions below. (Answers are at the bottom of the newsletter.)

1. Where did the founders of Morning Brew meet and start making the newsletter?

a. UCLA

b. The University of Maryland

c. Dartmouth

d. The University of Michigan

2. Which of the following is NOT a Morning Brew newsletter?

a. Revenue Brew

b. Marketing Brew