July 22, 2026

This week’s Stifel Bits is being brought to you by our
CIO Office summer interns. Enjoy!

The Appetizer

“People talk about AI reducing jobs – complete nonsense. It’s causing more software engineers to be hired.”

• Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, pushing back on fears that AI is coming for white-collar work.

Now, on to the numbers. Drum roll, please …

• 2,190: The mileage of the Appalachian Trail that 91-year-old Dale “Grey Beard” Sanders is thru-hiking to reclaim his title as the oldest person ever to complete it.
• 22,141:The number of fans wearing bald caps who helpedPitbull set a Guinness World Record for the largest gathering of people sporting his signature look.
• 1 million: The number of beers a 1,024-member WhatsApp group of mostly strangers aims to collectively drink and log by 2034 .... they’re already past 100,000.
• 15,000: The number of sandwiches’ worth of peanut butter smeared across a Dutch museum floor to honor artist Wim T. Schippers.

Dig In
Here Comes the Bill

Wedding season is pricier than ever. The average U.S. wedding now runs about $34,000 – “I do” comes with a serious invoice. And multiply that across the calendar: roughly two million couples got married in the U.S. last year, fueling a wedding industry worth more than $65 billion.

The spending starts long before the big day. Guests now drop an average of $1,300 on a bachelorette party, up roughly $600 from 2019, and about one in 10 spend north of $3,000. That’s a lot of matching pajamas.

Much of that cash heads to a few hotspots: Las Vegas tops the bachelorette rankings, followed by Nashville, with Miami, Charleston, and Scottsdale rounding out the list. Music City has practically built a second economy on it – Nashville hosts an estimated 30,000-plus bachelorette parties a year.

Group travel keeps fueling platforms like Airbnb, which has remitted more than $425 million in Tennessee tourism taxes since 2018. On the retail side, REVOLVE has rolled out dedicated bridal and special-occasion lines to catch the wedding-spend wave, while Etsy leans on weddings as one of its biggest categories – everything from custom invitations to bachelorette favors. Williams Sonoma, meanwhile, has turned the gift registry into a customer-acquisition engine, letting couples register across Williams Sonoma, Pottery Barn, and West Elm in one place.

The takeaway: from the proposal to the after-party, “til death do us part” is one very long receipt.

Weekly Specials

¡Campeones! Spain defeated Argentina 1-0 after extra time to win the 2026 World Cup, with substitute Ferran Torres scoring the game-winning goal. It marked Spain’s first World Cup title since 2010! The tournament also made history off the pitch with the World Cup’s first-ever halftime show, featuring stars like Justin Bieber and Shakira, making it a celebration of football, music, and love.

It’s Christmas in July in Aalborg, Denmark, where Santas and elves from around the globe gather for the annual World Santa Claus Congress. First held near Copenhagen in 1957, the decades-old tradition marks its 70th anniversary next year. Proof that even Santa books a summer offsite.

Meet the “Trojan Teddy Bear.” NPR warns that AI toys can look harmless and cuddly while quietly shaping how kids grow up, raising real questions about child development in the AI age. Cute on the outside, algorithm on the inside.

Corporate Lunch

Paramount is pushing ahead with its Warner Bros. Discovery merger despite a lawsuit from 12 states trying to block it. The company still expects to close by the end of September. Suddenly, the biggest drama in Hollywood isn't on the screen.

Letterboxd, the movie-review app beloved by 30 million-plus film buffs, may be headed for its own plot twist: it’s reportedly fielding early takeover interest from Sony, Paramount, and Netflix. Fans are bracing for a sequel nobody asked for.

United Airlines beat earnings estimates and even raised its full-year outlook but warned that surging jet fuel could pile on nearly $6 billion in extra costs this year. Turbulence, but make it expensive?

AT&T got the green light to pull the plug on copper landline service for about 184,000 California households starting in 2027, nudging one of the oldest forms of communication toward the finish line. Not a bad run for a technology from the 1800s.

Got milk? Coca-Cola doesn’t ... at least not the fairlife kind. The soda giant has suspended all U.S. production at its fairlife dairy unit after a ransomware attack breached its systems, though Canadian output keeps flowing. Turns out even the protein-shake crowd isn’t safe from hackers.