Breaking Point ✈️

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Breaking Point ✈️

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Tonight: Travel, whether by road or by air, is about to get a lot harder —just in time for the holidays. And while bond traders got the day off for Indigenous Peoples Day, stock markets were open, and therefore Nightcap carries on as usual. Let's get into it.

By Allison Morrow

✈️ BREAKING POINT

This weekend, Americans got a preview of sorts of what winter holiday travel might look like, and it was, uh, not great.

From Friday through Sunday, Southwest Airlines canceled more than 2,000 flights, stranding thousands of passengers around the country. The airline blamed a mix of causes — staffing shortages, bad weather and air traffic control problems.

The disruptions appeared to be limited to Southwest, however. The Federal Aviation Administration said there had been no air traffic-related cancellations since Friday.

The biggest issue for Southwest is staffing. Once weather or other hiccups hit part of the operation, there's simply not enough staff in enough places to absorb the shock. And the staff who are there are hitting a breaking point.

When air travel plunged in early 2020, all the airlines offered buyouts and early retirement packages to trim staff. Now, all of them are trying to hire new workers. But the hiring won't happen overnight. Southwest has roughly 7,000 fewer employees today than it did pre-pandemic.

🎄 TRAVELER BEWARE

This was a three-day weekend travel surge – a blip compared with the deluge that'll hit American airports for holiday travel in November and December. And there's little fliers can do about it besides hope for the best and try to roll with the inevitable punches that will disrupt Thanksgiving and Christmas even more than Aunt Hilda's homemade mulled wine.

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#️⃣ NUMBER OF THE DAY

$3.27

If airline drama has you considering a road trip this fall, prepare for sticker shock: The average price for gasoline hit a fresh seven-year high of $3.27 a gallon on Monday, up by 7 cents in the past week alone.

Why? Energy prices are skyrocketing as demand bounces back from 2020 lows, and supply simply hasn't kept up. US oil prices finished above $80 a barrel on Monday for the first time in nearly seven years. That's up $120 since oil crashed to minus-$40 a barrel in the spring of last year.

💰 EAT THE RICH

Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos regularly see-saw for the title of world's richest person, and Musk is relishing his moment at the top as only he, a 50-year-old cartoon villain come to life, can do.

Last week, Musk widened his lead over Bezos as his personal wealth shot up to $222 billion, according to Bloomberg's Billionaires Index. Bezos trails him in second place with $191.6 billion.

On Monday, Musk tweeted a second-place medal emoji at Bezos, who had tweeted something equally lame, with an equal dearth of self-awareness.

Here's the thing: This is standard Musk-Bezos feud fare.

Bezos is feeding his "started from a garage and now we're here" narrative by dunking on a publication that dared to challenge his business model at a time when tech startups were imploding en masse. (The garage tidbit is true, but he also had a nearly quarter-million-dollar investment from the Bank of Mom and Dad to help things along.)

And Musk, well…He's being Musk. The emoji was actually pretty mild in the grand scheme of Muskian trolling.

MY 🥈 CENTS

While it's pretty fun to track the horserace, it's important not to get bogged down in petty slights on the internet and take a moment to consider how inconceivably large these numbers are. If you were making $10,000 an hour since the birth of Jesus, working 24/7, you still wouldn't be as rich as either of these bozos.

Yet the rest of us have this thing called income tax that we pay as a cover charge for living in America. Musk and Bezos, despite their mind-boggling wealth, often pay little or no income tax. And it's all entirely legal. Meanwhile, the US median household income fell nearly 3% in 2020 to $67,521, and the economy is sputtering through the pandemic recovery.

WHAT ELSE IS GOING ON?

📈 Goldman Sachs is becoming increasingly pessimistic about the US economy, projecting that growth in 2022 will expand just 4%, down from a previous estimate of 4.4%.

🏡 Amazon is shifting its approach to working from home, allowing individual teams to decide how and whether to return to the office full-time or remain mostly remote.

👀 Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen will meet with the company's independent court-like oversight board in the coming weeks to discuss her concerns.