Another view of the Sydney Sweeney ad

Political pros often consider August to be silly season, so it would seem the donnybrook over American Eagle jeans model Sydney Sweeney is right on time. Bloomberg Businessweek national correspondent Joshua Green has been covering conservative corporate culture for a while, though, and writes today about the stakes for companies. Plus: Ooni branches out beyond the pizza oven, and Mumbai apartments add all sorts of luxuries. If this email was forwarded to you, click here to sign up.

I can't speak for anyone else, but I certainly didn't have "Sydney Sweeney culture war eruption" on my political bingo card for this summer. Yet here we are.

Everyone up to and including President Donald Trump seems to have weighed in over the past week on the 27-year-old Euphoria and White Lotus actress and her ad for blue jeans from American Eagle Outfitters Inc.

Sweeney's critics charge, somewhat preposterously, that her endorsement of AE's "great jeans" is racist dog whistle for the homophone "great genes." Thus—coming from the White, blond and blue-eyed Sweeney, who's registered as a Republican voter—the ad is evidence of encroaching far-right identity politics in the age of Trump. If that sounds like a stretch, maybe leftist TikTok can convince you that the ad is in fact "Nazi propaganda."

Conservatives have rallied around Sweeney, with Fox News airing 766 mentions of the denim-clad actress in the span of a week, per media analyst Brian Stelter. Perhaps inevitably, Trump, as America's great culture war accelerant, leapt to Sweeney's defense, praised the actress for having "the 'HOTTEST' ad out there" and cast the imbroglio as a backlash to earlier "woke" corporate controversies, such as Bud Light's partnership with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney for a social media campaign that sparked a boycott.

I've written quite a bit for Businessweek about how Corporate America is becoming the new battlefield in US politics. So when Sweeney-gate broke, I reached out for perspective to Matt Oczkowski, a former data scientist for Trump's 2016 campaign, whom I'd profiled amid the Bud Light fallout because he'd founded a research firm that studies shoppers' political psychology. Oczkowski had long predicted the rise of a conservative consumer culture, and his company helps brands navigate it. Bud Light was a textbook case of a brand misunderstanding and offending its own consumers. So how should we think about American Eagle?

A version of the ad outside an American Eagle store in New York. Photographer: Michael Nagle/Bloomberg

Somewhat to my surprise, Oczkowski didn't agree with Trump that the American Eagle ad fits neatly within the framework of the corporate culture wars as we've come to understand them. That's because American Eagle wasn't trying to broaden its appeal by pandering to new consumers in a way that conflicted with the values and politics of its core customers, as Bud Light had done to its beer-swilling, right-leaning male loyalists. But neither was Oczkowski shocked that Sweeney's ad became politicized.

"American Eagle wasn't trying to do anything political," he says. "But we're so dog-whistled now to expect brand controversies that the minute anyone injects a political angle, the whole thing instantly becomes politicized to the point that the president becomes involved."

What's noteworthy about this scenario, he adds, is how it whipsawed the company's stock price. At one point on Monday, American Eagle shares shot up 24% as speculators poured in. It was the stock's the biggest jump since 2000 and proved that the attention around Sweeney had turned the company into something like a political meme stock. The lesson, Oczkowski says, is that brands need to know how to navigate a political maelstrom even if they have no desire to become involved in one.

On that front, he thinks American Eagle did such a good job defusing the Sweeney controversy that it could alter how corporations respond to online mobs in the future. Rather than retreat or apologize, the company issued a simple statement reaffirming that the campaign's intent "is and always was about the jeans. Her jeans. Her story. We'll continue to celebrate how everyone wears their AE jeans with confidence, their way."

American Eagle's rising stock price, Oczkowski says, should embolden other companies to do the same. "I think that's going to give brands a shield to stick to their convictions and run their branding campaigns the way they want to," he says.

In Brief

Trump's advisers are encouraging him to nominate a temporary Federal Reserve governor to fill the soon-to-be vacant seat, according to people familiar with the discussions.
Uber announced $20 billion in new stock buybacks after disclosing a better-than-expected third-quarter forecast and quarterly results, suggesting its core ride-share and delivery units still have room to pick up steam.
Trump imposed an additional 25% tariff on Indian goods over its purchase of Russian energy, the White House said on Wednesday.
LISTEN: On a new episode of the Elon, Inc. podcast, the panel discusses the $242.5 million verdict in Miami over a a deadly 2019 crash involving Tesla's full self-driving feature as well as the board's $30 billion stock payoff to co-founder Elon Musk.

You can also listen and subscribe to Elon, Inc. on Apple, Spotify, iHeart and the Bloomberg Terminal.

Pizza in the Backyard

Darina Garland and Kristian Tapaninaho, co-founders of Ooni, the home pizza oven company in the backyard of their 17th century Edinburgh home. Photographer: Jillian Edelstein for Bloomberg Businessweek

Newlyweds make more pizza from scratch than just about anyone else, says Kristian Tapaninaho, who co-founded home-pizza oven company Ooni Ltd. with his wife, Darina Garland. It's a "weird correlation," he muses, extracting a gooey, blistered Margherita pie from 950F (510C) heat in the backyard of his family's 17th century Edinburgh home. "Maybe it's just beginning that nesting period in your life, when you want to stay home together and not eat out as much." Internal data from the company bears this out, he says; so does his own experience.

When Tapaninaho and Garland were newly hitched in 2010, they certainly crafted a lot of homemade 'za. Or at least, they tried to, but the young pair couldn't find a suitably hot home oven. A self-described problem-solver, Tapaninaho figured he could make one. Without any training in design or engineering, he drafted a prototype using 3D-design software and paid a local metal studio £50 (about $77 in 2010 dollars) to build it. To the couple's surprise, the invention worked, even if the first pie to emerge from it "looked like a sort of grumpy fajita," Garland recalls. That original oven ultimately served as the prototype for Ooni, whose name would become all but synonymous with backyard pizza-making during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Since the company began in 2012 with less than $100,000—raised through a Kickstarter campaign—its annual revenue has skyrocketed, surpassing $200 million in 2023, up from only $17 million four years earlier. Things have cooled since then, but just barely, Garland says.

For our series A Walk With, Brent Crane takes a post-lunch hike with the couple behind Ooni: The Pizza Oven Startup With a Plan to Own Every Piece of the Pie

Previously in the Businessweek Daily: A Pizza Oven Tells the Tariff Story So Far

Apartments With a Pool

Luxury apartment buildings in Mumbai's Worli district. Photographer: Abeer Khan for Bloomberg Businessweek

Mumbai residences are getting smaller as growing wealth in India's financial capital increases demand for luxury amenities.

In the space-crunched city, apartment developers are building projects that dedicate less space to individual units while offering more communal amenities such as pools, lawns and gyms. That's because buyers and renters are willing to pay more for such comforts in a city plagued by noise and air pollution, traffic congestion and crowded streets while remaining close to family or employers.

Compared with those in other Indian cities, high-rises in Mumbai have the highest square footage allocated to common areas, known in the Indian real estate industry as the "loading factor." In Mumbai the average loading factor for residential buildings built in 2025 is 43%, meaning that for a unit advertised as 1,000 square feet, 430 square feet are devoted to shared amenities, while the other 570 are private to the occupant.

Apoorva Ajith writes about the demand for more recreational and social facilities in housing: A High-Rise Push Is Helping Mumbai Squeeze in Pools, Gyms and Greenery

AI Gold Rush

$500 million

That's the valuation OpenAI could see in a potential sale of stock for current and former employees. The deal, in early talks now, would raise the on-paper price tag for the artificial intelligence leader by roughly two-thirds.

Frantically Drilling

"We can't have knowledge of this wealth underneath us and not exploit it. It's from this wealth that we'll have the money to build the energy transition we dream of."

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva

Brazil's president

As Brazil prepares for the COP30 climate change conference, Lula says the proceeds from an offshore oil discovery are needed to fund the energy transition—but environmentalists aren't buying it. Read the full story here.