Tech Brew // Morning Brew // Update

June 30, 2026

Make a wish. The Wall Street Journal asked its readers what tech they’d like to see invented over the next 20 years, and the answers ranged from “we’re not too far off” to gloriously unhinged:

EV battery packs you swap out at a station, no charging wait required.
A robot executive chef that orders the groceries, stocks the fridge, and cooks.
An at-home generator powered by bacteria that eat your trash.
Teleportation that works “like email”—disassemble, transmit, reassemble.
Space elevators to retire the rocket launch entirely.

Those are just five of the many interesting pitches, but now we want to hear yours: What tech do you want to see in the next 20 years?

Also in today’s newsletter:

A hidden Apple feature could help with motion sickness.
Amazon’s HR AI chatbot is causing chaos.
Why AI talking like a caveman could be a good thing.

—Lindsey Choo, Whizy Kim, and Saira Mueller

THE DOWNLOAD

The new tech elite is here

Photo illustration showing a close-up of a tower of the Golden Gate Bridge with the cityscape of San Francisco in the background, and the suspender cables of the bridge become the lines in the US dollar sign.

Morning Brew Inc, Photo: Adobe Stock

TL;DR: In San Francisco, a rift is growing between tech people who work in AI and those who don’t. The new AI wealth—which has helped drive up housing prices and the cost of living in an already expensive city—is enough to make even a six-figure salary feel somewhat lackluster. And it could be a bellwether of how AI widens class inequality beyond SF.

What happened: They say comparison is the thief of joy, and nowhere is that truer right now than in San Francisco. The sky-high income (and valuable equity) that AI workers earn is leaving even those that make $180,000 a year feeling insecure, according to a New York Times report.

To put it into perspective, a $180,000 annual salary puts you in roughly the top 20% of US household incomes. But it’s still a sliver of what OpenAI and Anthropic are paying some of their staff. Average yearly stock-based compensation for OpenAI employees, for example, reached $1.5 million in 2025. As one engineer told the NYT: “I feel a little bit like I’m not good enough to live here anymore because I don’t work at an AI company.”

Keeping up with the AI Joneses: One area where the influx of AI wealth has had the biggest impact: real estate. The median home sale price in SF as of May was $1.7 million—16% higher than the same time last year and almost quadruple the national median. The city has even snatched the title of having the most expensive rent from NYC, with the average apartment rent hitting $3,827 per month. (The national average is $1,742.)

The pre-IPO tech elite: Thousands of already well-paid AI workers could see their equity soar once Anthropic and OpenAI go public. (The NYT projects that these two IPOs, combined with the recent SpaceX listing, could mint about 20 new billionaires.) That might also help explain all the AI lab talent shuffling we’ve seen in just the last few weeks, with several top AI researchers from Google leaving for its not-yet-public competitors.

Bottom line: It used to be that working in tech at all meant you were near the very top of the socioeconomic ladder. The (perhaps worryingly big) AI boom has made that less true than it used to be for non-AI tech workers—and the widening income gap within Silicon Valley doesn’t exactly bode well for the majority of American workers who’ve never even touched a six-figure salary. —WK