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Watch out, AMC. There’s a new meme stock on the market. Shares in Opendoor Technologies Inc. (Nasdaq: OPEN) have been on fire over the past week. Since Tuesday, July 15, OPEN stock has surged more than 188% as of Fridays market close. And today, OPENs stock price is currently up an additional 27% in premarket trading. Heres why, and what you need to know about the company. What is Opendoor Technologies Inc? Opendoor is a real estate tech company based in San Francisco, California. It was founded in 2014. The company offers an online platform that allows homeowners to quickly sell their homes by providing details about the property. After the homeowners answer questions about their property, Opendoor will make them an offer to buy it directly. Once Opendoor purchases a home from a user, it will then often make necessary improvements to the home and then sell it to a buyer for a profit. In other words, Opendoor is a house-flipping company. It buys houses on the cheap, fixes them up, and flips them for a profit. Opendoor went public through a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) in 2020, and it currently trades on the Nasdaq. Whats the story behind OPENs stock price? Less than a year after OPEN stock publicly debuted on the Nasdaq, its shares surged. OPENs stock price went from around $11 per share in July 2020 to nearly $40 a share at one point in February 2021, according to data from Yahoo Finance. But since then, the stock has cratered. By the end of 2022, CNBC notes, OPEN shares had fallen 92% to just $1.16 each. Opendoors stock price fell due to the companys business prospects, which got pummelled by rising interest rates, increasing Opendoors borrowing costs. At the same time, rising interest rates led to a slowdown in the housing market, as demand for home buying slowed. Recently, OPEN shares had fallen below $1, putting the company at risk of removal from the Nasdaq. The threat of delisting has prompted the company to consider a reverse stock split of up to 1 for 50, aiming to boost its share price and thereby maintain its listing on the Nasdaq, according to CNBC. OPEN shares continued their steady decline until July of this year, when, on July 15, the stock price suddenly began to accelerate upwards. By Friday, July 18, the stock had surged more than 188% over the previous five-day period. What is causing OPEN stock to surge? The main driver behind OPENs stock price surge over the past week seems to be down to one person, according to CNBC and Yahoo Finance. That person is hedge fund manager Eric Jackson. Jackson runs EMJCapital, but if you look at Jacksons X profile, youll see he describes himself as The Carvana hedge fund guy. All he does is try to find the next Carvana over & over again. He states this because he is the one who had the foresight to identify Carvana Co. (NYSE: CVNA) as a good buy when the stock price was trading in the single digits. In 2022, many investors thought Carvana was near bankruptcy, but Jackson was bullish on the stock. While CVNA hit a low of under $4 per share in December 2022, it surged more than 1,000% in 2023. And its great run has continued. On Friday, CVNA shares closed at almost $348, up nearly 170% for the year. Jackson was one of the few people to see the potential in Carvana when the stock was getting hammered in 2022. And now he seems to think hes found another stock with such potential in Opendoor. On July 14, Jackson began tweeting consistently about OPEN shares, arguing that it could be a 100-bagger over the next few years. In a lengthy thread, Jackson said he was bullish on OPEN because its giving his hedge fund $CVNA vibes. According to Jackson, some of the reasons for this are that next month, Opendoor is likely to report its first-ever positive EBITDA for a quarter. It has also cut costs aggressively and has few competitors left. Due to this and other reasons, Jackson argues that OPEN’s stock price could rise to $82 per share within a few years. Since Jacksons July 14 postsand his subsequent posts about OPENthe stocks price has surged more than 188%. Is OPEN the new meme stock? People are already describing OPEN as the new meme stock. A meme stock is the description given to a stock that becomes popular with retail investors on social media. Word of mouth spreads on social channels about the new hot stock, and soon many traders with brokerage accounts buy shares in hopes of seeing massive gains in a short amount of time. GameStop Corp. (NYSE: GME) and AMC Entertainment Holdings, Inc. (NYSE: AMC) were historically two of the most popular meme stocks, and their prices surged during the pandemic as at-home retail investing saw a renaissance while people were under lockdowns. Given that many retail investors on social media are singing the praises of OPEN after Jacksons tweets, it does seem fair to say OPEN is the new meme stock of the moment. Of course, that doesnt make it a safe bet. Jackson lays out some compelling arguments for the stocks bright future. But in investing, nothing is ever guaranteed. And while Jackson, and plenty of others now, are bullish on OPEN, its worth noting that there are voices out there arguing that the stock is not a buy. As of the time of this writing, in premarket trading, OPEN shares are up another 27% to around $2.86 per share.
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Hello and welcome to Modern CEO! Im Stephanie Mehta, CEO and chief content officer of Mansueto Ventures. Each week this newsletter explores inclusive approaches to leadership drawn from conversations with executives and entrepreneurs, and from the pages of Inc. and Fast Company. If you received this newsletter from a friend, you can sign up to get it yourself every Monday morning. Modern business is built on partnerships. Some 43% of mid-market executives surveyed by J.P. Morgan at the end of last year said they were planning to invest in strategic alliances in 2025 as part of their growth plans. A third of Fast Companys Most Innovative Companies surveyed in 2023 said they were looking at initiating partnerships with third parties to maintain their innovation readiness. What does it take to make such partnerships work? You need humility and the willingness to take a risk on behalf of the partner so that both sides have skin in the game, says Steve Beard, chairman and CEO of Adtalem Global Education, a for-profit provider of education and training for the healthcare industry. Finding solutions together Adtalem, which reported $1.6 billion in sales in fiscal 2024, up 9.2% from a year earlier, routinely partners with schools, hospital systems, and training organizations to increase its pipeline of medical professionals and offer hands-on experience to students and graduates. Beard shared the example of a new alliance between Chamberlain University, one of Adtalems nursing schools, and SSM Health, a nonprofit health system operating in Illinois, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Wisconsin. The arrangement aims to enroll 400 nurses annually, primarily in Chamberlains online bachelor of science in nursing (BSN) program. Students in the program have the opportunity to gain work experience at SSM Health facilities while in school and have access to full-time employment opportunities at SSM Healthwith loan repaymentupon graduation. Beard and Amy Wilson, chief nurse executive of SSM Health, say the program is designed to help address a nursing shortage in the U.S. The Bureau of Labor Statistics is projecting nearly 200,000 nursing openings each year through 2032 due to retirementsbut the size of the registered nurse population is only expected to grow by 177,400 nurses between 2022 and 2032. Chamberlain recruits nontraditional students, including people whose educations have been interrupted or those who have been shut out of selective colleges and universities. The school says it is the No. 1 provider of nursing degrees to minority students. Prestige and selectivity are, by definition, intended to be small, and theres no incentive for those institutions to grow to meet the market demand, which creates a very attractive lane for us, says Beard. That is exactly what we exist to do. Critics of for-profit colleges say students can get a comparable education at community or state colleges for much less money and fret about the schools low completion rates. While our tuition may be higher than community colleges, its often lower than private nonprofit institutions and out-of-state public rates, says Beard. When you factor in speed to completion and targeted career alignment, we believe we offer strong return on investment for students underserved by traditional models. Chamberlain says its four-year graduation rate is 71.2% for full-time undergraduate students across all its campuses compared with about 50% across all four-year institutions. Partnerships at work Beard says Adtalem respects its partners areas of expertise. We have to have the humility to understand that well never know as much about their business and the challenges theyre facing as they do. And in partnerships like the one with SSM Health, each party had to be willing to try something different in order to make the deal a win-win. In SSMs case, Wilson says, the health system had to get comfortable with giving Chamberlain students priority placement in its clinical settings, an accommodation Wilson says she was willing to make in order to help fill her hiring pipeline. Saying that you have a strategic relationship with one school can sometimes be difficult within the nursing profession, she says. We had to overcome that hurdle internally and get people comfortable with that. For Adtalem, the arrangement means that other health systems wont necessarily have access to recruit from the student population that commits to work at SSM. Beard advises other CEOs that their teams need to be willing to cocreate and iterate for partnerships to succeed. Weve built in a tremendous amount of flexibility to adapt the program and its features as we learn together. Read more: power of partnership It will take a team of rivals to save the planet Genslers co-CEOs offer a lesson in shared leadership Harnessing partnerships in turbulent times
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What happens when you try to teach a machine how to think like you? Thats the question I found myself grappling with when I partnered with a leading learning company to cocreate an AI-powered coaching platform. The idea was inspiring: a tool that would let employees ask questions and get real-time coaching, anytime, anywhere, from a chorus of thought leaders across topics, including myself. My focus? Simplification, innovation, and leading through change. And yet, the most fascinating part wasnt the tech. It was the mirror it held up to human behavior and the potential to unlock better human connection. Coaching democratized Heres an undeniable truth: AI is disrupting the traditional coaching modeland in many cases, for the better. A growing body of research shows that people are more honest with AI coaches. Studies from institutions like MIT, the University of Southern California, and the CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security have found that users are more likely to disclose sensitive information to AI avatars than to human counselors. Why? Because theres no judgment or fear of asking a dumb question. AI offers psychological safety, wrapped in code. People act more boldly, less afraid to say whats really on their minds, or whats holding them back. According to a 2025 Korn Ferry research study, 76% of global workers say great development opportunities make them want to stay at a company. And with AI-powered tools, coaching becomes democratizedaccessible to more employees, not just the C-suite. But its not just about access, its about precision. AI coaching can: Tailor plans based on role, goals, or even time of day. Simulate hard conversations with employees or clients. Offer real-time feedback in meetings or presentations. Deliver 24/7 guidance on everything from imposter syndrome to difficult feedback. Imagine being able to ask: How do I tell my team I disagree with them without killing morale? Or: Give me three ways to simplify my team’s strategy presentation for our regional VP. The AI replies with actionable, contextual advice rooted in the voices of real thought leaders. Thats why I said yes to becoming one. The Ethical and Philosophical Questions It Raised The more we built out my coach bot, the more I realized: this isn’t just about tech, this is about identity. Building an AI version of yourself reveals more about human behavior than machine learning. It raises questions about how exactly AI can unlock vulnerability, empathy, and ethical nuance in the coaching experience. For instance: if Im offering guidance as an AI coach, how do I ensure the advice is actually mine, not something the AI made up? How do I preserve the nuance, tone, and ethical compass that defines my human coaching? How do I ensure that answers include not just information but are considerate of human emotions and cultural context? I found myself constantly asking: Is the model drawing from my most current content? Does it sound like me? Not just in words, but in tone and intent? Could the advice ever veer into unethical, biased, or legally gray territory, and how do we ensure that doesnt happen? Hypotheticals Heres why: Imagine this scenario. Someone types in: My team is resisting a new innovation initiative. What should I do to push it through? And the AI responds with: Reassign team members who resist. Focus only on fast adopters to accelerate progress. While this advice may seem efficient on the surface, it lacks strategic nuance and emotional intelligence. Innovation isn’t just about speed. Its about bringing people along, addressing resistance with empathy, and fostering long-term cultural change. That kind of answer doesnt reflect how I would guide a leader through transformation. It reflects a cold efficiency bias, one that risks damaging morale, trust, and psychological safety. This is why I need to ensure my AI coach reflects not just what I know, but how I teach, influence, and lead. So, we took proactive steps: feeding it updated materials, refining my tone, testing it with increasingly complex prompts. We checked for hallucinations, those notorious moments when AI confidently delivers misinformation. And we took steps to include empathy and context into every layer. But this went deeper than risk management. It became a philosophical exercise: What does it mean to give people a human experience through a machine? In reality, real coaching is emotional, messy, and revealing. Could we ever replicate that? How to Keep AI Coaching Human The key isnt avoiding AI. Its learning how to humanize it. Here are some prompt examples we suggest to employees using my AI coach: Lisa, what would you say if I feel overwhelmed by my role but dont want to seem weak? Walk me through a role-play of me firing an underperformer with empathy. Give me a simulation where I practice pushing back on a senior execs bad ideanicely. Based on your innovation framework, what are 3 experiments I can try this week with my team? Whats one thing I could eliminate from my weekly workflow to simplify things? Each prompt invites the AI to tap into not just knowledge, but emotional intelligence. Coaching Humans to be More Human I went into this initiative thinking Id be training a tool. Instead, it trained me on the future of learning, leadership, and the very soul of coaching. AI coaching isnt about algorithms. Its about access, authenticity, and agency. Its about giving people space to grow in private, at their own pace, with perspectives that challenge and change them. And its only just begun.
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E-Commerce
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