Sam Klebanov
Sam Klebanov is a senior reporter for Morning Brew’s daily newsletter, covering business, the economy, technology, media, and culture in a fast-paced, narrative format. His distinguishing trait is using vivid cultural hooks and plain language to make complex economic and business stories feel immediate and relatable. His reporting is frequently syndicated to Fortune, where he co-bylines features on billionaire wealth, robotics, and consumer trends such as the renewed Gen Z obsession with frozen yogurt.
Business stories with cultural hooks
Klebanov often builds business coverage around a concrete cultural or consumer moment, then works outward to the underlying economics.
In a Fortune collaboration on billionaire wealth, he breaks down how a significant share of global billionaires derive their net worth from finance, turning a statistics-heavy topic into a concise narrative about pathways to extreme wealth. In another joint piece he profiles DoorDash’s five-foot delivery robot Dot, using details like speed and size to frame a broader story about automation and last-mile logistics.
His frozen-yogurt coverage for Fortune follows Gen Z back into frozen yogurt shops, using the “froyopocalypse” and its reversal as a way to examine how taste cycles, franchise strategies, and discretionary spending intersect. On Morning Brew, he applies the same approach to lifestyle-adjacent subjects, such as explaining the legal rules that distinguish sparkling wine from Champagne and how they shape global branding and trade. Across these pieces, the through-line is clear: he treats everyday choices - from what people watch or eat to how they commute - as entry points into market structure and business strategy.
AI, IPOs, and the tech–business frontier
Another consistent strand of Klebanov’s work is following artificial intelligence and emerging tech from early-stage hype into concrete business outcomes.
He covers stories like Anthropic’s potential record-setting IPO, highlighting the valuation, the scale of the fundraising, and what a listing of that size means for the broader AI sector and capital markets. He writes on Oura delaying its own public offering, situating the decision within investor sentiment and the wearables market rather than treating it as an isolated corporate move. His coverage of OpenAI’s planned in-home device focuses on how a conversational, voice-driven product with moving mechanical elements could turn an abstract AI model into a consumer appliance, raising questions about hardware strategies and subscription revenue.
Klebanov also tracks semiconductor and hardware IPOs, such as SK Hynix’s debut on Nasdaq, using crisp details about deal size and listing dynamics to explain why memory chips matter to investors and everyday technology users. Earlier stories on Trump’s AI “power lunch” with tech leaders and Oracle’s concerns over a data center lease extend this interest to the policy and infrastructure edges of AI, linking corporate decisions, regulation, and long-term technological risk. Together, these pieces show him as a reporter who treats AI and advanced tech as business beats first - anchored in money, regulation, and corporate strategy - but always framed in terms that a general reader can absorb.
Media, entertainment, and platform economics
Klebanov regularly turns to media, entertainment, and influencer culture as businesses, not just cultural products. He covers state lawsuits being dropped against the merger of major Hollywood studios, focusing on how regulatory decisions shape consolidation and competition in entertainment. In pieces on video game adaptations and Nintendo’s evolution from handmade cards to the Wii, he shows how creative IP and long-running franchises translate into durable revenue streams and corporate strategy. His newsletter work on Substack as “media’s cool kid” examines how the platform attracts high-profile writers and audiences, treating newsletters as products in a crowded media market.
He writes about reporters returning to the White House after a ban, framing the story as a media-industry and access issue rather than purely political theater. A feature on IMAX, where he reports from IMAX facilities to understand why audiences are drawn to the brand’s format, uses on-the-ground detail to probe whether the company’s appeal rests on marketing, technology, or both. He also covers influencer culture more broadly, such as how social media correlates with declining happiness in English-speaking countries, tying the finding back to attention economics and platform design.
This cluster of work positions him as a go-to voice on how media and entertainment companies turn cultural trends into business models.
Economic snapshots in the daily newsletter
Klebanov is a core contributor to Morning Brew’s daily newsletter, where his segments translate macroeconomic developments into compact narratives. In a recent piece on a surprise slowdown in the US job market, he walks through the shortfall in job creation and connects it to interest-rate decisions, making monetary policy feel tangible without losing the underlying data.
Newsletter issues he co-writes track topics like the US helping support the Japanese yen, explaining coordinated currency interventions and their impact on exchange rates and trade.
He has written on Miami’s rising cost of living, citing data that show the city’s consumer prices climbing faster than almost any other major US metro area and using that to explore how migration, housing, and local policy collide. Other segments cover studies on coffee consumption and dementia risk, cross-border markets, and industrial policy, each treated as a brief but complete story with a clear takeaway. Before his current role, Klebanov worked in business research and content strategy, which informs his comfort with charts, statistics, and market indicators woven into narrative reporting.
Across the newsletter and longer features, he maintains a consistent style: tight, fact-driven stories that extract the business logic from news, while keeping the tone conversational enough for a broad readership.
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