Happy Friday! We don’t cover much sport here, but world #1 Scottie Scheffler teeing off for round 2 at the PGA Championship after being arrested for assaulting a police officer this morning feels intro-worthy… Today we’re exploring:

• Better together: House-buying habits have changed.
• Space debris: There’s a lot of junk orbiting Earth.
• Spicy noodles: Profits soar at S. Korean company thanks to TikTok.

TOGETHER WITH

Rearrangements

Home Alone and Friends are 2 of the most iconic pieces of Millennial media... they're also increasingly how the generation is thinking about homeownership. Indeed, 42% of the age group report purchasing a house by themselves, and some 14% have buddied up to buy a place, according to a new survey from financial services company Bankrate.

While buying as a couple is still the method that most Millennials reported (47% said they’d purchased with a partner/spouse), the route to homeownership has been more varied for the generation — especially when compared to Gen X and Baby Boomers. Even though respondents were allowed to select multiple responses, just 1% of Baby Boomers said they’d ever bought a place with a friend or a group of friends, and just 4% of Gen X said the same.

Bought in the USA?

Although discourse around Millennial struggles to get a place of their own have buzzed through the media and around family dinner tables for years — the oldest Millennials would have turned 40 roughly 3 years ago now — the age group did hit a significant housing milestone in 2022 when, for the first time in history, the majority (52%) owned their homes.

With a few key issues having beleaguered their home-owning aspirations, not least the fact that they’re all looking to buy at the same time, it’s little wonder that Millennials have been more open to exploring different options to get a foot on the property ladder, even if it increasingly means sharing a bathroom with their brother or bestie.

Space oddities

Another day, another “cloudy with a chance of space debris” forecast in North America: a farmer in rural Canada recently found an 88-pound, 2-meter-wide hunk of charred metal that astronomy experts believe is from a SpaceX rocket that shed the fragment in February. He plans to sell it to raise money for a hockey rink.

The Canadian discovery follows news of a much smaller piece of space junk crashing through the roof of a Florida home in early March. They’re part of a growing phenomenon, with 200-400 man-made objects reentering Earth’s atmosphere on average each year, most of which are mission-related debris from spacecraft, particles from disintegrations, and paint flecks… or dead satellites that continue to orbit the Earth long after we can still make use of them.

According to the BBC, there’s only one known case of someone being hit by falling space debris — an Oklahoma resident was harmlessly hit on the shoulder in 1997 — but the risk is real even if highly unlikely: the European Space Agency (ESA) reports that space agencies and nation states accept a 1-in-10,000 chance of a casualty from a single uncontrolled reentry.

Those stats may pickup in the coming years though, as the ESA tracks the ever-growing number of man-made objects that clutter the space around Earth. At the end of last year, a staggering 36,500 space debris objects over 10 cm in length were orbiting the Earth — perhaps little shock to anyone familiar with the Kessler Syndrome, a concerning theory that the more space junk there is, the more collisions there will be, causing a self-perpetuating chain reaction that could result in Earth’s orbit becoming essentially unusable.

Profits up 3X at Korean noodle maker... thanks to TikTok

Marketing used to be a slow affair. You’d set a budget, make an ad, show it to potential customers, and hope they buy your product. Today, all of that effort is often bested by simply going viral on TikTok.

Case in point: Samyang Foods, which has seen its shares soar 30% today, the daily limit on the exchange it trades on.

The South Korean company reported a blow-out quarter, with revenues rising more than 50% year-on-year, thanks to surging sales of its buldak carbonara spicy noodles, which have been the subject of TikToks that have racked up hundreds of millions of views in aggregate... including one by rapper Cardi B.

Buldak (which translates to “fire chicken”) carbonara noodles have all the ingredients for going viral on FoodTok: they’re hyper-convenient, bright, glossy, and (perhaps most importantly of all) can easily be customized... spawning an endless wave of copycat videos as creators try adding various items to the dish.

All told, operating profit hit more than $60M for Samyang Foods Co., over 3x the figure from Q1 2023.

More Data

• Instant karma: Reddit shares are climbing after the platform announced a partnership with OpenAI yesterday, adding artificial intelligence tools and allowing ChatGPT to use its content.

• How a Catholic fundamentalist page became the biggest content publisher on Facebook.

• Rocket Mortgage are committed to making home more affordable… which is why they’re offering Chartr readers lender credit of $1,000* when they lock in a loan using this link. Start an application today.**

• NFL fans now need to stump up ~$1,600 and subscribe to 7 separate services if they want to catch every game next season, according to estimates in the wake of a new deal with Netflix.

• The Dow hit 40,000 for the first time, which sure sounds positive, but how should we feel about it?

**This is sponsored content.

Hi-Viz

• Iconic: charting the most misunderstood emoji of 2024.

Off the charts: What impressive feat are we charting about? [Answer below.]