Hi, I'm Dan Pramak and welcome to Axios Recap, presented by Facebook.

Today is Thursday, December 10th.

New jobless claims are up, odds of a stimulus are down, and we're focused on the king of global hospitality.

Airbnb began trading today on the NASDAQ at a valuation north of $100 billion.

For context, that's more than Marriott and Hilton combined.

You could even add Expedia into that mix because it owns rivals Home Away and VRBO,

and Airbnb is still worth more.

It's also the single largest IPO of 2020 and may be this year's most fascinating corporate story.

Many viewed Airbnb as pandemic roadkill back in March as traveled ground to a halt,

and Airbnb might have thought so too.

It raised new equity and debt funding at an $18 billion valuation, which was down from a prior mark of $31 billion,

and in May laid off around 25% of its staff. But then a funny thing happened. People began

traveling, not overseas or necessarily even across state lines, but driving distances to more rural spots that Airbnb had an abundance.

And lots of those stays came with higher price tags and for longer durations because people didn't have to rush back to the physical office or school.

Plus, most Airbnbs allowed for social distancing or isolation

without front desks or elevators or housekeepers. To be clear, Airbnb's revenue is down from

2019, but it turned a third quarter profit and investors clearly believe it's well-positioned

to benefit from whatever 2021 throws at us.

We'll go deeper on all things Airbnb with company co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky.

But first, this.

We're joined now by Airbnb co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky.

So Brian, you're viewed as kind of one of the last IPO holdouts of your kind of generation of Silicon Valley founder.

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