Hello! It’s that time of year again, when the Chartr team opens up the archives and scrolls through the record 530+ charts that we made this year, to bring you: 2023 in Charts. We hope you enjoy this whistle-stop tour of some of the biggest stories across business, tech, entertainment, and society.

Coming in… softly?

‍As we entered 2023, there was a lot for markets to be nervous about: inflation was running hot, the corporate world was still adjusting to what post-Covid work looked like, and economists were rolling out their favorite words — “it depends” — when asked whether the Federal Reserve’s interest rate hikes would send the economy into a recession.

But the latest data seems to suggest that Jay Powell and co. might have pulled it off — indicating at the Fed’s final monetary policy meeting that they are more likely to be cutting interest rates than hiking them next year. Indeed, the recession that so many expected to come… hasn’t shown up.

Say no more

‍The slightest mention of rate cuts has been enough to send traders into a buying frenzy, with US stocks up 14% since the end of October, taking the total gains for the S&P 500 Index to a whopping +25% on the year. A substantial portion of that rally was because big tech was feeling much more like the 2020/21 version of itself, as some of the biggest tech stocks posted massive year-to-date gains (Alphabet+53%, Apple+57%, Amazon+79%, Tesla+138%) — but none more so than Nvidia, which had one of the best years in corporate history.

‍AI’s arrival

‍Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang this year revealed that back in 2018 the tech giant had a watershed moment, deciding — in his words — to “bet the company”, doubling down on building innovative graphics processing units (GPUs) that would become the building blocks for some of the most disruptive software ever built: generative artificial intelligence. The reward for that bold vision? Soaring GPU sales and a stock price that’s up 247% this year — taking Nvidia into the rarefied air of the $1 trillion market cap club.

Although ChatGPT was launched at the end of 2022, 2023 was undoubtedly the year that AI tools burst into the real mainstream, with students, creative artists, accountants, lawyers, coders, major enterprises, and even criminals finding ways to use the burgeoning set of tools.

The chatbot soared to a million users in just 5 days, hitting the 100 million user milestone a mere 2 months after its launch. For perspective, Instagram took 15x as long to reach that benchmark, and Spotify took around 4-and-a-half years. Ignoring Meta's Threads, which leveraged its Instagram user base, no product has ever grown at such a rapid pace. Throw in a little boardroom drama, plus a few doomsday “end of the world” quotes about AI, and you’ve had quite the year.

Stoppage time

‍While robots have been rising up, American workers have been increasingly downing tools this year: strikes and lockouts have blighted multiple major American industries, with several high-profile wins for trade unions commanding, among other stipulations, protection from AI, better benefits, and bigger pay packets.

The unions strike back

‍Even though private-sector union membership has been plummeting for decades, with just 6% of American workers belonging to an organized group last year, data from the Labor Department reveals that October 2023 saw more days lost to work stoppages than any single month since the early 1980s.

The 4.4 million days lost to stoppages in October alone — calculated using the number of workers involved in strikes/lockouts multiplied by the total workdays that each stoppage stretched over — added to an already massive year for striking in the US, totaling ~17 million workdays lost days as of November. Even Hollywood didn’t escape strike fever: the 4-month-long WGA/SAG-AFTRA strikes, the first joint writers-and-actors strike in 60 years and the longest actors’ strike in history, was estimated to have cost California’s economy almost $5bn.

Barbio

‍Even with strike-imposed restrictions on some movie promotions in the latter half of the year, moviemakers had a solid 2023 all told, with a few serious standouts.

Paint it pink

‍This year, the box office got all dolled up, with Barbie running away to become the highest-grossing movie of 2023, taking a staggering $636 million in the US, more than $1.4 billion worldwide, and breaking several cinematic records in the process.

There were other familiar faces leading this year’s movie rankings, with Super Mario, Spider-Man, and Guardians of the Galaxy all smashing it on the silver screen. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer — the film that, alongside Barbie, delivered a notable boost to the US box office when the movies debuted on the same weekend in July — rounded out the top 5, taking $326 million in 150 days.

‍In recovery

‍While the box office may still be suffering a little from an ongoing case of sequelitis, with at least 6 of the top 10 films of 2023 being out-and-out reboots or follow-ups, the symptoms aren’t as intense as they were when we wrapped up the state of cinema in 2022. Domestic theater takings are recovering more generally too, with nearly $8.5 billion grossed so far in 2023 — the healthiest showing since the pandemic, according to Box Office Mojo numbers.

Climate, changed

‍In environmental news, headlines were dominated by record-shattering climate figures, as global temperatures soared to preternatural highs and, month-on-month, anomalous weather patterns became the norm.

Collectively, we watched an unusually warm January transition into a series of extreme weather events in the spring — including ice storms, tornadoes, and cyclones — seeing all-time high ocean temps swelter through the hottest summer in recent history, where the global surface air temperature peaked at 17.08°C on July 6th, the world’s warmest averaged recorded day.

As the scorching summer fueled catastrophic wildfires the world over, burning 18 million hectares of land in Canada alone, exceptionally high temperatures persisted into the El Niño-impacted autumn and winter months — leading scientists to conclude that 2023 will almost certainly be the hottest year on record.

‍Fever pitches

‍2023’s startling temperatures did, however, propel pertinent changes in global climate policy: international summits such as COP28 paved the way for a fossil fuel phase-down (even if a full phase-out is yet to be promised) and mammoth investments into clean energy put renewable sources, like wind and solar power, on track to extend their lead over coal in the coming years.

Honorable mentions

A lot happened this year, some honorable mentions from our charting this year:

• 2023 (Taylor’s Version): 2023 has been an enchanted year for Taylor Swift: kicking off the record-shattering Eras Tour; releasing 2 chart-storming re-recorded albums; reaching billionaire status while boosting the US economy by an estimated $5.7bn; being named TIME’s Person of the Year and holding Spotify’s top spot as the most-streamed artist globally.

• Home truths: With US mortgage rates only recently dropping from towering highs, and prices remaining stubbornly high, would-be-buyers have faced the least affordable housing market in decades.

• Inflates rates: Following a year of pumped-up prices — inflation has finally begun to ease moving into 2024. But, even if the rate of price hikes is slowing, prices are still way above 2020 levels, taking a toll on many deflated Americans, who’ve seen sizable hikes to olive oil, healthcare, and even tooth fairy fees.

• Commuter times: Back-to-office orders was this year’s TL;DR takeaway from the world of work, as employees and employers made their cases in the debate. US office occupancy was creeping up over 50% in February, but there remained a deep mismatch between demand and supply for remote work.

• Stream of the crop: Streaming revolutionized how we entertain ourselves, but this year it started to look a little bit more like the cable packages of old, as explored in our Streamonomics deep dive. The space got even more crowded, leading to multiservice mergers, cancellations, and a power struggle for subscribers’ attention spans.

That's all folks — we hope you have a wonderful holiday season... see you in '24.