Business

A lot of staffers subscribe just because we enjoy his work (and when he gets his vacation ruined). But today’s newsletter is about the SpaceX lockup expiring — how it should work vs what we will find out tomorrow about how it will work — and how the noted AI hedge fund Situational Awareness may have tanked the bets of noted AI hedge fund Situational Awareness.

The newly privatized company is now saddled with $18 billion of debt, with annual interest payments of about $1.8 billion. Big changes are coming to justify the deal.

The software conglomerate has agreed to acquire Airtable for around $1.29 billion in cash — a fraction of the more than $11 billion it was once valued at in 2021. This is just the latest feather in Bending Spoon’s cap, which has built a reputation for buying software companies that are past their heyday.

It’s the first company to reach the audio streaming milestone, showing 9 precent year-over-year growth in premium subscribers. Monthly active users climbed to 777 million, up 12 percent since the same quarter last year.

The original satellite internet company “for rural America” has filed for bankruptcy after running out of cash and hemorrhaging subscribers to SpaceX. The service will continue to operate during proceedings, but will pivot away from consumers to focus on businesses and governments. It follows EchoStar’s Dish filing for chapter 11 protection in June.

AMZN surpassed $3 trillion in market value for the first time on the strength of accelerating cloud-computing revenue. It joins only Nvidia, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Apple in ever reaching the milestone. It first crossed the $1 trillion mark in 2018.

That’s up from 932 million a year ago, according to Snap’s latest earnings report. The company also says its revenue is up 19 percent year-over-year, as it prepares to launch its $2,195 augmented-reality glasses next month.

In 2021, the bank closed over 300 accounts affiliated with the Trump family business. The reasons why weren’t made public at the time. Last year, the organization filed suit claiming the closures were politically motivated, but in a filing this week, Capital One revealed that they resulted from an anti-money laundering review.

A fascinating book review. “Muskism, in reading its subject as more a symptom than a person, doesn’t offer any kind of psychological interpretation of Musk’s worldview, but many of his pronouncements and preoccupations reveal an ontological confusion of the categories of human and machine.”

The hedge fund Situational Awareness, founded by former OpenAI employee Leopold Aschenbrenner, who had no previous hedge fund experience, “rapidly sold a large portion of its public equity holdings” as losses mounted. The fund employed only eight people, of whom four were investment professionals. Aschenbrenner named the fund after some essays he wrote.

Building the data centers needed to support the AI boom requires lots of skilled human tradespeople working 10-hour days, seven days a week, and earning healthy overtime wages. Bidding wars have broken out in markets with heavy data center construction, allowing workers to jump ship for bonuses and even higher pay in a modern-day gold rush, with companies like Google, Meta, and Microsoft paying to help train new recruits.

Samsung Electronic’s memory chip business is killing it, hitting $49.64 billion for the quarter and driving over 99 percent of its operating profit. But the price gouging created by the AI hype caused its smartphone and home-appliance businesses to post modest operating losses due to the higher cost of chips and other components.

In addition to Reuters, WSJ, CNN, Fox News, and USA Today, Meta now has an AI content partnership to “…draw upon Newsmax’s significant current reporting as well as archived content across its platforms to support AI queries across Meta’s apps and devices.”

Elon Musk’s X Corp and the World Federation of Advertisers are ending their long-running legal fight. In 2024, Musk accused the industry group of illegally boycotting X through its Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) initiative, which set standards to prevent ads from appearing next to harmful content. GARM has since been disbanded. A judge dismissed Musk’s lawsuit in March.

Poor SK Hynix. Despite the memory-chip maker posting record net profit of about $64.64 billion, the stock fell by as much as 18 percent (down 9 percent at market close) when its revenue haul (also a record) failed to meet the lofty expectations set by the AI hype cycle. The results won’t help investors worried that the AI bubble’s about to pop.

After reports of Nvidia in talks for deals worth more than $750 billion — with OpenAI, among others — insurance on Nvidia’s debt got more expensive. “There’s a fear of financial alchemy driven by opaqueness, off-balance-sheet transactions and intercompany relationships, which could result in credit rating downgrades,” Sal Naro, chief investment officer of Coherence Credit Strategies, told Bloomberg. Nvidia is at the center of many transactions that tie the AI ecosystem together.

Chipmaker Changxin Technology Group is now the most valuable China-listed company after IPO’ing this morning, rising nearly 500 percent on speculation that RAMageddon will drive demand for its memory chips in a market dominated by Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron. Tim Cook’s said to have asked for an exception to use CXMT’s chips in Apple products sold in China to keep costs down.

That 28-day pause could go a lot longer, now that US District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín approved a deal saying that Paramount Skydance won’t close its transaction until June 1st, 2027, or at least until after legal claims of two lawsuits (one filed by a group of state AGs, and the other by the WGA) are resolved.

Shortly after confirming it was looking at closing plants and cutting up to 100,000 jobs, the world’s 2nd largest auto company posted miserable financials and a desperate outlook as it lays the ground work for a radical overhaul of its business under threat from Chinese upstarts.

Patreon CEO Jack Conte was clear in yesterday’s layoff announcement that AI doesn’t replace humans, but that might be cold comfort to the humans whose jobs were lost as AI impacts “how we operate and organize.”

US District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín issued a decision Thursday extending her temporary restraining order to a total of 28 days, report The Wrap and Variety. The mega media merger is paused for now due to lawsuits by a group of state AGs and the Writers’ Guild of America, as the judge plans to “hear the two motions for preliminary injunction on the same schedule” and has scheduled a hearing for August 3rd.

With previous import taxes struck down by the courts or set to expire, the Trump administration announced a new set of tariffs ranging from 10 to 12.5 percent on 60 trading partners, including the EU. This time around, the administration is accusing dozens of countries of failing to enforce bans on forced labor as a justification.

The partially government-owned chipmaker’s Q2 2026 revenue increased 25 percent from last year, with data center and AI revenue up 59 percent. CEO Lip-Bu Tan:

A typical account on the prediction market platform also tended to primarily bet on a single topic, according to research from Pew. Sports are huge categories for both Polymarket and its competitor, Kalshi.

While Paramount’s $110 billion WBD merger is suddenly on hold in the US, in Europe, the European Commission is ready to allow it after Paramount agreed to concessions including giving up its stake in United International Pictures within 13 months of the deal closing.

This is a story about how AI destroyed a long-running site of film data. It’s not just that search no longer refers traffic or that the site itself, The Numbers, is getting scraped. It’s also that there’s no way to defend 30-year-old webpages against malicious actors attempting to get the data early so they could win their Polymarket bets.

Reddit has discussed shutting off Google’s access to data used to train its Gemini AI models. Or maybe it’s just a renegotiation bluff now that its $60 million-a-year deal is coming to an end. According to The Wall Street Journal:

A state court has granted a preliminary injunction against Kalshi, ruling its sports-related “event contracts” likely violate state online gambling bans. The judge rejected Kalshi’s defense that federal CFTC regulation shields it from state enforcement. Kalshi will likely have to geoblock Washington residents, marking yet another legal setback for prediction markets.

Nilay called it back in 2024, and now the Gray Lady is on board with recognizing the demise of the open web. It takes a look at how Google went from being a gateway to the internet to becoming the internet for many users who never leave the cozy confines of its AI summaries.