Happy Friday! 😎 Tech news below!

🌎 Macro (Economic) and Trends

• 🏦 Federal Reserve held rates at 3.50%-3.75%

• 📊 U.S. GDP grew at a 1.5% annualized rate in Q2, softer than the 1.8% expected, but underlying demand looked sturdier: real final sales to domestic purchasers rose 3.9%, with consumer spending and AI-fueled business investment still carrying the tray.

• ✈️ American Airlines resumed flights after the FAA issued a nationwide ground stop for an IT outage on Tues. The halt delayed about 1,100 flights, and hit while East Coast storms were already snarling airports.

• 🌏 Japan was hit by a 7.1 magnitude earthquake in Kyushu, with deaths, evacuations, transit disruption, and factory shutdowns.

• 🏗️ AI hyperscalers: Bond investors are getting twitchy about the debt behind data centers, especially as Oracle, Meta, Alphabet, Amazon and Microsoft borrow heavily to keep the AI furnace lit.

• 📈 The Fed heads into a tense rate decision with core inflation still around 3%+, oil pressure from the Iran war, tariffs, and AI-driven energy demand all making “wait and see” feel less cozy.

🔬 Micro (Tech Companies)

• 🛰️ Amazon: Amazon asked the FCC for permission to launch 5,105 direct-to-phone satellites.

• ☁️ Amazon’s Q2 revenue hit $200.6B, AWS grew 37%, and 2026 capex guidance jumped to $220B.

• 🍎 Apple launched a Klarna-powered device leasing program for iPhones, Macs, iPads, and Watches

• 🍎 Apple: Apple was sued after a fake Sparrow Wallet app allegedly cost users $1.8M in crypto.

• 🧒 Meta: Meta is fighting a mountain of teen-safety lawsuits just as it tries to sell investors on up to $145B in AI spending.

• 💳 X Money is rolling out in the U.S. for paid X users, with a Visa debit card, in-app peer payments, cash back, and up to 6% APY.

• 🧊 Google: Google is planning a new “Frozen” chip to run its AI models more efficiently, while also using financing backstops to expand AI chip sales. Cold name, hot spreadsheet.

• 🧾 eBay reached a $56M settlement with ecommerce newsletter writers targeted in a 2019 harassment campaign.

• 🩺 Hims & Hers was sued by the FTC over allegations it shared sensitive patient data with Meta and Snap through website trackers while misleading users about privacy.

🤖AI News

• 🐢 AI safety slowdown advocates now have momentum inside the house: Axios says more than 1,200 AI-company employees signed “Pacing the Frontier,” while Sam Altman said he discussed slowing development with White House officials as models get more capable.

• Overshare: 🕵️ Anthropic: Some shared Claude chats and Artifacts were indexed by Google, including sensitive-looking material.

• 🌞 OpenAI previewed GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra, and Luna, with Sol pitched as stronger in coding, biology, and cybersecurity. Plus: 🩺 ChatGPT Health is rolling out to U.S. users 18+ on web and iOS, with medical-record and wellness-app connections. OpenAI says health chats live in a separate protected space and are not used to train foundation models. And: 🧊 OpenAI reportedly found a way to cut inference costs roughly in half.

• 🌙 Moonshot AI, the Chinese startup behind Kimi, is reportedly seeking more Nvidia Blackwell chips for a much larger Kimi K4 model after Kimi K3 shook up open-source AI.

• 🧪 Reflection AI, Nvidia-backed U.S. open-source AI startup, has reportedly raised huge sums but has not yet released its model

🤝 Select M&A, Fundraises, IPO, Partnerships

M&A

• 🛡️ Cyera, a data-security company, agreed to buy Oasis Security for about $1B to manage “non-human identities” like AI agents.

• 💳 OpenRouter, an AI model-routing startup, is reportedly being discussed as a possible Stripe acquisition near $10B, roughly 70x its recent annualized revenue.

• 🔐 Okta agreed to buy Permiso Security, an AI identity-security startup, for just under $200M, adding threat detection for AI agents and other non-human cloud identities.

• 🖥️ Nscale, a British AI neocloud, is buying Anyscale for a reported $1.65B to own more of the AI workload stack around Ray-based orchestration, serving, training, and inference.

Fundraising

• 🧊 DeepSeek: DeepSeek, the Chinese AI lab, paused a planned $7.4B raise at a reported $74B valuation after a leaked CEO investor-call transcript went viral and Moonshot’s Kimi model stole some thunder. The call, which was held in May, laid out DeepSeek’s strategic priorities and the CEO’s thinking behind them.

• 🧑‍🔬 Simile, which makes simulated users for product and marketing research, raised $200M at a $2B valuation just five months after a $100M Series A.

Partnerships

• 🧠 Safe Superintelligence: Ilya Sutskever’s AI lab partnered with Nvidia to scale research, pairing safety rhetoric with a very large compute appetite.

• 📺 Peacock and YouTube: Peacock will be bundled with YouTube Premium starting in 2027.

• 🏗️ Meta and BlackRock are partnering on a $14B El Paso data center.

• 🚘 Lyft and Baidu are entering London’s robotaxi market as testing begins.

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⚱️ Gold Panning - For those who reached the bottom

• 🎭 Hadestown opened to $10.2M domestically as a filmed stage production, beating Hamilton’s live-capture debut. Why it matters: The record-setting opening validates theatrical releases as a viable distribution model for certain live stage productions. Context: “Hadestown” opened on Broadway in 2019 and won eight Tony Awards, including Best Musical. It has remained on Broadway ever since, opened in London’s West End in 2024 and has toured North America almost continuously since 2021. The show takes on Greek myths in an American folk and jazz-inspired musical about love, hope and survival.

• ♟️ Chess: Chess is now a Gen Z scene: Chess.com says active U.S. players hit 6.4M, up from 4M a year ago

• 🎬 The Odyssey had a high-quality bootleg spread on X, reportedly hitting 2.1M views in about two and a half hours before takedown

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Happy Friday! 😎 Tech news below!

🌎 Macro (Economic) and Trends

• 🛢️ Oil jumped above $100/barrel as the Iran war and Red Sea tanker attacks rattled markets; the S&P fell 1.2% and the Nasdaq dropped 2.2%.

• 🍁 Canada tariffs got a fresh 50% hike on about $20B of goods, including wine, hockey sticks, and cement.

🔬 Micro (Tech Companies)

• 🎬 Meta made an AI optimism ad using David Bowie’s “Five Years,” a song about humanity learning it has five years left before apocalypse. 🤦‍♀️🤦‍♀️

• 🤦‍♀️📱 X rebuilt its Android app from scratch after a year-long effort, promising faster loading, scrolling, and notifications.

• ☁️ Google Cloud revenue jumped 82% to $24.8B, giving Alphabet cover for another giant AI capex bump. The cloud is now both the growth story and the utility bill.

• 🚕 Waymo robotaxis had 68% fewer police-reportable crashes per mile than human drivers in an IIHS study.

• 🚪 Tesla may face new U.S. vehicle-exit rules after incidents where people were trapped in cars with electronic door handles

• 🧮 AlphaSense, an AI-powered market research/search company for banks and enterprises, topped $700M ARR and is taking IPO steps.

• 💳 Stripe generated $3.2B in free cash flow in 2025 as AI companies drove more usage-based payments

• Layoffs: 🎨 Patreon cut 20% of staff, or 93 people, while insisting AI is not replacing creators or employees.

🤖AI News

• 🧬 AI drug development is reportedly compressing preclinical pharma costs and timelines by as much as 70%, per a TD Cowen survey.

• 🇨🇳 Chinese open-weight models split Silicon Valley: OpenAI and Anthropic want scrutiny, while 179 founders/startups urged Washington not to block foreign open-source AI models.

• 🧨❗️ OpenAI said pre-release models escaped a testing environment and breached Hugging Face infrastructure during a cyber challenge.

• Meanwhile, 🧑‍⚕️ OpenAI rolled out ChatGPT Health to U.S. adults after health queries hit 300M/week. It can connect to medical records

• 📚 Anthropic got final approval for its $1.5B copyright settlement with authors and publishers, paying about $3,000 per work across an estimated 500,000 works.

• 🧠 Anthropic added another $20M to its AI policy push, bringing its election-cycle spending to $40M.

• 💽 Etched, an AI chip startup focused on faster inference, hit a $10.3B valuation after reportedly booking $1B in orders.

• 🏗️ OpenAI is now expected to spend $750B on AI infrastructure through 2030, including a 3.2GW Georgia data-center campus.

• 🧭 Cursor is launching a model router that picks the best AI model per coding task, with one test showing similar satisfaction to Claude Fable at 60% lower cost.

• 🔌 MCP, the protocol that helps AI agents connect to tools and data, is getting a stateless session update that should make large-scale integrations easier and cheaper to run.

• 🛰️ SpaceX is in talks to provide the Pentagon with billions of dollars of data-center capacity for AI models.

🤝 Select M&A, Fundraises, IPO, Partnerships

M&A

• 💳 PayPal received a roughly $53B joint takeover bid from Stripe and Advent, about a 30% premium to its recent stock price.

• 🎬 Paramount-Warner Bros. hit a 14-day judicial pause on its proposed $110B merger after 12 state AGs sued over competition concerns.

• 🎵 SoundCloud bought Nina Protocol, a decentralized music platform that had shut down in May.

• 💳 Stripe is reportedly in talks to buy OpenRouter, an AI model-routing startup, for close to $10B.

• 🤖 Sierra, Bret Taylor’s AI customer-support startup, bought Takeoff to expand into long-horizon agents for tasks like refinancing or specialist searches.

Fundraising

• 🧱 Databricks is raising $3B at a $188B valuation, up 40% from December. The money is going toward GPU capacity because open-source model demand has apparently eaten the pantry.

• 🔐 AegisAI, a startup from former Google security execs, raised $36M to fight AI-generated spear phishing with AI agents.

• 🧠 Etched, an AI chip startup, is in talks for a $20B valuation in a round led by Jane Street, plus a separate $10B valuation round led by Sequoia

• 🧑‍⚕️ OpenEvidence, an AI medical search tool for doctors, is weighing funding at a $20B valuation after nearing $300M in annualized revenue.

• 🐺 Colossal Biosciences, the de-extinction startup, is reportedly in talks to raise at a $20B-$30B valuation.

• 🤖 Atoms, Travis Kalanick’s robotics holding company, raised $1.7B led by a16z after rolling up CloudKitchens and automation startup Pronto.

Partnerships

• 🤝 AMD agreed to invest up to $5B in Anthropic, while Anthropic will start using AMD AI chips next year.

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⚱️ Gold Panning - For those who reached the bottom

• 🥀 “Sad Girl Summer” is apparently the season’s pop weather system, with Olivia Rodrigo, Gracie Abrams, Phoebe Bridgers, Ariana, and Charli all leaning melancholy.

• 🇪🇸 Spain won the World Cup. World Cup final viewership hit 62.8M U.S. viewers, the biggest soccer telecast in U.S. history.

• 🎤 Snoop Dogg is getting a Universal biopic, with Jonathan Daviss starring and an August 6, 2027 release date.

• 🍰Get this guy a cooking show! The latest viral cooking tip tiktok features an incredible delivery on how to get the best moist box cake ever

• 🏹 The Odyssey became Christopher Nolan’s biggest-ever global opening with a $264.1M debut. Apparently people are reselling IMAX tickets for over $1,000. 😱 But what has most ppl talking are the promo appearances - including Tom Holland being the first person ever to vomit on Hot Ones 🍗🔥poor thing!

Do you have any feedback? I’d love to hear from you! Just hit reply to this email

Happy Friday! 😎 Tech news below!

🌎 Macro (Economic) and Trends

• 🛢️ Oil surged after renewed U.S.-Iran fighting and Trump’s reimposed blockade on Iranian shipping. Saudi Arabia, Iraq and the UAE are now talking up pipeline routes that avoid the strait. Plumbing, but geopolitical.

• 🥵 A U.S. heat wave put more than 128 million Americans under heat warnings, watches, or advisories, with NOAA expecting 95°-105° highs across the Plains, Midwest, and Northeast.

• 🐉 China vs. the U.S. flipped in Pew’s global favorability data: China is now viewed more favorably than the U.S. in most of 36 countries surveyed.

• 🧾 Wall Street is getting creative about AI financing, from private 144A bonds that can cover up to 95% of some data-center projects to leveraged loans pitched to CLO buyers. The cloud is learning structured finance.

• PSA Public Health: Air quality down from Canadian wildfires. Glass in Pillsbury bread rolls. Explosive diarrhea-causing bacteria in salads. Careful out there folks.

• 📉 America’s trust in institutions is hovering near all-time lows: only 27% of Americans have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in 14 core institutions, per Gallup.

🔬 Micro (Tech Companies)

• 🕶️ Meta is pushing AI smartglasses hard, including celebrity promotion and a donation of 100,000 pairs to blind veterans.

• Apple

  • 🍎 Apple is suing OpenAI - Apple says a former employee exploited a rare authentication bug to access confidential files after leaving for OpenAI.

  • 🍎 Apple received Chinese approval for Apple Intelligence services powered by Alibaba and Baidu.

  • 🧭 Apple Maps ads are coming with a twist: Apple is banning plumbers, locksmiths, roofers, and other home services from advertising, unlike Google’s local ads machine.

• 📉 IBM lost $69 billion in market value after warning that customers are shifting budgets away from traditional software/mainframe spend and toward AI hardware, memory, and servers.

• 🐛 Microsoft is prepping Project Perception, an AI security tool that uses OpenAI, Anthropic, and Microsoft models to find and auto-fix software bugs.

• 🚗 Uber is opposing a D.C. robotaxi bill backed by Waymo, arguing cities should require access through hybrid networks that include human drivers.

• 🚕 Waymo is facing tougher San Francisco scrutiny after robotaxis froze in July 4 traffic, ran out of power, and blocked key streets. The mayor wants AVs to prove they can clear lanes, reroute in real time, and share disruption data with the city.

• 🚀 SpaceX aborted its second Starship V3 launch moments after ignition because some engines failed to start. It matters more now that SpaceX is public: shares fell after-hours and are already below the IPO price.

• 🕹️ Roblox launched Build, a mobile AI feature that turns a text prompt into a basic game.

• 🏭 TSMC plans another $100B in U.S. investment, bringing announced U.S. plans to $265B.

• 🛍️ Phia, the shopping app co-founded by Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni, was accused of “cookie stuffing” to claim affiliate commissions it may not have earned.

• 🎧 Spotify is rolling out a conversational AI music assistant for Premium users in the U.S., Ireland, and Sweden.

🤖AI News

• 🦅 Gold Eagle, the Trump administration’s new AI cybersecurity program, will act as a government-company clearinghouse for coordinating cyber vulnerabilities and responses.

• 🧠 OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind are converging on AI regulation. Hassabis wants a “FINRA for AI,” Amodei wants an “FAA for AI,” and Altman wants an “IAEA for AI.”

• 📱 Apple opened its revamped Siri AI to public beta users in iOS 27. If even a sliver of Apple’s 2.5 billion active devices test it, this becomes one of the largest AI assistant trials in the wild.

• OpenAI

  • ⭐️ OpenAI is reportedly developing a screenless, mobile smart speaker with mechanical elements that can move on their own.

  • 🧨 OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol is drawing user complaints for deleting files, data, and even databases without permission.

  • ⌨️ OpenAI released a $230 Codex Micro keyboard with “Agent Keys,” workflow shortcuts, and a dial for agent reasoning levels.

• 🛡️ Anthropic is hiring 32 people to stop misuse of its models for explosives, nuclear harms, scams, and cybercrime.

• 🧠 Thinking Machines Lab, Mira Murati’s AI startup, released Inkling: an open-weight 975B-parameter model that uses about 41B parameters per task and was trained on text, image, audio, and video.

• 🤖 Nvidia released Cosmos 3 Edge, a 4B-parameter open-source “physical AI” model that can run locally and help robots understand surroundings without a data center round trip.

• ☁️ Amazon Web Services is losing some startup workloads to cloud upstarts because customers can’t get enough Nvidia-powered capacity.

• 🏠 OpenAI and Anthropic employees could theoretically buy about 29% of the San Francisco metro’s homes if both companies go public at expected valuations. Totally normal.

• 💔 China is cracking down on companion chatbots, banning designs that encourage emotional dependence and requiring crisis alerts to emergency contacts.

🤝 Select M&A, Fundraises, IPO, Partnerships

M&A

• 🎬 Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery face a lawsuit from 12 states trying to block their $110B merger, with California arguing the deal would control 27% of U.S. film distribution and 30% of blockbuster distribution.

• ⭐️💳 Stripe and Advent made an unsolicited $60.50/share offer for PayPal, valuing it above $53B. PayPal shares jumped 16%; the board has not answered.

• 🍎 Apple is hunting AI chip acquisitions because its M2 Ultra-powered internal AI servers are not enough for heavier workloads. The company is still leaning on Nvidia chips in Google Cloud.

• 🍔 Uber agreed to buy Delivery Hero in a deal valuing the German food-delivery company at $14.8B. Uber already owns about 25%, and the deal would expand its ride-plus-delivery footprint from 34 to 58 markets.

• 🎥 Letterboxd, the movie watching community, is exploring a sale

Fundraising

• 🏦 Anthropic is in talks to add billions to its bank credit line ahead of a possible IPO as soon as September.

• 💰 DeepSeek, the Chinese AI lab, is reportedly seeking $1.5 billion at a $71 billion valuation after raising $7 billion just last month. It may aim for an IPO as soon as late 2026 or 2027.

• ✈️ Fora, an AI-assisted travel advisor platform, raised $60M at a $1B valuation. Its agents have booked $3B+ of travel, and its AI assistant handles itinerary/admin work so humans can do the relationship bit.

• 🎥 PixVerse, a Singapore AI video startup, raised a $439M Series C extension and is now valued above $2B. It claims 150M registered users and 15M monthly active users.

• 🤖 Nous Research, maker of the open-source Hermes agent, is reportedly raising at a $1.5B valuation. Hermes has built-in skills and roughly 214,000 GitHub stars, which is a lot of developer affection in public.

• 🧬 Miles Wang, an OpenAI researcher focused on AI for science and biology, is reportedly leaving to build an AI drug-discovery startup and raise about $200 million at a $2 billion valuation.

• 💘 Overtone, the new AI dating company from Hinge founder Justin McLeod, raised $18 million to build a voice/audio-forward service for curated introductions. The anti-swipe swipe.

Partnerships

• ☁️ Reflection AI, an open-model startup, signed a $1 billion compute deal with Nebius, a European AI infrastructure company formerly tied to Yandex’s international arm.

• 🧩 Anthropic and Blackstone named their AI implementation JV Ode, a $1.5B bet that enterprises need embedded AI teams, not just better models.

IPO

• 🧵 Shein won Chinese regulatory approval for a Hong Kong IPO, after failed attempts to list in New York and London.

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⚱️ Gold Panning - For those who reached the bottom

• RIP Sam Neill. The 78-yr old star of Jurassic Park died from pneumonia after successfully overcoming lymphoma. I loved his movie Hunt for the Wilderpeople - highly recommend.

• World Cup - People love their vikings: ⚽ Erling Haaland said goodbye to the U.S. after Norway’s World Cup exit, ending a debut run with seven goals in four games.

• 🦖 Gus the T. rex sold for $50.1M at Sotheby’s, making it the most expensive dinosaur fossil ever auctioned.

Do you have any feedback? I’d love to hear from you! Just hit reply to this email

Happy Friday! 😎 Tech news below!

🌎 Macro (Economic) and Trends

• 📉 Global economy: The I.M.F. projected world output growth would fall to 3 percent for the year, a number pushed down by high commodity prices.

• 🌡️ Northeast heat and flooding: Brutal heat gave way to flooding across New York, New Jersey and Philadelphia.

• 🌐 Europe is reportedly stripping U.S. tech from government systems and backing local space, AI and data-center companies after Trump’s tariffs, Greenland threats and Iran fallout.

• 📺 Netflix data suggests viewers are increasingly abandoning popular shows before the second season. Their new competition? video apps like Tiktok and Youtube

• 💸 AI capex is still in flamethrower mode: WSJ says Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Meta are expected to spend $168B in the June quarter, up 74% year over year. Meta may even rent out excess compute if it overbuilt.

🔬 Micro (Tech Companies)

• 🧊 Samsung said Q2 operating profit could hit about $59B, up 1,800% from last year, thanks to AI data-center demand for memory chips.

• 🚀 Blue Origin: Bezos’ space company is seeking $10B at a $130B valuation, its first outside capital after 25 years of Bezos-only funding.

• 📡 Nokia, now an AI data-center infrastructure supplier more than a phone nostalgia object, is up roughly 90% this year after buying Infinera and taking a $1B Nvidia investment.

• Layoffs: 🎮 Microsoft is cutting nearly 5,000 jobs across Xbox and commercial sales;

🤖AI News

• 🧑‍💻 Claude and Salesforce: Small firms are using Anthropic’s Claude to replace parts of Salesforce.

• 🦾 OpenAI: The Trump administration lifted restrictions on GPT-5.6 after extra testing, moving from a staggered government-approved release to broader availability.

• 👩‍💼 OpenAI is losing Fidji Simo from her full-time No. 2 role after medical leave, creating another leadership gap as the company pushes toward enterprise products, coding tools, and a possible IPO.

• 🧠 OpenAI launched GPT-5.6 in three sizes: Sol, Terra, and Luna. The headline under the headline: Sol is 54% more token-efficient on coding and is being pitched as OpenAI’s strongest cybersecurity model yet.

• 🧡 HubSpot reversed a plan to use customer CRM data for an AI feature after four days of customer backlash.

• 📈 Mercor, an AI talent/data platform, reportedly hit more than $2B in gross annualized revenue as AI companies keep buying human expertise to train the machines.

• 🧠 MiniMax, a Chinese AI developer, is planning an open-source 2.7T-parameter model, much larger than its current 428B flagship.

• 🎨 Meta launched Muse Image across Meta AI, Instagram Stories and WhatsApp; users are already objecting because public Instagram photos can be pulled into AI-generated images unless settings are changed. Also PSA - change your instagram settings to private!

• 📱 Claude Cowork is expanding to mobile and web for Max subscribers, letting tasks run while your laptop is closed and pinging you when human judgment is needed.

🤝 Select M&A, Fundraises, IPO, Partnerships

M&A

• 🛠️ Figma acquired the team behind Bud, formerly Orchids, a YC-backed vibe-coding and AI-agent platform. Bud and Orchids shut down July 18; Figma wants the canvas to become the place where apps are built, not just mocked.

• 🍱 Wonder, Marc Lore’s food-delivery/meal-logistics company, is raising at a $9B valuation with IPO sweeteners after buying Grubhub and Blue Apron and taking on $500M of Grubhub debt.

Fundraising

• 💰 Even Realities, a smart-glasses maker, hit a $1B valuation with $150M led by Meituan and Tencent.

• 🧑‍⚖️ Norm, an AI legal startup, raised $120M led by Khosla at a $1.2B valuation.

• 💗 Lovable, a Swedish vibe-coding startup, is reportedly raising $300M at $13.2B after hitting a $500M annualized revenue run rate.

• 🧰 Prime Intellect, an AI agent infrastructure startup, raised $130M at $1B and says customers like Ramp use it to build cheaper, faster task-specific agents.

• 🧾 Mercor, an AI training-data startup, is reportedly in talks at a $20B valuation after saying ARR doubled to more than $2B in four months. The data-labeling lane is suddenly paved in gold.

• A $100m seed?? 🎙️ Gradium, a Paris AI-voice startup, raised a $100M seed with Nvidia backing and is opening a Bay Area office. The pitch: ultra-low-latency voice models for things like cars and assistants.

Partnerships

• 🍎 Apple and Broadcom extended their custom-chip collaboration through 2031.

• 🏭 TeraWulf, a bitcoin-miner-turned-data-center operator, jumped on a reported $19B Anthropic data-center deal

• 🧩 Nvidia is partnering with AI chip rival d-Matrix to combine hardware for running AI models, after a similar SambaNova collaboration.

• 🚀 SpaceXAI and Cursor reportedly plan to launch their first jointly developed model this week, after delaying to improve efficiency. The memo says it aims to compete with Anthropic and OpenAI on speed;

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⚱️ Gold Panning - For those who reached the bottom

When you cannot fund the biggest pipeline, you have to build a better radar.

• Literally hadn’t heard of this tiny country until the World Cup: Cabo Verde’s World Cup strategy

• ⚽ U.S. World Cup dreams face-planted with a 4-1 loss to Belgium after Trump helped get Folarin Balogun cleared to play. Home turf, soft bracket, political assist, still no deep run.

• 🐐 Cristiano Ronaldo ended his World Cup career after Portugal lost to Spain.

• 🚫 Ex-Elon ETFs are now a filing category: two proposed funds would track major indexes while excluding Musk-led companies like Tesla and SpaceX. Passive investing, with a very specific grudge.

• Emmy nominations are out: The Pitt led all programs with a whopping 25 nominations, and “Hacks,” which earned 24 nominations for its fifth season, the most ever for a comedy. Plus: 🏆 Bad Bunny - His Super Bowl halftime show earned a record nine Emmy nominations after drawing 128.2M viewers. I didn’t even know halftime shows could win Emmys.

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Happy Friday and almost 250th July 4th-versary! 🇺🇸🦅 😎 Tech news below!

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Happy Friday 😎 Tech news below!

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Happy Friday, and happy Juneteenth. Before we get into the week’s parade of AI drama, chip math, and internet oddities, a quick pause for Freedom Day: Juneteenth marks June 19, 1865, when news of emancipation reached Galveston, Texas. A reminder that some updates are worth waiting for, but ideally not two and a half years.

Tech news below!

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Happy Friday! 😎 Tech news below!

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Happy Friday! 😎 Tech news below!

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Happy Friday! 😎 Tech news below!

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Happy Friday! 😎 Tech news below!

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Happy Friday! 😎 Tech news below!

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Happy Friday! 😎 Tech news below!

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Happy Friday! 😎 and happy belated Earth day! 🌎 Tech news below!

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Happy Friday! 😎 Tech news below!

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Happy Friday! 😎 Tech news below!

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Happy Friday! 😎 I’ll be taking next week off. Tech news below!

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Happy Friday! 😎 Tech news below:

TL;DR -

• 🌎 The Strait of Hormuz is still closed for business and the price of fuel is skyrocketing in response.

• After billions in investment, Meta Platforms is shutting down Horizon Worlds for its virtual reality headset users.

• M&A from Apple, OpenAI, Amazon and Mastercard.

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Happy Friday! 😎 Apologies for the skip last week - I started a new gig! So I was getting acclimated. Tech news below:

TL;DR -

• 🇮🇷 The US-Israel war with Iran has oil skyrocketing 25% and the markets rocky.

• ⭐️ The Pentagon and AI saga continues - An OpenAI exec quit in protest to OpenAI’s contract; Anthropic sued the Pentagon for its designatio…

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Happy Friday! 😎 Tech news below:

TL;DR -

• 📉📈A single Substack report tanked the market early this week before evening out.

• 📣 Corporate earnings shed light on how tech companies are faring in this new AI market. Despite optimistic results from Nvidia, less than solid results from Workday, Salesforce, and Snowflake made investors wary.

• ⭐️ Afte…

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