Business

Kalshi says that in February, the former Republican congressman “placed a series of large trades in a market where the underlying contracts depended upon his own attendance” at the State of the Union. He’s now permanently banned and penalized $71,356.

Google is pitching its AI tools as a way to streamline production and visual effects, but the effort faces pushback from union workers and creators concerned about copyright, job displacement, and artistic control.

Nvidia, which recently debuted “compute as an asset class” and definitely is not doing circular financing, is reportedly buying Hugging Face for almost $13 billion, according to The Information, which cites a single anonymous source. Almost an hour earlier, Business Insider reported that the two companies were in talks but had not yet reached a deal, also citing a single anonymous source.

The Wall Street Journal and New York Times are both reporting on politicians like Greg Abbott and Josh Shapiro suddenly bashing types of projects they once championed. The Washington Post has a chart showing how online posts about data centers from both Democrat and Republican politicians have shifted from being mostly positive in early 2025 to being mostly negative.

Price hikes aren’t only for laptops, smart speakers, and game consoles, as Bloomberg reports that “some of Nvidia’s biggest customers” have been told that server prices are going up more than 15 percent. Those customers are the companies that build the AI data centers for Oracle, Microsoft, and others that have heavily contributed to the demand spike driving up component prices.

You may recall Apollo is majorly involved in AI infrastructure financing; it even is one of the “compute is an asset class” consortium. Sounds like the hackers stole a bunch of the usual things, like employees’ social security numbers. If they stole interesting things, like internal data on the AI deals Apollo has been making, that wasn’t disclosed in the breach notification. If you know anything about the hack, hit me up on Signal: lopatto.46.

After clearing a regulatory hurdle in California last week, Charter announced that it has officially completed its deal, which will bring its Spectrum products to customers in all former Cox markets in mid-September. Charter also plans on changing its name to Cox Communications within a year after the transaction.

The acquisition will combine Stripe’s payments platform with OpenRouter, which connects developers to a range of AI models while aggregating the costs of using each one. Stripe hasn’t disclosed the terms of the deal, but The New York Times reports that it’s purchasing the startup for $7.5 billion.

SpaceX approached the AI coding startup with an offer, though “the deal talks are not currently active,” according to a report from Bloomberg. The two companies are still reportedly discussing potential partnerships, which could involve Cognition using SpaceX’s computing capacity.

Google won a $10 million bankruptcy auction to acquire a hefty collection of business data from the now defunct Spirit Airlines, which it plans to use for AI training. The data, which includes calendar info, documents, spreadsheets, emails, and employee chats will be “deidentified,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement to Axios:

According to Bloomberg, a “nearly year-old investigation” is looking into the possibility that a16z “investment partners are improperly serving on the boards of competing artificial intelligence companies.” Co-founder Ben Horowitz is on the board of Databricks, while partner Martin Casado was on the board of dbt labs before it was acquired by Fivetran, where he now holds a seat.

Trustees are trying to keep Accell Group’s operations running while takeover bids are considered, but manufacturing in Hungary, where operations were recently centralized, has halted leading to concerns about spare parts and warranty claims. The Hungarian factory has an annual capacity of almost 300,000 bicycles, of which almost 99 percent are e-bikes.

An escape clause in Elon Musk’s $1 trillion Tesla pay package approved last year would eliminate daunting operational targets if SpaceX were to purchase Tesla, as many expect. Under the terms, an acquisition treats those performance goals as met. Depending on the acquisition price SpaceX sets for Tesla, which Musk can heavily influence, a merger could instantly award him hundreds of millions of Tesla shares and consolidate his voting control.

A really excellent essay about how Philip K. Dick predicted our current day, “filled with deranged billionaires, machines that claim consciousness, hallucinated worlds and political breakdown. Musk and his brethren seem more like escapees from this universe than the Asimovian super-geniuses they imagine themselves to be.”

Sky Sports reports that the Amazon founder is part of an investment consortium, along with Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin, close to buying a roughly 30-percent stake in one of the Premier League’s most successful clubs. Saverin has tried this before — he was part of a failed 2022 attempt to buy rival team Chelsea.

The company has reportedly slashed its revenue forecast for 2026 by a third after relying too heavily on frontier models from other providers to drive AI features on the platform. According to Startup Daily, here’s what CEO Melanie Perkins had to say in an update to shareholders:

Srini Gopalan in response to SpaceX saying it plans to “acquire quite a few” of T-Mobile, AT&T, and Verizon’s customers by turning Starlink dishes into tiny cellular base stations using the limited spectrum it acquired from EchoStar:

CEO Peter Stern said in the company’s latest earnings report that “Peloton delivered its first full year of net profitability” in 2026, after launching a new hardware lineup that initially had “weaker-than-expected” sales. At the same time, Peloton lost 247,000 subscribers year-over-year.

250 employees have been laid off, The New York Times reports, including members of the social network’s content moderation team. The closure was made “to streamline our operations and better align our teams for long-term growth,” a press officer for TikTok’s US joint venture told The Times.

Accell Group is the latest victim of Bikeaggedon: the turmoil created by soaring e-bike demand at the onset of covid, followed by a collapse of the supply chain, and then a period of massive oversupply.

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.