What we’re reading (8/15)
“Dow, S&P 500, Nasdaq Notch Weekly Wins As Slew Of Data Muddies Rate-Cut Path” (Yahoo! Finance). “US stocks were mixed on Friday as Wall Street tempered its rate-cut hopes amid economic data this week that showed higher-than-expected wholesale inflation and a rise in July retail sales. A meeting between President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin was also in focus as traders looked for clues on how the outcome could steer markets.”
“The Palantir Mafia Behind Silicon Valley’s Hottest Startups” (Wall Street Journal). “Alumni have either started or are leading more than 350 tech companies, and at least a dozen have been valued at over $1 billion, says Luba Lesiva, who was head of investor relations at Palantir from 2014 to 2016. Lesiva runs a venture firm called Palumni VC, a play on the words Palantir alumni, which invests in startups founded or led by ex-Palantir employees.”
“OpenAI Staffers To Sell $6 Billion In Stock To SoftBank, Other Investors” (Bloomberg). “Current and former OpenAI employees plan to sell approximately $6 billion worth of shares to an investor group that includes Thrive Capital, SoftBank Group Corp. and Dragoneer Investment Group, in a deal that values the ChatGPT maker at $500 billion, according to people familiar with the matter.”
“Spotting Clouds In A Carefree Summer Market” (Wall Street Journal). “The list of what is actually giving investors pause is remarkably short, itself a reason for concern. If stocks climb a wall of worry, they may be approaching the top—and the nasty slide down the slope of hope. What should be concerning them divides into three: the economy, stock valuations and politics.”
“This Is The Staggering Number Of Hours New Yorkers Spend On Their Phones Each Day: ‘Nonstop Loop of Distraction’” (New York Post). “To calculate the lengths, investigators converted the average screen time in every state into seconds, then multiplied each figure by 6.3 (the length of an iPhone 16 Pro Screen) over 10 (the frequency of a scroll, in seconds), resulting in the distance traveled in inches per day. The resulting figure was then divided by 12 to get the distance in feet per day. That figure was then divided by 5,280 to get the distance in miles per day, and then multiplied by 365 to get the final number.”
