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Capitalist Insider: $79,463 Bitcoin high: Treasury buybacks just rewrote the market
New York just dethroned San Francisco as top tech talent hub
660 million barrels secured: U.S. forces move on the Strait of Hormuz
Apollo confirms major data breach as financial hacking wave explodes
American brands are getting crushed by Chinese rivals at home
Trump taps Wall Street heavyweight Matt Zames for Social Security role
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Capitalist Insider: $79,463 Bitcoin high: Treasury buybacks just rewrote the market
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FTC urged to stop AI giants from shredding books for data
More than a dozen civil society groups are urging the Federal Trade Commission to investigate dominant AI companies for buying, scanning and physically destroying books as a data acquisition practice that may harm competition.
Groups demand FTC probe: Demand Progress Education Fund, Consumer Federation of America and Institute for Local Self-Reliance lead more than a dozen groups asking the FTC to examine the practice as an unfair method of competition.
Anthropic book destruction cited: A January Washington Post report based on court filings said Anthropic spent millions acquiring books and removing their spines to scan pages into its Claude model.
Starving market of materials: The letter argues the hoard-and-destroy approach starves rivals of critical source materials, raises competitors’ costs and could permanently eliminate rare books from the market.
Focus on competition not training: The groups stress they do not seek restrictions on AI model training itself but want intervention against destroying existing works that could create an insurmountable moat for incumbents.
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New York just dethroned San Francisco as top tech talent hub
New York’s office market now hosts more tech workers than the San Francisco Bay Area for the first time in 13 years of CBRE analysis, driven largely by rapid growth in AI-related roles.
New York leads overall: New York counts 394,300 tech talent jobs, edging out the San Francisco Bay Area’s 375,730, according to CBRE’s report covering 75 metropolitan markets in the U.S. and Canada.
AI roles expand rapidly: AI tech roles grew 45% in the past year across the U.S. and Canada, with New York and San Francisco each adding more than 20,000 AI-specific jobs since mid-2025.
AI drives leasing surge: In San Francisco, AI companies made up 58% of all leasing in the first half of this year and 30% of activity totaling about 10 million square feet since 2023.
Office culture remains key: AI has a more office-centric culture with workers in offices four to six days a week, fueling recovery as the sector creates more jobs than it eliminates.
Nvidia courts Korean AI chip startup Rebellions
Nvidia is in early discussions with South Korean AI chip designer Rebellions about a possible technical partnership, investment or acquisition after CEO Jensen Huang met the startup’s co-founder this week in Santa Clara.
Early discussions now underway: Nvidia is holding preliminary talks with Rebellions that could include a technical partnership, an investment or even an acquisition, according to people familiar with the matter.
Huang meets Rebellions CEO: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang met Rebellions co-founder and CEO Sunghyun Park at the company’s Santa Clara headquarters this week to discuss a potential tie-up.
Startup raises $850 million: Bundang-based Rebellions has raised roughly $850 million from investors including SK Hynix, Samsung Ventures and Arm and was most recently valued at around $2.3 billion.
Focuses on inference chips: The company founded in 2020 specializes in neural processing units for data centers optimized for AI inference, the higher-volume workload required to operate AI services at scale.
Nvidia’s valuation now hinges on one open-source AI shift
HSBC analyst Frank Lee says Nvidia’s next major stock re-rating will come from positioning as the world’s largest contributor to open-source AI rather than from earnings or product roadmap alone.
Expectations run hot into earnings: Nvidia reports results August 26 with the market positioned for strong numbers after the stock outperformed the S&P 500 by five percentage points over the past month.
Open-source models gain traction: Aggregate open-source models now represent the second most popular category by token generation and small language models are preferred for agentic AI and on-device applications.
TAM expansion potential: Boosting small language models lowers barriers for enterprise inference and expands Nvidia’s addressable market beyond frontier labs to millions of developers and sovereign nations.
Recent capital partnerships: Nvidia partnered with Apollo, BlackRock and others to deploy $500 billion in private capital for AI data centers and offered up to $105 billion credit support for an 8-gigawatt Ohio campus.
Bitcoin rockets 23% in one week as optimism floods back
Bitcoin was on track for a weekly gain of around 23% Friday after rising above $77,000, driven by falling Treasury yields, a short squeeze and renewed hopes for the Clarity Act.
Price and weekly performance: Bitcoin last traded near $77,000, up from about $62,800 at the week’s start, putting it on pace for roughly a 23% weekly advance amid broader crypto gains.
Yields and short squeeze: The rally started Wednesday as Treasury yields fell sharply after intervention, then amplified by a massive short squeeze that liquidated roughly $2.7 billion in crypto short positions.
Clarity Act catalyst hopes: Investor sentiment improved Thursday on a last-ditch White House and industry push to pass the Clarity Act, viewed as key to ending the crypto winter that began last fall.
Still below prior highs: Despite the rebound bitcoin remains well below its 2026 high of $94,820 from mid-January and the all-time high of $126,198 hit on October 6 last year.
660 million barrels secured: U.S. forces move on the Strait of Hormuz
U.S. Central Command has aided passage of more than 660 million barrels of crude oil through the Strait of Hormuz since early May, assisting about 1,300 commercial vessels amid Iranian threats and contested control.
Assistance volume since May: Central Command helped more than 660 million barrels of crude oil and about 1,300 commercial vessels sail through the Strait of Hormuz since early May this year.
Recent three-week flow: Military statements indicate at least 160 million barrels or more than 7 million barrels per day transited the strait over the past three weeks alone.
Far below pre-war levels: Shipments remain well under the roughly 20 million barrels per day of crude oil and products that passed through Hormuz before the conflict began.
Contested lanes and claims: Iran says the strait is closed until U.S. obligations under the June 17 interim peace deal are met while President Trump insists it stays open under American control.
Apollo confirms major data breach as financial hacking wave explodes
Apollo Global Management confirmed hackers stole names, birth dates, addresses and Social Security numbers from its cloud systems via social engineering between July 6 and July 10 amid a broader campaign targeting private equity firms.
Hackers gained cloud access: Between July 6 and July 10, attackers used social engineering to breach Apollo Global Management’s cloud environment and steal sensitive personal information, according to a California attorney general filing.
Stolen data includes identifiers: The breach compromised names, birth dates, contact details such as home addresses, and Social Security numbers from the private equity firm managing $938 billion in assets.
Part of extortion campaign: Security researchers at Google previously warned of hackers known as Falcon, Helix, Pink and Redact targeting financial giants with fake IT support calls to obtain passwords and codes.
Ransoms and employee scale: Similar attacks have yielded ransoms as high as $750,000 while Apollo employs around 5,000 people; the firm has not confirmed if a ransom was paid in this case.
American brands are getting crushed by Chinese rivals at home
American consumer brands including Nike and Starbucks are losing influence in China as geopolitical tensions, domestic competition and cultural disconnects reshape a once lucrative market for U.S. companies.
Nike China sales plunge: Nike has seen its China business shrink 30% since 2021, with annual revenue hitting its lowest level in eight years as shoppers turn to domestic brands.
Starbucks faces fierce rivals: Starbucks confronts intense competition from Luckin Coffee, which operates more than three times the number of stores in China and sells drinks at steep discounts.
Some brands still thrive: Lululemon expects about 20% China growth this year while Ralph Lauren posted 40% growth in its most recent quarter by staying locally relevant.
Gap exits local control: Gap sold its China business to Baozun for $40 million after struggling to connect with consumers, and the buyer has since refined strategy successfully.
Trump admin taps Matt Zames for Social Security advisory role
Former JPMorgan Chase executive Matt Zames is joining the Trump administration in an unpaid advisory role at the Social Security Administration to help modernize the agency, starting Monday at Baltimore headquarters.
Unpaid role begins Monday: Zames starts an unpaid advisory position Monday at Social Security Administration headquarters in Baltimore where an office placard bearing his name has already been installed.
Helping former colleague: He will assist former JPMorgan colleague Frank Bisignano, who became Social Security Commissioner last year, on modernization of the agency’s decades-old technology systems.
Career background details: Zames rose at JPMorgan after the London Whale cleanup, served as chief operating officer for about five years, then led at Cerberus before starting his own firm.
Special employee limits: As a special government employee Zames can hold the position for 130 days though that period may stretch because he will not work full-time.
New York just dethroned San Francisco as top tech talent hub, really! No worries, Mamdani will take care of that!