A King County judge ordered Kalshi to stop taking wagers on sports, elections, entertainment and more in Washington by Sept. 2, ruling the prediction market likely runs illegal gambling. It is the most aggressive state-level blow yet to the sector, hitting a business increasingly driven by sports bets. Kalshi must geofence Washington users or face $120,000-a-day penalties.
Apple has begun testing DRAM from China's CXMT for iPhones and MacBooks as a memory shortage pushes prices higher, but the plan is politically radioactive: CXMT sits on a Pentagon list of Chinese military-linked firms and the Trump administration is pushing back. The result could keep Apple locked into pricier Western memory just as AI demand tightens supply.
Nvidia's latest 13F shows a $21 billion SpaceX stake (122.8M Class A shares), now its second-largest disclosed holding behind Intel. The position, born from Nvidia's $10 billion xAI investment that converted via SpaceX's xAI acquisition, has since slid to about $17.2 billion as SpaceX shares pulled back after their June IPO.
July CPI rose 0.1% month over month, with the annual rate easing to 3.4% and core at 2.5%, both in line with forecasts. The tame print plus a soft July jobs report pushed September rate-hike odds down to 42% and lifted stocks. Energy kept cooling, though shelter still drove most of the gain.
Anthropic is projecting $190-200 billion in 2028 revenue, roughly four times its publicized May run rate, and bankers are pricing the IPO off that two-year-out forecast, Reuters reports. It's a stretch multiple on growth investors are asked to underwrite, with Cloudflare, Palantir and SpaceX as reference points.
The SEC charged Andrew Spaventa and three entities over $74M raised from 800+ retail investors in pre-IPO private funds pitched by 100-plus cold-calling sales agents. Prices investors paid ran ~46% above what Spaventa paid, with the markups buried as hidden fees that allegedly netted him around $23M.
Robinhood Ventures Fund II (RVII) priced 8 million shares at $25 and debuts on the NYSE, raising $200 million. The closed-end BDC holds 80 early-stage stakes, mostly Y Combinator-backed, with no accreditation or minimums. It's the second vehicle letting everyday investors buy pre-IPO exposure after Fund I's March listing.
Alibaba's open-weight Qwen family passed 3 billion downloads in six months, outpacing Meta (227M) and Google (418M) to become the world's most-adopted AI model line, per Hugging Face. With 460+ open-sourced models and 300,000+ derivatives, Qwen is now a default developer choice, signaling Chinese open models are winning the global developer race.
You’re caught up.
That was all 8 stories in the 16 August issue.