Business

The prediction market took action against a handful of congressional candidates: Ezekiel Enriquez (a Republican running in Texas); Mark Moran (an Independent in Virginia, who says he meant to get caught); and Matt Klein (a Democrat in Minnesota) for betting in markets related to their political races. Each was banned from the platform for five years and fined modest amounts ranging from several hundred to several thousand dollars.

Jason Bonfig, Best Buy’s chief customer, product, and fulfillment officer, will take over for Corie Barry as CEO on October 31st, the company announced on Wednesday. Barry has served as CEO since 2019, and has contended with layoffs, stagnant sales growth, and tariff-related price hikes.

Governor JB Pritzker signed an executive order today dealing specifically with prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket. State employees were already barred from using insider information for personal gain, but this executive order specifically bans them from using it to make bets on prediction markets.

Reporting from Bloomberg on how many Cybertrucks Elon’s other companies have been buying:

Verge favorite Matt Levine weighs in on the New Allbirds Thing. The financing is the crucial part — so some “institutional investor” is “essentially buying $50 million worth of stock at the old, defunct-sneaker-company price, and selling it at the new, AI-neocloud-company price,” maybe. Neocloud market looking frothy, imo.

Since launching in 2024 with 48 Hyundai dealerships, we’ve seen Amazon Autos add used cars from Hertz and Ford, but now the Wall Street Journal says it’s active in over 130 cities with Kia, Mazda, Subaru, Chevrolet, and Jeep vehicles listed. According to the article, one benefit to Amazon, beyond the listing fee, is attracting carmakers and dealers as advertisers.

Elon Musk has apparently made the jump from X to infect both TikTok and Instagram with new verified accounts. According to the New York Times:

TikTok star Khaby Lame sold his personal brand to a small, relatively unknown company called “Rich Sparkle Holdings.” Instead of handing him $975 million in cash, they paid him in stock. Fans piled in, causing the price to skyrocket, briefly making Lame a paper billionaire (several times over) before the price plummeted. It’s now looking suspiciously like a “pump-and-dump” scheme, causing trading apps to freeze the stock. 🤷‍♂️

The New York Times thinks it found the elusive person behind the pseudonym credited with creating Bitcoin. It relied on a combination of textual analysis and in-person tells to narrow a pool of suspects “from 34,000 down to one”.

Kalshi will have paid product placement on the biggest news channel in the US, according to The Hollywood Reporter (though Fox reportedly won’t use Kalshi for elections coverage). The network is the latest news organization to jump on the prediction market bandwagon: The Associated Press and CNN have deals, not to mention Kalshi and Polymarket’s vast influencer and advertising operations.

Preliminary earnings suggest an eightfold increase in profit (57.2 trillion won estimated, or about $37.8 billion) from the same quarter in 2025, exceeding its entire profit for all of last year. The spike is likely due to strong demand for its memory chips, which have only increased in price as Big AI gobbles up all available inventory.

The billionaire investor is offering to take over the world’s biggest music company (and home to artists like Taylor Swift and Kendrick Lamar) through his hedge fund. The deal for UMG is valued at more than $50 billion and would install Hollywood superagent Michael Ovitz as chair.

A long, and at times funny, report in The New Yorker on Altman’s will to power, people-pleasing, and alleged pattern of deceit, compiled from notes, memos, and more than 100 interviews. Altman’s reputation has given rise to grimmer rumors – hiring sex workers, the sexual pursuit of minors, even involvement in murder – that The New Yorker found no evidence for. Increasingly, the question is not whether computers are intelligent but whether OpenAI’s leadership is.

Jay Blahnik, the creator behind the three-ring fitness tracking feature on Apple Watches, is stepping down after a 13-year tenure at the company, following allegations that he sexually harassed an employee and fostered a “toxic work environment.” A lawsuit claiming Blahnik bullied an employee is set to go to trial next year.

OpenAI’s latest round of private investment has closed, with participation from Amazon, Nvidia, Softbank, and Microsoft, as well as $3 billion from individual investors, as it prepares for a potential IPO. This comes after it announced the end of its video generator Sora, and the announcement says it will focus on building a “unified superapp” with ChatGPT, Codex, browsing, and other agents all built in.

Econ writer Kyla Scanlon notes that a lot of society’s current obsessions — peptide stacks, prediction markets, the manosphere — have all the hallmarks of people coping with feeling out of control. “The reason we can’t solve our problems is not lack of tools or information — it’s that the dominant method (add, optimize, measure) is the wrong method for the problem (figure out what’s poisoning you.)”

But it is expanding its modest American Manufacturing Program. TDK will make camera stabilization sensors, while Bosch will build chips for crash detection and activity tracking. Cirrus Logic and Qnity Electronics are also on board. The $400 million planned for these new partnerships won’t make a major dent in Apple’s reliance on China, though.

A former employee of an online sportsbook writes about their experience. It’s not gambling that has been legalized — “what has been legalized is extraction, and the new methods of extraction that are possible using the internet and mobile devices. ” Read the whole thing to find out what got them to quit.

Hey, remember that weird trade The Financial Times highlighted? The one about oil? Paul Krugman doesn’t like it — nor does he like the weird Venezuela trade or the one about death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. I’ve written here about how ill-prepared the CFTC is for insider trading cases. Krugman has a solution: call some of it treason and let the FBI — well, the post-Kash Patel FBI — sort it out.

According to Axios, discussing a potential energy deal between OpenAI and Helion Energy for “a guaranteed portion of Helion’s production, potentially scaling to 50 gigawatts by 2035 (assuming the company can develop a fusion process that generates more energy than it consumes).

If there’s one job people might actually be happy to see eliminated by AI, it’s the CEO. Especially if that CEO is Mark Zuckerberg (74 percent disapproval rate as of June 2025). Well, according to the Wall Street Journal, he might be training his AI agent replacement as we speak: