The Verge’s latest insights into the ideas shaping the future of work, finance, and innovation. Here you’ll find scoops, analysis, and reporting across some of the most influential companies in the world. Our coverage also includes interviews with innovators and policy makers at the frontiers of business and technology on Editor-in-Chief Nilay Patel’s Decoder; a behind-the-curtain look at Silicon Valley with Alex Heath’s Command Line; and exclusive reporting on Microsoft’s strategy in Tom Warren’s Notepad.
A24, Sony Pictures Entertainment, and The New York Times Company are all reportedly interested.
Other rumored potential buyers include Versant and The Ankler, as well as Netflix, Paramount, and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian.
[New York Times]
The Theranos founder convicted of fraud in 2022 and sentenced to 11 years behind bars will be transferred from a minimum-security federal prison next year, according to a letter sent to victims of her crime. After several reductions to her sentence, her scheduled release remains February 22nd, 2030, but prisoners typically only spend a short time in halfway houses. Last year, she requested to have her sentence commuted by the Department of Justice.
[The New York Times]
Bloomberg chief Apple correspondent Mark Gurman on Siri, Tim Cook’s legacy, and what to expect from Ternus.
They’ll be joining Nvidia’s Jensen Huang next week at a White House state dinner for Xi Jinping. It’s the first chance for Tim Cook to earn that $47 million pay package in his new role as Apple’s dedicated Trump whisperer: You is smart, you is strong, you is important.
According to The Information, former DreamWorks co-founder (and co-founder of the quick bites video app) Jeffrey Katzenberg’s latest move is joining up with Bill Peebles, who left OpenAI after it pivoted away from the Sora team he was leading.
Huawei says it didn’t send it, but an agency claiming to represent the company has been contacting tech influencers, offering to pay them to promote Huawei’s new Mate XT 2 foldable around the iPhone Duo launch, and disguise the posts to look like an organic, grassroots groundswell of enthusiasm.
The new flick about the disgraced Theranos founder, directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, got a surprise screening at the Telluride Film Festival ahead of its October release. Here’s how A24 describes it:
“Thirty-four days before she’s sent to prison, notorious Silicon Valley founder Elizabeth Holmes invites a skeptical film crew to document her every move. What begins as an intimate portrait of an enigmatic felon becomes a mind-bending three-year journey into the abyss.”
The smart ring company filed for an initial public offering on Thursday, revealing over $1.4 billion in revenue between July 2025 and June 2026, along with 5 million paid members.
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.
In other news about everything being gambling now:
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.
The Verge’s Hayden Field on how OpenAI president Greg Brockman has consolidated power as Sam Altman’s second-in-command.
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.
CEO Tim Cadogan on how a for-profit company becomes a social safety net.
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.
On Sunday, Abbott appeared on ABC’s This Week, saying that by moving too fast, the industry “…basically dug their own grave for the problem that’s been caused for them, and that’s why they got the backlash they deserve.”
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.
Nvidia has already raised GPU prices this year, and we may hear more about its changes when it reports Q2 earnings on Wednesday.
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.
[Charter Communications]
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.
[The New York Times]
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.
“This is not true,” Cognition co-founder and CEO Scott Wu says on X. “Huge respect for the SpaceX team but Cognition is not for sale and we haven’t been talking.”
Update: Added post from Cognition’s CEO.
Jensen Huang wants you to think ‘ah, compute as an asset class’ not ‘oh no more GPU-backed loans.’
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:
“We will not receive any personal information from this dataset. Any data we receive will be rigorously scrubbed of any personally identifiable information by a third party before receipt.”
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.
Semafor’s editor-in-chief on billionaire owners, news influencers, and the anti-scale era of media.
Is the shakeup at Google DeepMind a strategy or a crisis?
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.
[Bike Europe]
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.”
[Financial Times]
