Avert your eyes! My Sunday morning look at incompetency, corruption and policy failures:
• Tesla May Have Sold a Million Fewer Cars Because of Elon Musk’s Toxic Politics: The billionaire CEO did his electric vehicle company no favors by aligning with the MAGA movement and serving as a high-profile Trump adviser, a new report finds. (Rolling Stone)
• AI Is the Bubble to Burst Them All: I talked to the scholars who literally wrote the book on tech bubbles—and applied their test. (Wired) see also This Is How the AI Stock Boom Plays Out: As the economic significance of AI becomes clearer, valuations of AI-linked stocks will fall. (Bloomberg) Counterargument coming tomorrow…
• UnitedHealth paid AARP $9B to sell Medicare products. Spammer/Marketing outfit AARP received $9 billion in royalties from UnitedHealthcare last year as part of an agreement to continue selling AARP-branded Medicare products, according to updated financial statements recently posted on the advocacy group’s website. (Axios)
• How Moderna, the company that helped save the world, unraveled: After missteps and misfortune, the biotech confronts a precarious future. (Stat)
• Inside the Trump family’s global crypto cash machine: The U.S. president’s family raked in more than $800 million from sales of crypto assets in the first half of 2025 alone, a Reuters examination found, on top of potentially billions more in unrealized “on paper” gains. Much of that cash has come from foreign sources as Donald Trump’s sons have touted their business on an international investor roadshow. (Reuters) see also The pardon was the payoff: Binance’s Changpeng Zhao earns a gold-plated pardon as other industry figures fund Trump’s $300 million ballroom. (Citation Needed) see also How a Billionaire Felon Boosted Trump’s Crypto Company en Route to a Pardon: Binance facilitated $2 billion purchase of World Liberty’s stablecoin and built its technology; clemency for Changpeng Zhao surprised some in administration. (Wall Street Journal)
• How America’s Elite Colleges Breed High-Status Careers—and Misery: The “career funnel,” a phrase coined by sociologists Amy Binder and Daniel Davis, describes the mechanism behind the crowding of elite college graduates into three high-paying fields. For instance, the Harvard Crimson’s annual survey of graduating seniors revealed that more than half of the class of 2025 had taken jobs in finance (21 percent), tech (18 percent), or management consulting (14%). (Mother Jones)
• How Obama maneuvered behind the scenes to fight Trump on redistricting: The ex-president’s involvement reflects the deep anxieties he has about Trump’s agenda and has propelled him into a more political, public-facing role than he envisioned. (Washington Post)
• Are We Losing Our Democracy? Our country is still not close to being a true autocracy, in the mold of Russia or China. But once countries begin taking steps away from democracy, the march often continues. We offer these 12 markers as a warning of how much Americans have already lost and how much more we still could lose. (New York Times)
• The Venezuela Boat Strikes and the Justice Department’s Golden Shield: How the Office of Legal Counsel Helps the White House in its Summary Killings (Executive Functions) see also Why Commanders Don’t Sign NDAs: Existing rules and laws applying to military secrecy are sufficient—and asking officers to sign NDAs is deeply inappropriate. (The Bulwark)
• Jennifer Lawrence Goes Dark: She has been cast in maternal roles since her teens. Now, playing a mother for the first time since becoming one, she has chosen the part of a woman pushed past the edge of sanity. (New Yorker)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Jon Hilsenrath of Serpa Pinto Advisory. Previously, he was chief economics correspondent for Wall Street Journal for 26 years. Dubbed the “Fed Whisperer” by Wall Street traders for his scoops on the FOMC, he worked out of Hong Kong, NY, and D.C. He was part of the Pulitzer Prize-winning team for on-scene coverage of 9/11. He is the author of “Yellen: The Trailblazing Economist Who Navigated an Era of Upheaval.”
The top 10 US companies account for almost a quarter of the global equity market, and eight of those companies are in the technology sector
Source: Goldman Sachs
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