Thieves stole about 30,000 bottles of some of Italy’s most prized wines worth an estimated 5 million euros ($5.8 million) from a winery in Tuscany, in what the producer described Friday as the country’s largest wine theft on record.
The theft targeted Marchesi Antinori’s facility near Cortona, in the province of Arezzo, where a group of at least seven thieves on Saturday night made off with bottles of some of Italy’s most sought-after wines, including Solaia, Tignanello and Guado al Tasso. The theft was discovered Monday, but the company made it public on Friday to avoid interfering with the investigation.
Chief Executive Renzo Cotarella said the thieves disabled the winery’s alarm system and surveillance cameras before entering with two large trucks. Using the company’s forklifts, they loaded the vehicles with wine and fled during the night.
“It is certainly a very well-prepared gang,” Cotarella said, adding that it may be the same group that has targeted other Italian wineries in recent months. “A theft of this size and value has never occurred in Italy.”
The stolen bottles were all from the 2023 vintage and are typically sold at a retail price of between 150 euros and 500 euros each. They included about 10,000 bottles of Solaia, one of Antinori’s flagship wines, from what Cotarella described as an exceptional year.
The company, founded in 1385 and run by the Antinori family for 26 generations, said it was alerting customers worldwide to be wary of offers outside official sales channels....
I was reminded of this story by German Chancellor Merz (no, not his Skeletor-like appearance), more after the jump.
From The Conversation via ScienceAlert, 17 May 2026:
In our research in the British Library's medieval collections, we have identified a previously unnoticed document that provides fresh insights into the survivors of the outbreak of plague known as the Black Death (1346–53).
The document – a scrap of parchment inserted into an account of the Ramsey Abbey manor of Warboys in Huntingdonshire – records how much time peasants were absent from work when struck down by the plague.
It also reveals the names of those who survived and how long their employers believed recovery could take.
In our recent paper with Barney Sloane, we shed new light on a group of 22 tenants who probably contracted plague, languished on their sickbeds for several weeks, and then recovered.
As one of the deadliest pandemics in recorded history, it has been estimated that between a third and two-thirds of the population of medieval Europe died during the Black Death.
Given the sheer scale, many historians have focused on discovering details about those who died. Yet this has left the histories of those who contracted plague and recovered largely untold.
Despite the deadliness of the disease, it was possible to recover from plague, and medieval chroniclers mention the possibility – however unlikely – of survival. For example, Geoffrey le Baker, a clerk of Swinbrook in Oxfordshire, wrote in the following decade that he thought recovery depended on people's symptoms:
People who one day had been full of happiness, on the next were found dead. Some were tormented by boils which broke out suddenly in various parts of the body, and were so hard and dry that when they were lanced hardly any liquid flowed out. Many of these people escaped, by lancing the boils or by long suffering. Other victims had little black pustules scattered over the skin of the whole body. Of these people very few, indeed hardly any, recovered life and health.
But who recovered? Why did so many succumb to the disease when others survived? And just how long was this "long suffering"?
Unfortunately, there is remarkably little documentary evidence because most medieval sources record information about mortality rather than ill health.
Unique list of plague survivors A unique inclusion in the account of the manor of Warboys details a group of people who fell ill between the end of April and the start of August 1349.
The monks of Ramsey Abbey wrote a list of their tenants who had fallen sufficiently sick that they could not work on the lord's lands and detailed the length of time that they were absent.
People were clearly affected differently by their experience of plague.
The quickest recovery was that of Henry Broun who missed just a single week of work. By contrast, John Derworth and Agnes Mold had much more protracted illnesses and were both absent for nine weeks.
The average length of illness was between three and four weeks, with three-quarters of people returning to work in under a month. The speed of their recoveries is all the more surprising given that they were entitled to up to a year and a day of sick leave from work.
This list of survivors includes a preponderance of tenants who occupied larger holdings on the manor....
And Chancellor Merz? It was re-reading his sick leave edict:
Germany's Chancellor Merz:
We can no longer accept the extraordinarily high levels of sick leave in our companies.
We are abolishing sick leave by telephone and introducing the requirement to submit a medical certificate from the very first day of illness.
We know this is a tough decision. But we can no longer afford this competitive disadvantage caused by prolonged absences from work.
Skeletor is the main antagonist of the Masters of the Universe franchise, and is the most dangerous threat on Eternia. His only goal is power, and to that end, he will not rest until he possesses the secrets of Castle Grayskull, which will enable him to become master of the universe. This places him in direct conflict with the only man powerful enough to stop him, He-Man....
For most of the war, Russia's Arctic was the part of the map nobody bothered to defend. That changed a month ago.
On September 9, Ukraine's Special Operations Forces said their drones flew "more than 3,000 kilometers" to hit two gas condensate plants in the Yamalo-Nenets region: Gazprom's Novy Urengoy condensate treatment plant, with a design capacity of 19.5 million tons of feedstock a year, and Novatek's Purovsky plant near Tarko-Sale, which processed 13.4 million tons of condensate in 2025 (Hromadske, Al Jazeera). "Until today, this was considered an absolutely safe rear area for the aggressor," the SOF said. Bloomberg and Reuters both picked up the claim; the Kremlin's envoy to the Urals, Artem Zhoga, confirmed it was the first attack to reach the Arctic.
On Tuesday Moscow gave its answer: cash. The Yamalo-Nenets government approved a payment of 1 million rubles (about $11,700) for every drone destroyed over the region, the highest bounty any Russian region has offered, according to TASS (others pay 20,000-200,000 rubles). The money goes to local "mobile fire groups," and there is a catch: per the decree, it is paid only if the defended facility suffers no damage, and the kill has to be confirmed by the military commissariat. Joining a fire group pays 100,000 rubles if you have a job and 150,000 if you don't, and requires signing a Defense Ministry contract (Barents Observer).
Paying the unemployed more than the employed to stand on the tundra with a machine gun: nothing says confident air defense quite like it.
Regular readers know we have been tracking Ukraine's drone range creep since it first reached Western Siberia last October. Since then the line has moved from Tyumen to Omsk (hit again on Thursday) to the Arctic Circle. So the obvious next question, and the one now going viral on X, is whether Norilsk, home of the world's biggest palladium miner, is next. As we show below, that is the wrong question: the Nornickel asset that matters for palladium is not in Siberia at all, and it is much closer to Ukraine than Novy Urengoy.
What Actually Got Hit
As usual, Russian officials described the strike as a successful interception. Yamal governor Dmitry Artyukhov said "falling debris" caused a fire at "one of the city's industrial facilities," with no casualties (NV). Somehow the debris keeps landing on the most expensive equipment.
Ukrainian OSINT group CyberBoroshno says the drones hit the de-ethanization unit at Novy Urengoy. That matters more than it sounds: the unit's gas feeds the Novy Urengoy gas chemical complex, which can make up to 400,000 tons of low-density polyethylene a year, so without it the chain from condensate to plastic stops (per RBC-Ukraine, Militarnyi). Satellite imagery also reportedly shows damage at Purovsky. Both of those claims come from Ukrainian OSINT and Russia has published no production data, so treat them accordingly.
Purovsky is the more interesting target for markets. According to Novatek's own description, most of its stable condensate goes by rail to Ust-Luga on the Baltic for processing and export, the same port complex Ukraine has hit repeatedly, most recently when drone strikes crippled Russia's key Baltic ports in March. Ukraine has now hit Novatek's condensate chain at both ends, 2,800 km apart.
The region is not a side show either. Yamalo-Nenets produces roughly 80% of Russia's natural gas and holds about two-thirds of its gas reserves (Al Jazeera); Yamal LNG and Arctic LNG 2 sit at its northern edge. The Fire Point FP-1 that its maker says carried out the attack costs under $60,000 to build. Even in Arctic economics, a million-ruble bounty per drone and a $60K drone is a trade that only works for one side.
All of this lands while Moscow's oil and gas budget is already shrinking: the Finance Ministry cut its 2026 oil and gas revenue estimate to RUB 7.6 trillion from RUB 8.9 trillion.
The Norilsk Siren That Wasn't (Quite)
Which brings us to this morning's viral claim, courtesy of Visegrád 24: "The city of Norilsk has started testing its air raid alarm system" because Ukraine "could be about to extend the range" of its drones, which "have a range of 3500 km. Norilsk is 4500 km away."....
There’s a big market (egg producers selling eggs to supermarkets etc.), and there’s a small market (egg producers selling extra eggs to each other on an electronic exchange). The price in the small market determines the price in the big market. Participants in the small market are also participants in the big market. You can spend a little money in the small market to move the price, which can make you a lot of money in the big market.
That’s the core idea of market manipulation: You find some small illiquid market that determines the price of some much larger and more liquid market. You buy $100 million worth of stuff in the large liquid market, without moving the price much. Then you buy $1 million worth of stuff in the small illiquid market, causing the price — in the illiquid market, and also in the liquid one — to double. You sell your stuff in the large liquid market for $200 million (it’s doubled), again without moving the price much. Then you sell your stuff in the illiquid market, maybe driving the price down to zero, but so what: You lose $1 million on your small-market manipulative trades, and make $100 million on your large-market manipulated trades.
In general, this is hard to pull off, because what markets have structures like that? Why would some giant liquid market depend on some small illiquid market for its pricing? There are a few salient examples — eggs, Indian index options, interest-rate swaps in the 2000s — but they’re kind of weird.
But maybe that’s the wrong way to think about it. The other day, I quoted a judge’s opinion in an insider-trading lawsuit, saying:
This is modern trading — where algorithms, AI agents, and career traders are all jockeying, minute by minute, for the newest hot trade, using analyst information, market trends, news reports, scuttlebutt from online forums, and other tea leaves to make split-second decisions.
You could tell a story like this: The marginal prices of stocks are set by, you know, four hedge funds; they are set by “algorithms, AI agents and career traders” reading “tea leaves to make split-second decisions.” The stock market is big and liquid. But the tea leaf market is weird and small. The marginal price setters in stock markets are looking to some data sources to set prices, and those data sources might be small and niche and manipulable, and if you can manipulate them you might have a big impact on stock prices.
Arguably the biggest market in the world right now is, like, “AI.” Trillions of dollars of stock market capitalization, of data-center financing, of expected capital expenditures and revenues, all depend on the path of artificial intelligence adoption. The modern debt market is basically built on the value of computer chips as debt collateral. If there is news suggesting that AI progress will be faster or slower than expected, that causes huge shifts in value.
Meanwhile we’ve talked occasionally about compute futures. Several exchanges are working on developing financial futures products to price and hedge the expected future cost of computing power. This has an obvious use case in the AI buildout; I wrote once:
If you can lock in the future price of computing capacity, then building computing capacity is a less speculative endeavor. You’re not building a data center hoping to sell compute to the AI startups of the future; you’re building a data center knowing that you can sell compute at the futures price that you’ve locked in.
But this is all pretty early and small right now; the compute futures are more of a proof of concept than a robust liquid market for AI computing.
Here is a fascinating story from Semafor reporting that “the US Commerce Department last month ordered Kalshi to take down one of its products tracking the price of AI compute,” and has “also pushed the Commodity Futures Trading Commission … to effectively freeze approval of new compute contracts for 60 days.” (“’This story is false,’ a Commerce spokesman said,” though.) Why? “It’s unclear why Commerce is worried about the nascent market,” but:
One potential reason floated to Semafor by market participants is that compute futures could be manipulated to show a sharp drop in the cost of older chips, which might destabilize AI stocks and debt markets. Some of these markets are thinly traded, which could lead to volatility even without bad actors.
That is: Maybe you can spend a small amount of money to manipulate the market for the value of computer chips as long-term debt collateral. The whole AI economy is, arguably, built on that value. If it goes down, maybe hedge funds will notice. Maybe that will crash the prices of AI stocks and bonds. Maybe you can make a lot of money in the biggest market by spending a little money in the compute futures market.....
Saudi authorities say an attack on Riyadh airport killed 12 people and wounded over 300 more.
The statement says the dead included four Saudi citizens as well as two Bangladeshi nationals, a Palestinian, a U.S. citizen, an Egyptian, a Jordanian, a Syrian and a Sudanese.
It said some of those injured were in critical condition.
THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back for updates. AP’s earlier story follows below.
The international airport in Saudi Arabia’s capital, Riyadh, was attacked again Saturday as the kingdom faces an extraordinary series of assaults in the new front in the Iran war. President Donald Trump said he was evaluating whether the U.S. should join Saudi strikes against the Tehran-backed Houthi rebels in neighboring Yemen.
The Houthis claimed attacks earlier in the week on King Khalid International Airport that killed three Saudis, including a pilot. On Saturday, a missile struck a complex housing terminals 3 and 4 for domestic flights and many people were wounded, a regional official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak to the media.
“We may. We’re going to look at it,” Trump said of intervening. “We just found out about the recent attack. So we’ll make a decision. We move very quickly.”....
I wonder if there are any Chinese engineers who would like to work for the Koreans?
From Asia Times, October 10:
Lawmaker’s review traced 27 Samsung and SK Hynix veterans moving to China’s CXMT, driving firms to pay dearly to retain talent
A Samsung memory chip worker earning about $60,000 a year could receive roughly $560,000 in bonuses before tax, according to the company’s largest union. Its estimate includes both Samsung’s existing profit-sharing bonus and a new special payment. Samsung hasn’t confirmed the amount.
On October 7, the company outlined how that special bonus would work: 10.5% of its chip division’s 2026 operating profit would go into an uncapped pool. Samsung plans to pay it in shares, subject to shareholder approval.
The next morning, Samsung estimated third-quarter operating profit at 107.4 trillion won, roughly $80 billion, almost nine times the year-earlier figure.
Those profits explain how Samsung can afford the payout. Findings released for a parliamentary audit the same week show the competition for the engineers it wants to keep.
What did the audit find?
The office of Choi Soo-jin, a People Power Party lawmaker on the National Assembly’s science and ICT committee, reviewed LinkedIn and other public career records. It traced at least 27 senior engineers from Samsung and SK Hynix who went on to work at ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT), China’s biggest DRAM maker.
Together they had spent 415.9 years at the two Korean companies, an average of 15.4 years each. Six were principal or executive-level staff with more than 20 years in mass production.
Eight worked in circuit design and seven in process integration. Others came from equipment, yield analysis, and advanced packaging, a mix that Dong-A Ilbo said was enough to run a whole chip factory....
This is exactly what we were thinking of back in May—"seems to be an El Niño developing" was decidedly tongue in cheek, everybody and his brother was solemnly proclaiming "We're all going to die."
This is the first time this year we've posted the Drought Monitor map.
There
seems to be an El Niño developing off the coast of South America which
would mitigate some of the dryness in the southern and central U.S.
Meaning that as all around you are losing their heads shouting "drought,
drought" there would be wetter weather just over the horizon which
would ruin any long futures one had on corn, beans or wheat.
However!
If the arrival of the moisture is delayed much past July 1 it could be
just awful for the farmers. So this is a heads-up but not actionable.
Yet.
Layering one complex/chaotic system, financial derivatives,
on top of another complex/chaotic system, weather can get interesting in
ways even the best supercomputers haven't quite figured out....
The moisture is not a direct result of El Niño but rather from the Pacific storms (which are partly the result of the El Niño) including two hurricanes that have landed in Mexico and moved on to the Southwest United States.
And here is another, via The Watchers, October 10:
Anthropic AI agents took ‘unintended’ actions on government sites One AI system made a false tip to a police hotline.
SAN FRANCISCO — Anthropic, maker of the Claude chatbot, said that some of its AI agents had taken unintended actions on federal, state and local websites, including submitting a false tip about a murder to a Philadelphia police hotline.
The State Department said separately Friday that an Anthropic testing model had filed 19 visa applications in August and another in May using a form on the department’s website.
Anthropic said in a report published Friday that an internal review had discovered that its AI models had acted inappropriately in some instances during testing and while employees were using them.
In one incident, an AI agent exploited a design flaw in a state government website to freely access public data that usually required paying a fee. In another incident, an AI agent submitted a federal government form when it was instructed not to.
“We have briefed the White House on these cases and notified each agency involved,” Anthropic wrote in its report. The company said the incidents led it to turn off internet access for AI agents during all internal testing, pending a review of security measures.
The State Department said in a statement that the visa applications were incomplete and not processed....
The luxury carmaker is expanding its factory in Britain to focus on rarefied custom cars. First up is a $3.5 million-plus electric roadster.
This April, Rolls-Royce unveiled a new model meant to look down at even the highest of high-end cars. Its battery-powered roadster, known as Project Nightingale, is imposing and intentionally impractical. Though it is as long as a Cadillac Escalade, it sports only two seats. Like an elite speedboat, it’s all prow and tail.
Limited to 100 units globally, this handmade vehicle starts around $3.5 million. And that’s before expensive customization options, which are myriad and de rigueur, and could add 50 percent to the price. This makes it not just the venerable British carmaker’s top offering, but also an exclamation point on its business strategy: expanding profit by catering to its elite customers’ desire for something uniquely personalized and conspicuously consumable.
“We wanted to respond to the growing demand that we see from our clients to create coach-built cars,” said Chris Brownridge, chief executive of the 122-year-old ultraluxury brand, which the BMW Group has owned since 1998. The demand is real. According to the brand, all 100 Project Nightingale allocations were reserved before the project was even announced publicly.
Coachbuilding isn’t new to Rolls. During the company’s first five decades, every Rolls-Royce was coach-built. The brand would sell a rolling chassis with an engine, drivetrain, instrument panel, steering wheel and upright “Pantheon” grille, and clients would hire a specialty firm to construct a body to their specifications.
Rolls never entirely gave up the practice, as it has recently demonstrated with its Sweptail coupe (just one was made, and topping eight figures) and Droptail roadster (a robust four of these were built). But it is now prioritizing in-house coachbuilding, doubling the size of its manufacturing plant in southern England to accommodate the practice, without noticeably increasing its annual production capacity.
More, and more complex, customization processes also invite clients “behind the curtain,” as Mr. Brownridge said, to meet with designers, engineers and executives, providing the access and direct involvement they crave.
“People consuming luxury don’t just want things. They want stories, they want experiences. They want to, with the most ambitious clients, create a legacy of something which they’ll hand down to future generations,” he said.
Milton Pedraza, chief executive of the Luxury Institute, a consulting firm, sees alignment here with the desires of the very affluent. “These clients are willing to pay for value,” he said. “And that is not only functional value, but personal value.”
To serve, and catalyze, these desires, Rolls-Royce has opened “Private Office” locations in key markets: New York, Shanghai, Dubai, Seoul, and at its headquarters in Goodwood, England. Here, top clients work directly with advisers who prompt their idiosyncratic fantasies with the latest materials and capabilities — be they on an “entry level” $370,000 Ghost sedan, or a one-off coach-built vehicle.
According to Philippe Fabre de la Grange, Rolls-Royce’s head of bespoke, the options go well beyond the burl veneers and flawless Connolly leather hides for which the brand is known.
“We’re playing with technical fibers, with new textiles integrated within lacquer, with new types of material that we use in the context of marquetry — not only carefully curated woods, but mother-of-pearl, abalone, metal,” Mr. de la Grange said. He also mentioned hand-painting, embroidery and the enhanced use of light and projection.
Rolls-Royce is constantly seeking fresh “canvases” for in-car personalization. Clients can now design constellations of thousands of tiny rheostatic LEDs to be impregnated into their vehicle’s door panel, headliner or cargo area. They can have personal text or iconography engraved on the reverse of their spherical metal climate vents.
“It’s like the lining of a jacket,” Mr. de la Grange said of these practices. “You don’t show it off straightaway, but you know it’s there. It makes you feel good. And if you want to flash it, you can.”
On the vehicles’ exterior, plebeian paint will not suffice. Colors can be developed and named exclusively for a client to match a favorite artwork or article of clothing. Finishes can feature frosted, layered, crystalline, color-shifted or laser-engraved elements.
Rolls even maintains a special workshop, the EX Vault, which, like James Bond’s “Q” gadget workshop, gathers designers, engineers and craftspeople to experiment with new materials and processes.
“We want to be pushing the boundaries, doing new content, evolving skills,” Mr. de la Grange said. The company’s hiring of artisans has helped increase factory head count by around 50 percent in the past decade.
Of course, Rolls-Royce isn’t doing this simply to keep dying skills alive. “At the highest level, our goal as a business is to create value,” for clients, but also for the business and shareholders, Mr. Brownridge said....
From Harvard Business School's Working Knowledge, September 25:
While the US fixates on a “frontier-first” approach, China seeks to embed the technology throughout its economy. Meg Rithmire explains why understanding their differing strategies is critical.
If AI is the new space race, how will we know when a country has won?
After all, an August article in Asian Economic Policy Review argues that China and the United States are not even racing toward the same planet as they pursue fundamentally different AI strategies. The US is fixated on a “frontier-first” approach, prioritizing increasingly powerful foundation models and infrastructure in hopes of capturing global dominance, while China is focused on embedding the technology deeply throughout its economy.
The distinction matters for businesses and policymakers because the country that gains the most from AI may not develop the most powerful model, but could instead be the one that translates AI most effectively into productive economic activity, explains Harvard Business School Professor Meg Rithmire.
There’s another version of the AI race, which is really about whose technology stack the world is going to rely on.
“China’s Diffusion-Forward AI Strategy: The ‘AI Race’ in Political Economic Context,” which Rithmire wrote with Harvard Kennedy School postdoctoral fellow Hao Chen, details how China’s state-directed approach to AI investing aims to improve industrial efficiency by integrating AI into manufacturing and robotics. Drawing on Chinese policy documents and registration data for AI services, as well as an analysis of humanoid robotics firm UBTECH, the researchers document the government’s expanding investment role, with nearly one in four Chinese AI services crediting some degree of state involvement in 2025, up from less than 5% in 2023.
In a conversation edited for length and clarity, Rithmire, the James E. Robison Professor of Business Administration, explores the race between China and the US to develop increasingly capable systems, including artificial general intelligence (AGI), which can outperform the “median human” in economically valuable work, as well as the broader competition over the technology stack that could shape the global economy.
Why is the current tech moment often compared to the space race?
"One interpretation is that whoever reaches AGI first is going to have enormous capabilities vis-a-vis the rest of the world. The dominant thinking right now in Washington and Beijing is about who has better capabilities of escalation dominance—meaning you can hurt me, but I can always hurt you more. I can dominate the escalation of our competition, and I then no longer fear your retaliation."
Why does it matter how advanced AI gets?
"The thinking around AGI is that there are some amazing capabilities that could allow one country to destroy the other. These are allegedly such powerful models that, if some adversary had that technology, they could use it to infiltrate systems, hack passwords, and shut down critical infrastructure. There’s a military defense logic to this thinking: If China gets these capabilities before the US, they’re going to use them to destroy other societies, so we should get them first because we won’t use them to destroy everyone else.
The way US companies and a lot of policymakers in DC have thought about it is: The biggest risk is China getting to AGI before the US does. And that’s the reason we have to focus on the quality of large language models. But what AGI really is, nobody knows. Sometimes I have this interesting debate with technology people, which is—will we even know when we have AGI?"
What else matters besides superintelligence?
"There’s another version of the AI race, which is really about whose technology stack the world is going to rely on for the next several generations. In a world where the US wins the AI race, most of the world is dependent on the US for the hardware stack, the chips, and US LLMs to build the application-layer products that are then sold into the rest of the world.
That's more of an economic power—locking the world into American technology such that American companies benefit, American markets benefit, and the world softly depends on the US for the AI stacks that are changing the way people work, receive services, buy things, and live."....
I've obviously been thinking too small with my dream of turning compliance into a profit center.*
From Fortune Magazine, September 17:
In today’s CEO Daily: A dispatch from Fortune’s CEO Forum in London
The big leadership story: Marc Benioff urges AI firms to take responsibility for their products.
The markets: U.S. futures are up after the Fed rate hike caused a selloff.
Plus: All the news and watercooler chat from Fortune.
Good morning. Kirsty McGregor, Editorial Director for Europe, writing from London this morning. How can Europe unlock its next phase of growth? That was the question running through nearly all the conversations at the Fortune CEO Forum in London yesterday, where we brought together execs from companies including Mastercard, Ferrari, BlackRock, Shell, EDF, Google, OpenAI, Honeywell, Anthropic, and Microsoft to explore the forces reshaping Europe’s economy.
Our venue was the historic Barber-Surgeons’ Hall in London, an apt place to have a conversation about Europe’s future. The U.K. remains deeply connected to European business and finance, while also maintaining close links to the U.S. and the wider global economy. At a moment of extraordinary volatility—from war in the Gulf and uncertainty in U.S. politics to intensifying competition from China—London offers a useful vantage point for thinking about how Europe should adapt.
The leaders who filled the room are grappling with a perfect storm of mounting energy pressures, geopolitical uncertainty, slowing productivity, and how to navigate the promise—and darker possibilities—of AI. Those themes were evident during the day’s discussions, which were private to allow for candid debate. But a few takeaways emerged:
Europe has scale; will it equal growth? Earlier in the day, we released the brand new Fortune 500 Europe list, which provides a useful snapshot of Europe’s corporate heft. The 500 companies generated $15.5 trillion in revenue this year, up 4% from last year, and more than $1 trillion in profits. That combined revenue is equivalent to half of Europe’s GDP. Finance, energy, and automakers together account for over half of all revenues and profits on the list.
The ranking is a reminder that Europe has enormous companies, deep pools of talent, significant financial resources, and areas of genuine industrial strength. But at the Forum, business leaders from across the region called for a policy, energy, infrastructure, and investment environment that allows those strengths to translate into the next phase of growth.
Europe’s green advantage. The sustainability conversation was notably clear-eyed. CEOs weren’t debating whether decarbonization matters; the hard part is doing it while energy costs squeeze competitiveness....
Frontier AI giant Anthropic has declared that artificial intelligence poses an “industrial-scale threat’’ to Australia and could reduce “demand for human work’’.
As a parliamentary inquiry probes OpenAI’s government data hacks and the AI industry’s creative “cannibalisation”, Anthropic has called for taxpayer support to retain, retain or redeploy workers whose jobs are replaced by AI agents and chatbots.
“Anthropic does believe that AI can deliver incredible progress in scientific discovery and workplace productivity but that these gains could also come with a reduction in demand for human work,’’ the company states in its submission to the Joint Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence, which will grill executives from Anthropic, Google, Microsoft and OpenAI at a hearing in Sydney on Tuesday.
Challenger Grey’s latest research finds that AI is now the number one reason for layoffs in the economy, at 21% of the total over the past year.
Stanford Labs data indicates this is not evenly distributed but focused, as you would expect, in entry-level positions.
We do not see widespread, economy-wide job displacement associated with AI.
However, young workers in AI-exposed occupations are increasingly falling behind their less-exposed peers. Employment among workers ages 22–25 in highly AI-exposed occupations now stands about 19% below where it would be if it had kept pace with employment among similarly aged workers in less-exposed occupations. Experienced workers show no comparable gap.1
This divergence has widened steadily since we first documented it in August 2025: by this same measure, the shortfall was 15% at the July 2025 data vintage and is 19% as of June 2026.
The adjustment appears to operate primarily through reduced hiring of young workers rather than increased separations.
The declines are concentrated in occupations where AI usage tends to automate human tasks. In occupations where AI is used more to complement workers, employment is flat or rising, particularly among more experienced workers.
So far, adjustment is showing up primarily in employment rather than base pay.
From anti-drone nets to signal jammers, governments are testing increasingly elaborate ways to protect cities from fast-evolving weapons.
The southern Ukrainian city of Kherson drapes nets over its roads to protect residents from daily Russian drone attacks.
Photographer: Pierre Crom/Getty Images Europe
Oleksandr Tolokonnikov has the weary tone of a man explaining life in a nightmare that never seems to end. Under the harsh white lights of a bomb shelter, the Ukrainian government official gives staccato descriptions of the daily Russian drone attacks in his region, the city of Kherson and surrounding villages. They have killed 65 civilians and injured more than 800 people in the first six months of the year.
Behind Tolokonnikov, a glossy poster of watermelons is a jarring reminder that this part of southern Ukraine used to be best known for its fruit; there’s even a watermelon monument further up the river. But today, Kherson is instead famous for the roughly 220 kilometers (137 miles) of green-tinged anti-drone nets draped over its roads.
The mesh canopies, which obscure the sky and fill with leaves in autumn, are a response to the latest evolution of drone warfare — which now ranges from large, purpose-built weapons to cheap commercial models that can be easily ordered online and adapted. Within 48 hours of my conversation with Tolokonnikov, deputy head of the Kherson state administration, Russian drone attacks killed one person and injured two others in the city. He says Kherson was seeing about 2,500 drone attacks per week this time last year; now it’s around 5,500.
The crude nets also embody a much broader challenge: How can you defend an entire city from this new danger? Kherson, a frontline city in a country at war, is an extreme example. But the threat is hanging over cities across Europe and the Middle East. Kyiv is experiencing more air-raid alerts than ever before as Moscow barrages the city with jet-powered drones. Last month, a small drone carrying explosives was found at Leipzig airport, a major cargo hub in Germany, with the country later blaming Russia for the attack. This summer, NATO forces shot down four drones over Romania, following an incident in May in which the country’s military tracked a Russian drone for four minutes before it crashed into an apartment block in the city of GalaÈ›i, injuring two people.
Governments and the defense industry are still trying to determine the safest, most efficient and least expensive way to protect urban areas from drones, says Gregory Falco, head of the Aerospace Adversary Lab at Cornell University. “There’s no consensus on this yet.”
The Small Drone Threat
Small, mini and micro drones — defined by NATO as those weighing less than 150 kg (330 pounds) — are a daunting problem for any military. Radar systems, built to spot large planes and fast missiles, often can’t distinguish them from birds. They fly in unpredictable patterns and are difficult to shoot down. Even when radio-frequency jammers do work, tall buildings can interfere with the signal. “Currently there is not a single country that can stop small drones,” says Major Modris KairiÅ¡s, head of Latvia’s Autonomous Systems Competence Center.
Officials consider Kherson’s nets, which entangle the drones, as the most reliable of all the available solutions.
Photographer: Ivan Antypenko/Global Images Ukraine/Getty Images
Pierce Brosnan forced to flee $100M Malibu compound over fears of quakes, fire and sky-high costs
Pierce Brosnan is ready to say goodbye to his slice of Malibu paradise, after decades of dodging wildfires, worrying about earthquakes and shelling out a fortune to keep his sprawling $100 million compound afloat.
The former James Bond star, 73, and wife Keely Shaye Smith, 62, are preparing to move on from the spectacular oceanfront estate they have called home for more than two decades, with Brosnan admitting that life along California’s famously volatile coastline has begun to lose some of its luster.
“We’ve been spared by the fires a few times now. But I think it’s time to move,” Brosnan told The Times. “Everything changes, everything falls apart.”
The actor said living beside the Pacific Ocean, in an area vulnerable to earthquakes and devastating wildfires, has created an underlying sense of unease.
“We live by this body of earth’s water on a fault in a ring of earthquakes. That creates a fear,” he told the outlet....
Real estate pro tip: If you are selling your $100mm California compound, do not be the first to mention the cost, the fires and the earthquakes when addressing potential buyers. Be forthright if asked but don't lead with, say, potential tsunami risk living on the beach.
Today's selection -- from Paved Paradise by Henry Grabar. The requirements enacted in America’s downtowns for overly plentiful parking helped drive out the things that citizens love about their cities:
“In 2017, a lawyer named Mark Vallianatos conceived a tour of Los Angeles he called ‘Forbidden City.’ It sounded mysterious, perhaps even indecent, but it was something like the opposite: an architecture tour with a heavy dose of regulatory history. The premise was simple. Los Angeles banned itself.
“The Forbidden City was not a distant imperial fortress; it was all around. The familiar houses and apartment blocks of neighborhoods like Hollywood, Koreatown, and Mid-City; gated courts of stucco cottages grouped around grassy courtyards; handsome two-story houses in the style of old Spanish missions or Cape Cods, split into two (duplexes), three (triplexes), or four apartments (fourplexes). Hollywood apartment towers, with their schlocky appropriations of French chateaus or Chinese pagodas. Elegant, Bauhaus-inspired midrise apartment buildings. The Forbidden City is the everyday architecture of Los Angeles neighborhoods–the glamorous and the mundane, essential, quintessentially LA. All of it was illegal to build, because none of these buildings had enough parking spaces.
“On a warm February day in 2020, I joined Vallianatos for a Forbidden City reprise. ‘We banned the parts of Los Angeles that people love the most,’ Vallianatos said, walking up the hill into Highland Park, an early streetcar suburb near Pasadena. Dressed in a natty green suit and thick architect glasses, the square-faced Vallianatos looked a little out of place in the California sunshine, and a lot out of place as he skulked around gates and peeked over box hedges. He was looking for electrical meters and mailboxes. That's how you figure out how many apartments sit behind a facade; it's how you know when what looks like a single-family home is in fact a fourplex. He approached a two-story house with a light-blue coat of paint behind neatly trimmed bushes. Five dials. Five apartments. Evidence that this particular building would be illegal to build in 2020. Circling around back, it was clear why: three measly parking spaces. And built for the small cars Angelenos drove in 1923, when the first tenants moved in. The tripartite garage looked like a toolshed.
Parking, 5 cents a day, Hollywood, United States, 1949
“If you wanted to build a five-unit building in Highland Park in 2020, you had to build at least five parking spaces (for five studio units), eight parking spaces (for five one-bedroom apartments), or ten parking spaces (for five two-bedroom apartments). Given those stipulations, on a lot this size, you wouldn't be able to build this building at all. It was an architectural fossil; the environment that gave it life was long gone.
"The overall theme is that most of these older neighborhoods in LA have a mix of smaller apartments and houses," Vallianatos went on. A dog barked, birds chirped, a drill whined in the warm air. Another rehab under way in the Forbidden City. One consequence of prohibiting such buildings from being built today is that the old ones are constant targets for luxury renovations. We passed an austere white-walled synagogue–no parking, forbidden–and paused below the scalloped red roof of a Mission Revival bungalow court with ten apartments around a manicured garden. Forbidden. In a new home in Los Angeles in 2020, as in virtually every other city and suburb in America, a parking space was as obligatory as a toilet. In fact more so. A two-bedroom apartment did not require two toilets. But it did require two parking spaces....
It’s harvest time in California wine country, but many growers are struggling to sell their grapes as changing drinking habits have caused demand to plunge. The decline is forcing some growers to tear out vineyards that their families have grown for generations.
Wine sales have decreased by more than 20% over a five-year period, causing prices paid for grapes to drop and prompting California growers to take roughly a quarter of the state’s vineyards out of production. Many growers are having to decide whether to harvest at a loss, leave grapes on the vine or replace vineyards with crops more in demand such as almonds, walnuts, pistachios and olives.
Third-generation grower Bill Berryhill said it means another year of losing money and wasting hundreds of tons of healthy grapes.
“It’s just sickening,” said Berryhill, standing in a vineyard of unsold merlot grapes. “You raise a beautiful crop, and it’s really a nice vintage this year, and you drop it on the ground. It’s sad. All your work is just down the toilet.”
Berryhill, who owns Berryhill Family Vineyards near Lodi in the San Joaquin Valley, said he can’t find buyers for grapes grown on 200 of his 500 acres (202 hectares). He plans to remove 50 acres (20 hectares) of vineyards when the harvest season is over.
“I will lose money for sure. It’s just a matter of how much,” Berryhill, 68, said. “This has been a big loser for three years now.”
Grape growers take vineyards out of production At its peak during the pandemic, California had almost 600,000 acres (242,811 hectares) of vineyards, but farmers have removed or stopped actively growing wine grapes on roughly 25% of that land, said Jeff Bitter, president of Allied Grape Growers, which represents about 500 farmers statewide.
This year, about half of California’s wine grape crop entered the harvest season without contracts with buyers, compared with 70 to 80% with contracts in a typical year, Bitter said.
If they’re lucky, growers can sell their uncontracted grapes at a loss to buyers making concentrated syrup.
Even as growers have abandoned or removed tens of thousands of acres of vineyards in California in recent years, too many grapes are still being produced, Bitter said.
“The market is just so depressed that it’s difficult to grow them profitably,” he said. “Demand is not going up. It’s still continuing to decline.”....
Someone may have to do an intervention, or at minimum a welfare check, on Mr. Son.
From ZeroHedge, October 9:
The scramble for AI cash is on (or rather, accelerating).
Just hours after the FT reported that OpenAI's annualized revenue is roughly $20 billion lower than the figure that had been making the rounds previously, the same paper reported that Masayoshi Son is trying to raise up to $100 billion from Gulf investors, and has spent recent weeks holding talks with senior figures in the UAE. That would be roughly the size of the original Vision Fund, which is either a sign of ambition or of how much more money the AI trade now needs just to stand still. Clearly, in a world of $1.5 trillion in 2027 capex, the answer is the latter.
**(denotes tweet at ZH)
Regular readers will not be surprised: we have been warning that the AI buildout runs on debt since exactly one year ago today, and SoftBank, which has committed some $65 billion to OpenAI, has spent most of 2026 as the poster child for that thesis. Over the past nine months Son has tapped bridge loans, margin loans on Arm and OpenAI shares, Japanese retail savers and, most recently, the largest junk bond on record. Now that the usual spigots have been opened all the way, it's time to call the sovereigns.
Below we walk through what Son is pitching to Abu Dhabi, how the money machine got here, why Thursday's OpenAI revenue "clarification" matters so much for SoftBank's balance sheet, and why the Gulf has quietly become the AI trade's lender of last resort.
"What Happened To Abu Dhabi?"
According to the FT, the new money would go into a vehicle that buys companies and then uses AI and other advanced technology to run them more efficiently: a private-equity roll-up with a robotics twist. Roze, SoftBank's robotics and physical AI unit, which Son hopes to take public at a lofty valuation (press reports have floated $100 billion), is expected to play a central role. The people cautioned that there is no guarantee the talks succeed, and SoftBank declined to comment.
The playbook is familiar. Saudi Arabia's PIF and the UAE's Mubadala anchored the first $100 billion Vision Fund in 2017; per the FT, that fund has generated about $29 billion in cumulative investment gains through June, while Vision Fund 2 (backed primarily by SoftBank itself, and home to the OpenAI stake) is up $20.5 billion. Not exactly WeWork, but not exactly the "information revolution" either for a fund that took nearly a decade to get there.
What is new is the timing. Just this week, OpenAI itself was shopping a $30 billion round to a group of UAE sovereign funds led by MGX (alongside BlackRock) at a $1.4 trillion pre-money valuation set by OpenAI itself. Which means that in the span of four days, both the biggest AI lab and its biggest backer have shown up at the same Abu Dhabi door with their hands out. Back in February, when OpenAI's record $110 billion round closed without a Gulf name on the cap table, we asked the obvious question:
**
Now we know: it was waiting to be asked.
It's not the first time the emirate has come to the rescue of the AI trade, either. Last December, as Oracle CDS blew out and Blue Owl walked away from Oracle, it was Abu Dhabi that may have delivered the Santa Rally when OpenAI went to sovereign wealth funds for up to $100 billion (a dependence we explored at length in "Dollar Supremacy Strategy Or All-Time Grift? American AI Imperialism's Reliance On The Middle East"). Abu Dhabi, through MGX and G42, has become one of the world's biggest AI spenders, as the FT notes. The difference this time is that there is now a war next door, Brent is above $100, and Gulf petrodollars are being asked to fund two of the biggest AI fundraises of the year at once.
Masa's Money Machine
To appreciate why Son needs the Gulf, look at what he has already done this year. The chart below tallies the headline size of every major facility SoftBank has lined up in 2026 to fund its AI ambitions (some refinance others, so this is not a cumulative total, but you get the idea):
In March, days after SoftBank's CFO warned that its loan-to-value ratio may temporarily exceed the 25% ceiling (to which we responded "chatbots gonna take down masa son"), it lined up a record $40 billion bridge loan for the OpenAI stake. In May, SoftBank had to cut the target for its OpenAI-backed margin loan by 40% to $6 billion,p and by June even the downsized loan had stalled, as lenders balked at taking private OpenAI shares as collateral. Then came a ¥1 trillion bond sold to Japanese retail investors at a 4.75% coupon, an Arm-backed margin loan upsized to $25 billion, a $6.5 billion credit line, an $11.87 billion loan and talks with Apollo to upsize another to $9 billion.
And then, the grand finale: a five-tranche, $11 billion-plus junk bond to fund the next OpenAI check, which the FT says paid yields as high as 9.75%. Goldman's credit sales desk confirmed in Adam Crook's latest AI issuance pulsecheck (available to pro subs) that the $11.14 billion deal was the largest non-investment grade bond sale on record, and it single-handedly made the week of Sept 25 the biggest for new HY issuance in Goldman's chart, which goes back to late July (chart source PitchBook LCD via Goldman):
Naturally, we called this one back in January, when the WSJ first reported that Son was in talks to pour another $30 billion into OpenAI:
**
Nine months later, SoftBank is the biggest junk issuer in history, so we'll allow ourselves a modest victory lap. The credit market got the message too: within a week of the jumbo deal, SoftBank's 5Y CDS had blown out to the widest levels since the Iran war began, as we flagged in real time:
**
Put differently, when you have already pledged your crown jewel (Arm), your largest asset (OpenAI), Japanese retail savers and the high-yield market's patience, the only pocket left is a sovereign one.
The $20 Billion Hole
Which brings us to why the timing of the Gulf push is so delicate. On Thursday afternoon the FT reported that OpenAI had told investors its annualized revenue was approaching $50 billion at the end of September, far short of the ~$70 billion figure that had been circulating since Dev Day. Nasdaq promptly tumbled more than 1%, Oracle slid 5-6%, and SoftBank's Tokyo-listed shares fell 5% on Friday. They are still up 25% this year, but have now dropped more than 30% from their June peak, when SoftBank briefly became Japan's most valuable company.
According to Goldman's TMT specialist sales team (available to pro subs), the gap is mostly a matter of accounting rather than collapsing demand: OpenAI reports revenue net of what flows through its cloud partners, while Anthropic reports something closer to gross. Investors who "grossed up" OpenAI to compare the two arrived at roughly $40 billion in August and $70 billion in September; on OpenAI's own net basis, the progression was more like $30 billion to $50 billion. That is still around 70% growth, Goldman notes, just not the growth everyone had priced in. Goldman's desk said it caught a heavy wave of long-only and hedge fund supply in megacap tech after the headline, over $1 billion in net selling of semis, AI and megacaps.
On Friday morning, right on schedule, came the spin: Bloomberg reported that OpenAI now expects to hit or top $70 billion of annualized revenue by year-end, and blamed the confusion on differences in how OpenAI and Anthropic calculate revenue. Futures bounced, and Goldman's TMT desk filed it under the whiplash sentiment swings that have become a defining feature of AI investing this year. So the $70 billion number didn't disappear; it was just moved three months into the future. Which, considering OpenAI is on the hook for some $1.5 trillion in compute commitments, is not quite the reassurance it was meant to be....
"But Son’s fairytale didn’t last long. After the dot-com bubble burst,
his company Softbank’s shares plunged 75 percent in two months and was
93 percent lower by the end of 2000.
The business almost went
bankrupt and Son ended up losing USD 70 billion, the highest ever
recorded financial loss for a person in history."
I've been meaning to write about Kelly for a couple years and keep forgetting. Today I forget no more.
In probability theory the Kelly Criterion is a bet sizing technique used when the player has a quantifiable edge.
(When there is no edge the optimal bet size is $0.00)
The criterion will deliver the fastest growth rate balanced by reduced risk of ruin.
You can grow your pile faster but you increase the risk of ending up
broke should you, for example bet 100% of your net worth in a situation
where you have anything less than a 100% chance of winning.
The criterion says bet roughly your advantage as a percentage of
your current bankroll divided by the variance of the game/market/sports
book etc..
Variance is the standard deviation of the game squared. In blackjack the s.d. is 1.15 so the square is 1.3225.
As blackjack is played in the U.S. the most a card counter can hope for is a 1/2% to 1% average advantage with much of that average accruing from the fact that you can get up from a negative table.
Divide by 1.3225 and you've got your bet size.
It's a tough way to grind out a living but hopefully this exercise will
stop you from pulling a Leeson, betting all of Barings money and
destroying the 233 year old bank.
