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📊 Gemini pops 14% in $425M Nasdaq debut Crypto exchange Gemini surged on its first day of trading, closing at $32 per share - a 14% jump from its IPO price of $28. The debut raised $425M, marking another win in crypto’s streak of successful listings. 🖱 Fully diluted market cap opened at $3.3B, well below its $7.1B peak valuation in 2021 🖱 IPO demand forced Gemini to raise its price range twice before pricing above it 🖱 Nasdaq invested $50M in a private placement at the IPO price, boosting confidence 🖱 Recent crypto IPOs like Circle, Bullish, and Figure also saw strong first-day gains 🖱 Despite mounting losses, investors piled in, underscoring appetite for crypto-native firms

Gemini’s public debut is a clear signal: traditional markets are warming up to crypto exposure, and the Winklevoss twins just scored their biggest validation yet.

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💼 Tesla board chair defends Elon Musk’s $1T pay package Tesla shareholders will vote in November on a 10-year, $1 trillion compensation deal for Elon Musk - the largest in corporate history. Board Chair Robyn Denholm, who helped craft the plan, dismissed criticism. 🖱 Performance-based: Musk gets nothing unless he hits future goals 🖱 Power over pay: Denholm says the real issue is Musk’s voting control, not the dollar figure 🖱 Timing: Proposal arrives as Tesla’s vehicle sales and profits are slipping 🖱 Dismissive tone: Denholm called the debate “a little bit weird”

Tesla positions the package as a bet on Musk’s ability to drive long-term growth, but with financial headwinds, the shareholder vote may be anything but smooth.

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⚡ Musk buys $1B in Tesla shares to boost control Elon Musk just purchased about 2.57M Tesla shares in open-market trades, spending nearly $1B to slightly lift his stake from 12.7% to 12.8%. 🖱 Paid between $372–$397 per share in the transactions 🖱 Tesla stock jumped over 8% pre-market after the disclosure 🖱 Musk has said he wants ~25% voting power at Tesla for long-term influence 🖱 Even this billion-dollar buy moves him only a fraction closer 🖱 Comes as Tesla pivots beyond EVs into robotaxis, AI, and robotics

The purchase signals confidence, but highlights the steep cost of Musk’s quest for control — raising the question: can he realistically reach 25% without massive new funding or board maneuvers?

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💼 Robinhood opens VC fund to retail investors Robinhood is launching Robinhood Ventures Fund I (RVI), a closed-end, publicly traded venture capital fund designed to let everyday investors buy into private companies, a space long reserved for institutions and the wealthy. 🖱 Managed by new arm Robinhood Ventures, filed with the SEC 🖱Open to Robinhood’s 26.5M customers 🖱 Targets private firms as public listings keep shrinking 🖱 Offers long-term, illiquid stakes with higher potential upside (and risk) 🖱 Pitched as democratizing access to Silicon Valley-style investing

The fund pushes the “retail revolution” into venture capital, but raises the question: will broad access to risky, illiquid startups empower small investors, or expose them to hazards they can’t hedge?

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🔐 Google releases VaultGemma: a differentially private LLM Google unveiled VaultGemma, a 1-billion parameter model trained from scratch under strong differential privacy (DP) constraints, with weights open to the public. 🖱 Establishes new scaling laws for DP-LLMs, quantifying trade-offs among model size, compute, data, and noise levels. 🖱 VaultGemma uses sequence-level DP (ε ≤ 2.0, δ ≤ 1.1×10⁻¹⁰) over sequences of 1024 tokens. 🖱 Shows little to no memorization of training data under tests, indicating strong privacy in practice. 🖱 Performance is comparable to non-private models from ~5 years ago, though still behind modern non-DP ones. 🖱 Released on Hugging Face and Kaggle, plus technical report, to accelerate community work in private AI.

The launch marks a big step: balancing utility and privacy in large language models — but asks the question: how quickly can that utility gap be closed for real-world use?

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👟 Under Armour’s tech pivot that almost broke the brand In the 2010s, Under Armour tried to reinvent itself as a “health-focused tech company”, inspired by Nike+, Strava, and Fitbit. It spent $700M+ acquiring fitness apps to build a connected ecosystem, but the bet collapsed. 🖱 Acquired MapMyFitness, Endomondo, and MyFitnessPal (then the biggest calorie tracker) between 2013–2015. 🖱 Vision: collect user data, sell connected sneakers, personalize gear, and monetize via subscriptions + device partnerships. 🖱 Reality: MyFitnessPal sold in 2020 at half price, MapMyFitness lost users, Endomondo shut down, stock fell as Nike/Adidas surged. 🖱 Core mismatch: UA’s audience were performance athletes, not casual wellness users, they already relied on Garmin, Apple, and niche pro tools. 🖱 Engagement in UA apps stayed weak; no rollout of premium features like personalized training or online coaching.

Data alone isn’t enough, success comes from turning it into insights your audience values and monetization that actually works.

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🌐 SpaceX buys $17B spectrum stake to supercharge Starlink direct-to-cell service SpaceX has acquired $17 billion worth of satellite spectrum licenses from EchoStar to boost Starlink’s ability to deliver broadband directly to cellphones, especially in under-connected areas. 🖱 Deal split: $8.5B paid in cash, $8.5B in SpaceX stock. 🖱 Spectrum includes the H-block (1915-1920 MHz), used for 4G/5G mobile services, plus AWS-4 from EchoStar. 🖱 EchoStar’s prior plan to build its own LEO 5G constellation is scrapped. 🖱 Starlink’s direct-to-device service launched in 2024 for text transmission; this spectrum boost promises much greater throughput, up to 20× more vs current satellites. 🖱 The deal also closes an FCC investigation of EchoStar’s use of that spectrum.

This is a big step toward eliminating “dead zones” for mobile connectivity, pushing broader broadband access, especially in remote areas. If SpaceX delivers, the gap between on-ground mobile networks and space-based connectivity keeps shrinking, but scaling performance, latency, and cost effectively will be the real test.

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💰 Alphabet’s market cap tops $3 trillion for the first time Google now joins the elite club alongside Nvidia, Microsoft, and Apple. Next in line is Amazon, with a market cap of $2.4 trillion.

Takeaway: The trillion-dollar race is no longer rarefied air, it’s becoming the new benchmark for Big Tech dominance.

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📱 TikTok set for U.S. spin-off under Oracle-led deal The U.S. and China are close to finalizing TikTok’s future: a new American company will own and operate the app for U.S. users, resolving years of political and security disputes. 🖱 Ownership: ~80% controlled by Oracle, Silver Lake, Andreessen Horowitz, and early ByteDance investors; Chinese stakes cut to <20%. 🖱 Algorithm: Rebuilt by U.S. engineers but licensed from ByteDance; Oracle to oversee U.S. data storage and protection in Texas. 🖱 Politics: Trump postponed the TikTok ban to December, saying a deal “has been reached,” pending direct talks with Xi Jinping.

This structure gives Washington ownership and data security assurances, while Beijing retains leverage via algorithm licensing. The true test will be whether U.S. engineers can replicate TikTok’s addictive feed without losing what makes the app tick.

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🤖 China halts corporate purchases of Nvidia AI chips Beijing has ordered major tech firms, including Alibaba and ByteDance, to stop buying Nvidia’s AI chips, a move aimed at reducing reliance on U.S. hardware and bolstering China’s leverage in trade talks. 🖱 Scope: Affects Nvidia’s RTX Pro 6000D chips, custom-built to skirt U.S. export restrictions. 🖱 Scale: Chinese companies had planned to buy tens of thousands of units for AI model training. 🖱 Strategy: Signals Beijing’s intent to accelerate domestic semiconductor development and curb U.S. tech influence.

This is less about short-term performance and more about long-term independence: by cutting Nvidia out, China forces its ecosystem to double down on homegrown chips even if the transition slows AI progress in the near term.

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