It’s Sunday.
One of the wildest stories of the year landed this week.
The Wall Street Journal profiled Cami Clark, wife and close adviser to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, tracing a largely scrubbed online history.
Before Anthropic, Clark co-founded an adult-content startup called Eddice and later sought funding from prospective investors. One of them? Jeffrey Epstein.
Clark also helped bring former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, whom she had previously dated, into Anthropic as a key early investor while the company was getting off the ground.
The timing is remarkable. Investors now expect Anthropic to pursue an IPO at a valuation greater than $2T.
Key Data Bites Over The Last Week:
Bill Ackman took new positions in 6 stocks.
Michael Burry said Palantir was worth under $1 in the long run.
Meta to face trial against 29 states over youth social media harms.
Wall Street giants are partnering with Nvidia to invest $500B in AI infrastructure.
Jane Street suffered $15B loss in July due to Situational Awareness.
Josh Kushner and Bob Iger to buy LA Lakers for $12.5B.
Elon Musk’s Terafab will be 5x bigger than world’s largest building.
US Strategic Petroleum Reserve fell to lowest level since 1983.
US retail sales posted biggest drop in 14 months.
Intel to raise $20B stock offering to support AI demand.
Silver Lake in talks to take $50B-listed Workday private.
PE firms are sitting on nearly 34,000 unsold companies.
In today’s newsletter:
💰 Berkshire Is Back To Buying
🥣 Cava Stores Outsell Chipotle
🇺🇸 How The USA Loses Money
🇨🇳 Most Valuable Chinese Companies
🆕 Reddit Is Joining The S&P 500
Let’s jump right in.
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Berkshire is starting to dig into its treasure chest.
After 14 straight quarters as a net seller, the company bought nearly $20B more stocks than it sold in the second quarter, including another $10B of Alphabet.
It also repurchased $4.5B of shares after nearly two years of limited buyback activity.
Even after all that spending, its cash pile remains enormous at roughly $365B.
The company remains healthy, with operating profit rising 16% to nearly $13B in the most recent quarter, as strength across its railroad and service businesses offset weaker results at Geico.
After years of building cash, Berkshire is starting to put more of it back to work.
Cava is starting to punch above its weight.
The average Cava restaurant now generates about $3.09M in annual sales, edging past Chipotle at $2.97M despite Cava being a fraction of the size.
That strength carried into another solid quarter.
Revenue rose 31% to $365M, same-store sales climbed 9%, and more than half of that growth came from higher guest traffic.
Cava also opened 17 net new restaurants, with management saying those locations are outperforming internal expectations.
The company did see a temporary hit from concerns around the cyclospora outbreak, but sales trends have already begun to recover.
America is collecting more money but still falling further behind.
Through July, federal receipts rose 3% to $4.49T, but spending climbed even faster to $6.28T.
That pushed the fiscal-year deficit to nearly $1.8T, up 10% from the same period last year.
One of the biggest pressures is interest on the national debt.
Net interest costs have already reached $931B this fiscal year, putting them behind only Social Security and Medicare among major federal expenses.
July alone added another $432B to the deficit, the largest monthly shortfall in more than five years.
China has a new number one.
Less than three weeks after going public, CXMT has surged to a roughly $555B valuation and overtaken Tencent as China’s most valuable public company.
The memory-chip maker has quickly become one of the clearest bets on China’s push for semiconductor independence and rising AI demand.
CXMT is already the world’s fourth-largest producer of DRAM, the memory used across everything from smartphones to AI servers.
The memory-chip boom has already swept markets around the world.
Now, China has its own breakout winner.
Reddit just made the front page of Wall Street.
The company will join the S&P 500 on August 18, becoming only the the second social media-focused company in the index alongside Meta.
The milestone comes less than two and a half years after Reddit went public.
Since its IPO, a $10,000 investment has grown to nearly $40,000 despite plenty of volatility along the way.
The business has scaled just as quickly, with Reddit recently posting its eighth consecutive quarter of revenue growth above 60%.
From IPO to the S&P 500 in under 30 months, Reddit’s rise has been incredible.
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🧸 CoreWeave Short↗ – Martin Shkreli called CoreWeave a short, arguing its debt load is too large for the company to generate free cash flow.
✂️ Tax Cuts↗ – President Trump is considering calling on Congress to cut capital gains taxes and create an exemption for certain home sales.
🔮 Zuck’s Vision↗ – Mark Zuckerberg issued a 6,500-word manifesto laying out the company’s view on the AI race.
🚪 Executive Exodus↗ – OpenAI revenue chief Denise Dresser is leaving after eight months, marking the company’s second major executive departure in days.
Notable Companies Reporting Earnings Week of August 16th, 2026:
Major Trades Published 8/10 - 8/14. Trades may be those of family members. [Source: Capitol Trades]
Buys
Ro Khanna (D)
Company: The Toronto-Dominion Bank ($TD)
Amount Purchased: $150K - $350K
Tony Wied (R)
Company: Adobe ($ADBE)
Amount Purchased: $50K - $100K
Sells
Tony Wied (R)
Company: AMD ($AMD)
Amount Sold: $100K - $250K
Ro Khanna (D)
Company: Microchip Technology ($MCHP)
Amount Sold: $51K - $115K
Company: Costco ($COST)
Amount Sold: $50K - $100K
Major Trades Published 8/10 - 8/14
Buys
Intel ($INTC)
Insider: Lip Bu Tan (CEO)
# of Shares Purchased: 105,263
$ Amount: $9,999,985
SEC Forms: [1]
Sells
Life Time Group Holdings ($LTH)
Insider: John Danhakl (Director)
# of Shares Sold: 5,119,099
$ Amount: $220,940,313
SEC Forms: [1]
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