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Bitcoin hits $123K, Tesla arrives in India

Good morning.
It’s Tuesday, July 15 — and summer is officially speeding like it's late to its own party. One second it was Memorial Day, now your sunscreen has expired and your suitcase still isn’t unpacked from that one beach weekend you barely remember.
Today in history: in 1988, Die Hard hit theaters, gave us Bruce Willis crawling through vents barefoot, and forever ruined Christmas for hostage negotiators. And in 2006, Twitter was unleashed upon the world. What started as a platform for status updates turned into a chaotic mess of opinions, brands pretending to be funny, and billionaires playing tag with democracy.
Anyway, whether you’re working, pretending to work, or just here for the air conditioning, we’re glad you showed up. Let’s get into it.
Today’s stories:
Climate crisis scorches Japan’s matcha harvest
Tesla enters India, skips factory commitment
McDonald’s AI hiring bot leaked 64M records
Denver museum finds dino under parking lot
LVMH brand busted for €4 sweatshop labor
Varda raises $187M for space-made drugs
Bitcoin hits $123K amid Trump crypto push
Banning TikTok actually helped kids learn
Meta pays $200M to poach Apple AI star
Boeing wins $2.8B military satellite deal
and more…

Stocks inched up Monday despite Trump’s latest tariff threats. The S&P 500 rose 0.1%, the Nasdaq 0.3%, and the Dow added 88 points. Over the weekend, Trump said 30% tariffs on the EU and Mexico are coming August 1 — unless, of course, they strike a better deal. Investors seem to be betting that cooler heads will prevail, especially with key inflation data and earnings reports on deck this week.
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Meta Drops $200M on Ex-Apple Exec
Meta is on a billionaire shopping spree, handing out $200 million+ to lure Apple’s former AI lead Ruoming Pang into its shiny new Superintelligence Labs. Apple didn’t blink — because nobody at Cupertino gets paid like that unless their name rhymes with Pim Tuck. Zuckerberg’s building an AI dream team with the energy of a tech bro drafting fantasy football players. His “literal list” of AI rockstars includes former CEOs, ex-Apple engineers, and anyone who knows what a transformer model is. Compensation packages are hitting $300 million, stock vesting like confetti, and signing bonuses hitting NBA levels. OpenAI’s Sam Altman admitted Meta’s been carpet-bombing his team with hundred-million-dollar offers.
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Bitcoin hits $123,000. Bitcoin just hit a new record of $123K before cooling off slightly, because crypto bros aren’t done manifesting financial freedom yet. The jump comes as the U.S. preps to debate new crypto rules. Trump, never one to miss a bandwagon, has declared himself the “crypto president” and wants to roll out red carpet regulations for digital assets. Investors are eating it up, betting big that lawmakers will finally make crypto feel less like the Wild West and more like Wall Street Lite™. Analysts say it’s all looking bullish, with strong demand and political tailwinds.
Tesla finally enters India, but only to sell — not build. Tesla is officially opening a showroom in Mumbai on July 15, meaning the electric car cult is finally touching down in India — just don’t expect any factories. The launch party will be held at Maker Maxity Mall. Elon’s been flirting with India for years. He even had a tech-and-vibes chat with Prime Minister Modi back in April. But while the government is eager for Tesla to build locally, the company prefers importing from Shanghai and Berlin — and dodging commitment like a red flag on Bumble. India isn’t rolling out the red carpet for free. Import duties on EVs are around 70%, unless companies cough up $500 million and set up shop in-country. So far, Tesla has responded with a solid “nah.” Meanwhile, local players like Tata and EV heavyweight BYD are already in the game. Tesla's here now, just fashionably late and a little too cool to unpack.
Boeing snags $2.8B to build fancy space satellites for the military. Boeing just locked in a $2.84 billion contract to build four new strategic military satellites, part of the Evolved Strategic Satellite (ESS) program. The deal comes courtesy of the U.S. Space Systems Command, because apparently outer space needs upgrades too. The satellites will allegedly offer more capacity, flexibility, and resilience than the ones currently floating around — translation: old space tech isn’t cutting it, and Boeing gets a blank check to make it better by 2033. Plenty of time to build, test, delay, re-test, and eventually deliver. All the work will be done in El Segundo, California, which is quickly becoming the unofficial capital of government-funded galactic spending.
Japan’s matcha supply is melting under climate pressure. Matcha is having a global moment — again. But Japan, the motherland of the green powder obsession, can’t keep up. Record-breaking heatwaves have fried this year’s harvest, slashing yields and sending matcha prices to all-time highs, just as the rest of the world can’t stop frothing it into lattes. In Kyoto, which produces about a quarter of Japan’s tencha (the leafy stuff that gets ground into matcha), last summer’s scorched bushes led to weak April–May harvests. One sixth-generation tea farmer saw his crop shrink by 25%. Demand, however, keeps rising — thanks to Gen Z wellness cults and TikTok’s endless thirst for anything green, aesthetic, and overpriced. At a May auction in Kyoto, tencha sold for a record-breaking 8,235 yen per kilo, up 170% from last year. That’s a hefty markup for a product people used to sip quietly at Zen temples — now being whipped into $9 smoothies by influencers in hoodies.

Denver Museum Finds Dino Fossil Under Its Own Parking Lot
The Denver Museum of Nature & Science accidentally found a 70-million-year-old dinosaur fossil while drilling in the parking lot — not for fossils, but for geothermal energy. So yes, they went looking for eco-friendly heating and hit prehistoric bones instead. The fossil, a partial vertebra from a plant-eating dinosaur, is now on display in the museum’s Discovering Teen Rexexhibit, because branding is everything. Scientists think this tiny bone might be part of a much bigger fossil buried 700 feet down, but no one’s planning to dig that far because science has a budget, and parking lots aren't cheap to rip up. The museum is now pretending it totally meant to do this, calling it a “scientific coring initiative.” Right.
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Varda raises money to make drugs in space. Varda Space just raised $187 million to keep sending tiny drug labs into orbit. The pitch is simple: drug ingredients behave differently in space. Crystals form better. Molecules align nicely. Pills get fancier. During a past mission, Varda grew anti-HIV drug ritonavir in orbit and brought it back down intact — the kind of lab work that sounds made-up until you realize VCs threw hundreds of millions at it. Each capsule can return 50 kilograms of active pharmaceutical ingredients per run, which they claim is a full quarterly batch for certain high-value meds. No need for bigger spacecraft. Just more launches, more money, and more men in Patagonia vests calling it “the future of medicine.”
McDonald’s AI bot served up 64M résumés to hackers. Applying for a job at McDonald’s now means dealing with Olivia, an AI chatbot that handles everything from asking for your résumé to giving you a digital personality test. But until last week, Olivia’s brain was basically a wide-open diary for hackers — thanks to security so lazy it included a password literally set to "123456." The bot runs on McHire, a job platform built by AI firm Paradox.ai, which apparently thought basic cybersecurity was optional. Independent security researchers found they could easily break in and access the entire backend, including 64 million records of conversations and personal info from McDonald’s job applicants. All it took was poking around the site and stumbling into admin-level access guarded by the digital equivalent of a sticky note password. Emails, phone numbers, and chat transcripts — all just sitting there, unprotected, for years. Paradox.ai confirmed the disaster in a blog post and insisted only the researchers accessed the data. They're now scrambling to patch the holes and launching a bug bounty program, which might be more helpful if they’d started one before storing millions of applicants’ info like it was fast food napkins.

Turns Out Banning TikTok Helps Kids Learn
Dutch schools banned smartphones in classrooms back in January — and shocker, it worked. A new government study says students are actually focusing, socializing, and, in some cases, even learning things. Wild. Out of 317 high schools surveyed, 75% saw better focus, two-thirds said kids were nicer to each other, and a third noticed improved grades. So basically: less doomscrolling, more doing homework. The government is thrilled. Education Secretary Marielle Paul called the ban “wonderful” and praised schools for “putting their shoulders to the wheel,” which is Dutch for “doing literally the bare minimum.”
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Luxury fashion still can’t quit labor abuse. Luxury cashmere brand Loro Piana — owned by LVMH — has been placed under judicial administration in Italy after a court found it was quietly outsourcing its €5,000 jackets to shady sweatshops that paid workers €4 an hour and made them sleep in the factory. The Milan court said Loro Piana “culpably failed” to monitor its supply chain, subcontracting through fake middlemen to Chinese-run workshops where workers pulled 90-hour weeks, seven days straight. One worker was beaten by his boss after asking for €10K in back pay. Loro Piana is now the fifth luxury brand busted by the same court since 2023, joining Dior, Armani, Valentino, and Alviero Martini in the shame parade. Despite an industry pact signed in May to stop worker abuse, these brands apparently kept the machine running — smooth cashmere, ugly business.
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TikTok of the day: watch here
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