Good morning.

It's Tuesday, August 11, and the weekend already feels like a rumor.

A public service announcement for the people running outside right now, in this heat, by choice: we see you, we do not understand you, and we are slightly concerned. Somewhere out there someone is doing six miles at a "conversational pace" while the rest of us get winded walking to the fridge. Incredible commitment. Deeply confusing decision-making.

Anyway, reheat that coffee nobody's judging you for, ignore the fourteen unread Slack messages for a few more minutes, and let's get into it.

Today’s stories:

Stocks finished mostly lower Monday as investors grew less confident that the U.S. and Iran will reach a lasting resolution anytime soon.

The S&P 500 slipped 0.06%, while the Nasdaq fell 0.32%. The Dow lost 61 points, or 0.11%. Intel was one of the day’s biggest laggards, dropping 4% after announcing plans to sell $15 billion in common stock. Nvidia fell 2.9%, while Apple lost 1.5%.

Meanwhile, Iran says it is getting closer to a deal with Oman to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, but Tehran is still resisting direct negotiations with the U.S. until several conditions are met.

Translation: markets are basically waiting for geopolitics to stop changing the mood every few hours.

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Bank of America now spends more than $250 million a year covering GLP-1 weight loss drugs for its roughly 211,000 employees, CEO Brian Moynihan told CNBC, up from zero just four or five years ago, which is a genuinely wild growth curve for a drug category. That $250 million now eats up about 13% of the company's total $2 billion healthcare budget, meaning Ozempic and its cousins have quietly become one of the biggest line items in BofA's benefits spreadsheet. Moynihan says it's worth it, pointing to early data on lower cardiovascular risk and admitting some employees will leave before the bank ever sees the long-term payoff, which is a strangely honest thing for a CEO to say out loud. The bank pairs the drugs with health coaching, and Moynihan says he's personally been "fascinated" watching employees change, which is either touching or slightly odd depending on how you feel about your CEO monitoring your weight loss journey. Only about a third of employers nationally cover GLP-1s for both diabetes and weight loss, and that number has basically stalled, so BofA is more the exception than the rule — mostly because everyone else looked at the price tag and quietly backed away.

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Wall Street and Nvidia are building a $500 billion fund. Nvidia is teaming up with a who's-who of finance — Apollo, Blackstone, BlackRock, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs, and KKR — to assemble a $500 billion funding package for AI infrastructure, in what's shaping up to be one of the biggest lending efforts Wall Street has ever put together. The deal could be announced as soon as Monday, and just the news of it getting reported knocked 1.4% off Nvidia's stock, wiping out more than $70 billion in market cap, which is a rough way to find out your secret meeting wasn't so secret. Nvidia's move here is part chip supplier, part bank: it often backs its own customers' debt so they can afford to buy its chips, a setup critics have started calling "circular financing," because the money conveniently keeps ending up back at Nvidia. Separately, Nvidia is also reportedly in talks to guarantee a massive 10-gigawatt data center in Ohio being leased to OpenAI, so the company is now underwriting the AI boom from multiple directions at once. Private capital firms are eyeing a piece of an estimated $8 trillion AI infrastructure wave over the next few years, which means your insurance company's investment portfolio might soon be quietly funding a data center you'll never see.

SpaceX's side quest costs $16.8 billion. SpaceX is spending $16.8 billion on the first phase of a semiconductor plant called Terafab in Grimes County, Texas, according to Gov. Greg Abbott, because apparently Musk looked at his rocket company, his car company, and his brain chip company and decided what he really needed was to also make the chips himself. Once finished, the 100-million-square-foot campus will churn out chips for both SpaceX and Tesla, housing the entire manufacturing process in one building, which tracks for a guy who prefers to own every link in every chain he touches. The first phase breaks ground this year and is expected to create 3,000 jobs. Texas is also kicking in $30 million from its Enterprise Fund to help close the deal, plus additional incentives under a state tech program, so taxpayers are chipping in too, literally. At this point Musk isn't so much building companies as building an entire industrial ecosystem that answers to him personally.

Intel's stock fell 4% on a $15B announcement. Intel announced a $15 billion stock offering Monday to keep up with soaring AI chip demand, and investors responded by sending the stock down 4%, which is a fairly normal reaction to a company saying "actually, we need more of your money." The funding will cover capital expenditures and general corporate needs, with Intel pointing to physical AI, custom silicon, and advanced packaging as its big growth bets. This comes right after Intel posted its fastest revenue growth in nearly 15 years and raised its own capex guidance to $20 billion, with the CFO warning 2027 spending will jump even higher, so this is less a rescue plan and more Intel trying to keep pace with an industry that spent $765 billion this year and is on track for $1.2 trillion in 2027. The stock has still quintupled over the past year, helped along by the AI infrastructure boom and the U.S. government's 10% equity stake in the company, so even with today's dip, Intel's shareholders are, broadly speaking, doing just fine.

California is burning its own vineyards. California growers are pulling out and burning perfectly healthy grapevines, some planted 80 to 100 years ago, because nobody's buying the grapes anymore. The state removed nearly 40,000 acres in 2025 and is on pace for 40,000 more this year, putting three-year losses past 100,000 acres. The vines aren't diseased or drought-damaged — they're being torched purely because farming them without a buyer contract loses money, sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, and no winery wants to sign one. One grower described it as erasing history, which feels accurate when you're feeding your grandfather's vineyard into an air burner. Part of the problem is a labeling loophole: a bottle can say "American" while only being 75% US-grown, with the rest quietly sourced from anywhere on earth, and a bill to close that loophole passed the Assembly 67-0 before dying in the Senate after big wine companies lobbied against it. Add in aging Boomers drinking less, younger people reaching for seltzers and canned cocktails instead, and a 19% jump in bulk imports, and you get a "global wine reset," which is a nicer way of saying an entire industry quietly downsizing while insisting the label still says what it used to.

Being an influencer is now a bachelor's degree. Arizona State University is launching a bachelor's degree in Content Creation this fall, teaching video production, audience analytics, branding, and social media strategy for a cool $142,000, which is a lot of money to formalize something most 16-year-olds are already doing for free in their bedrooms. The move comes after a survey found 57% of Gen Zers want to be influencers, so ASU essentially looked at the most oversaturated career path in America and decided it needed an accredited pipeline. To be fair, the creator economy is projected to hit $480 billion by 2027, and there's a real "creator middle class" now making steady income through brand deals, subscriptions, and merch without ever going viral, so the industry argument isn't crazy. Still, there's something delightfully absurd about a journalism school offering a four-year, six-figure program in a field where the top qualification has historically been "posted consistently and got lucky." 

Stanford researchers used AI to design 16 brand new, fully functional viruses that can replicate in a lab, marking the first time AI has designed a complete genome from scratch. The good news: these are bacteriophages, built to infect E. coli and nothing else. The AI models, called Evo1 and Evo2, work like ChatGPT but instead of predicting words, they predict genetic code, which is either the coolest or most unsettling use of the same technology, depending on your mood. Out of 302 AI-generated designs, 16 actually worked, and researchers reportedly found out at 2 a.m. when the phage started visibly wiping out bacteria in a petri dish, presumably followed by the appropriate amount of caffeinated screaming. Scientists are calling this a major turning point for treating disease, but biosecurity experts are also calling it an "urgent" safety concern, because a technology that can design a working virus is not exactly a technology you want falling into the wrong hands. For now, the genomes involved are tiny — about 5,400 letters, compared to 3 billion in a human genome — so we're not anywhere near AI designing actual organisms. Yet.

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OpenAI made a $300 doughnut that watches you. OpenAI is reportedly building its first hardware product, and it's a $300 doughnut-shaped puck with cameras, microphones, and moving parts, designed by Jony Ive, Apple's former design chief, presumably to make sure it looks nicer than it needs to. It's roughly hockey-puck-sized, battery-powered, and meant to be carried around the house or left on the counter, watching and listening and quietly building a profile on you so it can act "more like a human," which is a strange goal for a doughnut. Launch is planned for 2027, and OpenAI is pitching it as an AI-first computer that helps manage your to-do list, which is a lot of engineering for something your phone already does for free. Apple, unimpressed, is suing OpenAI over claims it copied a metal finishing technique from an Apple supplier, and OpenAI is calling the lawsuit "too vague and generalized," which is corporate for "we're not saying we didn't."

471 Boeing jets are getting inspected. The FAA ordered inspections on 471 Boeing 737 Max planes this week, after reports of cracks in a metal reinforcement piece called a bear strap turned up on older "Next-Generation" 737s. No cracks have actually been found in the Max models yet, but the FAA says they share a similar design and build process with the older planes, so they're getting checked anyway, just in case history decides to repeat itself. The rule kicks in September 10 and covers the 737-8, 737-9, and 737-8200. Boeing, for its part, says it's been on this for six years, having flagged the issue itself, sent operators inspection instructions back in 2019, and already expanded checks to the Max jets before the FAA made it official. So this is less a new discovery and more the government finally catching up to a memo Boeing wrote years ago, which is either reassuring or exactly the opposite depending on how much you trust a plane that needed a memo about cracking in the first place.

A Massachusetts lab is growing plastic from sugar. A lab in Woburn, Massachusetts is making forks, straws, and food packaging out of bioplastic pellets that microbes actually eat, fermenting sugar into a polymer called PHA and molding it into stuff that looks and works like regular plastic but disappears in a compost bin within about six months. The early test forks are thin enough to compost but too bendy to actually stab a steak with, so there's clearly some engineering left to do before this replaces your cutlery drawer. A knife tossed into the lab's own compost pile came back pitted, visibly being colonized and slowly consumed by bacteria, which is either very cool or the plot of a low-budget horror movie depending on your mood. The bigger point is microplastics: traditional plastic doesn't disappear, it just breaks into smaller and smaller pieces that end up in oceans, food, water, and apparently human bodies, and companies like this one are betting that concern over that is finally what makes compostable materials mainstream instead of niche. Big chains like McDonald's are experimenting with it, and production is expected to double by 2030, but bioplastics still cost more than regular plastic and only work if composting infrastructure actually exists, meaning the fork of the future is currently stuck waiting on your city to build it a bin.

The Pentagon released 41 new UFO documents Friday, the fifth batch under Trump's executive order requiring agencies to hand over what they've got, and the highlights are exactly as blurry and unresolved as you'd expect. Six videos show the same 2021 incident over the Gulf of Oman, where an AC-130 gunship's crew reported roughly 25 objects flying between 250 and 1,300 mph, maneuvering aggressively, and appearing to react when the plane fired its cannon, which is either alarming or just very good editing by the universe. The footage itself is, once again, cellphone video of a screen showing sensor footage — the UFO community's version of a photocopy of a photocopy. The FBI also released eight witness interview forms, complete with redactions and artist sketches of glowing orbs, so somewhere a government sketch artist has drawn more UFOs than actual suspects. One 2025 clip from the Middle East shows an object zooming across the frame over a populated area, and like basically everything else in this release, remains officially unresolved. Forty-one files, zero answers, business as usual.

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Netflix trapped a guy inside a billboard. Netflix built a fake vine-covered house into a billboard above Sunset and Selma, complete with a front door, a chimney, and a drainage pipe, then hired an actual person to live inside it to promote its new thriller "The Last House." Passersby can see the guy through the windows, going about his day 30 feet above traffic, and one photo caught him holding up a whiteboard reading "What's going on?", which is either brilliant improvised acting or a completely honest question at this point. 

A house elf just won against the national grid. A £430 million power cable connecting the UK and Ireland got rerouted after Harry Potter fans found out it would pass through the "grave" of Dobby, a house elf who does not exist and was buried, fictionally, in a movie. The project manager says he had no idea who Dobby was when the calls started coming in, describing his confusion perfectly: "He's a fictitious character in a fictitious book, the whole thing is fictitious, what are you talking about?" A colleague informed him it was, in fact, very serious. So planners found a new route, fans got their happy ending, and the project moved forward — swerving directly toward actual Bronze Age burial urns instead, because sometimes protecting fictional graves means getting closer to real ones. Somewhere, several thousand years of human history just got quietly deprioritized in favor of a CGI elf's feelings.

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TikTok of the day: watch here

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