The Brutalist Report

Fortune

• Meet the venture capital and crypto billionaires quietly bankrolling the fight against California’s wealth tax [1h]
• OpenAI says it paused AI training for two weeks and announces new security protocols following Hugging Face hack [1h]
• OpenAI data center deal with Nvidia comes in $145 billion lower than reported—signaling concerns of artificial demand for chips [2h]
• Reed Hastings says he learned why companies aren’t families after laying off one-third of Netflix: ‘You would never lay off two of your kids’ [4h]
• Dropbox co-CEO has just shared the simple rule he follows for when to turn down a meeting [4h]
• 2 Penn State frats were main suppliers in ‘upper level trafficking’ cocaine ring, authorities say [5h]
• Home Depot rides America’s housing affordability problem to sales increase on home DIY projects [6h]
• Data center gas plants to boost U.S. power emissions by 20% [6h]
• Biden’s favor to Trump on cheaper drug prices includes a largely forgotten law to make Medicare more powerful [6h]
• One guinea pig helped her son heal. Now she has to feed 400 every day, running America’s biggest Guinea Pig Sanctuary [6h]
• The gift of a garden: How Facebook’s Buy Nothing helped a teacher reinvent herself as an urban flower farmer for free [6h]
• ‘The negotiations are very intense and delicate’: Carney, Trump hold crunch talks to avoid midnight 50% tariff deadline [6h]
• Meet OpenAI’s ChatGPT for Teens, which doesn’t talk about sex or suicide and gives you homework help instead [6h]
• The Buss family wants an ‘exit gracefully.’ Jeanie Buss says no [6h]
• The finance skills that are becoming more and more critical in the AI age [6h]
• The most important AI habit I have is making one phone call a day [7h]
• 210 interns. 115,000 applicants. Here’s what Citadel Securities’ 0.18% actually have in common [7h]
• Financial adulthood has moved to the 30s: ‘the decade when people come to terms with where they are in life’ [7h]
• Current price of oil as of August 18, 2026 [8h]
• Anthropic’s annual revenue run rate reportedly hits $65 billion [9h]
• AI gets its own “boiler room” scandal [9h]
• Meta braces for federal child privacy trial in California [10h]
• The CEO of KB Home has a plan to tempt first-time buyers into the market at last [11h]
• The global ‘freedom of the seas’ is dying in the Strait of Hormuz—and everyone, everywhere, could pay the tolls [12h]
• Married 69 years, this philanthropic couple died 8 days apart—after giving away more than $20 million from a hotel-and-property fortune [12h]
• A dropout living in a trailer, he got $1 million from Peter Thiel at 19—now he’s a billionaire who says the American Dream isn’t dead [12h]
• AWS’s Asia chief is relocating to Japan as the country scrambles to modernize its legacy IT systems [12h]
• Alibaba’s $2 billion gaming exit signals where Beijing wants its money [12h]
• California’s billionaires just poured $40 million into blocking a wealth tax that threatens to force them to pay 5% of their net worth [12h]
• Ousted L3Harris CEO Chris Kubasik forfeits $45 million—but he’ll still walk away with $80 million in stock and options [19h]
• New Mexico’s attorney general reportedly pushes new social media safety laws a day before 29 AGs testify against Meta in federal trial [22h]
• 57 Trump officials are worth $100 million or more—quadruple the combined total of the last three presidents [23h]
• Check your fridge: Nearly 19 million eggs are under the FDA’s most serious recall classification [23h]