The Brutalist Report

Fortune

• Canva was the rare startup that grew fast and made money—then AI costs slashed its growth forecast by a third [14d]
• Nearly a dozen firms are already paying up to $100,000 per month for early access Trump’s Truth Social posts [14d]
• Japan and the U.S. just spent billions to try to save the yen. Why is it already losing ground? [14d]
• Jerry Buss made the Lakers Hollywood. Bob Iger and Josh Kushner reportedly bought the show for record-breaking $12.5 billion, up 21% in just 14 months [14d]
• CIOs and CTOs spent years lauding AI. Now, with costs rising, they’re putting limits on how it’s used [14d]
• Nvidia found a new way to keep the AI boom funded: your retirement money [14d]
• Gates Foundation’s $540 million gift to science comes as the federal government pulls back on funding [14d]
• The majority of U.S. employers say they plan to increase hiring this year—these are the top roles they’re looking to fill [14d]
• Sam Altman thinks working at Goldman Sachs ‘sounds unbelievably terrible now’ and admits he was ‘peer pressured’ into accepting an internship there [14d]
• Billionaire Michael Saylor says Elon Musk is wrong about AI making money irrelevant: ‘Everybody doesn’t get their own private jet’ [14d]
• Norway $2.3 trillion fund posts best quarter since 2020 [14d]
• Blackstone strikes $1.8 billion deal for Air Canada division [14d]
• BofA to plow $250 billion into critical infrastructure projects [14d]
• Lilly escalates its fight against black market weight-loss shots [14d]
• ‘Call Her Daddy’ host Alex Cooper raises money at a $500 million valuation [14d]
• New York City probes Kalshi and Polymarket over social harms [14d]
• New ‘Katsu Curry Index’ aims to show how weak the yen really is [14d]
• Phoebe Gates knew Phia shopping app took credit for sales it didn’t drive [14d]
• Norway oil fund CEO says he’s more nervous after record returns [14d]
• Trump blames the military for the Air Force One subterfuge and claims he wasn’t really scared. ‘I get a lot of threats’ [14d]
• Wall Street futures rise ahead of inflation report as the Fed watches surging costs [14d]
• She detasseled corn for $1 an hour at 14. Now she’s Google DeepMind’s chief AI exec—and says being an immigrant’s daughter made her a natural ‘first’ [14d]
• Meet Google DeepMind’s chief AI exec—she started out detasseling corn in Indiana for around $1 an hour at 14: ‘I grew up in really humble beginnings’ [14d]
• 87.5% of venture dollars went to AI. The rest fought over scraps [14d]
• Current price of oil as of August 12, 2026 [14d]
• ‘An unattractive deal with Iran is the best of limited bad options’ if the U.S. wants to get oil flowing again [14d]
• The Gulf’s AI boom is driving the race to control the data highways [14d]
• The Gulf wants to break free from the world’s data chokepoints [14d]
• From Edison to the AI age: inside GE Vernova’s reinvention and 600% stock spike [14d]
• Iran wants a mafia-style ‘protection’ toll on the Strait of Hormuz, but the eye-popping $20 billion per year haul is a pipe dream [15d]
• Forget the gala, these Silicon Valley schools run their own venture capital funds [15d]
• Kalshi’s CEO is racing to build a futures market for AI’s most precious resource, which could be worth $100 trillion by 2030 [15d]
• Meet ChatTJB, the “AI” chatbot with no AI, no algorithm and no LLM. It’s just one guy and 10,000 volunteers typing back [15d]
• Universities are buying and selling property for data centers, prompting concerns about an AI brain drain [15d]
• CoreWeave CEO Michael Intrator cites ‘sold out’ capacity as revenue more than doubles and backlog swells to $104 billion [15d]