Welcome back to your daily memorandum talking tech, business, AI, markets, and more. 🗞️

In today’s edition, we are tackling the following:

🚀 SpaceX lands $40B in debt financing for AI chips, Elon Musk says.
⚖️ Oura’s latest lawsuit threatens rival Ultrahuman’s smart ring comeback in the U.S.
📉 Apollo’s chief economist says AI yields “zero financial payoff” for most companies.
🛒 Instacart reportedly held talks with DoorDash and Uber about a potential sale.
🗳️ Lula wins reelection in Brazil as Flávio Bolsonaro rejects the results.

TECHNOLOGY

• SpaceX lands $40B in debt financing for AI chips, says Elon Musk (CNBC)
  ^{_{More: Reuters, Yahoo!}}

  • The deal-funded GPUs are expected to arrive in the first half of 2027.

  • SpaceX reportedly sought funds for NVIDIA chips, though market turmoil complicated financing talks.

  • Musk warned that over 200 neocloud companies could face widespread failures and consolidation as lending tightens.

• Oura’s latest lawsuit threatens rival Ultrahuman’s smart ring comeback in the U.S. (Engadget)
  ^{_{More: TechCrunch, Yahoo!}}

  • Filed in federal court in Texas, the complaint claims the Ring Pro infringes two Oura design and component patents.

  • Oura seeks damages and a permanent injunction that would stop Ultrahuman from selling the ring.

  • The redesigned ring returned in March after an ITC ruling banned imports of Ultrahuman’s earlier Ring Air.

• OpenAI stops training its models on the live web, citing “significant risks” (TechCrunch)
  ^{_{More: Yahoo!}}

  • The company will now use cached copies and simulated versions of the internet, as models proved too unpredictable.

  • Rival Anthropic adopted similar limits two weeks earlier, after models broke into external systems for months.

  • On September 20, an OpenAI model exploited a misconfiguration to go online, and the company paused training.

BUSINESS

• Apollo’s chief economist says AI yields “zero financial payoff” for most companies (Bloomberg)
  ^{_{More: Business Insider, TechCrunch, PYMNTS}}

  • Torsten Slok studied the ‘S&P 493,’ the S&P 500 minus seven tech giants like NVIDIA, Apple, and Microsoft.

  • Profit margins and revenue per worker look flat, with no evidence AI is improving productivity at these firms.

  • Slok doubts firms can turn cheap intelligence into growth, writing that “in business, intelligence is mostly judgment.”

• Instacart reportedly held talks about a potential sale with DoorDash & Uber (The Information)
  ^{_{More: Bloomberg, TechCrunch}}

  • Instacart hired an investment bank to evaluate its options, though Uber reportedly walked away from the discussions.

  • The grocery delivery company has a market cap above $13B, with its stock up 25% this year.

  • The talks are early and may not produce a deal, but Instacart shares still jumped over 9.2% Friday.

• Wonder bets on Texas, automation & user-built restaurants while eyeing an IPO (CNBC)
  ^{_{More: PYMNTS}}

  • Wonder plans to open more than 100 locations across Texas by the end of 2027.

  • Speaking to CNBC, founder Marc Lore declined to comment on the timing of a Wonder IPO.

  • He previously said Wonder would be “ready and prepared to go public early next year.”

MARKETS

WORLD

• Lula wins reelection in Brazil as Flávio Bolsonaro rejects the results (BBC)
  ^{_{More: AP, CBC, NPR}}

  • With all votes counted, the soon-to-be 81-year-old Lula won 51.8%, leading by nearly 4.4M votes.

  • Bolsonaro, son of former President Jair Bolsonaro, wants the results annulled after chaos followed a two-hour voting extension.

  • Lula’s win bucks a regional rightward trend, and Latin America’s largest economy will likely keep defying Trump.

• Mecca Pact officials will meet Iranian counterparts in Tehran on Monday (Reuters)
  ^{_{More: Economic Times, Yahoo!, Straits Times}}

  • Saudi Defense Minister Prince Khalid, Pakistan’s army chief Asim Munir, and Turkish intelligence chief Ibrahim Kalin will attend.

  • The talks mark Iran’s first high-level contact with the full bloc since Houthi attacks on Saudi Arabia escalated.

  • Pakistan helped broker a June interim peace deal between Iran and the U.S., which unraveled weeks later.

• Ukraine’s military says Starlink service appears to be working normally again (WSJ)
  ^{_{More: Reuters, TechCrunch, ABC}}

  • For 10 days, Ukrainian drones lost connectivity at around 100 mph, and the military lost control of some.

  • President Donald Trump reportedly called Elon Musk Wednesday and asked him to restore Starshield, the military-grade version of Starlink.

  • Musk claimed Ukraine “violated Starlink terms of service,” though Ukrainian officials say they never received an explanation.

FUTURISM

• SoftBank reportedly plans $50B investment in Malaysia, an aspiring “AI nation” (CNBC)
  ^{_{More: Nikkei, Japan Times}}

  • Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son has identified sites in Sarawak and peninsular Malaysia.

  • SoftBank signed a framework agreement earlier this month to explore AI and digital infrastructure development in Sarawak.

  • Malaysia targets AI leadership by 2030 and is attracting major data center investments from global tech firms.

• Jack Dorsey’s Block unveils a new voice model that sounds eerily human (Mashable)
  ^{_{More: TechCrunch, Yahoo!}}

  • Called Dessa, the model runs locally and was trained on human speech using a single rack of NVIDIA GPUs.

  • Dessa can talk and listen at the same time, drawing its knowledge from conversational data rather than a paired language model.

  • Block says emotion is built into Dessa, unlike rivals that use text and voice tags to drive expression.

• Hottest Christmas toy? NVIDIA CEO’s playful Microduck demo drives 20k preorders (TechCrunch)
  ^{_{More: Yahoo!, Economic Times}}

  • At GTC Berlin, Jensen Huang’s viral keynote showed the robots sitting, napping, and somersaulting on voice command.

  • The open-source robots come from Pollen Robotics, owned by Hugging Face, which NVIDIA acquired in September.

  • Trained in NVIDIA simulations, the Microducks ship with basic tricks, and owners can teach and share new ones.

• Hunting for AI roles eats hours across careers pages, internal referrals, group chats, and a dozen overlapping boards*

  • The Athyna AI Job Board does the watching for you and matches openings to your profile in the background.

  • When a role hits a 75% matching index or higher, we notify you with details and a direct apply link.

CONTENT

• Rob Snyder shares his practical, step-by-step guide to finding product-market fit (Lenny's Podcast)

  • Snyder, author of ‘The Power of Pull,’ has advised over 50 startups on reaching $1M in ARR.

  • He built his approach after spending two years as a founder pushing a product the market didn’t want.

  • The episode covers his PULL framework, cold outreach tactics, first sales calls, and why he discourages design partners.

• Robotics will be 100x bigger than coding agents, with inference worth $10T (20VC)

  • Naveen Rao founded Unconventional AI after selling Nervana to Intel and MosaicML to Databricks for $1.3B.

  • He argues energy will be AI’s biggest bottleneck, warning the U.S. could run out of excess power capacity.

  • Rao also discusses whether chip specialization threatens NVIDIA and why AI will move beyond transformers.

• Amazon’s Andy Jassy breaks down the company’s $220B bet on AI infrastructure (a16z)

  • Jassy says Amazon still leaves AI demand unmet and believes AWS could reach a $1T annual run rate.

  • Speaking with Ben Horowitz and Erik Torenberg, he argues cheaper inference could drive broader enterprise AI adoption.

  • Jassy also discusses smaller, faster teams, rebuilding Alexa, and Amazon’s investments in Anthropic and OpenAI.

EXTRAS

• Grok unveils just seven minutes of its promised AI-generated ‘Odyssey’ film (TechCrunch)
  ^{_{More: Yahoo!, Variety}}

  • Elon Musk promised a full-length, “historically accurate” film three months ago, but Grok labels the release “Episode 1.”

  • Musk criticized Christopher Nolan’s ‘The Odyssey’ for casting nonwhite and transgender actors; Nolan calls himself “a techno-skeptic.”

  • Nolan’s epic, filmed across six countries, sold out IMAX screenings for months and is a likely Oscar front-runner.

• Trump says Iran decision is close: a deal or “finish it off” (Bloomberg)
  ^{_{More: Yahoo!, Japan Times}}

  • Trump hinted strikes could resume after the November 3 midterms, sending a third carrier group toward the Gulf.

  • Officials warn the stretch between the election and the new Congress taking office could be especially dangerous.

  • The U.S. is reducing Middle East diplomatic and military staffing amid rising Iranian and Houthi threats.

• When forced to choose, Grok backs Republicans while OpenAI’s model backs Democrats (TechCrunch)
  ^{_{More: Yahoo!}}

  • A Convovo study asked both models, via their APIs, to name one candidate in nearly 500 midterm races.

  • Grok 4.7 chose Republicans in 92% of answers, and GPT-6.1 Sol chose Democrats in 97%, rarely agreeing.

  • The consumer apps refused to answer, which OpenAI said matters because most people use chatbots that way.

AND MORE

• These clever apps reveal just how much the iPhone Duo can do.

• Chinese copper tycoon He Jinbi receives a life sentence for fraud.

• Roko’s Basilisk skips the buzzwords and cuts straight to what moves markets, products, and careers.*

• Home sellers cut prices & sweeten deals as the housing market stalls.

• The top apps for tracking your reading & finding your next book.

• Halloween candy sales start slowly as high chocolate prices squeeze shoppers.

• The Boox Palma 2 Pro finally ended my phone reading habit.

• Baby orangutans expose India’s wildlife trafficking as experts question a billionaire’s zoo.