Good morning. Andrew here. There’s more fallout from the Epstein files today, with pressure growing on Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Casey Wasserman, the entertainment mogul, among others. We also take a look at the web of venture capitalists backing SpaceX (and xAI and X). And we’ve got an exclusive on how some companies are using prediction markets to hedge their business risks, and the implications of that. (Was this newsletter forwarded to you? Sign up here.)
More Epstein files falloutThe Justice Department’s release of files related to Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted sex offender, continues to rock the halls of power. (Adding to the fire was Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s longtime associate, refusing yesterday to answer questions before the House Oversight Committee.) The latest Epstein revelations have sent shock waves through Hollywood, Washington, Europe and the Middle East, and even briefly jolted Britain’s gilt and foreign exchange markets. Among those facing blowback over the latest revelations: Howard Lutnick: More prominent Republican and Democrat lawmakers have called on the commerce secretary to resign over new details showing that he had more extensive ties to Epstein than he had previously let on. “Lutnick has no business being our commerce secretary, and he should resign immediately,” Senator Adam Schiff, Democrat of California, said in a statement released yesterday. Representative James Comer of Kentucky, a Republican and the chairman of the House Oversight Committee, didn’t rule out issuing a subpoena to compel Lutnick to testify before Congress. Casey Wasserman. Pressure on the longtime sports and entertainment mogul has ramped up since decades-old flirtatious messages between him and Maxwell emerged. Yesterday, Chappell Roan, the Grammy-winning pop star, said she had cut ties with Wasserman’s talent agency, while other artists have pushed him to leave. A group of music agents at the firm have demanded Wasserman’s resignation, The Wrap reported, citing unnamed sources. Wasserman also remains under pressure to step down from LA28, the Los Angeles Olympic organizing committee, though he appears to have the support of the International Olympic Committee. Keir Starmer. The British prime minister appeared to have staved off a mutiny by members of the Labour Party yesterday over his appointing Peter Mandelson, a senior British politician who had ties to Epstein, as Britain’s ambassador to the U.S. Two aides to Starmer have resigned in recent days, including his chief of staff. Many political observers remain pessimistic about Starmer’s political survival: The odds on Kalshi, a prediction market, suggest he has a 65 percent chance of losing his job by Sept. 1. Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem. Ties between the powerful Emirati businessman and Epstein emerged late last year in a previous Justice Department release. But details from the latest release added more context, including efforts to broker deals for each other and crude discussions of women. More revelations could yet emerge. A small, bipartisan group of lawmakers yesterday reviewed unredacted versions of the Justice Department’s Epstein files. Some of them criticized some of the department’s redactions; two of them — Representative Thomas Massie, Republican of Kentucky, and Representative Ro Khanna, Democrat of California — threatened to reveal the names of six men in particular.
The White House plans to repeal Obama-era climate protections. Trump administration officials told The Wall Street Journal that they planned to target the “endangerment finding,” a legal framework that underpins key E.P.A. rules around greenhouse gas emissions. If successful, the move would advance the administration’s effort to dismantle decades worth of regulations around climate, though environmental groups are expected to challenge it in court. Alphabet goes around the world to fund its A.I. infrastructure. The tech giant sold $20 billion worth of dollar-denominated bonds yesterday, and was said to be planning sales denominated in Swiss francs and in British pounds (including a rare 100-year note), according to Bloomberg. The issuances will be closely watched as some investors grow anxious about Big Tech’s mammoth artificial intelligence spending. Opening arguments begin in a big social media trial. Lawyers for a California woman and for Meta and YouTube addressed jurors in court yesterday, sparring over claims that the tech companies’ products were made intentionally addictive, causing harm to users. The case is among the first of thousands against tech companies, who deny wrongdoing. Big Tech could reportedly get tariff relief on chips. The Commerce Department is considering giving so-called hyperscalers (think Microsoft, Amazon, Google and the like) exemptions on levies on advanced A.I. processors from Taiwan’s TSMC, The Financial Times reports. The amount of relief is still being worked out, and is tied to terms of the U.S.-Taiwan trade deal struck last month, an unnamed source told the FT. Hedging, not betting, on sports via prediction marketsSports betting has propelled the prediction markets to new heights. The latest proof: The contract on which team would win Super Bowl LX drew some $500 million worth of bets on Kalshi alone. (That led to big losers, too.) But Kalshi is also seeking to show that its platform goes beyond betting on the outcome of sports games and other events. One of those uses is hedging business risks, as a new partnership is expected to underscore, Michael de la Merced is first to report. Kalshi is now working with Game Point Capital, an insurance company that helps college athletics departments, sports teams and sponsors to manage the financial risks of performance incentives in athletes’ and coaches’ contracts. Game Point Capital has historically worked with traditional insurers to hedge its contracts, first through Lloyd’s of London, the big insurance market, and then through American providers. But starting this past weekend, the firm began hedging through Kalshi as well. It expects to hedge about $30 million annually through the prediction market. Kalshi estimates that the global sports insurance market at about $9 billion annually, a number it expects to grow — and hopes to capture a bigger piece of it. “We want to offer the most efficient pricing for teams and other clients,” Will Hall, a co-founder and the C.E.O. of Game Point Capital, told DealBook. He was introduced to Kalshi by a friend about a month ago, and was drawn to the prediction market’s claims that it could offer more transparent pricing than traditional sports books. In some instances, Hall said, “it might make more sense to hedge through Kalshi than through traditional channels, which might come with additional costs and fees.” How it works: Companies like Game Point Capital can use Kalshi’s “request for quotation,” a system for soliciting bids for particular contracts. Market makers on the platform can then find counterparties, helping build up volume. Adequate liquidity is paramount for making hedging work, Hall said. (That said, Game Point Capital also expects to continue hedging through traditional insurers.) Kalshi wants to expand this business. It has been building up a team to focus on sports hedging, and is expected to hire an executive to lead the unit, a spokeswoman told DealBook. Big funding for an A.I. video start-upScroll through social media today, and it’s increasingly difficult to decipher if the videos you’re viewing were produced by artificial intelligence. One of the companies behind that phenomenon is Runway, a New York-based start-up. Runway will announce this morning that it has raised $315 million in new funding, Niko Gallogly reports. The funding round was led by General Atlantic and includes investments from Nvidia, Adobe Ventures, AMD Ventures and others. It values Runway at $5.3 billion, according to two people familiar with the terms of the deal who weren’t authorized to speak publicly about the matter; that’s up from $3.3 billion last April. Runway is not your typical A.I. start-up. Its co-founder and C.E.O., Cristóbal Valenzuela, is an artist, and his start-up was seeded in 2018 at N.Y.U. Tisch School of the Arts, not at, say, Stanford. That origin story may have helped the company’s cause: winning over customers in A.I.-skeptical corners of the economy, including creatives in Hollywood, advertising and media. “We’re very much obsessed with making sure that the products and the models work as creators and artists really want them to work,” Valenzuela told DealBook. Big names have signed on. Runway struck a deal with the Hollywood studio Lionsgate in 2024, and Netflix has also begun using its tool, Bloomberg reported. Companies like Allstate and Siemens are using Runway for ads and other content. Valenzuela declined to share the company’s annual revenue but said a majority of its sales come from enterprise clients who pay an annual subscription license. Runway plans to pour the fresh capital into strengthening his company’s A.I. models and into hiring. The start-up is also adapting its technology for emerging business opportunities. Runway recently signed up a number of new clients, said Valenzuela, including self-driving vehicle companies hungry for realistic video footage to use in training their cars. But competition is fierce. Runway is up against some of the most capitalized A.I. companies in the world, including OpenAI and Google. Still, the start-up is ranked in the top five of A.I. text-to-video model developers, according to the crowdsourced leaderboard Artificial Analysis, despite its relatively small team of 140 employees. “Someone told me the other day that they thought we were 1,000 people,” Valenzuela said. “That’s a great compliment.” Who could win big from SpaceX’s I.P.O.SpaceX is moving ahead with what is expected to be the largest I.P.O. on record — and will probably mint riches for those involved. That may now include Michael Grimes, the longtime Elon Musk adviser who is returning to Morgan Stanley after working in the Commerce Department. Grimes, who helped Musk take Tesla public and buy Twitter, will become chairman of investment banking, and is expected to play a role in the SpaceX offering. And it is expected to yield a windfall for many of the investors who backed SpaceX — as well as xAI, Musk’s artificial intelligence company that SpaceX just acquired, and X, which xAI took over last year. The combined company is valued at roughly $1.25 trillion. The chart below shows major venture investors with stakes in SpaceX, and which companies they invested in to acquire their shares, according to data compiled by PitchBook. Some, like Sequoia Capital, put money into X, xAI and SpaceX. Others, like Gigafund, MGX or Founders Fund, invested in only one of the start-ups. Some investors and analysts have raised questions about the logic behind the deals that led to the SpaceX of today. But for others, it’s mostly a matter of betting on Musk. “If Elon believes in something, they’re going to be on board with it,” Gene Munster, a co-founder of Deepwater Asset Management and an investor in X and xAI, told DealBook.
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