Financial Mindset

It’s official: Tesla and SpaceX are in talks. Independent board members at the two Elon Musk-led companies have formed special committees to hash over a possible merger, Musk told investors during SpaceX’s third-quarter earnings call Tuesday. “These special committees consist of independent directors, and because I’m a conflicted party, I can’t actually be in the discussions of the special committees,” said Musk, who was asked about a potential combination during the call. “This is definitely the kind of question where I feel like I’m tap dancing through a minefield.” Tesla stock rose just over 1% in after hours trading, while SpaceX rose above 5% following the Q&A with Wall Street analysts featuring Musk, SpaceX president and COO Gwynne Shotwell, and chief financial officer Bret Johnsen. Musk said the committees haven’t reached any kind of an agreement on the terms of a potential transaction, and there’s no guarantee that they will. He noted that “some people ou...

We’ve all seen those emails or spam ads, telling us of singles in our areas. Sometimes they get past our spam blocker and pop up in our email box. While most of us might delete them, some Singaporean civil servants might soon reconsider: it may very well be a dating service, courtesy of the government.  FirstDate, a pilot program introduced by Singapore’s Government Technology Agency (GovTech), offers single public officers ages 21 to 35 one potential match. Once users receive a match, they have 72 hours to decide whether or not to connect. And because the Singaporean government can’t be too sure, the program relies on a Nobel Prize-winning matching theory algorithm to really get their employees together.  “Swipe fatigue ends here,” reads the new pilot program’s website. The experiment taps into a familiar dating-app frustration: whether more options make it easier to find the one—or just make choosing harder. That’s why it’s relying on the Gale-Shapley algorithm, wh...

In today’s CEO Daily: An onstage incident turns into a leadership lesson. The big leadership story: Supermicro finally gets a new CFO. The markets: Stocks recover from a shaky week. Plus: All the news and watercooler chat from Fortune . Good morning. A few minutes into talking with Flex CEO Revathi Advaithi on stage this week at the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit, I felt blood in my mouth. I knew what was coming as an injury to my lip had bled a few days earlier, unleashing a flood that reminded me of an old Saturday Night Live episode in which Julia Child (played by Dan Aykroyd) cuts herself while preparing a chicken. I tried to act nonchalant as a fistful of tissues turned red, and Advaithi paused a few times to ask if I was okay. My colleague Ellie Austin and members of the audience sprang into action, handing me fresh tissues and lip balm. Advaithi’s eyes conveyed concern as she answered my questions about data centers and geopolitics. I cracke...

A federal judge on Monday ordered a former OpenAI engineer accused of bugging an executive conference room to stay in jail , after questioning whether a $1 million bond the Saudi government offered to guarantee would bring him back if he fled. Abdulrahman Alfozan, the 35-year-old former OpenAI engineer, appeared in court today wearing an orange jumpsuit and white face mask while escorted by two U.S. marshals. He will remain in federal custody until his next court date, a preliminary hearing on Nov. 6. He has been in jail since the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) arrested him on Oct. 9, alleging he planted the device in a conference room where executives, and sometimes government officials, discussed sensitive information, on Sept. 28. Magistrate Judge Alex G. Tse said a $1 million bond had to be weighed against the possibility that Alfozan “potentially has access to much greater wealth.” “Once he leaves, there’s no getting him back, and that’s why this is a bigger ca...

One Los Angeles restaurant group traded $60,000 on Kalshi to hedge against the Dodgers’ abbreviated playoff run, and it’s just one example of how prediction markets are transforming how companies, particularly small businesses, are calculating and responding to risks. Kalshi told Fortune that the hospitality group, which was unnamed but operates 25 bars, including several near Dodger Stadium, made the trade on the platform if the city’s MLB team did not advance to the World Series. The Dodgers lost in the NLCS to the Milwaukee Brewers last week, and the position returned almost twice the original bet. The stake helped the business make up for the revenue it would have gotten had the Dodgers played more playoff games. The use of prediction markets as a financial hedge is likely to grow, a sign that these platforms are not just alternatives to online sportsbooks or prop bet forums, but a financial and decision-making tool. “You could imagine that there are other risks that ...

It’s one of the most urgent problems of the AI age: How to tell if the person you’re chatting with on the Internet is real, or a clever bot pretending to be human. In recent years, the inability to distinguish bots from humans has led to billions of dollars of fraud as AI agents trick companies into providing goods and services. In the most extreme cases, crooks have deployed deep fakes of corporate executives in order to trick employees into sending fraudulent wire transfers. But now a solution may be at hand. On Sunday, a company called World—which makes an orb device that uses iris scans to create a “ proof of humanity “—announced that video conferencing service Zoom, as well as several big financial companies, are adopting its technology to keep out malicious bots. The verification tool is part of a broader suite of services called World ID. “World ID for Zoom is designed to protect sensitive, high-stakes conversations by proving that a real a...

Anthropic  said Sunday it is committing 5% of its shares to a new “public benefit” fund, with the fund’s worth potentially increasing as its shares grow in value. The shares will go to the Anthropic Public Benefit Fund, a new entity within the company. The fund “will have increased flexibility and scale, enabling us to pursue our mission in new ways: for example, we might explore large donations to traditional nonprofits or direct distributions to specific populations,” Anthropic said in a  blog post . It gave labor market impacts as an example, saying that while it has already committed $200 million to study the effects of  artificial intelligence , “given the pace of AI progress, bolder approaches may be needed.” CEO Dario Amodei and the company’s five other cofounders established Anthropic as a public benefit corporation, a designation that for-profit companies select to balance financial goals and social impact. They have also pledged that they ...