Good Morning! Apollo's $7.7B bid for EasyJet has won board backing, topping Castlelake's ~$6.7B offer. JPMorgan hired two bankers to ride Hong Kong's IPO boom. And Phoebe Gates' shopping app allegedly took credit for sales it didn't drive.

A startup that builds AI agents used one to raise $100M. Several fund managers are competing to lead a proposed class action lawsuit challenging 3G Capital's $9.4 billion buyout of Skechers.

Plus: Private chef salaries have hit $300K as the wealthy chase their own Michelin stars. And what a private banker learned about rich people.

Build custom deployments around your firm’s unique workflows with Endex.

SQUEEZ OF THE DAY

AI Just Ran a Sell-Side Process

Have you ever looked at a multimillion-dollar investment banking fee and thought, surely a chatbot could do some of this? When megafund CVC sold its Greek e-commerce company Skroutz earlier this year, someone decided to stop wondering.

The process skipped the bankers entirely. Prospective buyers just got a link to an AI-powered data portal, where a chatbot analyst answered any diligence questions and looped in management as needed.

The company still sold to Blackstone in May for €635M, only the sell-side associate got replaced by a login page, and nobody seemed to notice. The unconventional exit was spearheaded by Skroutz co-founder George Hadjigeorgiou.

It is a pretty direct shot at one of Wall Street's nicer fee pools. Banks charge millions to package a company, manage buyers, answer diligence questions, run the data room and keep everyone moving toward a bid. Some of that is genuinely valuable - a white-glove relationship management and making sure the buyer who asks for "one quick follow-up" at 11:47 p.m. gets a 14-tab Excel file by breakfast. On Skroutz, software handled a meaningful chunk of that machine, and the deal got done anyway.

Hadjigeorgiou is apparently asking this question everywhere. He recently said he built an entire HR platform himself in four weeks for under €2,000 (around $2,300) using AI models.

The philosophy is straightforward: if expensive intermediaries are mostly moving information around, a technical founder with model access can just build the thing himself. It is the same logic applied to the M&A process, and it is a genuinely uncomfortable question for anyone whose job involves being an expensive human search function.

Takeaway: To be fair, the chatbot was probably not replacing actual rainmaker work; it was replacing the data room traffic cop. Early buyer questions are important but repetitive: where is the cohort data, what happened to margins, how should we think about working capital, can you point me to the customer files. That is not nothing, but it is also not senior strategic counsel. A chatbot is still not negotiating price, reading the room, managing egos or convincing a board to take the deal. The rainmakers are probably fine, but the industrial complex underneath them looks considerably more exposed.

PRESENTED BY ENDEX

Zuckerberg, Musk, Altman Shake Up Finance Model Race

Last week, three new model families were released in just three days: Meta's Muse, SpaceXAI's Grok 4.5, and OpenAI's GPT-5.6 (Sol, Terra, Luna).

On key benchmarks, all three are now outpacing Anthropic's Mythos. It's hard to say who truly owns the frontier right now, and Microsoft just named GPT-5.6 the default model for Microsoft 365.

For Wall Street, top firms are partnering with Endex to cut through the noise. Endex is model-agnostic. It routes every agent request to the model that clears the required quality threshold and reserves frontier models for the select tasks where incremental intelligence produces measurable economic value.

When a new model drops, teams don't have to reevaluate their tooling. Instead, Endex evaluates it and routes to it automatically, keeping them on the frontier as the landscape moves underneath them.

Endex brings these agents directly into the Microsoft Office Suite, building custom deployments around each firm's unique workflows.

HEADLINES

Top Reads

• EasyJet agrees in principle on $7.6 billion takeover deal from Apollo (WSJ)

• JPMorgan hires two bankers to tap Hong Kong IPO boom (BB)

• Gates heir's shopping app took credit for sales it didn't drive (BB)

• Warburg Pincus near over $7 billion deal for specialty pharmacy company PANTHERx Rare (WSJ)

• A startup that builds AI agents used one to raise $100 million (BB)

• Private chef salaries reach $300,000 as the rich seek their own Michelin stars (CNBC)

• Hedge funds fight to lead suit over Skechers' $9.4 billion buyout (BB)

• China's ascent in biotech rousts US venture capitalists to adapt (WSJ)

• JPMorgan Chase announces another round of layoffs at NJ offices (NJ.com)

• Geothermal startup XGS Energy hires Morgan Stanley to weigh IPO (Axios)

• Private credit rebukes Planview as AI boom roils software firms (BB)

• Delta beats Q2 estimates despite record fuel bill, reaffirms full-year outlook (CNBC)

• JPMorgan builds AI agents that beat 60/40 portfolio in backtests (BB)

• How Charles Schwab turbocharged Trump's stock-trading frenzy (WSJ)

• AI productivity gains are years away, Deutsche Bank's Reid says (BB)

• The mind game that investors can't stop playing (WSJ)

• UBS helped trigger exodus from Blue Owl private credit fund (FT)

• New EU ‘scale-up’ fund expects to burst past its €5bn target size (FT)

CAPITAL PULSE

Markets Rundown

Market Update

• U.S. equities finished higher to close the week, with communication services and materials leading gains.

• Health care was the only S&P 500 sector to finish lower.

• Treasury yields were little changed, with the 10-year Treasury yield at 4.56%.

• WTI crude oil closed just below $72 per barrel, as geopolitical tensions remained elevated but no new developments emerged.

Week Ahead

• Investors will focus on June CPI (Tuesday), PPI (Wednesday), retail sales (Thursday), and housing data (Friday).

• Second-quarter earnings season begins next week, led by major U.S. banks, with S&P 500 earnings expected to grow nearly 25% year over year.

• Recent economic data continue to show stable labor-market conditions, resilient consumer spending, and improving manufacturing activity.

Housing

• Existing home sales fell 2.4% in June, reflecting the impact of higher mortgage rates and elevated home prices.

• Existing home sales have averaged roughly 4.1 million annually since 2023, below the 2015-2019 average of 5.4 million.

• Wage growth has outpaced home-price growth for 15 consecutive months, which may gradually improve housing affordability.

Movers & Shakers

• (+) Vodafone ($VOD) +13% after French billionaire Xavier Niel, founder of Iliad, bought around a 16.2% stake.

• (+) Meta ($META) +6% because of a report the company is developing a custom silicon chip.

• (–) Moderna ($MRNA) -11% after the FDA voted against recommending its mRNA flu vaccine mFLUSIVA for adults under 50.

Prediction Markets

• Oil price has settled a bit following the Iran-tanker strikes. WTI market closes at 2:30pm EST.

• Trade on real-world events with Kalshi. Use code OWS to get a $10 bonus when you trade $10.

Private Dealmaking

• Prime Intellect, an AI agent building platform, raised $130 million

• Databento, a data market platform for finance, raised $97 million

• Leo Cancer Care, a British maker of radiation therapy devices, raised $65 million

• Kaon AI, a developer of personalized story worlds, raised $60 million

• InCharge Energy, which installs distributed energy assets, raised $46 million

• Quartermaster, a maritime awareness platform, raised $43 million

For more PE, VC & M&A deals, subscribe to our Buysiders newsletter.

BOOK OF THE DAY

The Lost Empire of Emanuel Nobel

Description:
A sweeping historical biography from Douglas Brunt that uncovers the remarkable story of Emanuel Nobel, one of the most influential industrialists you've likely never heard of. Set against the backdrop of Imperial Russia, the fall of the Romanovs, and the rise of the global oil industry, the book explores how the Nobel family's vast energy empire helped fuel the modern world. Blending business history, geopolitics, and biography, it reveals how innovation, entrepreneurship, and political upheaval shaped both the twentieth century and today's global energy landscape.

Book Length: 368 pages
Release Date: September 9, 2025

Ideal For:
Readers interested in business history, energy, geopolitics, and the entrepreneurs whose innovations quietly reshaped the global economy.

History often remembers the revolutions but forgets the builders who made them possible.

DAILY VISUAL

Most Followed Instagram Accounts

PRESENTED BY COVERD

Buy Now, Pay Maybe?

Coverd has evolved.

The app that allows you to win up to 100% of your purchases back has upgraded into a full-scale finance and entertainment app. In addition to tracking your spending (and winning it back), calculating and comparing your net worth, and playing old school games like Flappy Bird, Coverd has added a sports picks feature and tiered reward system.

Their flagship product, the Coverd Card, is now live. Each purchase with the card is like a free spin where you may or may not actually pay. Buy now, pay maybe. 

Sign up for the Coverd credit card in the app today.

DAILY ACUMEN

Competence Trap

Being good at something is one of the most reliable ways to get stuck. The skill that earns you praise and reward becomes the thing you are asked to keep doing, and the better you get, the harder it becomes to leave, because the cost of walking away from proven competence to become a beginner again feels absurd. So people spend decades excellent at something they have quietly outgrown.

This is the quiet tragedy of the high performer. The very success that should buy freedom instead builds a cage, each promotion and accolade adding another bar, until the person is trapped at the top of a ladder they no longer want to be climbing.

Growth almost always requires a period of being bad at something new, and the more competent you already are, the more that period stings. The people who keep evolving are the ones willing to trade a comfortable mastery for an uncomfortable beginning, again and again, refusing to let being good at something become the reason they never became something more.

ENLIGHTENMENT

Short Squeez Picks

• What Harvard Business School faculty are reading this summer

• 7 tips for a better night sleep from a sleep expert

• What I learned about wealthy people as a private banker

• Your bedtime can have a big impact on your sleep

• Rust-out is the new burnout

MEME-A-PALOOZA

Memes of the Day

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