Good Morning! Jefferies is facing fresh private credit trouble at its Point Bonita Capital fund as it reviews its exposure to Radiant World. Ares posted a record fundraising quarter, pushing AUM to $671 billion. Elon Musk's fortune slumped to $684 billion after peaking at $1.33 trillion, as SpaceX shares fell 46% from their June high.

Tech layoffs and rising inventory have made Seattle's housing market one of the weakest in the country. IBM's CEO says quantum computing will have a measurable impact on earnings by 2028 or 2029. And Brookfield faces a creditor clash over a bankrupt Polish solar firm.

Plus: AI's real threat to jobs could be lower pay rather than outright elimination, how Jersey Mike's IPO shows private equity is still working, and exercise vs. medication for depression.

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SQUEEZ OF THE DAY

Barbarians at the Bank

KKR might have built its reputation buying companies, but now the private equity megafund also wants to finance the firms buying companies. The private equity giant's Arctos unit is considering investing at least $250 million in Kuvare, an annuities and life insurer whose assets are partly managed by Blue Owl, out of a $6.2 billion fund built to bankroll other alternative managers.

It's a small deal on the surface, but it's one of the first checks out of a business KKR thinks could eventually be worth $100 billion.

It's ironic because KKR is the firm behind "barbarians at the gate," the guys who basically invented the modern LBO, and now they want to bankroll their peers and the broader private markets ecosystem they helped build. On top of fighting for every single deal, KKR can now finance the people doing the fighting. There's no need to win every deal when you can collect a fee no matter who does.

That's basically why KKR paid $1.4 billion for Arctos earlier this year. Arctos made its name funding sports franchises and providing capital to other alternative asset managers, and co-CEO Scott Nuttall has said KKR sees a chance to build on its existing relationships with 250 private equity firms.

Put those together and KKR gets a front-row seat every time another fund needs growth capital, a liquidity fix, or some creative structure that just so happens to come with fees attached.

Arctos CEO Ian Charles joined as Head of KKR Solutions to lead that charge, which executives say gives it a chance to disrupt secondaries by devising new ways to structure and facilitate those deals.

Charles co-founded Arctos in 2019 and, alongside the capital solutions business, turned it into a dominant investor in professional sports teams. The Arctos deal also puts KKR head-to-head with Blackstone, whose Strategic Partners secondaries business manages about $104 billion.

Takeaway: KKR doesn't just want to make money by owning companies anymore; it wants to make money financing the firms, funds, and insurers that own them too. The barbarians became the bankers to the other barbarians, and 250 relationships with private equity firms just turned into the foundation of a potential $100 billion business. Turns out the real power move in private markets isn't winning every deal; it's getting paid no matter who does.

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HEADLINES

Top Reads

• Jefferies faces fresh trouble at fund it was already shuttering (BB)

• Ares posts record fundraising quarter amid private credit tumult (BB)

• Elon Musk's fortune slumps to pre-SpaceX IPO levels after rout (BB)

• Tech layoffs and rising inventory have made Seattle's housing market one of the weakest in the country, but it's still ultra-pricey (Yahoo Finance)

• IBM CEO says quantum computing will have a 'measurable impact' on earnings by 2028 or 2029 (CNBC)

• Brookfield faces looming creditor clash over Polish solar firm (BB)

• AI's real threat to jobs could be lower pay (Axios)

• Jersey Mike's is growing. Thank private equity. (Washington Post)

• Reddit stock tumbles the most on record as lack of new AI deals, US daily users metric disappoints (Yahoo Finance)

• Griffin's knack for sniffing out trouble set to reward Citadel (BB)

• Why Situational Awareness hedge fund imploded, even in a tame stock market (CNBC)

• Situational Awareness: inside the implosion of Leopold Aschenbrenner's AI hedge fund (WSJ)

• Battery startup raises $550 million amid boom in AI data centers (BB)

• Dwindling cash and soaring memory costs: tech's AI buildout has ballooning price tag (CNBC)

• AI boom is lifting industrial stocks (Axios)

CAPITAL PULSE

Markets Rundown

Market Update

• Stocks gained as Apple and Amazon topped estimates; Apple fell on cautious guidance while Amazon rose over 15% on strong AWS growth.

• South Korea's Kospi jumped nearly 18% overnight; European markets also gained.

• The 10-year Treasury yield climbed back above 4.7% and the 2-year closed near 4.27%.

Earnings Season

• AWS revenue rose 37% year-over-year, its fastest growth in 18 quarters; Amazon raised its 2026 capex outlook to about $220 billion.

• Amazon posted a record operating margin of 13.7%, while Apple flagged supply constraints and rising component costs.

• S&P 500 earnings remain on pace to grow more than 25% this year. 

Movers & Shakers

• (+) Amazon ($AMZN) +15% after beating Q2 earnings expectations, with cloud segment revenue growing 37% year-over-year.

• (–) Apple ($AAPL) -7% because the company issued weak current-quarter guidance of 9-11% revenue growth, missing the 12% consensus.

• (–) Reddit ($RDDT) -21% after CEO Steve Huffman flagged that search referral traffic was "choppy" during the quarter.

Prediction Markets

• Earnings Call Special (after markets close): Palantir

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

Private Dealmaking

• Alimentation Couche-Tard agreed to buy Zabka, a Polish convenience store operator, for around $8.7 billion

• IG Group agreed to buy Underdog, a sports betting app, for up to $1.3 billion

• Function, a longevity and lab-testing startup, raised $450 million

• Xsight Labs, an Israeli fabless semiconductor startup, raised more than $300 million

• Simile, an AI simulation startup, raised $200 million

• Groundcover, an Israeli observability startup, raised $100 million

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

BOOK OF THE DAY

Don’t Be Evil

Description:
A candid memoir from Claire Stapleton, a former Google communications executive and organizer of the 2018 Google Walkout, offering an insider's perspective on the rise of Big Tech. Through her twelve years at Google, Stapleton chronicles the company's transformation from an idealistic innovator to a corporate giant grappling with power, workplace culture, and ethical compromises. Blending humor, personal reflection, and sharp observations, the book explores ambition, identity, leadership, and the difficult decision to challenge an organization from within.

Book Length: 288 pages
Release Date: August 4, 2026

Ideal For:
Professionals in technology, business leaders, entrepreneurs, and anyone interested in corporate culture, workplace ethics, leadership, and the evolution of Silicon Valley.

The hardest part of leaving isn't walking away from the company, it's letting go of the story you believed about it.

DAILY VISUAL

Higher for Longer Continues

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Here’s a New AI Tool to Help With Your Work

It’s a platform called DiligenceSquared, an AI-native take on commercial due diligence. For those unfamiliar: typically, a private equity firm outsources its market research to a consulting firm that spends weeks on expert interviews and charges $500K to $1M for a 200-page report. Anyone who’s lived through it has three words for the process: expensive, slow, manual.

DiligenceSquared delivers the same diligence but 10x cheaper and faster. AI voice agents run expert interviews at scale, in any language, then compile everything into an interactive report where you can audit each claim and trace it to source in one click. There’s a human layer too, AI handles the junior-analyst work, while senior ex-MBB consultants oversee every project before it ships.

Built for PE, private credit, and corporates making M&A, market-entry, and pricing calls.

Want to see it run? Book a demo.

DAILY ACUMEN

Steep Discount

The human brain does not discount the future the way a spreadsheet does, evenly and rationally. It discounts it steeply, valuing a reward today far more than an identical reward tomorrow, even when the wait is trivial. Offered ten dollars now or eleven tomorrow, many people take the ten. Offered ten dollars in a year or eleven in a year and a day, almost everyone waits the extra day. The math is identical. The psychology is not.

This is hyperbolic discounting, and it explains more financial behavior than most people admit. It is why retirement savings feel abstract at twenty five and urgent at fifty five, even though the dollars saved early are worth exponentially more. It is why a position meant to be held for years gets sold for a small gain today. The future self who benefits from patience is, neurologically, treated almost like a stranger.

The people who build real wealth usually found a structural trick to defeat their own wiring rather than relying on willpower. Automatic contributions. Locked up capital. Rules made in advance, before the temptation of now entered the room. You cannot out-argue a bias built into the brain's architecture. You can only build a system that never asks it to decide in the moment.

ENLIGHTENMENT

Short Squeez Picks

• 4 questions to move beyond small talk

• Exercise vs. medication for depression

• The race to commercialize the world’s most powerful psychedelic

• The best cities in the world 

• Fixing remote work behaviors that wouldn’t fly in person

MEME-A-PALOOZA

Memes of the Day

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