Good Morning! Goldman is on track to capture its biggest share of global deals since 2001, advising on 34% of the $3.8 trillion in mergers announced this year. Peter Thiel’s hedge fund dumped its Nvidia stake and slashed its Tesla position. And involuntary 401(k) rollovers are quietly costing Americans billions.

Bitcoin erased all of its 2025 gains, while gold is up 53%. Bain Capital is buying Clearlake-owned Concert Golf, and Tim Cook could step down as Apple CEO as early as next year.

Plus: How Apollo turned America’s retirement savings into Wall Street’s hottest trade, and why we were wrong about fasting.

Private credit is a portfolio essential. Percent provides access to institutional-grade deals. Explore their investment opportunities.

SQUEEZ OF THE DAY

Bezos is a CEO Again

Jeff Bezos is leaving his post-Amazon wedding-and-yachts era behind and stepping back into the CEO chair. Four years after stepping down from running Amazon, he is taking a formal operator role at Project Prometheus, the secretive AI startup he is funding and now co-leading. For the first time since 2021, Bezos is running a company again.

Prometheus is emerging from stealth as a secretive but AI heavyweight. The startup has raised $6.2 billion dollars (including from Bezos himself), instantly making it one of the most heavily financed early-stage AI companies in the world.

Prometheus has already hired nearly 100 employees, including senior researchers poached from OpenAI, DeepMind, and Meta. Bezos will share the chief executive role with Vik Bajaj, a physicist and chemist who helped build Google X and later founded Verily inside Alphabet. The capital and the roster make it clear this is not a side project for Bezos but rather a full-scale R&D effort.

The mission is still mostly under wraps, but the direction is obvious. Prometheus wants to build AI for manufacturing, engineering, aerospace, and industrial design. It is not chasing chatbots but instead wants to build systems that can design components, optimize factories, and solve physics problems that current models cannot. The big bet is that the next generation of AI will be trained in the physical world rather than on scraped text.

That puts Bezos right back alongside his long-time rival, Elon Musk. Musk now has xAI, Grok, and SpaceX all leaning hard into robotics and real-world manufacturing, and has said repeatedly that AI trained on physical data will drive the future of space and industry.

Prometheus looks like Bezos’s response. If Amazon was his e-commerce empire and Blue Origin is his space empire, Prometheus is the bridge between them. It puts him back into a head-to-head race with Musk across AI and aerospace.

Takeaway: Maybe Bezos has too much of an ego to sit on the sidelines without competing with Elon Musk but this puts him back in builder mode. The last startup Bezos founded is now valued at a cool $2.5T.

He’s back to thinking in decades and chasing capital-intensive, frontier-scale problems. The years after Amazon were defined by yachts and a headline wedding, but it looks like he’s officially back in the casino, chasing the next trillion-dollar upside.

PRESENTED BY PERCENT

The Blackstone and Apollo Playbook

Wealthy individual investors poured $48 billion into private credit in the first half of this year. They’re following the same playbook as Blackstone, KKR, and Apollo, all doubling down on private credit as the next major growth engine.

Blackstone’s Head of Private Credit, Brad Marshall, summed up the appeal in the FT: “Private markets offer investors a premium over what they can get in public markets.”

Percent gives accredited investors access to that same opportunity set, with:

• Annualized returns up to 20%

• Timelines shaped to your liquidity needs (6–36 months)

• Full transparency into each deal’s underlying data

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HEADLINES

Top Reads

• Goldman Sachs rides M&A surge to dominant position (Linkedin)

• Peter Thiel’s hedge fund dumps Nvidia stake, cuts Tesla position (CNBC)

• Involuntary 401(k) rollovers are costing Americans billions (WSJ)

• Bain Capital strikes deal for Clearlake-owned Concert Golf (BB)

• Bitcoin price under pressure, slips below $93,000 as four-year cycle comes into focus (YF)

• How Apollo turned American’s nest eggs into Wall Street’s hottest trade (BB)

• Huang’s half-a-trillion Nvidia forecast drops ahead of Q3 earnings (CNBC)

• Blue Owl private credit fund merger leaves some investors facing 20% hit (FT)

• Mike Wilson among top bulls calls for 16% S&P rally (BB)

• Alphabet rallies after Berkshire reveals stake (CNBC)

• Goldman Sachs unveils a 10-year playbook with AI at its heart (CNBC)

• Uncle Sam is outperforming the S&P 500 (CNN)

• Wall Street blows past bubble worries to supercharge AI frenzy (WSJ)

• A quiet Wall Street forced fueled a $17 trillion alternatives boom (YF)

• Beloved steakhouse chain is making a comeback (Fox)

• Fed’s Waller calls for December cut, while Jefferson wants to move ‘slowly’ (YF)

• More than half of US homes lost value in the past year (YF)

CAPITAL PULSE

Markets Rundown

Market Update

• Stocks tumbled to start the week, with the S&P 500 down 1% as over 80% of companies in the index finished lower.

• Small-caps lagged sharply, with the Russell 2000 down 2% on the day and nearly 5% over the past five sessions.

• Longer-dated Treasuries rallied slightly, pushing the 10-year yield down 1 basis point to 4.14%, while shorter maturities weakened as investors reassessed Fed policy expectations.

• The U.S. dollar strengthened modestly after last week’s sell-off, while oil held near $60 per barrel and gold slipped.

• Bitcoin extended its decline, trading near $92,000, down more than 25% from October’s peak.

Economic Data Highlights

• The AI and tech sector correction deepened, with mega-cap tech stocks down over 6% in November after a 70% rebound since April.

• Focus now shifts to NVIDIA’s earnings on Wednesday, which investors view as a key barometer for the ongoing AI boom.

• NVIDIA’s update on $500 billion in 2025–26 orders could determine near-term sentiment for the sector.

• Broader rotation toward health care, energy, and materials continues, signaling a more balanced market leadership.

Fed and Data Challenges

• With the shutdown now over, statisticians at the BLS, Census Bureau, and BEA are returning to work, aiming to clear data backlogs.

• The September jobs report is expected Wednesday, while October’s report will be partial, excluding the household survey (and thus the unemployment rate).

• Inflation data for October may be skipped entirely due to missing collection periods, and November reports could have quality issues.

• Fed Chair Powell reiterated that policy decisions amid limited data are like “driving in fog,” implying a slower pace of easing.

• Markets now price a 40% chance of a 25 bps rate cut at the December FOMC meeting, down from 70% earlier this month.

Earnings Today

• HD (Home Depot) – Watch for housing-related demand trends and holiday season outlook.

• BIDU (Baidu) – Focus on AI and cloud momentum amid China’s tech rebound.

• PDD (PDD Holdings) – Key to monitor e-commerce growth and consumer spending trends in China.

Movers & Shakers

• (+) Zymeworks ($ZYME) +29% after the drugmaker released positive cancer trial results.

• (+) Brinker International ($EAT) +7% because Stifel reiterated its buy rating on the Chili parent company.

• (–) Coinbase ($COIN) -7% after the digital assets sell-off continues.

Prediction Markets

• Is this the easiest return of the year?

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

Private Dealmaking

• Clayton Dubilier & Rice agreed to acquire Sealed Air for $10.3 billion

• Johnson & Johnson agreed to buy Halda Therapeutics for $3.05 billion

• Gibraltar Industries agreed to acquire OmniMax International for $1.3 billion

• Warburg Pincus agreed to buy ECN Capital for $814 million

• Zilch, a consumer fintech, raised $175 million

• Solve Therapeutics, a developer of ADCs for solid tumor malignancies, raised $120 million

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

BOOK OF THE DAY

Never Stop

Description: A gritty, unfiltered memoir from one of college basketball’s most intense and successful coaches. Dan Hurley takes readers from Jersey City roots and relentless self-doubt to NCAA championships and national acclaim. Along the way, he reveals the internal battles—anxiety, identity, legacy—that demanded just as much triumph as the court wins. This isn’t just about winning games—it’s about what you do when you’re losing yourself.

Book Length: 304 pages
Release Date: September 30, 2025

Ideal For: Aspiring leaders, coaches, athletes, team builders, and anyone wrestling with self-doubt but determined to rise above.

“What the world saw were championship rings. What it took was the refusal to give up on identity, leadership, and purpose.”

DAILY VISUAL

Marriage Rates Declining

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DAILY ACUMEN

The 5-Year Illusion

Most people overestimate what they can do in a year and underestimate what they can do in five.

You’ll rarely see progress day to day, but if you stay consistent, it sneaks up on you like compound interest.

The trick is to detach from immediacy. Success is built in invisible seasons: rejection, obscurity, boredom.

These are the years that compound into breakthroughs.

The biggest wins come from the patience to look foolish for a while.

ENLIGHTENMENT

Short Squeez Picks

• The man who runs the NYC subway

• How to find the keys to happiness

• The unique new way to pay your bills

• Why your team isn’t listening

• 7 mindful things you should insist on

• We were wrong about fasting

MEME-A-PALOOZA

Memes of the Day

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