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🍋 Daniel Ek's Next Subscription

🍋 Daniel Ek's Next Subscription

Plus: BlackRock crossed $15 trillion, Stripe is bidding $53 billion for PayPal, and a dating app is replacing human choice with AI entirely.

Short Squeez
July 16, 2026

Together With

“It’s tough to find values when everybody is preferring gambling.” — Warren Buffett

Good Morning! The New York Yankees are in advanced talks to raise ~$3 billion from Apollo. The founder of Hinge released a new AI dating app that skips swiping entirely; the AI just decides who you're compatible with and matches you automatically. And Anthropic is moving closer to a mega-IPO as bankers line up investor meetings.

BlackRock crossed $15 trillion in assets. Stripe and Advent made a $53 billion takeover offer for PayPal, sending the stock soaring. And Mira Murati's AI startup released its first AI model, an open-weights model called Inkling.

Plus: Jamie Dimon and JPMorgan announced $24 million to boost US shipbuilding, and is 8 hours of sleep overrated?

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SQUEEZ OF THE DAY

Daniel Ek's Next Subscription

Neko Health was founded by Hjalmar Nilsonne, left, and Daniel Ek, right

Daniel Ek helped convince the world to pay a monthly fee for music they used to own, and now he wants to convince them to pay for a body scan before anything is actually wrong. Neko Health, the preventive health startup Ek co-founded with Swedish entrepreneur Hjalmar Nilsonne, just raised $700 million to expand its clinic network, including a planned New York location later this year.

The round was co-led by Lightspeed and Eyal Ofer's OG Venture Partners, with Mark Zuckerberg, Priscilla Chan and Tim Ferriss among the backers. And when Zuckerberg and the guy who monetized podcasting are both writing checks into your health startup, you are probably onto something, or at least onto something that wealthy people will pay for.

So what is the product? You walk into a clinic that looks more like a spa than a hospital, step into what amounts to a pastel scanning booth, and let 70-odd sensors collect roughly 50 million data points off your body in under ten minutes.

It photographs and maps every mole you have, runs an ECG and arterial analysis, measures body composition and grip strength, and pulls a blood sample that gets processed in the on-site lab while you wait. The whole visit takes about an hour, and a doctor walks you through the readout before you leave, flagging risk for things like skin cancer, heart disease and diabetes.

In the U.K. it costs £299, roughly $400, which is cheaper than a full-body MRI and significantly cheaper than finding out the hard way. More than 350,000 people in Sweden and the U.K. have registered for a scan, though only a portion have actually gone through with one yet.

The most interesting thing about Neko is where it is working. Sweden and the U.K. both have national health care, meaning people are paying out of pocket for something they could theoretically get through their public system. That gap between what traditional medicine offers and what a modern consumer wants is basically the whole business. Wearables spent a decade training people to obsess over sleep scores, glucose levels and heart rate variability. And Neko is trying to take that same instinct from the Apple Watch to the clinic, at a price point that is uncomfortable but not insane.

The skeptics are not wrong either. Some doctors push back on full-body scans because more data does not always mean better outcomes, it can mean false positives, unnecessary follow-ups and a lot of expensive anxiety. That is a real tension, and Neko will have to navigate it as it scales into the U.S. market. Ek is also stepping down as Spotify CEO to focus on this, which is either a sign of how seriously he is taking it or a sign that running a health startup is more interesting to him than fighting with artists over streaming royalties.

Takeaway: Neko Health is a bet that preventive care can become a mainstream consumer product, cheaper than concierge medicine, more polished than the annual physical, and compelling enough to get people to pay out of pocket even in countries where health care is technically free. Ek already proved people would pay monthly for music they used to own. Now he is betting they will pay to see what their body is doing before the doctor has to tell them something went wrong. Given how that first bet turned out, it is probably worth taking seriously.

PRESENTED BY BUYSIDERS CLUB

Why Billionaires Still Go to Summer Camp

Last week, private jets stacked up in Idaho as Bezos, Zuckerberg, and Altman gathered for Allen & Co.'s "summer camp for billionaires." The Washington Post acquisition and the Disney–ABC merger both started as conversations there. And none of it happens by accident; who's invited, who hikes with whom, who's seated next to whom at dinner. The room is designed, and the design is why deals get done.

Buysiders Club brings that same design to Wall Street. It’s a unique place for all segments of finance to connect through dinner, dealflow, and discourse. Every dinner is curated down to the seat - the venue, the menu, the introductions - and members get access to private placement opportunities before most have even heard of them. All candidates are interviewed and character-referenced to ensure Buysiders Club accepts only the highest quality people on Wall Street.

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HEADLINES

Markets Rundown

Market Update

U.S. equities closed higher after a softer-than-expected June PPI report, with consumer discretionary and communication services leading gains.
Treasury yields declined, with the 10-year Treasury yield falling to 4.55% and the 2-year yield to approximately 4.14%.
Asian markets were mostly higher, led by a rebound in South Korea's KOSPI, while European markets finished slightly lower.
WTI crude oil edged higher as investors continued to monitor developments in the Middle East.

Inflation

Headline PPI slowed to 5.5% year over year, down from 6.0% in May, while monthly PPI declined 0.3%.
Core PPI rose 0.2%, below expectations for 0.4%, indicating broader wholesale inflation pressures eased.
Following this week's softer CPI and PPI reports, markets are pricing in no change at the July Fed meeting, with September expectations remaining mixed.

Consumer

Attention now shifts to June retail sales, with headline sales expected to rise 0.3% and control-group sales expected to increase 0.4%.
Consumer spending remained resilient during the first half of the year, supported by a stable labor market and stronger household income.
Moderate job growth and low layoffs continue to support household spending heading into the second half of the year.

Movers & Shakers

(+) Lucid ($LCID) +29% after issuing a firm rebuttal letter, signed by its chief legal officer, unequivocally denying the bankruptcy and take-private rumors.
(+) PayPal ($PYPL) +17% because a report surfaced that Stripe and Advent International have proposed a joint acquisition of the company in a deal valued at over $53 billion.
(–) Micron ($MU) -8% after Chinese competitor ChangXin Memory moved closer to an IPO.

Prediction Markets

Only a 59% chance that McDonalds advertises during the World Cup.
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Private Dealmaking

Neko Health, a whole-body scan company, raised $700 million
AdvanCell, an Australian radiopharmaceutical company focused on cancer, raised $315 million
Emergent, a vibe coding startup, raised $130 million
Brinc, a 911 drone maker, raised $125 million
TerraFirma, an interplanetary construction startup, raised $115 million
Spectro Cloud, an AI infrastructure company that helps manage token costs, raised $100 million

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

BOOK OF THE DAY

Uncommon Sense

Description:
A thoughtful guide from William R. Brody and Mike Field on challenging conventional thinking to solve complex problems more effectively. Drawing from leadership, medicine, business, and science, the book argues that many of life's biggest challenges persist because we approach them with outdated assumptions. Through practical examples and fresh perspectives, it encourages readers to think across disciplines, question accepted wisdom, and develop creative solutions that others overlook.

Book Length: 304 pages
Release Date: May 5, 2026

Ideal For:
Leaders, entrepreneurs, innovators, and lifelong learners looking to improve problem-solving, challenge assumptions, and think more creatively in business and everyday life.

Extraordinary solutions begin the moment you stop assuming that ordinary thinking is enough.

DAILY VISUAL

The Looksmaxxing Era

Source: Business of Beauty

PRESENTED BY REX SHARES

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DAILY ACUMEN

Power Laws

Most people plan their lives and portfolios as if outcomes follow a bell curve, clustering sensibly around the average. Almost nothing that matters actually works that way. In venture, in careers, in creative work, a tiny handful of outcomes produce nearly all the value, and everything else rounds to noise.

This changes the whole logic of how you should behave. If returns were normally distributed, you would optimize for a good average and avoid mistakes. But under a power law, the cost of a miss is bounded and the cost of missing the one outlier is not. Being wrong twenty times is survivable. Not being at the table for the one that mattered is the only unforgivable error.

The people who understand this look reckless to everyone else, because they tolerate a strike rate that seems terrible. They are not gambling. They are just playing the actual distribution rather than the one that feels intuitive.

ENLIGHTENMENT

Short Squeez Picks

A new clue linking depression to the immune system
1 thing you need more than compatibility in a relationship
Why reading feels so hard now
4 easy ways to live longer
Is 8 hours of sleep overrated?

MEME-A-PALOOZA

Memes of the Day

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