Good Morning! Employers are making job candidates jump through hoops to prove they're human amid a surge in deepfakes and North Korean remote workers. Saudi-backed LIV Golf may file for bankruptcy as soon as next week. And California passed a bill to restrict private equity investment in litigation firms.

The FTC sued Amazon, alleging it deceived advertisers and drove up prices. HSBC spent $68 million on its biggest cull of senior bankers since the financial crisis. And a hedge fund titan's $6.2 billion divorce is putting Wall Street's wealth on public display, including his wife withdrawing $75 million the day before she filed.

Plus: Nvidia is investing $3.5 billion in Taiwanese chipmaker MediaTek, what Tim Cook told employees on his last day at Apple, and how KKR is the rare private equity firm that bets on itself.

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SQUEEZ OF THE DAY

EY Is Paying Employees to Think

Corporate America might have spent the last two years telling employees to use more AI, and some companies even handed out AI adoption and usage bonuses like it was free candy. But now one of the Big Four firms Ernst & Young is reserving $100 million for employee bonuses earmarked specifically for more human work and less AI slop.

EY’s U.S. business is rolling out a $100 million employee-rewards pool for workers who demonstrate human skills like judgment, adaptability, innovation and critical thinking. Employees can earn quick $500 spot bonuses, and individuals and teams that make a meaningful difference to the firm can collect awards of up to $25,000.

The timing comes at a period when most firms have rolled out AI tools across their businesses, but the harder problem is making sure employees don’t blindly trust whatever the model spits out. Workplaces are getting flooded with AI-generated decks, emails, and analysis, and skills like knowing when something looks wrong, asking the right follow-up question, and exercising actual judgment are becoming more valuable, not less.

EY isn’t alone, and competing Big Four firm KPMG revamped its audit-intern training this summer to put more emphasis on critical thinking and judgment, while PwC has training around empathy and creativity alongside technical AI skills. So it’s ironic that the Big Four apparently spent years trying to turn junior employees into efficient corporate machines and AI users, only for being human to become the differentiator.

And firms are walking a delicate balance because AI is effective at doing the grunt work, but it changes the economics of billing clients for people’s time. If ChatGPT or Claude can make a deck in a fraction of the time it would otherwise take an analyst or associate 50+ hours to complete, firms have to experiment with charging for outcomes instead. So, in other words, the value of the employee shifts from how many hours they can grind to whether they can actually solve the problem, and human skills can become a differentiator.

Takeaway: The first phase of the corporate AI boom was about teaching employees how to use the tools. The next one may be about rewarding the skills the tools still can’t reliably replace and making sure everyone still knows what to do when the AI is wrong. EY is spending $100 million on judgment, creativity, and adaptability because once everyone in the office has access to the same AI models, knowing how to prompt one stops being much of a moat; knowing whether its answer is actually any good might be.

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HEADLINES

Top Reads

• Buysiders 2026 M&A predictions (Buysiders)

• Employers are making job candidates jump through hoops to prove they’re real (WSJ)

• Saudi-backed LIV Golf may file for bankruptcy next week (BB)

• California moves to restrict PE investment in law firms (Axios)

• FTC sues Amazon, accusing the ecommerce giant of misleading advertisers (CNBC)

• HSBC spends $68mn on biggest cull of senior bankers since financial crisis (FT)

• A hedge fund titan’s divorce is putting Wall Street’s staggering wealth on public view 

• (WSJ)

• Nvidia to invest $3.5 billion in chipmaker MediaTek (BB)

• What Tim Cook told employees on his last day at Apple (Yahoo Finance)

• KKR is the rare private equity firm that bets on itself (FT)

• ONEOK to buy Brazos Midstream’s Permian assets for $4.43 billion (WSJ)

• OpenAI ad business shows blistering growth, hits $1 billion annualized revenue (CNBC)

• Citadel says Marshall Wace 'stonewalling' in recruitment spat (BB)

• FDIC beats investor claim to $1.71 billion Silicon Valley Bank deposit (WSJ)

• US start-up seeks miners in race for $20 quadrillion moon resource (NY Post)

• Apollo to repackage $9 billion Oneok stake into debt deal (BB)

CAPITAL PULSE

Markets Rundown

Market Update

• Stocks edged lower after U.S. forces struck Iranian targets over the weekend; oil prices rose while the equity reaction stayed contained.

• The S&P 500 gained about 2.6% for August, defying the seasonally weak month.

• The 10-year Treasury yield closed near 4.73% and the 2-year finished around 4.34%.

Economic Data

• A busy labor-data week ahead: July JOLTS today, ADP Wednesday, and August nonfarm payrolls Friday, expected at 65,000 with unemployment at 4.2%.

• September rate-hike odds rose to about 65%, up from roughly 35% before Warsh's Friday remarks.

• Asian markets were mixed overnight and European markets traded mostly lower.

Movers & Shakers

• (+) Tesla ($TSLA) +6% after investors made sense of anticipated announcements, including a pothole avoidance feature.

• (–) Pinterest ($PINS) -6% because the social media platform disclosed that CFO Julia Brau Donnelly will leave at the end of October.

• (–) Aon ($AON) -10% after the insurance brokerage agreed to pay private equity firm KKR $17 billion for USI Insurance Services.

Prediction Markets

• Traders are forecasting continued economic expansion with the ISM manufacturing numbers coming out today.

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

Private Dealmaking

• KKR agreed to sell USI, an insurance brokerage, to Aon for around $17 billion

• SLB agreed to acquire Kelvion, a German provider of thermal management and heat exchange tech, from Apollo and Triton for $3.4 billion

• Ausperbio, a biotech focused on chronic hepatitis B, raised $120 million

• Hopscotch Primary Care, a primary care provider for rural communities, raised $53 million

• Gallos Technology, a U.K. defense-tech investor and incubator, raised $50 million

• Deep Cognito, a developer of hybrid reasoning models, raised $43 million

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

BOOK OF THE DAY

The Price of Becoming

Description:
Ryan Hawk explores what it actually takes to become an exceptional performer over the long term. Rather than focusing on shortcuts or motivational bursts, the book examines the daily practices, habits, discipline, and sacrifices that compound into extraordinary results. Hawk draws on conversations and lessons from high-performing leaders, athletes, and entrepreneurs to show how deliberate practice, consistency, self-awareness, and a willingness to endure discomfort can fundamentally change a person's trajectory.

Book Length: 288 pages
Release Date: October 6, 2026

Ideal For:
Entrepreneurs, executives, athletes, and ambitious professionals who want to understand the behaviors and habits that create sustained high performance.

Extraordinary performance isn't built in a single moment, it is the result of ordinary practices repeated long enough to compound.

DAILY VISUAL

Software Stocks Make a Comeback

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DAILY ACUMEN

Pattern Illusion

Show people a truly random sequence of coin flips and ask them to spot the pattern, and they will find one every time, a run that looks meaningful, a rhythm that seems to repeat. The pattern is not there. The brain evolved to find signal in noise because missing a real pattern was historically far more costly than imagining a fake one.

This is a serious liability in markets, where enormous amounts of genuinely random price movement get stared at by people whose brains are built to insist a shape is hiding in it. Technical patterns get traded with total conviction, some of which is real signal and a great deal of which is the same mechanism that finds a face in a cloud.

The discipline is asking whether a pattern would survive being shown as pure random data with the labels removed. If the shape only looks meaningful once you already believe it is meaningful, it probably is not.

ENLIGHTENMENT

Short Squeez Picks

• Have the benefits of intermittent fasting been overhyped?

• Why capitalism feels unfair to Gen-Z

• Why doing your job well isn’t always enough

• Can keeping a journal make you happier?

• How to develop a game-changing worldview

MEME-A-PALOOZA

Memes of the Day

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