Good morning! HSBC is phasing out fixed-pay allowances for senior staff and shifting more compensation into bonuses. Starbucks says it’s not buying Chipotle after takeover speculation. And fast-growing Clio yogurt bars was snapped up by private equity firm Stride Consumer Partners.

McKinsey removed partner Chris Bradley from his leadership role at the McKinsey Global Institute after he posted comments questioning the challenges female executives face. And Bumble, once valued at more than $14 billion, is in advanced talks to go private at a $1 billion valuation.

Plus: Intel and Broadcom’s CEOs warn a capital crunch could become AI’s biggest bottleneck, Getty Images will file for bankruptcy and go private in a deal with Koch, and 5 ways to read the room like a pro.

Petrarch is building a new asset class around a company’s operational data. If you are in private credit or distressed assets, set up a call with their executive team here.

Meta has spent billions in the AI arms race over the past couple years, spending big to recruit AI researchers, build data centers, and try and go toe-to-toe with the top players in the space. And now Mark Zuckerberg says Meta has finally caught up in AI. 

Meta launched Muse Wonder yesterday, its newest AI model and the successor to Muse Spark, and says it has reached the “AI frontier,” which basically means the leading edge of what the most capable models can do.

The company claims Wonder can compete with OpenAI and Anthropic’s top models in coding, reasoning, and complex financial and legal work, and beats them on some benchmarks. Independent testing still has to confirm that, but if it holds up, Meta becomes a real alternative for customers choosing between ChatGPT and Claude, and investors finally get something concrete to show for Zuckerberg’s spending.

After Llama 4 disappointed last year, Zuckerberg overhauled Meta’s AI operation, brought in Alexandr Wang through a ~$14B investment in Scale AI, and put him in charge of a new Superintelligence Labs team. That group scrapped Llama and rebuilt Meta’s AI from scratch, launching Muse Spark in April and an upgraded version in July. Unlike Llama, which Meta gave away for free, the Muse models are closed, and Wonder is the most powerful one yet.

It also changes how Meta makes money from AI. It will sell its best versions directly to businesses, competing for corporate AI budgets, with a premium tier, Muse Wonder Full, priced at $200 a month.

On the consumer side, Wonder will power the paid version of Muse, Meta’s personal AI assistant, which has strong momentum. Muse hit #1 on the App Store after launching in September, and some analysts called it the biggest US app launch since ChatGPT. Meta says it now has 6.6M downloads and 1.8M daily users.

Takeaway: Meta is trying to turn an expensive catch-up effort into a paid AI business. If Wonder holds up under outside testing, OpenAI and Anthropic get another deep-pocketed competitor. The harder part is getting people to use it, pay for it, and keep coming back. Muse shows Meta can get people in the door, at least for now. Zuckerberg already spent billions chasing the metaverse; this time, he needs the future to actually show up.

Spirit Airlines stopped flying in May, but they are still hitting news cycles for the value of their operational data. Google bid $10 million for the airline’s internal files, and a startup, Micro1, put in a higher, post-auction bid at $12.5 million. A judge will decide both the buyer and what the buyer in the near future.

The coveted prize is their ordinary record of running a business: years of emails, spreadsheets, and operating files that don’t ever appear on the balance sheet. Almost no company can sell that, because raw files are full of names, addresses, faces, and logos that expose the people in them and the business that made them.

Credit and PE firms are enlisting Petrarch as their partner in distressed assets. They strip out everything traceable and leave the operational knowledge behind, so records that were a liability walk out the door as an asset that pays.

Book some time with them this week to learn more. 

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Description:
Description: Bradley C. Birkenfeld offers a firsthand account of the secretive world of Swiss private banking and the international scandal that helped dismantle its culture of secrecy. A former UBS banker, Birkenfeld describes how wealthy American clients used offshore accounts to conceal assets from U.S. tax authorities and how Swiss banking institutions facilitated these arrangements. He recounts his decision to expose the practices, the personal and professional consequences of becoming a whistleblower, and the legal battles that followed. His revelations helped trigger a major U.S. investigation into UBS and contributed to a broader international crackdown on offshore tax evasion. The story also explores the complicated relationship between whistleblowers, financial regulators, and the institutions they expose, raising questions about accountability, incentives, and the price of challenging powerful organizations.

Book Length: 352 pages
Release Date: September 30, 2020

Ideal For: Investors, bankers, compliance professionals, tax specialists, and readers interested in financial crime, offshore banking, whistleblowing, and the intersection of money and government. It's particularly relevant for anyone interested in how regulatory failures and incentives can allow misconduct to persist inside respected financial institutions.

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Benjamin Franklin had a rival in the Pennsylvania legislature who disliked him. Instead of doing the man a favor, Franklin asked for one. He wrote to borrow a rare book from the man’s library, returned it a week later with a note of thanks, and the two became friends for life.

A 1969 experiment found the same thing. Participants who were asked to return their prize money as a personal favor rated the experimenter as more likeable than those who were not asked. Psychologists explain it as dissonance: you helped him, so you must like him.

Keep the ask small, easy, and genuine, like a piece of advice or a short introduction. A big ask just makes you the person who wants something.

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