Good Morning! Apollo agreed to buy UK airline EasyJet in a $7.7 billion deal after Castlelake withdrew its bid. Leopold Aschenbrenner made a $400 million investment in a privately held company just a week after his hedge fund Situational Awareness nearly blew up. And Jamie Dimon warned of high leverage in the market, saying somebody will eventually disrupt it.

BlackRock's troubled TCP sold $523 million of loans to Pantheon. SoftBank got an $8.2 billion boost from Intel as OpenAI takes a backseat. And mortgage rates hit their highest levels in over a year.

Plus: FS KKR's losses are narrowing as moves to stabilize the credit fund take hold, and the money regrets of eight CEOs and founders.

Modernize your LBO modeling the same way as largest firms on Wall Street with Mosaic. Demo their platform today.

SQUEEZ OF THE DAY

Millennium Hires Claude

Hedge funds are always looking for their next edge, and the latest alpha might be going all-in and hiring Claude as the latest analyst. Millennium Management is reportedly teaming up with Anthropic and building an AI risk analyst. And this won’t just be AI integrated into vanilla hedge fund operations; Claude will be touching one of the most complicated hedge fund operations on the planet. 

Anthropic’s engineers will work alongside Millennium’s own tech and risk teams and build a tool that will scan positions across every asset class. The tool will also flag emerging risks and help human managers make faster calls. So Millennium isn’t just asking Claude to pick stocks or run a portfolio; it wants the model policing the hundreds of traders who are already placing bets across the firm.

There are definitely barriers to rolling out an AI tool that will work at this scale. Millennium is a $92 billion fund and runs more than 340 separate investment teams. Each team at Millennium has its own strategy, risk limits, leverage and targets. The central risk desk has to know not just what every team owns, but whether trades that look totally unrelated are secretly exposed to the same market move. And Millennium wants to shift the central risk desk’s job to Claude’s and is hoping the AI tool can sort through mountains of data and catch the connections a human analyst might miss.

This isn’t Millennium’s first move with AI, either. Claude and Claude Code are already rolled out across the firm, and employees use them to write software and speed up workflows. The firm also stood up an AI lab recently to test new models early and work directly with companies like Anthropic. So this isn’t a one-off experiment; it’s more like the next step, and it’s landing in one of the most important parts of the whole multi-strat model.

The news comes right after Millennium dropped 2.1% in July during a rough stretch for AI and semiconductor stocks, leaving the fund up 8.2% for the year through July. Not a disaster by any measure, but the fund trailed behind rival Citadel, and it’s a good reminder that even a fund this diversified can get caught off guard by how fast correlations show up once markets start moving.

Takeaway: The appeal is pretty obvious to risk managers who spend their days chasing down questions like why exposure shifted overnight, what’s actually driving a loss, or whether three or four teams have unknowingly piled into the same trade without realizing it. A system that can chew through proprietary data, remember past conversations, and explain how risk is evolving in real time could make all of that faster and a lot more thorough.

PRESENTED BY MOSAIC

Anthropic and Apollo Discuss the State of AI in PE

Anthropic recently hosted a session for private markets deal teams called “Claude for Investing Teams,” featuring Apollo walking through how their firm uses AI day to day. 95% of PE funds report AI initiatives meeting or exceeding original business goals, according to FTI’s 2026 Private Equity AI Radar cited in the session.

Apollo’s own rollout started small: an AI chat pilot in March that scaled firm-wide within two weeks, then expanded into automated research briefings, spreadsheet modeling, and reporting. Apollo now relies on tools, like Mosaic, to automate its LBOs with a standardized workflow.

Mosaic is used for LBO screening, citing the platform’s built-in workflows rather than building that capability in-house.

The takeaway from the session: firms are drawing a hard line between what they build in-house (proprietary data, judgment, strategy) and what they buy off the shelf for high-volume, repeatable workflows.

Explore how Mosaic can scale your firm’s capabilities.

HEADLINES

Top Reads

• Apollo agrees to buy UK airline EasyJet in $7.7 billion deal as Castlelake withdraws (CNBC)

• Situational Awareness returns to investing with $400 million bet (BB)

• JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon warns of high leverage: ‘Somebody will disrupt the market’ (CNBC)

• BlackRock’s troubled TCP sells $523 million of loans to Pantheon (BB)

• SoftBank gets $8.2 billion boost from Intel as OpenAI takes a backseat (CNBC)

• Mortgage rates hit highest levels in over a year (Yahoo Finance)

• FS KKR losses narrow as moves to stabilize credit fund take hold (BB)

• Deutsche freezes Radiant World funds as miners move to cut ties (BB)

• Defense startup Hadrian valued at $7.87 billion in new round (BB)

• The SpaceX IPO investors who were left holding the bag (WSJ)

• Family offices back clean energy and sustainability startups in July as dealmaking holds steady (CNBC)

• The vulture capital capital: Inside private equity’s takeover of Hartford, Connecticut (Fast Company)

• Bain Capital’s co-head of global private equity set to retire (PENews)

CAPITAL PULSE

Markets Rundown

Market Update

• The S&P 500 slipped 0.2% as markets awaited Friday's payrolls report; WTI crude rose about 3.6% on unclear Strait of Hormuz agreement details.

• The 10-year Treasury yield edged up near 4.66% and the 2-year rose to about 4.25%.

• Initial jobless claims held low at 199,000, and Q2 labor productivity rose 1.4%, above the 0.7% estimate.

Earnings Season

• ADP showed 44,000 jobs added in July, down from a revised 95,000 in June.

• The Challenger Job-Cut Report showed announced layoffs fell to 33,429 in July, the lowest in two years.

• ISM manufacturing employment hit its highest level since August 2022, while ISM services employment fell into contraction.

Movers & Shakers

• (+) Versant Media Group ($VSNT) +7% after reporting Q2 revenue growth in its platforms business.

• (–) AppLovin ($APP) -20% because Q3 adjusted EBITDA guidance of $1.71–$1.74 billion missed the $1.75 billion consensus.

• (–) United Wholesale Mortgage ($UWMC) -35% after posting a $452 million net loss and suspending its dividend for the first time ever.

Prediction Markets

• Traders are predicting with high certainty that Gemini 3.5 Pro releases in August.

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

Private Dealmaking

• Hadrian, a defense manufacturer, raised $1.37 billion

• Iceye, a Finnish satellite observation provider, raised around $1.1 billion

• Pathos AI, an AI drug developer, is raising up to $300 million

• LifeMine Therapeutics, an immunosuppressant developer, raised $263 million

• Moove, a UAE-based autonomous mobility startup, raised $250 million

• Xylem is paying $200 million to buy WaterFleet, a provider of mobile water and wastewater utility services

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

BOOK OF THE DAY

Training Camp

Description:
A leadership fable from Jon Gordon that reveals the mindset and habits separating elite performers from everyone else. Through the story of an overlooked rookie football player fighting to earn his place in the NFL, Gordon shares practical lessons on mental toughness, discipline, purpose, and continuous improvement. Blending sports, leadership, and personal development, the book demonstrates that lasting success is built through consistent daily habits, resilience in the face of adversity, and an unwavering commitment to excellence.

Book Length: 176 pages
Release Date: May 18, 2009

Ideal For:
Leaders, athletes, entrepreneurs, sales professionals, and anyone striving to develop the mindset and habits of top performers.

Champions aren't defined by talent alone, they separate themselves through the choices they make when no one is watching.

DAILY VISUAL

The AI Capex Boom = 3% of GDP Every Year

PRESENTED BY BLUEFLAME AI

12 AI Use Cases for Junior Investment Bankers

1. Coverage and relationship management

2. Pitch book development

3. Deal kick-off and workspace setup

4. Financial Modeling

5. Equity story and CIM development

6. Buyer identification and process preparation

7. Buyer outreach and process management

8. Due diligence and VDRs

9. Bid evaluation and negotiation

10. Quality control and document review

11. Legal and regulatory workstreams

12. Closing and deal administration

For more knowledge into how private markets use AI, follow Blueflame’s Instagram. And to try it out yourself, schedule a demo with their team.

DAILY ACUMEN

Cheap Bubbles

A bubble doesn't always look expensive. Sometimes it looks cheap.

One of the most counterintuitive lessons in investing is that the lowest P/E ratios can appear at the peak of a cycle. Why? Because earnings, not valuations, are temporarily inflated.

That's what made many banks look attractive before the 2008 financial crisis. They weren't trading at extreme multiples; they were trading on peak earnings that ultimately proved unsustainable.

Some investors argue today's AI infrastructure buildout shares that characteristic. Their concern isn't that Nvidia or the hyperscalers trade at outrageous valuations, but that current earnings may be flattered by extraordinary capital spending, optimistic accounting assumptions, and an investment cycle that may not persist indefinitely.

Whether that bearish view proves correct remains to be seen. But the broader investing lesson is timeless: a low multiple isn't automatically a bargain. Sometimes the real question isn't "How cheap is the stock?" but "How durable are the earnings?"

ENLIGHTENMENT

Short Squeez Picks

• The money regrets of 8 CEOs

• How to talk to anyone and why you should

• Are heavy weights or high reps better?

• The no. 1 question that makes me want to hire someone on the spot

• Why recovery has become non-negotiable for modern leadership

MEME-A-PALOOZA

Memes of the Day

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