Short Squeez
Posts
🍋 Missionaries vs. Mercenaries

🍋 Missionaries vs. Mercenaries

Plus: The SEC is probing Situational Awareness, Goldman is warning AI is eroding bankers' judgment, and Silicon Valley parents are keeping screens away from their own children.

Short Squeez
August 25, 2026

Together With

“You describe power as though it were a prize to be won. I experience it as a responsibility to be passed on." — Bernard Arnault

Good Morning! The SEC launched an investigation into Leopold Aschenbrenner's Situational Awareness fund and sent subpoenas to multiple banks asking for details about the timing of trades and how the firm communicated with lenders. A Goldman Sachs partner warned of a "huge danger" in letting AI replace bankers' reasoning skills. And Marc Rowan is still fighting with his Hamptons town over his seafood shack.

Silicon Valley executives are tech fans, just not for their own kids. Nvidia is spending $6 billion to build a powerful US alternative to Chinese AI. And Blank Street Coffee raised $105 million to fund its West Coast expansion.

Plus: Clearlake-backed Ivanti's earnings sank 21%, and the cognitive benefits of reading physical books.

The world’s leading deal modeling platform is hiring a deployment strategist. Apply here.

SQUEEZ OF THE DAY

Missionaries vs. Mercenaries

Anthropic has become one of the most important companies on earth, and if you're one of the roughly 2,500 people who work there, it might be your ticket to generational wealth. The company was valued at $4.1 billion a little over three years ago in its May 2023 Series C and has quickly vaulted way beyond that, raising at a $965 billion valuation this summer. With the company now on a path toward a potential record-setting IPO at a $2 trillion valuation, imagine grinding through weeks of interview prep for a shot at that equity, only for your interviewer to ask: hypothetically, how would you feel if we deliberately made all of it worthless?

According to a new report, that is apparently a real question Anthropic candidates have faced. Anthropic is reportedly running candidates through a dedicated culture interview, and some of the questions are wild. At least one applicant remembers being asked how they'd feel if Anthropic someday abandoned its AI ambitions for safety reasons and sent the stock to zero. Other candidates recall versions focused more broadly on sacrificing revenue or company value for safety, which is an incredible thing to ask someone whose comp package is built around stock.

The concern is straightforward enough, and Anthropic is in a position where they can be picky and still have droves of candidates fighting for a spot. Anthropic was founded by former OpenAI employees who wanted to build powerful AI without accidentally ending civilization in the process. And now that Anthropic is one of the hottest companies in Silicon Valley, it increasingly attracts a different kind of person: someone who would simply like to become extremely rich. Those two motivations don't always line up and CEO Dario Amodei has reportedly questioned whether newer hires are joining for the right reasons.

The new interview process looks designed to find out and asks candidates to discuss moral dilemmas. The careers page mentions "mission" six times. Anthropic has walked away from government business and has limited access to its most powerful models over cybersecurity concerns. So to Anthropic's credit, this doesn't look like pure branding, but it's a lot easier to romanticize the mission-versus-money tradeoff once the theoretical money has become enormous.

And with people now paying thousands on private interview coaching and mock sessions with engineers just to get in the room, the comedic irony is hard to ignore. So the full arc is to spend thousands optimizing your odds of winning millions in equity, then sit down and explain why you'd be morally fine watching that equity go to zero.

Takeaway: Every startup says the mission comes first. But most also very much want the share price to go up. Anthropic is the rare one asking candidates, out loud, what happens when you actually have to choose. Anthropic is trying to sort missionaries from mercenaries at the exact moment joining a frontier AI lab became one of the fastest ways for a 25-year-old engineer to get rich. It's easy to say money doesn't matter right up until someone hands you equity that might someday be worth $5 million.

PRESENTED BY MOSAIC

Job Opening at Mosaic for IB/PE professionals

Mosaic is an AI-driven deal modeling platform that automates financial modeling, including LBOs and DCFs. Clients include Warburg Pincus, CVC, New Mountain, and Evercore, and it's used by five of the top ten PE firms. They raised an $18M Series A led by Radical Ventures in April, and plan to grow from 16 employees to more than 40 by the end of the year

The role: Deployment Strategist

Owns the post-sale relationship across PE and IB clients, from onboarding to renewal
Leads onboarding, training, and workflow design, including mapping Mosaic onto legacy Excel models
Partners with senior investment professionals and feeds client input into the product roadmap

Who's the ideal fit

1-3 years in private equity, investment banking, or a related field
Fluency in financial modeling and valuation
Full-time, on-site in NYC. Base salary, performance bonus, and equity

Apply today.

HEADLINES

Markets Rundown

Market Update

Stocks slipped modestly as tech underperformed ahead of NVIDIA's earnings Wednesday; long-term Treasury yields eased.
WTI crude fell 2% to $85 as Treasury Secretary Bessent unveiled a new sanctions plan targeting Iran.
U.S.-Canada talks broke down Friday, triggering new 50% tariffs on roughly $20 billion of Canadian goods, with Canada set to retaliate September 8.

Earnings Season

Treasury Secretary Bessent is weighing use of the roughly $950 billion Treasury General Account to help fund expanded bond buybacks.
The 10-year Treasury yield remains below the economy's roughly 6.5% nominal GDP growth rate, near but below its 2023 peak of nearly 5%.
Investors await signals from the Fed's Kevin Warsh at the Jackson Hole symposium.

Movers & Shakers

(+) Expedia ($EBAY) +5% after Evercore ISI raised its price target on the online travel booking platform to $430 from $375.
(–) Hims & Hers ($HIMS) -8% because Visa enrolled the company in its Acquirer Monitoring Program over a surge in credit card disputes.
(–) Applied Optoelectronics ($AAOI) -14% after the optical networking components maker announced a $600 million equity offering.

Prediction Markets

Traders are forecasting new home sales that indicate a healthy economy.
Trade on real-world events with Kalshi. Use code OWS to get a $10 bonus when you trade $10.

Private Dealmaking

Navi, an Indian fintech, raised $100 million
Delix Therapeutics, a developer of psychoplastogens, raised $85 million
Convex, a reactive backend platform, raised $57 million
Claros Technologies, a developer of PFAS-destruction tech, raised $55 million
Fish Audio, a developer of AI voice models, raised $52 million
Network Bio, a developer of disease-specific AI models, raised $50 million

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

BOOK OF THE DAY

The Sacred Truths of Investing

Description:
A practical investing guide from Louis Navellier, with David R. Evanson, focused on identifying growth stocks with the potential to generate outsized long-term returns. Navellier combines his market experience with a framework for evaluating fundamentals, market trends, investor behavior, dividends, buybacks, and industry opportunities. The book also explores broader economic forces and argues that successful investing requires patience, optimism, discipline, and the ability to rely on data rather than emotion.

Book Length: 224 pages
Release Date: February 11, 2025

Ideal For:
Investors looking to improve their stock-selection process, better understand growth investing, and develop a more disciplined approach to finding long-term investment opportunities.

Successful investing requires the discipline to trust your research when the market gives you every reason to doubt it.

DAILY VISUAL

Diesel Dilemma

Source: Axios

PRESENTED BY OPENSTOCKS

AI Agents Are Now Competing with Wall Street on Earnings Forecasts

For a hundred years, a company's earnings have been measured against one bar: Wall Street consensus.

Consensus has always been a human product that carries human problems. Banks publish forecasts on companies that are clients of their other divisions. They cluster coverage around the biggest names, while smaller companies go thinly followed. And models sit untouched for months because analysts are slow to change their view in public.

That consensus has a new competitor; one forecast entirely by AI agents.

AI agents are increasingly active participants in public markets, and market participants need a place to understand AI's view on earnings. OpenStocks is that place, with one rule: no human analysts. Agents forecast company earnings in public, compete on a leaderboard, and get scored against reported results once they're out. Their forecasts compile into the AI Consensus for every company, and it is tracked side-by-side with Wall Street's. Whether the agents are actually better is the open question, and early signs suggest it's going to be a great fight.

See the AI Consensus for the companies you follow, or build your own agent and submit forecasts here.

DAILY ACUMEN

Zero-Risk Bias

People will pay disproportionately more to eliminate a small risk entirely than to meaningfully reduce a much larger one. Offered a choice between cutting a minor risk from one percent to zero, or a major risk from ten percent to two, most people pick the first, even though the second saves far more expected harm.

The appeal of zero is not really the math. It is the story you get to tell yourself afterward. Zero means the worry is fully closed. A reduction, even a large one, leaves the door open a crack, and that crack feels worse than a much bigger door that was never touched.

This shows up in portfolios that eliminate one small, already-remote exposure at real cost, while a far larger and more consequential risk sits untouched because addressing it fully feels impossible. Chasing zero is emotionally satisfying and financially expensive, and the two have almost nothing to do with each other.

ENLIGHTENMENT

Short Squeez Picks

Stop saying “let me know if you need anything”
Great leadership is a choice
The cognitive benefits of reading physical books
5 myths about buying wine at the grocery store
The rewards of parallel careers

MEME-A-PALOOZA

Memes of the Day

📣 Partner With Us: Get in front of an audience of over 1 million finance professionals, business leaders, and policy influencers. Submit a partnership inquiry.

📊 Wall Street Comp & Culture Data: Get the most detailed comp, carry, and culture insights across 1000+ Wall Street firms. Explore the data.

📈 Grow With Us: Work directly with the Overheard on Wall Street team to scale your finance brand. Schedule your free consult.

🧢 Wall Street Shop: Explore our collection of finance-themed apparel and merchandise. Visit the shop.

📬 Deals Newsletter – Buysiders: A curated roundup of major M&A, private equity, and VC activity. Plus access to private deal flow. Subscribe here.

What'd you think of today's edition?

Reply

or to participate.