New look, who dis?

In all seriousness, we’ve been working on a brand refresh to match the quality of the content we’re producing. Our updated logo, a bull inside the lemon from our old logo, also strengthens our ties to our parent brand, Overheard on Wall Street. We went with a yellow and black theme and brought in more elements of old-school Wall Street. Let us know what you think by replying to this email.

Now, back to our regularly scheduled programming:

KKR is banning non-competes for lower-paid employees at its US portfolio companies. McKinsey says automation will affect 36 million jobs by 2035, with administrative work getting hit the hardest. And Blackstone raised ~$1 billion for a private credit continuation fund.

Ramp hit a $60 billion valuation in a $1.85 billion round. Private credit firms are eyeing BDCs as a rare growth shortcut. And co-investments and deal-by-deal investing now equal ~63% of PE fundraising totals as institutional investors bypass blind-pool funds.

Plus: Biotech IPOs are defying the broader slowdown, and what to do when there’s too much work.

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If you work on Wall Street, you’re probably sick of hearing about your higher-ups’ vacation trips. St. Barts feels exclusive until every partner at your PE firm goes there. And Antarctica sounds adventurous until the guy across from you at dinner tells you he’s been twice. The problem with buying exclusivity is that once everyone in your tax bracket can buy it too, the goalposts move.

So the new flex is paying to do something literally nobody else has done.

The ultra-wealthy are hiring expedition companies like Cookson Adventures and Eyos Expeditions to arrange bespoke “world firsts,” with prices ranging from ~$500,000 to dive an undiscovered shipwreck to $2.4 million-plus to attempt the first snowmobile crossing of Antarctica.

Past clients have e-foiled across a lake in Iceland, taken a helicopter from their yacht to camp on the edge of a remote volcano and heli-skied in Antarctica.

And they aren’t necessarily roughing it: Eyos brings “Michelin-caliber” chefs on most trips, while Cookson sets up remote camps with running hot water and good linens. Wall Street is already well represented. PE and VC executive Victor Vescovo summited Everest, then became the first person to reach the deepest point of all five oceans.

The economics make sense, because what the wealthy really want is something their peers can’t copy. Anyone can buy the same Ferrari, but no amount of money lets you be the second person to discover a shipwreck first. Once you have enough watches, cars and villas, each new purchase means less, but being first comes with permanent bragging rights.

Takeaway: The catch is that the bar keeps rising. Heli-skiing in the Alps one year leads to heli-skiing in Antarctica the next, and expedition companies now keep running lists of the “firsts” still left to claim. As Cookson’s managing director put it, “If they can tell the story at the dinner-party table and someone else can say, ‘Oh, I did that when I went to Antarctica,’ we haven’t really done our job.”

Coverage calls in London, a management meeting in Frankfurt, an LP update in Tokyo. Your week doesn't happen in one language, and now your notes don't have to either.

Granola, the AI notepad for people with back-to-back meetings, now supports 32 languages. Switch on multi-language mode once and Granola follows along, whether the call is in English, French, German or Japanese. You jot down what matters, Granola transcribes the meeting from your computer, then turns your notes into clear summaries, action items and next steps before your next call.

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Description:
Kevin Roose takes readers inside the high-stakes race to build artificial general intelligence, drawing on more than 150 interviews with insiders at OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind. He reconstructs the pivotal decisions, corporate rivalries, scientific breakthroughs, and internal conflicts that have shaped the modern AI industry. The book explores Sam Altman's dramatic removal and reinstatement at OpenAI, the disagreements that led Anthropic's founders to leave OpenAI, and Google's efforts to catch up in the race for increasingly powerful AI systems. Roose also examines the tension between AI leaders who believe these technologies could solve humanity's greatest problems and those who fear they could pose unprecedented risks. The result is an inside account of an industry where enormous financial incentives, competing visions of the future, and questions about humanity's control over technology collide.

Book Length: 448 pages
Release Date: October 6, 2026

Ideal For:
Technology executives, AI professionals, investors, entrepreneurs, policymakers, and anyone interested in artificial intelligence, the future of work, technological competition, and the risks and opportunities of superintelligent machines.

“The future of intelligence isn't inevitable. It's being shaped by the decisions people make today.”

There are now over 8,000 single family offices worldwide, up 31% in five years, and Deloitte projects 10,720 by 2030. “Single Family Offices” are private firms that exist to serve exactly one family.

Beyond picking investments, a family office’s real job is running the family balance sheet like a corporate treasury. Liquidity comes from credit, not sales. Real estate, tax bills, and new deals get funded by borrowing against the portfolio which allows it to continue compounding untouched. It’s why the ultra-wealthy rarely show up as sellers.

Stelrix brings that treasury function, in the form of an investment-backed credit card, to individual investors without the nine-figure minimum.

Learn more about how the wealthy spend through their Instagram and sign-up for their gold card waitlist today.

Daniel Kahneman once taught psychology to Israeli Air Force flight instructors. They told him that praising a cadet after an excellent landing was usually followed by a worse one, while shouting at a cadet after a poor landing was usually followed by improvement. Their conclusion was that criticism works and praise backfires.

Kahneman saw what they missed. An unusually good or bad performance is partly luck, and the next attempt tends to land closer to the cadet’s average whatever the instructor says.

The same mistake shows up in investing. The fund manager at the top of this year’s rankings has probably had some good luck, and next year’s results tend to be closer to the middle. Before crediting skill or blaming a change in strategy, ask how much of the extreme result was always going to fade.

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