Short Squeez
Posts
🍋 OpenAI Hits the Brakes

🍋 OpenAI Hits the Brakes

Plus: MongoDB got Zucked, Goldman is lining up John Waldron to succeed David Solomon, and Nvidia is buying back another $150B of shares.

Short Squeez
September 29, 2026

Together With

“All sorts of people came to me saying, ‘You have to stop DJing if you want to be the CEO of Goldman Sachs’” — David Solomon

Good morning! Nvidia authorized a record-breaking $150 billion share buyback. Goldman is discussing succession plans for David Solomon, with John Waldron lined up as CEO. And a former gay JPMorgan associate claims his manager warned "DEI is not going to save you" before the bank pushed him out.

Morgan Stanley officially picked Dallas for its new regional HQ and unveiled a $1.3 billion project that will bring 3,800 jobs. MongoDB shares fell nearly 20% after Meta poached its CEO to lead Meta Enterprise Platform. And Wall Street strategist David Zervos is joining the Trump administration as a senior adviser to Treasury Secretary Bessent.

Plus: Former Disney CEO Bob Chapek is building a new career in private equity after getting fired four years ago and says he loves his "drama-free" life, and why discipline is not the key to productivity.

Today’s newsletter is brought to you by F2, the agentic operating system for global credit. Golub Capital has selected F2 to power its next $100B in assets, bringing model-agnostic AI to one of private credit’s most prominent firms.

SQUEEZ OF THE DAY

OpenAI Hits the Brakes

OpenAI might be trying to become the most important company in the world. But getting there means walking a very fine line between what could eventually be one of the biggest IPOs ever and accidentally releasing a model it can’t fully control.

A couple of weeks ago, OpenAI ruled out going public in 2026, and Sam Altman blamed it on “everything happening with safety,” saying even a 10% risk of AI-driven human extinction would be unacceptable. And then yesterday, the company scrapped the planned October release of GPT-6.1 Astra after internal testing found the model was more deceptive than its predecessor and more willing to push ahead on tasks without asking permission.

And GPT-6.1 Astra was supposed to be really good. OpenAI planned to roll it out across ChatGPT and Codex in October, moving AI another step closer to AGI that could match or exceed human cognitive abilities. But the problem was that as Astra got better at acting on its own, it also got worse at knowing when to stop.

Yesterday Nvidia also debuted the Open Agent Safety Platform, which apparently quarantines agents that stray outside their boundaries "in milliseconds." Jensen Huang, who has dismissed extinction warnings as fearmongering, put it more diplomatically on X: "Safety is how trust is earned."

It’s unusual for a company to pause the rollout of its most powerful product while planning what will surely become one of the largest IPOs in history. But executives at both OpenAI and Anthropic are warning that labs probably need to slow the pace of model development. Earlier this summer, OpenAI agents ended up breaching Hugging Face, and last week the company paused training after an agent slipped through an internet restriction.

Takeaway: OpenAI's execs are in a tough spot, balancing both speed and existential AI threat. If they move too slowly, OpenAI could lose ground to Anthropic and other rivals. But if they move too fast, the company risks shipping systems its own engineers don't fully trust. What used to be a research problem is quickly becoming a governance and capital-markets problem too. Turns out the hardest part of building a trillion-dollar company is convincing everyone you can turn it off.

PRESENTED BY F2

Golub Capital Chose F2 to Power its Next $100B in Assets

Golub Capital is putting AI at the center of its next chapter. Its investment comes on top of it’s purchase and firm wide rollout of F2, and aims to secure a strategic advantage in agentic solutions for direct lending.

The partnership reflects three priorities for global credit:

Purpose-built AI: F2’s operating system handles the complex workflows of private markets and global credit.
AI sovereignty: F2’s adaptive, model-agnostic harness accesses the latest frontier and open-source models while protecting proprietary data through zero data retention and zero model training.
Unlocking trapped knowledge: F2’s top-bucket deal agent, Adam, acts as a senior MD from day one. He draws on precedent deals and captures future decisions, keeping the firm’s deal history in persistent, proprietary context.

Golub Capital’s investment and rollout mark a turning point for how large firms deploy agentic AI across sensitive, proprietary workflows.

Schedule a Demo with the F2 Team.

HEADLINES

Markets Rundown

Market Update

The S&P 500 fell 0.8% and the Russell 2000 fell 0.6% as Middle East diplomacy stalled; Nvidia jumped 2% on buyback headlines.
The 10-year Treasury yield rose 5 basis points to a new 20-year high.
Gold is down more than 7% in September as rising rates lift the dollar.

Economic Data

September payrolls are due this week, with consensus at 90,000 and unemployment expected to hold steady.
The Fed's preferred PCE inflation gauge is due as part of the August personal spending report, alongside consumer confidence and ISM manufacturing data.
Markets price close to a 70% chance of a 25 basis point Fed hike on October 28.

Middle East

President Trump reportedly rejected Iran's seven-day ceasefire proposal and plans to resume military action after the midterms.
Middle East crude exports are set to reach nearly 13 million barrels per day in September, the highest since the war started.
Rising Strait of Hormuz flows suggest Iran's blockade is becoming less effective, though exports remain 6 million barrels below pre-war levels.

Movers & Shakers

(+) Kodiak Sciences ($KOD) +178% after its pivotal Phase 3 DAYBREAK trial hit its primary endpoints.
(–) MongoDB ($MDB) -18% because CEO CJ Desai abruptly resigned to take a newly created Chief Enterprise Platform Officer role at Meta.
(–) Getty Images ($GETY) -40% after reports the stock-photo company is in confidential talks with lenders over rescue financing.
Prediction Markets

Robinhood hosts their HOOD Summit this week in Houston.
Trade on real-world events with Kalshi. Use code OWS to get a $10 bonus when you trade $10.

Private Dealmaking

Instinct, a developer of general-purpose AI agents, raised $1 billion
SiMa.ai, a physical AI startup, raised $150 million

Firecrawl, a library of official data for AI agents, raised $75 million
Moonwalk Biosciences, a developer of RNAi medicines for obesity and cardiometabolic diseases, raised $70 million
TwoStep Therapeutics, a cancer-focused biotech, raised $62.5 million
ARC, an enterprise device management platform for frontline retail workers, raised $60 million

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

BOOK OF THE DAY

Pyramid of Lies

Description:
Duncan Mavin tells the extraordinary story of Lex Greensill and the collapse of Greensill Capital, a fintech company that promised to revolutionize supply-chain finance. Greensill's rise brought him into the orbit of some of the world's biggest banks, corporations, investors, and political figures, including former British Prime Minister David Cameron. But behind the rapid growth was an increasingly risky financial structure involving questionable loans and enormous amounts of other people's money. Mavin, a financial journalist who helped expose the scandal, reconstructs how Greensill went from a relatively obscure Australian entrepreneur to a billionaire financier before the entire empire unraveled. The book provides a detailed look at shadow banking, financial incentives, political access, and how seemingly sophisticated financial businesses can conceal extraordinary risks.

Book Length: 352 pages
Release Date: October 21, 2022

Ideal For:
Investors, bankers, entrepreneurs, private equity professionals, finance executives, and readers interested in fintech, financial fraud, shadow banking, corporate collapses, and the intersection of business and politics.

“The most dangerous financial structures are often the ones that look safest while everything is still going up.”

DAILY VISUAL

Foreign Investors are Loving the U.S. Stock Market

PRESENTED BY UNIQUE AI

Meet Your AI Teammates for Wealth and Asset Management

Meet Remy, Casey, and Ivy, Unique AI’s teammates for wealth and asset management.

Each is powered by perpetual memory. Remy builds a “second brain” of client context for advisors, from onboarding to proposals. Casey holds the full case history for compliance, running KYC and Source of Wealth work and flagging risk early. Ivy remembers every investor interaction, turning past RFPs and DDQs into faster, more consistent responses.

The result: grow AUM, cut admin overhead, and improve win rate, retention, and oversight, all with data governance control.

Join Unique AI on Oct 6 in NYC for the live launch with Chief Product Officer Dana Ritter and the executive leadership team. Discover what agentic AI can do across every function at your firm, and connect with peers across wealth and asset management tackling the same questions. Register now.

Who you’ll meet: Unique AI’s leadership team won’t just be on stage, they’ll be in the room. Network with them alongside senior leaders across wealth and asset management, from COOs, CTOs and Heads of AI to the advisors, compliance officers and investor relations teams who’d use these tools every day.

DAILY ACUMEN

Margin of Safety

Benjamin Graham built an entire investing philosophy around one deceptively simple idea: never buy something at a price that only works out if your analysis is correct. Buy it at a price that still works out reasonably well even if you are somewhat wrong. The gap between what something is worth and what you pay for it is your margin of safety, and it is the only real protection anyone has against their own mistakes.

This matters because every analysis, no matter how careful, is built on assumptions that will turn out to be at least partly wrong. Growth rates come in lower than modeled. Competitors show up that weren't in the spreadsheet. A margin of safety is not a hedge against bad luck. It is an acknowledgment that your own judgment has an error bar, and a refusal to bet as if it doesn't.

The practical test is simple. If the only way your position makes money is for your specific view of the future to be exactly correct, you don't have an investment. You have a prediction with your capital attached to it, and predictions are wrong more often than anyone likes to admit.

ENLIGHTENMENT

Short Squeez Picks

4 30-second habits that could make you calmer
A 5-minute Wednesday habit that can save a bad week
How to explain something complicated
Discipline is not the key to productivity
Why reshaping memories might be key to self-esteem

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.