Good Morning! Advent and Stripe pulled the plug on their take-private pursuit of PayPal, walking away from what could have been one of the biggest LBOs of all time at more than $50 billion. Citadel posted a record $7.3 billion in trading revenue in Q2. And Authentic Brands Group acquired a 51% stake in the intellectual property of Drake's streetwear brand, October's Very Own (OVO).

OpenAI is launching a second VC fund, raising $400 million to invest in early-stage AI companies. Truist and Fifth Third paused sales tied to Mark Walter's biggest insurer amid a US probe of his business empire. And Nvidia insists it can keep printing money to fund the AI boom.

Plus: How PE drove an apartment complex into the ground, KKR is nearing a $17 billion sale of insurance brokerage USI, and the NFL general manager who built a dynasty by investing like Warren Buffett.

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SQUEEZ OF THE DAY

The Next Ozempic?

If you were an investor betting a few years ago that people would pay almost anything to lose weight, you'd have made a fortune. Eli Lilly rode GLP-1s to a $1 trillion valuation. Wall Street is now hunting for the next giant cash-pay pharmaceutical market, and you don't have to look much further than the nearest investment banker's receding hairline to find it.

Pattern hair loss isn't contained to burned-out 30-somethings in finance. Roughly 50 million men and 30 million women in the U.S. deal with it, and there hasn't been a new approved treatment since the late 1990s.

The existing options aren't great: minoxidil can cause heart palpitations, and finasteride can tank your sex drive. Transplants cost thousands of dollars and have become enough of an industry that American men routinely fly to Turkey to get one done.

The baldness industry is starting to look like a pretty attractive total addressable market, and investors have already piled in.

Veradermics, which developed an oral minoxidil that could be the first treatment ever approved specifically for female-pattern hair loss, is up nearly 500% since going public in February.

Absci, whose AI-designed injection is still in early testing, has more than doubled this year. Cosmo is developing a topical called clascoterone that blocks the hormone behind male-pattern loss directly at the follicle, could win FDA approval in early 2027, and has Jefferies modeling $3 billion in eventual global sales.

Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk proved that when pharma solves a problem millions of people care deeply about, the market gets enormous fast. Lilly crossed $1 trillion in market value largely on the back of its obesity franchise. And while hair loss isn't obesity, and no insurer is going to cover a $500-a-month baldness drug as a public health necessity, that might matter less than you'd think. Hair restoration is already a massive out-of-pocket market

There's also room here for more than one winner, which is unusual in pharma. Most drug markets are zero-sum, because a better treatment simply replaces the old one. But hair loss doesn't work that way, and people already stack a pill, a topical, and whatever else they think might help, all at once. In a market like this, the constraint isn't insurance formularies; it's just how much someone is willing to spend to keep their hair.

Takeaway: Nobody knows yet which of these drugs actually work, and early-stage biotech up 500% is priced for a lot of things going right. But with tens of millions of potential customers, mediocre incumbents, no approvals in nearly 30 years, and a population that has already proven it will pay, this market won't likely stay small for long.

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HEADLINES

Top Reads

• ABG's Drake sells OVO lifestyle brand to Authentic Brands Group (Hollywood Reporter)

• Advent, Stripe consortium is said to drop pursuit of PayPal (BB)

• Citadel Securities notches record $7.3 billion trading haul (BB)

• OpenAI is the sole investor in its latest venture fund (WSJ)

• Mark Walter's biggest insurer sees banks pause sales amid probe (BB)

• Nvidia insists it can keep printing money to fund the AI boom (WSJ)

• How a private equity group drove an apartment complex into the ground (NYT)

• Retail advisers ditching private assets as workload outstrips fees (BB)

• Aon nears roughly $17 billion deal for insurance brokerage USI (WSJ)

• The NFL general manager who built a dynasty by investing like Warren Buffett  (WSJ)

• Chevron, other U.S. firms near deal to invest billions in Venezuelan oil fields (WSJ)

• Rivian's CFO is leaving the company (TechCrunch)

• August apartment rents turn positive for the first time in four years (CNBC)

• Anthropic pushes into physical world with new standard to help AI agents operate machines (CNBC)

• Fed chairman Warsh warns on inflation at Jackson Hole (CNBC)

• Y'all Street and the Texas Stock Exchange won't mess with Wall Street (BB)

• Trump's corporate donors defect ahead of midterms (WSJ)

• What a 125-year-old bull market says about today's trading craze (WSJ)

• Apple TV+ raises prices to $12.99 a month in the US (CNBC)

• CVC-backed home insurance company Bamboo files for US IPO (BB)

• Pharma industry stares down biggest patent cliff in decades (WSJ)

• Guggenheim stain piles onto biggest junk laggard (BB)

• Glencore took $480 million provision on Radiant World exposure (BB)

• Most insurers invest for the long haul, Mark Walter’s did the opposite (WSJ)

• Blackstone to sell up to $1.25 billion stake in Knowledge Realty Trust (BB)

• Personal assistants are suddenly venture capital's new obsession, and one startup is closing in on a $1 billion valuation (Inc.)

• Syracuse University faces enrollment crisis threatening budget (WSJ)

CAPITAL PULSE

Markets Rundown

Market Update

• Stocks edged lower as Fed Chair Warsh's hawkish remarks at Jackson Hole pushed the 2-year Treasury yield to 4.35% and the 10-year to 4.72%.

• September rate-hike odds jumped to about 55% from roughly 35% following the remarks.

• WTI crude closed near $83; Asian markets were mixed and European markets mostly higher.

Economic Data

• The S&P 500 is up more than 3% for August, a strong showing in a seasonally weak month.

• Warsh reaffirmed 2% PCE inflation as the Fed's "firm and fixed" target, with inflation still above objective across measures.

• Since 1970, August and September have averaged 0.16% and -0.82% returns, versus 0.96% for other months.

Movers & Shakers

• (+) Gap ($GAP) +13% after the apparel retailer named industry veteran Michael Francis as the new CEO of Old Navy.

• (–) Marvell Technology ($MRVL) -10% because revenue from the Google deal is delayed until 2029.

• (–) PayPal ($PYPL) -13% after the digital payments company’s would-be acquirers, Advent and Stripe, abandoned the buyout deal.

Prediction Markets

• After Warsh’s hawkish remarks in Jackson Hole on Friday, chances of a 25bps rate hike are up.

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

Private Dealmaking

• Ajaib, an Indonesian online stock trading platform, raised $270 million

• Owner, an AI platform for restaurants and small businesses, raised $240 million

• Cyclic Materials, a Canadian rare-earths recycler, raised $75 million

• RQD, a clearing and custody firm, raised $74 million

• Wrtn, a South Korean AI services platform, raised around $72 million

• Fasset, a stablecoin neobanking platform, raised $68 million

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

BOOK OF THE DAY

Wrong Number

Description:
A practical guide from Aaron Brown on becoming harder to fool in a world increasingly dominated by numbers. Brown examines how statistics, financial models, charts, algorithms, polls, and other quantitative claims can be manipulated—or simply misunderstood—to create misleading conclusions. Drawing on his background in finance and quantitative analysis, he provides a framework for distinguishing meaningful information from numerical noise and recognizing when seemingly precise numbers are actually telling the wrong story.

Book Length: 288 pages
Release Date: September 1, 2026

Ideal For:
Investors, executives, entrepreneurs, analysts, and anyone who regularly makes decisions based on financial, economic, or statistical information.

Numbers can look precise while telling you almost nothing.

DAILY VISUAL

Yemeni-American Coffee Shop Boom

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More than 80,000 readers rely on Semafor Business for insightful reporting on the companies, power players, and deals shaping the financial world. Get sharp, timely analysis from Liz Hoffman — one of Wall Street’s best-sourced reporters — delivered to your inbox twice weekly. Subscribe for free.

DAILY ACUMEN

Focusing Illusion

Nothing in your life is as important as it feels while you happen to be thinking about it. This single sentence from Daniel Kahneman summarizes an entire category of misjudgment. Ask someone how a factor like income affects overall happiness, and simply asking the question inflates its importance in their answer far beyond its actual weight in daily life.

This distorts career decisions constantly. The comp number under negotiation feels, in that moment, like the single variable that determines satisfaction for years. In practice its influence fades within months, while other factors nobody focused on, the manager, the commute, the daily texture of the work, quietly do most of the real work on how the job actually feels.

The correction is deliberately widening the frame before a big decision. Whatever you are staring at right now is, by definition, larger in your mind than it deserves to be.

ENLIGHTENMENT

Short Squeez Picks

• Rewriting the playbook for early career success

• Is Garmin’s answer to Whoop worth it?

• Why are sleep, exercise, and diet vital for sleep?

• How dogs try and read our emotions

• What happens when we stop reading?

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