Good morning! Arctos says the number of active PE firms peaked 18 months ago and is now shrinking as managers who can’t raise their next fund turn into zombies. JPMorgan’s Park Avenue tower reportedly cost ~$6B, well over its $3–4B budget.

McKinsey, BCG and Bain are raising US starting pay for the first time since 2022, to $200K for MBAs and $120K for undergrads. Alphabet fell 10% after hours on an earnings miss. And TCU’s CIO says PE firms are getting more willing to mark down their holdings.

Plus: The brutal Harvard class everyone suddenly wants to take, why PE could land back in the political crosshairs if Democrats win, and Jamie Dimon says CEOs should be more like Ted Lasso.

Today's newsletter is brought to you by Leverage Shares by Themes which has 2x long and 2x short Anthropic ETFs. Stay up to date on the IPO and their funds.

When Lehman, Enron, WorldCom and GM went bankrupt, they all called Weil, Gotshal & Manges to sort out the wreckage. Now the firm that built its name on corporate collapses is shutting itself down. Leadership recommended an orderly wind-down on Wednesday, and for once, the restructuring work isn’t billable to someone else.

The strange part is that Weil isn’t broke. The firm reportedly has no debt, clients are still paying, and it brought in $2.1B in revenue last year with ~1,200 lawyers. Weil hasn’t run out of customers but apparently its running out of partners who bring them in.

That’s because law firms are basically fixed-cost businesses that run on a small group of rainmakers. Associates, staff, rent and overhead all stay put, but clients follow their partners, and a partner can leave with their book whenever they want. There’s little brand or IP holding a client in place, and since the partners are the equity, every exit takes a piece of the firm with it.

Weil was an easy place to poach from. Profits per equity partner were ~$5.6M last year, roughly half of what Kirkland and Wachtell pay, so rivals had plenty of room to offer more. Then the merger talks with Willkie fell apart, the firm’s incoming head walked away before she even started, and Weil stopped looking like a takeover target at all.

From there it worked like a bank run. Each departure shrank the profit pool for the partners left behind while their share of the fixed costs grew, and recruiters kept calling. Weil didn’t need everyone to think the firm was doomed. It only needed enough rainmakers to decide they’d rather leave before finding out.

Weil has brought in Davis Polk for restructuring advice and plans to keep serving clients while it collects bills and settles accounts, including its ~380,000 square feet in the GM Building. Associates and staff are getting 90 days of salary and benefits. For the people who picked Weil for its stability, the recruiting war has played out very differently than it did for the partners being courted.

Takeaway: Weil’s fall shows that a professional-services firm can be profitable and still lose the confidence of the people it needs to stay that way. Once leaving becomes the sensible individual decision, keeping the partnership together gets much harder. Wall Street likes to say its people are its greatest asset, but the trouble starts when those assets get a better offer.

Now that we have the S-1, Anthropic is expected to go public in November in what could be the largest IPO on record. Revenue rose nearly twelvefold to $4.6 billion in 2025, while net losses reached $42 billion, including a $34.3 billion fair-value accounting expense¹. Reuters reports it is seeking to raise up to $100 billion²; some investors now value it around $1.5 trillion, below earlier expectations near $2 trillion³.

So the clear debate is that nothing is clear. One side sees the company defining the AI era; the other sees costs growing faster than revenue. Leverage Shares by Themes* is building a fund for each side. ANUU, the 2X Long Anthropic Daily ETF, will seek 200% of Anthropic's daily performance. ANDD, the 2X Short Anthropic Daily ETF, will seek -200%.

Neither fund is trading yet, but get notified the moment they are.

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Billionaires like Larry Ellison and Elon Musk have long borrowed against their stock instead of selling it. A new Deloitte survey of 57 major lenders, reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, puts a number on how big that kind of lending has become: about $5.4 trillion in credit extended against portfolios. Deloitte estimates about $1.6 trillion is actually borrowed.

It's also reaching a wider group of clients. Schwab said its pledged asset line, open to clients with at least $100,000 in nonretirement assets, helped lift its bank-loan balances 35% to $72.3 billion last quarter.

Stelrix builds on the same idea with an investment-backed credit card, helping investors spend the way the wealthy do: against their investments, without selling them.

Learn more about Stelrix.

From 2012, Google studied 180 teams over two years, 115 in engineering and 65 in sales. It measured 250 attributes, from personality to how often teammates socialized.

The strongest factor was psychological safety, meaning people feel safe admitting mistakes and asking questions. The others, in order, were dependability, structure and clarity, meaning and impact.

No combination of individual traits reliably predicted performance. Co-location, extroversion, seniority and stacking the team with top performers didn’t predict it either.

How a team works together beat who was on it. As a manager, you can raise safety by admitting your own mistakes first.

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