Sep 29, 2025 4 min read Daily Rundown

⛵ The Largest LBO

Plus: Musk's Real Purpose, Amazon Subscription Maze

Good Morning, Early Adopters!

Money bends markets, lawsuits stall empires, and even the biggest platforms discover the limits of trust.

LBO

EA’s $50B Deal Would Be the Largest LBO in History

👀 What’s the move: According to WSJ, Electronic Arts is in advanced talks with Silver Lake, Saudi PIF, and Affinity Partners to go private at a $50B valuation. If completed, it would not just be gaming’s biggest transaction — it would mark the largest leveraged buyout ever recorded. Shares jumped as investors quickly priced in the takeover premium.

💡 Why it’s not boring: The story here is not really about video games, it is about financial engineering. A record LBO signals the return of the classic private equity playbook built on predictable cash flows, heavy leverage, and sovereign capital backstops. EA’s sports and shooter franchises deliver steady yield, while Saudi Arabia views games as a form of soft-power oil. If the deal goes through, it will create a new template for mega-deals across entertainment and technology.

⛵ Key takeaway: When EA becomes the largest LBO in history, gaming isn’t just content anymore; It’s treated like a new milestone for global capital.

Attention is The Only KPI

Viral Buddy is your shameless sidekick in the attention economy. Forget luck, forget algorithms, this AI sniffs out what makes people click, laugh, and share, then twists it into content that begs to go viral. It’s like hiring a mischievous intern who’s allergic to boring ideas, but never asks for coffee breaks. If your posts usually die quietly, Viral Buddy gives them a loud, obnoxious life.

Try now👉

LAWSUIT

Musk drags OpenAI IPO into the courtroom again

👀 What’s the move: As OpenAI’s paper valuation races past $500B, private markets are nearing the limits of how much capital they can absorb. An IPO is the only escape valve, but governance quirks and nonprofit entanglements already complicate the path. Musk’s new lawsuit, alleging trade-secret theft and staff poaching, adds another roadblock by muddying OpenAI’s legal and reputational standing.

💡 Why it’s not boring: This isn’t about Grok’s code or a handful of engineers. It’s about slowing the juggernaut. If OpenAI can’t untangle its nonprofit shell, fend off Musk, and repackage itself into a clean LLC, Wall Street will balk. Musk knows this—every subpoena, every filing buys him time while starving Altman of the one thing he needs most: liquidity.

⛵ Key takeaway: Musk isn’t protecting IP, he’s taxing OpenAI’s IPO clock—turning litigation into the most valuable bottleneck in AI.

FTC

Amazon Pays $2.5B to Stop Charging You for Saying No

👀 What’s the move: Amazon just cut a $2.5B check to the FTC for trapping 35M users in Prime with dark patterns—$1B as penalty, $1.5B as refunds. The settlement forces Amazon to redesign its “labyrinth” sign-up and cancellation flows into something resembling actual consent.

💡 Why it’s not boring: This isn’t just about refunds, it’s about killing the most profitable UI trick in ecommerce. Prime’s friction-locked funnel has been Amazon’s growth engine for two decades, quietly juicing retention. Stripping away the “no button that sounds like guilt” sets a precedent regulators can now aim at every subscription business built on inertia, from streaming to SaaS.

⛵ Key takeaway: Dark patterns just got priced, and Amazon’s moat is now a map for regulators.

STARTUP SPOT

🪐 Supernal
“Urban skies via eVTOL.”
Hyundai’s air taxi unit building 5-seat battery eVTOL for city mobility.
→ Founded 2020; backed by Hyundai Motor Group; S-A2 prototype unveiled CES 2024; mid-2025 paused program as CEO/CTO exited amid wider exec shakeup.

🧠 Juicebox
“AI recruiting via PeopleGPT.”
LLM-powered search across 800M+ profiles to find and engage top talent.
→ YC S22; Series A $30M led by Sequoia (Sep 2025, $36M total); 2,500+ customers, $10M+ ARR.

🪙 Kraken
“Exchange into finance rails.”
Crypto platform expanding from trading & custody into payments, stocks, and no-code trading.
→ Founded 2011 by Jesse Powell; now co-CEOs Arjun Sethi & Dave Ripley; $500M raise at ~$15B, eyeing $20B round; launched Krak app + Capitalise.ai acquisition.

BAY AREA MEMOS

Hyundai's troubled air taxi startup Supernal loses its chief strategy and safety officers amid a wider leadership shake-up.
Juicebox, an AI-powered search company, has raised $30M from Sequoia to use LLM-based search to reinvent hiring and position itself as a default tool for startups.
Musk’s xAI priced Grok at 42 cents for the US government, undercutting OpenAI’s $1 and Google Gemini’s $0.47 in a cutthroat AI price war.
Crypto exchange operator Kraken is in talks to raise $200–300M at a $20B valuation, setting the stage for expansion and a potential 2026 IPO.
AI data center startup Nscale raised $1.1B backed by Nvidia, Aker, Dell, and Nokia to expand its global AI infrastructure, including massive new facilities for OpenAI and Microsoft.

TOGETHER WITH US

AI Secret Media Group is the world’s #1 AI & Tech Newsletter Group, boasting over 1 million readers from leading companies such as OpenAI, Google, Meta, and Microsoft. Our Newsletter Brands: