The Morning Bro

Wall Street's favorite AI bet now runs on rented computers

The AI trade has a new gear. The money is no longer just in the chatbots. It's in renting out the computers they run on. Customers pay for that computing power, those payments justify the stock prices, and those same payments are what lenders count on to get their money back.

SpaceX: The stock is surging because demand for its computing power is, per Wall Street, 'off the charts.' It's lifting the broader AI universe with it. One company says customers are lining up, and suddenly everybody's chip-adjacent stock gets a tailwind.

CoreWeave: This is the debt side of the same bet. Janus Henderson portfolio manager John Lloyd owns CoreWeave (now $62.13, +1.6% 1D) bonds and is sticking with them. He calls it a 'best in class' data center play and sees a buying opportunity. Bondholders don't care about the hype. They just need the rent checks to keep clearing so the interest gets paid.

Zoom out: Stocks and bonds are now leaning on the same single assumption: computing demand stays 'off the charts.' If it does, everyone wins. If it cools, stockholders feel it first and lenders feel it longest. Plenty of retirement funds own a slice of both.

Why is an airline CEO asking to be taxed more?

A New York Times interviewer asked United Airlines (now $97.77, +2.3% 1D) CEO Scott Kirby whether CEOs bear any responsibility for the public's growing distrust of them. His answer: wealth inequality is a 'danger to society,' and the U.S. should have a national wealth tax and an inheritance tax. Cue the backlash.

Scott Kirby: His logic is that trust erodes when the gap between the top and everyone else keeps widening, so CEOs should back fixing it, even at their own expense. Conservative politicians and commentators aren't buying it. Now the guy who runs your connecting flight is a policy debate.

The self-own: Kirby saw this coming: 'I'd, like, be the worst politician in the world.' Credit for self-awareness. When a CEO wades into tax policy, about half his customers get mad on cue, and he knew that going in.

Zoom out: Whatever you think of the policy, this is a business problem. Airlines can't choose their customers by voting record. A CEO's personal politics can turn into a brand fight, and the brand belongs to shareholders.

Anthropic wrote an AI safety bill. Guess who it protects.

Anthropic is pitching an AI safety bill that could block a model if 50+ people might be killed. Sounds like a kill switch. But the fine print forbids federal agencies from blocking a model's release unless a judge signs off.

Here's how it works. Normally a regulator can act fast, and companies fight it afterward. This flips the burden. The government has to win in court before it can hit pause, while the model is ready to ship. That's a speed bump for the regulator, not the robot.

Why you should care: the company being regulated is writing the rulebook. If it passes, the bar for stopping a dangerous model gets set by the people who build dangerous models.

One of the keys guarding 60 million website certificates was the number 4

Every padlock in your browser's address bar depends on a 'certificate authority' vouching for the site with a secret key. eMudhra, an Indian authority that has issued over 60 million certificates, used keys so simple that one of them was just the number 4.

Here's the problem. A proper key is a random 384-bit number, roughly 10¹¹⁵ possibilities. Nobody could ever guess it. Researcher Scott Helme found eMudhra's keys were 4, 56, and 115, with others at 66, 155, and 237. He recovered them from the public certificates on his laptop 'in less than a second.'

With those keys, an attacker can create a forged certificate for any domain, so your 'secure' bank login could actually be someone else's server reading your traffic. Mozilla got the report on October 17 covering eight compromised keys. Firefox, Chrome, and Apple have since patched their browsers to stop trusting them.

Your move: The fix only kicks in after you install the update. Restart the browser you've been ignoring for three weeks.

The AI company needs a human writer, and it'll pay $345K

Anthropic's chatbot can draft a speech in seconds, yet the company is hiring an executive communications writer for $295,000 to $345,000 a year. The requirements: at least 8 years of experience, a fast grasp of technical ideas, and calm nerves when news breaks.

Here's the logic. Anthropic's CFO says AI already writes 90% of the company's code, so hiring has shifted away from doing the work and toward checking it. When the typing gets cheap, the person who knows what not to say gets expensive. As one comms pro put it: 'When speed becomes cheap, judgment carries a premium.'

The catch: That premium goes to the veterans. Junior workers made up just 9% of technical hires in June, down from 27% in early 2025. That's two-thirds of the entry-level door, gone in about a year and a half. If you're early in your career, the path to that $345K job just got a lot narrower.

Facebook is somehow still America's front page

People keep skipping news websites and getting headlines from whatever feed they're already scrolling. That's why Facebook, home of AI fruit videos and birthday posts, is now where 40% of U.S. adults regularly get news, up from 36% in 2020, per a Pew survey of 5,600 people.

The strange part: 59% get news from social media 'often or sometimes,' but only 19% actually prefer it. Nobody chose this. The feed is just where people already are, and the algorithm decides what counts as news.

TikTok went from 3% of adults to 20% since 2020, and YouTube sits at 34%. For Meta (now $694.25, -1.6% 1D), every point of news traffic means more time in the app, which means more ads sold. Facebook's aging image is apparently still a money machine.

What does LeBron actually buy the 76ers?

Wharton professor emeritus Kenneth Shropshire unpacks what LeBron James joining the Philadelphia 76ers means off the court. A superstar brings ticket demand and community buzz. He also brings special treatment that can strain the locker room.

The idea is that a single name can move seats, sponsors, and attention all at once. The trade-off is that the whole organization starts bending around one guy. Whether that's worth it depends on whether the hype outlasts the honeymoon.

• UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham launched a campaign against playing music and videos without headphones on public transit. Finally, true bipartisanship.
• German police arrested a 28-year-old Russian man, an alleged Qilin ransomware member, linked to the Synnovis hospital attack that resulted in a patient's death. Good.
• Instacart parent Maplebear will pay $5 million to settle federal claims it discriminated against American workers in hiring.
• YouTube appears to be testing tucking the dislike button into the three-dot menu. First the count disappeared, now the button.
• Android users report Google automatically added their phone number to accounts they deliberately kept separate. Go check your burner.

1D / 1W / YTD = move vs prior close / 5 sessions ago / Jan 1. Pulled fresh.