The weekend is here! Pour yourself a mug of Colombia Tolima Los Brasiles Peaberry Organic coffee, grab a seat outside, and get ready for our longer-form weekend reads:
• How to Think About the Tariffs: This is bad policy, executed thoughtlessly. But it is worth thinking through exactly *why* it is bad. (The Overshoot)
• How Trump Could Make Larry Ellison the Next Media Mogul: The co-founder of Oracle and friend of President Trump, who was a flamboyant fixture in the 1990s, has returned to the spotlight through — of all things — TikTok. (New York Times)
• The Code That Controls Your Money: COBOL is a coding language older than Weird Al Yankovic. The people who know how to use it are often just as old. It underpins the entire financial system. And it can’t be removed. How a computer language controls the financial life of the world. (Wealthsimple)
• I Quit Google Search for AI—and I’m Not Going Back: Ads and search-optimized junk made a mess of the go-to engine. Now ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude—and even Google’s own AI—do it better. (Wall Street Journal)
• How Ed Bastian turned Delta into America’s most profitable airline, while giving employees billions along the way: Contrarianism has made Delta the largest U.S. air carrier by revenue, and the most profitable—while earning the kind of customer loyalty that can help it weather catastrophes like the Toronto crash. Its place atop the podium represents a crowning achievement for Bastian, who has led Delta with a rare blend of salesmanship, showmanship, and an accountant’s mastery of return on capital—and who has helped the airline build strong employee-management relations in an industry where those ties are often strained. (Fortune) see also How Brazil built a world-beating aircraft manufacturer. Embraer was founded as a majority owned state company, with its founders coming from both ITA and DCTA. The company understood early on that it would need to focus on a niche product and said initial product would be the EMB-110, a small commuter plane for both military and civilian use that could operate well in areas with poor infrastructure, as was the case in Brazil. Embraer’s focus in the first 20 years or so was in similar types of aircraft (i.e., small airplanes) and in that respect, it worked: in its first peak in 1989, Embraer was selling nearly USD1b (in 2000 dollars) with half being exports and it had around 2500 employees. (Noahpinion)
• Who’s Boring Now? The Corporate Capture of our Fight Against Boredom (The Flaw)
• If Anthropic Succeeds, a Nation of Benevolent AI Geniuses Could Be Born: The brother goes on vision quests. The sister is a former English major. Together, they defected from OpenAI, started Anthropic, and built (they say) AI’s most upstanding citizen. (Wired)
• Elon Musk’s Mission to Take Over NASA—and Mars: The billionaire is in position to speed up plans for a voyage to the planet, with a potentially huge impact on SpaceX. (Wall Street Journal)
• Sit, Stay, Say Goodbye: Volunteer “puppy raisers” are chipping away at a shortage of service dogs, one short-term adoption at a time. (New York Times)
• Trump Tells Inner Circle That Musk Will Leave Soon: The president is pleased with Elon Musk, but the decision comes as the tech mogul increasingly looks like a political liability. (Politico)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business this week with Lisa Shalett, Chief Investment Officer and head of Global Investment Office for Morgan Stanley Wealth Management, with more than $100 billion in assets under management. She leads the development of all asset allocation models, global investment due diligence and portfolio analytics, and oversees the Global Investment Committee’s models and Outsourced Chief Investment Office mandates.
This interactive housing market map shows where sellers—and buyers—have the most power right now
Source: ResiClub
Sign up for our reads-only mailing list here.
~~~
To learn how these reads are assembled each day, please see this.
