Tootfinder

Russia's Rosatom seeks to sell 49% stake in Turkey's first nuclear plant: https://benborges.xyz/2025/07/02/russias-rosatom-seeks-to-sell.html

Thoma Bravo agrees to acquire a stake in Chicago-based capital markets industry SaaS provider Trading Technologies, sources say in a deal valued at over $1B (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-07-30/thoma-brav…

I know folks here dump on WAPO but my wife likes this columnist, Anne Lamott, and this column is pretty good. I hope the guest link works.
“The one thing liberals need to address before the June parade
Putting Biden’s head on a stake is not helpful.”
Opinion by Anne Lamott
https://wapo.st/4jqeQLP…

The one thing liberals need to address before the June parade
Putting Biden’s head on a stake is not helpful.

Control at Stake: Evaluating the Security Landscape of LLM-Driven Email Agents
Jiangrong Wu, Yuhong Nan, Jianliang Wu, Zitong Yao, Zibin Zheng
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.02699

Control at Stake: Evaluating the Security Landscape of LLM-Driven Email Agents
The increasing capabilities of LLMs have led to the rapid proliferation of LLM agent apps, where developers enhance LLMs with access to external resources to support complex task execution. Among these, LLM email agent apps represent one of the widely used categories, as email remains a critical communication medium for users. LLM email agents are capable of managing and responding to email using LLM-driven reasoning and autonomously executing user instructions via external email APIs (e.g., se…

Foxconn partners with Taiwan-based Teco for AI servers and other AI data center hardware, taking a 10% stake, while Teco gets a less than 1% stake in Foxconn (Debby Wu/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-…

NFL sells RedZone, NFL Media assets to Disney for stake in ESPN in blockbuster trade: Sources https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6530655/2025/08/01/nfl-espn-media-deal-tv-broadcast/

The Cost of Restaking vs. Proof-of-Stake
Akaki Mamageishvili, Benny Sudakov
https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.24440 https://arxiv.org/pdf/25…

The Cost of Restaking vs. Proof-of-Stake
We compare the efficiency of restaking and Proof-of-Stake (PoS) protocols in terms of stake requirements. First, we consider the sufficient condition for the restaking graph to be secure. We show that the condition implies that it is always possible to transform such a restaking graph into secure PoS protocols. Next, we derive two main results, giving upper and lower bounds on required extra stakes that one needs to add to validators of the secure restaking graph to be able to transform it into…

Fox acquires one-third of Penske Entertainment, owner of the IndyCar Series, sources say for between $125M and $135M; Fox started carrying IndyCar in 2025 (Joe Flint/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/business/media/fox-takes-stake-in-i…

Cinven acquires a majority stake in Smart Communications from Accel-KKR; sources: the deal values the customer conversations platform at ~$1.8B including debt (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-08-01/cinven…

"The complicity exposed by this report is just the tip of the iceberg; ending it will not happen without holding the private sector accountable, including its executives. International law recognizes varying degrees of responsibility – each requiring scrutiny and accountability, particularly in this case, where a people’s self-determination and very existence are at stake. This is a necessary step to end the #genocide

Stephen Miller Has Financial Stake in Company Helping ICE With Deportations: Report (Nikki McCann Ramirez/Rolling Stone)
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/stephen-miller-financial-stake-palantir-ice-contractor-1235371343/
http://www.memeorandum.com/250624/p135#a250624p135

Sources: Meta offers to buy ~49% of Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross's VC fund NFDG; about half of NFDG's first fund of ~$1.1B, raised in 2023, has been invested (Yuliya Chernova/Wall Street Journal)
https:/…

Sony acquires a ~2.5% stake in Tekken and Pac-Man owner Bandai Namco for $464M, to expand "the fan community for IP such as anime and manga around the world" (Jesse Whittock/Deadline)
https://deadline.com/2025/07/sony-buys-stake-in-pac-man-own…

Sony Pays $464M For Stake In ‘Pac-Man’ Owner Bandai Namco
Sony Corp. has taken a small stake in 'Tekken' and 'Pac-Man' games giant Bandai Namco, as part of a strategic business alliance.

Commanders' Bobby Wagner on ownership stake in WNBA's Storm: 'I want to be on the right side of change' https://www.nfl.com/news/commanders-bobby-wagner-on-ownership-stake-in-wnba-s-storm-i-want-to-be-on-t…

Stephen Miller’s Financial Stake in ICE Contractor Palantir
https://www.pogo.org/investigations/stephen-miller-conflicts-of-interest

N.Y. Jets owner buys stake in Crystal Palace team https://www.espn.com/soccer/story/_/id/45567347/ny-jets-owner-woody-johnson-agrees-buy-crystal-palace-stake

Sources: the NFL is in talks to take a minority stake of up to 10% in ESPN, which would own NFL Network and RedZone rather than just hold a controlling stake (Alex Sherman/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/24/nfl-media-espn-equity-ownership-deal.html

NFL in talks to take a 10% stake in ESPN
ESPN would own all of NFL Network and NFL RedZone, rather than just a controlling stake, if the deal moves forward as currently constructed, CNBC has learned.

Proof-of-Behavior: Behavior-Driven Consensus for Trustworthy Decentralized Finance
Ailiya Borjigin, Wei Zhou, Cong He
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.22171 http…

Proof-of-Behavior: Behavior-Driven Consensus for Trustworthy Decentralized Finance
Current blockchain protocols (e.g., Proof-of-Work and Proof-of-Stake) secure the ledger yet cannot measure validator trustworthiness, allowing subtle misconduct that is especially damaging in decentralized-finance (DeFi) settings. We introduce Proof-of-Behavior (PoB), a consensus model that (i) gives each action a layered utility score -- covering motivation and outcome, (ii) adapts validator weights using recent scores, and (iii) applies decentralized verification with proportional slashing. T…

Raiders' Tyree Wilson fully aware what's at stake ahead of 2025 NFL season https://www.sportingnews.com/us/nfl/las-vegas-raiders/news/raiders-tyree-wilson-fully-aware-whats-sta…

Verifiable Weighted Secret Sharing
Kareem Shehata, Han Fangqi, Sri AravindaKrishnan Thyagarajan
https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.24289 https://

Verifiable Weighted Secret Sharing
Traditionally, threshold secret sharing (TSS) schemes assume all parties have equal weight, yet emerging systems like blockchains reveal disparities in party trustworthiness, such as stake or reputation. Weighted Secret Sharing (WSS) addresses this by assigning varying weights to parties, ensuring security even if adversaries control parties with total weight at most a threshold $t$. Current WSS schemes assume honest dealers, resulting in security from only honest-but-curious behaviour but not …

I tried hunting POTA with five different #HamRadio antenna arrangements while taking a short holiday at the beach over the past few days. I tried the built-in antenna on my KX3, a 20m vertical with radials on a deck, the same vertical with radials stuck with a stake into the top of a sand dune, and two inverted-V 40m end-fed half wave arrangements on a spiderbeam, a north/south and an e…

Blackstone agrees to acquire a majority stake in NetBrain, valuing the Burlington, Massachusetts-based network operations and automation company at $750M (Ryan Gould/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-07-…

feel this

MLB acquires a minority stake in Jomboy Media and partners with the baseball-centered media company to collaborate on content activations, IP growth, and more (Todd Spangler/Variety)
https://variety.com/2025/digital/news/…

MLB Buys Stake in Jomboy Media, Partners for Digital Content
MLB inked a pact with Jimmy O'Brien's Jomboy Media, under which the league is acquiring a stake in his company and collaborating on digital content.

Trump has promoted his private businesses in unprecedented ways for a sitting president, presenting conflicts of interest.
His ventures into crypto, in particular, have drawn scrutiny because he has simultaneously moved to create a more friendly regulatory environment for the industry. 
The $57 million from his stake in the crypto firm World Liberty Financial came from the sale of digital tokens.
That provides a glimpse into Trump’s earnings from cryptocurrency ventures t…

Sources: Meta agrees to take a 49% stake in Scale AI for $14.8B, in a deal that gives cash to Scale's shareholders and makes Alexandr Wang a top Meta executive (Cory Weinberg/The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/me

Meta to Pay Nearly $15 Billion for Scale AI Stake and Startup’s 28-Year-Old CEO
Meta has agreed to take a 49% stake in data labeling firm Scale AI for $14.8 billion, two people familiar with the matter said. The unusual deal will be structured so Meta will send the cash to Scale’s existing shareholders and place the startup’s CEO, Alexandr Wang, in a top position inside ...

Global climate action is at stake in the UN top court's biggest ever decision (Molly Quell/Associated Press)
https://apnews.com/article/un-court-opinion-climate-change-1ac84a94a5aaffd63518ef1da3502a9e
http://www.memeorandum.com/250723/p27#a250723p27

I am 100% certain that the intractable and ancient questions of “What is ‘human?’” and “What is ‘intelligence?’” will finally be resolved once and for all by corporate lawyers in a contract dispute with billions of dollars at stake
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/07/agi-may-be-impossible-to-define-and-thats-a-multibillion-dollar-problem/

Eli passes on Giants stake: 'Too expensive for me' https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/45703430/eli-manning-passes-buying-ownership-stake-giants

Project 2025 isn’t a blueprint, it’s already 40% enacted or completed.
Surviving Trump: With Democracy On Life Support: EPISODE 29: Project 2025 Overview — Dismantling Democracy and Women’s Rights
Episode webpage: https://survivingtrump.buzzsprout.com
Listen

Surviving Trump: With Democracy On Life Support
Surviving Trump is your indispensable guide to navigating the challenges and contradictions of life under the second Trump administration. In the first 20–25 segments we’ll uncover what’s truly at stake: our democracy. You'll deep dive into the ke...

What Is at Stake for the Raiders This Season? https://www.si.com/nfl/raiders/las-vegas-seattle-seahawks-pete-carroll-geno-smith-san-francisco-49ers

@… This is so cool. 😊
We live close to Lake Zürich and often, when it’s raining, the mallards will come to visit us, because they know we’ll throw bird food over the balcony.
At this time of year, because they’re nesting, a male will fly up, stake out the area, and wait for their mate. When their mate comes too, the male will start hollering until we no…

New EU sanctions could block Rosneft's Indian refinery sale plans, Bloomberg reports: https://benborges.xyz/2025/07/18/new-eu-sanctions-could-block.html

A great piece of analysis with lots of suggestions for what to do in response to the Trump administration's efforts to destroy U.S. research infrastructure. I appreciate the inclusion of the work to #DefendResearch against #censorship.

Eli Manning backs out of bid for New York Giants ownership stake citing cost, conflict of interest

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/eli-man

ESPN makes a minority investment in Premier Lacrosse League, marking a shift in the network's strategy as it looks to invest in areas beyond traditional TV (Sara Fischer/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2025/06/25/espn-premier-lacrosse-league-media-right…

ESPN takes minority stake in Premier Lacrosse League
This marks a shift in ESPN's strategy.

What's at stake when public media funds are cut (Sara Fischer/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2025/07/21/public-media-funding-emergency
http://www.memeorandum.com/250721/p6#a250721p6

My colleague had a question about rational functions that needed a little algebra to answer, leading me to update my supplemental course notes on abstract algebra (where I've used the Beachy/Blair textbook). A main goal of the notes is to stake out my position on the notation for rngs vs. rings.
https://use…

Sources: Prosus offered to cut its 27% Delivery Hero stake to below 10% and give up its board seat to address EU concerns over its €4.1B Just Eat Takeaway deal (Foo Yun Chee/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/sustaina…

Disney closes its deal with Comcast to buy out NBCUniversal's 33% stake in Hulu, paying an additional $439M, after agreeing in 2023 to pay $8.61B (Alex Weprin/The Hollywood Reporter)
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business

Disney to Pay Comcast an Additional $439 Million for Hulu Stake as Streaming Saga Comes to an End
The Bob Iger-run entertainment giant agreed to buy the 33 percent stake in Hulu in 2023; after an extended appraisal process, the deal is finally set to close.

German Quantum Systems takes 10% ownership in Ukrainian defense robotics firm Frontline: https://benborges.xyz/2025/07/16/german-quantum-systems-takes-ownership.html

Disney closes its deal with Comcast to buy out NBCUniversal's 33% stake in Hulu, paying an additional $439M, after agreeing in 2023 to pay $8.61B (Alex Weprin/The Hollywood Reporter)
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business

Disney to Pay Comcast an Additional $439 Million for Hulu Stake as Streaming Saga Comes to an End
The Bob Iger-run entertainment giant agreed to buy the 33 percent stake in Hulu in 2023; after an extended appraisal process, the deal is finally set to close.

Coarse Addition and the St. Petersburg Paradox: A Heuristic Perspective
Takashi Izumo
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.12475 https://arxiv.…

Coarse Addition and the St. Petersburg Paradox: A Heuristic Perspective
The St. Petersburg paradox presents a longstanding challenge in decision theory. It describes a game whose expected value is infinite, yet for which no rational finite stake can be determined. Traditional solutions introduce auxiliary assumptions, such as diminishing marginal utility, temporal discounting, or extended number systems. These methods often involve mathematical refinements that may not correspond to how people actually perceive or process numerical information. This paper explores …

Swedish streaming service Viaplay buys the remaining 50% stake in broadband and satellite TV provider Allente Group from Telenor for ~$113M (Anna Ringstrom/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/viaplay-buys-remaining-s…

Predicting the Raiders' Top MVP Candidate https://www.si.com/nfl/raiders/las-vegas-brock-bowers-geno-smith-gardner-minshew-mvp

Google will have a nonexclusive license to certain Windsurf technology, but will not be taking a stake in the company (Maxwell Zeff/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/11/windsurfs-ceo-goes-to-google-openais-acquisition-falls-apart/

Windsurf's CEO goes to Google; OpenAI's acquisition falls apart | TechCrunch
Notably, Google is not taking a stake in Windsurf and will not have any control over the company.

Justin Sun says he is buying another $100M worth of $TRUMP, doubling his total known stake of digital coins tied to President Trump (MacKenzie Sigalos/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/11/trons-justin-sun-100-million-trump-memecoin.html…

Tron's Justin Sun says he's buying another $100 million of Trump's memecoin
Crypto billionaire Justin Sun is buying another $100 million worth of $TRUMP, doubling his total known stake of digital coins tied to President Donald Trump.

UK legislation to allow foreign states to own up to 15% in British newspapers passes, clearing the way for the Telegraph's sale to a RedBird Capital-led group (Mark Sweney/The Guardian)
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2025/jul

Bittensor Protocol: The Bitcoin in Decentralized Artificial Intelligence? A Critical and Empirical Analysis
Elizabeth Lui, Jiahao Sun
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.02951

Bittensor Protocol: The Bitcoin in Decentralized Artificial Intelligence? A Critical and Empirical Analysis
This paper investigates whether Bittensor can be considered the Bitcoin of decentralized Artificial Intelligence by directly comparing its tokenomics, decentralization properties, consensus mechanism, and incentive structure against those of Bitcoin. Leveraging on-chain data from all 64 active Bittensor subnets, we first document considerable concentration in both stake and rewards. We further show that rewards are overwhelmingly driven by stake, highlighting a clear misalignment between qualit…

US investment firm Carlyle agrees to acquire a majority stake in IT consultancy and services provider Adastra, sources say valuing it at $400M including debt (Swetha Gopinath/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

Riyadh-based food delivery service Jahez agrees to acquire a 76.56% stake in Qatari e-commerce platform Snoonu for $245M in cash and stock (Yassmin Jabri/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-07-09/…

Sources: Meta has bought under 3% of Ray-Ban maker EssilorLuxottica, a stake worth ~€3B, and is considering further investment that could build the stake to ~5% (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

European satellite company Eutelsat raised €1.35B, including €717M from France, to build out its fleet of satellites to rival Starlink; France's stake is ~30% (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-0…

Blackstone acquires Vista Equity Partners' minority stake in event software company Cvent, sources say for $1.3B; Blackstone acquired Cvent for $4.6B in 2023 (Ryan Gould/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

Sources: Microsoft is prepared to walk away from high-stakes talks with OpenAI if they cannot agree on critical issues, such as the size of Microsoft's stake (Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/072e90fe-1c8c-415c-8024-5996b1ebb3cb

Microsoft prepared to walk away from high-stakes OpenAI talks
ChatGPT maker’s plans to convert into a for-profit leads software giant to make contingency plans

Sources: OpenAI wants Microsoft to take a ~33% stake in exchange for giving up future profit rights, and seeks to revise its exclusive cloud deal with Microsoft (The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/opena…

OpenAI Seeks New Financial Concessions From Microsoft, a Top Shareholder
Negotiations between Microsoft and OpenAI over the startup’s plan to restructure its for-profit unit, which requires Microsoft’s approval, have entered their eighth month with no end in sight and new conflicts emerging. OpenAI wants Microsoft, the startup’s biggest outside shareholder, to have a ...

Source: Blackstone has withdrawn from the consortium led by Susquehanna and General Atlantic seeking to invest in TikTok US, after considering a minority stake (Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/blackstone-d…

PE firm TPG completes its $7.6B acquisition of the remaining 70% stake in DirecTV from AT&T, marking AT&T's exit from media (Dan Primack/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2025/07/07/att-directv-tpg

AT&T completes $7.6 billion sale of DirecTV
Buying a media company in the name of vertical synergies rarely ends well.

President Trump's 2024 financial disclosure report shows he earned ~$57M from his stake in World Liberty Financial and $1.2M from an NFT licensing deal (New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/13/us/politics/trump-disclosure-cryptocu…

Trump Was Already a Crypto Czar in 2024
Financial disclosures for 2024 filed by the president on Friday show that digital coins had already become one of his family’s most successful ventures.

Sources: Google is paying $2.4B for a nonexclusive license to certain Windsurf tech and hire some of its employees, but won't be taking a stake in the company (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

PE firm TPG completes its $7.6B acquisition of the remaining 70% stake in DirecTV from AT&T, marking AT&T's exit from media (Dan Primack/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2025/07/07/att-directv-tpg

AT&T completes $7.6 billion sale of DirecTV
Buying a media company in the name of vertical synergies rarely ends well.

Quantum computing company IonQ raised $1B via a sale of stock and warrants to Heights Capital Management, an affiliate of Susquehanna International Group (Anthony Hughes/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20