Robinhood prediction market revenue could jump sharply when the NFL and college football seasons get underway, according to a Wednesday note from Piper Sandler analyst Patrick Moley, who lifted his price target on HOOD to $145 from $135 and raised his earnings forecasts for 2026 and 2027. The catalyst is straightforward: football is far more popular in the United States than football’s World Cup equivalent, and the World Cup already delivered explosive volume growth. Between June and August, average monthly prediction market volumes at Robinhood grew 88% compared to the January-to-May period, driven largely by World Cup engagement. Moley’s conclusion…
Author: Funke Adeyemi
Funke Adeyemi
Funke Adeyemi spent a decade in corporate banking and fintech before moving to business journalism. She started in trade finance at a major UK bank, moved to a payments company scaling into African markets, and spent her last role leading partnerships at a cross-border remittance platform. She writes about business strategy, fintech, digital banking, and the corporate news that moves markets. She is interested in how companies actually make money rather than how they describe making money in investor presentations. Funke lives in South London. She reads earnings calls the way other people listen to podcasts, and finds them about as reliable.
The Meta Muse Spark pricing model, disclosed alongside the model’s public preview launch, offers developers a choice that most AI companies have left implicit: share your prompts and outputs with Meta, and your API bill drops by roughly 95%. Under the standard agreement, one million input tokens costs $1.25; under the contributor tier, that same volume costs $0.10. Output tokens fall from $4.25 per million to $0.20. The framing is that developers “contribute” to future model development by letting Meta train on their data. The commercial reality is that Meta has a training-data problem, and it is now willing to…
WeatherNext 3 forecast accuracy now leads every major competitor, according to Brightband’s Operational WeatherBench, as Google DeepMind and Google Research release the most capable version yet of their AI-driven weather system. The model bests deep-learning rivals from Microsoft, Nvidia, and the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasting (ECMWF), and outperforms traditional physics-based forecasts from the US National Weather Service and the ECMWF. Google says WeatherNext 3 will feed into what users see on Google Search, Maps, and Gemini, and will be available via Google’s cloud platforms. ‘This is going to be the first time that some of the core variables…
The Builders Stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 returns this October with a roster of founders, venture investors, and operators tackling the questions that actually keep early-stage company builders up at night: how to raise before you have a product, how to hire when AI is eating the job description, and how to survive the jump from seed to Series A. The event runs 13–15 October at Moscone West, 800 Howard Street in San Francisco, drawing more than 10,000 founders, investors, and technology leaders. THE D*AI*LY BRIEF’s Disrupt 2026 overview puts the programme at more than 200 expert-led sessions from more…
New Jersey’s prediction markets Supreme Court petition, filed on 2 September 2026, has set up what could become the definitive legal reckoning over who controls a rapidly expanding corner of American gambling: the federal government or the states. Attorney General Jennifer Davenport put the state’s position plainly. ‘We’re calling on the Supreme Court to resolve this issue and recognise that Congress did not silently make the sports-betting industry immune from state law,’ she said in a statement accompanying the New Jersey AG’s certiorari filing. The petition names KalshiEX, LLC as the respondent, with Mary Jo Flaherty, Interim Director of the…
Greg Abel, chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway, used a Wednesday interview with CNBC’s Becky Quick to put a number on the data center pushback building across the United States, and to set out the conditions under which Berkshire will, and will not, power the AI buildout. ‘There is a lot more pushback in the communities across the U.S.,’ Abel said. The resistance, he made clear, is not hypothetical. It is organised, it is political, and it is beginning to reach statehouses. The Scale of Data Center Pushback The grievances driving that resistance are not hard to locate. Electricity bills near…
The Pivotal CEO departure of Ken Karklin, confirmed this week by the Larry Page-backed electric aircraft company, closes a four-year chapter at one of the more unusual bets in personal aviation. Karklin did not cite a specific reason for leaving; a press release said only that he is ‘pursuing new endeavors.’ ‘Leading Pivotal has been the privilege of my career. Together, we’ve moved beyond the promise of light eVTOL and proved it out in practice,’ Karklin said in a statement. ‘This industry has moved past prototypes and press releases; it’s now operating in the real world, under real constraints, with…
The August jobs report prediction markets got badly wrong became clear on the morning of 4 September 2026, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that nonfarm payrolls rose by 162,000 in August, shattering both the Dow Jones consensus of 53,000 and the 50-50 odds that Kalshi traders had placed on the economy adding more than 50,000 jobs. The miss was not subtle. Going into the release, Polymarket gave a 48% probability to the economy adding more than 50,000 jobs in August. Economists surveyed by Dow Jones were centred on 53,000, with the broader professional range running from roughly 51,000…
The Microsoft 365 outage entered its second day on Tuesday, with the company still unable to declare a full resolution after a misconfiguration in core authentication infrastructure knocked out email, file access, and collaboration tools for business and enterprise customers across the globe. The fault originated in Microsoft’s Exchange Online service. According to BleepingComputer, Microsoft tracked the incident under identifier MO1465074 and attributed it to ‘core authentication configuration issues used by multiple internal services within the Exchange Online infrastructure.’ What the Microsoft 365 Outage Actually Broke The disruption spread well beyond Outlook. Microsoft’s own status page listed SharePoint Online, OneDrive…
The Fermi Explorer interstellar mission asks a deceptively simple question: what if the point was never to get there quickly? Backed by the founders of orbital data-centre startup Starcloud, the newly announced non-profit wants to send a one-kilogram spacecraft on a journey to Alpha Centauri, accepting an 80,000-year travel time rather than waiting for propulsion technology that may never materialise. The mission emerged publicly this week, soliciting partners, donations, and scientific payloads. The core team: Starcloud co-founders Philip Johnston, Adi Oltean, and Ezra Feilden, joined by programme manager Garret Jameson. Their plan is to launch a vehicle carrying a 10-cm-square…
