Welcome back to your daily memorandum talking tech, business, AI, markets, and more. 🗞️

In today’s edition, we are tackling the following:

📈 Stocks notch fresh records as Iran framework talks advance.
🤝 NVIDIA and Corning unveil a $3.2B optical fiber pact.
🏦 Anthropic ships 10 prebuilt AI agents for Wall Street.
🪙 Coinbase cuts 700 jobs ahead of first-quarter results.
🎢 Disney beats with streaming income up 88% year over year.

TECHNOLOGY

• NVIDIA, Corning partner on massive optical fiber deal that may be a game changer for AI (CNBC) 

  ^{_{More: Bloomberg, NVIDIA Newsroom, The Motley Fool}}

  • NVIDIA took a $500M stake in Corning, with the right to invest up to $3.2B in total.

  • Three new plants in North Carolina and Texas will lift U.S. optical capacity tenfold and add 3,000 jobs.

  • Corning shares climbed about 12% on the news, while Nvidia gained roughly 6% in the session.

• Anthropic Unveils AI Agents to Field Financial Services Tasks (Bloomberg) 

  ^{_{More: Fortune, American Banker, TechRadar}} 

  • Anthropic released 10 prebuilt agents that draft pitchbooks, review statements, prep credit memos, and route compliance cases.

  • Claude Opus 4.7 scored 64.4% on Vals AI's Finance Agent benchmark, ahead of GPT-5.5 and Gemini 3.1 Pro.

  • FactSet shares fell as much as 8.1% after the briefing, with Morningstar, S&P Global, and Moody's also under pressure.

• QuantWare Raises $178 Million to Build World's Most Powerful Quantum Processors (The Quantum Insider) 

  ^{_{More: Bloomberg, NL Times, Tech.eu}} 

  • The Delft-based startup raised €152M led by Intel Capital, with backing from In-Q-Tel and ETF Partners.

  • Funds will scale KiloFab, a Dutch facility designed to grow quantum chip output by 20 times.

  • QuantWare unveiled VIO-40K, an architecture targeting processors with up to 10,000 superconducting qubits.

BUSINESS

• Uber (UBER) 2026 Q1 earnings (CNBC) 

  _{^{More: Yahoo Finance, Investing.com, Benzinga}} 

  • Gross bookings rose 25% to $53.7B, and adjusted EPS hit $0.72, with revenue of $13.2B narrowly missing the $13.29B estimate.

  • Q2 bookings guidance of $56.25B to $57.75B beat consensus, sending shares up roughly 10% intraday.

  • Uber One reached 50 million members and now drives half of mobility and delivery gross bookings.

• Disney Q2 2026 Revenue Rises 7% in Earnings Beat, Streaming Income Up 88% (Variety) 

  _{^{More: CNBC, TheWrap, PPC Land}} 

  • Revenue of $25.17B and adjusted EPS of $1.57 beat the consensus of $24.85B and $1.50 in CEO Josh D'Amaro's debut quarter.

  • Entertainment SVOD operating income jumped 88% to $582M, while Disney+ and Hulu revenue accelerated by 13%.

  • Shares rose roughly 7% as Disney lifted buybacks to $8B and reiterated about 12% adjusted EPS growth for fiscal 2026.

• Coinbase cuts headcount by 14%, citing AI acceleration (CNBC) 

  ^{_{More: Bloomberg, Fortune, Yahoo Finance}} 

  • CEO Brian Armstrong announced about 700 layoffs ahead of Thursday's earnings, citing volatile crypto markets and shifts in AI workflow.

  • Coinbase expects $50M to $60M in restructuring charges and will cap management at five layers from the top down.

  • Each remaining manager will oversee at least 15 reports, with Armstrong promising "no pure managers" and AI-native pods.

MARKETS

WORLD

• Voting underway in UK local elections seen as a verdict on Keir Starmer's leadership (Euronews) 

  ^{_{More: BBC, LSE Politics, PollCheck}} 

  • Britons cast ballots Thursday for 5,066 council seats across 136 English authorities, plus Scottish and Welsh devolved bodies.

  • Reform UK is projected to take Essex, Norfolk, and Suffolk county councils as Labour polling sits near 20%.

  • A heavy Labour rout could trigger a leadership challenge against Prime Minister Keir Starmer in the coming weeks.

• Marco Rubio meets with Pope Leo after Trump's criticism over Iran war (NBC News) 

  _{^{More: Al Jazeera, Washington Post, State Department}} 

  • Secretary of State Marco Rubio held a closed-door audience with Pope Leo XIV at the Apostolic Palace on Thursday morning.

  • The meeting marked the first known sit-down between the pope and a Trump cabinet official in nearly a year.

  • Topics included the Middle East, humanitarian aid for Cuba, and religious freedom amid sharp public tensions.

• Justice Dept. Finds UCLA Medical School Illegally Used Race in Admissions (US News) 

  _{^{More: New York Times, Inside Higher Ed, Boston Globe}} 

  • The Justice Department concluded a yearlong probe, finding UCLA's medical school favored Black and Hispanic applicants.

  • Investigators cited 2024 admit GPA averages of 3.72 for Black students versus 3.84 for Asian American applicants.

  • Similar probes are now active at Stanford, Ohio State, and the University of California, San Diego.

FUTURISM

• Starship Flight 12 Targets Mid-May with New V3 Vehicle (BASENOR)

  _{^{More: Space Launch Schedule, Next Spaceflight, NextBigFuture}} 

  • SpaceX is targeting May 12 for Flight 12, the maiden launch of Booster 19 and Ship 39 in V3 configuration.

  • The 408-foot stack is designed for over 100 tons to low Earth orbit, nearly tripling V2's payload capacity.

  • It will also debut Orbital Launch Pad 2 at Starbase, a key step toward higher launch cadence.

• DoorDash (DASH) earnings Q1 2026 (CNBC) 

  _{^{More: Stocktitan, Yahoo Finance, Investing.com}} 

  • Marketplace gross order value rose 37% to $31.6B as total orders climbed 27% to 933 million in the quarter.

  • CEO Tony Xu said about two-thirds of the company's code is now AI-written, with autonomous "Dot" delivery in expansion.

  • Q2 GOV guidance topped consensus, sending shares roughly 8% higher even as revenue narrowly missed estimates.

• Arm delivers record-breaking quarter and full-year results (Arm Newsroom) 

  ^{_{More: BigGo Finance, Yahoo Finance, Substack}}

  • Q4 revenue rose 20% to a record $1.49B, with data center royalties more than doubling year over year.

  • Arm AGI CPU customer demand has doubled to over $2B in committed pipeline across fiscal 2027 and 2028.

  • Shares fell after-hours on a $1.26B Q1 forecast that fell short of the $1.34B Wall Street consensus.

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  • As aspiring leaders and innovators, this list helps you absorb the knowledge that has propelled others to success.

CONTENT

• The $84 Trillion Wealth Transfer + The Real Value in Prediction Markets (The Prof G Pod) 

  • Scott Galloway examines the largest intergenerational wealth transfer in history and what an inheritance tax-free world means for inequality.

  • He argues that prediction markets like Polymarket beat experts at predicting because crowds aggregate skin-in-the-game information.

  • Galloway also fields a listener question about taking a pay cut to pursue more meaningful career work.

• An AI state of the union: We've passed the inflection point, dark factories are coming (Lenny's Podcast) 

  • Django co-creator Simon Willison argues that November 2025 was the inflection point when coding agents truly became reliable.

  • He shares three daily agentic patterns: red/green TDD, templates, and aggressive context hoarding for repeated reuse.

  • The conversation warns of the "lethal trifecta" of prompt injection, over-trust, and OpenClaw-style security blindspots.

• The Startup Ideas Podcast: HyperAgent live walkthrough with Howie Liu (Greg Isenberg) 

  • Airtable CEO Howie Liu joins Greg Isenberg to launch HyperAgent and demo agents acting as autonomous coworkers.

  • They build a custom contrarian AI skill in real time, comparing it against Perplexity Computer, Manus, and Codex.

  • The episode argues that skills, not chatbots, are the new primitives for frontier agents in daily knowledge work.

EXTRAS

• McDonald's (MCD) Q1 2026 earnings (CNBC) 

  ^{_{More: FinancialContent, Quartz, Quiver Quantitative}} 

  • Adjusted EPS of $2.83 beat the $2.77 estimate, with revenue of $6.52B topping the $6.47B consensus.

  • Same-store sales grew 3.8% globally, broadly in line with Wall Street's expectations for the chain.

  • CEO Chris Kempczinski flagged a "challenging environment" for diners despite stronger-than-expected U.S. spending.

• Trump signs new counterterrorism strategy targeting cartels and "left-wing" groups (Time) 

  ^{_{More: White House, Just Security, Fox News}} 

  • The strategy redefines terrorism to include transnational criminal cartels and groups like Antifa as core priorities.

  • Officials describe it as expanding the policy framework beyond traditional foreign terrorist organization designations.

  • Critics argue the broader scope risks politicizing federal counterterrorism resources around domestic political opponents.

• Appeals court rules ICE cannot broadly detain undocumented immigrants without bond hearings (POLITICO) 

  ^{_{More: Just Security, Washington Post, New York Times}} 

  • Judge Stanley Marcus wrote that Congress did not grant unfettered authority to detain every unadmitted noncitizen indefinitely.

  • The ruling requires the government to provide bond hearings for many undocumented immigrants currently in ICE custody.

  • Trump appointee Judge Barbara Lagoa filed a dissent, signaling further appeals from the administration are likely.

AND MORE

• The Justice Department sued Colorado over its high-capacity magazine ban in an escalating gun fight.

• France deployed a carrier strike group to the Red Sea ahead of a potential Hormuz mission.

• A federal judge unsealed a purported Epstein suicide note from his New York jail cell.

• Roko’s Basilisk skips the buzz words and cuts straight to what moves markets, products, and careers.*

• Hungary returned an $82 million cash and gold shipment seized earlier this year to Ukraine's Oschadbank.

• Bret Taylor's customer service startup Sierra closed a $950 million round at a $15.8B valuation, led by Tiger Global.

• Tennessee Republicans unveiled a redistricting map that slices the state's majority-Black congressional district.

• DHS axed an accelerated training program that fast-tracked the training of thousands of new ICE deportation officers.

• Iran's IRGC Navy said safe Hormuz transit is possible under "new procedures" as memo talks continue.