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Jacquees On ‘Mood 2’ And How A Decade In Music Changed Him

August 12, 2026 MMN Editor Filed Under: Uncategorized

Jacquees opens up about ‘Mood 2,’ love, fatherhood, personal growth, the “King of R&B” debate and how a decade in music has shaped him.

Now China wants to become the shop floor for the Muslim world

August 12, 2026 MMN Editor Filed Under: Uncategorized

Chinese exporters are moving into halal food, cosmetics and fashion, but success in this vast market depends on something harder to manufacture than cheap goods: trust.

Too Many Personal Loan Borrowers Skip This Money-Saving Step

August 12, 2026 MMN Editor Filed Under: Uncategorized

One in six borrowers said they didn’t compare multiple offers the last time they considered taking out a personal loan, according to a new survey from Experian.
That could end up being an expensive shortcut. Depending on the loan and the borrower’s credit, shopping around could save you hundreds of dollars in interest.

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Still, it’s easy to see why borrowers might take the first acceptable offer — especially when they need the funds quickly. If you’ve already been approved and the monthly payment fits your budget, you may be ready to take the money and move on.
Christina Roman, consumer education and advocacy senior manager at Experian, says borrowers may be more focused on solving the financial problem in front of them than on taking the time to compare their options.
“Whether they’re consolidating debt, covering an unexpected expense or funding a major purchase, it can be tempting to accept the first offer that seems good enough and move on,” Roman says.
Sometimes “good enough” works out. Other times, settling for the first offer can cost you hundreds of dollars — and, in some cases, more than a thousand.
Shopping around for a personal loan could save you hundreds
It’s easy to see two loan offers with slightly different rates and assume the difference won’t amount to much. But when you’re borrowing thousands of dollars, even a couple of percentage points can add up.
Take a $15,000 personal loan that you pay back over three years. In one example from Experian’s analysis, a borrower with a good FICO score — generally, between 670 and 739 — gets one offer with an 11.77% annual percentage rate, or APR. That works out to monthly payments of $497 and $2,876 in total interest over the life of the loan.
Another offer comes with a 14.27% APR. The monthly payment is only $18 higher, at $515, but the borrower would pay $3,527 in interest by the time the loan is paid off.
The two offers are 2.5 percentage points apart — but that relatively small gap translates to $651 more in interest over three years.
Your credit score can also affect the rates you’re offered. Lenders generally consider borrowers with stronger credit histories to be less risky, which can help them qualify for lower rates. But lenders may weigh your credit history and other financial information differently, so the rate you receive can vary from one lender to another.
That’s another reason to compare multiple lenders. Even if two lenders are looking at the same borrower, they may not offer the same rate or terms.
You don’t have to find a dramatically cheaper loan for comparison shopping to pay off. Experian compared the lowest APR it saw for borrowers in each credit tier with the median, or middle, APR. On a 36-month loan, choosing the lowest APR saved borrowers between $80 and $295, depending on the borrowers’ credit tier. Over 60 months, the potential savings ranged from about $115 to $452.
In other words, even if the first offer you receive seems reasonable, it may still be worth seeing what your other options are. A better offer could save you hundreds of dollars over the life of the loan.

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How to shop around for a personal loan
You don’t need to become a personal loan expert to compare options. But you do need to understand the key costs and terms of each offer, including the APR, monthly payment and total cost of borrowing.
So where should you start? Let’s walk through what to look for — and how to compare your options once you have them in front of you.
Gather a few options
You can shop for a personal loan through a marketplace that lets you compare options from multiple lenders in one place, or check offers directly from banks and credit unions. Depending on the site or lender, you may be able to see your estimated rate before formally applying, which can help you compare your options without immediately committing to a loan.
The goal isn’t to collect a bunch of loan offers, but to have a few options to compare side by side so you can see how their rates, terms and costs differ.
Start with the APR
Once you have a few offers in front of you, start with the APR rather than the interest rate alone. The APR factors in the interest rate plus certain lender fees, such as origination fees, giving you a better sense of the cost of borrowing.
That distinction matters because two loans can have similar interest rates but different fees. The loan with the lower interest rate isn’t necessarily the cheaper option once those costs are factored in.
And don’t assume the lowest rate you see advertised is the rate you’ll get. Lenders determine your actual rate based on factors such as your credit history and debt-to-income ratio. Prequalifying with multiple lenders can give you a better idea of what you may actually qualify for before formally applying.
Pay attention to how the lender checks your credit when you prequalify. Prequalification often involves a soft credit inquiry, which doesn’t affect your credit standing, while formally applying for a loan typically results in a hard inquiry, which can temporarily ding your credit score.
But that’s just one step in the process. Matt Tomko, chief revenue officer at Happy Money, a consumer finance company that focuses on helping consumers pay down credit card debt, says borrowers should look beyond the advertised rate and monthly payment when comparing personal loans.
“The advertised starting rate and the monthly payment are helpful places to begin, but they don’t tell you what your actual costs will be over the life of the loan,” Tomko says.
Another important thing to note is that personal loans are fixed-rate installment loans, meaning you make regular payments over a set period and the interest rate stays the same throughout the life of the loan.
Understand the fees
Even after comparing APRs, it’s worth taking a closer look at the loan’s fees. Some fees are reflected in the APR, while others may apply depending on the lender or how well you manage the loan. For example, late fees may apply if you miss a payment.
An origination fee is one of the highest costs to watch for. It’s typically a percentage of the amount you borrow and may be deducted from your initial loan amount. So if you need $10,000 and the lender charges a 5% origination fee, you could receive just $9,500. These fees typically range anywhere from 1% to 10% of the loan amount.
Some lenders may also charge application fees, although this is uncommon. Check the lender’s disclosures so you understand which charges could apply and when.
No matter what, borrowers should look for transparency around the costs of the loan.
“Are all costs clearly disclosed?” Tomko asks. “The best personal loan for your situation might not be the lowest advertised rate, but the one with transparent terms, manageable payments and a clear path to meeting your financial goals.”
Compare loan terms and total costs
The loan term is how long you have to repay the loan. A longer loan term can generally mean a lower monthly payment, but you’ll typically pay more interest overall.
When comparing options, use the same loan amount and repayment period in any loan payment calculator or lender comparison tool. For example, if you’re considering a $15,000 loan that you’d repay over three years, enter a loan amount of $15,000 and a 36-month term, then plug in each lender’s APR to see how the monthly payment, total interest and total cost compare.
And don’t let the lowest monthly payment decide for you. The monthly payment needs to fit in your budget, because getting in over your head could result in more debt than you started with. But keep in mind that a lower monthly payment can also mean you’re paying off the loan over a longer period of time and spending more on interest.
This is where a personal loan calculator comes in handy.
“While a lower payment can provide important budget and cash flow flexibility, it may also extend the repayment period and increase the total cost of borrowing,” Tomko says.
Tomko suggests asking yourself: “Does the payment fit comfortably within your budget, and does it help pay down debt at a meaningful pace?”
Give yourself time to shop around
It can be tempting to take the first acceptable offer, especially when you’re already stressed about whatever expense prompted you to borrow in the first place.
Tomko says that’s one reason folks may skip comparison shopping. “The first acceptable offer can feel like the fastest solution, especially when they’re under financial stress and looking for relief,” he says. “But taking the time to compare options can result in real money back in your pocket.”
His advice is simple: “Spend a little extra time looking at your budget and comparing rates, terms and total costs. Even a modest reduction in interest can translate into meaningful savings and a faster path to financial stability.”

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SpaceXAI debuts Grok 4.6, overtaking Kimi K3’s performance and matching GPT-5.6 Sol for world’s third best on Artificial Analysis

August 12, 2026 MMN Editor Filed Under: Uncategorized

Elon Musk’s company SpaceXAI, formerly known as xAI, has released Grok 4.6, its latest frontier AI model, with a focus on long-running agents, coding and knowledge work — and a pricing strategy designed to make those workloads cheaper to run.The model scores 61 on the third-party Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, surpassing the popular open weights Chinese model from Moonshot, Kimi K3, and tying rival OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol Max and improving five points over Grok 4.5 High. Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5 and Fable 5 occupy the number one and two spots, respectively. More consequential for enterprises evaluating AI agents, Grok 4.6 posts sizable gains over its predecessor across coding, terminal, knowledge-work and agent benchmarks while retaining an application programming interface (API) price starting at $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens, making it a mid-priced frontier model comparing leading options that are both proprietary and open source, globally, according to VentureBeat’s analysis.ModelInput ($/1M)Output ($/1M)Total ($/1M)SourceMuse Spark 1.2 Contributor$0.10$0.20$0.30MetaMiMo-V2.5 Flash$0.10$0.30$0.40Xiaomideepseek-v4-flash$0.14$0.28$0.42DeepSeekdeepseek-v4-pro$0.435$0.87$1.305DeepSeekGPT-5.6 Luna$0.20$1.20$1.40OpenAIMiniMax-M3$0.30$1.20$1.50MiniMaxLongCat-2.0 — limited-time promo$0.30$1.20$1.50LongCatMiMo-V2.5$0.40$2.00$2.40XiaomiLongCat-2.0 — standard$0.75$2.95$3.70LongCatMiMo-V2.5 Pro (≤256K)$1.00$3.00$4.00XiaomiMuse Spark 1.1 / 1.2$1.25$4.25$5.50MetaGLM-5.2$1.40$4.40$5.80Z.aiGrok 4.6 — 256K)$2.00$6.00$8.00XiaomiQwen3.8-Max$2.00$6.00$8.00QwenCloudGemini 3.6 Flash$1.50$7.50$9.00GoogleGPT-5.6 Terra$2.00$12.00$14.00OpenAIGrok 4.6 — ≥200K prompt tokens$4.00$12.00$16.00xAIGPT-5.4$2.50$15.00$17.50OpenAIKimi K3$3.00$15.00$18.00Moonshot AIClaude Opus 5$5.00$25.00$30.00AnthropicSakana Fugu Ultra (≤272K)$5.00$30.00$35.00Sakana AIGPT-5.6 Sol — Standard mode$5.00$30.00$35.00OpenAIClaude Fable 5 / Claude Mythos 5$10.00$50.00$60.00AnthropicGPT-5.6 Sol — Fast mode$10.00$60.00$70.00OpenAIStill, that’s less than half of what GPT-5.6 Sol costs over OpenAI’s API in standard mode. SpaceXAI says Grok 4.6 is available today in Grok Build, SpaceXAI’s answer to Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex, which is available starting in the $30 per month SuperGrok plan. It’s also available in SpaceX’s recent acquisition of the AI coding startup Cursor, and from partners including OpenRouter, Vercel and Cloudflare. SpaceXAI is providing twice the included usage for Grok 4.6 in Cursor and Grok Build during the first week.The release arrives only weeks after Grok 4.5, which SpaceXAI launched in July as a model targeting coding, agentic tasks and knowledge work, and one day after the launch of Grok Bot, a new system for assigning AI agents to complete designated tasks as virtual employees.The bigger change is agent behavior, not just another benchmark pointSpaceXAI describes Grok 4.6 as being built specifically to stay on task across longer sequences of work, including researching unfamiliar topics, analyzing information, navigating codebases and converting product ideas into working applications.The company says it subjected the model to a longer supplemental training run than Grok 4.5, using curated model-generated reasoning and technical data alongside engineering data and changes to its optimizer and training recipe. It then used Grok 4.5 to regenerate supervised fine-tuning trajectories across reasoning levels, agent harnesses, STEM, software engineering and knowledge work, filtering problematic trajectories with model-based checks.Reinforcement learning also targeted agentic environments spanning general coding, knowledge work, kernel optimization, web development and computer-aided design.That matters because enterprise AI deployments are increasingly moving beyond isolated prompt-and-response interactions toward agents expected to maintain state, operate tools, modify code and recover from problems across longer execution paths.SpaceXAI says that during its testing, Grok 4.6 showed more self-testing and verification on longer trajectories, checking its own work before proceeding. It also reports stronger first attempts on interactive and visual projects than Grok 4.5. Those are company observations rather than independent guarantees of production behavior, but they indicate where SpaceXAI concentrated the model’s post-training work.Grok 4.6 reaches the frontier, but does not sweep itGrok 4.6’s improvement over Grok 4.5 at this juncture of the AI model competition cannot be overstated.According to Artificial Analysis, Grok 4.6 reaches an Elo score (human preference of head-to-head model outputs, adapted from chess) of 1,753 on GDPVal-AA v2, the benchmark measuring performance on real-world tasks like scheduling and diagramming, versus 1,526 for Grok 4.5, 1,728 for GPT-5.6 Sol Max and 1,741 for Fable 5 Max. The coding results from SpaceXAI show a similar generational improvement but more competition at the frontier. Grok 4.6 scores 69.9% on CursorBench v3.2, up from 66.7%, while Fable 5 Max reaches 70.5%. On DeepSWE v1.1, Grok rises sharply from 54% to 65.9%, but GPT-5.6 Sol Max leads at 73%. FrontierCode v1.1 Extended moves from 56.6% to 61.3%, compared with 60.6% for GPT-5.6 Sol Max and a leading 63.6% for Fable 5 Max.Agent benchmarks tell much the same story. Grok 4.6 reaches 57.5% on APEX-Agents, a 10.4-point increase over Grok 4.5’s 47.1%, narrowly exceeding GPT-5.6 Sol Max’s 56.7% but trailing Fable 5 Max at 59.2%. On APEX-SWE, Grok 4.6 rises to 56.4% from 53.6%, while Fable 5 Max scores 58.8%.Terminal-Bench v3.0 exposes a larger remaining gap. Grok 4.6 improves from 15.7% to 26%, but GPT-5.6 Sol Max and Fable 5 Max score 34.6% and 34.1%, respectively.Two of Grok 4.6’s strongest results come from longer-horizon professional work. On AA-Briefcase it scores an Elo of 1,577, narrowly exceeding Fable 5 Max’s 1,574 and topping GPT-5.6 Sol Max’s 1,502. On Harvey LAB, Grok 4.6 reaches 15.8%, versus 12.9% for Grok 4.5, 11.3% for Fable 5 Max and 2.5% for GPT-5.6 Sol Max.SpaceXAI notes an important methodological caveat: third-party scores in its table use the best self-reported or publicly available results. The comparison therefore should not be interpreted as a perfectly controlled four-model evaluation.In other words, the evidence supports a substantial upgrade over Grok 4.5 more clearly than it supports across-the-board superiority over rival frontier models. Grok 4.6 wins several of the displayed evaluations while GPT-5.6 Sol Max and Fable 5 Max retain meaningful leads elsewhere.Cost could be the more important enterprise benchmarkArtificial Analysis’ supplied evaluation adds another dimension: how much work the model performs for the money spent.The testing places Grok 4.6 on its Intelligence-versus-Cost-per-Task Pareto frontier at a reported $0.84 per task — which actually makes it less of a bargain than its predecessor, Grok 4.5, and less economical than OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Luna, z.ai’s GLM-5.2, and Meta’s new Muse Spark 1.2, among other models. Artificial Analysis also reports that Grok 4.6 completed its AA-Briefcase workloads in roughly 53 turns and about 0.5 billion input tokens on average, versus approximately 103 turns and 2 billion input tokens for Claude Opus 5 Max.Those measurements do not prove that every production agent will use fewer tokens or finish twice as quickly. Agent costs depend heavily on harness design, prompts, tool calls, caching, retry behavior and the task itself. But they point toward an increasingly important enterprise metric: the cost of completing a workflow, rather than simply the cost of generating one million tokens. That distinction is central to SpaceXAI’s positioning.The standard Grok 4.6 API starts at $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens, and SpaceXAI also offers a faster variant at twice the price.The supplied API documentation adds an important caveat for long-context deployments. Grok 4.6 supports a 500,000-token context window, but prompts below 200,000 tokens are billed at $2 per million input tokens, $0.50 per million cached-input tokens and $6 per million output tokens. Once a prompt reaches 200,000 tokens, those rates rise to $4, $1 and $12 respectively, with the higher pricing applying to all tokens in that request.That means enterprises should not extrapolate the $2/$6 headline pricing across the model’s entire context window when estimating total cost of ownership.Artificial Analysis says the standard headline rates remain more than 60% below the competing frontier-model prices it cites for Claude Opus 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol. The practical savings will depend on how many tokens each model consumes to complete the same workload.The Grok name carries considerable baggage and controversy, separate from the general AI skepticismPerformance and price may not be the only hurdles SpaceXAI faces in converting Grok 4.6’s benchmark gains into enterprise adoption. The Grok brand arrives with an unusually visible history of safety and governance controversies — including extremist and antisemitic outputs, politically skewed responses, exaggerated praise of Elon Musk and, more recently, the use of Grok’s image-generation capabilities to produce non-consensual sexualized imagery. For companies with strict compliance, brand-safety or responsible-AI requirements, that history could become a procurement consideration separate from the technical capabilities of Grok 4.6 itself.The most notorious text-generation episode came in July 2025, when Grok produced antisemitic posts, praised Adolf Hitler and in some responses referred to itself as “MechaHitler.” SpaceXAI’s predecessor xAI subsequently said it was removing inappropriate posts and taking steps to prevent hate speech from being published by Grok. Also in summer 2025, Grok began inserting references to an alleged “white genocide” in South Africa into answers to unrelated questions. xAI said an unauthorized modification to Grok’s response software had directed the system to produce a particular response on a political topic while bypassing its normal review process. The company said the change violated its policies and subsequently pledged to publish Grok’s system prompts and establish round-the-clock monitoring for problematic responses. The South African government has rejected claims that a genocide against white South Africans is taking place.Grok’s objectivity came under scrutiny again in November of the same year after the chatbot repeatedly produced implausibly flattering assessments of Musk. Among the examples reported at the time were claims placing Musk above elite athletes and historic intellectual figures. Musk said Grok had been manipulated through adversarial prompting into making “absurdly positive” statements about him. Whatever the underlying cause, the incident illustrated the reputational problem for an enterprise model whose outputs can become entangled with the public persona of the executive most closely associated with its developer.The most serious controversy has involved image generation. In January 2026, U.K. regulator Ofcom opened a formal investigation into X after reports that the Grok account was being used to create and distribute undressed images of people and sexualized images of children. Ofcom said the material under examination could amount to non-consensual intimate-image abuse, pornography and child sexual abuse material. X subsequently said it had implemented measures intended to stop the Grok account from being used to create intimate images of people, but Ofcom said its investigation remained open.The scrutiny extends beyond Ofcom. Britain’s Information Commissioner’s Office is investigating X and xAI over both the development and deployment of Grok, including whether personal data was handled lawfully and whether adequate safeguards existed to prevent harmful manipulated imagery. The European Commission, meanwhile, opened a separate formal investigation under the Digital Services Act examining X’s management of systemic risks connected to Grok, including the dissemination of manipulated sexually explicit material.Those investigations concern X and the earlier xAI organization rather than establishing a finding that the newly released Grok 4.6 API violates those laws. Nevertheless, they are unlikely to help SpaceXAI sell Grok to businesses.SpaceX acquired xAI in February 2026, and the AI operation now markets itself as SpaceXAI, meaning Grok’s newest models sit under a different corporate structure but retain the same consumer-facing brand.There is no evidence in the material examined here that Grok 4.6 itself repeats the specific “MechaHitler,” “white genocide,” sexual-image or Musk-flattery incidents associated with earlier Grok deployments. But enterprise procurement teams rarely evaluate a model in isolation from its vendor and product history. For SpaceXAI, that means Grok 4.6 may have to demonstrate not only that it is cheaper or more capable than competing frontier models, but that the controls around it are sufficiently predictable for organizations that cannot afford their AI supplier to become a brand-safety event.That continuity creates a potential adoption problem that benchmark tables cannot measure. Developers choosing a model for an internal coding agent may care primarily about price, latency and task completion. A bank, government agency, healthcare provider or consumer brand deploying the same model into customer-facing or regulated workflows may also have to consider vendor governance, content-safety controls, auditability and reputational exposure.A model designed to be deployed, not just chatted withGrok 4.6 supports text and image inputs with text output, function calling, structured outputs and reasoning, according to the supplied API specifications. Those specifications also list rate limits of 150 requests per second and 50 million tokens per minute, with API availability in us-east-1 and us-west-2.Cursor’s launch announcement similarly characterizes Grok 4.6 as designed for long-running agents and ambitious interactive and visual work, giving developers immediate access to the model inside an established coding-agent environment rather than requiring them to build a new harness around the API first.For enterprise buyers, that distribution may matter almost as much as another leaderboard result. Models increasingly compete not just on reasoning scores but on whether developers can place them inside existing coding, research and operational workflows without destabilizing those workflows or dramatically increasing inference costs, as well as incurring any blowback from associating with a controversial brand. Grok 4.6 does not establish an uncontested performance lead. Its launch instead presents a different proposition: frontier-level intelligence, large improvements over the previous generation, stronger long-running agent behavior and relatively aggressive token economics.The next test will be whether the efficiency Artificial Analysis observes on controlled agentic workloads carries into production. If Grok 4.6 can consistently complete long-running coding and knowledge-work tasks with fewer turns and fewer tokens, the model’s most important benchmark may ultimately be the enterprise inference bill rather than the leaderboard.

Eminem Joins Some Of The Biggest Rock Bands Of All Time

August 12, 2026 MMN Editor Filed Under: Uncategorized

Eminem’s ‘Curtain Call: The Hits’ becomes only the sixth album to spend at least 800 weeks on the Billboard 200, joining a club made up almost entirely of rockers.

Will Trump accounts and grandparent 529s bring down the price of college in the future?

August 12, 2026 MMN Editor Filed Under: Uncategorized

Caps on student borrowing could also play into how America pays for college.

Alphabet’s stock slips as Nvidia’s $500 billion financing deal threatens custom chips

August 12, 2026 MMN Editor Filed Under: Uncategorized

Investors are concerned that Alphabet faces a fresh threat from Nvidia’s plans to help fund the AI buildout alongside major Wall Street players.

Michael Burry delivers brutal verdict on $420 billion AI giant

August 12, 2026 MMN Editor Filed Under: Uncategorized

I covered Michael Burry’s first Palantir short thesis on June 4, when he called the stock a “sand castle” trading at 16 times intrinsic value. The stock dropped sharply the following day. Then Palantir reported one of the most extraordinary quarters in enterprise software history. On top of that, Palantir surged 64% from its June low of $106 to the current $175, and the bears — including Burry — faced intense pressure.On Monday, August 10, Burry responded by doubling down.Writing in his Cassandra Unchained report, Burry disclosed that he purchased March 2027 Palantir put options struck in the low-to-mid $100 range, taking advantage of implied volatility falling to multi-month lows to rebuild his bearish position at cheaper option prices. His long-term verdict on the stock was stark: under $1. Yes, you read it right, it’s not a typo.Palantir (PLTR) trades near $175.52 at a market cap of approximately $420 billion, according to Yahoo Finance. The company has a trailing price-to-sales ratio of 73.19 and a forward P/E of 112.36.Burry is betting against those numbers. Palantir is betting investors should ignore them.Also Read: Latest PLTR NewsWhat Burry is actually arguing — the accounting gap and off-balance-sheet commitmentsBurry’s bear case has evolved beyond valuation multiples. He now points to two specific accounting issues he says the market is not pricing correctly.First, stock-based compensation. Burry noted that Palantir issued 31.3 million shares to staff, worth approximately $5 billion over the past year, representing roughly six times the company’s reported stock-based compensation expense. More Palantir:Palantir CEO admits AI would make him 20 times richerMicrosoft CEO adds fuel to Palantir CEO’s AI warningPalantir CEO has a blunt verdict on OpenAI and AnthropicHe described this as the widest accounting gap among 66 companies he recently reviewed. The implication is that Palantir’s reported earnings metrics look stronger than they would if total shareholder dilution were fully reflected.Second, off-balance-sheet commitments. Non-cancellable infrastructure purchase obligations have more than tripled this year, according to Burry’s analysis. Related: Michael Burry sends warning on one of Wall Street’s top stocksThese long-term committed expenditures do not show up prominently in current earnings but represent future cash outflows that constrain the business’s financial flexibility. Combined with the SBC gap, Burry argues the true economic picture is dramatically less favorable than the headline numbers suggest.Trading at 69 times sales, he concluded the intrinsic value is under $1 in the long run.The “otherworldly” Palantir quarter Burry is betting againstHere is the genuine complication in Burry’s trade. The Q2 2026 results, reported August 3, were, by several measures, the most impressive Palantir has ever delivered, according to its Q2 fiscal 2026 earnings release.Total revenue reached $1.935 billion, up 93% year-over-year (YOY)U.S. commercial revenue grew 149% YOY to $764 millionU.S. government revenue grew 90% YOY to $809 millionGAAP net income was $1.062 billion, representing a 55% marginAdjusted free cash flow was $1.220 billion. The company’s Rule of 40 score — the sum of the revenue growth rate YOY and the adjusted operating margin for each of the periods presented — reached 155%.Full-year 2026 revenue guidance was raised to $8.150 billion to $8.158 billion, representing 82% year-over-year growth. U.S. commercial revenue guidance was raised to over $3.424 billion, representing at least 134% growth. Impressive, right? In fact, CEO Alex Karp did not underplay the results. Related: Palantir’s blowout quarter creates dangerous new question”Our entire business nearly doubled in the span of 12 months,” Alex wrote in Palantir’s investor letter.On the earnings call, he told analysts to “forget consensus” and argued that no business at Palantir’s scale has ever grown half that fast. He called Q2 “otherworldly” and projected the growth pace would continue.Those are bold statements. In fact, they are backed by numbers and facts hard to dismiss.

Palantir’s entire business nearly doubled in 12 months.Fabrice COFFRINI / AFP via Getty Images

The tension at the center of the Palantir debateI want to be direct about what makes this one of the genuinely difficult investment debates in the current market.Burry is not arguing that Palantir’s AI Platform does not work, or that its government contracts are not real, or that its customer growth is manufactured. He is arguing that the accounting structure around the earnings inflates the reported quality of those results, and that the valuation priced in for any scenario where things go slightly less well than perfect is effectively zero margin of safety.Related: Michael Burry issues blunt warning as he bets against 2 AI favoritesPalantir’s own data validates the business momentum. At the same time, it is supporting Burry’s valuation concern. The company’s year-to-date return is negative 1.77%, and its one-year return is negative 4.42%, according to Yahoo Finance, despite generating $1.2 billion in quarterly free cash flow and growing revenue 93% year over year.The market has not re-rated the stock higher even as fundamentals accelerated, suggesting the 73x sales multiple was the ceiling, not the floor.The options positions Burry entered — March 2027 strikes in the low-to-mid $100s — give him several months for the valuation to compress. If Palantir grows into its multiple without a price correction, the puts expire worthless. If the market eventually decides that 70-plus times sales is too much to pay even for a company growing at 93%, Burry collects.Both outcomes are plausible. That is what makes this one interesting to watch closely.Related: Michael Burry just sent a fresh signal to stock market investors

Goldman Sachs leaps into bitcoin income ETFs with $2.25 billion NEOS buyout

August 12, 2026 MMN Editor Filed Under: Uncategorized

The $2.25 billion deal expands Goldman’s derivative platform to $130 billion in total ETF assets, taking direct aim at BlackRock’s rival BITA fund, according to an analyst.

Wendy’s Stock Soars 12% As Billionaire Investor Nelson Peltz Reportedly Plots Take-Private Deal

August 12, 2026 MMN Editor Filed Under: Uncategorized

Wendy’s shares also rallied in June following a Reddit-fueled meme-stock frenzy.

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