News of the Week (June 8-12, 2026)

It was a busy week of fundamental news. Over the last 5 days, we covered and contextualized the following events with condensed detail:

Headlines & Macro:

Headlines:

Amazon raised $10B in bonds.
ServiceNow and IBM expanding their partnership to jointly accelerate AI adoption via modernizing legacy and fragmented data systems.
New headlines out on Meta restricting employee usage of AI. More & more of these cases are popping up. Walmart, Uber, Starbucks and Amazon are more examples. Meta is also partnering with Reliance Industries to build a large next-gen data center in India.
The Government is temporarily forcing Anthropic to limit public access to its new Fable 5 model.
Uber is seeking to sell some parts of the Delivery Hero business to ease regulatory hurdles as it looks to take that business over.
Starbucks promoted Val Bauduin from Senior Vice President of Corporate Finance to Principal Accounting Officer.
The highly anticipated Coupang data breach punishment is significantly smaller than expected & just a fine. Specifically, it’s a little over $400M while some thought it would be nearly double that. Others feared the Korean government would go one step further and try to start restricting business operations. Not happening here. This penalty is better than feared and can actually be taken as good news. This removes a great cloud of uncertainty hanging over the company, and leaves ongoing normalization in consumer habits as the remaining obstacle for this financial engine fully recovering. Signs of that happening were clear in last quarter's earnings report, and I expect that to remain the case as we move through 2026 and into 2027.
The Trade Desk settled their dispute with Publicis. That agency will resume recommending TTD to their clients, which is great news considering about 10% of that company’s 2025 revenue came from this agency. It’s absolutely a positive development for TTD. I would need to see a lot more positive development to entertain the idea of owning this again. On the other hand, their Chief Revenue Officer is leaving the company after 7 short months. More executive turnover.
Adobe results were fine. Revenue was 2.5% ahead. EPS was modestly ahead. Backlog was 1% ahead. Guidance was a tad ahead across the board and still slightly ahead excluding M&A help. The CFO leaving for Marvel probably led to the negative reaction.
There was a small ServiceNow data breach this week for some of their Australian customers. It has since been fixed and I don't anticipate a big impact from this. This isn't like CrowdStrike in 2024 or Coupang last year. Much smaller. Much quieter too. Still not good news.

Macro:

Inflation readings were in line with expectations but hotter than they've been in a couple of years. Importantly, this is clearly related to the war, as Core Consumer Price Index (CPI) came in at a modest 0.2% M/M compared to 0.3% expected and 0.4% last month. The PPI was a similar, yet less positive story. It came in at 0.4% M/M vs. 0.5% expected and 0.7% last month. PPI rose by a whopping 1.1% M/M vs. 0.7% expected as food and energy push prices higher. This likely continues until we get a firm resolution in the Middle East. We'll see when that happens. Initial jobless claims were worse than expected at 229K vs. 220K consensus estimates and continuing jobless claims were also worse than expected at 1.795M vs. 1.780M expected.

One more interesting piece of macro news from this week. OpenAI is considering 40%-50% price cuts for its products according to reports from Bloomberg. The move would be made to better compete for market share with Anthropic. I’ve also been seeing more anecdotal evidence in earnings reports and conferences pop up about companies being increasingly indifferent when it comes to which 3P models & agents are being used in their work with enterprise software vendors. If these things are actually moving towards commoditization & model differentiation isn't sustainable… That means AI era differentiation will come from the companies with custody of the largest sums of customer-specific data. Those will be the companies that can guide & execute compliant agent-based work on behalf of customers... most effectively tailoring product deliveries based on that customer's most valuable data. And who are the companies with all of this data? The large enterprise software firms that everyone hates right now. If we have access to the same models… and these models are increasingly similar… that’s good news for the durable competitive differentiation of NOW, SNOW, PANW etc.

Have a great weekend!