📰On The Record – 13th August 2026

New York City's Council opened a sweeping investigation yesterday into prediction-market platforms Polymarket and Kalshi, along with crypto exchanges Coinbase and Gemini, demanding answers on marketing practices and whether ads are reaching users too young to legally gamble. The probe treats these apps less like innovative financial tools and more like casinos wearing a fintech disguise — precisely the argument critics have been making for months. With state regulators and the federal CFTC already fighting over who even has jurisdiction, this adds a third, very loud voice to an increasingly crowded room.

A federal lawsuit filed yesterday accuses Trump Media of selling an unfair edge to Wall Street. Its new Truth API charges up to $100,000 a month for early, machine-readable access to the president's Truth Social posts — posts that can move markets the moment they land. Press freedom groups argue this turns potentially market-moving government communication into a subscription product available only to those who can afford it. The core question isn't really about technology, it's about who gets to know what the president said, and when — and that's a much bigger fight than one API.

Stateside Brands, the company behind Surfside vodka iced tea, has turned down multiple acquisition offers to keep building alone — and its newest drink, Super Lyte, is already outselling Surfside's own explosive debut year. It's tempting to read that as proof that saying no to big money always pays off. It doesn't, always. Plenty of founders who passed on real offers watched the market shift before they got another chance. What actually rewards Stateside's bet is speed — launching, testing and iterating without a parent company's sign-off slowing things down. Independence isn't a strategy on its own — it's only as good as what you do with the freedom it buys.

Paramount Skydance signalled yesterday that selling CNN is now genuinely on the table as it tries to clear California's antitrust lawsuit over its $110 billion Warner Bros. Discovery deal. The company's top lawyer even raised the prospect of leaving California altogether. Handing over one of the most recognisable news brands in the world just to close a merger shows how much this deal matters to Paramount — and how little room they have left to manoeuvre, with California now standing as the last real roadblock after other jurisdictions signed off.

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Google unveiled the Pixel 11 yesterday, betting less on new hardware and more on Gemini becoming a genuinely proactive assistant — one that anticipates what you need instead of waiting to be asked. The timing matters: Apple is about to ship its own Gemini-powered Siri. The smartphone wars have quietly become an AI wars rematch, and whoever nails "assistant that actually helps" first probably wins the next decade of phone loyalty.

Meta's Partnership Ads — adverts delivered through creators rather than brand accounts — hit a $10 billion annual run rate, doubling in just a year. Creator-fronted ads are outperforming brand-only versions on clicks, conversions and cost, prompting some companies to shift up to 40% of their ad budgets toward them. Influencer marketing has quietly graduated into a measurable performance channel — and budgets are following the proof, not the hype.

Wendy's stock jumped 12% yesterday on reports that activist investor Nelson Peltz is assembling a consortium to take the struggling burger chain private. The move comes as Wendy's grapples with falling customer traffic and just pulled its own 2026 outlook. When a company's biggest shareholder starts talking about buying the whole thing rather than fixing it from the boardroom, that's usually a sign patience has run out. An offer could land within weeks.

If Trian Partners really is lining up a take-private bid for Wendy's, yesterday's 12% jump might be the opening move rather than the finish line — take-private rumours often push share prices toward whatever buyout premium the market expects. Watching Wendy's now is really a bet on deal speculation, not burgers. This is not investment advice. The biggest risk: if Trian's consortium never files a formal offer, or offers less than the market has already priced in, that jump reverses just as fast as it arrived.

Cognition, maker of the AI coding agent Devin, is reportedly already in talks to raise fresh funding at a valuation of at least $40 billion — a huge leap from the $26 billion it was valued at just three months ago. The jump would reportedly be tied to Cognition hitting a $1 billion annualised revenue run rate. Devin isn't pitched as a replacement for programmers; it's built to handle the tedious, unglamorous work most developers avoid. In a market this jumpy about AI valuations, actual revenue is what's buying Cognition the benefit of the doubt.

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Most founders spend all their energy plotting growth and almost none imagining how it ends — a mistake, since a company's value isn't decided by the founder's optimism, it's decided by how confident a buyer feels about its future. One entrepreneur who built a fast-growing real-estate business during the pandemic turned down acquisition offers, convinced the upside was still ahead, only to watch conditions shift before he got another chance. An exit plan works like a fire escape: you build it hoping never to need it, but you're glad it's there before the smoke shows up. The best time to sell is usually right when you feel least like doing it.

Away from the day's biggest fights, plenty else moved markets, headlines and at least one very famous net worth yesterday.

Around this time last year, Cisco reported fiscal Q4 earnings showing AI infrastructure orders from cloud customers had topped $2 billion for the year — more than double the $1 billion target it had originally set. Revenue climbed 8% to $14.7 billion, yet the stock still slipped on a cautious outlook, proof that even beating your own ambitious target doesn't guarantee investors reward you for it. A year on, with AI infrastructure spending now the story dominating markets, it's a reminder that Wall Street was already pricing in tomorrow's growth even when today's numbers were this strong.