🗞️Perplexity offers to buy Google Chrome

August 12th, 2025

What happened today 🇺🇸,

• AI startup, Perplexity, has made an unsolicited $34.5 billion offer to buy Google's Chrome browser, aiming to acquire the browser if antitrust rulings require Google to sell it…Perplexity is currently only valued at $18 billion, but has secured backing from major investment funds and promises to keep Chrome’s underlying engine open source and invest $3 billion in upgrades though Google's leadership remains opposed to a forced sale

• President Trump's pick to lead the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), E.J. Antoni, has publicly suggested suspending the monthly jobs report due to what he calls serious flaws in its accuracy and methodology…Antoni has proposed pausing the monthly reports in favor of less frequent but more accurate quarterly data until the problems are fixed

• President Trump threatened to allow a "major lawsuit" against Federal Reserve Chair, Jerome Powell, criticizing Powell for what he called "horrible and grossly incompetent" management of the multi-billion dollar renovation project at the Federal Reserve's headquarters…read more here 

• Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has appointed Republican state Senator Jay Collins as Florida’s new lieutenant governor

• Former Democratic Ohio Senator, Sherrod Brown, who lost his 2024 re-election bid, plans to run for the U.S. Senate again in 2026 in an effort to regain his seat

• OpenAI co-founder, Sam Altman, is backing a new company that will compete with Elon Musk’s Neuralink by developing brain-computer interface technology to connect human brains directly to computers, per Financial Times

• The U.S. saw 71 large companies file for bankruptcy in July 2025, the highest monthly total since July 2020 (during the pandemic), following 66 filings in June and 64 in May…Year-to-date, there have been 446 large bankruptcies, which is the most for the first seven months of any year since 2010

• July CPI inflation came in at 2.7% year over year below the expectations of 2.8%, Core CPI inflation came in at 3.1% year over year, above expectations of 3.0%

• DOW up 1.10% / S&P up 1.13%

• The S&P 500 hit another all-time high today

• Ukrainian President Zelenskyy made it clear today that Ukraine will not give up the Donbas region to Russia as part of a ceasefire deal, this comes ahead of President Trump’s meeting with Russian President Putin in Alaska this Friday…the White House has also said that Trump will speak with Zelenskyy before meeting with Putin

Plus: A look at the number of billionaires in every state

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Quote of the day: “The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails.” —William A. Ward

Have a great night!

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