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Another glowing red indicator just lit up on the control panel steering the US economy: short sellers have placed a nearly unprecedented magnitude of bets against the domestic stock market.A new analysis by the firm S3 Partners has found that short interest in the S&P 500 is now the highest it’s been since the company began compiling that data in 2010, Business Insider reports. In all, S3 found that roughly 3.7 percent of the S&P’s free float — meaning the total market value of shares available to the public for trading — is now tied up in short interest.That’s a…

Tesla’s latest earnings report was very bad news for the company. In the second quarter, it made $1.1 billion in net profit, less than the $1.2 billion it reported a year earlier. Vehicle sales were up, but profits remain about a quarter billion short of expectations, and the automaker’s cash flow is negative for the first time in over two years.But the real blow has been the slow rollout of its Robotaxi service. Elon Musk has staked his automaker’s future on fully autonomous vehicles, promising investors it would help push Tesla’s valuation to an eyebrow-raising $30 trillion — approximately the…

AI chatbots and politicians who aren’t even pretending to try anymore are a match made in heaven.Exhibit A: Canadian lawmaker Bill Oliver, who made a strange, cyborgian digression in a speech addressing the New Brunswick legislature last month.“Public confidence in the office of an advocate matters,” Oliver intoned, before offering a bizarre non sequitur.“Here’s a more natural, flowing version of that section that reads like a legislative speech rather than a series of short points,” he added.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX is many different things to many different people — but one thing that it definitely isn’t is a get-rich-quick scheme.Since its debut on the public tickers back in early June, SpaceX shares have sunk from a high of over $225 to a dismal $110 today, as compounding failures and overvaluation fears take their toll. Overall, SpaceX is down nearly 30 percent compared to its opening stock price of $150 — and all those day-one rubes are now seeing red.“Elon has ruined me,” one Redditor posted on r/WallStreetBets, along with a screenshot showing a loss of nearly $455,000…

On Wednesday, an a pro-privacy account called “Orwell Day” shared a video on X-formerly-Twitter of a man discovering a Flock license plate reader embedded inside an otherwise innocent roadside speedometer. Operated by the local Sheriff’s department, the device was cleverly hidden to be undetectable to approaching road and pedestrian traffic.“What lurks on the back of it?” the man behind the camera asks as he approaches the device. “Look at that. Someone did some custom metal fabricating and decided to put a Flock camera, a mobile one, anywhere they want to put it, in the speedometer.”That particular unit is operated by…

While the rest of us were busy rooting against Argentina, suspicious things were afoot on gambling markets related to the World Cup.The Group of Copenhagen, an international sports integrity body, has flagged seven suspicious bets on platforms including Polymarket, which it says could be related to match manipulation.The full report hasn’t been released yet. But sources told The Athletic that some of the bets that raised “irregularities” include the nearly $4.8 million placed on Polymarket for Spain not to defeat Cape Verde in their group stage match-up. The game ended in a goalless draw, in one of the first major…

The Cybertruck is a flop. For all of Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s grandiose claims that the pickup would be an “apocalypse-proof” tank capable of winning its driver style points wherever they go, it’s instead earned a reputation for being incredibly unreliable and just about the opposite of “easy on the eyes” — probably because you can imagine the numerous sharp edges that define its low-poly design poking you in them as soon as you see it.Most unforgivable in the capitalist society Musk champions, it hasn’t sold well. He once estimated that Tesla would sell up to 500,000 Cybertrucks annually, but it…

As fears of a bursting AI bubble reach new heights, Google has emerged as arguably one of the best yard sticks available to measure investor sentiment around AI.Google’s parent company, Alphabet, released its quarterly earnings report on Wednesday. On the surface, there were plenty of reasons to pop the champagne: as the New York Times reported, the company’s profits rose to a staggering $112 billion, four times higher than the nearly $25 billion in profit over the same period last year.Yet underlying that banner profit is a familiar beast: the same circular financial motions that gave rise to the AI…

Last week, SpaceX’s enormous Starship rocket failed to ignite several of its engines, forcing the company to abort its first test launch since its IPO earlier this summer.The scrub served as the perfect metaphor for the space company’s ongoing struggles to convince investors of CEO Elon Musk’s lofty ambitions — ambitions which have little to no chance of turning into a reality without Starship.While the almost-trillionaire has promised that SpaceX will one day be worth “more than the rest of the Earth,” its prolonged decline on the stock market suggests otherwise. Instead of joining the AI race, SpaceX has resorted…

Publishers have watched in horror as Google continues to double down on AI features that discourage users from actually clicking on links — a once-steady source of readership that’s causing a crisis in the media now that the search engine is cutting it off.The situation has become so dire that some publications are now debating whether to cut Google off entirely, as the Wall Street Journal reports, illustrating an increasingly fraught relationship between the tech giant and the publishers that are creating content its AI models are regurgitating.According to the newspaper, prominent outlets including USA Today, Politico, the Economist, People,…