SpaceX bets $100bn on a Louisiana spaceport

The Starbase Louisiana site on Pecan Island will eventually run five launch complexes with ten pads, propellant production, and its own power plant, all on 125,000 acres of Gulf Coast marshland, according to SpaceX and state officials. Governor Jeff Landry is calling it the largest capital investment in state history, with 3,000 jobs promised at full build-out. The number that matters is the ambition behind it: SpaceX wants the site to support thousands of Starship flights a year, with some reports citing a target of 30 launches a day. That cadence only makes sense if Starship becomes the backbone of orbital data centers and satellite mega-constellations, not just crewed missions, which is the bet TechCrunch says underpins the site's second purpose as an AI infrastructure hub. Construction starts in 2027. First launch isn't expected until 2029, so this is a three-year wait to find out if the demand exists.

Mark Carney's government will impose tariffs of up to 50% on more than 700 US products from 8 September, hitting steel, dairy, agricultural equipment and electronics after Washington slapped 50% duties on $20bn of Canadian wine, cement and hockey sticks, as Reuters reports. Carney has publicly admitted the retaliation will raise prices and cut choice for Canadians, and he's doing it anyway. Talks collapsed after Trump told Canadian officials to fall in line or face something worse, according to CNBC. For UK exporters watching from the sidelines, this is the clearest sign yet that Washington's tariff playbook has moved from leverage to habit, and that even America's most integrated trading partner isn't exempt.

Heilongjiang Agriculture, the listed arm of China's third-largest farming conglomerate, has been ordered to pay 1.41 billion yuan in back corporate income tax and penalties for 2021 to 2025, a sum that exceeds its entire 2025 net profit of 1.166 billion yuan, according to Caixin. The trigger: tax officials ruled that 16 of its agricultural subsidiaries wrongly claimed preferential rates after taking land lease fees from non-employee farms. Shares opened limit-down when the notice landed, and the company now expects a first-half loss, its first in over two decades as a public firm. What makes this land differently from prior retroactive tax scares is the target: Beidahuang is ultimately controlled by China's Ministry of Finance, and Bloomberg frames the case as proof that Xi's fiscal tightening now reaches even state-linked champions.

Anthropic is pitching a total addressable market north of $30 trillion, edging past the $28.5 trillion figure SpaceX disclosed in its own S-1 filing, according to the Wall Street Journal. That number is roughly the size of annual US GDP. It is not a revenue forecast: even Anthropic's own leaked internal projections of $190 to 200 billion by 2028 would capture well under 1% of the market it's claiming. The figure exists because fundraising decks now compete on scale of imagination rather than scale of business, and Anthropic wanted a bigger number than the rocket company sitting next to it in the same investor conversations.

Darline Graham, sister of the late Senator Lindsey Graham, beat Rep. Ralph Norman in Tuesday's runoff after Trump personally recruited and campaigned for her following her brother's death from an aortic dissection in July, according to NBC News. She now faces Democrat Annie Andrews in November in a seat no Republican is expected to lose. Sen. Tim Scott called her win a significant victory, and the result sits alongside Trump's other South Carolina play this year, backing Alan Wilson to a 68.6% governor primary win despite initially hedging toward a rival candidate. Two wins in one state in one cycle is a small sample, but it's the sample the White House will point to heading into the midterms.

Listed Bitcoin miners have signed more than $70bn in cumulative AI and HPC hosting contracts, and CoinShares now projects that AI revenue could hit 70% of total income for these firms by year-end, up from 30% in January, according to ETF Trends. Bernstein puts the total power committed at roughly 7 gigawatts across 19 deals worth more than $135bn. Riot Platforms has leased a 191MW former mining site in Rockdale, Texas to Anthropic for 20 years. TeraWulf says it intends to exit Bitcoin mining entirely. The mechanism is simple: AI hosting contracts run at 80 to 90% operating margins against Bitcoin mining's volatile, halving-squeezed returns, so the industrial asset, cheap power, cooling, land, is worth more rented to Nvidia's customers than pointed at a blockchain.

Generalist is raising roughly $200 million led by 8VC as an extension of June's $400 million Series B, lifting its valuation from $2 billion to $3 billion, according to TechCrunch. Nvidia and Bezos Expeditions backed the earlier round. The speed is the story: eleven weeks from one price to the next in a category, physical AI for robots, that has no revenue disclosures to justify either number. Investors are pricing the platform bet, not the product.

Commonwealth Fusion Systems raised another $1 billion, taking total capital to $4 billion, which the company says is roughly 30% of all private money ever put into fusion globally, according to CFS's own announcement. The new backers include pension funds and sovereign wealth funds, the most risk-averse capital in the market, moving into fusion for the first time at meaningful scale. That matters more than the headline number: pension money doesn't chase moonshots, it chases infrastructure. CFS's SPARC magnet has already hit the field strength needed for its compact tokamak design, which is the technical proof point letting conservative capital treat this as an energy asset rather than a science experiment.

Frank Flight, Citadel Securities' head of macro strategy, now says the risk in long Treasuries tilts toward a rally, reversing the bearish call he made a month ago, according to Bloomberg. His reasoning: bearish positioning in the long end has gotten crowded, and inflation data has turned more disinflationary than his July framework assumed. Thirty-year yields near 5.19% to 5.28%, the highest in roughly 19 years, gave him plenty of room to be wrong in either direction. This is his second U-turn this year, having moved from bearish to neutral back in March, and each pivot has moved fast enough to matter for anyone pricing duration risk this week.

The Australian Retirement Trust, managing A$370 billion, has built an overweight position in the yen while trimming US dollar exposure, a wager that markets are underpricing further Bank of Japan hikes, according to Bloomberg. The BOJ has already taken rates to 1%, the highest since 1995, yet the yen barely moved on the June hike, which is exactly the gap ART is trying to exploit. Reuters polling shows more than 75% of analysts expect the policy rate to hold at 1% or higher through September. If ART is right about a bigger structural shift in Japanese rates than the market has priced, the payoff comes from a currency move most traders are still treating as incremental.

Intuit guided fiscal 2027 revenue growth to 9 to 10%, down from 14% in fiscal 2026 and below Wall Street's roughly $23.72 billion estimate, according to MarketWatch. TurboTax growth specifically is guided to just 2 to 3%, down from 7%, as the company deliberately cuts DIY pricing to win back filers. The offsetting bet is TurboTax Live, projected to grow revenue 36% to $2.8 billion and now representing 53% of the TurboTax business. Fourth-quarter profit still fell to $363 million from $381 million a year earlier, and investors sold the stock on the slower headline number rather than waiting to see if the customer-acquisition trade pays off.

Rob Bonta says Paramount is fighting the $110bn Warner Bros. Discovery deal in the court of public opinion instead of the court of law, sharpening a fight where his 12-state coalition has already filed for a temporary restraining order to block the merger outright, according to CNBC. Bonta wants structural remedies, meaning divestitures, not behavioural promises. Paramount has responded by warning it could leave California entirely, which Bonta has called blackmail, and Gavin Newsom's office is reportedly pushing Bonta privately to settle rather than risk the jobs. The state's own governor and its own attorney general are no longer aligned on how hard to push, and that split is now part of Paramount's leverage.

The party wants to replace UK data law with a lighter regime modelled on New Zealand's adequacy arrangement with the EU, plus a cap on non-executive director civil liability at £10,000 or three times average salary at smaller firms, according to the Telegraph. Criminal liability for unlawful employment or immigration practices stays untouched. The UK only just finished phasing in its own Data (Use and Access) Act reforms, which received royal assent in June 2025, so this is a pledge to unwind a rulebook that firms have barely finished adjusting to. Losing EU adequacy would hit any UK exporter moving personal data into Europe, and Reform hasn't published enough detail yet to say whether its New Zealand model would actually preserve it.

The Trump administration's investigation into Deloitte's hiring and promotion practices has ended in a $21.5 million settlement rather than a prolonged fight, a notable outcome given how aggressively the White House has pursued corporate DEI practices this year. Big Four firms have largely avoided public settlements of this size until now, which makes Deloitte's decision to pay and move on worth watching for how other consultancies respond to similar federal scrutiny.

The PCAOB has eliminated the position created to represent investor interests inside the regulator, part of a wider Trump-era restructuring of how the board oversees auditors. Removing the one internal role built to push back against industry influence changes who gets heard when audit standards are set, and it lands at a moment when the administration is already reshaping other financial watchdogs from the inside.

It's the clearest sign yet that Syria's post-war power structure is consolidating around a single national force rather than regional militias.

Consumer lawyer Dean Dunham confirms it's a breach of the standard vacant possession clause, recoverable through small claims if the seller won't pay up, as This Is Money reports.

Germany's stricter autonomous vehicle rules make this a tougher regulatory test than any US market Waymo has entered so far.

Grid operators in both countries are still tightening rules after last year's blackout, and battery capacity is now the bottleneck everyone's fighting over.

It sits on a former Exxon property, the kind of industrial land swap that says as much about Gulf Coast economics as it does about rockets.