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*UAE SAYS FZ1073 COPILOT ATTACKED PILOT WITH CRASH AXE: WAM

Low-profile hedge fund smashes record for New York office rent

Castle Hook will pay up to $21.2mn a year for 53,000 sq ft of penthouse space at developer Related’s new Madison Avenue tower

A skyscraper in midtown New York has smashed rent records by leasing its top two floors to a low-profile hedge fund for up to $21.2mn a year.

Castle Hook Partners will move into the penthouse of 625 Madison Avenue, an office tower owned by real estate developer Related Companies, in the second half of 2029. 

The fund’s willingness to pay between $350 and $400 per square foot in yearly rent for 53,000 square feet of space, according to people familiar with the matter, signals the boom at the high end of Manhattan’s office market is accelerating. 

The previous reported record for office rent was set earlier this year when a private international family office signed a 10-year lease averaging $327.50 per square foot in a Midtown tower owned by the Soloviev Group.

While Related had originally planned to build a luxury residential high-rise on the site, purchased from SL Green in early 2024, it decided instead to tap into the “real premium” that exists for “new, properly amenitised, high-end office with incredible views”, Related chief executive Jeff Blau said in an interview.

A war for talent in the financial services and technology sectors, combined with a drive to attract workers back to the office, has resulted in a golden era for the city’s luxury offices. 

The 53-storey high-rise overlooking Central Park has been designed by British architect Lord Norman Foster and will feature private dining facilities and wraparound terraces on its penthouse and “amenity floor”, said Blau. 

Castle Hook, founded by Soros Fund Management alumnus David Rogers in 2016, is currently headquartered in the General Motors Building on Fifth Avenue. The firm counted legendary hedge fund manager Stanley Druckenmiller among its early investors and has kept a low profile on Wall Street. It manages about $11bn with 35 employees, according to its most recent regulatory filing.

The firm is among so-called global macro hedge funds — which trade macroeconomic trends in currencies, commodities, bonds and stocks — that have benefited from a volatile few years in markets. Macro funds were up 6.8 per cent for the year through the end of August, according to research firm PivotalPath.

Castle Hook has posted high returns in recent years. The firm reportedly gained about 50 per cent last year and made more than 60 per cent the year prior.

A spokesperson for Castle Hook did not respond to a request for comment.

The battle for talent among hedge funds has become fierce, with lavish offices and amenities emerging as ways to compete for top portfolio managers beyond huge cheques. Hedge funds and other financial firms were among the first companies to require employees to return to their desks after the pandemic.

Prominent hedge fund managers such as Bill Ackman and Dan Loeb have been among the loudest voices decrying New York mayor Zohran Mamdani’s populist policies and their potential impact on the city’s real estate market. After Mamdani won the Democratic primary, some Wall Street executives privately warned his ascent would drive financial firms out of the city.

“People might have their views on where New York politics are, but I think people believe in the future of New York City,” said Related’s Blau. 

Related’s building on Madison Avenue would be 67 per cent leased by the end of the year, mostly to financial services companies, said Stephen Winter, the company’s executive vice-president. Private equity firm General Atlantic will take five floors as the anchor tenant. 

JPMorgan Chase’s headquarters, unveiled in 2025, features a state of the art health and wellness centre and 19 dining options, and has set the tone for new office amenities around the city. 

The value of Castle Rock’s lease has not been previously reported. The 15-year tenancy agreement was reported earlier by the New York Business Journal.

Qiagen : Strength attributed to constructive comments from an M&A blog

**NOTE: 09/17 QGEN Traders circulating German press report saying Qiagen attracts interest from KKR, Advent, TPG

Related: QIA.DE

- Operation could launch in coming weeks

- Considering coastal push to secure Red Sea route

- Will be led by Yemeni forces on the ground

Context: Renewed Saudi-Houthi fighting threatens Saudi oil facilities and shipping through the Red Sea. The Houthis have attacked Saudi energy infrastructure and gained ground along Yemen’s coast, making a planned Saudi offensive a potential escalation rather than an isolated strike. The report describes a plan, not an offensive already under way.

Related: CVX XOM USO BNO UGA ARAMCO.SA

- Plenty of room for anything on the table as far as rate hike or pause

- Open to seeing if we get evidence we are heading back to 2% inflation

- Will not react strongly to one month of data

- Won't rule out any decision at the next meeting

Related: SHY INFLX TRADEX JOBSX USFED

Sean Parker Spreads the Gospel of AI Music

Two years ago, a Sean Parker–led investing group took command of Stability AI, a onetime darling of AI images. With the backing of the major record labels, Stability now hopes to convince musicians to fully embrace a technology that has unnerved parts of entertainment.

To the music industry, Sean Parker has been many things. As co-founder of Napster, he was first an “outlaw renegade,” as he himself puts it. After his time at Facebook, his next act was as an early Spotify investor—putting in money while at Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund—and as a longtime Spotify board member.

Parker today hungers to be the guy who gets recording artists and music producers hooked on artificial intelligence. And he hopes to do so through the quiet resurrection of Stability AI, the once red-hot startup that nearly cratered out of existence before he took control of it two years ago.

As Parker tells it, bringing change to the music world isn’t for the faint of heart. “Generally, you find that people who are very passionate about music go into the music industry, get burned and then maybe never come back,” he said, breaking a long-held silence on his hopes and plans for Stability. “I’m probably one of a very few people who is enough of a masochist.”

Stability is something of an unlikely vehicle for Parker’s return to music. After the startup’s founding in 2020, it was initially best known for its image-generation model, Stable Diffusion, which got talked about in the same company as OpenAI’s Dall-E. It zoomed to a $1 billion valuation. But overspending and staff unrest led to founder and CEO Emad Mostaque’s ousting in 2024. In came Parker and a group of other investors, who shored up the perilous financial situation with an $80 million infusion—and renegotiated with the startup’s cloud providers to forgive several hundred million dollars of debt. In the process, Parker became Stability’s executive chair, while the CEO job went to Prem Akkaraju, former head of Weta Digital—the special effects company started by director Peter Jackson—and a longtime friend of Parker.

For a while, Stability seemed to disappear. A month or so ago, it rather unexpectedly rematerialized, saying it had raised $76 million in fresh funding, with a trio of prominent new investors: Sony Music, Warner Music Group and Universal Music Group, the three major record labels. (The startup is spending the funding on research, product development and compute; neither Parker nor Akkaraju would comment on the company’s new valuation.) With the money and investors, Parker and Akkaraju are now focusing the company on developing AI for music industry professionals.

In addition to the investment, the labels have also cut licensing deals with Stability, which will use their catalogs to train its AI. Already over the last few months, Stability has released three new audio-generation models and AI music-editing software.

Stability’s small and medium-size models are available for free for non-commercial use. Businesses with more than $1 million in revenue need to sign licensing deals to use any of the models.

The AI can generate whole instrumental tracks and small snippets of audio through natural-language text prompts. An upcoming update will let users also direct the AI through audio of themselves humming a melody or beatboxing a drum pattern. “Natural language is a pretty bad bottleneck for describing music,” said Zach Evans, Stability’s head of audio research. “People tend to want to actually use music itself to describe music.”

By focusing on AI for music professionals, Parker and Akkaraju are choosing to sidestep the crowded field of startups making AI music apps for everyday consumers, like Suno and Udio. (Those consumer apps generate both instruments and lyrics—Stability’s AI does not produce lyrics, as it assumes artists will want to keep control over that part of creating a song.) Still, those startups could refocus on the professional market. Meanwhile, Parker and Akkaraju are gambling that none of the big players in tech that have released their own AI music features—a list that includes OpenAI, Meta Platforms and Google—will choose to pay attention to their corner of the business and snuff it out.

The stiffest existing rival to Stability’s AI is probably Google’s audio-generation model, Lyria. But unlike Lyria, Stability’s models are open weight, which allows their users to tweak and customize them. Stability’s AI also allows for greater editing within a song and can handle longer song lengths.

When I spoke to Warner Music CEO Robert Kyncl, he readily acknowledged that the specter of competition looms over Stability. “What’s stopping a better-funded competitor from jumping in? Well, if you grew up on the internet, you know the answer is ‘Nothing,’” said Kyncl, who was previously YouTube’s chief business officer and an early key Netflix executive. “Like I always used to say when I was at Netflix or at YouTube: ‘We’re always paranoid, because our competition is just a click away and raising money from Andreessen Horowitz.’ That’s a way of life.”

Parker maintains that Stability has moved as fast as possible in its comeback efforts. He felt the licensing deals and record label investments were essential to secure first if Stability hoped to win legitimacy with major customers: Those negotiations with the labels weren’t going to happen overnight, and he had no interest in returning to his renegade past.

“With anything Hollywood related, it takes a little more time to do things the right way,” said Parker. “It’s a case of a lesson learned from when I was first starting out: Asking for forgiveness rather than permission is generally not the right strategy.”

Kyncl said his decision to partner with Stability was a bet on Parker’s past at Spotify and “passion for solving issues within the music industry,” as he politely put it—as well as his yearslong relationship with Akkaraju, who led the talks with Warner. (Akkaraju and Kyncl originally met at a Cannes Film Festival party in 2014.) More fundamentally, Kyncl was also concerned about the idea of Warner sitting out the AI era. “I don’t want the lessons of the file-sharing era to go by the wayside,” he said. (Warner has also done licensing deals with Suno and Udio.)

As Akkaraju and Parker talk up Stability’s tools in the entertainment world, they find themselves in a landscape where the perception around AI seems to be shifting. The media and entertainment elite initially met the AI boom with a sense of dread—and waves of copyright litigation. Some of those legal battles continue. Universal Music and Sony Music, for instance, are still suing Suno over copyright infringement. (Warner Music has settled with Suno.) And The New York Times Co. and other publishers remain locked in a fight with OpenAI.

Yet there are some signs that entertainment is beginning to warm to AI. In March, actor Ben Affleck sold his AI startup, which has been working on movie-editing software, to Netflix for $587 million. Three months later, Google said it would invest $75 million in A24—the much-loved indie studio with a shelf of Oscar gold—and partner with it to develop AI tools.

Akkaraju tries to take every opportunity he can to coax the AI reticent to try Stability’s products. At a recent party for his child’s school at his Los Angeles home, Akkaraju dragged a music supervisor from one of the major studios away from the festivities and into his study to give the software a test spin. How’d it go?

“It was probably the same reaction as when a mailman saw email for the first time,” Akkaraju said. “He was super excited.”

When I asked Akkaraju about the tall challenges I can picture lying ahead for Stability, he had a succinct reply. “If I wanted to do easier stuff,” he said, “I would just sell crunchy, salty snacks.”

For his part, Parker sees nothing but fertile ground ahead. “The widespread use of AI tools and technologies for the creative class is, relatively speaking, in its infancy,” he said. “Ultimately, there’s a very big opportunity to augment the creative power of professional musicians who actually want to use these tools in a very creative, expressive way.”