FINANCIAL TIMES
-US and Chinese officials have started high-stakes trade talks in Malaysia, marking the beginning of a summit with President Xi Jinping in Asia. The talks, which will shape the outcome of the summit, are taking place after Beijing announced sweeping export controls on rare earths, prompting Trump to threaten an extra 100 per cent tariff on Chinese imports from November 1. The talks come a day after the US trade representative's office launched a probe into whether Beijing complied with a trade deal agreed in Trump's first term, potentially leading to further duties on Chinese imports. Trump is heading to Malaysia to meet with Xi on the first leg of a week-long Asia trip.
-In just nine months, US Treasury Secretary Michael Maga has endorsed Trump's aggressive tariff policies, overhauled the Federal Reserve, and introduced a new era of deregulation and tax cuts. He has also brought Maga to the US Treasury to probe left-leaning organizations suspected of fueling political violence, including those affiliated with George Soros. Bessent is also orchestrating a multibillion-dollar US rescue package for Argentina to support President Javier Milei, Trump's libertarian ally in Latin America. He has spoken to the Financial Times twice this month, including before announcing US sanctions on Russian oil exporters and a trip to Asia to resolve trade tensions with China.
-The Tony Blair Institute, a not-for-profit set up by former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, is undergoing a major restructuring, including staff lay-offs, as it seeks a more sustainable funding model. The institute, which advises nearly 50 governments worldwide, has announced a new stage of its journey, including changes in senior management. The new leadership includes the appointment of a new finance chief and operating officer, as well as plans for a regional managing director in Europe. The TBI will now focus on four global functions, with an emphasis on AI and innovation, with the appointment of a new chief AI and innovation officer, Benedict Macon-Cooney. The changes come as the not-for-profit, which undertakes commercial consulting to fund pro-bono work for governments, suffered deepening losses last year.
-President Trump has outlined a fundraising initiative for the White House ballroom, which would not require the destruction of existing federal property. The project, which would not require the destruction of existing federal property, has been supported by tech giants Amazon, Google, and Meta, as well as companies seeking regulatory relief or policy changes from the Trump administration. Alphabet subsidiary YouTube has pledged its $22M settlement with Trump over the suspension of his account in 2021 to be donated to the ballroom fund. Lockheed Martin, the US government's largest defense contractor, has pledged $10M to the project, pledging to make the addition to the people's house a powerful symbol of American ideals.
-Artificial intelligence (AI) is a powerful tool that can solve complex human challenges. However, it also poses significant dangers, including job losses, misinformation, and the risk of losing control of AI as it progresses. There are no international norms or sustained technical and legal processes in place to address these issues. As the CEO of a tech company that heavily uses AI, the lack of effort to address the existential challenges it poses is astonishing. While AI has the potential to solve many problems, it is crucial to address these issues to ensure its continued development and use.
-Donald Trump has triggered global trade turmoil by approving new tariffs on China and expressing anger at Canada. The US trade representative's office is investigating whether Beijing complied with a trade deal during Trump's first term, potentially leading to further duties on imports from China. This investigation could increase tension between the world's two largest economies in the run-up to the US-China summit. The probe could allow Trump to impose new tariffs on Chinese imports if the Supreme Court strikes down levies imposed on Beijing.
-A gun shop in Arizona secured a $1bn order of ammunition for Ukraine in 2022, covering an armoury worth more than Estonia's annual defence budget. OTL Firearms, a small gun shop, had no export record, large storage facility, or expertise to take state-scale orders. Ukraine wired €17mn upfront but never received a single round of ammunition from OTL's then 30-year-old owner. A US federal judge has ordered OTL to repay the full sum, plus interest and legal fees, bringing its liability to more than €20M. The June 2022 contract called for the delivery of 10mn rounds of 23mm anti-aircraft shells, 56,000 Grad rockets, 24,000 mortar bombs, and a vast inventory of other Soviet-standard munitions.
NEW YORK TIMES
-Speaker Mike Johnson has put the House on an indefinite hiatus for the second month, causing a decline in the role of Congress and stifling the speakership. This move, driven by political expedience, could have significant consequences for the institution that has already ceded much of its power to President Trump. Johnson, who has little influence over his own members, has chosen to become subservient to Trump, a departure from past speakers who sought to act more as a governing partner with the president. Trump has joked about being both the speaker and the president, raising concerns about sharing private conversations.
-The Trump administration is planning a shake-up at Immigration and Customs Enforcement, aiming to replace senior leaders in field offices across the country. The move is a response to the slow pace of deportations, which is falling short of President Trump's goal of over a million by the end of his second term. The plans, which involve reassigning about half a dozen field office leaders, have not been finalized. The administration is still trying to meet Trump's demand for crackdown on immigration, despite his efforts to secure the border.
-About 42 million low-income Americans are set to lose access to monthly nutrition assistance in November, after the Trump administration said on Friday that it would not reconfigure the budget to provide benefits during the government shutdown.The decision, described in an Agriculture Department memo, appeared to contradict earlier guidance from the agency that said it could tap into leftover emergency funds. The move raised the risk of some of the nation’s poorest families being unable to buy food in a matter of days. Dozens of states have warned that they cannot provide benefits next month, and at least two have already paused delivering them, prompting a surge of demand at food banks and eliciting anxiety among recipients. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, provides one in eight people in the United States with money to buy food. Those benefits, often referred to as food stamps, average about $187 per month and cost the federal government $8B monthly. The shutdown has put funding for the program at risk. But SNAP maintains a reserve, currently estimated to be about $5B, which can help cover emergencies and shortfalls.
-Unusual Machines, a Florida-based drone company, has won its largest contract from the Pentagon, as the US government expands its procurement of drones. The company, which has a $4mn stake in Trump Jr., has been contracted to manufacture 3,500 drone motors and other drone parts. The US army plans to order an additional 20,000 components from Unusual Machines next year. The acquisition is believed to be the largest order for Unusual Machines parts from the US government to date, but the value of the contract has not been disclosed. Shares in Unusual Machines jumped as much as 13% on Friday. Trump Jr.'s stake in Unusual Machines was disclosed in November 2024.
-President Trump is set to visit Malaysia on Air Force One, where he will meet with China's top leader, Xi Jinping, and the region is undergoing a new kind of superpower rivalry. The rivalry is centered on not only troops and warships but also supply chains, ports, and data centers. Governments across Asia are increasingly being pressured to pick sides, and countries caught in the middle, like Thailand, Singapore, and Indonesia, must weigh how to benefit from the competition without being held hostage. Countries in the region want to avoid being seen as pawns for the U.S. and P.R.C.
-Russia and Ukraine are engaged in a parallel war on each other's energy assets, which could force them to negotiate more than any international diplomacy. The US and Europe have announced new sanctions on Russia's oil industry, while Ukraine has been implementing its own "long-range sanctions" through drone strikes. Russia targets Ukrainian electricity and gas infrastructure, aiming to cripple Ukraine's ability to function and sap its people's will to abide the war. Analysts believe both sides view their energy attacks as a strategic lever to break the stalemate in a conflict that has lasted nearly four years.
-Ivory Coast's long-time president, Alassane Ouattara, is facing a potential extension of his rule in an upcoming election. Ouattara, who has been in power for 15 years, is accused of using his authority to bar opponents and has criticized his crackdown on dissent. Voters in the world's largest cocoa bean producer face a choice between renewal and continuity. Despite a major political and economic turnaround in the last decade, Ouattara's crackdown on dissent remains a concern.
NEW YORK POST
-The Pentagon has accepted an anonymous $130M donation to cover military paychecks during the government shutdown, an unprecedented move that has sparked questions over its legality. President Trump announced the gift, stating that "a friend" sent a check to make up for what he called a "Democrat shutdown." The donation was made under the condition that it be used to offset the cost of service members' salaries and benefits. The Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said the donation was grateful for this donor's assistance after Democrats opted to withhold pay from troops. The contribution came as millions of federal employees face missed checks and shuttered offices on day 24 of the partial government shutdown, the second-longest in US history. Experts warned that the administration may not be able to legally disburse the money without congressional approval.
-Ford and General Motors have praised President Trump for reducing tariffs on big and midsized trucks from other countries. Ford CEO Jim Farley slashed its expected tariff costs by $1 billion, down to about $2 billion. General Motors CEO Mary Barra also thanked Trump for the important tariff updates. Ford reported adjusted earnings per share of 45 cents, above expectations of 36 cents. The company's turnaround program, Ford+, has been praised for its performance in the quarter, demonstrating consistent improvement. The levies are expected to make American alternatives more competitive. Ford CEO Jim Farley thanked Trump and his team for the tariff updates. General Motors also cut its projection for the levies' impact by half a billion, to between $3.5 billion and $4.5 billion. Both Ford and GM reported earnings that beat Wall Street estimates across the top and bottom lines.
Meta, Microsoft, and Others Need Power. These Utility Stocks Will Benefit.
Artificial intelligence’s power demands are driving growth for regulated utilities, as data centers require new power plants.
Analysts project 8.8% aggregate annual earnings per share growth for utilities through 2027, up from 7% this year.
Mergers and acquisitions are anticipated in the utility sector, with smaller providers like AES and Avista being potential targets.
Regulated utilities are headed for a new era of growth, given the power that artificial intelligence requires. Look for some smaller providers to receive merger and acquisition offers.
The root of the story is that AI requires hyperscalers— Microsoft, Oracle, Meta Platforms, Alphabet, Amazon.com —to build more data centers, which require power. This means utility providers must build new power plants, which they monetize by agreeing with their states to earn a certain rate of return on. As they grow their plants, or what industry folks call their “rate bases,” they will grow earnings.
Earnings growth will increase moderately. McKinsey & Company forecasts data center capacity can grow by just over 20% annually through 2030. The total rate base growth for utilities will be much lower than that because a chunk of their rate bases are still in the slower-growing residential businesses.
But data center demand should still drive growth a bit higher for many years to come, especially because plant build-outs will take longer than data center completions. Analysts expect companies on the Utilities Select Sector SPDR Fund to grow earnings per share, in aggregate, by 8.8% annually through 2027, according to FactSet, up from 7% this year.
The whole picture makes M&A in utilities likely, especially because there are about 3,000 electric utility providers in the U.S., according to the Transportation Department. Through the first half of this year, 24 power and utility deals happened, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers, up from 17 in the same period last year. Plenty more are possible, given the number of utilities out there.
More deals could come in the form of mergers or purchase offers from larger utilities because of the potential synergies. Sure, creating revenue synergies, which is when a combined company uses its scale to create higher revenue than the sum of its parts, may prove difficult because utilities are regulated. States don’t want to raise costs for consumers more than they have to. But cost synergies are easier, meaning a combined company could eliminate redundant costs and drive higher profits than the two stand-alone entities could achieve.
That’s one of the potential drivers behind more deals, says Gabelli Funds portfolio manager Tim Winter, who expects more “consolidation” in the sector.
Winter says utilities could also attract buyers from private equity or infrastructure investment funds. They like the growth potential of the sector. They can’t easily achieve synergies, given that they’re not utility companies themselves.
Blackstone’s infrastructure business agreed in May to buy the currently $6 billion TXNM Energy, owner of Public Service Company of New Mexico, for $61.25 a share in cash, which sent the stock up 7% on the announcement. The stock currently trades at $57, and the two parties are waiting for regulatory approval, with an expected close in the second half of 2026.
The other candidates to receive offers are smaller utilities where buyers can finance a purchase. A bunch that Winter listed as possibilities are AES, Idacorp, Avista, and Portland General Electric, which all have market capitalizations below $10 billion.
Avista, with a $3.1 billion market cap, is interesting. It serves Oregon, Montana, Idaho and Washington, home to hundreds of data centers. It has overlap in Idaho with Idacorp, and with several Washington providers, some of which are privately held.
Analyst expect it to grow its asset base and its earnings per share by almost 8% annually over the coming two years. That’s up from 2% last year.
Expect deals—and stock gains for the smaller names.
24-Hour Stock Trading Is Coming—and Wall Street Isn’t Ready
Extended trading could change everything from staffing models to market volatility. What happens when a bank collapses at 1 a.m.?
Wall Street employees agree that 24-hour trading is inevitable. That doesn’t mean they’re happy about it.
For years, investors hoping to trade U.S. equities on major exchanges were confined to the traditional hours of 9:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. ET, five days a week. Some exchanges also offered “extended hours,” starting at 4 a.m. and ending at 8 p.m.
But soon, round-the-clock equity trading will be the new normal. The New York Stock Exchange, Nasdaq, and the London Stock Exchange are all weighing plans to extend weekday trading deep into the night. Robinhood Markets, Interactive Brokers, Firsttrade, and Charles Schwab all already offer 24-hour trading five days a week for many stocks. And a key market infrastructure provider, the Depository Trust & Clearing Corp., says it is preparing to accommodate round-the-clock trading as soon as the second quarter of 2026.
For now, the weekend is still off limits. But finance professionals across Wall Street are watching the advance of 24-hour trading with trepidation. They wonder: Will asset managers need to staff their offices at midnight? Will nighttime liquidity harm retail investors? What happens if a bank collapses at 1 a.m.?
Jenny Hadiaris, head of North America electronic execution at Citigroup, says that while retail clients are excited about round-the-clock trading, “institutional investors have been a lot more tepid on this.” She adds, “It’s a huge lift. It’s a massive lift for the Street.”
Financial advisors also see potential trouble ahead. “Imagine going through Covid-19, the fastest drop in history, with a market that never closes,” says Peter Mallouk, president of Creative Planning, a large wealth manager. “We are not staffed for round-the-clock client assistance.”
The Push for Round-the-Clock
Exchanges are moving to round-the-clock trading for many reasons. They want to cater to Asian retail investors, who are increasingly interested in big-name U.S. stocks like Nvidia and Microsoft. They are following the lead of cryptocurrency and commodities markets, which already trade continuously. And they want to encourage more foreign companies to list their stocks in the U.S.
Some wonder whether the appetite is even there. Just 11% of overall trading volume in 2025 took place outside the traditional 9:30 a.m. to 4 p.m., according to Nasdaq. Trading from 8 p.m. to 4 a.m. is even thinner, accounting for only 0.2% of total volume.
But some traders and exchanges are hoping that NYSE and Nasdaq’s moves will induce additional activity. “Us coming into the market will likely unlock additional demand,” says Chuck Mack, senior vice president for North American markets at Nasdaq.
If that demand materializes, it could be a tremendous boon for traders and exchanges, since both typically profit when more people are buying and selling stocks. But when there is no closing bell, it could also disrupt life on Wall Street. “It doesn’t matter what your view is,” says Hadiaris. “There’s pros. There’s cons. It doesn’t matter—it’s coming.”
Wide Spreads and Flash Crashes
In conversations with Barron’s, more than a dozen financial professionals voiced a variety of concerns regarding the impact of 24-hour trading—though they also stressed that the change is inevitable.
Many worry about liquidity and execution. When few participants are trading, market makers must hold on to shares for longer. To compensate for the increased risk, they widen their bid/ask spreads—the gap between the cost of buying and selling shares. At night, when almost no one is trading and not all market makers are offering their services, spreads can be unusually wide.
If unsuspecting investors place orders at night when spreads are broad, they will effectively receive worse prices than if they wait for daylight.
“A lot of people don’t realize that they’re likely to do far worse in terms of price if they’re going to trade overnight,” says Benjamin Schiffrin, director of securities policy at Better Markets, an advocacy group. Schiffrin believes that if overnight trading is conducted on exchanges, spreads could narrow somewhat, but far more retail investors would be exposed to the risks.
Low liquidity wouldn’t just harm individual investors. If an investor places a large sell order and there are few buyers available, prices could fall, potentially triggering additional automated selling. “There could be many flash crashes,” says Lynn Challenger, global head of trading at UBS asset management. When the market is thin, anybody buying or selling at the wrong moment could lose their shirt.
In the short term, many trading experts expect liquidity to be extremely thin between 8 p.m. and 4 a.m. But volumes could pick up when big events occur, like a presidential election or geopolitical crisis.
Pressure on People and Plumbing
Many traders and investors have come to appreciate the closing bell. After 4 p.m., they have ample time to clean up their books, meet with co-workers, schmooze with clients, and grab some sleep. While asset prices technically move overnight, the tape is out of sight and volume is thin.
In a continuously trading world, stock-price movements would always be in view. “I think for the equities traders, it’ll be a new level of stress and anxiety because they will never get a break,” says John Shammas, chief growth officer at DriveWealth, a financial-technology company that helps investors operate overnight. “For the futures and options traders, they’re used to this” because those assets already trade at nearly all hours.
Investors who enjoy an evening cocktail aren’t the only ones who rely on the closing bell. Currently, exchanges and brokers use the dead of night to handle a host of rarely thought-of functions. Trades must be settled, closing prices recorded, stocks split, mistakes reversed, and dividends paid. In a round-the-clock world, it’s still unclear how the market plumbing will operate.
“Most broker-dealers are used to having a six-plus-hour period when they can do all their corporate action processing,” says Shammas.
Staffing is an obvious issue. “If the market’s going to be open, regardless of whether there’s a lot of liquidity or not, it could create price risk for investors,” says Michael Cyprys, an equity analyst at Morgan Stanley. Someone will need to be awake to manage that risk, at least at firms with demanding clients.
The Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, a trade group, noted in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing that “overnight on-exchange trading will require additional staffing at regulators, firms, and third-party service providers” to monitor systems and respond to clients. The trade group asked: “Who pays for these increased costs?”
Those costs could fuel further consolidation. Many large traders and asset managers already have staff awake at all hours. If a price moves while New York is asleep, employees in Singapore are able to respond. But smaller firms without global presences will be out of luck.
Who Will Benefit?
Many finance professionals are also wondering what might happen when market-shifting news happens during the wee hours. On the one hand, overnight exchange trading will allow more asset managers to respond to events in real time, so their portfolios will always reflect their views on current information. On the other, overnight trading—especially when more retail investors get involved—could cause investors to respond impulsively. Rather than waiting until morning, when cooler heads may prevail, investors could jump into the fray right away.
“It heightens the probability that you get an emotional response to market events,” says Kristi Mitchem, a founder of wealth manager &Partners who was previously CEO of Wells Fargo asset management.
If investors react impulsively, the people who benefit will be the professionals: the hedge funds, proprietary traders, and algorithmic funds who already dominate pre- and postmarket trading and can take advantage of irrationally priced assets.
“My view of 24-hour trading is it has little benefit,” says Victor Haghani, a wealth manager who co-founded Long-Term Capital Management. “It’s just going to facilitate a greater redistribution of wealth from retail speculators to proprietary traders.”
The rise of 24-hour trading could also privilege high-speed, computerized operations. Under the current system, there is little benefit to reading a news release at 8 p.m. as opposed to 8:05 p.m. All investors have to wait until the morning to place their trade, giving everyone ample time to receive and digest information. But if the exchanges are open when news arrives, reaction time may become more important. Using machine learning and web scraping tools to consume information—already par for the course for some funds operating in the daytime—could become even more important.
A senior trading executive at a large U.S. bank noted that overnight trading could exacerbate market contagion. The executive observed that, during the collapse of Bear Stearns in March 2008, regulators and executives had several nights and a weekend to organize a bailout and sale of the beleaguered bank. That breathing room may soon be in short supply.
“Imagine if when GameStop was happening, the markets were open 24/7,” says Better Markets’ Schiffrin. “I think it was hard enough for the SEC and others to understand what was transpiring in the market then.”
Skeptical of the benefits and wary of thin liquidity, many investors say they are planning to stay away from overnight trading and expect others to do the same. “Buy-and-hold and institutional investors would probably sit on the sidelines,” says Michael Arone, chief investment strategist at State Street.
That could create a chicken-and-egg scenario. If institutional investors don’t provide overnight liquidity, then trading volumes will remain low, making nighttime trading less appealing to institutional investors. The graveyard shift will become the domain of retail investors and specialized firms.
But competitive pressure may compel asset managers and traders to build overnight capabilities anyway. “If I don’t get that type of service from one counterpart, I will go to the next one who provides it,” says Vineer Bhansali, founder and chief investment officer of LongTail Alpha, a hedge fund. “We’re talking about millions of dollars of opportunity loss.”
Overnight trading will catch on, Shammas predicts. “This is going to be a feature like fractional shares, where it’s going to be something that everyone has over the next five years.” Some brokers may never be able to support 24-hour monitoring due to technical inefficiency, he says, “but customers will demand and expect it.”
What Investors Should Do
How should investors prepare for continuous trading? It’s a question many on Wall Street may have to answer—soon. For most investors without vast tools at their disposal, the optimal strategy remains buy and hold. Trying to time the market is perilous; timing the market when spreads are wide is even worse.
But LongTail Alpha’s Bhansali says investors should have a plan to rebalance their portfolio if market disruptions happen overnight.
When Bhansali started his Wall Street career more than three decades ago, repositioning a portfolio was a lengthy process. “Going back to 1994, it used to take months,” he says. “In 2008 to 2010, it was weeks. And then, suddenly, time started to get compressed,” he says. “Now, it has gone from minutes to seconds.”
He sees 24-hour trading as an extension of this broader acceleration. In a world where news happens at all hours, portfolio managers need to be ready to respond within seconds, and trades need to be pre-staged. “When the event happens, all you can do at that point is literally route the trades,” he says.
The old daytime trading system—developed at a time when stocks needed to be traded in-person—looks increasingly quaint. “It’s silly that the market closes at all,” says Creative Planning’s Mallouk. “But I think it will be unfortunate, in the sense that the market is a point of stress for a lot of people. And having it go nonstop, all the time, will make for a lot more anxiety.”
The NBA Made a Big Bet on Sports Gambling—and It Just Blew Up
Commissioner Adam Silver had been one of the earliest proponents of legalized betting. Following this week’s arrests, it has led to an existential crisis for his league.
- Federal agents arrested NBA player Terry Rozier and others in an illegal betting scheme, despite a prior NBA investigation finding no violations.
- The probe implicates current and former players and coaches, including Chauncey Billups and Damon Jones, in insider trading and rigged poker games.
- NBA commissioner Adam Silver, an early advocate for legalized sports betting, now faces a crisis highlighting the vulnerabilities of widespread gambling.
When federal agents announced charges against more than 30 people involved in a sprawling gambling probe on Thursday morning, the specifics of the case were gripping.
There were underground poker games, X-ray tables, tips whispered to bettors about where to put their money in upcoming professional basketball games.
But for the NBA, the general picture that emerged—at a Brooklyn press conference across the East River from the league’s Fifth Avenue offices—was much more chilling. Prosecutors unveiled an indictment that featured an active player, a retired one and a current head coach spilling secrets to illegal gamblers.
It was a “fraud,” FBI Director Kash Patel said, “that these perpetrators committed on the grand stage of the NBA.”
It’s also an existential threat to professional sports, and perhaps the defining crisis of Adam Silver’s tenure as NBA commissioner. Silver was an early proponent of legalized sports gambling in the U.S. and had long argued that legal betting would have the positive effect of bringing criminal behavior—such as manipulating and fixing games—into the light.
Still, Thursday’s arrests showed the vulnerability in Silver’s argument. Technology has turned gambling into a widespread habit on a scale too vast for any league to police. Every fan now has a casino in their pocket, and the number of bets per game has grown exponentially, putting sports leagues in the same boat as social-media companies trying to root out inappropriate content.
The sweeping allegations, unveiled across two indictments, touched nearly every corner of the league. Terry Rozier, an active player, was charged with fraud after allegedly telling a friend that he’d be pulling himself out of a game early so the friend could bet on it. Damon Jones, a retired player and former assistant coach, was accused of participating in rigged poker games and passing along confidential team information for illegal wagers.
Chauncey Billups, a Hall of Fame player and now the head coach of the Portland Trail Blazers, was also charged with participating in illegal poker games backed by organized crime families. But the indictment further suggests that he fed insider information about his team to the betting ring.
The NBA has now placed Billups and Rozier on leave.
“I was deeply disturbed,” Silver said of the allegations while attending Friday’s New York Knicks game. “There’s nothing more important to the league and its fans than the integrity of the competition.”
For any sports league, learning that federal investigators had charged its players and coaches of colluding with gamblers would be a catastrophe. But it is especially stinging in the case of the NBA. Over a decade ago, when sports-betting apps weren’t legally available, Silver was one of the earliest and most influential advocates for legalizing sports gambling.
“Congress should adopt a federal framework that allows states to authorize betting on professional sports,” Silver wrote in a New York Times opinion piece in 2014, “subject to strict regulatory requirements and technological safeguards.”
Since then, every other major league has followed Silver’s lead. Legalized gambling quickly developed into a booming industry and sports books have flooded leagues with money through advertising, product fees and fan engagement.
It is impossible to watch an NFL or MLB game without seeing ads for gambling companies during commercial breaks. In fact, on Thursday, when a panel on ESPN’s flagship morning show discussed the charges, the network scrambled to remove an advertisement for the ESPN Bet sportsbook on the bottom of the screen.
But feeding the growth of sports gambling carried risks like those laid out in this week’s indictments. Though Rozier was investigated by the league after a March 2023 game, the NBA didn’t find any violations of its rules. Rozier played for two more seasons with the Charlotte Hornets and Miami Heat, collecting about $50 million in salary until his arrest. His lawyer says he intends to fight the charges against him.
Billups was charged only over his involvement in rigged poker games, where prosecutors say he was recruited to lure in wealthy players, and pocketed a share of the proceeds. But in the separate sports-betting indictment, prosecutors allege that “Co-Conspirator 8,” an unnamed player-turned-coach whose description and career timeline matches Billups’s exactly, knew that the Trail Blazers intended to rest their best players on March 24, 2023—one day after Rozier left his game with an apparent injury.
The co-conspirator fed that information to bettors, who placed about $100,000 worth of wagers on Portland to lose that night, before the injury details were released to the public and the betting lines moved. They profited when Portland lost by 28 points. Billups’s lawyer has issued a statement denying the accusations against him, and also says he intends to fight them.
Jones, who played alongside LeBron James and later coached him in Cleveland, is also accused of parlaying his privileged position into a betting edge. The former teammates remained close and worked together in an unofficial capacity that gave Jones access to the Los Angeles Lakers, James’s current team. The government says Jones repeatedly tried to sell inside information to another member of the poker-rigging crew.
In February 2023, days after James set the NBA’s all-time scoring record, he had a sore ankle. Before he was listed as “Out” on the injury report, Jones alerted another unnamed co-conspirator. “Get a big bet on Milwaukee tonight before the information is out!”
In all, the sports-betting indictment alleges that participants in the scheme tried to leverage insider information about no fewer than four different NBA players, in addition to Rozier.
Betting crises aren’t unique to the NBA. Baseball has dealt with “spot-fixing,” where a pitcher might throw a single ball on purpose instead of a strike. The NFL has suspended a number of players for betting on games.
But basketball has proven especially susceptible to foul play. It didn’t raise eyebrows when the Blazers willingly benched their best players for a night in the hopes of securing a higher draft pick, a common practice known as “tanking.” And one booming corner of sports betting is prop bets, placed on not the score of the game but a single stat, such as how many rebounds a player might grab. Basketball, a game of constant motion, has many such prop bets to offer—or manipulate.
On Tuesday, the day the NBA season tipped off, Silver himself called for tighter regulations on betting, especially when it comes to the prop bets for lesser players.
“We’ve asked some of our partners to pull back some of the prop bets,” he said on ESPN.
Just two days later, the FBI had arrested one on a $96 million contract, an acquaintance of the league’s most famous current player, and a coach who was already enshrined in basketball’s Hall of Fame.
The night before the FBI’s press conference, Billups had chosen an unfortunate metaphor to describe how he responds to pressure.
“I do the best I can,” Billups said, “and let the chips fall where they may.”
Faster, Higher, Stronger—and Full of Drugs. The Billionaire Quest to Hack Sports.
A new sporting competition is enticing athletes to openly use performance-enhancing drugs and break records with million-dollar paychecks. Is it a grotesque spectacle or pushing the boundaries of human achievement?
One Tuesday last February, alone in a pool in North Carolina, a former Olympic swimmer took exactly 20.89 seconds to prove that his highly-tailored doping program was working.
He was bigger, stronger, and quicker than he’d ever been in his life. And the cocktail of chemicals coursing through Kristian Gkolomeev’s body had helped him pulverize the 50-meter freestyle faster than anyone in history.
At any major competition, that turbocharged swim would have had Gkolomeev thrown out and banned. Instead, it earned him the biggest paycheck of his career: $1 million.
The world record wasn’t recognized by any major sporting authority, nor did it officially topple the mark of 20.91 set by Brazil’s César Cielo in 2009. But that was the whole point. Gkolomeev’s backers, an organization known as the Enhanced Games, weren’t trying to rewrite the old history books.
With investors that include venture capitalist Peter Thiel and Donald Trump Jr., Enhanced is attempting to push sports into a world of logical and physical extremes, unencumbered by the rules, regulations or doping controls of traditional competition. They plan to host their own Olympic-style competition in Las Vegas next year with a roster that already includes the British swimmer Ben Proud, who won silver at Paris 2024, and U.S. sprinter Fred Kerley, a multiple world champion.
The World Anti-Doping Agency has called it a “dangerous and irresponsible” undertaking. Seb Coe, the president of World Athletics, dismissed any participants as “moronic.” But organizers argue that they are simply more transparent than the regular Olympics—and finally paying athletes what they deserve.
For Gkolomeev, a 32-year-old who has represented Greece at four Summer Olympics and is the father of a toddler, the debate boiled down to this: Make another four years of sacrifices for one last shot at a medal, or close that chapter forever for a modicum of financial security. Over 14 years as a pro, his career earnings had amounted to roughly $200,000.
Gkolomeev understood that widely-publicized doping would mean he could never go back to the swimming world he knew. But by the end of last year, he had grappled with the ethical quandary and come out on the side of trying something different. The Enhanced project had realigned his entire worldview on professional sports.
The idea for a no-testing, whatever-it-takes, free-for-all version of the Olympics has an extensive history. For as long as performance enhancement has been around, there have been thought exercises and barroom debates that ask, what if athletes could just take everything? How fast would humans run? How high might they jump? How many home runs could they crush?
The philosophical arguments against it, meanwhile, have centered on sporting integrity—the idea that performance should be generated through sweat, focus, and skill, unassisted by potentially dangerous chemicals.
But the Enhanced Games have a different read on what constitutes a level playing field. They are taking taboos and turning them into hacks. Technological advantages, such as ultra-buoyant swimsuits, are encouraged. And the unapologetic use of performance-enhancing drugs is a given, tapping into the larger, often controversial movement that is challenging the rules on what we eat, how we age, and what our bodies need.
Advertisement
In fact, performance-enhancing products underpin the entire enterprise.
The Enhanced Games have no corporate sponsors or broadcast deals. Instead, they have built their revenue model around the sale of training plans and supplements. The organization’s website currently offers three testosterone-boosting products, which it hopes to begin selling later this year.
The lawyer and entrepreneur behind it is Dr. Aron D’Souza, who isn’t a medical doctor, but rather holds a degree from Oxford and a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Melbourne. Though he has spent much of his career in tech, it was his involvement in a high-stakes legal battle that first earned him attention in the U.S.: He takes credit for devising the strategy behind Thiel’s litigation that ultimately bankrupted Gawker Media. (That said, the most surprising line on D’Souza’s CV is his role as the Honorary Consul of Moldova in Australia.)
“I’m addicted to the action,” he says.
In 2023, D’Souza decided that the action was in sports. So he founded the Enhanced Games to correct what he viewed as rampant hypocrisy that left athletes not only underpaid, but also limited in their potential by constantly shifting and arbitrary rules.
“Let’s remember in 1896, when Baron Pierre de Coubertin invents the modern Olympiad, the line was about amateur versus professional,” says D’Souza, 40. “It was somehow viewed that being a professional athlete was cheating. It was doping…That took nearly 100 years to go away.”
D’Souza speaks in the sweeping terms of a person convinced he can fix any problem—market forces and social change, inefficiencies and revolutions. He says his dream is to one day build a trillion-dollar company. Beyond that, he also believes that he can usher in new ways of living, in which performance-enhancement isn’t reserved for elite athletes, but becomes a daily fact of life.
“In 10 years time, I imagine we will not even be talking about pharmacological enhancements,” D’Souza says. “This is gonna be so commonplace, it’s going to be like Ozempic. Everyone’s going to be doing it…”
“What I’d like to be remembered for is not bringing the Enhanced Games to life, but bringing the enhanced age into existence,” he adds. “Who would want to be a Human 1.0 when you can exist in the world of Humans 2.0?”
First, though, he needed to create Swimmer 2.0.
Gkolomeev first learned about the Enhanced Games when he heard an experienced coach named Brett Hawke appear on a podcast. Hawke himself had signed up to the organization after hearing D’Souza on the Joe Rogan podcast last year.
Hawke, an Australian-born former coach of the Auburn swimming team, explained that in his years of pacing the pool deck, his greatest frustration was seeing athletes earn less than they deserved.
“Olympic swimmers, they always struggled,” Hawke says. “The athletes that I trained, these are the best swimmers in the world and they should be regarded as such.”
Gkolomeev felt that pain sharply. After last summer’s Paris Games, he was sitting at a crossroads in his career. He’d finished fifth in the 50-meter freestyle final in 21.59 seconds, coming closer than ever to an Olympic medal in 12 years of trying.
The podium was just three hundredths of a second away.
So the question facing him was whether another four-year cycle of discipline and self-denial was worth it for the chance to bridge that blink of an eye. He had no savings, no investments, and no assets. At some point, he would need to do something else. Plus, Gkolomeev couldn’t shake the feeling that others in the pool might not have always played by the same rules. His suspicions were borne out when it emerged last year that 23 Chinese swimmers had tested positive for a banned substance before the Tokyo Olympics and been cleared by their country’s national doping agency.
“As athletes, we know if something is sketchy or not,” Gkolomeev says. “I definitely know that I haven’t competed against athletes that have been doing everything according to WADA rules…They win prize money that you were probably supposed to win.”
“I was always saying to myself, give me what these guys are taking and, you know, I will be unbeatable.”
As it happened, the Enhanced Games were offering swimmers precisely that opportunity. Gkolomeev talked it over with his wife Lindsay, a former swimmer at the University of Alabama. And last fall, she reached out to Enhanced by sending an unsolicited email to the general inbox.
Soon, Gkolomeev met Hawke and the pair realized that they had never had so many training options available to them. Everything Hawke knew about workload and recovery times went out the window. So he did research, consulted doctors, and spent hours interrogating ChatGPT to explore this new realm of possibility.
Hawke had already seen dramatic results working with the Enhanced Games’ first swimmer, a former Olympian from Australia named James Magnussen. They could train six days a week. Instead of taking 24 hours to recover from a workout, he would take 12. They pushed so hard that the barrier was no longer physical, but mental and, as Hawke says, “neurological.” Magnussen was becoming a machine.
By the time he began working with Gkolomeev, Hawke had adjusted his plan to five days a week to prevent burnout. Even so, sessions could be 20% more intense than they’d been during Gkolomeev’s career and the turnaround times would be unprecedented. He expected to complete a traditional 12-week training bloc in only six.
“I’m thinking it’s endless,” Hawke says. “Where’s the limit?”
The harder part was navigating the perception from the outside world. All over the swimming ecosystem, former friends and acquaintances told Hawke that he was making an embarrassing mistake. He could talk about small doses and medical supervision all he wanted, but critics, including WADA, insisted that Enhanced was putting athletes in danger and setting a profoundly toxic example.
“I’ve lost friends over this. I’ve lost colleagues,” Hawke says. “I wasn’t naive enough to think that this wouldn’t have an impact.”
Still, Gkolomeev was ready to throw in his lot. In November, he decided there was no going back. For more than a decade, Gkolomeev had faithfully complied with every rule of life as a drug-tested athlete—the 6 a.m. knocks on his door, the supervised urine collection, and the constant updating of his whereabouts so testers could find him. All of that was about to end.
He contacted the antidoping authorities at WADA to let them know: Kristian Gkolomeev should no longer be their concern.
In order to figure out which performance-enhancing drugs he should take, Gkolomeev first needed to learn which parts of his performance stood to be upgraded.
Guided by his doctor in Orange County, Calif., he underwent a battery of tests to paint a complete picture of where he was, biologically, as an athlete. They measured everything that could be measured—his heart, his lung capacity, how he absorbed oxygen. What they found was that there was plenty of room for him to get stronger. Gkolomeev had always gotten the impression that no matter what he ate or how he trained, he hit a ceiling when he tried to gain more useful muscle. He also wanted to recover faster. With chemical help, both would be easy to fix.
Gkolomeev began “the protocol,” as he calls it, early in the year by microdosing three different drugs for a short spell, a mix of steroid hormones such as testosterone or its derivatives, metabolic regulators, and FDA-approved growth hormone. (He declined to name the specific products, because he didn’t want to encourage anyone to copy his program without medical advice.) If this regimen seems obvious for an athlete seeking immediate results, that’s because it is. When nothing is banned, there’s no reason to look for workarounds. No one has to bother with elaborate prescriptions to avoid detection or slower-acting alternatives.
Immediately, Gkolomeev identified a boost during recovery. He used to come home from a hard practice and vegetate on the couch, shattered by exhaustion. Now, it seemed as though someone had put in fresh batteries.
Then came the changes he could see, not just feel. In the space of three weeks, he was up 5 pounds with no discernible side effects. By the end of his two-month cycle, when he was ready to find out just how fast he might be, he had packed on 13 pounds of lean muscle.
“I feel different in the water, outside of the water,” he says. “My strength was good, my recovery was good, my confidence got really good. Everything, everything was just so much better. I could recover within a night and then be ready for the next day to push and push more.”
On most days, he swims less than 1,500 meters, 30 lengths of an Olympic pool, at an intensity high enough to break any amateur. Gkolomeev is a sprinter, so workouts are focused on building the explosive power to turn him into a torpedo. That much he was prepared for. The strange surprise was how quickly his body was evolving.
“When you change your body and you become stronger, it changes everything inside the water, your buoyancy, your resistance,” he says. “You need to change small things in the stroke, in your technique—I’m much heavier in the water.”
Because of that, neither Gkolomeev nor Hawke went to North Carolina in February expecting a serious attempt at the César Cielo record. Even with a faster, more buoyant suit designed for open water swimming—illegal in regular pool competition—20.91 seconds seemed out of reach. Hawke even told D’Souza that Gkolomeev probably needed more preparation. It wasn’t worth hopping on a plane to attend in person.
But from the moment Gkolomeev dove in that Tuesday, he knew he was motoring. Fifty meters. One length of an Olympic swimming pool, all in a single breath. As he pounded through the water, Gkolomeev sent waves rolling into the empty lanes beside him. And when he reached for the wall, he spun around to look at the clock: 20.89. It was a time he’d never imagined in two decades of striving.
It was also more cash than he’d ever considered possible in his former life of doing things by the book. But there it was, a round million, printed on a giant novelty check.
The reaction to Gkolomeev’s swim came swiftly. There was elation from like-minded fans who shared D’Souza’s views on the contradictions of modern sports. There was also a barrage of abuse from those who called Gkolomeev a cheater. Among some of his former peers, there was outright disgust. Four-time Olympic champion Leon Marchand, France’s hero of the Paris Games, wrote as much under one of Gkolomeev’s Instagram posts.
“This,” he typed, “is sad.”
The following month, World Aquatics went even further in June when, in the name of sporting integrity, it adopted a new bylaw that gave it the power to ban any athlete, coach, trainer, or doctor who “actively supported or endorsed a sporting event or competition that embraces scientific enhancements that include the use of Prohibited Substances or Prohibited Methods.” Gkolomeev could never return to official competition, even if he wanted to.
Enhanced responded in August by filing an $800 million lawsuit in New York’s Southern District against World Aquatics, USA Swimming, and WADA, alleging antitrust violations. The filing argues that these sporting bodies are trying to organize a de facto boycott of the Enhanced Games.
“The central element of their winner-take-all market structure is having that record book,” D’Souza says. “When they lose control of it, it’s all over for them.”
That’s why D’Souza is targeting as many iconic records as he can. As a sport with dozens of different events and clear correlation between an athlete’s engine and his results, swimming offers plenty of low-hanging fruit. But beyond the pool, D’Souza also has Usain Bolt’s 100-meter mark in his sights. And he has no doubts that the talent is there. Thousands of athletes have been in touch since the Enhanced Games project launched two years ago, he says, with “hundreds of potential Olympians” in that group.
D’Souza will need plenty of them to fill out his fields when the Games come to life next May in Vegas, with events in swimming, track, and weightlifting—and lavish appearance fees and bonuses for all. Gkolomeev will be there, at that point several cycles into the science experiment he’s running on himself. He’ll have just one objective: sweeping up more of the paychecks that swimming clean never earned him. Should he best his own mark in the 50-meter freestyle, he’ll collect another $1 million.
“I know what I did in my career,” Gkolomeev says. “I know I’ve been clean, I’ve been fair to everybody. And yeah, I have no regrets.”
David Ellison Is Moving Fast and Spending Big to Remake Hollywood
The industry is rooting for him to revive Paramount. His pursuit of Warner Bros. Discovery has some worried.
Newly minted Hollywood mogul David Ellison is trying to make good on a promise he made to former Paramount film chief Sherry Lansing.
Soon after closing his $8 billion purchase of Paramount, Ellison told the board member, “we’re going to go off like a rocket,” she said in an interview.
He’s been spending like he meant it.
This stretch has been frenetic even for speed-loving Ellison. Flying planes since he was a teen, he recently boasted about being one of the top 10 aerobatic pilots in the country when he was in his early 20s and having flown 300 miles an hour and 15 feet off the ground.
Less than three months into his reign at Paramount, Ellison has signed a $7.7 billion agreement to bring Ultimate Fighting Championship matches to the Paramount+ streaming service and CBS, lured “Stranger Things” creators Matt and Ross Duffer from Netflix, and bought the news and opinion site the Free Press and installed its chief Bari Weiss as editor in chief of CBS News.
On top of that, the 42-year-old movie producer-turned studio chief has made three bids in the past six weeks for Paramount’s bigger rival, Warner Bros. Discovery, a sign of his ambition to reshape the media and entertainment industry.
All of those overtures have been rebuffed by Warner Discovery, according to people familiar with the matter. His offers, backed by his father, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, pressured the board to put the company on the auction block earlier this week.
If Ellison succeeds in acquiring Warner Discovery, he would command an entertainment behemoth whose holdings would include the Warner and Paramount movie and television studios, the Paramount+ and HBO Max streaming services and dozens of cable networks including CNN and Comedy Central.
It would also be a meteoric rise for someone who has only just become chief executive of a publicly traded company.
Many in the industry were rooting for Ellison to get control of long-moribund Paramount. Now, though, there is significant trepidation about him adding Warner Discovery to his portfolio. Paramount itself is bracing for a wave of layoffs next week that will be in the thousands. Combining the company with Warner Discovery would likely result in even more job losses.
Filmmakers in particular are worried about two more major studios combining, which could further shrink an already challenged film industry.
Warner Bros., once seen as Hollywood’s crown jewel, released the most movies, offered talent the most lavish deals, and produced hit TV shows for numerous networks. After changing owners in a series of acquisitions, the studio has downsized significantly.
Warner has had a banner year in 2025 thanks to hits including “A Minecraft Movie,” “Superman” and “Sinners.” But its motion-picture division laid off 10% of its U.S. staff in July, showing that no amount of box office success can make up for the economic pressure faced by its parent company.
Ellison and his team have signaled they want to keep Warner Bros. Pictures operating separately from Paramount Pictures following a merger, according to a person familiar with the matter. But many in Hollywood fear the combined company would release fewer movies than the two have been producing under separate ownership.
The grimmest possibility for the filmmaking community is that Warner would become a production label under Paramount, like the former 20th Century Fox studio has become at Disney. This year the 20th Century label is releasing a handful of movies in theaters. In 2018, the last full year before it was acquired by Disney, 20th Century Fox released around a dozen films.
A Warner Discovery acquisition would require government approval. President Trump has publicly praised the Ellisons and attended UFC matches with David. Analysts say that bodes well for the combination receiving a blessing from the administration.
Ellison got bit with the film bug as a teen, seeing movies with his mother and his younger sister Megan—also a movie producer—and going to the University of Southern California to study filmmaking.
Deciding he could learn more on a set than in a classroom, Ellison dropped out and began acting. He co-starred with James Franco in “Flyboys,” a 2006 movie about World War I pilots that was funded mostly by his father. After a second movie he was planning to act in fell apart, he pivoted to producing full-time.
With cash from his father and mentors including Steve Jobs and David Geffen, he launched Skydance Media in 2010.
“He very much embraces disruption as a positive to forward the industry,” said Gerry Cardinale, managing partner of RedBird Capital, which helped back his takeover of Paramount.
Ellison’s flying experience also helped in the making of the hit “Top Gun: Maverick,” which Skydance made with Paramount.
“He was really up-to-date on all the new aviation,” said “Top Gun: Maverick” producer Jerry Bruckheimer, who added that sometimes Ellison was too far ahead of the curve on the latest planes. “We had to tell David, ‘Listen, we can’t do it with that plane. The Navy only has a few of them and they’re not gonna give them to us,’ ” Bruckheimer said.
Ellison soon showed himself to be a sharp dealmaker and producer. His first movie from a co-financing deal with Paramount was the 2010 Joel and Ethan Coen-directed western “True Grit,” a box office and critical success that garnered 10 Oscar nominations.
Skydance quickly became a major producer of movie and television shows, including the hit “Reacher” for Amazon’s Prime Video streaming service and “Grace and Frankie” for Netflix. Ellison realized though that he needed more heft to compete against big tech and established studios.
Skydance, with backers including the Ellison family and RedBird, agreed to acquire Paramount parent National Amusements from the Redstone family and merge the storied media company with his production firm.
The deal got caught up in a lengthy regulatory review that, while frustrating, gave Ellison time to plan for his next acquisitions and start considering Warner Discovery so that he could build an entity that could truly compete with Netflix and have plenty of intellectual property to fuel a strong theatrical business, people familiar with his thinking said.
“I think he sees that there is a great landscape sitting out there right now that he can be part of leading,” said Citi Global Chair of Banking Leon Kalvaria, who advises Ellison.
To run Paramount, he assembled a team of high-profile executives including Jeff Shell, a former chief executive of NBCUniversal, and Cindy Holland, the architect of Netflix’s original programming strategy.
“The last eight weeks have just been thrilling to watch,” said Lansing, the former Paramount movie chief.
Barry Diller, the entertainment mogul who led Paramount for a decade in its heyday, said in an email, “Most people, coming into senior executive positions, on scrutiny, fail to impress. David Ellison, on scrutiny, continues to impress.”
Were Ellison to acquire Warner Discovery, a likely scenario would be combining operations of CNN and CBS, people familiar with the matter say. While the move would give CBS News journalists a cable platform and there could be tremendous cost savings, it could lead to further cuts and consolidation. No plans have been cemented, a person close to Ellison said.
Already Weiss has made waves in her three weeks at the network by asking employees to send a memo detailing their jobs. Ellison said at the time of the Weiss hire that his goal is for CBS News to “to speak to that 70% of the audience that would really define themselves at center-left to center-right.”
One thing Ellison is expected to part with, at least for now, is his Maverick-like flying habit.
“I told him he’s my key man, we’re going to tone that down a bit,” Cardinale joked.
Thames Water paid £20mn to cover KKR’s due diligence for abortive bid
Cost adds to multimillion pound fees billed by advisers trying to secure utility’s future
Near-bankrupt Thames Water paid £20mn to cover the due diligence costs of KKR for its abortive attempt to rescue the UK’s largest water utility.
Thames Water selected KKR, the private equity giant, as its preferred bidder for an emergency rescue earlier this year. Thames Water was obliged to pay for the cost to potential buyers of assessing and researching the state of the utility’s infrastructure, operations and finances under the terms of the deal. The cost of that exercise topped £20mn, according to people familiar with the situation, largely due to fees paid to KKR’s advisers.
KKR pulled out of the deal in June, citing the risk of government intervention. It then passed its due diligence to lenders that are now trying to win approval from regulators for their own takeover of Thames Water, which provides water and sewerage services to about 16mn customers. Any deal will also need to be approved by London’s High Court.
The fees will raise concerns that cash is leaking out of the utility, which receives all of its income from customer water bills. Thames Water is struggling under the weight of £20bn debt and is trying to avoid temporary renationalisation under the government’s special administration regime after its previous owners — a clutch of pension and sovereign wealth funds — wrote off their investments and walked away from the business in 2024.
The scale of the due diligence effort, which included site visits to water and waste treatment facilities, was borne from the poor visibility Thames Water has over the state of its crumbling infrastructure, with documents revealing last year that the utility has failed to map almost a third of its sewage pipe network.
Reports produced by KKR and the creditors underscored the dangers of so-called “single point of failure risk” at some of Thames Water’s biggest sites, according to people familiar with the matter and documents seen by the Financial Times.
Coppermills water treatment works and Beckton sewage treatment works in East London were identified as the two facilities at the highest risk of outages, according to this analysis.
The cost of the due diligence work has added to a multimillion pound fee bonanza for advisers, bankers and lawyers trying to secure the financial future of the troubled company. The total advisory bill could top £200mn a debt restructuring is agreed, the High Court heard earlier this year; costs that the utility itself is covering from its own cash-strapped balance sheet.
KKR’s advisers on its abandoned bid included investment bank PJT Partners, law firm Kirkland & Ellis and management consultant Roland Berger.
Had KKR completed its rescue of Thames Water, the private equity firm would have covered the costs of its due diligence, according to a person familiar with the situation.
The senior creditors — which include US investment firms Elliott Management and Apollo Global Management — submitted their latest rescue proposal to regulator Ofwat earlier this month, pledging £3.15bn in equity and a 25 per cent writedown of the nominal value of their exposure.
They have also asked for concessions on regulatory fines and targets. The creditors said they had “an ambition” to reduce sewage outflows by 30 per cent by 2030, well below the government’s target of 50 per cent.
Rival potential buyers including CK Infrastructure, owner of Northumbrian Water, have recently written to Ofwat claiming they have been “excluded” from the bidding process meaning it was unlikely to get the best deal for customers. CKI has indicated it would bid for Thames Water if the government puts it into its SAR.
The creditors said their plan “will see £20.5bn invested over the next five years and is the fastest and most reliable route to turn around Thames Water, deliver on customer priorities, clean up waterways and rebuild public trust.”
KKR declined to comment on its due diligence costs.
Thames Water said: “Advisor fees are part of an extensive, complex recapitalisation; customers will not pay for these fees. We remain focused on securing a market-led recapitalisation that establishes the financial and regulatory foundations required to support the investment and performance improvements our customers expect and return the company to a stable financial foundation.”
Daniel Naroditsky, chess grandmaster, 1995-2025
From a child prodigy, he became one of the game’s most respected teachers and commentators
Daniel Naroditsky, the American chess grandmaster and streamer who cultivated the game’s digital renaissance, has died aged 29. One of modern chess’s most respected teachers and commentators, he was familiar to many players from their computer screens, where he sat in big headphones behind a microphone, his shelves packed with chess books.
The ancient game has been transformed into an e-sport in recent years, driven by the emergence of talented players and personalities like Naroditsky, who livestream their matches and lessons on the internet.
A speed-chess specialist, he had an uncanny ability to simultaneously play and talk about playing, unpicking knotty positions in real time and with a novelist’s ear for animating the board. He liked to discuss the “fertile preconditions” for an attack, describing certain opening sequences as “zesty”, or a knight fighting to protect a bishop “with its last breath”.
Naroditsky, who went by Danya, was born on November 9 1995 in San Mateo, California. The son of immigrants from Ukraine and Azerbaijan, he learnt to play chess from his older brother when he was six years old.
“With chess it was almost this palpable electricity that I felt,” he explained. “You’re totally in control of your own fate. There’s no luck factor. It’s you and the pieces.” A prodigy, he won prestigious youth tournaments, including a California schools championship, grade-level national competitions and the under-12 world championship. Aged 18, he became a grandmaster, the game’s highest title. He graduated in history from Stanford University.
In hundreds of earnest and erudite videos, Naroditsky taught with the edge of an elite player and the humility of a friend. “Even grandmasters can get super sloppy,” he said. Attuned not only to strategy and tactics but also to pedagogy, he had a large virtual classroom — broadcasting to hundreds of thousands of subscribers on YouTube and Twitch. He wrote a column for Chess Life and offered puzzles based on historic games at the New York Times. As a teenager, he wrote two books, covering positional ideas and complex endgames.
Though it seemed to come easily to him, he was sympathetic about the game’s difficulty, particularly for beginners. “You need extreme patience because, more so than in any other game, you’re going to suck for a while,” he told the New York Times.
In 2020, Naroditsky moved to North Carolina. He served as a coach and “resident grandmaster” at the Charlotte Chess Center, teaching the area’s top junior players.
The Financial Times interviewed Naroditsky at the elite Candidates tournament in Madrid in 2022, where he was providing live commentary for Chess.com. Bubbly but tired, he had been up all night playing speed chess with one of the competitors.
In the final months of his life, Naroditsky was forced to battle insinuations of cheating levelled by the Russian former world champion Vladimir Kramnik. For two years, Kramnik has been engaged in an anti-cheating campaign that also ensnared other prominent chess figures.
“This is a sustained, evil and absolutely unhinged attempt to destroy my life,” Naroditsky said on a podcast last October. The game’s international governing body said this week it was investigating Kramnik, citing bullying as “a particularly serious concern”. Kramnik has denied wrongdoing. “I have not bullied Daniel Naroditsky, nor ever made personal insults towards him,” he told Reuters. Kramnik posted on X that he hoped the “real truth about the circumstances and cause of this tragedy will be revealed, despite all attempts to hide it”.
Fellow streamers and grandmasters mourned Naroditsky and celebrated his contributions to the game. Levy Rozman, the streamer known as GothamChess, described him as “exceptional” and “brilliant” and called for “justice”. Magnus Carlsen, the world number one, said he had spent many hours watching Naroditsky’s videos and called his death “a great loss”. The two played chess together on Carlsen’s wedding night.
He leaves behind a trove of recorded lessons and an enormous history of play — the Chess.com history for DanielNaroditsky contains 140,646 games.
Naroditksy was visibly distraught in his final livestream as he recounted the recent toll on him. Chess and his reputation, he said, were all he had. But in a video dated October 17, he began, “I’m back better than ever”, saying that after a creative break he was planning future content. Pulling a rare chess book off his shelf he launched into a history of the English and Sicilian openings. “Hopefully this is interesting,” he said. It was.
“Rest in peace Danya, the best chess teacher that the internet has ever seen,” reads one typical comment.