Everything moving the Street, before it moves you.
Good morning.
The Seattle Seahawks are getting new owners, and the price tag is one for the record books. A group led by the Khosla family, fronted by Sun Microsystems co-founder and venture investor Vinod Khosla, agreed to buy the Super Bowl champions for $9.6 billion, the most ever paid for an NFL franchise and 59% above the previous record set by the Washington Commanders in 2023. League owners could vote on the deal as early as August 26.
Khosla made his first fortune selling the machines that ran the internet. Now he's buying the one asset that still beats it in the ratings.
FINANCE
Stripe and Advent Put PayPal in Their Cart at $53 Billion
The company that taught the internet to check out just found itself sitting in someone else's.
Payments giant Stripe and private equity firm Advent International have made a joint offer to acquire PayPal (PYPL) for $60.50 per share, Reuters reported, valuing the fintech pioneer at more than $53 billion. That's a 28% premium to Tuesday's close, and PayPal shares jumped more than 15% in premarket trading once the news hit the tape.
The offer landed at PayPal's door earlier this month, and so far the register hasn't rung: the bidders have received no response and are pushing to advance talks in the coming weeks.
Express Checkout
PayPal helped invent online payments, then spent the last decade watching leaner rivals process the internet out from under it. Stripe, still private and still the darling of developers, would get PayPal's massive merchant network and its Venmo user base in one transaction.
Reuters' reporting sketches an unusual structure: rather than a classic take-private-and-carve-up, Stripe and Advent would own PayPal jointly with equal stakes and keep the company whole, backed by roughly $50 billion in committed financing from banks. Bloomberg noted the proposal ranks among the largest offers ever made for a payments company.
Stripe built the internet's newest toll roads. Now it wants the town that paved the first one.
Buyer Protection: A deal this size combining two of the biggest names in online payments would give antitrust reviewers plenty to read, and PayPal's board hasn't even opened the package yet. But the bid itself tells you what the smart money thinks: the payments aisle is consolidating, and nobody wants to be the last cart left at closing time.
MARKETS
Wall Street Prints a Record Quarter While Its CEOs Study the Fault Lines
Wall Street just posted the kind of quarter you frame and hang in the lobby. Its CEOs are treating it like a seismograph reading.
JPMorgan (JPM) reported the largest quarterly profit in its history on Tuesday, and Goldman Sachs (GS) delivered its own blowout hours later, capping the busiest big-bank earnings day in memory. The engine was equities trading, supercharged by a quarter that included SpaceX's record IPO and the frenzied positioning around it, with JPMorgan's haul driven by a nearly $6 billion windfall from stock trading.
And yet the man atop the biggest bank in America spent the day pointing at the ground beneath it.
Richter Scale Readings
Jamie Dimon warned that risks are "shifting below the surface like tectonic plates," Fortune reported, citing geopolitical wars, sticky inflation and swelling fiscal deficits. The tremors are easy to miss in the numbers. By the numbers: JPMorgan earned $21.2 billion, or $7.70 a share, including a $4.6 billion gain on its Visa stake, with core profit of $16.9 billion still clearing estimates; Goldman's EPS of $20.98 rose 92% from a year ago on revenue of $20.34 billion, per its 8-K; and Goldman's fixed-income desk pulled in $4.59 billion against a $3.76 billion estimate, per Bloomberg Intelligence.
"It's getting close to as good as it gets. We just don't know how long it's going to last."
Herman Chan, senior bank analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, said on the July 14 Bloomberg Intelligence show that the elevated cost lines simply reflect the boom: "These banks have to pay their employees and their bankers and traders... which in our view are really good expenses." He noted JPMorgan's adjusted return on tangible common equity hit 23% against a long-term target of 17%. Meanwhile, cooling June inflation of 3.5% gave the tape one more reason to rally, with traders cutting the odds of a July Fed hike to about 17%.
Aftershock Watch: Morgan Stanley (MS) reports this morning, with analysts looking for $2.81 a share. The bar has moved: after Tuesday, merely great will register as a tremor. Just remember what the seismologists say about long quiet stretches, and what Dimon keeps saying about loud ones.
SEMICONDUCTORS
ASML Raises Guidance Again Because the AI Boom Keeps Buying Every Press It Prints
When you own the world's only printing press for advanced chips, the hardest part of the job is saying no to nobody.
ASML (ASML), the Dutch maker of the lithography machines behind every cutting-edge semiconductor, raised its full-year guidance for the second time this year on Wednesday and beat on both the top and bottom line, as AI chipmakers keep accelerating their capacity plans. CEO Christophe Fouquet called first-half order intake "extremely strong."
Pressing Matters
ASML is Europe's most valuable company and the sole supplier of extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography, which makes it the tollgate for the entire AI buildout: TSMC, Samsung and Intel all queue at the same door.
CNBC reported Q2 net sales of €9.3 billion (versus €8.8 billion expected) and net profit of €2.9 billion, with 2026 guidance lifted to €43–45 billion from €36–40 billion; the stock rose over 7% at the open before paring to about 4%, and has surged 115% this year.
Intel (INTC) will use ASML's next-generation High NA EUV machines, which cost around $400 million apiece, to make some of its flagship Panther Lake laptop chips, per Reuters.
The beat lands mid-tremor: a roughly $1.7 trillion global chip rout has trained the spotlight on ASML and TSMC results, Bloomberg reported, with TSMC's own earnings due Thursday.
"There's a lot priced in, and we see it slightly overvalued."
Litho-graphic: ASML plans to add 30% to its 2026 low NA EUV and DUV immersion capacity, which is the company's way of saying demand isn't the constraint, physics is. After a week when memory stocks wobbled and chip indices bled, a beat-and-raise from the industry's bottleneck is the closest thing the AI trade gets to a second opinion. The presses stay hot.
The Tape
Big Blue Bruise: IBM (IBM) plunged 25% after preliminary Q2 revenue of $17.2 billion missed estimates, but CEO Arvind Krishna's nod to "rapidly-evolving, industry-wide cybersecurity concerns" sent CrowdStrike (CRWD) up 12% and Okta (OKTA) up about 11%.
Special Delivery: Uber (UBER) is in advanced talks to acquire Germany's Delivery Hero and aims to reach an agreement as soon as this week, after a previous approach at €33 a share was deemed too light.
Toll Booth, Removed: President Trump dropped his 20% fee on Strait of Hormuz shipments one day after floating it, opting for Gulf-state investment pledges instead while keeping a blockade on Iranian ships.
What You May Also Like
Peek IPO: DeepSeek has begun preparing a mainland China IPO, filing perhaps this year for a 2027 debut, while seeking new funding at a valuation of at least 480 billion yuan ($71 billion) just weeks after a record $7 billion round.
Speaker of the House: OpenAI's first device will be a movable, screen-free smart speaker with a camera and sensors, built to be a humanlike AI companion, Bloomberg reported.
Gravity Check: SpaceX (SPCX) stock slid back toward its $135 IPO price a month after the biggest listing in history, with its first earnings report due August 6.
Just For Fun
Anthropic's new ad, "There's hope in hard questions," featured a burning house and rows of tombstones, and even Sam Altman thought it was satire. (TechCrunch)
After the Bell
Morgan Stanley steps into the box before the open, batting cleanup after Tuesday's murderers' row. And set your alarms for Thursday: Bloomberg Tech sits down with GameStop's Ryan Cohen, the man who recently traded a $35 billion bonus plan for a clearer shot at buying eBay. Some people collect consoles; some people collect marketplaces.
That's the tape. We'll see you at the open. — AllThingsWallSt
