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She’s blowing up the bathroom.

The City of Angels is bracing for monster Hurricane Polo as its effects reverberate across California's Golden Coast.

Larry Ellison Pledges $9 Billion More In Oracle Stock To Fund Warner Bros Deal As Price Tumbles, CDS Hits Record

Two weeks after the Larry Ellison inexplicably pulled his plan to sell up to 50 million shares, worth about $7.5 billion news of which had sent the stock sliding the day prior, the Oracle CEO - the key figure behind Paramount Skydance’s deal to buy Warner Bros. Discovery - has pledged 67 million more shares of Oracle as collateral for personal loans than he had at the same time last year, approximately 350 million shares.

The shares pledged, revealed in an Oracle Schedule 14A filing on Friday, amount to a 19% increase in the number of shares Ellison has pledged since 2025. The stock is worth about $9.2 billion at Oracle’s closing price of $137.10 on Friday.

As Bloomberg notes, Ellison has been helping his son David’s company, Paramount, acquire Warner Bros. in a transaction valued at $111 billion. The Ellisons have committed to $47 billion in equity funding for that deal, about $24 billion of which is coming from three Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds, and much of the rest now appears to be sourced from pledge ORCL shares. 

Paramount is also looking to raise debt financing.

Having negotiated a settlement earlier this week with 12 state attorneys general and the Writers Guild trade union who had sued to block the merger, Paramount is now just one step away from sealing its deal for Warner Bros.

While Oracle officers and directors are forbidden from pledging company shares as collateral for personal loans, there is one exception: Larry Ellison - who serves as the company’s executive chair and chief technology officer.

The total stock pledged now represents about 36% of Ellison’s total holdings of 1.16 billion shares; in dollar terms that amount to just over $57 billion in ORCL stock pledged. 

The regulatory filing also disclosed that Oracle’s co-chief executive officers will receive $870 million in combined stock option awards. The package of Clay Magouyrk was valued at $621.7 million, while Mike Sicilia’s was worth $248.7 million. The executives were named to the joint CEO role a year ago, taking the job from Oracle veteran Safra Catz. Ellison, who didn’t receive awards in the previous two fiscal years, got a package valued at $117.8 million.

The 82-year-old technology mogul announced plans earlier this month to sell as much as $7.5 billion in Oracle stock, but then quickly canceled those plans, which may have been the result of the stock price's precipitous drop.

Aside from the Warner Bros. deal, Oracle has been caught up in an escalating data center fiasco, having announced force mejeure on its largest data center in New Meixco, the 2.25GW Project Jupiter complex, which has advised the project developer it will be unable to meet some contractual obligations due to lack of power at the facility as a result of regulatory delays. 

The Force Majeure sent ORCL bond yields surging to a record high, despite a relatively muted reaction in the stock - which nonetheless trades near 52 week lows...

Oracle Bonds Plunge To Record Low As $30 Billion CapEx In Peril On Data Center Turmoil https://t.co/ZuAwlgIWyO

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) September 25, 2026

... and will likely trade even lower once it notices that ORCL CDS have also just hit a new record wide, as the company's default risk has never been higher

As such, one wonders at what stock prices does ORCL get a margin call and is forced to source liquidity, potentially leading to a collapse in the Warner Bros takeover (at a wildely inflated price) as suddenly it finds itself without the funds to do so. 

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/26/2026 - 14:35

The restaurant serves as a testing ground for how the fast-food chain that Colonel Sanders founded might modernize without abandoning the things that made it famous.

The beef started in the group "Mainers for Troy Jackson," when members complained about cancelled campaign events.

The Tush Push isn’t the only way the Eagles may be bending the NFL rulebook. 

Before 2-plus-2 became a matter of opinion, I preferred single-digit numbers as stand-alone numbers. Last week provided witness to several numbered news items of sports business note. 1) Nike stock is in a sustained free fall. While its money and influence — one and the same — remains the lifeblood of ask-no-questions sports and athletes...

ABC's audio turned into a static-filled mess Saturday.

Justin Verlander is getting a sendoff befitting a three-time Cy Young winner.

The new book, "Funny Business: The Old-School Wedding Crashers and Knocked-Up Virgins Who Changed Comedy Forever," is full of hilarious revelations.

Rickards: The Real In AI Is Not 'Super-Intelligence', It's China

Authored by James Rickards via The Daily Reckoning,

It's past time to look beyond the AI hype. The stock valuations of the leading hyperscalers and frontier AI modeling companies are almost certainly in bubble territory. But the market will sort that out in time.

We all know the names of the AI stocks whether from the hardware, software or compute vectors - Apple, Microsoft, Meta, Google (Alphabet), Amazon, OpenAI, Anthropic, NVIDIA and a few others.

Some of these names have valuable core businesses independent of the AI bubble. Others are pure AI plays. All will be hurt to a greater or lesser extent when the AI bubble bursts.

Still, bubbles can get bigger before they pop and they can take far longer to pop than many market participants realize. It's not prudent to short these names but one should definitely lighten up on long positions. Moving portfolio allocations to cash and hard assets is a good way to weather the coming storm.

Valuations aside, these companies now pose serious risks to national security, critical infrastructure, the financial system and other institutions. These risks need to be considered on their own because they will affect all of us.

These dangers are not about stock bubbles. They're about social chaos.

Geopolitical Catalyst

Two threats in particular stand out.

• The first is the use of AI models by the Chinese to attack the United States.

• The second is rogue AI models that work autonomously to attack us on their own.

We've seen continuous headlines about the AI race going on between China and the U.S. The elements of the race include massive data centers, high-powered semiconductors and frontier AI models built by U.S. firms such as Anthropic, OpenAI and xAI and by Chinese firms Baidu, Tencent, DeepSeek and Moonshot AI. Other critical inputs in this race include massive amounts of electricity and water required to run the hardware.

The U.S.-China AI race is usually framed in existential terms. Whichever country gets to superintelligence first will control global AI and possibly the world. Even in less grandiose terms, there are critical outcomes in areas of national security, encryption, digital payments, weapons systems and curing disease that depend on the winner of the AI race.

Yet, the competition is far from fair. The U.S. relies on massive investment in fixed assets, superior technology and access to the fastest semiconductors.

China has some of these tools but they rely more on theft of intellectual property from the U.S., using output from U.S. AI apps as curated input on their own apps (to increase processing speeds) and smuggling advanced chips through third countries. China may not be leading the AI race but they are certainly keeping pace.

AI Recon

Now a new threat has emerged. China is using the most advanced AI models including Claude from Anthropic to process information scraped from a wide variety of open sources in the U.S. including military photographs, ship transponder signals, commercial satellite images and other information combined with Chinese satellite images to determine the exact locations and movements of U.S. naval vessels.

That AI-generated information is then passed to Iran, who use it to fire missiles at U.S. Navy vessels near the Strait of Hormuz and the Arabian Sea.

So far, no U.S. vessels have been hit but that may just be a matter of time. China is using U.S. AI technology to help attack the U.S. Navy at sea. Just days after this revelation, a Chinese spy satellite blew-up in space.

No one has taken responsibility for it. But it's not a stretch to infer that the U.S. used a space-based weapon to destroy the Chinese satellite that was used to help Iran attack the U.S. Navy.

The AI wars are becoming star wars in real time.

Regulatory Capture

As a separate threat, the media is flooded with stories about an AI Apocalypse in which AI apps from frontier developers like OpenAI and Anthropic achieve superintelligence, join forces and take over the world putting humans in the same position relative to the AI systems as apes are to humans. Other versions of this AI dystopia involve gangs of AI apps working together to shut down the power grid, loot banks and brokers and cause chaos in civilized society.

This wave of panicked propaganda began with an essay by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. The Amodei essay was amplified by Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon who publicly resigned from Anthropic and issued a warning that AI could "kill all humans" within a decade. The Amodei and Coxon warnings were then taken up by the media, politicians and tech experts in what became a cascade of doom and gloom.

But let's put these warnings in perspective. Whenever you see the same talking points coming from multiple insiders at once, one should be suspicious that a psychological operation (or "psyop") is being conducted to sway public opinion. In this case, the message is that regulation is needed to protect the world against AI going rogue. This regulation would involve government rules, internal compliance departments, auditor inspections, testing and periodic safety certifications.

How convenient for Anthropic and OpenAI. The kind of regulation they envision is extremely expensive. The giant AI developers can afford it but their newer and smaller competitors cannot. Anthropic and OpenAI are planning $1 trillion plus IPOs later this regulatory moat around their franchises to keep out competition with help from the year. The scaremongering about rogue AI could be nothing more than a tactic to build a government-enforced oligopoly.

My own research indicates that superintelligence can never be achieved because it is impossible to program abductive logic (in contrast to inductive and deductive logic) which can be summarized as gut feel or common sense.

Still, AI is powerful and needs guardrails. But it is not as potentially dangerous as the scaremongers insist. Trump was smart to resist calls for more government regulation. The real enemy in the AI world is not superintelligence - it's China.

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/26/2026 - 14:00

The incident has rattled residents in the posh neighborhood, where a low crime rate and high income levels have not protected the community from illegal migration.

Kai Trump suffers a wrist injury in her Miami golf debut.

Tennessee fans erupted in a vulgar chant after Nick Saban mocked them on ESPN, boasting about his 16-1 record against the Vols.

The Dodgers get a good –– but not passing –– grade in the final power rankings of the season.

She paid tribute to her ex-boyfriend via an Instagram carousel.

"♥️ rest easy king," she captioned an Instagram carousel. "Love you so much Pres connected for life I’ll talk to you soon."

Ukraine's army airdropped ground robots behind the frontline to take out 3,000 Russian soldiers and reclaim 48 square miles of occupied territory in Donetsk.

One of the wounded victims, Federico Ruiz, was not found until Friday morning when he was discovered wandering around three miles from the explosion site. He was diagnosed with burns in his lower limbs and other parts of the body.

This suddenly dire situation means the entire Giants’ offense is one play away — one Winston injury — from having Jake Haener as the starting quarterback.