Greg Guenthner

Apple May Have Revealed a Big Earnings Clue by Announcing Tim Cook Successor

Apple said Monday afternoon that longtime CEO Tim Cook will step down later this year and transition to executive chairman. As expected, he will be succeeded by John Ternus, currently Apple's senior vice president of hardware engineering. Ternus will take the helm on Sept. 1.

The timing of the announcement caught some on Wall Street by surprise, perhaps explaining why the stock is down close to 3% on Tuesday. After all, Apple is likely poised to report a strong quarter on April 30.

This will be a strange earnings day for Apple. For one, will Ternus make an appearance on the earnings call with Tim Cook? And how pressured will gross profit margins be amid surging prices for memory chips? Cook discussed this important risk on Apple's last earnings call.

On the other hand, Apple's stock has underperformed the S&P 500 this year (down 2% versus up 3%) in part because of concerns about margins and uncertainty around new product releases later this year.

All in, it wouldn't be a shocker to see Apple positively surprise on earnings due to momentum behind the iPhone, Mac, and services. And hey, who would want their new CEO tied to a poor quarter? No one ever, especially if you are Apple.

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Enrique Abeyta

Chinese Workers Horrified as Bosses Direct Them to Train Their AI Replacements

For years, a buzzy Silicon Valley startup called Mercor has been hiring an army of desperate job-seekers – often including educated and underemployed experts – to train AI models to replace them in the workforce.

It’s a grim facet of an AI-dominated future in which the business world continues to push for automation, hoping to wean itself off relying on pesky and expensive human labor.

As MIT Tech Review reports, an eerily similar situation is now playing out in China. Workers told the publication that their bosses are directing them to painstakingly document their workflows with the eventual goal of automating specific tasks using AI agents, such as OpenClaw, an open-source piece of software that has become immensely popular in the country.

Chinese employees already got an early glimpse of what an AI agent-led future could look like. A GitHub project called Colleague Skill works by ingesting the chat history and profile details of a specific coworker, then automatically spitting out workplace manuals that describe their tasks in stunning detail.

The tool has sparked a fierce debate over the future of human agency – and dignity.

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Chris Campbell

Why Crypto Breaks Next

Senator Tom Tillis told Politico last week that Washington is holding back the copy of CLARITY on purpose. Not because it's stuck. The opposite. They want to know when the markup date is first.

Translation for anyone who doesn't speak Hill: The thing is done. They're just waiting for the right moment to walk it out. Patrick Witt – the guy running digital assets for the White House – put out his own quiet signal the same day. The line was that Democrats have "moved on from their war on crypto."

Maybe…. We’ll see. 

But here's the tell that matters more than any press release: Representative Sher Biggs just filed a $250,000 personal purchase of Bitcoin. Disclosures are what you read when you want to know what people actually believe.

Watch what they do. Not what they say.

The sentiment in crypto is so bearish it's bullish. The infrastructure is already there. The regulatory cover is about to land. The macro wind just shifted.

The window is open. The room hasn't noticed.

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