Weekend edition — markets closed, futures thin. Next bell: Monday 9:30 ET. FOMC four sessions out (Jul 28–29).
If you read nothing else
Wall Street clawed back some of Thursday's AI-capex scare Friday (Dow +0.46%, Nasdaq still -0.64% and down 2% on the week) as oil retreated from its brief run above $100 and a coalition of Nvidia, Microsoft and Meta publicly split from OpenAI and Anthropic over open-weight AI policy. Iran shuttle diplomacy collapsed over who controls Hormuz, with Netanyahu now in Washington and Trump weighing a "massive" strike. And SpaceX finally got Starship's 13th test flight off the pad Thursday — clean satellite deploy, laser link to the existing constellation, and the softest splashdown yet.
🗞 The Front Page
Iran war grinds past its two-week escalation mark; Netanyahu in Washington, Trump weighing a "massive attack."
Iraqi PM Ali al-Zaidi carried a US proposal to Tehran for a temporary ceasefire built around reopening the Strait of Hormuz; Iranian officials rejected it, saying they won't accept any deal that doesn't settle who controls the strait. Defense Secretary Hegseth put the campaign's cost so far at $37.5B, with the administration now asking Congress for more. Oil's brief run above $100/bbl this week (Houthi strikes on two Saudi tankers in the Red Sea) has since eased.
Wildfires force the largest evacuation of the summer across France and Spain.
France ordered a full evacuation of the Cap Ferret peninsula — roughly 40,000 people, many pulled out by boat — as a blaze burned across 140 sq km of the Gironde region, with 110,000 total displaced. Spain declared a national emergency after fires forced ~20,000 from villages near Madrid. Heat wave conditions across the Mediterranean are driving both fires.
Chongqing landslide toll rises to 11 dead, 50 still missing.
The July 17 collapse in Pengshui County buried more than 10 residential buildings; recovery teams found three more bodies this week but say there have been no recent signs of life among the missing.
France becomes the first EU country to ban social media for under-15s.
Both chambers of parliament passed the bill, which also bars phones in high schools starting next year and mandates age verification on platforms. Macron wants it in force by September 1, pending constitutional review — a flagship policy after the country's public-health watchdog found social media harms teen mental health, especially girls'.
Nvidia and Microsoft lead 20+ tech giants urging Washington to protect open-weight AI.NEW
Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta, Palantir and others sent a letter to the Trump administration arguing that restricting open-weight models would cede ground to Chinese competitors. The split is notable for who's missing: neither OpenAI nor Anthropic signed — both have been lobbying for tighter restrictions on open-source Chinese models — coming ten days after Moonshot AI's Kimi K3 landed near the frontier as an open-weight release.
Anthropic ships Claude Opus 5.NEW
Released July 24, following Sonnet 5's late-June launch as the new default for Free/Pro users. Anthropic separately introduced Claude for Teachers and self-serve HIPAA configuration for Enterprise/API orgs this month.
Black Forest Labs launches FLUX 3.
A multimodal image/audio-video model generating clips up to 20 seconds from a single prompt — one of a dense run of releases this month alongside Google's Gemini 3.6 Flash (July 21) and Alibaba's Qwen-Audio-3.0-TTS Plus (July 20).
▲ Nasdaq's "Magnificent Seven" shed nearly $800B in market value Thursday as AI-capex anxiety hit Alphabet (-6%, capex guided to $195-205B, first negative free-cash-flow quarter) and Tesla (-14%, operating margin 1.4%). Intel's Friday-adjacent beat (revenue +25%, AI/data-center +59%) complicated rather than resolved the "cracks in the AI trade" narrative — evidence the buildout still works, landing a day after the selloff.
M&A stayed busy this week: Tempus AI is buying Personalis for $1.5B (genomics consolidation); OCS Group is acquiring facilities-services firm Mitie for $4.17B; Var Energi is buying BlueNord for $1.3B; Iberdrola is taking control of Finnish utility Caruna for $2.3B.
Friday was a stabilization attempt, not a resolution: Nasdaq Composite closed 24,975.82 (-0.64%), Dow +0.46% to 51,947, S&P 500 essentially flat (+0.05% to 7,412) — but all three indexes still closed the week lower, Nasdaq down ~2% on a five-day AI-capex scare. Oil's retreat (Brent below $96, per Friday's tape, off the week's brief spike above $100) took pressure off inflation-fear trades, which is likely why equities found a bid even as the Iran story stayed hot. Asia didn't get the memo — Nikkei's -2.73% was the region's worst print of the week. BTC and gold both softened on the firmer dollar and higher-for-longer repricing; 2Y/10Y prints lag to Thursday (7/23) — Friday's official print wasn't posted at data-pull time.
📰 Themes Running the Cycle
Iran: succession, Hormuz & the war that won't stay endedDay 23
What's new since Friday: shuttle diplomacy failed outright (Iran won't sign a temporary Hormuz deal), and the story shifted from "will it widen" to "will Trump order a massive strike" — Netanyahu's Washington visit is the tell to watch. Oil eased off $100 Friday, which the market read as short-term relief, not resolution.
AI capex goes physical → the AI trade cracksDay 23
Still unresolved in both directions: Intel's beat argues the buildout is real; the market still punished the sector on the week. Friday added a new wrinkle — Nvidia/Microsoft/Meta breaking from OpenAI/Anthropic on open-weight policy is a fault line inside the AI industry itself, not just a spending debate.
Higher-for-longer, now with a new Fed chairDay 23
No new print since Thursday's 2Y 4.31% / 10Y 4.67% — this edition's pull shows 2Y 4.37% / 10Y 4.71% as of the same Thursday close (data lag, not a new move). FOMC blackout holds through July 28-29; oil's whipsaw this week raises the stakes on how the committee frames inflation with no Fed voices available beforehand.
🗓 Next Session
Markets are closed through the weekend. Futures reopen Sunday ~6:00 PM ET; the next cash open is Monday, July 27, 9:30 AM ET — roughly 51 hours from this edition. FOMC begins Tuesday (7/28), decision Wednesday (7/29), so Monday is the last full session before the blackout-adjacent stretch. Carry-forward risk into the open: Iran/Hormuz headline risk over the weekend (the highest-probability gap-risk source), plus whatever Sunday night brings on the shuttle-diplomacy front. Job 3's pre-staged QQQ levels were not pulled for this edition — as a weekend snapshot they'd be stale by Monday's open; check the live board Monday morning instead.
🔭 So What for the Forest
The risk tone handed to Monday's tape is mixed-to-cautious: equities stabilized Friday but didn't reverse the week's AI-capex damage, and the Iran story is arguably more dangerous now than a week ago (failed diplomacy, Netanyahu in DC, a "massive attack" openly on the table) even though oil eased off its highs. The transmission channel into QQQ/components is direct — any weekend Hormuz escalation reprices oil and yields before Monday's open, and the AI-capex debate is still live under AAPL/NVDA/semis regardless of what Iran does. The one exogenous wildcard: a Sunday-night Trump decision on Iran strikes would gap futures well before the pre-market opens Monday, ahead of an FOMC week that was already going to be tense.
🚀 The Good Stuff
Starship's "Lucky 13" test flight finally flew Thursday — and nailed it.
After a T-0 abort on the 16th and a weather scrub on the 23rd, Flight 13 launched clean: SpaceX deployed the first-ever batch of 20 Starlink V3 satellites, established laser links between the new hardware and the existing 10,000-satellite V2 constellation to prove inter-generational interoperability, and both booster and upper stage completed what Space.com called the softest splashdown yet. Six of the satellites carried cameras that turned back to scan Starship's heat shield on the way down, beaming home imagery before the whole batch deorbited on schedule about 20 minutes later.
A gas-station sign nearly became a man's permanent address.
A maintenance worker in Wilmington, Illinois got stranded inside a 130-foot gas station sign for over six hours Tuesday after his lift broke — and the local fire department's ladders topped out at 100 feet. Crews had to locate a taller lift at a job site 17 miles away in Joliet and get a state police escort to bring it over. The whole time, witnesses say the guy just gave a thumbs-up to everyone below.