The FCC has granted Paramount a waiver of its 25% foreign-ownership limit for broadcast licensees, allowing sovereign wealth funds from Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE to collectively hold up to 49.5% equity in the merged Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery entity. The commission says the funds will hold non-voting stakes, so they won't exercise formal control over the 28 broadcast stations involved. The underlying petition had actually requested approval for up to 100% foreign ownership.
The FCC has approved Paramount Skydance's request to waive federal foreign-ownership limits, allowing indirect foreign ownership to reach 49.5 percent through investments from sovereign wealth funds in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar. The funds, totaling roughly $24 billion, are tied to Paramount's pending $111 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, a deal already cleared by the Justice Department but still facing a lawsuit from several US states.
Treasury Department data shows foreign official holdings of US Treasuries fell to $3.77 trillion in July, roughly the same level as 2012, even though total Treasury debt outstanding has tripled since then. Their share of marketable Treasuries has dropped to 12.8%, the lowest since 1993, while overall foreign holdings—including private investors—still hit $9.25 trillion, buoyed by activity in offshore financial centers like the Cayman Islands.
Fund issuers are preparing exchange-traded funds tied to unconventional themes such as election outcomes and hockey statistics, expanding the range of speculative investment products available to retail investors. These offerings reflect the broader trend of ETF providers seeking niche angles to attract attention in an increasingly crowded market.
The FCC has waived its 25 percent cap on foreign equity ownership to approve a deal allowing sovereign wealth funds from Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Abu Dhabi to collectively hold up to 49.5 percent of the combined Paramount-Warner Bros. entity. The agency argued the stakes carry no voting rights and therefore no control, but critics including Free Press and Commissioner Anna Gomez dispute that reasoning.
AI coding startup Cognition has closed a Series E funding round of $2 billion, valuing the company at $48 billion. The round includes backing from investors such as Peter Thiel, underscoring strong investor confidence in AI-driven software development tools.
Blockstream's Liquid Bitcoin sidechain confirmed that hackers withdrew about 4,000 BTC—roughly 95% of its federation wallet, worth roughly $320 million—on September 6. The attackers embedded an on-chain message calling themselves 'whitehats,' asking Liquid to patch the vulnerability before they return the funds, and Liquid has since suspended transactions while shifting communication to an encrypted channel.
A growing number of individual investors are using generative AI to write custom trading scripts and delegate portfolio decisions to automated agents, effectively mimicking strategies once reserved for professional quant funds. This trend, sometimes called 'vibe-coding,' lets non-programmers describe a trading idea in plain language and have AI translate it into executable code.
Particle, the AI newsreader startup started by ex-Twitter engineers, has launched Radar, a search engine that transcribes and semantically indexes over 130,000 podcasts to surface quotes and highlights. The product grew out of a popular clip-sourcing feature in Particle's news app and is now offered as a standalone API for AI agents and data buyers, including hedge funds and search platforms like Exa.
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