What’s up, WhatsApp? Meta announced yesterday that the popular messaging app will start showing users ads for the first time. It’s been over a decade since Meta purchased WhatsApp for $19 billion, so it makes sense that it finally wants to make money off it. For now, your personal messages will stay ad-free and the ads will appear in only one tab. 

US stocks rallied as some of the geopolitical risk premium built into markets late last week dissipated amid reports that Iran is seeking a de-escalation with Israel. The S&P 500 rose 0.9%, the Nasdaq 100 gained 1.4%, and the Russell 2000 ended 1.1% higher on Monday.

Communication services was the best-performing S&P sector ETF, with tech, financials, and consumer discretionary also up more than 1%.

An unbelievably simple gardening simulation game, said to be initially created in about three days by a 16-year-old, has Roblox shares trading at their highest level since late 2021.

This silly little garden game has fostered an auspicious moment for Roblox, as the company’s shares have spiked 72% since March 31, when “Grow a Garden” first sprouted. That’s added slightly more than $28 billion to the company’s market cap, all because the children who spend their summers ambling in a blocky metaverse just love to farm. 

Oh, this is far from done growing. Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter last week said “Grow a Garden” is “driving massive engagement growth” in the company’s current quarter as summer vacation begins. The game has led a 75% surge in concurrent users since December and “positioned Q2 2025 for a potential record-breaking quarter,” according to Pachter.

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Nvidia’s investment in AI cloud computing startup (and customer) CoreWeave has gotten a lot of ink, but it isn’t the only data center business Nvidia’s invested in that’s showing big gains.

A much lesser-known AI firm, Nebius, is next in our list of Nvidia’s biggest investments. The AI cloud computing company is not like other startups — perhaps most importantly because it isn’t the kind of startup often mythologized involving a few guys in a garage, some scrappy coding, and a lucky break or two. 

Instead, Nebius emerged from the Russian tech giant Yandex. Sherwood’s Jon Keegan has a succinct summary of how it went from Russian tech IPO darling to delisted to back in everyone’s good graces again.

Nebius’ business is focused on four key pillars: AI cloud computing infrastructure, autonomous vehicles and robotics, educational technology, and data training. That last one has the backing of a few other tech heavyweights, too. The company is positioning itself to serve the growing market for sovereign AI, especially in Europe, where, oh look at that, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang was just doing a keynote on that topic. 

Nvidia disclosed its investment in Nebius in February, worth about $33 million by the end of Q4 2024. That’s up 140% since Q1 2025.

It remains to be seen if Nebius will follow the same meteoric rise as CoreWeave. But its close partnership with Nvidia gives Nebius a similar advantage: to get early access to Nvidia’s latest and most powerful GPUs. And the halo effect of any Nvidia involvement has given other companies’ stocks a glow-up before.

During uncertain times, such as war or economic turbulence, gold offers some downside protection. So it stands to reason that over a longer time frame, it will have lost ground to the innovation machine that is the American stock market. But that isn’t the case: the paradox of gold is that it has also crushed the US stock market over the last 25 years by more than you probably can guess.

Read more.

Fresh off clinical testing in the EU, Future Cardia is building an implantable cardiac monitor designed to transform how we detect and manage heart disease, the world’s #1 killer.