Good morning. Andrew here. There’s some new drama in the planned $12.5 billion sale of the L.A. Lakers. Josh Kushner and Bob Iger, who agreed to buy control of the team from the financier Mark Walter, had also been expected to buy out the 17.8 percent stake held by the Buss family. But Jeanie Buss, who’s also the team’s governor, is reportedly fighting her siblings’ plan to sell. N.B.A. rules prevent a single private equity firm from owning more than 20 percent of a team; financial firms in total can’t own more than 30 percent. If the Buss family sells, Kushner and Iger have to cover $10 billion in equity — or syndicate the deal to others. Who else might want to own the Lakers? Expect a long line of suitors wanting courtside seats and championship rings. (Was this newsletter forwarded to you? Sign up here.)
Silicon Valley’s board seats in the spotlightMarc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz have been some of President Trump’s biggest champions in Silicon Valley. Yet their powerhouse venture capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz, now reportedly faces antitrust scrutiny from federal prosecutors. The investigation could have wide repercussions for Silicon Valley, Niko Gallogly reports. What’s happening: The Justice Department is examining A16Z, as the firm is known, over the board seats it holds at companies including Databricks and Fivetran, Bloomberg reported, citing unnamed sources. Horowitz is a director on the board at Databricks, and Martin Casado, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, sits on Fivetran’s board. Both companies help firms manage large quantities of data, and Databricks, recently valued at $190 billion, is one of America’s biggest privately held start-ups.
Federal prosecutors have been interested in overlapping boards, where people concurrently serve as directors of ostensible competitors. As DealBook has previously reported, the Justice Department has been examining potential violations of the Clayton Act, a 1914 antitrust law. Section 8 of the statute bars people from so-called interlocking directorates; people have been forced to resign after investigations.
The case introduces new angles to Section 8 investigations. Previous Justice Department cases have largely focused on private equity, though a venture capitalist, Larry Illg, stepped down from a board in 2022. Perhaps more important, previous Section 8 inquiries have largely focused on people, while the A16Z case centers on a firm having simultaneous representation on competitors’ boards. This “leaves the law more open to interpretation,” Nili told DealBook. It strikes at a core practice of venture capital, where firms often invest in multiple companies in a sector to better understand their market. (Consider a famous Silicon Valley phrase often attributed to the investor John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins: “No conflict, no interest.”) Nili added that many venture investors will worry about where “you draw the line between two companies that are not competitors and are competitors.” But it’s also a shot at a firm that has championed many Trump policies. Andreessen and Horowitz both donated millions to Trump’s re-election campaign and to Republican causes afterward, and promoted the second Trump administration as a boost for artificial intelligence, crypto and defense start-ups. A16Z has also become a formidable lobbying force in Washington when it comes to A.I. policy. Yet that influence may have taken a hit more recently, as national security concerns and public backlash have led to a more hands-on White House approach to the sector.
A big government contractor ousts its C.E.O. L3Harris said that it had replaced Christopher Kubasik after an investigation into whether he violated the company’s code of conduct. (Sam Mehta, the head of its space and communications business, is taking over.) Kubasik became C.E.O. of L3Harris, which retrofitted a Boeing 747 from Qatar into an Air Force One, in 2021. Anthropic’s business reportedly continues to soar. The artificial intelligence giant is now on track to generate more than $65 billion in annualized revenue, based on its current business performance, according to Bloomberg, which cited unnamed sources. Accelerating financial performance will help bolster Anthropic’s fortunes as it pursues an I.P.O. as soon as this fall. Moelis hires rainmakers from LionTree. The investment bank has recruited Jake Donavan, LionTree’s president of Europe, and Ehren Stenzler, who founded LionTree in 2012 with Aryeh Bourkoff, Benjamin Mullin and Lauren Hirsch report. Stenzler (based in New York) and Donavan (based in London) will become managing directors at Moelis, which recently advised Jeff Bezos and others in buying a stake in the English soccer club Liverpool F.C. It also advised Netflix in its bid for Warner Bros. Discovery. ‘Panic button’A global bond rout is deepening this morning as investors fret about the finances of the world’s biggest countries. There’s another wrinkle: Governments are increasingly competing with artificial intelligence giants like Amazon, Google and Meta in the debt markets. All issuers — governments or hyperscalers alike — are “now competing with more borrowers,” Tony Rodriguez, the head of fixed-income strategy at Nuveen, an asset management firm, told Bloomberg. “And therefore yields have to be higher.” The latest:
The Treasury Department faces another test tomorrow. It is set to sell $16 billion worth of 20-year debt with what could be another record-high yield. “We aren’t pushing the panic button,” strategists at Yardeni Research wrote in a research note today. “However, we are closely monitoring whether the bond vigilantes might do so.”
Watch what the Fed has to say next week, as central bankers convene at its annual confab in Jackson Hole, Wyo. Of special interest is what policymakers might say about inflation amid the war with Iran, especially as Kevin Warsh, the Fed chairman, seeks to tame rising prices.
Scoop: Big growth for an A.I. voicebot start-upThe competition to build a better voicebot with artificial intelligence is fierce. But Sierra, a start-up co-founded by the Silicon Valley veteran Bret Taylor, has made big gains recently selling its A.I.-powered, conversational customer-service agents, Sri Muppidi reports. The company’s annualized revenue was $135 million for its 2026 fiscal year, which ended in January, a more than fivefold increase from the previous year, according to documents seen exclusively by DealBook. And the company hit $200 million in annualized revenue in May. Step back: Taylor is a tech industry fixture. He is the chairman of OpenAI’s board, and spent 14 months as a C.E.O. of Salesforce alongside Marc Benioff. Taylor also was Twitter’s board chairman when Elon Musk bought it, and was once the C.T.O. of Facebook.
Sierra’s A.I. voice agents are multilingual and multimodal. Rather than a script, the agents are given a goal and guardrails, and allowed to reason through their responses, resulting in more natural-sounding responses. Sierra also tailors them for specific industries, including banking and retail. The start-up is working with big companies. Sierra’s top customers by annualized revenue include Walmart, Rocket Mortgage and Cigna, according to the documents.
But that growth hasn’t come cheap. Sierra burned through roughly $140 million in its 2026 fiscal year, according to the documents. But it is still well funded:
Sierra is not alone in this space. Its competitors include the start-ups Decagon, valued at $4.5 billion, and Parloa, worth $3 billion, according to PitchBook. And a few big companies have begun building A.I. agents themselves using foundation models from A.I. labs.
Meta is back on trial for social media addictionAnother bellwether trial over Meta’s role in child social media addiction begins today in Oakland, Calif. The attorneys general of California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey have accused the social media company of harming children with technology designed to be addictive, like cigarettes, and they are seeking roughly $200 billion in damages. Meta is expected to argue that it has safeguards in place to protect young users and that it did not deceive consumers. Meta said last month that it had spent more than $2 billion last quarter on legal expenses related to the social media addiction trials and other litigation. Whatever the outcome of this trial, it will have a significant effect on Meta’s business, Cecilia Kang and Eli Tan report for The Times: The lawsuit is among thousands of personal injury and consumer protection lawsuits filed by states, school districts and individuals against Meta, YouTube, TikTok and Snap, which owns Snapchat. The cases claim that social media sites have harmed children with addictive products, drawing inspiration in part from a legal playbook used against Big Tobacco in the 1990s. The strategy has already paid off. In March, Meta and YouTube were found liable in a landmark personal injury case in California’s Superior Court of Los Angeles County, where a young California woman was awarded $6 million in damages. This month, a New Mexico judge ordered Meta to pay damages totaling nearly $1 billion in a case brought by the state attorney general for violations of consumer protection laws. The companies have settled several other cases that were headed for trial this year. Lawmakers worldwide are also moving to restrict children’s use of social media. Countries across Europe — including France, Germany and Spain — have been considering such restrictions. And U.S. lawmakers have introduced a bill that would strengthen privacy for minors and allow them to opt out of algorithmic social media features. We hope you’ve enjoyed this newsletter, which is made possible through subscriber support. Subscribe to The New York Times.
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