Highly valued startups with a lot of investor hype aren't in any rush to go public, because, for now, they can still raise huge sums on their own pretty easily. On Tuesday, news broke that Uber was looking to get $2 billion in loans, not too long after a $3.5 billion investment from Saudi Arabia. Yesterday, we learned that Airbnb had secured $1 billion in loans, and that Chinese Uber rival Didi Chuxing finished a $7 billion funding round.
[Johana Bhuiyan | Recode]
Tencent and other investors are close to finishing a deal with SoftBank to buy a majority stake of Supercell, the Finnish mobile gaming company behind "Clash of Clans." SoftBank took on a lot of debt when it bought Sprint, and now it's working to clear up its balance sheet a bit.
[Juro Osawa, Rick Carew and Matthias Verbergt | The Wall Street Journal]
Malcolm Gladwell has a new podcast, and he'd like to make you cry while listening to it. On the new Recode Media podcast with Peter Kafka, Gladwell talks about his new show, mass shootings, the critical response to his writing and more.
[Eric Johnson | Recode]
Trump's refusal to fully cooperate with establishment Republicans (and vice-versa) on putting together a functional national campaign is probably the best case for why he'll get crushed in November. Trump isn't doing much fundraising legwork, and Hillary Clinton is already rolling out a significant ad blitz in swing states.
[Kenneth P. Vogel, Eli Stokols and Alex Isenstadt | Politico]
Janet Yellen has again said that the Federal Reserve won't raise interest rates like it previously planned to, because the economy is still pretty shaky. She and other policymakers are especially wary of what damage Britain exiting the EU could do to the United States.
[Binyamin Applebaum | The New York Times]
Politics
By Dawn Chmielewski
The document calls Trump a “liar” and someone who is “loyal only to himself.”
Samsung
By Ina Fried
Terms were not disclosed, but the company’s top management will join the Korean electronics giant.
Amazon
By Mark Bergen
A former Google researcher will crunch numbers for AWS.
Media
By Noah Kulwin
“It’s fine.”
Social
By Ina Fried
Melinda Gates, Reid Hoffman, Steve Ballmer and Pierre Omidyar all pour money into the millennial twist on a call-in hotline.
Earlier this week,
the New Yorker reported that Chris Christie was fetching food for his new political ally Donald Trump. From BuzzFeed: "A spokesman for Christie denied he was a manservant."
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
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