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Good morning.
Elon Musk is defining egalitarianism drastically downward. The average CEO-to-worker pay ratio at S&P 500 companies rose to 312-to-1 last year, up from 285-to-1 in 2024, according to data released by the AFL-CIO on Thursday. But that figure doesn’t include Musk. The labor group estimates Tesla’s CEO earned 2,522,203 times the compensation of a median employee at the company.
If Musk’s outlier compensation package, which included a restricted stock plan valued at $158.3 billion, is taken into account, the 2025 S&P 500 CEO-to-worker pay ratio jumps to 5,387:1. In fact, the AFL-CIO said Musk last year earned compensation equal to the total annual pay of a median Tesla employee every 4.23 seconds, which is enough time for you to take a deep breath and look at your payslip without hyperventilating.
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*Presented by Sprott. Stock data as of market close on August 13, 2026.
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*Please see important PHYS disclosures below.
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As Anthropic preps for its initial public offering, there’s a math puzzle not even its ultrafrontier models can solve: What’s the right price?
Not just the price of its eventual IPO (though that’s certainly top of mind these days), but also the price of using its suite of high-powered artificial intelligence tools. On Thursday, Bloomberg reported that Anthropic is in talks to pay $6 billion for startup Decart, which makes software that improves chip efficiency, reducing the cost of training and running AI. It’s a big sign that it’s reading the room on cheaper open-source models.
Cost in Space
More and more US firms are right-sizing their AI needs to lower-cost (and often Chinese-made) open-source AI models, Citi said in a note to clients this summer. Meanwhile, SpaceX’s xAI unit this week announced Grok 4.6, its latest AI model that scores dead even with OpenAI’s top model and just behind Anthropic’s ultra-powerful Opus 5 and Fable 5 Max models on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index. Worse for Anthropic, xAI boldly broke into the frontier while offering its model at roughly half the cost of Anthropic’s best models, per the index.
Still, everyone is feeling the heat of AI costs these days. Even DeepSeek, which made its name as the first cheap open-source Chinese alternative to expensive flagship US models. On Thursday, the Chinese firm said it is upping the price of its models during “peak hours,” moving from a previous price of $0.87 per 1 million output tokens for the V4-Pro model to $3.96. It will cost half that during non-peak hours. Grok 4.6 is offered at $6, while Claude Opus 5 runs for $25.
The good news for Anthropic? It’s still the clear pack leader in the US:
- Anthropic held a 43% market share for US businesses spending on AI subscriptions and tokens in July, according to a recent report from expense management platform Ramp. That’s well up from just 21% in January, better than OpenAI’s 40% (a share now in decline), and trounces the 6% and 4% market shares held by Google and xAI, respectively.
- Overall AI adoption continues to rise, too; 55% of US businesses now spend on AI tools, per Ramp, up from 47% in January and 44% a year ago.
  Finish Line: All roads still lead to an IPO, possibly as soon as October. Investors are expecting the company to float at a valuation of $2 trillion or more, according to a Financial Times report on Thursday, though Anthropic has yet to affix a valuation target of its own. That would beat the record IPO valuation notched in June by SpaceX, which has recently seen its share price rocket 40% above a post-IPO low.
Written by Brian Boyle
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There’s only one place you can sit in a booth surrounded by Egyptian columns, European-style frescos, and fiery blown-glass light fixtures that resemble the Eye of Sauron and scarf down a slice of “Reese’s Peanut Butter Chocolate Cake Cheesecake.” That’s Cheesecake Factory of course, which, along with other kitsch dine-in chains, is having a moment as diners ditch fast food for sit-down experiences they can’t have at home (or so one hopes).
Chains including Cheesecake Factory, BJ’s, IHOP and Chili’s have seen sales and foot traffic climb alongside their shares, while fast-food companies like Wendy’s are struggling to keep sales warm.
Sitting Down, Not Driving-Thru
The casual-dining sector seemed to start its comeback last year, with sales among 500 chains tracked by Technomic climbing 2.9%. That’s a pickup in pace compared with 2024’s 1.5% growth. Chili’s led the charge with double-digit growth last year. As of last quarter, the Triple Dipper-seller has been on a growth streak for five years. Cheesecake Factory, meanwhile, saw sales climb 5.8% and foot traffic rise 2.7%, and it’s a similar story for BJ’s, IHOP and Darden-owned locales including Olive Garden and LongHorn Steakhouse.
Fast-food restaurants, on the other hand, are missing traffic as diners’ back-of-the-napkin math seems to favor value from sit-down chains:
- McDonald’s reported sales growth of less than 1% in its most recent quarter. While customers spent more per check, traffic fell. McDonald’s had rolled out a national discounting strategy to bring value-conscious diners back, but CEO Chris Kempczinski said many franchises didn’t get with the program.
- Wendy’s, for its part, is proving that likes on super out-of-pocket social posts don’t translate to sales. The chain last week reported its sixth quarter in a row of falling same-store revenue. To save the square-burger chain, Nelson Peltz’s Trian Fund Management is said to be prepping a bid to take it private. The chain has said both its quality and value prop have weakened over the years.
Not a Monolith: While quick-service restaurants have generally seen foot traffic slow or stall and casual-dining spots have been notching more butts in booths, there are exceptions to the rule in both categories. Burger King has been winning royally with surging same-store sales, while Applebee’s has struggled to turn dollaritas into dollars for parent Dine Brands. Customers want more bang for their buck and when the gap between a fast-food burger and a casual-dining dish closes, they may be willing to pay a little extra for a meal served under a European-style fresco.
Written by Jamie Wilde
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Photo via Oracle NetSuite
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Back to Pershing Square one? It’s been a busy year for Bill Ackman. In addition to listing his alternative asset manager Pershing Square and its new stock-picking fund Pershing Square USA, he abandoned a $1.5 billion position in Universal Music after the company said no to a $65 billion takeover.
On Thursday, he revealed one of the biggest shakeups at those funds in years, writing that Pershing took on six new holdings in the second quarter: Netflix, Mastercard and Visa, eye care firm Alcon, exchange operator Intercontinental, and financial data provider S&P Global. You can expect to hear a lot about it.
V for Value
Ackman stands out among his peers in social media visibility. His 3 million X followers make him one of the world’s most visible stockpickers, on top of having the battle scars of activist victories (Canadian Pacific Railway, Chipotle) and defeats (Herbalife, JCPenny) to prove his Wall Street bona fides. Just don’t let being extremely online or swashbuckling activism deceive: Ackman is an old-school value investor at heart. Pershing’s latest portfolio additions, Ackman emphasized in a shareholder letter Thursday, are set for good old-fashioned growth, that most reliable driver of long-term investment value.
Visa and Mastercard are “among the highest-quality businesses in the world,” he wrote, and investor fears they will be disrupted by stablecoins or agentic commerce are overblown. Netflix, he argued, “has effectively won the streaming wars,” while Alcon, the world’s biggest standalone ophthalmology company, is poised for consistent long-term growth due to aging population demographics. Now, Pershing could use some investors willing to get behind these things:
- Pershing Square USA raised $5 billion in an April IPO but has underperformed since. As a closed-end fund, it issued a set number of shares, which trade based on investor demand that has, so far, proven thin.
- Pershing USA is trading at a discount of 22% to its portfolio value, which Ackman named its “biggest challenge,” noting it’s among the widest discounts among US closed-end funds.
As Advertised: Promotional tweets alone won’t fix things. Ackman said Pershing plans to launch an “active marketing program” for Pershing USA, and admitted “we clearly need to do a better job of generating demand for our funds.”
Written by Sean Craig
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Disclaimers
*Sprott Asset Management LP is the investment manager to the Sprott Physical Gold Trust (the “Trust”).
Important information about the Trust, including the investment objectives and strategies, applicable management fees, and expenses, is contained in the prospectus.
Please read the document carefully before investing. You will usually pay brokerage fees to your dealer if you purchase or sell units of the Trust on the TSX or the NYSE. If the units are purchased or sold on the TSX or the NYSE, investors may pay more than the current net asset value when buying units or shares of the Trust and may receive less than the current net asset value when selling them. Investment funds are not guaranteed, their values change frequently, and past performance is no guarantee of future results.
1Bain Capital Ventures, “AI and the Office of the CFO in 2025.”
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