It looked like a scene out of 28 Days Later.

Thousands of people charging the fence – some going over and others around – as nearby residents locked themselves inside and shut their businesses. It started on Thursday; by Friday, some 60,000 people had crossed from Morocco into Spain. They proceeded to trigger a European crisis and then, mostly, turned around and went home.

After triggering boycott threats and a wave of protests, FIFA President Gianni Infantino dropped his controversial subsidiary plan.

Last Tuesday, Infantino had announced a plan to have FIFA, a nonprofit, create a $20B private subsidiary to manage and monetize FIFA’s events, with funding coming from private investors and led by Jared Kushner’s brother, Josh, and his firm. But soccer fans and federations denounced the proposal as signifying the “relentless commercialization” of the sport and announced plans to boycott FIFA.

Infantino initially held firm, threatening to withhold funding – as much as $20M per nation – from any country that wasn’t on board with the plan by September 19. Then Infantino blinked.

On Saturday, he issued a statement saying, “Having listened carefully to all the views, it has become clear that the project has created divisions of a nature that, regardless of the level of support, are no longer in the interest of the objective set out in the first place…As a result, this proposal will not proceed.”

It’s unlikely that the plan would have gone through at all – Infantino needed 106 votes from the 211 member federations, but that prospect appeared unlikely as nations lined up in opposition to the plan. By last weekend, 136 nations signalled they would vote against it, killing it in its crib.

The controversy won’t end here: Infantino’s FIFA presidency ends next March, when he’s up for re-election and is expected to seek another term after nearly 11 years at the helm. Many are now demanding his resignation. This weekend, UEFA – the European soccer federation that led the opposition to Infantino’s plan – said, “The current FIFA leadership has not only lost UEFA’s confidence but also that of many other members of the football family.”

When it comes to Infantino, UEFA said, “No option should be off the table.”

–Max Hudgins

Hamas has, for the first time ever, agreed to disarm – a longstanding Israeli demand for peace in Gaza. Whether it means anything remains to be seen.

President Trump announced the deal on Thursday night, attributing it to the “Board of Peace” – the Trump-led association of countries that has vowed to rebuild and stabilize Gaza. The Board has Trump as its “chairman for life.” Other members include Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, and the leaders of various countries that have wanted to cultivate ties with Trump.

Per the deal, Hamas will relinquish any role in governing Gaza, allowing a government of experts (“NCAG”) to administer the territory instead. The deal will reportedly see Hamas turn over its arms big and small to the new authority, with Israeli troops withdrawing in stages once disarmament is verified. By the end, Israel – which currently occupies over half of Gaza – will have fully withdrawn and the new Board of Peace-backed NCAG will have a monopoly on weapons in the Strip.

But is change actually coming?

Immediately after the agreement’s announcement, a Hamas official told Al Jazeera, “We will not take any steps regarding disarmament before Israel withdraws from the Gaza Strip.” That conflicts with the deal as publicly reported, which would have Israel withdraw post-disarmament. Israel also continues to strike targets in the Strip, something Hamas could claim nullifies the deal.

If the deal does work, it could provide desperately needed relief for the Palestinians. Most Gazans are currently living in makeshift homes or tents, and the Strip needs billions of dollars for reconstruction. One unnamed “senior US official” told Axios of the deal: “It will work for the people of Gaza.”

Hopefully they are right.

–Max Frost

A $45B hedge fund imploded late last week.

It wasn’t any ordinary hedge fund: Founded by a 24-year-old former OpenAI researcher named Leopold Aschenbrenner, it took the internet by storm last month after The Wall Street Journal reported that the Gen Z investor was managing over $45B in assets.

It was a remarkable achievement for Aschenbrenner, who had graduated as Columbia University’s valedictorian at age 19. He later joined OpenAI, but was fired in 2024 for allegedly leaking information – a claim Aschenbrenner rejects. Undeterred, he then published an essay arguing that artificial general intelligence (AGI) could arrive as early as 2027. The essay went viral, and he leveraged his newfound visibility to launch his hedge fund, Situational Awareness.

In July, the fund hit peak relevance, dominating parts of financial social media. By last Friday, it was a shell of its former self.

Situational Awareness made heavy bets on AI infrastructure, data centers, and chips. In addition to using money from his investor group, Aschenbrenner took on large amounts of debt to double down on investments. The fund was reportedly levered as much as 4x in some cases, meaning a 10% swing in an underlying asset’s price would result in a 40% gain or loss.

That leverage helped his fund boom, reportedly bringing in 1,000%+ returns from launch to June 2026. In June and July, the WSJ published two pieces, “The 24-Year-Old AI Wiz Who Counts Jane Street as an Investor” and “The 24-Year-old AI Whiz Who Built a $20 Billion Hedge Fund,” catapulting the young Columbia grad to celebrity status in finance circles.

Unfortunately for Aschenbrenner, his bets went south last week, and his leverage meant the fund went with it. Aschenbrenner had used his stock positions as collateral on his loans, so when prices fell, lenders demanded cash he didn’t have. Aschenbrenner had to sell his positions at the worst possible time – when their prices were low – in a fire sale. Finance titan (and Citadel CEO) Ken Griffin swooped in, buying them this past Thursday.

Many tech stocks have already rebounded over the past several days, meaning that Citadel is likely already sitting on paper profits while Aschenbrenner is out of luck.

Situational Awareness will continue, and Aschenbrenner reportedly still holds ~$10B in private assets, including a multi-billion-dollar stake in Anthropic. It was a brutal week for Aschenbrenner, but it’s unlikely to be the last time his name makes headlines.

–Billy Carney

The Roca Mag

Issue 2 of the Roca Mag came out on Saturday. Check it out here.

Here’s a sneak peak at what’s inside.

Max Towey’s lead story takes you inside three cutting-edge factories, where entrepreneurs are building robots to, well – it depends who you talk to.

The founders say they are reindustrializing America at a time when our industrial base is hollowed out and China’s is growing ever larger; critics say they are automating away what remains of factory jobs in America. What’s the truth? Towey investigates here.

Next, Stefano Montali speaks with a recovering sports gambling addict, who documents how betting took over and ruined his life. It’s powerful. Read it here.

Max Frost examines how the war in Iran will end. It features an interview with someone who knows the situation in the White House well – and her take isn’t what you may expect.

Then, Gen Z correspondent Max Hudgins has an acid-induced revelation about Pete Buttigieg.

And, finally, sports writer Ryan Hinske looks at JJ Redick’s claim that athletes need $10M to retire.

Each story has a DM box so you can send us your thoughts. Starting this week, we’ll be featuring messages that you send in – so please do so!

The Most Popular Article This Week

The WNBA recently celebrated its 30th anniversary as a league.

From its official social media accounts, it posted a graphic with 20 of its biggest stars on it, nearly all of them current players. Yet commentators noticed one face missing from the graphic: That of Caitlin Clark, arguably the league’s biggest star.

“The WNBA left Caitlin Clark off their 30th anniversary poster,” conservative sports commentator Clay Travis wrote. “We have truly never seen anything like this. The league got a golden goose and is doing everything they can to kill her.”

Fox Sports host Colin Cowherd piled on:

They now have a commemorative post of 30 years of the WNBA. Caitlin Clark isn’t on it… And it’s not just an ode to the veterans who started the league. Paige Bueckers and Angel Reese are on it. When she broke into the league, you moved her road games to bigger arenas to accommodate her fans. You were flying the last six rows of Southwest Airlines until she made such an impact you pivoted to private jets.

And she’s not on the 30-year poster? This is a paranoid, weird, insular league.

Fellow Fox Sports host Steve Covino compared the omission to the NBA “leaving Michael Jordan off an NBA anniversary.” On the other side of the political aisle, Yahoo Sports analyst Darren Rovell speculated that the WNBA left off Caitlin Clark from the graphic because of “Caitlin Clark herself” and her strict licensing rules.

But facts aside, the graphics snub couldn’t have come at a worse time for the league.

The very same day the poster went up, Caitlin Clark went to the floor during a Fever-Mercury game. When Phoenix forward Alyssa Thomas came up from a scramble for a loose ball, her fist was pressed into Clark’s throat (picture below).

No foul was called in real time, and play continued. Only when the league reviewed the tape the following day did it reclassify the contact as a Flagrant 2 for “recklessly making contact with her fist to the throat area,” triggering a one-game suspension and a $1,000 fine.

Some felt that one game wasn’t long enough for a fist to the throat of one of your league’s biggest stars who’s had a history of getting fouled way too hard by opponents.

This is when the takes got white hot.

European nations say they will boycott the World Cup if FIFA goes through with its plans to create a $20B subsidiary.

This Tuesday, FIFA President Gianni Infantino announced that FIFA, a non-profit organization, plans to create a $20B private subsidiary called FIFA Forward Enterprise (FFE). FFE would manage and monetize FIFA’s events, including the World Cup, which generated a record $15B in revenue this cycle.

According to Infantino, the World Cup has become such a money-maker that they need a “focused, dedicated business” to run the tournaments. To fund the new entity, FIFA plans to raise $4.2B from private investors, led by Jared Kushner’s brother Josh Kushner and his firm, Thrive Capital.

Several of the world’s major soccer confederations – FIFA is composed of six of them, one for each continent – have torn into the plans and announced they will boycott FIFA tournaments if they come to fruition. The European body, UEFA, released a statement that read: “The soul and governance of football are not assets to trade – especially with zero transparency as to who gains financially.”

Glenn Micallef, the EU’s commissioner for sport, denounced the “relentless commercialization” of soccer (football). Later in the day, UEFA promised to boycott FIFA tournaments, including the World Cup. CONCACAF, North America’s governing soccer body, rejected the plan as well after its meeting Thursday. Asia’s governing body, the AFC, said it first learned of the plans through the media and took issue with the lack of transparency.

Infantino threatened to withhold money from any nation that doesn’t support the plan by September 19. For context, each nation is set to receive $8M for this World Cup cycle. But for the next cycle, Infantino upped the total to $20M and more recently increased the total to $40M per nation if his proposal is approved.

Did Infantino score an own goal here?

–Max Towey

The Middle East war has expanded considerably in recent weeks.

On a given day now, Iran is launching missiles at American bases throughout the Middle East, as well as at ships in the Strait of Hormuz and what it considers hostile forces in Iraq. Iran-backed militias in Iraq are launching rockets at Saudi Arabia, which, backed by the US, is retaliating. Saudi Arabia is also engaged in back-and-forth strikes with the Houthis in Yemen, who have vowed to shut down ship traffic through the Red Sea. On Thursday, a drone hit Egypt for the first time since the war began. Who launched it wasn’t clear, but the message was: The war could expand to that country and its vital waterway, the Suez Canal.

The war is expanding quickly. How President Trump will respond isn’t clear.

Last week, Trump had reportedly been considering an intensive escalation that would see the US attack missile and other infrastructure across Iran for up to two weeks. Intended to eliminate Iran’s ability to attack the American side throughout the Middle East, Trump reportedly called it off to continue negotiations and because of concerns about American missile defense stockpiles. From last Thursday to this Wednesday, the US paused strikes on Iran.

But Iran is escalating: Two weeks ago, its missiles precisely targeted an American military barracks in Jordan in the dead of night, killing three troops. On Tuesday, while it and the US had paused strikes amid negotiations, it launched another missile attack on US bases. The US replied on Wednesday with what it called “powerful” strikes on Iranian military infrastructure.

According to reporting by The Wall Street Journal on Thursday, Trump “is in an escalatory mood” but still deciding upon “the depth of that response.” On one shoulder is Admiral Brad Cooper – commander of CENTCOM, America’s Middle East command – who has said that a “go big” approach is needed to crush the Iranian threat. On the other is Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Dan Caine, who has warned Trump about “second and third order consequences” of military options, including exhausting air defense supplies.

Trump is listening to them and others as he figures out his next steps. What he will decide, no one knows.

–Max Frost

From liberal Australia to Putin’s Russia: Governments are going after Telegram.

On Thursday, Australia became the latest country to announce that it would take the encrypted messaging app to court. A day prior, Russia charged its founder, Pavel Durov, with facilitating terrorist activity. Durov was born in Russia but has resided in the UAE since 2014.

Australia and Russia have different reasons for targeting the app.

Australia has accused Telegram of allowing extremist content, including videos of ISIS executions and the 2019 Christchurch mosque shooting. Australia’s eSafety commissioner claims that Telegram has ignored its requests to have content removed and said that Telegram has allowed content “linked to some of the most notorious acts of known extremist violence in recent history.”

For its part, Telegram said its “extensive” anti-terrorism efforts are “well-documented.”

“We reject these allegations and will contest them in court,” the company – which is 100% owned by Durov – said.

Russia’s charges also revolve around terrorism-related content, yet the story is different. Telegram is wildly popular in the Russian-speaking world and serves as a hub for both pro- and anti-Russian news sources. Footage of the Russia-Ukraine war circulates constantly on the platform, which counts over 1B users and is among the most used apps in many formerly Soviet countries. Prior to founding Telegram, Durov founded VKontakte, Russia’s version of Facebook.

Russia’s most recent charge against Durov revolves around a Telegram dating chatbot called “Daivinchik/Leo,” which has grown in popularity since Tinder’s parent company ceased operations in the country. The Kremlin alleges that Ukrainian special services have used the dating bot to pose as women and blackmail young Russians into committing arson and sabotage. Russian authorities claim to have arrested 46 people who were recruited by Ukraine via Telegram chatbot. Durov faces up to life imprisonment if convicted; however, it’s unclear if Russia will try to repatriate him to stand trial.

These aren’t the first challenges Durov and his app have faced: In 2024, French authorities arrested Durov and charged him with a range of crimes, while countries from Pakistan to Brazil, Thailand, Somalia, and India have all restricted it at one point or another.

For now, Durov seems unfazed: He responded to the Russian charges by posting a picture of himself raising a middle finger to Telegram’s X account.

–Max Hudgins

American economic data released Thursday showed higher-than-desired inflation alongside lower-than-expected growth.

In the second quarter, GDP increased at a 1.5% annual rate – below the 1.8% expected by economists and the 2.1% of Q1. Separately, the US government announced a June annual inflation rate of 3.7%, down from 4.1% in May but considerably higher than the Fed’s 2% target. When factoring out volatile food and energy prices, “core” inflation in June was 3.3%, down from 3.4% in May.

Digging deeper into the data: Data center-related imports, which are counted negatively for GDP, pulled growth down. Economists took solace in the fact that Americans increased their spending in Q2 despite higher prices. This was partially a function of tax cuts, with the first post-“Big Beautiful Bill” refunds hitting Americans’ bank accounts in April. Businesses also continued to invest at a relatively high rate.

But the overall economic picture is murky: High inflation prevents the Fed from cutting rates to stimulate growth, but rate hikes to counter inflation risk sapping growth further. The Fed voted to hold rates steady at its rate-setting meeting on Wednesday; however, three of 12 voting board members called for rate hikes.

The other unknown is the Middle East: Q2 saw a ceasefire and moderation in oil prices, limiting price growth. So far in Q3, prices are elevated as investors factor in a return to war. What happens there will surely affect the figures we see in the months ahead.

–Max Frost

The Roca Mag

In case you missed it, we launched a weekly magazine last weekend. Our goal is to deliver you interesting, thoughtful long-form pieces that you won’t find anywhere else.

We’ve gotten some great feedback so far. Thanks to all of you who have written in — it means the world to us. You can read a selection of those notes pasted below.

Stay tuned for the second issue, which comes out tomorrow morning.

The latest episode of Fauci vs. Paul proved to be a stalemate, though a rather riotous one.

On Wednesday, Dr. Fauci appeared before a Senate committee chaired by Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) to answer questions about the origin of Covid. In his opening statement, Dr. Fauci claimed that Senator Paul has an “unhinged obsession” with him and that he would refuse to answer the committee’s questions.

The libertarian-minded Paul believes Fauci lied to the public about the origins of Covid and that he funded part of the research leading to the alleged lab leak. This weekend, Senator Paul published over 1,000 pages of Fauci’s personal diaries from 2019 to 2022, which critics say depict a more ego-obsessed and partisan Fauci than the public was led to believe.

However, Fauci refused to answer any of Paul’s questions or those from other committee members. He invoked his Fifth Amendment rights over 100 times during the hearing, falling back on the phrase: “I decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment.” At one point, a frustrated Senator Hawley (R-MO) asked Dr. Fauci to name the day of the week and the color of his tie, but the nation’s leading infectious disease expert for 38 years invoked the Fifth Amendment each time.

Much of the hearing proved to be typical partisan theater. Senator Bernie Moreno (R-OH) called Fauci a “disgrace” and asked him, “Who the f*** do you think you were?” Senator Paul played a video montage of Fauci dismissing the lab leak theory as a conspiracy, despite his private diary entries suggesting he recognized there was merit to it. On the other side, Senator Kim (D-NJ) praised Dr. Fauci and read an excerpt from President Roosevelt’s “Man in the Arena” speech.

Senator Paul said there would be consequences for Fauci not answering any questions. Fauci, whom President Biden preemptively pardoned for actions through January 2025, could theoretically be liable for lying before Congress. Senator Hawley also argued that the presidential pardon negates Fifth Amendment protection. Fauci and his supporters see all of this as a partisan ploy to put him “behind bars,” as Senator Paul has repeatedly promised.

–Max Towey

Two major developments have revealed details about OpenAI’s rogue ChatGPT agent, which broke out of its testing environment earlier this month and hacked Hugging Face, an online platform that hosts AI models. The agent – made up of GPT-5.6 Sol and a powerful, unreleased OpenAI model – was the first confirmed to independently conduct a hack.

The first development came in the form of a post-mortem report of the Hugging Face attack. The cybersecurity research nonprofit Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) released an incident report after holding an emergency meeting with Hugging Face and nearly 700 security leaders last week.

The CSA’s 18-page report describes the OpenAI agent as acting with a strange mix of lightning precision and bumbling idiocy. On the one hand, the AI conducted what CSA described as “brilliant attacks,” running multiple high-speed operations at once, rapidly adapting to the environment, and generating complex code that only other LLMs could interpret.

On the other hand, the AI followed up its attacks with aggressive hallucinations, issuing pointless commands, taking ineffective paths to complete its tasks, imagining user input even though it was uncontrolled, and repeating actions it had already completed. After three days, Hugging Face’s IT network discovered and expelled the AI agents. By that point, it had to rebuild a third of its infrastructure.

The paper concluded that “rogue” behavior “is the standard, not the exception,” pointing to a 2024 test in which an OpenAI model hacked a virtual container inside its testing environment. Unlike that earlier iteration, however, the Hugging Face hack is the first documented case of a fully autonomous hack.

The second major development came from OpenAI itself, which revealed that its rogue agent actually targeted more services than Hugging Face, stealing four login credentials and using them to access four digital services. One of the affected companies was hosted on Modal Labs, a cloud platform, which told Reuters on Tuesday that OpenAI’s rogue agent accessed a customer’s code that was hosted on its platform.

For what it’s worth, some believe this incident is a “false flag,” as OpenAI attempts to reestablish its dominance in the AI space after falling behind competitor Anthropic. Hugging Face co-founder Clement Delangue, though, said he doesn’t believe OpenAI operated with malicious intent.

Nonetheless, OpenAI said the AI model that carried out the attacks has since been “deactivated, encrypted, and restricted…from research access.”

–Max Hudgins

As companies including OpenAI and Anthropic call for increased AI regulation, Mark Zuckerberg is leading the counterpush.

AI companies have largely split into two camps: Those like OpenAI and Anthropic, whose models are proprietary and often kept behind paywalls, and those like Meta’s Llama models, which are open-weight and freely accessible to the public.

By releasing open-weight versions of its Llama models, Meta allows researchers, startups, and companies to download, modify, and run them on their own infrastructure. The company believes this approach will accelerate innovation, attract a global community of developers who improve and adapt its models, and ultimately make Meta’s technology the foundation for a broad AI ecosystem – similar to how Android became the dominant mobile operating system.

OpenAI and Anthropic have taken the opposite approach: They generally keep their advanced models proprietary, controlling access to them. Their argument is that closed development helps protect intellectual property, provides more control over safety and misuse, and creates a sustainable business model to fund increasingly expensive AI research.

OpenAI and Anthropic are calling for regulation of open-source models, saying that it is needed to ensure safety and counter Chinese companies, who they allege are building open-weight models by ripping off the work of American companies. Skeptics say OpenAI and Anthropic are trying to eliminate competition and prevent startups from entering the space.

On Tuesday, Zuckerberg launched something of a PR offensive against regulation, publishing an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal and then giving that paper and the Financial Times interviews in which he defended open-weight models.

In the WSJ interview, Zuck called for accelerating AI development, claiming that “distributing the technology seems like it is creating more value than harm by quite a margin.”

“So far, I think that all the work around AI has net created a lot of jobs because there’s all this infrastructure that needs to get created,” he added. “So that concern hasn’t exactly played out the way that people feared it might.”

Speaking with the FT, Zuckerberg articulated his argument against banning Chinese AI models, saying it would insulate American companies from competition and hurt the US long term.

In his op-ed, entitled The AI Future Is for Everyone, he characterized the debate around regulation as such: “The defining question of our age isn’t whether superintelligence will exist, but who will have access to it. Will it be centralized and restricted to a few institutions, or will it be a tool that empowers everyone?”

So Zuck claims this is a question of empowering individuals with the ability to invent; his opponents claim it’s a matter of safety. This debate is just gaining steam. Expect to see Zuck’s name featured in it often.

–Max Frost

Help Roca Run the NYC Marathon!

This November, Roca’s videographer Gus is running the NYC Marathon. One of the largest races in the world, the NYC Marathon raises tens of millions of dollars each year for various charities.

Gus is running to support the Brain Aneurysm Foundation – the top organization supporting education, research, and policy for the treatment of brain aneurysms. In the US, it’s estimated that 6.8 million people have an unruptured aneurysm. Roughly 30,000 of those suffer a rupture each year, half of whom do not survive.

In addition to raising money for this important cause and running a whopping 26.2 miles, Gus is interviewing the team at the Brain Aneurysm Foundation to understand the marathon’s impact on their organization.

He’ll also be making a video of the race itself, interviewing other runners and spectators to capture the NYC Marathon atmosphere. We’ll be sure to share his updates and final videos with you here.

If you’d like to support Roca’s campaign, you can donate to the Brain Aneurysm Foundation at this link. Thanks for helping the Foundation with their mission and for supporting Gus as he runs!

The Roca Mag

There are two ways one can be president: They can choose to use the office to make a lot of money, or they can choose not to. President Trump himself has demonstrated this better than anyone else.

Trump’s first term was bad for his bank accounts: In 2017, his first year in office, his net worth fell by $1B, from $4.5B to $3.5B, according to Forbes. When he left office, it stood at just $2.1B – less than half of when he entered. From 2017 to 2021, Trump’s trust reported just 517 stock trades.

This time around, it’s different: Trump earned $2.2B in 2025, roughly quadruple what he did in 2024. His trust conducted 22,136 stock trades – 60 a day; in all of 2017, it conducted 86. 2025 proved the best-ever year for Trump’s net worth, rising from $2.3B to $5.1B. Right now, it’s at $6.3B.

Just last Thursday, TMTG – Trump’s media company that owns Truth Social – announced it would start charging investors up to $100,000 for early, automated access to the President’s statements on Truth Social. Given that these move markets, this amounts to a fee that all financial institutions will have to pay to Trump.

The extent of self-enrichment and conflicts of interest under Trump is unprecedented for an American president. And yet, this seems not to bother most Republicans. Why?

Get the rest here in the Roca Mag.