Issue #78

DJs drive Burberry sales, British government sells stolen Bitcoin, economist warns AI bubble will burst, and more. 

News from July 17 - July 24, 202

DJs Drive Burberry Sales

Young people buying scarves, boots and jackets to wear at music festivals contributed to Burberry enjoying its best sales in 18 months, which just fell 2% in the second quarter. Shares in the fashion brand rose 4% at the news. 

CEO Joshua Schulman said it was because the company was appealing to younger luxury customers via pop-up DJ sets in shopping centres and a successful trial of “scarf bars”. 

This comes after years of declining sales, which fell 6% the previous quarter. Burberry announced in May it was cutting 1,700 jobs as part of its cost-cutting strategy, aiming to save £100 million by the end of the year. CEO Joshua Schulman: “Over the past year, we have moved from stabilising the business to driving Burberry forward with confidence.”

Source

China Hacks American Companies

China-backed hackers have allegedly hacked Microsoft Sharepoint, exploiting a zero-day bug, with dozens of private companies and government organisations compromised. This has enabled them to steal private keys, gain access to internal documents, install malware, and download sensitive information. 

The CVE-2025-53770 bug was discovered on the weekend on the Sharepoint software, which is used by companies and public organisations to store and share internal documents. Microsoft identified three China-backed hacking groups, Linen Typhoon, Violet Typhoon, and Storm-2603, which have exploited the bug to steal intellectual property and private information. Microsoft has since rolled out patches to fix the bug.

Spokeperson for the Chinese Embassy in Washington D.C. Liu Pengyu: “China firmly opposes and combats all forms of cyber attacks and cyber crime — a position that is consistent and clear.”

Source

British Government Sells Stolen Bitcoin

The British government is working with the police to sell more than £5.4 billion in confiscated Bitcoin to fund its spending plans, with further plans to develop an official system to regularly sell seized cryptoassets. This comes after economists warned the government would have to raise taxes in the autumn. 

While the value of the government’s crypto stash is not known, one 2018 raid seized 61,000 bitcoins from a Chinese Ponzi scheme, now worth more tha £5.4 billion. Some analysts criticised the government’s decision, pointing to the surging value of bitcoin in recent years. 

Reform chairman Zia Yusef: “Selling now will go down as a far worse decision than Gordon Brown’s fire sale of our gold. The Westminster class are dinosaurs who don’t get the future.”

Source

Bulletin Board

• Elon Musk Opens a Restaurant. Tesla opened a retro-futuristic diner in Hollywood called the Tesla Diner & Drive-In, where Tesla drivers can charge their EVs and order hamburgers. The diner is fitted out with two 45-foot LED movie theatres, an Optimus robot, and Tesla-branded merchandise. Tesla CEO Elon Musk: “If our retro-futuristic diner turns out well, which I think it will, @Tesla will establish these in major cities around the world, as well as at Supercharger sites on long-distance routes.” Source
• Netflix Turns to AI. Netflix has started using AI to make movies and TV shows. The company’s co-CEO Ted Sarandos announced the company used GenAI to create a scene of a building collapsing for the Argentine TV show El Eternauta. Sarandos said AI made producing the scene ten times faster and at a fraction of the cost. This will be the world’s first GenAI footage to appear on screen. Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos: “This is real people doing real work with better tools.” Source
• Temu Bypasses EU Laws. The EU has found evidence that Chinese fast fashion brands like Temu and Shein are bypassing EU consumer laws. The EU justice commissioner noted their use of infertility-inducing chemicals in cosmetics, children’s raincoats laced with toxic chemicals, and sunglasses with no UV filter. EU justice commissioner Michael McGrath: “European businesses are expected to compete with sellers who are not complying with our rules.” Source
• OpenAI Releases Agent. OpenAI has released a general-purpose AI agent to Pro, Plus and Team subscribers. The agent can run code, create slideshows, and “plan and buy ingredients to make a Japanese breakfast for four”. Unlike previous iterations, this new agent can gain access to apps like Gmail and GitHub to better find relevant information for prompts. OpenAI says the agent scores 41.6% on Humanity’s Last Exam, double the scores of o3 and o4-mini, and 27.4% on Frontier Math, in which o4-mini just scored 6.3%. Source
• Economist Warns AI Bubble Will Burst. Apollo Global Management chief economist Torsten Slok warned that the top S&P 500 companies are more overvalued than they were in the 1990s. Slok released a widely circulated chart showing that the top performing companies’ stock prices are rising far higher than their earnings, the ratio wider than it was in the years leading up to the dot-com crash. Source

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