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Good morning.
Grand Theft Auto VI doesn’t come out for three more months, but it has already made $429 million in sales, according to analytics company Sensor Tower. The highly anticipated action video game could make parent company Take-Two Interactive as much as $5.2 billion in the first week after its November 19 release, analysts at market research firm Newzoo estimate.
Just how bad do people want to play this game? CBS News reported Wednesday that a US Army unit in Georgia is offering active duty soldiers in one battalion a four-day pass to play GTA VI when it comes out as a perk for reenlisting. If AI truly is set to take everyone’s jobs, four days of GTA beats free college tuition hands down.
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MARKETS
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Stock data as of market close on August 19, 2026.
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It has been roughly 18 years since a stock on the S&P 500 more than doubled in a single day. Reset the clock to zero.
Shares in Moderna surged, not-a-typo, 176.97% on Wednesday after the biotech company and partner Merck said an experimental vaccine-drug treatment showed signs of slowing the recurrence of skin cancer. A bit of caution and celebration, analysts said, are in order.
A Tale of Two Analysts
Moderna and Merck announced that their treatment, which combines jointly produced mRNA-based vaccine Intismeran with Merck’s immunotherapy drug Keytruda, slowed the return of melanoma and its spread to other parts of the body. The development, they said, is a result of a late-stage trial which enrolled more than 1,100 patients who already had their cancer surgically removed. But the companies have yet to publish their findings in a peer-reviewed setting. Instead, they pledged to present the trial data on the vaccine-drug combo at an upcoming international medical meeting and share it with regulators.
From a pure medical standpoint, it represents a potentially triumphant breakthrough: Melanoma accounts for just 1% of US skin cancer cases, but is responsible for the vast majority of skin cancer deaths, according to the American Cancer Society. It would also break new ground for mRNA vaccines, which were first approved for public use during the COVID-19 pandemic. Moderna, which has suffered steep revenue declines and losses since making record earnings from its Covid shots, won FDA approval for the first mRNA-based flu shot earlier this month. For Merck, which rose 12.6% on Wednesday, the news represents new potential for Keytruda, a blockbuster drug that made $8.4 billion in second-quarter sales, or more than half the company’s $16.6 billion revenue. For investors, some analysts advised a chill pill while others said roll with it:
- “We think that retail investors should keep expectations measured,” said eToro analyst Lale Akoner. “The companies have not yet released the full trial data, overall survival results are still pending, and manufacturing personalized vaccines at scale could be expensive and complex.”
- RBC’s Trung Huynh estimated the new treatment could be worth up to $2.5 billion, adding: “We expect a significant ‘halo effect’ across the robust [cancer] program.”
Other biotech companies developing mRNA-based cancer therapies benefited from spillover sentiment on Wednesday. Germany’s BioNTech closed up 20.7% and Switzerland’s Roche up 4.6%.
  Falling Short: Short sellers who bet Moderna’s extended slump would keep on slumping had a rough day. According to ORTEX, it’s one of the most shorted large-cap stocks on the market, with short interest amounting to 13.5%. Shorts, already reeling from Moderna rising more than 100% in 2026 prior to Wednesday because of its mRNA flu vaccine, were faced with paper losses of roughly $4.8 billion on Wednesday.
Written by Sean Craig
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Like the Allies in the latter years of World War II, Amazon is establishing air superiority. Only instead of conquering Germany, the e-commerce giant’s sky-high fleet aims to conquer America’s suburbs and sunbelt.
On Wednesday, Amazon announced plans to roll out its drone delivery program to nearly 500 US cities and towns by the end of the year. That marks a sixfold increase from current drone delivery service areas, and may well double as a way around (or, rather, right over the top of) some thorny labor law fights in major metro areas.
As The Drone Flies
Amazon is on a mission to shrink two-day delivery down to the amount of time it takes to carry a pizza to a customer. Its drones, which are capable of transporting packages weighing up to 5 pounds and can fly as far as 7.5 miles from their home bases, are playing an increasingly important role in the ultrafast delivery push, and currently operate in 11 metropolitan areas including Dallas, Houston and the suburbs around Phoenix.
Hundreds of thousands of drone deliveries have already been completed so far this year, well up from years past, Amazon Prime Air Vice President David Carbon said Wednesday. Drone deliveries typically take anywhere from an hour to mere minutes to arrive, Carbon said.
According to a CNBC report, Carbon recently told staffers that the goal is to hit 1 million drone deliveries this year. It’ll require a massive expansion, meaning Amazon will be increasingly sharing a crowded sky already occupied by its biggest rival:
- Drones will soon begin delivering from warehouses in Chicago, Syracuse, Cleveland and Atlanta, among other locations. The goal is to have the ability to reach 30 million Americans by the end of the year.
- Walmart drone partner Wing, an Alphabet subsidiary, says 40 million Americans will be in its reach by the end of next year.
A New York Mile: Both consumer giants share the same goal: lowering delivery costs. (It’s no surprise that DoorDash and Uber have made similar drone pushes this summer.) It’s a problem all the more fraught for Amazon these days. The commerce giant has gone to war in New York City this summer, spending big to lobby against proposed legislation that would force it to turn its complex network of subcontractor couriers into full-time employees. The Big Apple is notably not listed among Amazon’s planned drone expansion sites.
Written by Brian Boyle
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Photo via Rise Robotics
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Unitree Robotics’ humanoid robots may give M3GAN a run for her money.
The Hangzhou-based company’s product lineup includes bipedal bots that can do backflips, kung fu and more moves that plenty of humans (and their knees) can only dream of. The “Superman,” which the company previewed this week, can jump 2 meters and run up to 12.66 meters per second.
While the robots have certainly captured the attention of the internet, they’re exciting investors, too. Unitree raised roughly 6.1 billion yuan ($904 million) in its initial public offering, which was oversubscribed more than 8,000 times by retail investors, and shares skyrocketed 460% when the firm debuted on the Shanghai market Wednesday.
C-3PO’s Use Case
Investor fervor around an IPO doesn’t necessarily translate to a business model that can keep appealing to investors; just ask Beyond Meat or Peloton. Unitree’s powerful market debut does beg the question of whether the humanoid robots will be key players in making AI advancements more useful to humans, or simply theatrics.
“Humanoids are probably more like swapping steam engines for electric motors than redesigning the factory floor,” Amelia Michael, a non-resident fellow at the think tank Foundation for American Innovation and a research scholar at GovAI, recently wrote. As in, the result would be only minor productivity improvements. “It would be surprising if the human form factor is optimal for most tasks.”
That doesn’t mean companies aren’t releasing them, hoping they change the way we live and work:
- Boston Dynamics’ humanoid Atlas is built in part for industrial work and material handling. The firm also has the four-legged dynamic sensing bot Spot, which it says can offer insight into potentially hazardous situations.
- Tesla’s Optimus is a general-purpose humanoid that the company says can perform “unsafe, repetitive or boring tasks.”
The Droids You’re Looking For Are From China: Unitree’s home country is also the robotics supply chain leader. It’s now almost impossible to build a humanoid robot without parts from Chinese companies, Ming Hsun Lee, the head of greater China industrials at BofA Global Research, told The New York Times. “The component cost in China has gone down way too fast,” he added. “Other countries can’t compete.”
Written by Mallika Mitra
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- Hedging Bets: Cantor Fitzgerald is opening up prediction markets to hedge funds and other institutional investors by allowing its clients to trade event contracts on Kalshi.
- Easy Does It: The US Treasury doubled the size of some previously planned repurchases of long-term government debt to $4 billion each in an effort to steady the bond market.
- Mindstream Is Your Daily AI Advantage in a Rapidly Evolving Landscape. Join 200,000+ industry leaders, innovators and professionals who rely on their concise newsletter for the AI insights that matter. Subscribe today.*
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