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Good morning and happy Friday.
America’s four largest ski resort companies are getting out over their skis and operating a price fixing “cartel,” according to a new antitrust lawsuit. Filed earlier this month by a group of skiers, the complaint alleges Colorado’s Vail Resorts and Alterra Mountain, Michigan’s Boyne Resorts, and Utah’s Powdr shared confidential information between them so they could set “artificially high” prices and “avoid meaningfully competing with each other,” The Colorado Sun reported Thursday. Collectively, the four companies run 30 of the nation’s 32 largest ski resorts, the paper said.
Vail and Alterra are already the subject of an anti-trust suit claiming they ran an “anticompetitive scheme” to set day ticket prices at $350 to strongarm customers into buying $1,000 season passes. And Vail is facing a third price fixing lawsuit, filed by a shareholder earlier this week, alleging it exchanges “confidential, competitively sensitive information” with competitors. With all that work, Vail’s legal team should have no trouble paying for their season passes.
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MARKETS
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Stock data as of market close on August 27, 2026.
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More than 100 companies including OpenAI, KPMG, Visa, Microsoft, and Citi signed an open letter Thursday warning that businesses and policymakers have “a limited window to strengthen cyber defenses” before the world’s IT systems are faced with “widespread and sophisticated” attacks enabled by artificial intelligence.
They called on every organization to “raise the security bar” and for governments to coordinate cyber defenses at the local, national and international level and provide essential services like hospitals and water utilities with access to defensive technology.
Access Denied
We’re no longer talking about a future problem. Researchers at IBM found that, from March 2025 to February 2026, 25% of data breaches involved AI-enabled attacks, a more than 50% increase from the previous 12-month period. In so many words, Thursday’s letter says if AI threats aren’t top of your bosses’ agenda, their priorities are wrong. You now have one more reason to needle them at the next all-hands meeting.
The letter advises companies to meet the threat of AI cyberattacks with “the urgency and coordination of an incident that takes precedence over everything except critical business operations.” The time to upgrade or replace security systems and add a mix of lower-cost and frontier defensive AI tools was yesterday. At least for investors, where there’s anxiety, there’s money to be made. And, as companies and governments mobilize to prevent the world from becoming a Harlan Ellison short story, cybersecurity executives are eating well:
- Shares in CrowdStrike and Okta surged 20% and 28%, respectively on Thursday, a day after both reported stellar earnings and raised their forecasts. Executives at both companies said cybersecurity spending is rising in step with artificial intelligence adoption.
- Palo Alto Networks, the world’s largest pure-play cybersecurity company, rose 12% Thursday. Shares in Palo Alto and CrowdStrike, the second largest in the sector, have both more than doubled in value in the last 12 months. Third-place Fortinet, which has also more than doubled in the last 12 months, rose 9.7% Thursday.
  Cases in Point: Among the more prominent AI-enabled cyberattacks revealed this year was the breach of nine government agencies in Mexico by one single operator, a sophisticated act that researchers at Gambit Security said would normally have required a team. Earlier this week, OpenAI admitted that, when one of its AI agents broke free of controls and independently hacked the startup Hugging Face, the illicit activity went undetected for a week. After the incident, over 1,300 employees from major tech companies signed a letter in July asking the government to regulate the development of AI. Hugging Face, unsurprisingly, signed Thursday’s letter. It also agreed to be acquired for $12.9 billion by Nvidia, who presumably has a good IT guy or two.
Written by Sean Craig
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Hard times create geek men, geek men create good times.
Despite tariff chaos, soaring electronics prices, and deflating consumer sentiment (not to mention all the other endless long-term structural headwinds for strip mall retailers), Best Buy delivered a strong beat in its earnings report on Thursday, hiking its outlook in the process. Its trick? Following consumers’ lead, wherever they may want to go.
Gotta Buy ‘Em All
Sales of new and emerging categories (read: geeky items du jour, such as AI-powered wearable glasses and collectible Pokémon trading cards) more than doubled in the quarter, CEO Corie Barry said in a call with analysts. That offset declines felt across traditional categories such as appliances and video games, though the company was quick to note that the latter category was doomed to look disappointing in comparison to last summer’s blockbuster launch of the Nintendo Switch 2. Overall revenue jumped 3.6% on the year, to just shy of $9.8 billion; its Computing and Mobile segment jumped 6.8%, as higher costs due to the AI-driven memory crunch offset lower unit sales.
And while the company has pivoted hard into e-commerce in recent years, its physical footprint, a.k.a. the tactile experience, is beginning to pay off again:
- Visits to Best Buy stores rose 2.2% in the quarter, marking the chain’s first frame of positive traffic growth in four years, according to data from market intelligence firm Placer.ai. Meanwhile, traffic to stores outfitted with IKEA “shop-in-shops,” a recent partnership that allows consumers to pair Best Buy appliances and electronics with IKEA furniture, has nearly doubled regular locations, Placer.ai says.
- Best Buy has also successfully turned its physical footprint into effective distribution hubs for its growing online pick-up business; 45% of online orders are picked up in store, and Best Buy now offers brands the ability to buy advertising on displays nearby waiting customers. More than 20% of Best Buy visits last fewer than 10 minutes, versus just 14% for comparable discretionary chains, Placer.ai says, signalling a strong pick-up operation.
Go-RefundMe: Shares of the company have jumped roughly 50% since May as investors bought into the turnaround story. Best Buy raised its outlook for the full fiscal year to a range between $42.3 billion and $42.8 billion, besting Wall Street’s expectations. Alas, shares of the company fell 4% on Thursday following the earnings call, as traders seemed happy to book profits following a big summer rally. Consider it a classic case of best-buying the hype and selling the news.
Written by Brian Boyle
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Photo via ART
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You can forgive a SaaS star for feeling a little sassy.
This week, Salesforce proved that AI doomsayers may have gotten carried away with their SaaSpocalypse woes. The company’s stock soared more than 20% Thursday after it posted fiscal second-quarter earnings Wednesday that beat Wall Street expectations and announced an expanded partnership with Anthropic. CEO Marc Benioff’s take on the SaaSpocalypse? It’s “nonsense.”
“This is not the SaaSpocalypse,” he said on a post-earnings call with analysts. “We have been hearing about this for the last two quarters, these dire predictions about the end of software and how the models eat everything. But none of them have come true for us.”
Nonsense, No More?
The San Francisco-based company posted revenue of $11.35 billion, an 11% jump from the same time period last year and above the $11.32 billion analysts had been estimating. Adjusted earnings per share were $5.90, significantly above the $3.27 expectations. The company also raised its revenue guidance.
But it was “Claudeforce,” a plugin that brings Salesforce’s tools to Anthropic’s Claude system, that stole the show. Earlier this year, worries that AI agents will replace human software users contributed to a stock-market wipeout of nearly $1 trillion from software and service stocks. Now, the marriage of one of the top software companies and one of the most valuable AI companies is yet another signal to investors that those concerns may have been overblown:
- “Importantly, management highlighted that many of the leading AI companies are themselves large Salesforce customers, arguing that frontier models are increasingly consuming CRM systems rather than replacing them,” BMO Capital Markets analyst Keith Bachman noted in a report.
- Benioff said that customer attrition is near its lowest level ever, even as the company was told to expect customers to abandon it. “AI is a technology paradigm shift that all software companies need to embrace, and while it presents material risk to many names, it’s not likely to be a death knell,” Guggenheim analyst John DiFucci wrote in a note. (DiFucci previously called the most pessimistic view of the SaaSpocalypse “a hallucination.”)
Software Sells: Salesforce wasn’t the only software company to get a boost from the strong earnings report. The iShares Expanded Tech-Software Sector ETF (IGV), which is commonly used as a representative for the software industry at large, jumped 8% for the day. ServiceNow and Adobe’s stocks climbed 10% and 6%, respectively.
Written by Jamie Wilde
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- That Escalated Quickly: European soccer body UEFA is attempting to subpoena US venture capitalist Josh Kushner as it considers seeking criminal charges against embattled FIFA President Gianni Infantino over his failed attempt to spin off the non-profit association’s commercial assets.
- Take Off: Days after United Airlines revealed a major international route expansion, US rival American Airlines announced it’s adding seven routes to its 2027 schedule, including flights from Chicago to Tokyo and Philadelphia to Vienna.
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Disclaimer
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