📈Biggest Australian M&A So Far: Macquarie Asset Management headed a consortium of investors paying $5.20 per share (totalling $8.3 billion) for Qube Holdings Ltd, Australia’s largest import-export logistics provider.

📈Buffet Sold On His Way Out: Berkshire Hathaway’s latest SEC filing, showing the December quarter has just been released. We can see they sold 50 million shares of Bank of America and 10 million of Apple, alongside the sell-off they added 5.1 million shares of the New York Times. Despite all this, their cash pile remains at a massive $382 billion.

📈BHP Making it Rain: BHP, the world’s largest miner by market cap reported a 28% yearly increase in profit and boosted the dividend by 46% to ~$1 AUD. BHP’s copper business attributed to more than half of their EBITDA as growing demand for renewables hits the mining industry.

📈A Private Credit Speed Bump: Shares of Blue Owl, Apollo, KKR and Ares fell between 2-6% on Friday in response to Blue Owl preventing investors from withdrawing their money from funds due to limited liquidity. Previously, Blue Owl allowed investors to redeem 5% of their capital per quarter but now liquidity has seemed to dry up and investors have gotten a bit wary.

🌎Liberation Day … From Tariffs: In perhaps the largest ruling for the Supreme Court in Trump’s second term, the Supreme Court has ruled 6-3 that Trump’s global tariffs are illegal and that he went too far without authorization from Congress. Read the full ruling here.

🌎The First Woke AI: Anthropic, the makers of Claude, have stated they don’t want Claude used for “domestic surveillance and autonomous lethal activities”. As Claude remains the only AI used in highly classified settings (including in the Venezuela operation) the DoD has pushed back against this, marking Claude as a potential “supply-chain risk”, something previously only reserved for foreign adversaries.

🌎Iran: T-10 After gathering the most air power in the middle-east since the 2003 Iraq invasion, Trump will determine his next move around Iran in the next 10 days. Tehran is currently in negotiations with the US over their nuclear enrichment program but it hasn’t stopped the US moving two aircraft carriers into the region.

🌎Are Aliens Real?: We may find out now that Trump has directed “the Secretary of War and any other relevant Departments and Agencies” to identify and release any files related to UFOs and Aliens.

👔Zuck Defends Meta: Mark Zuckerberg defended Meta in a landmark trial investigating if its platforms are intentionally addictive to children. Plaintiffs cited internal documents showing Meta knew youths felt "hooked" and ignored under-13 age limits. Zuckerberg argued the evidence was taken out of context and highlighted Meta’s safety tools instead. As countries like Australia and Spain ban youth social media, this case could serve as a critical moment for similar lawsuits.

👔Onigiri On The Way: After completing the acquisition of 7-11 Australia in 2024, Seven & i Holdings Co (the owner of 7-11 Japan) is starting to roll-out the winning formula of fresh, prepared food and daily services here in Aus. 7-11’s revenue from food accounts for just 15% of overall revenue but as 80% of 7-11 stores will be refurbished in the coming years that percentage is set to rise.

👔eBay Gets Depopped: With over 60% of eBay’s user base aged over 35, executives are trying to draw in millenials and Gen Z. To do so? They’ve decided to buy Depop from Etsy for $1.7 billion (AUD) in cold hard cash. Depop saw $1.4 billion in gross sales in 2025 and 90% of Depop’s users are under the age of 34.

👔Accenture Makes AI Mandatory: Accenture now requires staff to use their in-house AI if they want to get promoted. Accenture would track logins and they would be used as an “input token” in promotion discussions.

🤪JPMorgan Embraces English Roots: Fun fact, JPMorgan opened an English style pub/bar on the 13th floor of its Manhattan headquarters. It’s called Morgan’s. However, apparently it’s almost impossible to reserve a seat as it has 55 seats for 10,000 employees.

🤪Local Exec. Discovers The True Cost Of AI Automation: A KMPG partner in Australia has been fined $10,000 (AUD) by the Big 4 professional services firm for uploading training materials to an AI to answer questions on … AI.

🤪OpenAI Hires AI Stud: "Hacked together" by Austrian coder Peter Steinberger, OpenClaw is a viral virtual personal assistant that completes real-world tasks like sending emails, debugging code, and calling restaurants to make reservations. After reaching peak virality in late January when the agents began communicating with each other on Moltbook, Steinberger is joining OpenAI. He chose OpenAI because they offered "stronger guarantees that OpenClaw would remain independent."

🤪Louvre Staff Uncover $17m Fraud: After a year-long investigation into a multinational fraud network, nine people have been arrested over alleged ticket fraud first reported in December 2024. Two tour guides were accused of reusing single-entry tickets for different people and pocketing the entry price as cash. The loss to the museum was estimated to be $17M (AUD).