More on TikTok’s plans to sue the U.S. over the White House’s recent executive orders seeking to block the app on American soil and force its owner, ByteDance, to sell its American assets. The company intends to argue that the EOs “deprived it of its due process and [claimed] it had been unfairly and incorrectly treated as a security threat” – NYTimes and WSJ and Bloomberg
A group of WeChat users forming the U.S. WeChat Users Alliance have already done as much, asking a federal judge in San Francisco to block the White House’s intended ban on the messaging app as unconstitutional – Bloomberg
Turns out Zuck was firmly in the mix in helping guide D.C.’s focus to TikTok in the past year – WSJ
Movie theaters are opening again across the country for the first time since March, and it won’t be your average cinema experience. Instead, the country’s four biggest theater chains have agreed on uniform health protocols that include “mask requirements, limited capacity, no condiment stations, plexiglass partitions and enhanced air-filtration systems” – NYTimes
Derecho aside, it’s been a pretty wonderful summer for crops, but the pandemic has driven down demand more than some renewed Chinese buying has boosted it, leaving farmers across the country in dire straits heading toward harvest time – WSJ
Goldman Sachs is out with new forecasts that suggests that nearly 25% of temporary worker layoffs will become permanent, potentially leaving more than 2 million Americans “unemployed well into 2021” – Bloomberg
Federal authorities in Belgium have opened a criminal probe into Credit Suisse Group over concerns the bank “helped more than 2,600 clients to hide money in Swiss accounts” – Bloomberg
Longtime National Enquirer chief (and White House ally) David Pecker is out at the tabloid as part of a shakeup that will see Enquirer parent, American Media, become A360Media and merge with sibling company Accelerate 360. Pecker will remain with the company as an “executive adviser” – NYTimes and WSJ
In a piece it dubs the “Big Short 2.0,” the Times looks at how the combination of the pandemic and private equity firms leveraging their retail holdings have combined to decimate malls from the inside out, while hedge funds smelling distressed assets have reaped massive returns – NYTimes
Secretive data analytics company Palantir is hoping to make the most of a surprisingly strong IPO market with a mammoth public offering planned for later this year. A first look at the company’s financials and operations in preparation for that move reveals that the company “has not turned a profit since it was founded in 2003” and lost $580 million in 2019 alone – NYTimes and WSJ and Bloomberg
Streetwise warns that investors’ overreliance on the 5 biggest companies in the market right now—Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet, and Facebook—all of them tech firms, could “spell trouble for future returns” if bond yields start to rise – WSJ
Jeff Wilke, Amazon’s head of consumer operations and a key Bezos lieutenant, has revealed plans for an early retirement—a “rare changing of the guard at the top of the e-commerce giant” – NYTimes and WSJ
The U.S. Oil Fund—a “popular exchange-traded fund that tracks oil prices”—has received its second Wells Notice in a week from a federal agency taking an interest in the fund’s “disclosures surrounding April’s oil price crash” – Law360
Your UK slice of life in the pandemic summer of 2020 includes Brits trading in Greece or Ibiza for the English countryside, where the generally uncool caravan is the new hot ride – NYTimes
Stay safe.