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|  |  | Friday, October 24, 2025 | |  | | Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images | Good morning, Quartz readers! It’s Shannon Carroll with the Daily Brief. Today, Sam Altman is pitching an everything app, Tesla is selling a thinner present as a sturdier future, President Donald Trump is workshopping urban policy with tech CEOs, and the Ritz-Carlton is
testing how far luxury floats. | | HERE'S WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW | Hedge funds are back — and bigger than ever. Quarterly inflows of $34 billion pushed total assets to a record $5 trillion, signaling investor confidence and a widening gap between those who can hedge and those who can’t. | The feds could go full venture capitalist. The government is exploring direct equity stakes in quantum computing firms, blending defense priorities with potential financial upside and rewriting the rules of tech capitalism. | The president’s latest policy advisor: Silicon Valley. Trump scrapped plans to “surge” troops in San Francisco after appeals from Marc
Benioff and Jensen Huang — showing Big Tech can reach straight to the Oval Office. | Is Trump legalizing loyalty? He pardoned Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, ending the Biden-era
crackdown on digital assets and folding crypto into the Trump financial machine through his family’s blockchain
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| | PROPHET MARGINS | Sam Altman has always believed belief itself is the product. In 2019, he wrote that “the most successful people believe in themselves almost to the point of delusion.” Six years and one trillion-dollar valuation later, that philosophy has become OpenAI’s business model. Altman now wants ChatGPT to be the
universal interface — a personal assistant, doctor, DJ, and travel agent in one chat window. With Spotify, Expedia, Zillow, and now Walmart on board, he’s building less of a chatbot than a lifestyle brand for techno-confidence.
But even the everything-app pitch comes with the usual Altman loop: promise, pivot, reframe. AGI that would “elevate humanity” is now “not a super useful term.” A vow to devote a fifth of OpenAI’s compute to safety evaporated when the team behind it did. His
Senate testimony flipped from demanding “strong regulation” to warning against “overregulation.” And the same man who once invoked the perils of runaway intelligence now insists we’re “close to building digital superintelligence.” Each pivot reinforces a familiar pattern: The story changes faster than the product does.
So when Altman insists ChatGPT will “seep everywhere,” the question is less whether he can make it happen and more whether we should keep believing he will. The
everything-app dream sounds tidy — until you remember that Apple, Google, and the FTC exist, and that the man selling “superintelligence” is still losing money on basic intelligence. Altman might get his wish to be everywhere. Whether that’s progress or just another hallucination depends on how much belief you’re still willing to buy. Quartz’s Alex Daniel has more on what happens when hype becomes habit. | | FUTURE TENSE | Tesla’s next frontier isn’t Mars, autonomy, or humanoid robots — it’s persuasion. The company’s latest quarter delivered record revenue and shrinking margins, proof that the math still moves even when the magic stalls. Profit fell 37% to $1.4 billion, operating margin slid to 5.8% (halved from its peak), and the
company said to expect another year of next-big-things still under construction. The all-purpose explanation was that the future the company is building is expensive. Investors were told not to worry; the delays are simply part of the design.
This is Tesla’s new balancing act: making a thinner present feel like a deliberate buildout rather than a slowdown. The company’s output keeps hitting records (expiring EV credits that pulled sales through helped), but its profitability keeps
sagging, and the fix, investors are told, is patience — until robotaxis roam far beyond Austin, Texas, and humanoids clock in for factory shifts. This latest quarter didn’t prove those dreams are near; it reassured shareholders they’re still scheduled. Tesla’s greatest innovation may now be its ability to turn deferral into discipline.
There’s a certain genius in that. Musk has convinced the market that “fine” is a feature, not a warning light. So far, investors agree: The stock is
up 17% this year, and the story is still selling. Tesla can miss on profit as long as it overdelivers on conviction. But Tesla’s next stage won’t hinge on unveiling the next prototype or factory; it’ll depend on proving that operational steadiness can still look like forward motion. And that’s harder to automate than any robotaxi. Quartz’s Shannon Carroll has more on the “fine” print in Tesla’s latest quarter. | | | Sponsored | | Take Years Off Your Face in Minutes a Day | Looking older
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