Apple
Apple hired Nate Gatten, formerly American Airlines' head of government affairs, as its new vice president of government affairs, effective August 31.
Why it matters for sellers
New leadership = vendor stack re-evaluation
Signal details
- Counterparty
- American Airlines
- Event date
- August 31, 2026
- Reported
- August 13, 2026
- Source
- fortune.com
From the coverage · fortune.com
Good morning. Reporter Lily Mae Lazarus pinch hitting here today for Andrew. Apparently, the PTA has a better portfolio than you. Silicon Valley private schools are trading silent auctions for cap tables with a handful of Bay Area campuses now running miniature venture funds steered by parent-investors from Sequoia, Lightspeed, and Battery. The programs have become somewhat of Silicon Valley lore, Fortune ’s Amanda Gerut writes . Saint Francis High School’s parent-run growth fund turned a $15,000 bet on Snap into roughly $34 million at IPO. With SpaceX just pulling off the biggest IPO in history and Anthropic and OpenAI widely expected to follow, these school funds could be sitting on the next windfall.
Here’s what else moved tech and money today. Want to send thoughts or suggestions to Fortune Tech? Drop a line here . Nvidia announced partnerships this week with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs, and KKR to build financing platforms aiming to mobilize more than $500 billion for AI infrastructure—with the cash coming largely from “third-party investors” rather than Nvidia’s own balance sheet. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang framed it as treating AI compute like “productive infrastructure,” even offering residual-value support of up to 25% on some deals to sweeten the pitch.
Wall Street mostly likes it—Morgan Stanley and Bank of America both called Nvidia’s chips unusually financeable. But Stratechery’s Ben Thompson isn’t fully sold, warning it’s “a completely new nerve-racking thing to bring safety-seeking assets to bear” on a pile of GPUs. — Eva Roytburg Apple hired Nate Gatten (American Airlines' head of government affairs since 2017, and a Republican with prior stints at JPMorgan and Fannie Mae) as its new vice president of government affairs, starting Aug. 31. He’ll report directly to Tim Cook . The hire may be Apple angling for a lobbyist who can align with the Trump administration.
C. crowd. — Lily Mae Lazarus Sergey Brin has reportedly spent months personally pushing Google DeepMind staff to move faster on Gemini, as Anthropic pulled ahead with its Claude Mythos preview, according to Reuters . Google allegedly delayed its next flagship, Gemini, by two months after internal testing showed its coding still lagged rivals. And last week's shakeup handed day-to-day authority from DeepMind chief Demis Hassabis to his deputy, Koray Kavukcuoglu, who now has final say on major DeepMind decisions and reports to CEO Sundar Pichai. The move marks a further erosion of DeepMind's independence since Google bought the London lab in 2014, with some teams shifting into corporate Google.
But other top talent—including Gemini's original co-leads Jeff Dean and Oriol Vinyals—have headed out the door. 3 billion valuation , more than double its December price tag. — DeepSeek is quietly staffing up to challenge Anthropic’s Claude Code , posting job listings for a new AI-agent team. — Google’s newest wearables will track insulin resistance , a category first using AI and sensor data instead of continuous glucose monitoring.
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