THE JETSONS

Electric air taxis are finally ready for takeoff

A cab ride from Midtown Manhattan to New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport today costs about $100, takes up to two hours, and includes up-close views of the soot-covered trash on the Van Wyck Expressway.

Paul Sciarra, executive chairman of Joby Aviation, thinks it’s time for an upgrade: A traveler will soon be able to make the same journey in less than 10 minutes, he says, while enjoying views from more than a thousand feet up in the sky. It will cost about the same, too, according to Fortune’s Alexei Oreskovic.

Sciarra’s vehicles are called eVTOLs (short for “electric vertical takeoff and landing”). Six electric rotors lift Joby’s aircraft vertically, then tilt sideways and propel it forward, generating a fraction of the noise of a helicopter. It can carry four passengers and a pilot up to 100 miles at altitudes as low as 1,000 feet, roughly the height of the Chrysler Building.

Starting this summer, a series of pilot projects across the U.S. will let Joby and several other companies with all-electric aircraft start carrying cargo, then passengers, in real-world tests.

THE MARKETS

U.S. traders ignore sliding global markets as Palantir earnings loom

• S&P 500 futures were up 0.49% this morning. The index was up 0.7% in the last session. 
• In Europe, the Stoxx 600 was up 0.43% in early trading and the U.K.’s FTSE 100 was flat before lunch.
• Asia: South Korea’s KOSPI was down 5.12%. Japan’s Nikkei 225 was down 0.94%. India’s Nifty 50 was up 0.74%. China’s CSI 300 was down 0.98%. 
• Brent crude was $83 per barrel this morning.
• Bitcoin was $62,585.

Stocks slumped globally today but not in the U.S., where futures were up before the opening bell in New York as investors anticipate Q2 earnings calls from Palantir (today), SpaceX, and AMD (both tomorrow). Palantir stock was up 2.83% in premarket trading. SpaceX and AMD were both also marginally up before the bell.

Jobs data incoming: Traders appear to have fully priced in an interest rate rise from the Fed in September. CME Fedwatch put the odds of a hike at 65% this morning.“It seems the only way the Fed can avoid hiking in September is if the U.S. data is poor enough. A major input to that decision comes this week in the form of U.S. jobs data, including JOLTS job openings, ADP [private payrolls], and Friday's non-farm payrolls report [NFP],” ING’s Chris Turner said in an email this morning. On the NFP new jobs number, the consensus expectation is for around 75,000 to 80,000 new jobs. “Probably not quite weak enough to rule out a Fed hike,” Turner said.

MORE FROM FORTUNE

Mamdani’s city-owned supermarkets will fight the one force no city has ever beaten: the market - Shawn Tully

How Barnes & Noble CEO James Daunt tapped his indie bookstore cred to revive the big-box chain - Phil Wahba

Markets signal investors are back in buying mode again after Kospi’s record surge while Trump gives peace a chance with latest Iran reversal - Jason Ma

As AI creates more entrepreneurs and a skills mismatch, Gen Z faces the choice of being a specialist or a ‘general-purpose nerd’ - Jason Ma

IRAN

Iran and Oman discuss deal to reopen Strait of Hormuz as Trump calls off attacks

The price of Brent Crude oil fell to $83 per barrel from a high of $91 on Friday after President Trump announced that he had called off a planned attack on Iran “subject to being able to rapidly make a DEAL.”

According to the BBC: "We were all set to go," Trump said. "The reason they asked is [that] they think there's a deal," he said. "There's a deal on Hormuz, and there will be a deal on the nuclear."

Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmail Baghaei said that Iran and Oman were close to making a deal for the administration of the Strait of Hormuz. “We are now going to reach an understanding on a route acceptable to both sides – neither the northern route nor the southern route – but one that respects the sovereign rights of both sides and safeguards our national interests and security,” he said on state TV. However, he also said that the Strait of Hormuz “will in no way return to the status it was before February 28th,” the day the war started.

As usual, there were few details about what the deal might look like. Much of the coverage of today’s talks has focused on the feeling of déjà vu: This is not the first time Trump has promised to rain destruction on Iran, not the first time he has then called off those strikes, and not the first time he has said a deal is imminent.

NEW SOURCE OF INEQUALITY JUST DROPPED

AI is propping up GDP growth while reducing wages, studies show

AI data center construction forms a significant part of U.S. GDP growth but AI’s effect on wages is to suppress them, especially for those in lower paid jobs, two separate analyses said last week.

In breaking down Q2 GDP growth (1.5%), Pantheon Macroeconomics’ Oliver Allen updated this chart showing that for the seventh quarter in a row, “fixed investment” (i.e. corporate capex) only went up because of spending in AI-linked sectors like software and IP, which rose 10.8%. If the AI spending boom disappears, capex goes negative as non-AI spending is shrinking:

Separately, Sania Edlich and Torsten Slok of Apollo Global Management published a statistical study of the change in wages from 2015 to 2025 in occupations with high exposure to AI. They found a 6.7% decline in wage growth over the period in those companies, with no noticeable loss of jobs. That suggests “firms are capturing AI productivity gains through wage compression rather than workforce reduction,” they said in the paper.

However, low earners were most affected. “Service workers face a 24.3% decline and the bottom wage quartile a 10.7% decline, while top earners show no significant effect,” they wrote. AI is therefore a potential driver of increased inequality, they concluded: “As AI adoption deepens across corporate America, this figure is likely to grow substantially, with significant implications for income inequality and labor market policy in the years ahead.”

CHART OF THE DAY

When Kevin Warsh speaks, stocks go down

It is not the job of Fed chair Kevin Warsh to make stocks go up, and that is just as well because he is the worst Fed chair for stocks on the days when he has had to make an interest rate announcement, according to Bespoke Investment Group. On his first “Fed day,” back on June 17, the S&P 500 fell more than 1%—“the worst ‘first Fed day’ for a new Chair going back to 1994,” Bespoke said in a note.

Last week was Warsh’s second-ever “Fed day,” and the market fell another 1%. “That was enough to rank as the worst ‘second Fed day’ as well,” beating (if that is the word) Ben Bernanke, Janet Yellen, and Jay Powell, Bespoke said.

NUMBER OF THE DAY: ICE CREAM

$230 million

The gain in Q2 sales by The Magnum Ice Cream Co., driven in part by the long, fierce heatwave that has gripped Europe much of this summer. Magnum (spun off from Unilever last year and now home to Ben & Jerry’s, Klondike, Cornetto and, you guessed it, Magnum) booked $3.34 billion in total sales.

THE FRONT PAGES TODAY

Why the U.S. stepped in after decades to prop up Japan’s yen — and what’s at stake - CNBC

James Dacombe, 25, triples AI chip start-up’s valuation to $3.3bn - FT

Newsom shows fundraising muscle for state parties - Axios

The Kremlin Is Bullying More Russians Into Fighting in Ukraine - WSJ

AstraZeneca Shares Fall on Deal Talks With Bristol-Myers - Bloomberg

Ex-‘60 Minutes’ boss Bill Owens wants to launch rival news show with Scott Pelley, other fired staffers - NY Post

ONE MORE THING

If you aren’t waiting in line, you’re nobody

One of the most-read stories on Fortune last week was this oddity by Tatiana Sataua about the way that standing in a line for something—an event, a product launch, whatever—has become a social media status symbol. “Conspicuous waiting,” she calls it.

Richard Larson, an MIT operations researcher known as “Dr. Queue,” has spent his career thinking about what happens when people wait. Lately, it’s been making him a little sad.

“As Dr. Queue, I get quite depressed sometimes,” he told Fortune. “If I’m at my Stop & Shop supermarket and I see a line of, let’s say, nine people, and they all have their heads bowed, looking at their hands, checking their cell phones — I find that quite depressing.” In the old days, he said, strangers in a queue would talk to each other.

If there is one thing young people don’t want to do today, it’s talk to strangers. Instead, those in line jump on their socials. Outside a Broadway theater, a concert venue, or a bakery that has gone viral, “the wait becomes part of the event,” Larson said. The line becomes a narrative with a beginning, middle, and end — social media content in its own right.

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