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Key PointsEli Manning’s private equity firm Brand Velocity Capital is acquiring RCX, the youth sports operating partner for the NFL, NBA, WNBA, MLS, NHL and MLB. Last month, a group of Democratic congressmen announced a bill that would ban some private equity firms from investing in youth sports. Manning has long championed flag football and told CNBC he wants it to be sanctioned as a high school varsity sport for both boys and girls.A version of this article appeared in the CNBC Sport newsletter with Alex Sherman, which brings you the biggest news and exclusive interviews from the worlds of sports…

Former New York Giants quarterback Eli Manning said he supports athletes who take political stances, but warned they should be prepared to face potential criticism if they do. The two-time Super Bowl-winning quarterback spoke to CNBC Sport about political activism in sports after the Giants’ current signal caller, Jaxson Dart, came under scrutiny for introducing President Donald Trump at a rally outside of New York City. His decision to publicly back Trump sparked backlash, including public criticism from his teammate Abdul Carter. “Athletes should be allowed to do it if they feel strong about politics or supporting someone, that’s fine,”…

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Alex Ruber, a 29-year-old cofounder and CEO, based in San Francisco. The following has been edited for length and clarity.About five months after being in Y Combinator, my cofounder, Parth, and I thought we might have to give up.We met through Y Combinator’s Co-founder Matching Program, a free resource to help people find potential business partners, in January 2024. We were both working full-time. After building some projects together, we launched an AI-powered shopping tool and were accepted into Y Combinator’s fall 2024 batch.It became clear that the shopping app was…

I recently asked a startup CEO for his take on the best AI coding tools. He mentioned the usual suspects: OpenAI’s Codex and Anthropic’s Claude Code.Then he brought up a less familiar name.”There’s another coding agent, Code Puppy, built by an amazing guy called Mike Pfaffenberger at Walmart, ” this CEO told me. “It’s got masses of usage in Walmart.”The tip sent me down a rabbit hole that revealed something much bigger than another AI coding assistant. Code Puppy is part of Walmart’s effort to avoid what many technology executives fear could become one of the defining business problems of…

In New York City, where almost nothing is free, a startup called Shift Robotics is offering to clean your apartment for $0.There is, of course, a catch: The cleaners wear head-mounted cameras that record first-person footage as they do dishes, mop floors, and fold laundry. That footage is turned into training data for AI labs and robotics companies.Few people had heard of Shift before last week. Then its launch video went viral, drawing more than 8 million views. The initial 250 cleaning sessions sold out almost immediately. “We had thousands and thousands of people trying to book,” Harry Kilberg, Shift’s…

AI may be changing software engineering, but former Google distinguished engineer Kelsey Hightower says developers who bring more than coding skills to the table have little reason to panic.Speaking on Wednesday’s episode of “The Pragmatic Engineer,” Hightower told show host Gergely Orosz that AI is exposing a long-standing divide between developers who only write code and those who contribute across product, design, architecture, and business decisions.”You as a software developer, you may have thought your job was to be the only person in organization that can write code. And since no one else could do it, you were safe, right?”…

Walmart’s new internal vibe coding tool is getting popular. A little too popular.The retail giant’s tech chief said that the company decided to place usage limits on its AI-powered programming tool known as Code Puppy, which has been circulating for the past several months.”There are large classes of problems that people are doing again and again,” Walmart’s Global CTO, Suresh Kumar, told reporters on Wednesday during the company’s annual shareholder meeting in Bentonville, Arkansas.Compared to a traditional search or app, asking AI to accomplish the same task is considerably more expensive. Companies are navigating how to balance rising AI costs…

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche testifies before the House Appropriations Committee, Tuesday, June 2, 2026 in Washington. Allison Robbert/AP hide caption toggle caption Allison Robbert/AP WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump said Wednesday that he will nominate Todd Blanche to serve as attorney general, tapping his former personal lawyer who has aggressively pursued the Republican president’s agenda while leading the Justice Department in an acting role. Trump said at a dinner at the White House that he plans to nominate Blanche formally on Thursday, according to a video of the event posted on social media by a White House aide. “We…

A squad of media heavyweights turned up at the NBA Finals on Wednesday evening.Among them were Disney board member Bob Iger, Disney CEO Josh D’Amaro, ESPN chairman Jimmy Pitaro, and NBA Commissioner Adam Silver.The group was spotted at Frost Bank Center in San Antonio as the New York Knicks took on the San Antonio Spurs in the first game of the NBA Finals.Their presence later earned a shoutout on the ABC broadcast.The commentators for the night — Mike Breen, Richard Jefferson, and Tim Legler — joked that the four men made up a “murderers’ row of executives” and looked extremely…

The U.S. Supreme Court Kent Nishimura/Getty Images hide caption toggle caption Kent Nishimura/Getty Images The Supreme Court was in the news Wednesday after delivering a second blow to the Voting Rights Act in just over a month. The latest ruling, issued late Tuesday, cleared the way for Alabama to use a congressional redistricting map that favors Republicans by eliminating one of the two existing districts where voters had elected a Black Democrat to Congress. In late April, the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority all but gutted what remained of the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act. The ruling set off a mad…