- Link & Load
- Posts
- 🚗 Tesla Faces Probe Over Autopilot Traffic Violations | 💳 COMESA Unveils Digital Payment System | 🧠 Google & Oracle Linked to Massive Data Leak
🚗 Tesla Faces Probe Over Autopilot Traffic Violations | 💳 COMESA Unveils Digital Payment System | 🧠 Google & Oracle Linked to Massive Data Leak
From Silicon Valley to African trade corridors, the week’s biggest stories spotlight how tech power and digital infrastructure are reshaping trust, privacy, and global commerce.
Comfort Okpere & Sascha Thiele
October 10, 2025
In partnership with
Peak Bank’s High-Yield Savings Helps You Reach New Heights
Peak Bank’s high-yield accounts offer intrepid savers the opportunity to maximize the mileage of every dollar, giving you a more solid foothold on your way to the top. Take advantage of rates as high as 4.35% APY* and convenient digital tools with Peak Bank.
Member FDIC
🖋 Today’s Angle
Good Morning — hope your coffee’s strong. Today’s mix: a self-driving probe, African fintech in motion, and a supply chain hack you should care about. Let’s get to it.
The U.S. opens a sweeping investigation into Tesla’s FSD system — autonomy meets regulators.
COMESA rolls out a cross-border digital payments system to slash dollar dependence across Africa.
Oracle software was exploited in a supply chain hack that touched dozens of organizations.
Crypto takes a breather as Bitcoin dips under $122K amid macro tremors.
Markets tread carefully — Asia’s choppy landscape, yen sliding, and global bubble chatter rising.
––Sascha Thiele
🚀 Tech & Business
What Happened: The NHTSA has initiated a preliminary evaluation of ~2.9 million Tesla vehicles equipped with Full Self-Driving features, following over 50 complaints, including instances of red-light violations and unsafe lane changes.
Why It Matters: Tesla’s autonomy narrative is under legal fire. If regulators find evidence of systemic issues, recalls or limits on deployment could follow..
What Happened: The Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA) launched a Digital Retail Payments Platform. Its pilot connects Malawi and Zambia, allowing cross-border trade without the need to convert into U.S. dollars.
Why It Matters: This is a step toward reducing FX friction in trade. If scaled, it could shift financial sovereignty toward African currencies and undercut dollar dependency in regional commerce.
What Happened: Google disclosed that a hacking operation tied to vulnerabilities in Oracle software hit dozens of organizations—the attackers used Oracle’s reach as a launchpad into downstream systems.
Why It Matters: Trust in enterprise software just got murkier. When even core vendor platforms can backdoor into your data, defenses must be systemic, not siloed.
👾 My Software Stack
The concept of Manychat is easy: get rid of manual work on Instagram and use automations to make money. Use the link to get one month of the pro subscription for free.
*This is an affiliate link, so I would get a small commission if you use the tool.
💰 The Finance Overview
Giphy
Markets are hitting fresh highs—but it feels like they’re walking a tightrope. The S&P & Nasdaq are flirting with all-time highs again, propped up by AI optimism and megacap strength.
Big tech is carrying this rally—if something cracks (earnings miss, regulation, or rate shock), the downside risk is sharper.
On the startup side, funding is cooling. Earlier in the cycle, everything got capital; now the bar is higher. IPO whispers are faint, especially for tech that can’t yet prove a path to profit. Infrastructure names—cloud, semiconductors, chip fabs—are under watch: they often reveal how deep the slowdown might go.
Rare earths & critical minerals are back in the spotlight. China’s export controls are tightening, stoking supply fears. That’s bullish for miners and any hardware play relying on exotic metals.
Treasury yields and a strong dollar are weighing on risk assets. Watch for central bank signals closely—if dovish moves stall, the multiple compression could come fast.
Ticker |
|---|
S&P 500: $SPY ( ▼ 0.29% ) |
DowJones: $DJI ( ▼ 0.52% ) |
Nasdaq: $QQQ ( ▼ 0.12% ) |
German DAX: $DAX ( ▼ 0.58% ) |
Indian NIFTY: $NIFTY50.NSE ( ▲ 0.41% ) |
Bitcoin: $BTC.X ( ▼ 0.6% ) |
Ethereum: $ETH.X ( ▼ 2.43% ) |
🎰 Crypto Carousel
Gif by darkbean on Giphy
What Happened: After recent highs, Bitcoin retreated under $121,000. The pullback is being attributed to profit-taking as some capital shifts to gold and silver.
Why It Matters: The dip underscores how vulnerable the rally is to macro swings. If institutional flows pause, the downside is real..
Senate Democrats’ Leak Sparks DeFi Alarm
What Happened: Leaked drafts of a Senate Democrat crypto framework propose steep regulations—mandating custodial paths, heavier disclosures, and treating smart contract services as securities.
Why It Matters: If those drafts influence final law, DeFi could be forced into legacy frameworks or shrink significantly. It’s a turning point for how “open” crypto can stay.
Further Reading: CoinDesk link above
Business news as it should be.
Join 4M+ professionals who start their day with Morning Brew—the free newsletter that makes business news quick, clear, and actually enjoyable.
Each morning, it breaks down the biggest stories in business, tech, and finance with a touch of wit to keep things smart and interesting.
🎓 Skill Builder
Scaleout - Published February 2025
What You'll Learn:
Architecting federated models across heterogeneous devices
Privacy techniques (differential privacy, secure aggregation)
Communication compression & client drift fixes
Debugging & monitoring decentralized AI
Strategies to mix central and edge training
Why It's Worth Your Time: Why It’s Worth Your Time: Whether you're building analytics on phones, IoT, or health apps, federation is the future. This walks you through real code and trade-offs.
🎲 Link Grab-Bag
✅ tight.studio — An AI-native, more powerful Screen Studio
✅ glue.ai — Agentic, MCP-powered team chat turns talk into action
✅ getnyra.ai — The AI Growth Stack for Founders
✅ tasklet.ai — Automate your business with AI agents
✅ OnelineGame — Draw it in one continuous line!
Got a killer link we missed? Hit reply and share the goods. 💌
What do you think about Link & Load? |
🏁 Tomorrow’s Forecast
Expect new legislation drafts in crypto, more tension in markets, and at least one jaw-dropping regulatory move. ⚖️
Typing is a thing of the past
Typeless turns your raw, unfiltered voice into beautifully polished writing - in real time.
It works like magic, feels like cheating, and allows your thoughts to flow more freely than ever before.
With Typeless, you become more creative. More inspired. And more in-tune with your own ideas.
Your voice is your strength. Typeless turns it into a superpower.
Start your own newsletter and get a 30-day trial + 20% off for 3 months. Sign up here.
Reply