In light of the Twitter rebrand to X, let’s look back at some of the most notable — and bizarre — corporate name changes in history: In 1898, Brad’s Drink rebranded as Pepsi to reflect its “indigestion relief” benefit. In 1971, Blue Ribbon Sports got a new “swoosh” logo and took the name Nike. And then a year later, Pete’s Super Submarines became Subway.

We’ll probably stick with Roca for now, but rebranding as Twitter sure is tempting.

In today's edition:

• Kylian Mbappé receives a humongous offer

• 2 more Russian billionaires die suspiciously

• Who was Oppenheimer?

 🔑 Key Stories

Record Soccer Offer

Saudi soccer club Al Hilal has offered a world-record $1.1B package for world-class striker Kylian Mbappé

• Mbappé, 24, is one of the world’s top soccer players. He currently plays for French team PSG, but is in the midst of a heated contract dispute with the club

• In soccer, clubs must pay transfer fees to other teams to acquire players bound by a contract. On Monday, Saudi soccer team Al Hilal offered $1.1B for Mbappé: $332M which would go to PSG – a record – and $776M that would go to Mbappé for one season

• Mbappé hasn’t commented on it; analysts widely believe his club of choice is Spain’s Real Madrid

Dig Deeper

• Here’s how Mbappé’s offer stacks up to the next nine largest contracts in sports history, ranked by average annual value

Israel Passes Judicial Reform

Israel’s legislature passed controversial judicial reforms after months of protests

• Israel’s judicial system has long judged laws based on a “reasonableness” doctrine, wherein a judge can strike down a law or act if they deem it to be “unreasonable,” even if it doesn’t break any law

• Proponents argue that limits government corruption; opponents say it is subjective and allows unelected judges to overrule elected officials

• On Monday, after months of protests, Israel passed a law banning that doctrine in most cases. Activist groups have already said they will sue to stop the law and hundreds of thousands of Israelis turned out to protest it

Dig Deeper

• Israelis blocked roads and many businesses closed in protest. Israeli police have arrested at least 19 people and used a water cannon to try to disperse protestors in Israel’s capital

• Israel’s ruling coalition hasn’t given a timeline for advancing other judicial reforms

US Talking with North Korea

The US denied earlier reports that it had begun talks with North Korean officials over an American soldier who fled there last week

• The US soldier, Travis King, crossed into North Korea while on a tour of the border. He had previously been jailed in South Korea for assaulting a person and kicking a police car, and was supposed to have been traveling back to the US to face disciplinary actions

• The US said he crossed the border without permission, but hasn’t labeled him a deserter yet

• On Monday morning, outlets reported that the US and North Korean officials had reportedly begun talks over King via intermediaries; on Monday evening, the State Department denied talks had begun and said the “reports may have resulted from a misinterpretation”

Dig Deeper

• US defections to North Korea are rare: Only six soldiers are known to have defected there since 1953, and none have since 1982. North Korea released the last three known American captives in 2018. A year before that, an American student jailed there died after being returned to the US in a coma

Yeezys Off the Wall?

Adidas has received $563M worth of Yeezy orders since resuming sales of the apparel brand linked to rapper Kanye West (“Ye”), the Financial Times (FT) reports

• Adidas cancelled its lucrative Yeezy contract with Ye late last year. It has since debated what to do with $1.3B worth of unsold Yeezys it has already produced

• In May, Adidas decided to sell off its remaining stock and donate profits to charity. It began accepting orders for Yeezys in late May and early June

• Per the FT, it has since received $563M in orders, smashing expectations. It will reportedly donate much of its profits to social activism groups and has identified five charities

Dig Deeper

• Adidas has not made a final decision on how much it will give to each charity. Its CEO said the company likely won’t make any profit off the Yeezy sales but will make enough to offset the potential losses from not selling them

Who owns your data?

Sponsored by Incogni

An Incogni survey of 2,310 Americans showed 63% were unfamiliar with data brokers

• Data brokerage has grown into a $200B industry that spent $56.1M on lobbying in 2022. That is more than Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, and Google’s combined lobbying spend of $49.8M in 2022

• Data brokers buy your data – SSNs, DOB, home addresses, health information, contact details – and sell it to the highest bidder

• Researchers at Duke University were able to find brokers willing to sell Americans’ mental health records for as little as $0.06 a per person. They were also able to purchase individually identifiable information on members of the US military for as low as $0.125 per service member

Dig Deeper

• It is difficult for consumers to track how their data is used. A 2008 study found that it would take over 600 hours to read all the privacy policies from the websites a single person visits annually

• If interested in learning more, check out Incogni’s blog. Roca readers can get 55% off Incogni annual plans with code ‘ROCA10’

🍿 Popcorn

ICYMI

• Bye bye birdie: Twitter officially changed its bird logo to an “X” on Monday. Twitter began its transition to X in April when the name of Twitter Inc. changed to X Corp.

• Greta Fineberg: A Swedish court found Greta Thunberg guilty of disobeying police during a protest of an oil shipment and fined her the equivalent of $240

• Betting Bronco: The NFL has suspended a Denver Broncos defensive end indefinitely for betting on games during the 2022 season. He’s the 10th NFL player to be suspended for gambling this year

Wildcard

• Cocaine cheese: US customs officials seized cocaine-filled cheese wheels from a pickup truck entering Texas at the Mexico border. An X-ray scan detected 17.8 lbs of cocaine

• That was… not OK: MLS team D.C. United fired its head athletic trainer for allegedly making a downward-facing “OK” hand signal, which some say is a white supremacy sign

• Another coincidence: 2 Russian billionaires were found dead on July 22. One was a 40-year-old tech mogul who allegedly died after overdosing on “medical gas,” while the other was found dead in his Moscow apartment

👇 What do you think?

Today’s poll is sponsored by Incogni. Use code ‘ROCA10’ to scrub your phone number from data brokers with the help of Incogni

Today's Question:

Should legacy status play a role in college admissions?

Reply to this email with your answers!

🌯 Roca Wrap

"My two great loves are physics and desert country,” Robert Oppenheimer once wrote a friend. “It’s a pity they can’t be combined.”

Oppenheimer, a Christopher Nolan-directed movie starring Cillian Murphy as the title character, was released on Friday. The real Oppenheimer was born 119 years earlier.

Robert Oppenheimer was born in New York City in 1904.

His father had made a fortune in textile exports and the family lived in a luxurious apartment in one of Manhattan’s richest neighborhoods. Oppenheimer excelled as a student, completing third and fourth grade in one year and skipping half of eighth grade.

He graduated high school early at age 17, but fell sick and his parents sent him to recover in New Mexico. The experience shaped Oppenheimer: He loved the desert and the rural lifestyle, and throughout his life would often return to the American Southwest for vacation.

Oppenheimer recovered and attended Harvard, where he discovered a passion for physics. He took six classes a semester, some at the graduate level, and graduated summa cum laude in three years. He then pursued graduate studies at Cambridge and in Germany.

Oppenheimer developed a reputation as a brilliant theoretical physicist and studied alongside his generation’s most influential physicists. He also struggled with his mental health and was known to be volatile. On one occasion, he told a friend he had poisoned one of his professor’s apples; on another, he choked his friend after his friend told Oppenheimer he was engaged.

After graduating, Oppenheimer accepted a professorship at UC Berkeley. Over the following years, he wrote several groundbreaking studies, some of which form the cornerstone of modern understandings of quantum and nuclear physics.

While Oppenheimer claimed not to have been political during his youth, he befriended several communists, and the FBI – which surveilled him – said he would often meet with Communist Party USA leaders and attend radical student groups. Years later, in 1942, he wrote on an official form that he was “a member of just about every Communist Front organization on the West Coast”; he later claimed that was a joke.

During the 1930s, Oppenheimer also developed a passion for Hindu scripture. He learned Sanskrit to read Hindu texts in its original form. “I believe that through discipline…we can achieve serenity,” he wrote to his brother of that.

In 1939, Nazi Germany invaded Poland, beginning World War II. The US didn’t immediately enter the war, but feared that Germany – which had launched a nuclear program – would develop a nuclear bomb before the war was over.

At that time, nobody knew if creating a nuclear weapon was even possible. The US commissioned several teams to investigate the possibility – one of which was led by Oppenheimer – and, after discovering that it was, resolved to build one. That top-secret project was called the Manhattan Project, and it was led by Oppenheimer.

The project needed a private, unoccupied space to develop a bomb and eventually test one. Oppenheimer chose Los Alamos, a New Mexico desert near where he had often visited. By 1945, his team had developed its prototype.

The date for the first nuclear test – “Trinity” – was set for the early morning of July 16, 1945. As the countdown timer neared zero, an observer noted that Oppenheimer “grew tenser…He scarcely breathed. He held on to a post to steady himself.” Trinity detonated at 5:29 AM, outshining the Sun and creating a shockwave felt 100 miles away.

An observer said Oppenheimer “relaxed into an expression of tremendous relief” after the explosion. “I’ll never forget his walk,” another said minutes later. “This kind of strut. He had done it.”

When asked about the test, Oppenheimer said, “We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered [a line from Hindu scripture] ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

On August 6, 1945, Oppenheimer’s creation was put to use.

A US warplane dropped a nuclear bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, instantly flattening 12 square miles of the city and killing 80,000 people. Oppenheimer clasped his hands “like a prize-winning boxer” when announcing it later that day.

Three days later, the US dropped a second bomb on the Japanese city of Nagasaki. Oppenheimer was furious at the decision to use a second bomb, and personally handed the Secretary of War a letter outlining his revulsion.

Oppenheimer became a vocal critic of nuclear weapons after the war, calling them weapons “of aggression, of surprise, and of terror.” He told President Harry Truman in 1945, “I feel I have blood on my hands.”

Oppenheimer’s opposition to the nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union – in addition to his years of alleged communist ties – made him a political outcast.

In 1949, Oppenheimer was called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in connection to his ties to communism. He identified several former students as communists, and HUAC officially revoked his security clearance, barring him from working in many government positions.

Later in his life, Oppenheimer continued to lecture, write, and teach, and received awards for his contributions to physics. He died of throat cancer in 1967 at the age of 62.

Do you find Oppenheimer a hero, villain, both, or neither? Let us know at [email protected]!

 🌊 Roca Clubhouse

Yesterday's Poll:

Do you have a positive or negative attitude toward Barbie?
Positive: 60%
Negative: 40%

Yesterday's Question:

What’s the biggest risk you’ve ever taken? Did it pay off?

Michael F from California: “In 2013, I was diagnosed with a very terminal cancer. We were told to go get my affairs in order and to go "live your life". Clinical trial was the only answer and there was only one available in the world. We flew to MD Anderson in Houston in an attempt to get the last spot in the trial. Upon interview and testing, we were given the spot. Even though my health has not been robust due to the experimental drug's effect, here I am 10 years later having walked my daughter down the aisle, am "Poppi" to almost 8 grandbabies, and traveled the world!”

Kyle from Ohio: "Going to work every day as a high voltage lineman”

Becky: “Agreeing to date and then marry my current husband after a 20 year abusive marriage was the biggest risk I have ever taken. I had sworn off relationships and had stuck to it for several years, then I met my current husband. I have not regretted taking that risk ever. Not even one time. We just had our 10 year wedding anniversary.”

Bruce: “Letting an ex back into my heart. Pay off? no, not at all.”

Zachary: "Well, I woke up today, that’s been risky. Not sure if it’ll pay off though, I guess we’ll have to wait ‘til tomorrow to find out!”

🧠 Final Thoughts

Thank you all for your wonderful responses to yesterday's question of the day. They were a moving reminder of why the Roca community is so great. We can't think of another news outlet that has anything close. Thank you all.

See you tomorrow!

—Max and Max