How fake Spotify streams broke a $3 million bet
Spotify has told Kalshi and Polymarket to drop its logo after users faked streams to rig prediction-market bets on its charts.
Business Bagel News
Daily news from the Business Bagel desk — the markets, money and company stories shaping South Africa, reported fast and kept clear.
Naspers is giving away powerful AI, and hoping the payoff comes later
Prosus has launched ToqanClaw, a free tool that lets small businesses build their own apps, but it still hasn't cracked how to make money from it.
Rand firms and the JSE climbs as soft US jobs data weakens the dollar
The local unit traded around R16.23 to the dollar on Friday and the Top-40 rose 1.1%, as a tepid American jobs report pushed back bets on a near-term Fed rate hike.
South Africa’s private sector edges back to growth as price pressures cool
The S&P Global PMI rose to 50.5 in June, nudging past the line between growth and contraction as inflation eased — but business optimism sank to a near-five-year low.
Big story
Pick n Pay bets on Gemini-powered ‘Penny’ to close the gap on Checkers
The retailer’s asap! app gains an AI assistant that builds a basket from a voice note, a photo or a scribbled shopping list — with a full rollout from 6 July.
Christo Wiese's Titan backs alternative lender Preference Capital with R350m
The 84-year-old billionaire's Titan Premier Investments has taken a R350 million position in alternative credit provider Preference Capital, its latest 2026 deployment.
Big story
Tax season opens: six million South Africans will be auto-assessed
SARS has begun issuing auto-assessments to around six million taxpayers between 1 and 12 July, telling most of them they need do nothing at all.
Big story
Idris Elba and Google want to hand Africa's storytellers the AI keys
A new programme worth more than $1 million will give 100,000 creators across five African countries access to Google's AI tools.
South Africa's new homebuyer is young, single, and going it alone
First-time buyers are driving the housing recovery, and a record share of young South Africans are buying without a partner.
The R24 billion coding site that AI quietly gutted
Prosus has written off most of the value of Stack Overflow, the developer favourite it bought in 2021, as AI chatbots empty it out.
Why Pick n Pay's boss just handed back R21 million in shares
Sean Summers has forfeited a slice of his turnaround bonus after Pick n Pay pushed its break-even target out to 2029.
1.7 million South African cars still carry a hidden danger, and the fix is free
The motor industry is launching a year-long drive to find cars with faulty Takata airbags, which are free to repair but hard to track down.