The boom in spending on AI infrastructure and services is sustainable because it's driving meaningful innovation, the CFO of Amazon Web Services tells me.

💸 Zoom in: AWS CFO John Felton says the company's AI capital expenditures are paying off, adding that its experience shows the payback of spending aggressively on AI.

⚠️ The big picture: Felton's comments came after Gartner research analysts rattled investors Wednesday with a report estimating that more than $3.5 trillion in AI infrastructure spending "could be exposed to impairment" by the end of 2030.

• Gartner noted the real risk of revenue growth failing to pay the costs of the AI buildout, leading to potentially massive write-downs.

Between the lines: While AWS is exposed to the risks Gartner identifies, it's also among the companies best positioned to withstand them, as a hyperscaler with massive and highly diversified revenue streams.

🗣️ Felton says he's "comfortable about what we're doing" with capex based on a nearly $500 billion order backlog as of Q2, driven by a mix of "big and small customers, large enterprises, large AI labs, but also small and medium-sized businesses."

• "The demand is real," he says.
• He also says AWS' AI server investments are proving fruitful: "We're seeing paybacks of under three years on those servers."

Felton's comments about AI spending come after the business community's approach to LLM usage has evolved rapidly.

• But Felton says he studied AWS' own token usage and found that, in general, more is better.

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Elon Musk's spectacular unveiling of a flying, rocket-powered Tesla Roadster last night could be seen as a boisterous farewell to Tesla, the car company, Axios' Joann Muller writes.

Zoom in: The Roadster is an extravagant tribute to the very thing Tesla is moving beyond: the thrill of driving.

• Musk told the audience the two-seater would be "the only manually driven car that Tesla makes" in the long term.
• And last night's demo arguably had little to do with selling them.
• Not every version of the Roadster will be street legal. When someone shouted that question from the crowd, Musk replied with a playful joke.

👁️ And he even had some fun while acknowledging the risks of driving a rocket-powered automobile: "We'll just ride the limit of 'don't detach the retina of the human in the car.'"

Reality check: For all its technological wizardry — a suction fan system and compressed-air thrusters — the Roadster isn't likely to generate much revenue for Tesla. Musk has said as much.

The bottom line: Tesla is more of an AI and robotics company than an automaker now.

• The original Roadster announced Tesla's arrival as a car company. The new one might be its most extravagant exit.

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📱 Apple sold out its initial inventory of iPhone Duo foldable phones today after it began accepting preorders. Delivery dates went from Oct. 23 to late January. (Yahoo Finance)

💰 ExxonMobil is expected to post record refining profits for the third quarter. Margins have soared after wars in Iran and Russia hobbled industry capacity. (Bloomberg)

Sportsbooks that partner with the NBA will stop accepting certain bets deemed too susceptible to manipulation after the league asked them to do so.

🚫 State of play: Newly banned bets include:

• Parlays involving multiple bets on a single NBA player to perform below expectations in different statistical categories, known as "unders."
• Unders on players expected to play fewer than 12 minutes in the game.
• "The NBA also directed its authorized gambling operators, including DraftKings and FanDuel, not to offer bets on the winner of the opening tip" and "players to miss specific shots," ESPN reported.

🤨 The big picture: The move comes after multiple incidents raised suspicions of players intentionally underperforming to help win bets.

Yes, but: The NBA doesn't have any official partnerships with prediction markets, which aren't required to follow the league's requests.