The movement that defeated Aleksandar Vučić’s list after fourteen years of SNS-led rule never told voters who would govern if it won. On Sunday it won.

Serbia’s Republic Electoral Commission published its preliminary count from 8,187 polling stations on Monday evening. The Student List had 2,267,615 votes, or 52.71 percent, and 140 of the 250 seats in the National Assembly. Vučić’s list, “Aleksandar Vučić – United Serbia,” had 1,685,022 votes, or 39.17 percent, and 104 seats. Ipsos and the Center for Free Elections and Democracy (CeSID) published a separate projection based on their full sample. It gave the students 141 seats and Vučić’s list 103, and CeSID noted that its sample excludes diaspora polling stations. Under either set of figures the students clear the 126 seats needed for a majority. They do not need a coalition partner.

Turnout was 68.78 percent, the highest in more than thirty years, according to commission data reported by Al Jazeera.

Vučić conceded on Sunday night. “Based on the stratified sample, it is clear that we have lost these elections,” he told supporters at Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) headquarters in Belgrade, according to Anadolu. The Associated Press reported that he also blamed Serbia’s independent media, unnamed European countries and an “American deep state” for the result. The reports we reviewed contain no evidence offered for those claims.

### How he got here

Vučić’s party has governed Serbia since 2012. He became prime minister in 2014 and president in 2017. He resigned the presidency on September 27, eight months before his second and constitutionally final term was due to end, so that he could lead his party’s list and return as prime minister. That plan failed on Sunday.

The movement that defeated him grew out of the November 2024 collapse of a canopy at Novi Sad railway station, which killed 16 people. Protesters blamed the disaster on corruption and negligence. Its list of 250 independent candidates, drawn from academics, doctors, workers, activists, artists and athletes, was built so that no single person could become its face. That list won the election. Next it has to work within the constitution.

### The nomination

Under Serbia’s constitution, the new parliament must be constituted within 30 days of the final results. The president then proposes a candidate for prime minister after consulting the parliamentary groups, and the nominee needs a majority in the Assembly, bne IntelliNews reports. A government must be formed within 90 days after the parliament is constituted, according to Al Jazeera.

Serbia’s acting president is Ana Brnabić, the former Assembly speaker and a senior SNS figure. The Polish Centre for Eastern Studies (OSW) describes her as a long-standing close associate of Vučić. She took over the president’s duties on September 28. She is also required to hold a presidential election no later than December 27.

Brnabić cannot install a government the students do not want, because no nominee can pass without their votes. Still, the first formal move belongs to the party that lost, and the winners have not yet said whom they want nominated. Ilija Srdanović, a cardiologist and professor of medicine at the University of Novi Sad who headed the list, has been the movement’s most visible figure, and Al Jazeera describes him as the most likely candidate. bne IntelliNews reports that he has resisted a leadership role and that commentators doubt he will be chosen. Dejan Šoškić, an economist who was governor of the National Bank of Serbia from 2010 to 2012 and is 27th on the list, has also been mentioned. On Monday the movement named no one, and it has not said who would take the interior, finance and justice ministries.

### The second clock

The presidential election has to take place by December 27. Al Jazeera notes that the office is largely ceremonial. Under Vučić it was where power actually sat. In September OSW argued that holding the presidential vote separately was meant to weaken opposition turnout in the parliamentary race. That analysis assumed the SNS would win on Sunday. Whoever takes the presidency will hold the office that nominates prime ministers in the future.

### What is not settled

The students campaigned on corruption and on reforming state institutions. bne IntelliNews reports that they said much less about foreign policy, relations with Russia and Serbia’s stalled bid to join the European Union. Those are the issues most likely to divide a list built to have no ideology beyond accountability. Vučić had Vladimir Putin’s endorsement, according to the AP. Serbia now has a parliamentary majority that has not said what it thinks about Moscow.

The figures above are preliminary and projected. Final results have not been announced. The SNS remains the second-largest force in parliament, with more than 100 seats.

This week we will be watching for four things: the commission’s final count, the date parliament convenes, the name the students give Brnabić and the date she sets for the presidential vote. The movement has kept its leaders anonymous until now, and it will soon have to name them.

Anthropic made its IPO registration public on Monday. The headline number is a loss, and most of it is not what it looks like. The paper’s other numbers deserve the same scrutiny.

The company plans to list Class A shares on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the ticker “ANT.” The price range in the filing is still blank. The Wall Street Journal reported that the offering could come as early as the week before Thanksgiving.

### Revenue and operating loss

Revenue for the six months ended June 30, 2026, was $16.29 billion, up from $1.16 billion a year earlier, an increase of 1,304 percent. Revenue for all of 2025 was $4.59 billion. The operating loss for the half was $693 million, narrower than the $2.1 billion loss in the first half of 2025, as TechCrunch reported from the filing.

### The $80.7 billion

The net loss for the half was $80.7 billion, compared with $12.9 billion a year earlier. According to the S-1, $72.4 billion of that came from changes in the fair value of convertible notes, derivative liabilities and simple agreements for future equity. The company says these changes were “primarily driven by an increase in the fair value of our outstanding convertible promissory notes resulting from an increase in our enterprise valuation.” The comparable charge was $34.3 billion for all of 2025.

In plain terms, the charge is not cash out the door. It reflects the period’s remeasurement of convertible notes, derivative liabilities and future-equity agreements as the company’s valuation rose; it is not a direct measure of cash spending or a fixed percentage of equity already promised. Stock-based compensation, another non-cash cost that dilutes holders, was $2.2 billion in the half, up from $286 million.

The company also reports an adjusted net income figure. It excludes stock-based compensation, the fair-value changes, non-cash charitable contributions, a legal settlement the filing calls the Bartz settlement and certain mark-to-market items. The filing says the company “may not achieve or sustain profitability.”

### Who controls the board

Anthropic is a Delaware public benefit corporation. A Long-Term Benefit Trust of five “financially disinterested” trustees holds Class T stock. That stock has no economic rights, but it lets the trust elect directors who together will be a majority of the board. A single share of Class F stock, held by an LLC of the seven co-founders, will carry 50.1 percent of the voting power on matters put to stockholders generally, including the election of the remaining directors. Employees other than the co-founders get Class E stock, which can vote only on limited matters. Strategic partners hold non-voting Class N stock.

Class A buyers get one vote per share and a full view of the books. Through the trust and the founders’ share, control stays with insiders, subject to the filing’s transition and sunset terms.

The filing helped lift chip stocks and the S&P 500 on Monday. Rising stocks are not evidence that a $16 billion half-year revenue run is durable or that the company has an answer to its 94 pages of risk factors.

The Federal Open Market Committee begins its two-day meeting on Tuesday and will release its decision at 2 p.m. Eastern on Wednesday, October 28. The midterm elections are on November 3.

In September the Fed raised its benchmark rate by a quarter point, to a range of 3.75 to 4 percent. CNBC reports that it was the first increase since 2023. Futures traders now see little chance of a second increase this week: CME FedWatch put the probability of a hold near 90 percent on Monday, according to Kiplinger. Nearly all economists in a Reuters poll taken October 16 to 20 expected a pause now and an increase in December.

### What the September report shows

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported on October 14 that consumer prices rose 3.7 percent in the twelve months through September, up from 3.4 percent in August. Over the same period, gasoline was up 34.2 percent, fuel oil 74.2 percent, the energy index 20.4 percent and airline fares 22.4 percent. Prices excluding food and energy rose 2.6 percent, up from 2.4 percent. Shelter rose 3.2 percent.

CNBC tied the energy surge to the war with Iran that began in late February. On Monday Brent crude settled at $115.81 a barrel and West Texas Intermediate at $101.57.

The Fed has to decide which of these numbers describes the economy. The 34 percent figure is about a war. The 2.6 percent figure, which also rose, is closer to the Fed’s concern about whether inflation is spreading.

### The case each way

BofA Securities economist Aditya Bhave has argued for an increase this week. “The inflation picture has gotten worse on net since the September meeting,” he wrote, calling the September beat “large and broad-based enough” to outweigh downward revisions, according to Kiplinger. Deutsche Bank economists argued for waiting. “Financial conditions have started to tighten, though they remain accommodative on many metrics,” they wrote, and officials may want to see how much tightening happens on its own.

The 2026 voters include Chair Kevin Warsh and Governor Jerome Powell, his predecessor in the chair. The two-year Treasury yield, the rate most sensitive to Fed expectations, was about 4.70 percent at midday Monday.

An increase a week before a national election would be read as politics, and so would a hold. The Fed will be accused either way. What matters is whether Wednesday’s statement treats the energy shock as temporary or the rise in core prices as a trend. Bond traders will be pricing December by Wednesday afternoon.

The headline numbers on Monday were $95 billion and 60,000. Each needs a second sentence.

### Meta

Meta said it plans to raise $95 billion in equity to fund AI infrastructure and what it calls “personal superintelligence.” Its own press release splits that figure in two.

About $35 billion was launched on Monday. Of that, $22.5 billion is Class A common stock sold under forward sale agreements, and Meta says it does not expect to receive any of the proceeds at first. The Company Chronicle, citing the filing, reports that the cash arrives when Meta settles the forwards, on or before November 19, 2027. The other $12.5 billion is 250 million depositary shares representing mandatory convertible preferred stock.

The remaining $60 billion is a planned at-the-market program for Meta’s previously announced non-voting Class C shares, which would begin once those shares start trading. Meta says it “has not entered into any agreement” for that program and that its “timing, size and terms” have not been determined. In the company’s words, there is “no assurance” it will happen at all.

CNBC reported that Nvidia, AMD and Broadcom were interested in buying up to $5 billion of the shares, according to a Meta statement. All three sell Meta the chips and networking hardware that the money will pay for. Meta shares fell nearly 2 percent on Monday.

### Microsoft

Microsoft offered a “Voluntary Exit Offer” to eligible employees on participating teams in the United States, Canada, India and the United Kingdom, at internal level 70 and below. About 60,000 people are eligible, roughly a quarter of its 223,000 employees, according to the company’s statement to GeekWire and a person who spoke to CNBC. Employees have until early December to decide. Those who accept leave on December 31.

The terms match Microsoft’s standard severance, GeekWire reports. Some teams, including parts of sales, marketing and security, are excluded. The company told GeekWire it expects a much smaller share to accept than the more than 30 percent who took its spring retirement program, which was open to about 8,750 people. A company spokesperson said the offer is not a sign that Microsoft needs fewer employees. The company also said the offer does not replace layoffs.

Microsoft has forecast $175 billion in capital spending for calendar 2026, Reuters reported. It reports earnings after the close on Wednesday.

The common thread is the AI build-out. Meta is funding it by selling shares, with its own suppliers lining up as possible buyers. Microsoft is trimming payroll by asking people to leave. Microsoft’s real number will be known after December 31. Meta’s depends on when the forwards settle and whether the $60 billion program is ever agreed.

Polls opened across Israel on Tuesday in the first general election since the Hamas-led attacks of October 7, 2023, the war in Gaza and the war with Iran fought alongside the United States. Polling stations close at 10 p.m. local time, and exit polls will be published at that moment. We have no results to report, and we will not guess at them.

### What the final surveys showed

The last legal polls were published on Friday, October 23. After that, Israeli law banned new surveys until the polls close.

- Channel 13: the bloc opposed to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, 54 seats; his coalition, 50; the Arab parties, 16. - Channel 12: the opposition bloc, 56; the coalition, 50; the Joint List and Ra’am, 14. - Kan: the opposition bloc, 52; the coalition, 50; the Arab parties, 14; Yoaz Hendel’s Reservists party, 4. Hendel has not committed to either side. - i24NEWS (Direct Polls): Netanyahu’s bloc, 59; Gadi Eisenkot’s bloc, 47; the Arab parties, 14.

Channel 14’s pollster gave the governing camp 62 seats in its final survey. The final surveys therefore disagreed on whether Netanyahu’s camp had a majority.

The Times of Israel reports that Eisenkot’s Yashar led Likud in each of the three main broadcaster polls: 22 to 19 on Channel 13, 23 to 21 on Channel 12 and 22 to 20 on Kan. Naftali Bennett’s party polled at 14 or 15 seats.

### Who refuses whom

The Knesset has 120 seats, so a government needs 61. Several polls show the opposition bloc reaching 61 only with an Arab party. Ra’am’s leader, Mansour Abbas, has said he is open to joining that bloc. The Times of Israel reports that several of its parties have ruled out sitting with Ra’am in a government. Several small parties sit near the electoral threshold. Each one that misses it pushes its votes out of the seat count.

Kan found that 36 percent of respondents had not settled on a party, up from 30 percent in its previous poll. Asked who was better suited to be prime minister, Kan respondents chose Eisenkot over Netanyahu 44 percent to 38.

### The outside endorsement

On Sunday President Trump repeated his endorsement of Netanyahu on Truth Social, Anadolu reported. He called him an “outstanding Warrior Prime Minister” and urged Israel to “finish the job” in Iran. A foreign head of state’s preference is not a vote, but it is part of what Israelis are voting on.

Tonight’s exit polls will not by themselves produce a prime minister. They will start a negotiation.

On Saturday we wrote that gunmen had attacked a funeral in Jordan and that the government could not say who they were. On Monday it named three suspects.

The attack came on Friday, October 23, at a funeral at St George’s Greek Orthodox Church in the village of Hmoud, in Karak governorate, about 120 kilometers southwest of Amman. The BBC and Al Jazeera’s wire-agency explainer report nine people killed and 34 wounded. An earlier Al Jazeera and Reuters report cited Jordan’s Health Ministry figure of eight killed and 40 wounded. The reports we reviewed do not explain the difference, and we have not resolved it. According to Al Jazeera, 27 of the wounded were still in hospital on Monday.

### The arrests

The Public Security Directorate says it found the three men before dawn on Monday in an abandoned house in al-Jadeeda, a village a few minutes’ drive from Hmoud. It says they refused to surrender and fired on security forces, who returned fire. A government source told Al Jazeera the exchange lasted about three hours. All three were wounded, one critically. Officials say no security personnel were hurt and that firearms and ammunition were recovered.

At a news conference, Public Security Director Maj. Gen. Abdullah al-Maaytah named them as Hazza Zaidan Mohammed, whom he called the planner, his brother Meshal Zaidan Mohammed and their relative by marriage, Ahmad Sami Hussein. Interior Minister Mazen al-Faraya said there was no indication they had ties to other cells, and that authorities would examine what draws young people toward extremism.

No group has claimed the attack. The directorate has called the perpetrators “extremist terrorists” but has not named an ideology or an affiliation.

### What has not happened yet

The directorate said the suspects had “met their just fate.” So far they have been named, wounded and detained. They have not been charged in court, as far as public reporting shows, and they have not been tried. King Abdullah II ordered an “iron fist” response to a rare attack on Jordan’s Christian minority, and the government acted quickly. Quick action and a proven case are different things. The second requires evidence presented in court.

The officials’ account is of a family-linked plot with no indicated ties to other cells. It may be true. Investigators have not yet published the evidence for it.

The most valuable literary property of the autumn is 23 pages long, and the public cannot read it.

In September Netflix bought Nicholas Binge’s unpublished short story “Understudy” for $1 million plus a script commitment, according to Deadline and The Hollywood Reporter. The Hollywood Reporter says seven studios bid for it. The premise, as sources described it to that trade, is an actor hired for an unusual role in South Korea who slowly realizes he is at the center of a crime wave. Phil Lord and Chris Miller and Steven Yeun’s Celadon Pictures will executive produce, and Binge will write the adaptation.

The deal is not a one-off. On Monday Publishing Perspectives summarized New York Times reporting on the trend. Universal has bought Colin Bannon’s “Long Lost,” with Steven Spielberg attached to produce, and Amazon MGM Studios has acquired Harrison Query’s “Code Black.” A year earlier A24 won Chandler Baker’s short story “Discretion” in a competitive bid. Publishing Perspectives says it later received a straight-to-series order at Paramount+, with Nicole Kidman and Elle Fanning attached.

In the same summary, Publishing Perspectives reported a Rightscenter study finding that American film and TV producers’ inquiries about international stories rose 3.5-fold year over year, and that backlist titles made up nearly two-thirds of requests. Translated fiction, which English-language publishers say they cannot sell, is what producers are now asking about.

### Why it works

A short story is a pilot with prose on top. It has a premise, a turn and an ending, and a showrunner can expand it without having to cut a 400-page novel down. Novels give an adapter too much to cut. Short stories give an adapter room to build.

### What it might cost the form

The risk is aesthetic. Once a story is worth a million dollars as a premise, writers will start producing premises: high-concept setups, hooks on page one and endings that leave room for a second season. That would be a treatment rather than a short story. The great short stories, from Chekhov to Alice Munro, work because they refuse to expand. Their whole point is what they leave out.

Publishers can either ignore this and keep losing the material, or they can do what magazines once did and pay short fiction what it is now clearly worth. The irony is that Hollywood has rediscovered the value of the magazine story just as most of the magazines that published one are gone.

Tell us about the best short story you have read this year, and what you think it would lose on screen. Letters are welcome.

Every company that goes public sells a story with its shares. Anthropic’s story is unusually noble. It is a public benefit corporation whose board majority will be chosen by a trust of five financially disinterested trustees with expertise in AI safety and national security. The point of the structure is to stop the profit motive from overriding the company’s judgment about dangerous technology.

I think that structure is admirable, and I think buyers should still read the next paragraph of the filing.

The S-1 says the Class T stock that gives the trust its power “will remain outstanding indefinitely,” subject to the right of the board and the trustees, or of specified majorities of the Class A, Class E and Class F holders, to amend or end the trust’s terms or to redeem the stock. With the same approvals the stock can be transferred “without restriction.” The company says it “intentionally structured the Class T common stock in this manner to preserve long-term flexibility if circumstances change.”

That is an honest sentence, and investors should treat it as the real terms of the deal. The safety constraint is not a law of nature. It is a contract, and the filing describes how it can be undone. Separately, one share of Class F stock held by the seven co-founders carries 50.1 percent of the general vote. Public buyers will get one vote per share in a company where the founders initially hold that general-vote majority, subject to the filing’s Class F transition and sunset terms, while the trust elects most of the board.

The usual complaint about founder control, that it insulates executives from accountability, does not quite fit here. The founders say the insulation is the point. In their account, public shareholders are exactly the force that might push the company to ship too quickly. I find that argument persuasive. Markets are bad at pricing tail risks, and the Journal reports that the filing’s risk factors contemplate a catastrophic AI-related incident too large to insure.

The argument has a weakness, though. A constraint that its holders can loosen together is only as strong as their resolve when the pressure arrives. That pressure has a number already: $72.4 billion in a single half-year in fair-value changes across convertible notes, derivative liabilities and future-equity agreements. The day the trust’s caution costs a quarter’s revenue is the day the flexibility clause gets read again.

So here is my advice to anyone buying ANT: do not pay a premium for virtue. Pay for the revenue, which is real and growing, and treat the governance as a promise. It may be kept. If it is kept through a bad year, it will have proved worth more than any number in the prospectus. Until then, it is a promise.

The Student List won by refusing to have a face. That was right for a protest. A movement with one leader can be bought, smeared or arrested. A movement of 250 professors, doctors and workers is much harder to break. Aleksandar Vučić spent two years looking for the person to discredit and never found one.

The election is over, and refusing to have a face has stopped being a strength.

Within weeks a new parliament will convene. The acting president, a close ally of the man the students beat, will consult the parliamentary groups and propose a prime minister. The students have the votes to reject anyone they do not want. What they have not yet produced is a person they do want. Every day without a name is a day the losing side gets to describe the winners: inexperienced, divided, run behind closed doors. bne IntelliNews already reports that much of the movement’s decision-making happens out of public view. That is exactly the kind of politics the movement was formed to end.

The students should do three things this week.

First, name a prime minister and stop treating the job as an embarrassing exception to collective politics. The country voted for a government, and a government needs someone at the top.

Second, name the ministers of interior, justice and finance at the same time. These are the ministries that decide whether the Novi Sad canopy collapse ends in prosecutions, whether the police answer to the law or to a party, and whether public companies stop serving as patronage. Voters gave the students a majority for these three jobs, not for the symbolism of the win.

Third, field a presidential candidate now. The presidential election must be held by December 27. Vučić ran the country from the presidency. If his party keeps the office while losing parliament, the students will have won the vote and left their opponents in the office he used to rule.

The objection is that a fast choice will split the movement. Maybe. But it will split eventually anyway, over the EU, over Russia, over the budget. Better that the split comes after the students have shown they can govern than before. Being leaderless was how they won. Now they need to show they can govern.

We would like to hear from readers in Serbia who disagree. Letters are open.