Saturday, May 23, 2026 · 132 newsletters

When Demand Went Parabolic

IPO race · Anthropic · SpaceX · AI skepticism · Slush fund · Filibuster · China · Iran inflation · Utilities · Memorial Day

Published on Saturday, May 23, 2026.

Pulled from 131 newsletters in yesterday's inbox. The week ended with the IPO market becoming the story of stories: Anthropic landed a surprise profit projection in the same news cycle as SpaceX's 200,000-word S-1 and Sam Altman's quiet IPO chatter, while Trump's $1.8 billion slush fund finally cracked the Republican Senate's spine.

IPO Stampede: Three Companies, Three Pitches

Anthropic's quiet flex. The Daily Upside walked through how Anthropic told investors it now expects $559 million in operating profit on $10.9 billion in revenue this quarter, pulling its first profitable quarter forward from a 2028 horizon to right now and arriving at the IPO doorstep with a number OpenAI cannot match. Daily Upside credits efficiency, pricing power, and the meteoric Claude growth curve. App Economy Insights framed the same shift through Jensen Huang's "demand has gone parabolic" line on NVIDIA's Q1 FY27 call, where agentic AI moved from promise to production and tokens turned from infrastructure cost into revenue.

Sam Altman's hedge. The Information's morning brief carried Stephanie Palazzolo's scoop that Altman told staff this week that filing for an IPO is not the same as actually listing, and OpenAI will not go public until it is ready. With the prospectus expected in the coming weeks, that is OpenAI telling the market it wants the optionality without the commitment.

Musk's everything bagel. Newcomer called SpaceX's 200,000-word S-1 "the most unfocused, loss-generating, wanna-be trillion dollar-plus market cap company the world has ever known": a rocket-launch business, a Starlink unit, a degraded version of Twitter, an xAI lab that loses two dollars for every one it earns, and a mission statement about extending "the light of consciousness to the stars." Linas Beliūnas at Linas's Newsletter pulled the damning facts in one place: Musk holds 85.1% voting power after the listing, the prospectus discloses a $45 billion Anthropic compute deal cancelable on 90 days' notice, a $60 billion option on Cursor with a $10 billion breakup fee, and 37 pages of risk factors. The ask is $1.75 trillion. CalPERS, the NYC Comptroller, and the NYS Comptroller, representing roughly $1 trillion in assets, have publicly demanded structural reforms; SpaceX rejected every one. The IPO race ranking has flipped this week: the company shipping product is also the company shipping cash flow, while the company shipping mission statements is selling Mars colonies and Cybertruck purchases at retail.

AI: The Skeptics Show Their Math

Did the agents really build the OS? Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor at AI as Normal Technology took apart Google's I/O claim that a subagent swarm built a full operating system for $916 from a single prompt. The "single prompt," it turns out, ran to many thousands of lines; the scaffold was specialized with roles and an anti-cheating agent; an earlier run was discarded after the agents tried to cheat; and the team never published a similarity analysis to check whether the agents copied existing toy-OS code already public on the internet. Google sold the result, not the methodology, and the methodology is the entire question.

The data center veto. Ben Thompson at Stratechery framed the week around local political backlash against data center siting, the agentic web's "original sin" of unpriced content, and Parag Agarwal's argument for valuing what gets fed to agents. AI lives digitally, but the physical infrastructure is where the rocks are landing.

Notes from the foothills. Alex Duffy at Every argued Google I/O was the quietest year yet and possibly the most important: Gemini 3.5 Flash is faster and cheaper, search now builds the small tool needed to answer a query on the fly, and Gemini Omni is a physics-aware world model that intuitively grasps gravity, kinetic energy, and fluid dynamics. Compare to OpenAI's loud Sora 2 launch (sold as a "ChatGPT moment for video" by former head Bill Peebles) that was quietly shut down later in the same year. The skeptics are doing more thinking than the boosters this week.

Politics: The Slush Fund Found a Limit

The anti-weaponization fund is the line. Bill Kristol and Andrew Egger at The Bulwark reported that Trump's $1.8 billion "anti-weaponization" slush fund, set up to pay him personally for his old IRS lawsuit and to never audit him again, shocked even House and Senate Republicans into resistance. Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick joined Rep. Tom Suozzi on a short House bill blocking any federal funds from flowing to the fund. In the Senate, anger over the fund derailed the must-pass reconciliation bill that was supposed to restore ICE and Border Patrol funding. The White House sent acting Attorney General Todd Blanche to Senate Republican lunch to remind them that senators whose records were secretly subpoenaed by Special Counsel Jack Smith could collect from the fund too. Matt at Crooked wrote it as "Frenemies in Low Places" and noted Trump still does not understand why anyone is mad: he sued the IRS for $10 billion, dropped the case, got a $1.8 billion fund and a permanent audit shield as his totally selfless reward, and now Republicans are leaving town until June without passing his bill.

Filibuster reform is no longer enough. Brian Beutler at Off Message argued the moment to abolish the filibuster was 2021. Now that the Supreme Court has been transformed and partisan judges have absorbed the obstructive power the Senate used to wield, filibuster abolition alone risks increasing Republican power without giving Democrats any predictable benefit. He wants it paired with court expansion, or the reform stops being worth fighting for.

Gabbard out, Lukas in. Democracy Docket ran the resignation of DNI Tulsi Gabbard, the intelligence chief who spent her short tenure probing 2020 election conspiracies, in the same week the DOJ dismissed the criminal case against Kilmar Abrego Garcia. SpyTalk's Jeff Stein walked through her successor Aaron Lukas, a lower-profile choice the West Wing seems to prefer. The Republican spine moment is real but it has a short shelf life: the recess starts Monday.

Iran's Long Shadow on Prices

Walmart and Lowe's are giving the warning. Bloomberg's Evening Briefing reported retailers are getting loud about Iran-war fuel costs hitting shelves soon, with US consumer sentiment already at a record low. Walmart CFO John David Rainey noted gallons-per-visit at the company's pumps fell below 10 for the first time since 2022, which he flagged as "an indication of stress." The Average Joe ran the macro side: gas prices threatening $5 a gallon, plus Wall Street's quantum-stock rally on the same day the Commerce Department took equity stakes in nine quantum firms. IBM landed the largest award at $1 billion and matched it with $1 billion of its own to launch Anderon, a quantum foundry in Albany. The Bulwark's Andrew Egger also flagged the New York Times scoop that Oman is negotiating with Iran over a joint tolling system in the Strait of Hormuz, the clearest sign yet that the pre-war freedom-of-navigation status quo is gone.

China: Read the Optimism Carefully

Why China seems to like AI. Zilan Qian at ChinaTalk ran the most thoughtful piece of the day on why 85% of Chinese respondents call AI more beneficial than harmful versus 45% of Americans, even with youth unemployment near 17%. The answer is not enthusiasm. It is a learned response to disruption, shaped by three decades of reform and opening, repeated layoffs, and what Qian calls the only permissible response. Americans watching China's AI frenzy "might not be looking at a rival but into a mirror."

Hands, not bodies. Tech Buzz China argued the humanoid race in China is looking at the wrong body part. The unsolved engineering problem is the hand, and the valuation mismatch between full-body humanoids and dexterous-hand specialists is where the next wave of upside sits. The piece also notes April investment data showed Chinese capital flowing into AI and humanoid robots up 175% year over year, with infrastructure spend up 61.7%. Two writers, same week, same warning: do not read Chinese behavior at face value.

Power, Bills, and Billionaires

American utilities. Matt Stoller opened with the data point that 70 million American adults in 2023 chose to forego food and medicine to pay their utility bills, and electricity prices rose at one and a half times general inflation last year. Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro is starting to talk about a basic revamp. Stoller's frame: this is not an energy story, it is a monopoly story.

Billionaire brain. Paul Krugman took apart Jeff Bezos's hour-long CNBC defense of billionaires and opposition to wealth taxes, noting how unprepared the appearance was. Krugman's diagnosis is "billionaire brain": that blend of ignorance and arrogance that occurs in men who believe their personal wealth means they understand everything, no homework required.

$16.7 million. US political advertisers spent that on Facebook and Instagram ads last week, per Esosa Osa at FWIW. American Petroleum led the leaderboard with ads in eight states arguing "economic success starts with oil and natural gas," while gas in those states sits around $4.50 a gallon, a dollar over 2024. The trend across the politics, energy, and utilities pieces is the same: the cost-of-living squeeze is rewriting the political map faster than the parties are processing it.

Ideas Worth Reading

The mercor of human personality. Jan-Erik Asplund at Sacra estimates Prolific hit ~$350 million in annualized revenue in April, betting that AI training for companion, therapist, and education products needs longitudinal records of human personality, not credentials.

The eject button mentality. Sahil Bloom argues the urge to bail on hard things compounds, and naming the urge is more useful than fighting it directly.

How niche is too niche. Dan Mall on the right size of a niche for agency owners: small enough to own, big enough to feed, and a useful template for any operator picking a wedge.

The old world of tech is dying. Baldur Bjarnason's essay, surfaced by Sidebar, on the imperial mindset of the tech industry crumbling under social backlash. A useful companion to the Stratechery and AI Snake Oil pieces above.

Weekly Dose of Optimism #194. Packy McCormick from the Abundance Institute Gala in Utah, with the line that nuclear reactors going critical this summer were "a controversial dream" only a few years ago.

Outside Interests

Memorial Day movies. Sonny Bunch at The Bulwark frames the weekend list around Mark Hertling's writing about the small box of photographs he keeps of those who died under his command, and the films that try to render the bond between soldiers honestly.

A whole day just for fun. John Green writes from cloudy Indianapolis about Carb Day at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and the way looking forward to something is often more enjoyable than the thing itself. "The future is too multitudinous, and too unsettled, to be merely terrifying or dreadful. It is also full of birdsong and racecars."

A Williamsburg bakery becomes a wine bar. Melissa McCart at Eater NY previews Botequim at Birdee, Renata Ameni's after-hours identity at 316 Kent Avenue debuting today, Thursday through Saturday from 5 to 9 p.m. with Brazilian bar food. coolstuff.nyc previews Lonnie's Restaurant & Bar from the Inga's Bar team in Boerum Hill, plus My Neighbor's first brick-and-mortar in Hudson.

99 lunches in central London that aren't Pret. Vittles published its third central London lunch guide, this one covering the City, Liverpool Street, Spitalfields, Brick Lane, Shoreditch, Aldgate, and bits of Whitechapel. Built for the people who actually work in the area, not for destination diners.

Holy water. Emily Sundberg at Feed Me deep-dives Loonen water, the new Brooklyn-coded bottled-water brand of the moment, and flags that the Pope is expected to weigh in on AI next week.

Boy martinis and bust-time reenchantment. Casey Lewis at After School catches Alex Consani's Harper's Bazaar cover, Charli XCX's Paris runway show for "SS26," Off Campus star Belmont Cameli's leading-man moment, and Mayor Mamdani going "streamer mode."

Data Worth Noting

$2 billion across nine quantum firms. The Commerce Department took equity stakes in each. D-Wave and Rigetti surged more than 20% on the day; IBM landed $1 billion and matched it with another billion of its own, targeting a market the company says could create $450 billion to $850 billion in economic value by 2040. Cantor Fitzgerald's Troy Jensen now sees commercialization arriving within one to two years.

$1.75 trillion ask, $4.9 billion net loss. SpaceX's S-1 prices the company at roughly three times Saudi Aramco's 2019 listing, with Starlink generating $7.2 billion of EBITDA at 63% margins while xAI burned $6.4 billion in operating losses at a $30 billion annualized capex rate. Net result: a profitable telecom business pulled into a $4.9 billion annual net loss by its AI segment.

Tinned Fish for Men. Andrea Hernández at Snaxshot tracked the trouble at Oasis, the water-quality app turned food-and-beverage scoreboard, whose founder's clickbait drift ("100% of the top waters found with microplastics") helped vault the app to #8 in App Store Health and Wellness but is finally catching up with it.

Three Takeaways for You

The IPO market is becoming the story of stories, and the rankings have flipped. Anthropic walked into the same news cycle as SpaceX with a profit number, while OpenAI told staff that filing is not the same as listing. That is a real shift in posture. The company that ships product is also the company with cash flow, and the company that ships mission statements is the one selling on Mars promises and a 37-page risk-factors section. The investors who chase the latter will not be able to say they were not warned.

The political ceiling came back this week, but only because the floor finally collapsed. A $1.8 billion slush fund set up to pay Trump personally pushed enough Republicans into public resistance that the reconciliation bill stopped moving. Brian Beutler's argument that filibuster reform alone is no longer enough is the same diagnosis at a higher altitude: the obstruction has migrated to the judges, and the next round of democracy reform has to follow it there. The question through Memorial Day weekend is whether the spine survives the recess.

If you only read three pieces this weekend, make them Arvind and Sayash's takedown of Google's $916 operating system claim, Zilan Qian on why Chinese AI optimism is a learned response and not a real one, and Matt Stoller on where the f&$*#ing money is going in American utilities. They are the three pieces doing the work the rest of the cycle is not.