Week 21 · 2026-05-18 → 2026-05-24 · 319 newsletters

The Slush Fund and the IPO

slush-fund · anthropic-profit · spacex-ipo · bond-rout · data-center-backlash · agent-stack · revenge-purge · stablecoin-rollup · dnc-autopsy · compute-trade

Published on Monday, May 25, 2026.

Pulled from roughly 815 newsletters across seven days. The week opened with Bill Cassidy finishing third in his own primary and closed with Anthropic projecting a $559 million operating profit one IPO ahead of OpenAI. In between, the Justice Department quietly converted Trump's own $10 billion lawsuit into a $1.776 billion "Anti-Weaponization Fund" he controls, Thomas Massie lost the most expensive House primary in American history after a final-week smear, SpaceX filed a 200,000-word S-1 at $1.75 trillion, and the 30-year Treasury cleared 5.2%. The through-line: two of the largest convergences in years happened on the same weekend, the corruption story and the AI capital-markets story, and they belong in the same frame.

The Slush Fund: When Graft Stops Hiding

The dominant political story of the week, and the one every full-time politics writer reached for the same word on. The DOJ settled Trump's $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS by creating a $1.776 billion fund Trump himself controls, with a supplemental memo from Acting AG Todd Blanche declaring the government "FOREVER BARRED and PRECLUDED" from prosecuting tax claims against the Trump family. Andrew Egger at The Bulwark called it the "Ultra-Corrupt Settlement Fund." Paul Krugman said the move "takes the shamelessness to a new level." Rick Wilson hit it twice in one day, with Den of Thieves and the earlier Casino Donnie's Insider Trading Racket tying it to JD Vance's defense of Trump's 3,700 first-quarter stock trades worth up to $750 million. George Bounacos at Gov Brief Today framed the trade in one line: "Trump sued his own government for $10 billion. He walked away with permanent audit immunity for his past returns and a $1.8 billion fund he controls."

JVL named the operating mode. JVL at The Bulwark called this "the Turn," the point at which a regime stops claiming popular legitimacy and starts leveraging institutional power instead, with Trump's worsening approval running alongside improving House Republican prospects as the asymmetry the courts and the media are now built to absorb. By Thursday, JVL was openly begging Democrats to pick a brand name for the fund, because "if political malfeasance doesn't have a brand name, it can't hurt you." Judd Legum at Popular Information walked through the Thermo Fisher pattern in Trump's 113-page disclosure: $215,000 of stock purchases in February and March, followed by a March 11 facility tour urging pharma companies to contract with the "great company," with no disclosure until May 14.

The Senate spine arrived late and on a short clock. By Friday, Bill Kristol and Andrew Egger at The Bulwark reported that the fund had 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 in. Anger over the fund derailed the must-pass reconciliation bill that was supposed to restore ICE and Border Patrol funding. The White House sent Blanche to Senate Republican lunch to remind senators whose records were secretly subpoenaed by Special Counsel Jack Smith that they too could collect. Matt at Crooked wrote it as "Frenemies in Low Places." By Saturday, Jim Swift's "Trump's Corruption by the Numbers" stacked the fund against a Fox poll showing Trump at minus 22 and a Senate that had just declined to fund his ballroom.

The corruption here is not hidden, it is procedural. It got a name, a line item, and a press release. When graft stops needing to disguise itself, the tell is not the theft, it is the confidence. The recess starts Monday, which gives the spine an expiration date.

The Revenge Tour Becomes the Whole Strategy

The political through-line ran on a faster clock than usual. Bill Cassidy finished third in his Louisiana Republican primary, with Trump-endorsed Julia Letlow leading 45 to 28. Rick Wilson at Against All Enemies called it the latest case study in "Everything Trump Touches Dies." Cassidy voted with Trump 90% of the time, sat on a $10 million-plus war chest, and was the doctor who personally helped confirm RFK Jr. as HHS Secretary. None of it survived the one vote to convict after January 6th. Stuart Stevens at Lincoln Square framed the RFK Jr. vote as the moment Cassidy's career bargained itself away.

Tuesday night the apparatus came for Massie. Rep. Thomas Massie lost his Northern Kentucky primary to Trump-endorsed Ed Gallrein in what Semafor DC called "the most expensive House primary in American history," with most of the anti-Massie money coming from pro-Israel groups and a pop-up PAC run by Trump strategists. Will Sommer at The Bulwark spent his column on the genuinely surreal Cynthia West interview on Laura Loomer's show that buried Massie in the final week. Sommer's read: the smear was almost certainly Trumpworld-assisted, even if no fingerprints are visible. Reid at Crooked's Open Tabs framed both defeats as "The FAFO Presidency," with Steven Cheung tweeting "Do not ever doubt President Trump and his political power" the night the results came in.

The polling tells the other half. Bill Kristol walked through five straight months of CBS/YouGov decline: 41% approve in January, 37% in May, 63% disapprove. Dan Pfeiffer's Message Box called the new New York Times poll "devastating news for Republicans," and his Friday counter-take argued Trump is burning down his own coalition for personal revenge. Joe Trippi at Lincoln Square read the same primary wins as setting up trouble in the fall, with Alabama suddenly in play. By Sunday, Pfeiffer's reader question column had the cleanest accounting: primary electorates are not general electorates, which is the part the political press keeps eliding.

Cassidy was the proof of concept. Massie was the test. Both fell. The party is now living inside the paradox Kristol named: live by Trump, die by Trump. The kingmaker keeps winning primaries his party then loses in November. Brian Beutler asked why legacy stopped mattering inside the GOP and answered his own question by pointing at the post-Nixon afterglow effect that never actually materialized for the people who ousted him.

The Bond Market Catches Up to the Iran War

Markets did the thing markets eventually do. The 30-year US Treasury yield hit 5.2% on Wednesday, its highest since 2007. The 10-year reached 4.687%, the highest intraday level since January 2025. Paul Krugman's "From Dropping Bombs to Dropping Bonds" wrote the cleanest version: "the inflation spike of 2021-22 was overwhelmingly the result of factors outside Joe Biden's control. The current inflation surge, by contrast, is all Trump." John Ellis at News Items reprinted John Authers asking whether this is a replay of the 2007 bond selloff that preceded the GFC. The Average Joe ran the cleanest piece of accounting: roughly 15% of global oil supply has vanished since the Iran conflict began, and Americans have spent an estimated $40 to $45 billion more on gas and diesel than in the same period last year.

The retailers got loud. By Friday, Bloomberg's Evening Briefing had Walmart and Lowe's warning that Iran-war fuel costs will hit 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 Bulwark flagged the New York Times scoop that Oman is now negotiating with Iran on a joint tolling system in the Strait of Hormuz, the clearest sign yet that the pre-war freedom-of-navigation status quo is gone.

The mismatch is the trade. Matt at WTF Just Happened Today noted futures markets now put 60% odds on at least one Fed hike by year-end despite Trump pressuring Powell. Exec Sum flagged that fund managers boosted stock allocations by a record amount even as the long bond breaks. By Sunday, Noah Smith had moved publicly from relaxed to worried on U.S. debt, with the burden back above 100% of GDP. The slush fund, the audit immunity, the primary purges, and a 5.2% 30-year yield are not separate plotlines. They are the same machine, and Thursday was the day the bond market started pricing it that way.

The AI IPO Stampede

The structural AI story of the week, and the one nobody priced six months ago. Three companies, three pitches, one Friday afternoon. Eric Newcomer walked through SpaceX's S-1: listing on Nasdaq under SPCX, $28.5 trillion addressable market, of which $26.5 trillion is tied to the AI segment and $22.7 trillion is pinned on enterprise applications running on orbital data centers SpaceX itself admits will not begin deploying until "as early as 2028." Axios AI+'s Ina Fried reported Anthropic is paying SpaceX $1.25 billion a month through May 2029, roughly $15 billion a year against SpaceX's current $18 billion in annual revenue. By Saturday, Linas Beliūnas had pulled the damning facts in one place: Musk holds 85.1% voting power, the $45 billion Anthropic compute deal is cancelable on 90 days' notice, there is a $60 billion option on Cursor with a $10 billion breakup fee, and the prospectus carries 37 pages of risk factors. CalPERS, the NYC Comptroller, and the NYS Comptroller, representing roughly $1 trillion in assets, publicly demanded structural reforms. SpaceX rejected every one.

Anthropic walked in with a number. By Saturday, The Daily Upside and Contrary Research had Anthropic projecting $10.9 billion in Q2 revenue, more than double its $4.8 billion Q1, with a first-ever quarterly profit of roughly $559 million arriving just ahead of a planned IPO. That is the rare AI story where the headline is a margin, not a model. 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. That is OpenAI telling the market it wants the optionality without the commitment, while Anthropic ships a profit number two desks over.

Nvidia hit parabolic. App Economy Insights framed the shift through Jensen Huang's "demand has gone parabolic" line on Nvidia's Q1 FY27 call. Nvidia posted $81.6 billion in revenue against $78.9 billion expected, guided $91 billion against an $87 billion whisper, and projected $1 trillion in Blackwell-and-Rubin sales through 2027. Roundhill Investments flagged that Samsung crossed $1 trillion in market cap, SK Hynix is reporting a 72% operating margin on high-bandwidth memory with 57% share, and Jefferies expects Samsung to post the largest operating profit of any company in the world by 2027.

Two years of "is this a bubble" coverage assumed the eventual unwind would happen in private markets, away from retail. That was wrong. The unwind, if it comes, will now happen in front of every retirement account in America. The company shipping product is also the company shipping cash flow, while the company shipping mission statements is selling Mars colonies and a 37-page risk-factors section.

The Data Center Veto: AI Buildout Meets Its Backlash

The week's most-cited single piece was Ben Thompson's "Data Center Discontent". Thompson's argument is blunt: there are understandable reasons for residents to oppose nearby data centers, and the only solution that will actually work is to pay them off. He cited the DeForest, Wisconsin block of a Meta site, Texas counties imposing construction bans, and QTS's $50 million community commitment as the template. By Saturday, Thompson had returned to the theme in "The Data Center Veto", framing the week around local political backlash and the agentic web's "original sin" of unpriced content.

The political version is rage. Matt Stoller's "The Rage of the Billionaires Is Coming" flagged that seven in ten Americans now oppose a data center near them, that commencement audiences including Eric Schmidt's are now booing AI mentions, and that CEO comments about white-collar elimination are stinging in a way they did not a year ago. Anthropic's Dario Amodei keeps saying half of white-collar jobs go away. Palantir's Alex Karp said on an earnings call that "some people can get their heads cut off." Voters are filing those quotes away. Stoller's Saturday piece added the harder data point: 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.

The financial version is consolidation. NextEra's $67 billion all-stock bid for Dominion was the biggest power deal ever, structured to plant the combined company directly on top of Virginia's data center cluster. David Callaway called it the latest tell that "investor stampede into AI might be getting long in the tooth." Linas's deep read of Coatue's May 2026 report sized the underlying capex pipeline at $12 trillion between 2026 and 2031. Paul Kedrosky's Chart of the Day showed commercial electrical demand from data centers passing residential demand in the United States. The load curve has flipped.

The buildout is no longer a financing question. It is a politics question. The next presidential cycle will be argued, at least in part, over who pays the substation bill.

The Agent Stack Moves Up: Karpathy, Stainless, and the Orchestration Layer

The single biggest personnel move in AI in years dropped Tuesday afternoon: Andrej Karpathy, founding member of OpenAI and former Tesla AI director, joined Anthropic. The Information AM called it "a coup." Pirate Wires Daily wrote flatly that Anthropic's pre-IPO valuation has surpassed OpenAI's and "if there was any doubt about who's winning The AI Race, Karpathy joining Anthropic has ended that discussion." In the same news cycle, Every's Context Window by Jack Cheng pointed at Anthropic's reported $300 million acquisition of Stainless, the MCP-server tooling company. The MCP layer is now being purchased outright by the lab that has the most to gain from owning it.

Google I/O was the stack, not the keynote. Ben Thompson at Stratechery titled his update "Google I/O, World Models, I/O Spaghetti" and asked whether DeepMind is aligned with Google's actual business objectives. Ken Huang at Agentic AI had the most technical read: I/O was Google "stitching together models, tools, sandboxes, browsers, Search, Workspace, Android, Chrome, and Cloud into one agentic operating layer." Snacks put the punchline on the keynote: investors looked at $180 to $190 billion in 2026 capex against the announcements and dropped Alphabet 2% on the day. By Saturday, Alex Duffy at Every had filed the more interesting essay, calling I/O the quietest year yet and possibly the most important.

The operator literature caught up. Nate's Substack ran the most useful single piece of the week: "Seven questions decide whether your AI agent ships. Most teams can answer two." His map of the seven companies turning agentic behavior into permissioned infrastructure, naming Cloudflare, Stripe, Okta, Auth0, Datadog, and Snowflake, is the kind of thing a CIO will be handed next quarter. Lenny Rachitsky's How I AI ran Thariq Shihipar of the Claude Code team on why HTML is now the superior format for talking to agents, and why engineers are becoming "compute allocators" when Claude can run for eight hours unattended.

The skeptics did the math. By Saturday, Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor at AI as Normal Technology had taken apart Google's I/O claim that a subagent swarm built a full operating system for $916 from a single prompt. The "single prompt" 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. Google sold the result, not the methodology, and the methodology is the entire question. Gergely Orosz at The Pragmatic Engineer shipped Part 2 of "AI's impact on software engineers in 2026" from 900+ subscriber responses: codebase quality is decreasing while management does not care, and AI tooling "feels like a slot machine" with pricing engineered to keep you prompting.

The durable economic value is moving up from the model layer to the orchestration, auth, and control-plane layer. Karpathy joining Anthropic, the Stainless acquisition, Nate's seven-question control map, and Google's all-out push to stitch its surfaces together are four versions of the same insight written down inside a single week.

The Permanent Underclass: The Labor Story Gets Louder

A coherent supporting cluster. Anand Giridharadas at The Ink opened the week with Ken Griffin confessing depression on camera about AI's coming displacement of high-level work, the messenger being a finance magnate who is both an investor in AI and a user of it inside his own firm. Guillermo Flor's AI Market Fit catalogued the predictions from Dario Amodei, Sam Altman, and Musk, and named the concept everyone is circling: the Permanent Underclass. Ruben Hassid hit the math: "a subscription to an intelligence" is getting 6,000x cheaper in four years. By Thursday, Bloomberg's Angela Cullen had Jamie Dimon "choosing his words carefully on AI" and Bill Winters quietly regretting his "replacing lower-value human capital" line. Meta cut about 8,000 jobs. Intuit is cutting 17% to "pivot toward AI." Hebba Youssef reported recruiters are now fielding 300+ applications per role. Alex Wilhelm at Cautious Optimism summed it up: "the layoffs will continue until the AI booing halts."

The Stablecoin Roll-Up and the Distribution War

The fintech story compounded all week. By Friday, Jan-Erik Asplund at Sacra had tallied the year: Stripe acquired Bridge, Ripple acquired Rail, Mastercard acquired BVNK, and Kraken acquired Reap, totaling nearly $4 billion. Nicole Casperson at Fintech Is Femme covered Mercury's $200 million raise at a $5.2 billion valuation, 49% above last round on 14 months. Samora Kariuki's Frontier Fintech GPS led with Tether taking a strategic stake in LemFi to power stablecoin remittances. Linas Beliunas argued Google's Universal Cart and Universal Commerce Protocol, unveiled at I/O 2026, are the most consequential announcement of the conference: Google wants the protocol layer between every merchant and every AI agent. The agentic commerce stack is being claimed before most merchants have a meeting on the calendar.

Quantum: Industrial Policy Becomes AI Policy

The Commerce Department awarded $2 billion in grants to nine quantum computing companies, with $1 billion of it going to IBM for a new Albany-based foundry called Anderon, and took equity stakes in each grantee. Techmeme rounded up the Rigetti, IonQ, D-Wave, Infleqtion, and GlobalFoundries pops. David Birch tied that to a fresh Glassnode estimate that nearly a third of all bitcoin in circulation, roughly $469 billion at current prices, sits in pay-to-public-key outputs that a real quantum computer could sweep. The administration that postponed its own AI and cybersecurity executive order hours before the signing ceremony still signed off on direct equity stakes in nine compute companies the same day. Skip the rulemaking, take the cap table.

The DNC's Self-Inflicted Wound

Friday afternoon the DNC quietly released its 192-page draft autopsy of the 2024 election. The release was a disaster on contact. Matt Berg at Crooked walked through a document with missing sections, misspelled names from Jon Corzine to Matt Bevin, a per-page disclaimer that the committee "cannot independently verify the claims presented," and a chair who admitted in a same-day blog post: "I am not proud of this product; it does not meet my standards." Dan Pfeiffer at The Message Box was blunter: "Ken Martin Has to Go." Almost nothing on Biden's age. Almost nothing on Gaza. Both parties spent the same news cycle telling on themselves about their internal capacity.

China: The Vibe Summit Ages Poorly

Bill Bishop at Sinocism and Andrew Polk at Trivium China both read the prior week's Xi-Trump summit as "a calculated stalling tactic from both sides," with both governments adopting Beijing's "constructive relationship of strategic stability" framing and shipping almost no deliverables. Trivium noted the Iran war has handed China's excavator industry, including Sany, XCMG, and Liugong, the first coordinated price hikes in years.

Read the optimism carefully. Zilan Qian at ChinaTalk ran the most thoughtful piece of the week 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. Americans watching China's AI frenzy "might not be looking at a rival but into a mirror." Tech Buzz China argued the humanoid race is looking at the wrong body part; April investment data showed Chinese capital flowing into AI and humanoid robots up 175% year over year.

Ideas Worth Reading from the Week

Ben Thompson's "Data Center Discontent." The clearest single statement of the AI infrastructure politics ahead, and the frame every other writer is using without naming.

Brian Beutler on filibuster reform alone. The argument that the moment to abolish the filibuster was 2021, and that now obstruction has migrated to the judges.

Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor's takedown of Google's $916 OS claim. Methodology is the entire question; Google sold the result. The cleanest piece of AI skepticism written this year.

Eric Newcomer on SpaceX's orbital data centers. The prospectus reads less like a rocket company than a frontier AI lab with a launch business attached.

JVL's "Trump Takes the Turn." The point at which a regime stops claiming popular legitimacy and starts leveraging institutional power, named in real time.

Adam Jentleson with Sarah Longwell on heterodoxy. The left-versus-center framing is mostly an online turf war. Pair with Kristoffer Ealy's purity-politics critique.

Baldur Bjarnason on the old world of tech dying. The imperial mindset of the tech industry crumbling under social backlash.

Ken Huang's compound-engineering taxonomy. Five things that keep getting lumped together, sorted by which layer of the stack they actually occupy.

Outside Interests

Yotam Ottolenghi's "It All Starts with an Egg." The egg as ingredient, symbol, and shapeshifter, with three recipes attached for when the philosophy wears off.

The Vittles Ice Cream Guide 2026. Ruby Tandoh on a new 80-page print pocket guide called Ice Cream City covering 100+ London makers across gelato, soft serve, kulfi, booza, bingsu, sheeryakh, and bastani.

99 lunches in central London that aren't Pret. Vittles' third central London lunch guide, built for the people who actually work there.

Sonny Bunch on Memorial Day movies. The list framed around Mark Hertling's small box of photographs of those who died under his command.

John Green on a whole day just for fun. From cloudy Indianapolis about Carb Day at the Speedway and how looking forward to something is often more enjoyable than the thing itself.

Casey Lewis on whimsy capitalism. "Whimsy" as the it-word of 2026, Etsy searches for whimsical jewelry up 50% year over year.

Data Worth Noting

Anthropic's $10.9 billion quarter. Q2 revenue projected at more than double Q1, with a first-ever profit of about $559 million landing right before the IPO. The number that reframes the rest of the AI year.

$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.

$2 billion across nine quantum firms. Commerce 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.

Coatue's $12 trillion AI capex map. OpenAI plus Anthropic combined run-rate is now $55 billion, surpassing Salesforce, Adobe, ServiceNow, and Workday combined. Hyperscaler capex tracking to $700 billion+ this year alone.

Trump's approval slide. CBS/YouGov: 41 in January, 40 in February, 39 in March, 38 in April, 37 in May. A real, slow, monotonic decline.

Noise That Didn't Matter

The Musk verdict. The jury unanimously rejected Elon Musk's claims against Sam Altman, finding the case fell outside the statute of limitations. Pirate Wires caught the right note: "well that was disappointing," after months of discovery and dumped texts produced no revelations. The IPO calendar is the actual Altman story.

CBS's Beijing logistical debacle, encore. Lincoln Square's Jennifer Schulze caught CBS sending Tony Dokoupil to Taiwan to cover the Xi-Trump summit, a thousand miles from the actual summit in Beijing. Colbert's line on the same night: "CBS News: when events happen, we're at most one country away." The fifth straight week of sub-4-million CBS Evening News viewers suggests the audience has already adjusted.

The "in no hurry" Iran posturing. Trump telling reporters he won "all races last night" while postponing a previously unannounced attack was loud and content-free. The bond market priced the inflation; the Oman-Iran toll negotiation priced the strait. Both did more work than any presidential quote.

Three Takeaways from the Week

The corruption story changed shape, and that is the part to track. A $1.776 billion payout with a brand name and a press release is not a scandal that leaked, it is a policy that was announced. When Paul Krugman, the Bulwark editorial board, Rick Wilson twice in one day, Crooked, Lincoln Square, Gov Brief, Popular Information, JVL, Pfeiffer, and Beutler all reach for the same frame inside 72 hours, the political environment has moved. JVL's "Turn" thesis names what every other writer is circling. The recess starts Monday, which means the Senate spine has an expiration date.

The AI conversation got a number attached for the first time in a year. Anthropic's projected $559 million operating profit on $10.9 billion in Q2 revenue landed in the same news cycle as SpaceX's $1.75 trillion S-1, Nvidia's parabolic earnings, and OpenAI's leaked IPO prep. That is the moment the unwind, if it comes, stops being a venture story and becomes a retirement-account story. Pair it with the data center backlash framework Ben Thompson set, the Permanent Underclass language Guillermo Flor surfaced, and the Karpathy and Stainless moves at Anthropic, and a coherent picture forms: the durable economic value is migrating up from the model layer to the orchestration layer at the exact moment the politics of the buildout becomes the binding constraint.

If you only read three pieces from the week, I would suggest Eric Newcomer on SpaceX's orbital data centers for the dominant capital-markets trade, JVL's "Trump Takes the Turn" for the cleanest single read on what the regime change looks like in real time, and Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor's takedown of Google's $916 operating system claim for the most useful piece of AI skepticism written this year. The week told me three things in sequence: the corruption finally stopped hiding, the compute trade priced itself for retail, and the agent buildout met its first political ceiling. Those are the three frames I am carrying into next week.