My mid-week morning reads:
• SpaceX: Here’s What You Get For $1.75 Trillion: The largest IPO in history. Here are the numbers that matter. A clean bottoms-up breakdown of the SpaceX IPO valuation by segment — launch, Starlink, contracts, “AI infrastructure.” Useful for the math beneath the headline. (Fiscal.ai)
• How Prediction Markets and Crypto Firms Steamrolled a Watchdog Agency: The NYT on the CFTC’s quiet capitulation to Polymarket and the broader crypto bloc. The cop on the beat got bought, lobbied, and reorganized; the only surprise is how openly. (New York Times) see also Stealth Deregulation & Institutional Decay: Dave Nadig with a sharp piece on how regulatory rollback is happening through staffing cuts, missed deadlines, and quiet non-enforcement rather than headline rule changes. The decay is the policy. (Dave Nadig)
• The Secret Team Blowing Up Ford’s Assembly Line to Make a $30,000 Electric Truck: 3 a.m. tests and culture clashes: The automaker brought together Silicon Valley techies and industry misfits in a quest to beat China at EVs. (Wall Street Journal)
• Why strong corporate earnings may not be quite what they appear: Axios on the gap between headline EPS at the Mag 7 and the actual cash generation once you back out share-based comp, capex, and one-offs. Worth re-reading every earnings season. (Axios)
• How to Adapt When Clients Know More Than Ever: ThinkAdvisor interviewing Ben Carlson on advising clients who already have podcasts, spreadsheets, and opinions. The job description for our industry keeps shifting, and Ben is one of the few writing honestly about it. (ThinkAdvisor)
• The end of the internet’s golden age. Axios with a tidy summary of what just ended: search referral traffic, social distribution, the open-web business model. Pair with the TechCrunch “Search as you know it” piece from last week. (Axios)
• The Apartment Megamerger That Shows Landlords Are in Trouble: Equity Residential and AvalonBay’s $69 billion deal follows years of weak profits and slow to no rent growth. A defensive REIT merger that says more about the multifamily cycle than any earnings call. Cap rates, rent growth, the works. (Wall Street Journal) see also These Parents Are Buying Homes for Their Kids — With Strings Attached: The WSJ on the structures wealthier families are using to underwrite kids’ first homes without simply handing over the cash — trusts, shared-equity deals, formal IOUs. Useful for clients wrestling with the same. (Wall Street Journal)
• One-and-Done Heart Disease Prevention? Scientists Show It May Be Possible. A single infusion of an experimental gene-editing drug seemed to reduce LDL long-term in a small trial. The results may point to something “curative,” one expert said. The LDL-lowering gene therapy that, if it scales, makes statins look quaint. Still early but the trial data is unusually clean. Scientists Show It May Be Possible. (New York Times)
• How the Knicks built an NBA Finals team: Patience, restraint and Jalen Brunson.The journey to this moment, all of New York spellbound by a basketball team that doesn’t seem to ever lose anymore, began years ago. Before the Knicks tore through the Eastern Conference with blowout after blowout. Before the trades for Karl-Anthony Towns, Mikal Bridges, OG Anunoby or Josh Hart. Before the team’s captain, star guard Jalen Brunson, ever arrived. The Athletic on the front-office choices behind the Knicks’ Finals run. A nice corrective to the “tank and pray” theory of roster construction. (The Athletic)
• Sonny Rollins, Jazz’s Saxophone Colossus and Greatest Improvisor, Dead at 95: Rolling Stone’s obit for Sonny Rollins. Alongside his own pioneering albums as band leader, Rollins also recorded with Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, and the Rolling Stones, contributing the sax solo to “Waiting on a Friend.” A good moment to put on Saxophone Colossus and the Williamsburg Bridge solos and just sit there. (Rolling Stone)
Video of the day: Why Did Humans Evolve To Be So Weak?
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Vimal Kapur, CEO and Chairman of DJIA component Honeywell International. The firm is in the midst of dividing into three companies: Honeywell Automation, Honeywell Aerospace, and Solstice Advanced Materials. The firm has fully integrated AI as the intelligence layer in all of its automation processes and products.
Change in Fed call: pushing cuts out to 2H 2027
Source: BofA Global Research
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