📈 Memory chip shortages will last beyond 2026, Micron says

🖱 Micron and SK Hynix report that all memory supply for this year is already booked. The main buyers are AI data centers. PC and smartphone makers are now negotiating allocations for periods after 2026.

🖱 Chinese outlet Jiemian reports that Xiaomi, Oppo, and Transsion have cut 2026 smartphone shipment targets due to rising memory costs. Oppo reduced its target by 20%.

🖱 Micron is expanding production in the US and Asia, but new capacity will come online gradually from 2027 to 2030. AI demand is pulling the supply curve forward.

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🔥 2026 could trigger the largest IPO wave since 2019

🖱 OpenAI, Anthropic, and SpaceX are taking early steps toward going public. OpenAI is valued near $500B, Anthropic is in talks around $350B, and SpaceX was last valued at $800B.

🖱 Even one of these listings would rank among the biggest IPOs ever. Together, they would reopen public markets for AI after years of private funding dominance.

🖱 The driver is capital intensity. AI companies now spend tens of billions on compute and infrastructure. Private rounds keep growing, but public markets offer scale in one move.

After a long IPO drought, Wall Street is preparing for deals that could reset expectations for tech listings.

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Assets under management at BlackRock

Last year, BlackRock recorded a record inflow of new capital.

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"The more you learn, the more you'll earn."

- Warren Buffett

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🔽 Meta’s metaverse bet cost about $73B and never scaled

🖱 Reality Labs was meant to move social interaction into Horizon Worlds, grow to 1B users, and create a massive digital commerce layer. Early stats looked promising, but usage stalled and criticism piled up.

🖱 Revenue crossed $1B per quarter only twice. Horizon has about 60M total downloads since 2018. Daily sessions per US user rose slightly, but nowhere near mass adoption. Developer fees reached 47.5%, higher than Apple or Google.

🖱 By late 2025 Meta cut spending, shut VR studios, froze Supernatural content, closed Horizon Workrooms, and began layoffs. Resources are now shifting toward AI and wearables.

🖱 The metaverse idea is not fully abandoned, but the focus moved to smartphones and smart glasses. Ray Ban Meta glasses revenue tripled in 2025.

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⚪️ An era ends for Sony televisions

🖱 Sony signed a memorandum with TCL to form a TV and home audio joint venture controlled by TCL at 51%. Sony keeps 49%. The new company will run the full stack, from design and manufacturing to sales, logistics, and service. Final deals are planned by March, with launch targeted for April 2027.

🖱 Sony and Bravia branding stay. What changes is control. TCL brings scale, vertical integration, and cost efficiency. Sony contributes its image and sound processing tech developed over decades.

🖱 Lower costs for Bravia look likely. TCL also gains direct access to Sony know how. For Sony, this is a clear step back from owning the TV business it once defined.

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🔥 OpenAI targets its first hardware launch in late 2026

🖱 OpenAI says it is on track to unveil its first device in the second half of 2026, according to policy chief Chris Lehane speaking at Axios House Davos. No product details were shared and a retail launch is not yet confirmed.

🖱 CEO Sam Altman has hinted at a new kind of AI device since OpenAI acquired a company founded by former Apple design lead Jony Ive. Reports point to small, screenless hardware, possibly wearable, built around simple interaction rather than apps.

🖱 Lehane said devices are a key focus for 2026, with more information expected later in the year. For now, the timeline signals intent, not a finished product.

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The biggest advantage you can have as an investor is being deeply comfortable with high levels of uncertainty.

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💰 Trump family wealth is now heavily tied to crypto

A Bloomberg analysis puts the family’s net worth at about $6.8B. Around $1.4B of that was added from crypto over the past year, making digital assets close to 20% of total wealth for the first time.

Crypto became the main growth engine:

🖱 World Liberty Financial sold about $550M in tokens, generating roughly $390M for the family
🖱 Founder tokens worth about $3.8B remain locked and excluded from the estimate
🖱 A Trump-branded memecoin is valued at about $280M after liquidity discounts
🖱 American Bitcoin, launched with Hut 8, still leaves Eric Trump’s stake at about $114M despite an 82% share drop

Other parts of the empire moved in the opposite direction:

🖱 Trump Media shares fell 66% over 12 months
🖱 New ventures were announced across prediction markets, crypto funds, defense, and even fusion
🖱 The company remains unprofitable

The family’s balance sheet now moves with crypto markets as much as with property cycles.

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📣 Details emerge behind the Thinking Machines breakup

🖱 At the AI startup founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, two co-founders and several employees left within days. Public explanations conflicted. Reporting since then paints a messier picture.

🖱 Thinking Machines launched in late 2024 after Murati pulled dozens of engineers from OpenAI. The company raised money at a $12B valuation and has a single product, Tinker, a tool for configuring open-source models. At the same time, Murati has been trying to raise a new round at around $50B.

🖱 According to Wired and WSJ, the departures involved internal trust issues, disputes over technical control, personal relationships inside the team, and parallel talks with Meta and OpenAI. One co-founder was fired, then quickly rehired elsewhere.

The timing matters. The exits land while fundraising is ongoing and questions around product direction remain unresolved.

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A headline about Tesla in 2013.

Shares have since risen by 6,173%.

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🔍 Nvidia linked to pirated books used for AI training

A controversial story has surfaced around Nvidia and the use of pirated book datasets to train AI models.

In early 2024, a group of authors sued Nvidia, claiming the company trained models on Books3, a known pirated dataset containing hundreds of copyrighted books. Nvidia responded at the time that this fell under fair use.

The case is still ongoing, but a new filing has added fresh detail. Newly revealed correspondence shows contact between an Nvidia employee and Anna’s Archive, a large shadow library hosting pirated books and academic papers.

What the messages show:

🖱 An Nvidia data strategy employee asked Anna’s Archive what content was available and how to get fast access to a large book corpus

🖱 Anna’s Archive explicitly warned Nvidia that the data was illegally sourced and asked whether the employee had internal approval to use it

🖱 About a week later, Nvidia management reportedly approved the request, citing competitive pressure

🖱 Access was then granted

The exact scale and payment details are unknown, but reports estimate the dataset at roughly 500 terabytes, potentially millions of books.

The situation may go further. The plaintiffs claim Nvidia likely used other shadow libraries such as LibGen, Sci-Hub, and Z-Library, and may have distributed internal scripts allowing corporate clients to automatically download similar datasets. These claims have not yet been proven.

The lawsuit continues.

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❓ What’s going on with the money at OpenAI

Over the past few days, headlines around OpenAI finances have intensified. The core narrative is simple. Cash burn is accelerating, and the gap between costs and revenue keeps widening.

Here is what the numbers say.

🖱 The Information reports, citing internal forecasts, that OpenAI could lose $14–17B in 2026. That is roughly three times higher than earlier estimates. By the end of 2028, cumulative net cash outflow could reach $44B, based on internal documents.

🖱 Deutsche Bank is more pessimistic. Their estimate puts total negative cash flow before profitability at $143B. They note that no startup in history has operated at losses of this scale. Around $15M per day is reportedly spent on Sora alone.

🖱 Even under optimistic assumptions, cumulative spending by the end of the decade could approach $200B. That assumes the company keeps operating without disruption.

🖱 Based on the current balance sheet, cash would run out around mid-2027. This does not factor in the $134B lawsuit filed by Elon Musk.

🖱 Against this backdrop, investor George Noble publicly criticized OpenAI, saying the company is “falling apart” and advising AI founders to sell near peak hype, while investors reduce exposure to the AI trade.

🖱 A near-term cash crunch still looks unlikely. Sam Altman is currently raising around $50B at a reported valuation of $750–830B, according to Bloomberg. Talks are largely with Middle East investors.

The real issue is not access to capital today. It is scale. If revenue does not grow by an order of magnitude while costs keep compounding, even very large checks only buy time.

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📹 TikTok in the US is now officially American-controlled

The sale of TikTok’s US business was approved by both the US and Chinese governments. The asset was valued at $14B, with additional fees paid to the US government for brokering the deal.

Ownership after the transaction:
🖱 New US investors hold 50%, including Oracle and Revolution
🖱 Existing investors retain 30.1%
🖱 ByteDance keeps 19.9%

The company will be run by Adam Presser, currently deputy CEO of global TikTok.

Structurally, this resolves years of regulatory pressure. TikTok’s US operations now sit under American control, while the product and brand stay intact.

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💰 OpenAI wants a cut of what its models help create

OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar said the company is exploring business models beyond subscriptions. The reason is cost. Compute spending keeps rising, and flat fees do not scale with outcomes.

What OpenAI is considering:
🖱 Commerce layer fees from purchases made directly inside ChatGPT
🖱 Discovery layer participation tied to value created with its models

The second part is the shift. In some cases, OpenAI would take a share of intellectual property or future revenue. One example mentioned was drug discovery, where an AI-generated molecule could trigger a claim on patent value or sales.

This would not apply to regular users. The focus is enterprise contracts in areas like pharmaceuticals or energy, where AI output has direct commercial value.

The model moves OpenAI closer to revenue sharing based on results, not usage.

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Value of $5,000 invested 15 years ago:

🖱Nvidia: $1,650,000
🖱Tesla: $1,455,844
🖱Broadcom: $587,824
🖱Lam: $222,916
🖱Micron: $200,666
🖱KLA: $179,635
🖱ASML: $177,594
🖱AMD: $168,521
🖱Netflix: $159,942
🖱Amazon: $132,339
🖱Alphabet: $108,312
🖱Apple: $107,320
🖱Applied Mat: $106,372
Microsoft: $80,500

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This chart looks obvious in hindsight.

But living through it wasn’t easy.

Microsoft survived missed cycles, brutal bear markets, antitrust lawsuits, bad products, leadership changes, and years where the stock went nowhere.

Most investors would’ve sold long before the payoff.

This is what real compounding actually looks like - slow, frustrating, boring… until suddenly it isn’t.

The question isn’t “could you buy Microsoft?”

It’s could you have held it?

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“i have no faith in this company for good reason. anyways….who would like to pay for it?”

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Finding a high-paid job in the US now looks statistically brutal

🖱 The odds sit around 0.000029%, roughly 1 in 3,400,000. That is the implied probability based on current openings versus demand.

🖱 For context, becoming a unicorn company is estimated at about 0.00006%, or 1 in 1,700,000.

By the numbers, creating thousands of jobs is more likely than landing one of the top ones.

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"For quality of life, it is better to err on the side of being an optimist and wrong, rather than a pessimist and right"

- Elon Musk

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