Valuations today:

🖱 Apple: $4.1 trillion
🖱 Nokia: $40 billion

Valuations when iPhone launched:

🖱 Nokia: $110 billion
🖱 Apple: $104 billion

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“To be successful, you don't have to be special. You just have to be what most people aren't - consistent, determined and willing to work for it. No shortcuts."

~ Tom Brady

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🌐 How a $100 domain turned into a $70,000,000 sale

In 1993, Arsyan Ismail registered AI.com for $100. He was 10 years old. The letters matched his initials. He held the domain for 32 years.

Ismail built early internet projects in parallel. He released Orenscript as a teenager, shipped popular mIRC tools, launched a local social network, founded 1337 Tech, and became an early Bitcoin user with marketplace experiments.

Over time, AI.com became one of the rarest domains online. Two letters tied to the most valuable tech narrative. By 2023, it was redirecting between giants like ChatGPT and xAI, watched as a digital trophy.

In 2026, the sale closed. Crypto.com CEO Kris Marszalek bought AI.com for $70,000,000, paid fully in crypto. The deal was brokered by Larry Fischer.

$100 became $70M. Time did the work.


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💰 A $5k angel helped pull $700k into a seed round

🖱 In 2020, Freshpaint was raising its seed round when COVID hit. The company still closed $1.6M. One investor came in with a $5,000 check.

🖱 That angel introduced other angels. Those angels brought in more investors and funds. The chain that started with the $5k check delivered $700,000, about 43% of the round.

🖱 Freshpaint builds software that helps companies collect and analyze customer data, with an early focus on healthcare. Since then, it has raised two more rounds in 2022 and 2024, reaching $42M total.

Small checks can open big doors.

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❕ The AI trade is bigger than $NVDA

Everyone keeps framing AI as a single stock story. But the actual spend moves through a long supply chain.

Big Tech capex flows in stages. It does not go straight to GPUs.

🖱 Tools and equipment first
ASML
Lam Research
Applied Materials

🖱 Then the fabs that make the silicon
TSMC
Intel
GlobalFoundries

🖱 Then the real choke points
Broadcom
Marvell
Credo Technology
Amphenol
Coherent
Lumentum

🖱 Servers ship at the end
Super Micro Computer
Hewlett-Packard Enterprise
Dell

Many of these stocks trade as if AI spending slows soon. Capex plans across Big Tech point the other way.

The middle of the chain looks underwatched.

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The books you need to succeed

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✖️ Key engineers leave xAI as 2 co-founders walk out to launch a new startup

🖱 More than 10 well-known engineers and researchers have left xAI in the past 24 hours. Among them are two co-founders, Jimmy Ba and Yuhuai Wu.

🖱 In total, 6 of the company’s 12 co-founders have now exited within a few years of its launch. The latest group appears to be moving together. They hint at building something new and are already hiring, though no official details have been shared.

🖱 The departures are unfolding as xAI is being absorbed by SpaceX and faces investigations linked to Grok’s erotic content generation.

A young AI lab is losing half its founding bench while a new one forms next door.

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📈 Alphabet’s 2026 capex comes in above expectations

Alphabet plans capital spending in 2026 that exceeds market forecasts. The biggest cost driver is data center buildout for AI workloads across Google.

This is part of a wider push. Mark Zuckerberg has said Meta will allocate $125B to capex this year.

AI is pulling hyperscalers into a new spending cycle.

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“You can't make a good deal with a bad person.”

— Warren Buffett

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🚀 Musk lays out a 12–36 month roadmap across xAI, X and SpaceX

In the latest all-hands shared by xAI, X and SpaceX, Elon Musk outlined an aggressive plan.

Within 12–18 months, the goal is to reach “singularity” in code and model self-improvement. Over 12–36 months, the focus shifts to building digital humans and launching agent-driven digital businesses. X is expected to grow from 1B users to 4B, with its own chat system and payments layer.

In parallel, SpaceX plans more rockets, space-based data centers, a lunar city, later a Mars city, and even a lunar electromagnetic mass driver.

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Ⓜ️ Bill Ackman just revealed a position in $META.

Not because it’s “cheap.”
Because the business is compounding.

Meta isn’t just a social media company anymore:

🖱 3B+ users = unmatched ad scale
🖱 AI is lifting engagement and ad ROI
🖱 First-party data = pricing power
🖱 Cost discipline post “Year of Efficiency”
🖱 Heavy AI spend now → earnings leverage later

This is one of the clearest AI monetisation stories in big tech.

Ackman isn’t buying hype.
He’s buying the cash flow engine behind it.

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