Dirt, Dogs, & Disclosures

📈 Portfolio Pulse

🧠 Anthropic: The S-1 Leaks Out

A draft S-1 leaked to the WSJ shows $16.3B in first-half revenue against an $80.7B net loss, with computing commitments that could reach $750B, including deals still in negotiation. Anthropic is expected to IPO before Thanksgiving. Ahead of the listing, it committed 5% of its shares to a new Public Benefit Fund, bringing roughly 20% of the company to the public good once founder and employee pledges are counted. It is reportedly in talks with Nscale on a second data center deal valued around $45B. On product, it launched Claude Duet, an Opus 5.5 agent app in research preview that asks before it pays, signs, or sends. One crack: Replit made OpenAI its default, though Claude stays on the menu. The demand is real. So is the bill.

🚀 SpaceXAI: Profitable & Eyeing Tesla

SpaceX reported $14.6B in Q3 revenue and $4.4B in net income. The Super Intelligence segment, home to Grok, Cursor, and the neocloud, brought in $7.5B, and AI now makes up 52% of income. Capex hit $19.6B, and the CFO guided to $35B to $40B in Q4 as Colossus II comes online. On the call, Musk said both boards have formed special committees to look at a combination with Tesla. A day earlier, he pledged one of his SpaceX shares to every kid in America next year, worth around $10.7B at Friday's close. The next Starship flight, expected in November, will try to recover both stages. The rocket company now reports like an AI company.

🤖 OpenAI: Every Cloud, Plus Biotech

OpenAI is bringing its frontier models and Codex to Google Cloud, starting in private preview in Model Garden with purchases through Google Cloud Marketplace. That puts its models on all three of the biggest US clouds. It also acquired Orchestra Bio, folding the team and technology into Rosalind, its life-sciences model, and the Rosalind Workbench tool. Moderna and Novo Nordisk are already Rosalind customers, per Quartz and TechCrunch. Neutral on distribution. Vertical on science.

📊 Kalshi: Bring Back the GPU Market

Kalshi is asking the CFTC for permission to re-list compute derivatives, which would let users trade on the future cost of renting GPUs. The markets came down earlier this year after a reported Commerce Department order, which Commerce denied giving. Closer to the ground, an Oklahoma tribal leader says Kalshi was duped by an impostor with no authority to sign a deal, while Kalshi says the deal is still on. And Google now blocks prediction market ads in Connecticut, Michigan, Nevada, New York, and Ohio. Compute is the new oil. Kalshi wants to run the pit.

🔍 Perplexity: Giving Away the Sandbox

Perplexity made SPACE, its AI agent sandbox, open source, with CoreWeave, Akamai, and Crusoe signed on to offer it to customers. It tested SPACE by telling nine frontier models to break out. In 118 tries, none did. Separately, Perplexity Computer now runs fully locally on a Mac for Pro, Max, and Enterprise subscribers, on Qwen 3.6 or a post-trained version of it, with 36GB of memory or more recommended. Open-source the jail. Sell the agents.

🦎 Gecko Robotics: Navy Ceiling Hits $300M

The Navy and GSA raised the ceiling on Gecko’s contract to $300M, more than quadrupling the original $71M award six months after it was announced. The work targets ship maintenance delays and fleet readiness. Gecko says its robots and AI can save the Navy up to $8M in repair costs per ship and find structural issues up to 50 times faster than traditional methods. MarineLink notes the $300M is the maximum potential value, not guaranteed spend. Six months from award to 4x. The Pentagon rarely moves that fast.

💊 Varda: Third Launch This Month

Varda's W-7 launched into orbit on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rideshare from Cape Canaveral to study cancer-drug crystallization in space. It is the company's third launch this month and fourth of 2026. Per Axios, Varda plans seven launches in 2027. Orbit used to be a science project. Varda is turning it into a schedule.

🏦 Erebor: Robinhood Buys In

Robinhood Ventures Fund I bought $30M of preferred stock in Erebor. The bank also launched an Opportunity Initiative with a $20M first commitment to financial institutions in its hometown of Columbus, starting with minority-owned Adelphi Bank. Former HUD Secretary Marcia Fudge will chair it. Erebor has passed $8B in assets after opening in early 2026. Year one, and the retail crowd is already buying in.

👀 Watch List

🐕 Warhound: Engineered War Dogs, Anduril Gear

Warhound, the company Colossal’s Ben Lamm and Palmer Luckey dreamed up together, came out of stealth with $200M at a $1.2B valuation. Its backers include In-Q-Tel, Sequoia, and 8VC. The plan is to gene-edit Belgian Malinois and German Shepherd lines for health, longevity, and sharper noses for bomb detection. Anduril builds sensor-laden vests and goggles for the dogs and their handlers. Luckey is a partner, not a shareholder. More than 80% of the US military’s working dogs come from Europe, and less than half of them are fit for service. The first cloned dogs are expected early next year.

🔥 Crusoe: $700M to Buy Its Own Power

Crusoe and Neuberger Specialty Finance announced a $700M facility to buy power generation equipment for Crusoe-built and Crusoe-owned AI data centers, with the gas generators themselves as collateral. It follows a $3.9B Series F in September at a $30.9B post-money valuation, and Crusoe says it has more than 6 GW of gross AI infrastructure capacity under contract. Debt, not equity. When the grid can't keep up, you finance your own.

💬 Prompt

What can I help you with?

I just bought or am about to buy [house, car, boat, big appliance]. Act like someone who’s owned ten of them. What breaks first, what should I check in the first 30 days, what’s worth paying a pro for, and what can I learn to do myself

📚 Content

🚇 Field Trip: Boring Co in Bastrop

This week we drove to Bastrop, Texas, 45 minutes outside Austin, to spend time with The Boring Company. A few years ago it was bare farmland. Now it’s one of the busiest construction sites we’ve ever seen.

Across the street from Boring, three buildings of more than 1M square feet each are going up. One will make Tesla Powerwalls and is still under construction. One is where Starlink satellites are assembled, and it’s already built. The third, also under construction, is for the data center satellites that will one day go to space. Hundreds of dump trucks, hundreds of cement trucks, and hundreds of people were working hard.

The tunneling numbers are hard to ignore. Prufrock, Boring’s tunneling machine, digs about a mile a month at roughly $12M to $15M per mile. Traditional machines manage about a mile a year and cost 20x or more. About 80% of the process is automated and 20% is still done by hand, well ahead of anyone else in the industry. Every tunnel is waterproof. Boring owns the whole stack, from the concrete company that pours the structure to the machines and even the trucks that haul the dirt out.

What stuck with us most was the team. Everyone shares the same sense of mission, which is rare and refreshing. They’re hiring trades from schools across the Austin area: people who want to turn bits into atoms.

Texas keeps pulling in the companies that build hard things, and each one that lands makes the next one easier to recruit.

We got an in-depth tour, but we could only take photos in approved areas. Here are a few.

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