Orbits, Odds, & Offerings

📈 Portfolio Pulse

🧠 OpenAI: A $1.2 Trillion Ask, Politely Deferred

Investors approached OpenAI about a pre-IPO private round at more than $1.2T, roughly 41% above the $852B mark set in March. The talks are early, and the investors started them, not the company. Reporting suggests OpenAI is holding out for $1.5T. Altman ruled out a 2026 listing, calling now an "ill-advised moment" to go public. Meanwhile OpenAI is the last defendant standing in Musk's Texas antitrust case after X Corp and SpaceXAI dismissed Apple with prejudice, no reason given. Every quarter it stays private, the secondary market prices the largest private asset in tech.

🦾 Anthropic: Nvidia at the Door, Trump at the Gate

Nvidia is in talks to anchor Anthropic's IPO with up to $10B, against a raise reportedly as large as $100B at roughly a $2T valuation, with a listing targeted before the November midterms. Nothing is final. Novo Nordisk signed on to test Claude Science across specific R&D workflows, no terms disclosed. Then Monday, Trump called the doom case a hoax, said Amodei is "pretending to be a 'perfect little angel,'" and reminded everyone the government holds "tremendous CRIMINAL and REGULATORY power over these companies." Safety-first was a commercial asset. It just became a procurement risk.

🚀 SpaceX: Orbit, Finally, With Cargo Aboard

Starship Flight 14 is set for September 22, the first orbital attempt in fourteen flights, carrying 26 production Starlink V3 satellites to a 275km orbit, six revolutions, Pacific splashdown. No tower catch. CFO Bret Johnsen calls it the first revenue-generating Starship flight, and used the same appearance to disclose a new AI compute hosting deal worth $1.11B a month from December 1, about $13B in added ARR, customer undisclosed. Falcon also flew its 700th mission Sunday, completing SES's 13-satellite O3b mPOWER constellation. Capex turns into capacity.

📊 Kalshi: A Billion-Dollar NFL Week, Almost

Kalshi cleared $983.18M in NFL volume for the week ending September 13, up 1,288% week over week off the season's first full slate, with $3.26B in sports contracts and $12.98B across all markets. It also wants roughly 60 perpetual futures on single stocks and ETFs including TSLA, AAPL and NVDA. That needs both the SEC and the CFTC, since single-stock futures are jointly regulated, and CME is already suing the CFTC over Kalshi's crypto perps. The volume is real. The perimeter is still being drawn.

₿ Kraken: A Trade Button Inside the Feed

X launched its US Cashtag Partner Program with Kraken, Coinbase, Gemini, Interactive Brokers and Moomoo. Tap $BTC or $NVDA and a Trade button routes you to your chosen partner to execute. X never touches the order, and the earlier trade-free version already drove an estimated $1B in volume. Kraken separately launched xStocks vaults, showing estimated net yields of 2% on tokenized SPYx and QQQx and 1.8% on NVDAx, lent through Kamino on Solana with Veda and Sentora running the strategies. Distribution at the top of the funnel is the scarce asset in retail crypto.

🛡️ Anduril: Fury Picks Up the Ground Mission

Anduril released imagery of the YFQ-44A Fury fit checked with 500-pound JDAMs and a twin rack of GBU-39/B Small Diameter Bombs, alongside integration work on low-cost cruise missiles, targeting pods, 2.75-inch rocket pods and its own Barracuda 500. Worth being precise: a fit check is not a weapons test, and nothing has been released from a Fury in flight. The same airframe now lines up for counter-air, counter-UAS, counter-cruise-missile and air-to-ground. A swing-role Fury is a far easier aircraft to export, and export is where the volume is.

🧠 Perplexity: Buying Itself a Cost Structure

Perplexity signed a multi-year deal with Crusoe covering the full model lifecycle: frontier training on dedicated NVIDIA GB300 NVL72 clusters, then production serving through Crusoe Managed Inference, consolidating work that currently spans multiple clouds including AWS. Crusoe is putting Perplexity Enterprise Pro and Max in front of its own 1,800 employees. Days earlier, Perplexity brought its local-execution agent to Windows machines running NVIDIA RTX GPUs with 24GB or more of VRAM, where the work burns no Perplexity credits. One deal locks the input cost. The other moves it onto the user's GPU.

🧬 Paradromics: She Chose Her Own Words

The first participant implanted with Connexus, a Michigan woman living with motor neuron disease, used the implant for real-time speech and text: her own words, open-ended answers, and a live phone call with her grandchildren. The work runs under the Connect-One early feasibility study on an FDA-approved investigational device exemption. Paradromics also reported distinct neural signatures for attempted and imagined speech, the second of which needs no physical attempt at all. Unscripted is the line between a research device and a clinical product.

👀 Watch List

🚁 Zipline: Asking for 220,000 Drone Deliveries a Day

The FAA opened comment on a draft environmental assessment that would authorize Zipline across five Texas metros, Houston, San Antonio, Austin, Amarillo and El Paso, at up to 220,000 drone deliveries a day. The package covers 220 Chargers, 4,400 Dropboxes and a ceiling of 660,000 flight legs a day across 17,584 square miles, around the clock. The Dallas-Fort Worth authorization signed last December allowed 75 sites at 400 deliveries each, 30,000 total. Comments close October 11. The regulatory ceiling, not the hardware, has always been the binding constraint on drone delivery economics.

🐉 ByteDance: $29.6B at 68 Basis Points

ByteDance signed a $29.6B syndicated loan with 28 banks, upsized from a $20B ask and now the second-largest dollar loan in Asia this year behind SoftBank's $40B bridge. Three years with an option to stretch to five, unsecured, priced at 68 basis points over SOFR. Fifteen Chinese lenders supplied $18.9B, 64% of the facility, with ICBC in for $3B. Reports put ByteDance's 2026 AI infrastructure budget as high as $70B. The debt market is underwriting Chinese AI capex at near investment-grade terms. US labs are funding the same buildout with equity.

💳 Ramp: First Stop Outside North America

Ramp launched in the UK on September 15, its first market beyond North America, with cards, expenses, bill pay, procurement, travel and treasury on one platform, a London team and Visa on the card. The payments authorization came with its acquisition of Billhop, which carried licenses in both the UK and the EU, and ElevenLabs signed on as a customer. Ramp says more than 70,000 companies use it globally. Exporting a spend-intelligence wedge is a different business than exporting a card.

💬 Prompt

What can I help you with?

Pick a regulation that exists today. Describe the trillion-dollar company that becomes possible the day it changes, and tell me who is already quietly positioned for that day.

📚 Content

🛰️ Musk Puts a Date on Orbital Compute

"I am highly confident that SpaceX will be launching Nvidia NVL72 AI computers in space next year." Ten thousand likes and 710K views inside a day, because a delivery window is a different thing than a thought experiment. Every power, cooling and transformer bottleneck we have been reading about on the ground is the reason this pitch keeps getting louder.

🛡️ Autonomy Breaks How We Buy Weapons

The best thing in Marvin Liao's Sunday reads is the argument that once you take the human out, sustainment collapses. A weapon stops behaving like a fighter jet you maintain for thirty years and starts behaving like a phone you replace every two. That kills the one-contractor-for-a-generation model, which is the entire opening Anduril and Saronic are walking through. Also in the pile: FPV drones now account for roughly 60% of casualties in Ukraine. Worth your lunch break.

📖 Colossus Drops "Mark"

Jeremy Stern spent nearly a year on this profile of Zuckerberg, framed as the head of history's largest nonterritorial empire who is somehow still a prisoner of his rivals. Patrick O'Shaughnessy put his phone on airplane mode to read it and called it one of the best profiles he has ever read. There is a 2-hour audio version if you would rather listen on a walk. Add it to the queue.

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