Reactors, Rulings, & Rockets

📈 Portfolio Pulse

🚀 SpaceX: First Earnings, Next Catch

SpaceX held its first earnings call since June's $86B IPO at a $1.77T valuation. Q2 revenue hit $7.8B, up 92% from a year ago, with the net loss cut nearly in half to $541M. Starlink did about $4.3B of that, more than half the company. Musk says Starship's 14th flight goes up as soon as late August, aiming to catch the upper stage at the tower for the first time while dropping operational Starlink V3 satellites in orbit. He wants a flight a day within a year. Catch the ship and the economics change.

🧠 Anthropic: Google's $200B Chip Machine

Google structured roughly $200B in financing to keep Anthropic in compute, tied to chips and data centers and routed through a network of Wall Street lenders that keeps most of the risk off Google's own balance sheet. It is one more strand in a web that now runs through Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Nvidia, AMD, and Akamai, plus a fresh $10B deal with a newer cloud provider. The same week, the White House called Anthropic and OpenAI in to talk AI and cybersecurity. Nobody wires $200B for a hobby.

📊 Kalshi: $36B Target, Record Month

New York wants Kalshi gone. On July 31, AG Letitia James and Governor Hochul sued for roughly $36B, calling the CFTC-licensed market illegal gambling and flagging that 18-to-20-year-olds could trade sports contracts. Days earlier, a federal judge blocked Minnesota from enforcing its own ban, ruling that federal commodity law preempts the states. The fight is now a jurisdictional standoff. Meanwhile Kalshi processed $37.7B in July, a 74.5% share of all prediction-market volume and roughly 50x its haul a year ago. The states are suing the thing that is winning.

🛒 Perplexity: Agents Get a Green Light

The Ninth Circuit handed Perplexity a precedent that reaches well past Perplexity. On August 5, the court threw out Amazon's injunction against Comet, Perplexity's AI shopping agent, ruling that when an agent acts inside a user's own logged-in browser, it is the user, not a bot, accessing the site. That puts agentic browsing outside the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the law platforms lean on to wall off scrapers. Amazon wanted permission to be required. The court said the user already gave it. Every agent builder just got the same green light.

🔌 OpenAI: A Standard for Agents

OpenAI launched Agent Plugins, an open standard for packaging agent tools and skills into portable pieces that work across any compatible product. It shipped with a lineup that reads like a truce: AWS, Cursor, GitHub, Vercel, and OpenAI on the same masthead. The play is obvious. Own the format everyone builds agents in and you own the layer above the models. It landed almost exactly one year after GPT-5.

⚛️ Aalo Atomics: Nuclear Meets the AI Factory

Aalo and Crusoe are teaming up to build what they call the first nuclear-powered AI factory, sited at Idaho National Laboratory. Crusoe drops its Spark modular data center in 2027, with Aalo Pods and 50 MWe reactor plants fully deployed by the end of 2029. Aalo's first unit, Aalo-X, is a 10 MWe reactor that scales to a 50 MWe commercial system, and the company hit criticality on its test reactor back on July 4. AI needs power, and the power is going to sit right next to the compute. The grid just became optional.

🚢 Anduril: A Shipyard in Baltimore

Anduril is in advanced talks to turn part of the old Sparrows Point steelworks outside Baltimore, once Bethlehem Steel, into a factory for autonomous surface vessels. It has signed a memorandum of understanding with the operators of the 3,300-acre site, drawn by deep-water port access that lets you build ships and put them straight in the water. The investment could run into the hundreds of millions, though nothing is locked and Palmer Luckey has pushed back on parts of the reporting, so treat the details as fluid. Steel town in, drone navy out.

👀 Watch List

☢️ Valar Atomics: Sequoia Bets $1B on Reactors

Valar Atomics raised a $1B Series B at a $6B valuation, led by Sequoia's Shaun Maguire, to mass-produce small modular reactors for AI data centers. The pitch is factory-scale nuclear instead of one-off megaprojects, and the round follows Valar reportedly powering an Nvidia chip demo. It is one of the largest early-stage nuclear raises on record. When Sequoia leads a billion into reactors, the AI-power trade is no longer fringe.

🔋 Base Power: $13B to Rewire the Grid

Base Power raised another $1B at a $13B valuation, led by Ribbit, Addition, Valor, and JPMorgan's strategic arm, to put batteries in people's backyards and lean on them to steady the grid. Its Base Core unit holds 39.2 kWh, one or two per home, built in Austin and sold on a subscription: about $695 to install and $19 a month in Houston. Base is already dropping roughly 100 batteries a day, more than 500 MWh deployed, and wants to double that by year-end. The grid can't keep up, so Base is building a new one out of houses.

💬 Prompt

What can I help you with?

Based on everything you know about me, what movie character am I?

📚 Content

🏭 A Fab 50x the Pentagon

Nic Cruz Patane dropped a size comparison of the planned Terafab next to Tesla's Giga Texas, and Giga Texas looks like a shed. For scale, the finished building would be roughly 50x the size of the Pentagon. The largest building on Earth today is the New Century Global Center in Chengdu, Sichuan, a single complex packing a shopping mall, hotels, offices, and an indoor beach under one roof. Terafab would be more than 5x that. Whatever you think about an AI bubble, the physical buildout is running on a scale we have no reference point for.

🎙️ Founders Fund on Building Hard Things

Jack Altman's latest Uncapped brings on Trae Stephens and Delian Asparouhov from Founders Fund, the firm that turned defense and frontier hardware into a real venture category. Between Anduril and Varda, these two have lived the thesis, not just funded it. Worth the hour if you want the logic behind the whole hard-tech trade.

🤝 Skip Netflix, Learn to Negotiate

Rohit's pick: a one-hour Stanford lecture from Joel Peterson, JetBlue's chairman, on negotiation and getting what you want. In a business that runs on relationships and terms, that is a better hour than anything queued up tonight. Bookmark it.

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