Tokens, Terawatts, & Tickers

📈 Portfolio Pulse

🧠 OpenAI: The Ban Lifts, 5.6 Ships

Commerce Department reviewers lifted the pre-release restrictions on GPT-5.6, which had been limited to roughly 20 vetted partners, and OpenAI launched it globally on July 9 in three tiers, Sol, Terra, and Luna, priced from $1 to $5 per million input tokens. The bigger signal is the process: the first frontier model to enter Washington's national-security review came out the other side fully commercialized within weeks. And the tiered pricing is a direct answer to Grok and Claude on cost.

🤖 xAI: Grok 4.5, Priced to Fight

xAI, now shipping under the SpaceXAI banner, released Grok 4.5, its first model since going public, at $2 per million input tokens and $6 out. Elon pitches it as Opus-class but faster and more token-efficient, which makes it a straight pricing assault on Anthropic and OpenAI in the same week both moved. The catch: it lands against reportedly softening Grok app usage. Frontier capability is getting cheaper by the week. Margins are the next casualty.

⚡ Anthropic: 401 MW for 20 Years

Anthropic signed a 20-year lease with TeraWulf for a purpose-built 401 MW AI campus in Hawesville, Kentucky, worth roughly $19B in contracted revenue, with first capacity online in the second half of 2027 and a full ramp by early 2028. Compute is the input that gates frontier-model economics, and Anthropic just locked multi-decade supply years ahead of need, backed by investment-grade counterparties. Compute is the new real estate and Anthropic just signed a 20-year lease on it.

🚀 SpaceX: Index Money Arrives

SpaceX joined the Nasdaq-100 on July 7, fifteen trading days after its June 12 IPO, under the index's new fast-track rule for mega-listings. Inclusion forces roughly $4.3B of mechanical passive buying and puts SPCX in every QQQ account in America. The launch business kept moving too: a July 4 Falcon 9 carried two Besxar Space Industries test pods, reportedly part of a 12-flight booking to trial semiconductor substrate production in orbit. A month ago you needed access to own it. Now index funds are forced to.

⚛️ Aalo Atomics: Critical

Aalo demonstrated criticality on its Aalo-X test reactor at Idaho National Laboratory on July 6, the fourth advanced reactor to go critical under the DOE Reactor Pilot Program, pushing the program past its executive-order goal of three. Founding to fission in under three years, on the same full-scale core as its 10 MWe commercial design, with a stated 18-month path to a commercial Aalo Pod. Criticality is the gate to NRC authorization, and it lands exactly as compute buildout bottlenecks on firm power. Proud of this team. They pushed on every front to get here.

🛡️ Anduril: NATO Calls

NATO's communications agency selected Anduril's Lattice platform for its eAirC2 Data Platform initiative, a nine-month evaluation and Anduril's first direct NATO contract. The win opens a multinational European procurement channel beyond the US DoD, and a successful eval seeds far larger follow-on demand across allied air command and control. One evaluation, 32 countries watching.

⚖️ Kalshi: See You in the Second Circuit

An SDNY judge refused to block New York's enforcement action against Kalshi's sports contracts, and Kalshi filed its appeal to the Second Circuit on July 8. Sports is the company's highest-volume product, the engine behind a record June of roughly $31.5B in notional, so the stakes are not academic. The outcome sets precedent for the entire CFTC-versus-states fight across prediction markets. The product printing the volume is the one on trial.

👀 Watch List

🏗️ Crusoe: Tripling While Shipping

Crusoe is reportedly in talks to raise about $3B at a valuation near $30B, roughly triple its October mark, on the back of about 4.9 GW of contracted capacity across OpenAI, Oracle, Microsoft, and Meta. Same week, it launched Serverless Fine-Tuning and Self-Serve Inference on its Intelligence Foundry platform, climbing from energy-first data centers into higher-margin managed AI software. Reported, not closed. But nobody triples on vibes.

🌐 Vercel: The Toll Road

CEO Guillermo Rauch disclosed that Vercel now handles 6 million deployments a day, about half triggered by coding agents, with more than a trillion tokens a day flowing through its AI gateway as customers drop single-lab commitments to route across OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, and open models. Model-agnostic infrastructure is the position every lab war makes more valuable. The toll road gets paid no matter who wins the race.

💬 Prompt

What can I help you with?

Write the headline about my industry that will make me feel stupid for not seeing it coming in 2030. Then work backwards and tell me what's already visible today that points straight to it.

📚 Content

🕴 The Posting Class Runs the Show

Patrick O'Shaughnessy brings Jeremy Giffon back on Invest Like the Best for a wide swing at how narrative became the product: why billionaires quietly defer to the poster class, why so many white-collar jobs are made up, and the SPV system forming around access to private companies.

🏆 Why Winners Keep Winning

Eric Jorgenson, a friend of ours and someone we follow closely, just published the cleanest breakdown of preferential attachment you'll read: whoever is ahead pulls further ahead, because being ahead is the advantage. He traces the same mechanism from PageRank to Canadian youth hockey to "no one ever got fired for buying IBM," then lands it where we live, with a startup's lead compounding decision by decision and reputation starting the snowball. It's the physics behind every power-law outcome on the book. He's also an Aalo investor, so he's having a good week.

🪂 Playing It Safe Is Still a Risk

Leila Hormozi gets the whole go-for-it decision down to five lines. The sharpest: playing it safe is still a risk. Worst case, you survive. Best case is the whole point.

🤝 Get in the Room

Private investing for (almost) everyone*

We are a curated network of exceptional angels, VCs, family offices, founders, and industry experts investing in pre-IPO companies. We back sharp operators and high-leverage deals. We move fast. We bring value. We don’t miss around the edges. Deals don’t wait. Neither do we.

*Vibes and values must be aligned. Must be an "accredited investor."