← Weekly

2026-W18

Big 4 earnings, spirit, dinosaurs, Taiwan — plus Skills go public

Released in CHANGELOG: v2.6.0→

2026-04-27 → 2026-05-03

Texas ranch pilot, Foundry v0.4, 71 Claude Code skills published, and a deep podcast week: Stripe economy index, METR time horizons, dinosaurs as an asset class, Taiwan silicon shield, and Pershing Square PSUS IPO.

TL;DR · the week in 40 points

8 items

May 2Stripe Sessions

Stripe Sessions keynote: AI replatforming global trade, agentic commerce, and the Solow Paradox

  • ~5M Americans now earn a living solo; AI is letting the $100k+ cohort scale without hiring.
  • Modern AI startups on Stripe go globally-native — median firm earns most of its revenue internationally in year one.
  • Tempo CLI + stablecoin micro-payments bypass fiat rails — agentic commerce at the infra layer.
  • When intelligence is cheap, its complements (proprietary data, network effects, physical moats) accrue value.
  • Solow Paradox: the productivity dividend lags structural replatforming — we're still in the replatforming phase.
May 2Odd Lots

Odd Lots: KMT vs DPP, the silicon shield, and why China cannot win a land invasion yet

  • Xi needs reunification for political legitimacy — predates and supersedes the semiconductor story.
  • China has built shock absorbers (oil, cotton, chip stockpiles); the ruble playbook is the model for sanction-shock survival.
  • "Avalanche decoupling" — gradual sectoral de-risking — beats attempting total decoupling in a crisis.
  • DPP = US-aligned Taiwanese identity, KMT = one-China framing — the domestic split shapes how Taiwan responds.
  • Sea warfare cascades faster than land — early naval losses can structurally collapse Chinese capability.
May 2Odd Lots

Odd Lots: METR time horizon charts — measuring AI autonomy and the 4-month doubling rate

  • "Time horizon" = task difficulty in human-hours, NOT clock time the model can run for.
  • 50% success threshold chosen for statistical stability; 99% reliability needs vastly larger samples and is label-noise-sensitive.
  • Capabilities doubling ~every 4 months; committed compute makes near-term deceleration unlikely.
  • Charts measure capability ceiling, not deployment reality — messy codebases, human verification, collab overhead are uncaptured.
  • Baptist-and-bootlegger dynamic: the labs warning loudest are the ones building the systems — METR neutrality is the answer.
May 2Odd Lots

Odd Lots: dinosaurs as an alternative asset class — provenance, bone maps, and pre-buys

  • Stan T-Rex ($31M) and Apex Stegosaurus ($45M) reset pricing from low-millions to tens-of-millions.
  • "Bone maps" quantify % real bone vs resin/3D-printed — the primary fraud vector and provenance authenticator.
  • Pre-buy strategy: sovereign-wealth and institutional buyers fund excavation before pieces surface.
  • US-only specimens on private land are the only clean-title path — legal status varies by country.
  • Collectible first, investment second — high maintenance, low liquidity, no historical return data.
May 2YouTube

Bill Ackman on PSUS: closed-end fund IPO, permanent capital, and the Berkshire insurance float model

  • Closed-end structure chosen for tax efficiency + flexibility — Ackman runs PSUS like an investment holding company.
  • No incentive fees → lowest-cost Pershing Square vehicle across all their offerings.
  • Permanent capital model: grow primarily through long-duration NAV compounding, no redemption pressure.
  • Vantage Holdings insurer modeled on Buffett-style insurance float — patient capital deployed into equities.
  • Track record: 19% ROE over 22 years, 24.9% over 8 years of permanent capital.
May 3All-In

All-In: OpenAI missed targets, machine-vs-machine cybersecurity, Musk-Altman trial, hyperscaler capex, vibecoding risk, retatrutide

  • OpenAI missed 1B WAU + revenue targets — bottleneck is power/compute, not demand.
  • Cybersecurity is shifting to machine-vs-machine; GPT 5.5 ≈ Anthropic Mythos for white-hat work.
  • No "dark GPUs" — hyperscaler capex isn't a Cisco-2000 bubble; every chip is utilized on arrival.
  • Vibecoding cautionary tale: an AI agent deleted a prod codebase during a routine credential fix.
  • Retatrutide (GLP-1 + GIP + glucagon) shows real liver-fat reduction with muscle preserved.
May 3TBPN

TBPN live from Stripe Sessions: Collisons on agentic commerce, Atlas, Radar, Treasury, programmable money + stablecoins

  • 71% YoY growth in new businesses joining Stripe in Q1.
  • Stripe Atlas now incorporates 26% of new US C-corps.
  • Agentic commerce = agents purchasing domains, signing up for APIs, deploying infra autonomously.
  • Stablecoins are winning the working economy: cross-border, working capital, streaming pay.
  • Build products that are "legible to agents" — clean APIs, deterministic flows, machine-readable receipts.
May 3Money Stuff

Money Stuff: Ackman PSUS dual IPO, Bobby Jain unwind, Boaz Weinstein BDC tender, Avis squeeze + Section 16 dodge

  • PSUS dual IPO opened at ~20% discount despite Ackman's premium-to-NAV pitch.
  • IPO anchors got 3/10 of a management-co share; other PSUS buyers got 1/5.
  • Bobby Jain returns to Millennium — multi-strat economics only close at huge AUM (PMs want $50M cash now).
  • Boaz Weinstein BDC tender at ~65¢ filled <1% — non-traded holders refuse to mark to market.
  • Pentwater rode Avis $100→$700 and kept ~$1B by booking the sells out of separate longer-held funds, dodging Section 16 disgorgement.

Timeline · commits + curated notes

8 entries

  1. notePruned redundant learned/met cards that duplicated podcast modal content. Tagged each watched item with its log date and added day-tab filter to the grid. Each detail section now opens with a TL;DR paragraph + bullet summary.
  2. noteAdded 3 podcast entries: All-In (OpenAI/cyber/capex/vibecoding/retatrutide), TBPN live from Stripe Sessions (agentic commerce + Atlas/Radar/Treasury), Money Stuff (PSUS, Bobby Jain, Boaz Weinstein BDC, Avis short squeeze + Section 16). Tags expanded with the new namespaces.
  3. noteModal UX: clicking a watched item now opens a scrollable detail modal (react-markdown, ESC/X/backdrop to close) instead of jumping to a page anchor.
  4. noteBackfilled Thursday (Apr 30) deep-dive session across all 5 podcasts in learned rail.
  5. noteAdded Pershing Square PSUS entry. Expanded tags to 35. Full prose notes in body.
  6. noteAdded 4 podcast entries (Stripe, Taiwan, METR, Dinosaurs) with inline notes and anchor-linked detail sections.
  7. noteAdded explicit image overrides for the Karpathy thumb and Latent Space logo.
  8. noteInitial publish — rails, prose, and home-page surfacing.