2026-W20
KKR/FSK at NAV, SpaceXAI, and the EDA Primer — three primers on capital, compute, and silicon
2026-05-11 → 2026-05-17
Matt Levine on KKR's $300M FS KKR injection (half preferred-at-NAV, half tender-at-discount), the Virginia redistricting referendum that broke Kalshi's resolution rules, and OpenAI's $30M-per-head employee tender. Ben Thompson on the Anthropic-SpaceXAI deal and AI as a deployment-company business. SemiAnalysis's 13-stage RTL-to-silicon primer.
TL;DR · the week in 62 points
15 items
Money Stuff (Matt Levine): KKR Buys Back Some Private Credit — FS KKR, Virginia redistricting on Kalshi, OpenAI tender
- KKR puts $300M into FSK: $150M preferred at NAV ($18.83) + $150M tender at $11 — synthesises the two manager impulses.
- Apollo in talks to sell MFIC (BDC at ~85% NAV) to another publicly listed BDC in stock — BDC-on-BDC.
- VA redistricting passed 51.7% then nullified by VA Supreme Court; Kalshi resolved YES on accelerated 4-of-8-media rule.
- OpenAI tender: $30M cap per head, ~75 sold the max, 600+ participants, $6.6B total — old "rest and vest" line is gone.
- Private credit volume -14% Q1; bank corporate lending +12.7% (fastest since 2022) — banks de-re-tranching.
Money Stuff (Matt Levine): Nobody Can Read the Prospectus — white-on-white disclosures, Skechers appraisal, Segantii pre-hedging, live trading esports
- CSG IPO prospectus allegedly hid a €1.4B put-exercise disclosure in **white-on-white text** — visible to machines, invisible to humans. "Software glitch" defence.
- Skechers appraisal case: 3G bought at $63 (Sep 2025) but stock was $78.24 pre-Trump tariffs; 30% premium was to *post-crash* VWAP. Hedge funds with $1.3B challenged → settlement crept to $65.
- Segantii / BofA / Esprit: HK prosecutors call it illegal tipping; defendants call it pre-hedging. The legal line turns on whether the deal was mandated.
- Live trading esports at Church St Boxing Gym — Boredom Markets Hypothesis updates: trading itself became entertaining (drones, katana prize, $10K paper money).
- Soon all disclosures are read by computers; the future trick is hiding info from machines, not from humans.
Money Stuff (Matt Levine): Ryan Cohen Wants to Work at eBay — the activism reveal, Adani charges dropped, fund-formation fees
- eBay rejected the bid. Cohen wrote to chair Paul Pressler and announced he goes directly to shareholders — confirming this was always an activism play, not a takeover.
- Cohen on Pomp: "It's eBay, it's the one" + "I didn't want to be CEO of GameStop" — the $56B offer was a bizarre job application.
- Two paths to a CEO seat: activism (needs persuasiveness, little money) vs hostile takeover (needs money, little persuasion). Cohen has neither $56B nor a credible bid → stuck on activism, framed it as takeover for attention.
- Adani: DOJ dropping the 2024 bribery charges after Trump-tied lawyer Giuffra presented 100 slides + a $10B investment / 15,000 jobs pledge. Levine: "That's an incentive!"
- ILPA asks SEC to cap PE fund-formation legal/admin/compliance at $10M or 0.05% of fund target. Levine's counter-example: public M&A — buyer effectively pays for target's lawyers via closing proceeds.
Stratechery: SpaceX and Anthropic, xAI's Two Companies, Elon Musk and SpaceXAI's Future
- xAI dissolves into SpaceX as SpaceXAI — consumer-facing AI app folded into the infra org.
- Anthropic getting all of SpaceX's Colossus 1 compute — same point the Levine column flagged in 'things happen.'
- Thompson thesis: Musk should serve other companies (the durable layer) rather than compete with Anthropic/OpenAI at the model layer.
- Mirrors the Stratechery 'Amazon Durability' read — vertical-integration value at the infra layer, not at the consumer app.
SemiAnalysis: The EDA Primer — From RTL to Silicon (Part 1 of 3)
- 13-stage chip design waterfall: Planning → Architecture → RTL → Verif → Freeze → FW/SW → PD → Signoff → Tapeout → Fab → Post-Si → System → Production.
- AMD MI455X: 320B transistors, 12 logic dies on 2nm/3nm, hybrid-bonding 3D, HBM4, 224G SerDes.
- Big Three EDA: Synopsys, Cadence, Siemens EDA (Mentor 2017, $4.5B). Verification = 70% of project effort.
- PDK access tiers — Apple/AMD/Nvidia at Tier 1 (3+ yr pre-prod); academia at Tier 4.
- Intel 18A PDK: Sep 2022 → Jul 2024 → Panther Lake Jan 2026. Industry productivity +20%/yr vs +50%/yr complexity.
Stratechery: The Deployment Company, Back to the 70s, Apple and Intel
- OpenAI forming a new entity for deployment — the model layer alone is not enough; you need McKinsey-like integration.
- Pattern: every lab is following — Anthropic financial-services agents, Google Cloud agentic, OpenAI deployment org.
- Apple has economic reasons to work with Intel — foundry diversification + supply security after 2025's memory squeeze.
- Vertical-integration analogy back to 1970s IBM/DEC — model + tooling + deployment as one stack.
TBPN: Trump-Xi Summit, Inflation Fears, Space Data Centers | Max Levchin, Delian Asparouhov, Richard Socher, Brandon Hill, Nate Tepper, Joubin Mirzadegan, Roman Chernin (3h 6m)
- Trump-Xi summit framing + the Sharp China take from Stratechery same week.
- Space data centers debate (Lubin/Delian) — power density and cooling vs cost-to-orbit.
- Inflation prints running hot — implications for AI capex financing.
- Diet TBPN exists for the 30-minute skim of the 3h6m episode.
TBPN: Condé Nast CEO Roger Lynch — Why Human Journalism Wins in the AI Era
- Trusted-brand moat: Vogue / New Yorker / Wired as authentication layer against synthetic content.
- Subscription + commerce + licensed-IP stack — the LLM era forces vertical integration on publishers.
- Cross-references the May 4 Stratechery Joanna Stern interview on 'living with AI.'
TBPN: Trial Update, AI SPVs, BuzzFeed Sold — Doomberg, Sahir Jaggi, Sam Blond, Kevin Hartz, Alex Shan, Glen Wise, Roger Lynch (2h 56m)
- AI SPVs as the new vehicle for compute and hardware exposure (13:10 / 24:28).
- Thinking Machines interaction-models product walked through.
- BuzzFeed sold — closing chapter on the 2010s digital-media playbook.
- Doomberg / anonymous-publishing framing.
All-In: Charles & Chase Koch on Quietly Building a $150B Empire (1h 35m)
- Koch Inc. scale and business-line overview (1:04 / 2:21).
- Decade-horizon capital allocation across chemicals, energy, electronics, and venture.
- Family-operated counterexample to quarterly-earnings governance.
Uncapped #49 (Jack Altman): Kevin Hartz & Bennett Siegel — A* Capital, $1B AUM five-year-old early-stage VC (37m)
- A* Capital: 5 years old, $1B AUM, early-stage, deliberately small partner count.
- Hartz on the Eventbrite/Xoom playbook applied to angel-style early-stage checks.
- Anti-platform stance — direct counter to the a16z $2.2B crypto fund pattern.
Cattle Logic — Durham, KS ranch operations platform (Benmore engagement)
- Offline-first React Native mobile + Django/Postgres backend — built for dead-zone pasture work.
- HeadCountService invariant — every CattleInbound/Outbound flows through one service so per-lot counts always reconcile.
- Apple App Store release discipline codified as a Claude skill (/skills/apple-release).
- On-site walkthrough video: https://youtu.be/kfNiCBbhrBg
- Case study: https://www.benmore.tech/case-studies/cattle-logic/
Home Service Pass — SLC hospitality platform (Benmore engagement)
- Stripe-billed membership entitlements checked at the API edge.
- Desktop operator console for triage, dispatch, SLA tracking.
- Multi-vendor capacity-aware routing.
- Case study: https://www.benmore.tech/case-studies/home-service-pass/
Propurti — Calgary proptech platform (Benmore engagement)
- Property-manager desktop console with showings, applications, lease pipelines.
- Tenant-portal with payment + maintenance flows.
- Document workflow primitives — typed schemas for lease and disclosure docs.
- Case study: https://www.benmore.tech/case-studies/propurti/
Noble Gas — Windsor, CT automotive + enterprise LLM (Benmore engagement)
- Enterprise LLM grounded in typed inventory/service backend — no hallucinated parts.
- Agent-mediated workflows: parts lookup, procurement, service scheduling.
- Structured extraction over historical service records seeds the agents.
- Case study: https://www.benmore.tech/case-studies/noble-gas/
Timeline · commits + curated notes
14 entries
- noteMoney Stuff May 13 + May 14 columns added with prose + ASCII flows — white-on-white prospectus disclosure (CSG / Hunterbrook), Skechers appraisal-as-volatility-trade, Segantii pre-hedging vs front-running, Boredom Markets / live trading esports, Cohen-as-activism reveal (the GameStop arc closes), Adani charges dropping for $10B + 15K jobs, ILPA fund-formation fee cap proposal. New TL;DR-by-date overview section at top of body.
- noteCattle Logic on-site walkthrough video + 4 Benmore case studies (Cattle Logic, Home Service Pass, Propurti, Noble Gas) added to built rail; Stratechery MoffettNathanson interview + Invest Like the Best (Patrick O'Shaughnessy) added to read/watched.
- noteWednesday additions — Stratechery deployment-company piece, TBPN Trump-Xi episode with Levchin/Delian/Socher.
- noteTuesday additions — Stratechery on SpaceXAI/Anthropic, SemiAnalysis EDA Primer Part 1, TBPN x2 (Conde Nast / AI-SPVs), All-In (Koch), Uncapped (A* Capital).
- noteInitial publish — Money Stuff KKR/FSK column with ASCII flow on the preferred-at-NAV / tender-at-discount split and the Virginia Kalshi referendum timeline.