SpaceX might be the reason why your rent is going up
Things I'm thinking about 6/12/26
Is Fort Greene the best place to watch Game 5? Happy Knicks Championship Eve! I watched Game 4 at HOME by MYSELF, which I quickly realized was a mistake shortly after the game ended and I went online and saw the crowds of people celebrating all over the city. I try not to get FOMO as a rule because my life is pretty good and no matter how hard you try you’ll inevitably miss things, but I will NOT be making that same mistake Saturday night. I half expect to meet the love of my life tomorrow. See you all in the streets! (Before anyone accuses me of being a bandwagoner I’d like to point out that Linsanity hit my very Asian New Jersey high school like a nuclear bomb in 2012, so I think it’s been long enough to move up to the ranks of ‘regular fan’.)
‘Momfluencers’ are enthusiastic about ‘coparenting’ with AI. Where are the fathers? It feels like the girlboss is making a comeback—this time, using AI as a “tool of liberation”.
Meanwhile, New York City parents are calling for a moratorium in schools.
Golden Goal, a new magazine about the World Cup, made this fun quiz to help determine what team you should root for. I got Morocco! The New Yorker wrote about why the Moroccan team has so much global significance this year.
Elon Musk is now the world’s first trillionaire. If not for the SpaceX IPO he was on track to achieve trillionaire status anyway—last fall, Tesla shareholders approved a nearly $1 trillion pay package for Musk on the condition that he grows the company to at least $8 trillion in market cap over the next decade (very unlikely). I don’t like how fast the paradigm is changing.
Who benefits from the SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI IPOs this summer? Real estate, mostly. A couple of weeks ago on the L train I over heard a conversation between two friends, one who was looking to buy property in New York: “At least in New York, homes actually end up selling for the listing price. In SF homes will be listed at 1.1 [million] and the starting bid will be like, 1.4.” My condolences to everybody just trying to find an affordable place to live in SF amidst all the brand new millionaires.
Reformation is trying its best to get in on the action. This is the exact intersection of my interests.
The Trump administration and friends are cashing in, too. Although, curiously, Trump hasn’t weighed in publicly on the SpaceX IPO yet. Does anyone know where he and Elon stand right now? Are they still friends?
OpenAI is waging a price war with Anthropic. Maybe this is news for AI skeptics to rejoice, since there is no way OpenAI can possibly afford to cut prices. After three years of companies encouraging their employees to introduce AI in their workflow wherever it makes sense (and often where it doesn’t make sense), they’re scaling back their token spending.
Last month was the first ever Enhanced Games, where athletes are encouraged to take as many steroids as they want. Very few athletes were willing to describe exactly which drugs they were on. To no one’s surprise, Peter Thiel had a hand in this.
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