A welder took a $28 an hour job in 2015 at a company he had never heard of. On Friday, Juan Hernandez became a millionaire. He spent ten years building the structures that lifted rockets onto the launch pad. SpaceX paid him partly in stock, the way it paid its cooks, machinists, technicians and cafeteria staff, equity instead of bigger salaries. His $10,000 grant grew into $880,000 at the IPO price. The first day pop carried it past a million. He is 42, an immigrant from Mexico, married, three kids. He says he is keeping the job. He is not the outlier. He is the pattern. 4,400 current and former SpaceX employees became millionaires on Friday. One in five people who ever badged into the company. About 400 of them are walking away with $100 million or more. One employee took every cash bonus in stock instead of money. He is sitting on 50,000 shares, worth more than $8 million at Friday's prices. And then there is the other side of the cafeteria. Some employees sold their shares years ago, certain the company would never go public because Musk said he hated public markets. A few traded their stock for restaurant gift cards. The New York Times says they are consumed by regret. Same grant, same building, same years. One group held the claim. The other ate it. None of the winners can touch the money yet. The first selling window opens after the August earnings report, and the rest unlocks in waves through December. Underneath all of it sits the only lesson the market ever teaches. The welder and the gift card came from the same place. The difference was never the work. It was the ownership. Salary pays for the month. Equity pays for the era. A cook in Brownsville just answered the question every buyer of SPCX is asking at $170: what is a claim on this company actually worth? The piece prices that exact question at $2.2 trillion.

Without Congressional action, Notre Dame AD Pete Bevacqua says a "super league" is inevitable. "You’re going to only have a small number of universities who can invest to field a nationally competitive football team."

Nick Saban: "Now you have schools that have close to $40M rosters [in football]. If we continue to do that were going to lose olympic sports, were gonna lose non revenue sports. We're gonna have football and basketball succeed and were going to have club sports for everything else with no scholarships."

The Economist on the U.S. economy’s consistent growth outperformance relative to other advanced countries: “America’s outperformance began decades ago, but in the 2020s it has become vast. And it is likely to last. The latest IMF forecasts show American growth besting the rest all the way to 2030 and beyond…. Many of America’s advantages are hard to emulate. The country’s continental scale, single language, natural-resource wealth and the fiscal space that comes from issuing the world’s safe asset give it a unique economic advantage over Europe… But America also shows just how much other rich countries are failing to live up to their economic potential.” #economy @EconUS @TheEconomist

NEW: A recently laid-off Meta employee accuses the company of operating like “Squid Game,” with workers pitted against each other in a toxic stack-ranking culture.

JUST IN: Bolt CEO Ryan Breslow fired the company’s entire HR team because they were “creating problems that didn’t exist.”

Jeff Bezos on America's spending and taxes: "We don't have a revenue problem in this country. We already have the most progressive tax system in the world. The Top 1% of taxpayers pay 40% of all taxes. The bottom 50% pay just 3%. We have a spending problem."

ANTHROPIC CEO DARIO AMODEI: “50% OF ALL TECH JOBS, ENTRY-LEVEL LAWYERS, CONSULTANTS, AND FINANCE PROFESSIONALS WILL BE COMPLETELY WIPED OUT WITHIN 1–5 YEARS.”

Green & Golden 🏆 The men of Colorado State capture a second-straight @MountainWest Outdoor Track & Field title 🐏 #Relentless x #CSURams

New standard on the horizon? 🐏 @GoHeels AD @BubbaUNC believes there will be a shift in non-revenue athletics: "I do think we'll get to a bifurcated system … that will have two pay-per-play models. One is you will be paid to play your game and others you'll have to pay if you're going to play your game. And so that's where we're going to end up, I think, at some point." Cunningham also offered a look into the transfer portal: "This past year, almost 50% of the Division I basketball players entered the portal. That just doesn't seem to be something that is good for the academy." 📰: drvco.omeclk.com/portal/publ…

Big Ten announces $1.37 billion distributed to its 18 member schools during fiscal year 2024-25, a $490 million increase from 2023-24 The $1.37 billion is $76.1 million per school, although Washington & Oregon receive reduced share after joining in 2024 on3.com/nil/news/big-ten-ann…

The Big 12 just approved a five-year deal with RedBird Capital Partners, and I want you to understand what that actually means. It’s being framed as a “business partnership.” No ownership stake. No operational control. Just a friendly capital infusion and some help finding new revenue streams. Private equity doesn’t invest in things they don’t control. They don’t need an ownership stake when they have something better, debt obligation and revenue dependency. The deal includes a school-level credit line of up to $30 million per institution. Cash-strapped programs will take that money. And when the projected revenue doesn’t materialize on RedBird’s timeline, those schools will have a private equity firm’s hand in their annual distributions. Here’s the part nobody’s talking about, RedBird negotiated a non-compete clause. They won’t partner with any other power conference in a commercial capacity. That wasn’t done to protect the Big 12. That was done to protect RedBird’s investment and lock in their leverage. Private capital has one obligation: return on investment. Not the health of the sport. Not competitive integrity. Not the student-athlete experience. ROI. Every time we let another financial interest sink its teeth into college athletics, we move further away from what made this sport worth caring about in the first place. And we never seem to find our way back.