Been around a while..

Drake Baldwin hits a leadoff homer in his first AB since May 18th!

🚨 SpaceX just pulled off the greatest financial engineering feat of the century. In about a week. Here's everything that happened, in order: – Folded xAI into a rocket company, turning "space logistics" into an "AI infrastructure" story overnight – Priced the IPO at a flat $135. No book-building, no range. Take it or leave it – Floated just 4% of the company. 556 million shares against 13 billion – Raised $75 billion at a $1.77 trillion valuation, near 100x revenue – Lobbied to get into major indices in ~15 trading days. Amazon took years. Forced buying, by law – Handed an unusually large slice of the float to retail. Tiny supply, an army of buyers – Watched the stock rocket past $200, up nearly 20% in a single session – Saw ~46% of the entire float trade hands in one day – Then announced a $60 billion all-stock buyout of Cursor, the AI coding tool – Structured it so the higher the stock trades, the fewer shares it has to print to pay A company losing $4 billion a quarter is now buying AI startups with paper it manufactured out of a 4% float. The scarcity that pumped the stock now makes its shopping spree cheaper. This isn't aerospace. It isn't even AI. It's the finest financial engineering of the century, and it's only week one.

WHOA

There's so many out there we might yet still save

Yup

wow lol

SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell just laid out the official launch roadmap for Starship, and the cadence is about to go vertical Here's the timeline: • Flight 13: Launch is roughly a month away • Flight 14: The big one. SpaceX intends to attempt a full orbital injection • Post-Flight 14 Cadence: SpaceX plans to transition to an unprecedented launch rate of flying every single month Shotwell confirmed they expect Starship to be fully operational in orbit by the end of this year. The regulatory approval from the FAA remains the primary bottleneck, but the manufacturing and engineering pipeline is completely locked in

My opinion on the actual Iran deal (MEK infiltration of Congress aside): This may end up being an even bigger tar baby for the Trump administration than actually starting the Iranian war. This has nothing to do with capitulation accusations or JCPOA comparisons. It's that it's much more than a "what's wrong with wanting peace" thing. It all comes down to: the deal legitimizes the IRGC. That legitimacy is going to be the decisive factor for a lot of players, Israel most of all. The moment the US signs across the table from the IRGC, it's treating it as a normal government instead of what the Iranians in exile say, what Israel believed going in, what Trump himself said a few months ago. My read on why the US did it anyway: they got their interests served, wanted an official "war's over" to run on going into the midterms, and needed to buy time on the Strait of Hormuz. Fair enough on our own terms. Disaster in geopolitics. IMO, the better outcome was to refuse to legitimize any regime at all, even if that meant no deal and just holding the status quo until we figured out a real answer to Hormuz.

This AI just exposed the BIGGEST legal insider trading operation in America. A platform called GovGreed built a seven-layer machine learning system that cross-references every stock trade disclosed by every sitting politician against the bills their committees control, the campaign donations they receive, and the companies their votes directly impact. It scored all 540 politicians currently in Congress. And the numbers are crazy: 56% of every stock purchase made by Congress in the last 16 months was on a stock directly affected by a bill the buyer later voted on. That is 6,170 out of 11,016 total purchases. More than HALF of all congressional stock buys are on companies whose fate that same politician is about to decide. 343 of 540 Congress members actively trade stocks while holding access to nonpublic legislative information. That is 63.8% of the entire legislature making market bets with an informational edge that would put any hedge fund manager in prison. The AI identified 752 active "Triple Signals" in the current Congress. A Triple Signal fires when three conditions line up at once: The politician sits on the committee controlling a bill, they traded stock in a company affected by that bill, AND they received campaign contributions from that same industry. Bills carrying these insider indicators pass at 5.4 TIMES the normal rate. Now look at the individual leaderboard: - Nancy Pelosi's estimated portfolio sits at $194 million with a Greediness score of 98.1 out of 100 - Ro Khanna made 13,231 trades across 800 different tickers - Michael McCaul made 32,302 trades and filed 6,670 of them late - Thomas Suozzi filed 86.4% of his trades late with an average delay of 396 days, meaning his disclosures landed over a YEAR after he made the trade And then there is Lisa McClain, the fourth-ranking Republican in the House. She has made 1,443 trades in three years, more than 98% of all politicians tracked. She violated the STOCK Act twice in a single year, disclosing up to $900,000 in trades months after the legal deadline. Her husband bought up to $250,000 in Elon Musk's xAI, which quietly converted into SpaceX equity before last Friday's $2 trillion IPO. The penalty for all of this? A $200 fine. The number of Congress members ever prosecuted under the STOCK Act since it passed in 2012? Zero. And the cruelest part is this: A bill to ban congressional stock trading was introduced in January 2026. It has bipartisan support. Over 80% of American voters want it passed. But Congress is sitting on it, because the people who would have to vote yes are the same people making millions from the system staying exactly the way it is. They write the insider trading laws, they exempt themselves from enforcement, they trade on the information those laws generate, and when they get caught, they pay a fine that is basically nothing. The AI didn't discover anything Congress was hiding. It just organized what was already public into a pattern so obvious that nobody can pretend it isn't there anymore.

laser weeding in broccoli. real-time AI decision making at the edge. whistles and purrs. no chemicals. from our friends @carbon_robotics.

Bro wants to burn the Library of Alexandria because it's cold tonight.

Asteroid mining is not only going to make a lot more trillionaires, it's going to make us all rich. Just like the Industrial Revolution, the Space Revolution will greatly increase standards of living across humanity... yours, mine, everyone's. Electric light and indoor plumbing were once luxuries. Now they are so universal that we can have them and still think of ourselves as poor. But preindustrial folk would have thought us wealthy beyond measure. What's coming is another paradigm shift. You may think this is all theoretical. You may think asteroid mining is an unproven concept. You're wrong. Because you don't know one critical fact. We're already asteroid mining. And we've been doing it since the Bronze Age. All gold we mine on earth, all the copper for wires, the uranium for reactors, all the iron for nails, everything made of heavy metals that you own, or use, or have ever seen... it's all mined from ancient asteroid strikes. All the native Earth metals sunk to the core when the whole planet was molten. Past our reach. Do you think there are precious metals, like gold and silver and platinum? Do you think that even common metals, like iron and tin and copper, cost a lot to extract and refine? Artificial scarcity. Every piece of metal you have ever seen was sourced from the tiny percentage of asteroids that once hit Earth. Leave the gravity well, learn to sail the void, and we can loot all the asteroids that haven't. Imagine that we built all of civilization picking up our raw materials, grain by grain, with tweezers. Asteroid mining, true asteroid mining, is a shovel. And no, not a hand tool shovel, I mean the shovel attachment on the front of an industrial digger. That's why SpaceX has trillion dollar plus valuation. And unless we screw things up on Earth, and sabotage them somehow, that valuation is way too low. Below here, you'll see a different part of the plan. A little company, running out of a little industrial space in the San Fernando Valley, is building humanity the ultimate shopping bag. They think Mars is a sideshow, you see. They want to bag up asteroids, just scoop the little ones right up with a great big robot butterfly net, and bring back to high Earth orbit. Strip them down there, and build. If you thought data centers in space are wild, wait until you see factories in space. Wait until everything from toasters to CPUs to machine tools are made in high orbit, or on the moon, and the only bits that ever make it to Earth on the finished products. In space, minerals are cheap. And power is free. And it doesn't cost much of anything to move goods down a gravity well. You have no idea what's coming. Neither does SpaceX or Transastra, for that matter. They've got a hold of the tail of the elephant, and they think the Space Revolution is a rope. I'm a science fiction author. My job is to see the whole elephant. It's a big fucking elephant.

From the tornado's perspective, it's being chased. 🌪️@ReedTimmerUSA

The revelations six years later are pouring out so quickly that it is impossible to keep up much less mentally process all this: * The Director of National Intelligence has documented 120 US-funded/owned biolabs in 30 countries many of which are manufacturing and manipulating infectious diseases. * Senator Rand Paul's committee has released the receipts concerning US funding/backing of the manufactured SARS-CoV-2 virus/vaccine as part of this program. * Senator Johnson has produced definitive evidence that US public health agencies knew of the grave dangers of the shot to everyone but said nothing. * Many officials are privately admitting/proving that the whole point of lockdowns was to preserve population immunity for the shot and block other avenues toward wellness. * Hardly any of this makes the national news and one wonders if the public mind has any awareness at all.

Bluesky won’t be included in the under-16s social media ban. Twitter/X will be. This is clearly a political decision, nothing to do with child safety.

Someone showed me this on Telegram. It is very silly. It is clearly masquerading as "Free GPT and Claude". Anyone with half a brain knows this is malicious, but people will still fall for it. People asked what it is. I have some free time. I poked it with a stick, People discussing it said it is XMRig. That is not entirely accurate. This is not XMRig. This is flagged as XMRig from Triage and VirusTotal because it does indeed drop XMRig, but it is much more than that. This is a (maybe new) information stealer packaged with XMRig as a double whammy. This malware is interesting because of a few things: 1. It is position independent, they care enough to be evasive and strip out a majority of dependencies. This is usually indicative of more serious malware. 2. They .zip it delivers from the "Free GPT and Claude" is intentionally bloated (payload inflation). It is 97MB, which may evade a majority of anti-malware product (initially) due to it's large size. It packages itself with FFMpeg and various other audio codecs. 3. It accesses Microsoft Outlook e-mails, accesses Chrome stuff using the COM IElevationService, looks for any SFTP credentials It (currently) does not have any matching YARA rules from AV vendors. The closest approximation is LummaStealer. My knowledge base on the Information Stealer scene is out-of-date (it changes a lot). However, on first initial glance this appears like a new information stealer. Again, this should be taken with a grain of salt. It's also worth noting the domain it exfiltrates to does not appear in any malware reports. The domain is unique, and the payload does not match any existing YARA rules (it's behavioral characteristics do, but not a specific malware family), so this is actually a pretty interesting sample. A lookup though shows this is an emerging malware campaign. It first appeared around the end of May. This is (probably) a known Threat Actor who has switched it up a bit (or it's MaaS, whatever though). The malware appears online masquerading as various products. - ecore-sourceproject - LogiDA - GPT_Claude_Free - CortexSystems.v3.4.2.Stable - TikTokBot-v2.2 - CortexLauncher Funny enough, this malware would have been much, much, much, MUCH more evasive if they didn't package it with XMRig. VirusTotal and Triage immediately flagged it because after it establishes persistence, and steals any credentials on the machine, it pulls XMRig to turn into a cryptocurrency miner. If they did not pull the XMRig binary this stealer would be much more quiet. I have no idea why they decided to burn their OPSEC with XMRig. C2: dfwioeiofwr-dot-info Payload (and associated families from the C2) 027d576c6b5512d661081aaeeeb8e611f95a469ccf5ba35e0a390e8814334d05 5dcc599cf48227e65ea49d2708d08704fd1cb7e3b89736718d0d8e557857c49c 5e8b40b0b7512e1a1355374fb0cf34bfdf1260ebdb80a353c8f9da2490beeed3 6a0c332296b017220fc2b522da653fce36a8a3c5c79de0200d61c5fc31eb89ce a2f8ebf65d54a4d9c8b720d01da77ad796683f1a5b8bd3d08738d7df4365f8a 9d4aaa9842c947756b7c128c432292732098fb71d247ef0bce60368563572da3 c4caca93e2291c018e701c217b7d232c534e4dd142042a59aa4d32754ef3022a

BIG WHEEL: This is what life was like in the 70s. It was epic.

Saw this coming a loooong time ago. Sad, really

SpaceX raised only $12B of capital before going public. With that $12B, they revolutionized the rocket industry, built a global satellite network, and created arguably the most innovative company of all time. The federal government spends $12B every 15 hours and still can’t get its shit together. Prior to SpaceX, NASA was sending astronauts into space on Soviet-era Russian Soyuz capsules. So no, I don’t find Elon’s wealth to be a problem, and I wouldn’t trust Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders to allocate a single dollar of it.

The idea that this Big Boy was rotting in a parking lot in Pomona, CA for six decades until Union Pacific rebuilt every component to get it working again is actually awe inspiring.