Oil tops $100 and drags everything down with it Brent crude punched through $101 and WTI hit $92.61 after Houthi attacks on Saudi tankers widened the Iran conflict into Red Sea shipping lanes, sending the Nasdaq down 2.2% and the S&P 500 down 1.3% as traders priced the oil shock straight into inflation expectations. Crypto slipped with the rest of the risk stack, with total market cap down about 2% to $2.21T, bitcoin:native near $64,700, and the Fear & Greed index at 37. Rate markets now see an 82% chance of a September Fed hike, up from 52% a week ago, per CME FedWatch.

260718🔍[#음중풀캠#] ‘DAILY:DIRECTION – DOWN WITH IT’ ▶ #쇼음악중심# #음중# #데일리디렉션# #DAILYDIRECTION# #DOWN_WITH_IT# @_official_DD

Dear Joe, I wish I could sit down with you face to face and explain why so many of us were offended by the UFC fight on the South Lawn of the White House. For me, it had nothing to do with the UFC or who showed up for the fights. The brand you and Dana have built is a bona fide American success story. More power to you. As for the fighters, in my book, anyone brave enough to put it all on the line in the arena is remarkable to witness. Their dedication and discipline inspire me. I don’t understand anyone who can’t admire that. And as for the people who attended, I, for one, love Shane Gillis. I think he’s hilarious and brilliant. It was a show. A once-in-a-lifetime spectacle. I can’t blame anyone for wanting to witness it firsthand. My problem is that I believe some of our public spaces are sacred. And unlike many of the great powers that came before us, these American monuments belong to all of us. Not to whoever happens to hold power at the moment. The White House does not belong to Donald Trump. It does not belong to any President. It belongs to the people. To treat it as Caesar treated the Colosseum is antithetical to everything our founding fathers fought for. This is not Rome. Presidents are not emperors doling out bread and circuses for the peasants. The White House is the People’s House. This “celebration” could have happened in any stadium within a stone’s throw of the South Lawn. No one would have had an issue with it. But that was obviously Donald Trump’s whole point. By holding the event on the South Lawn, what he was saying to the rest of us is: “This is my house. I own it. I will do with it what I please. I’ll build a colosseum and have the gladiators fight under my gaze. I’ll tear down the East Wing. I’ll pave over the Rose Garden. I’ll cover everything in gold and marble. I’ll erase the names of all the men who came before me.” The fights were an exhibition of imperial domination, not a celebration of our 250th anniversary as a democracy. The White House is not Buckingham Palace. It is not the Palace of Versailles. It is not the Forbidden City of Beijing. It does not belong to an emperor, or a king, or a commissar. The White House belongs to us. All of us. The person who sits behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office is nothing more than an honored guest. A temporary caretaker. The President is our servant. Not our Caesar. Respectfully, Hunter P.S. Cage match between me and Don Jr.? Your call on the venue. Anywhere but the South Lawn.

Last night, one fibre cut in eastern North America sent latency and timeouts as far as Europe, taking major platforms down with it. A single physical fault, a continent-wide blast radius. Data shouldn't go dark because a cable did. The bytes were fine the whole time.

Sam Altman just crashed two stock markets in 4 hours and exposed the AI bubble. OpenAI is delaying its public listing until 2027 because Altman REFUSES to accept a single dollar under a $1 trillion valuation. Asia opened to the news and the panic was instant: SoftBank fell 13% in Tokyo, its worst day in months. The Nikkei dropped 4.5%. South Korea's KOSPI crashed 8% and the Korea Exchange triggered circuit breakers on the futures market, then halted trading entirely for 20 minutes when the bleeding refused to stop. Hong Kong and Shanghai followed. US futures slid before market open. One report triggered all of it in roughly four hours, erasing trillions in market cap across three continents. The world's most valuable private company just admitted it doesn't believe public markets will pay its asking price so Altman's own bankers presented him with two options: He could list this year at a lower valuation or he could wait until 2027 and try for the full trillion. He picked the wait, and the New York Times quoted a source saying he called any haircut a "non-starter." So basically: The man building "the most important technology in human history" doesn't think investors who actually have to mark their positions to market every day will hand him a trillion dollars right now. The reason he's right to be scared is sitting on the SpaceX ticker. Elon Musk's company IPO'd three weeks ago at a record $1.77 trillion valuation. The stock has since collapsed from $225 to $153, a 32% drop in seven trading days. Musk lost his trillionaire status in the process and every other AI-adjacent name has been dragged down with it. Altman watched that happen in real time and decided he'd rather burn another 18 months of compute cash than risk the same humiliation. Meanwhile the financials underneath the trillion-dollar number look like this: OpenAI did $13 billion in revenue last year on a $21 billion net loss. The company has committed roughly $600 billion in compute and hardware spending through 2030. Revenue is climbing to $2 billion a month, but the spending climbs faster. They are losing money at a scale that would have ended any other company in tech history, and the only thing keeping the lights on is the next funding round at the next higher number. The system Altman built depends on one thing: Each round has to price higher than the last, because that's what convinces the next round of investors to keep writing checks. The moment public markets refuse to pay the markup, the whole structure starts pricing itself the other direction. Anthropic already overtook OpenAI's last private valuation at $965 billion in May. SpaceX is showing what happens when reality finally hits. And SoftBank, the company that has bet $60 billion of borrowed money on OpenAI hitting that trillion-dollar mark, just had its worst session in weeks because the timer on Masayoshi Son's exit got pushed out another full year. Son spent yesterday at the shareholder meeting calling SoftBank "the goose that lays golden eggs." But the takeaway here is the TIMING: Altman's advisors told him retail enthusiasm "may be limited given current market jitters." That is banker code for "the bubble is showing cracks and you'll get embarrassed if you try this right now." The man who has been telling Congress, the press, and the public that AI will reshape civilization just looked at the order book and decided he doesn't want to find out what it's actually worth. The real story here goes beyond the delay itself. The most aggressive, hype-trained, valuation-obsessed CEO in modern technology just chose to wait rather than face a market that might say no. When the loudest believer flinches, the rest of us should probably pay attention.

Last year, I sat down with my good friend Bruce @Springsteen for a long and meaningful conversation that touched on so much of what we’re all dealing with these days. I’m excited to share it with you over the next few weeks:

Plastic recovery has a transparency problem. ♻️ @Plastiks_io is solving it with verified data on Cardano, and Armenia and El Salvador are already piloting it. We recently sat down with the team to dive into their solution. Read the full breakdown: