"Why Musk Is Predicting ‘Guppy-Level Death’ for Scores of A.I. Companies" (SPCX; CRWV; IREN; NBIS)

From the New York Times' DealBook newsletter, October 26: 

Elon Musk sees many artificial-intelligence infrastructure companies being shut out of the debt market, a warning that could weigh on markets.

Andrew here. Just in: Apollo Global Management is said to be nearing a deal to buy a nearly 10 percent stake in Mubadala Capital, the asset management arm of Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund and the majority owner of Fortress Investment Group, CNBC reports, citing unnamed sources.

Elon Musk was busy this weekend. He warned that interest rate increases were going to crush independent data centers, which is already rattling neocloud stocks. Plus, the top law firm Weil Gotshal & Manges is dealing with a messy wave of defections that has people wondering what’s next for it. More below.

A.I.’s shakeou
Concerns about rampant artificial intelligence spending have slowed the stock market rally and driven up tech companies’ borrowing costs. Now Elon Musk predicts that many companies tied to the A.I. boom will not survive, as they’ve been effectively shut out of the debt market.

The ominous remarks on social media have come as investors brace for a major test this week. More hyperscalers’ earnings are on tap, and details on Anthropic’s upcoming I.P.O. may be, too.

Could a looming credit bottleneck wipe out a slew of tech companies? Musk thinks so. But he said his $2 trillion company, SpaceX, was well cushioned thanks to its investment-grade credit status and booming Starlink internet business.

• He underscored that point on Sunday by announcing that SpaceX had just landed a $40 billion debt deal to buy more chips, including from Nvidia. But that may not be final.

Who’s at risk? Musk singled out neoclouds, the companies that sell computing power to A.I. companies. Many of them, he wrote on social media, face “guppy-level death and consolidation.”

Bears may seize on Musk’s warning. Nasdaq futures point to a modest rebound on Monday, but investors have punished neoclouds lately. For example, shares in CoreWeave, which counts Anthropic and Microsoft as customers, were sold off sharply last week and are down again in premarket trading. CoreWeave’s credit default swaps, a measure of credit risk, have ballooned, too, as investors worry about the borrowing binge driving the A.I. build-out.

But Musk’s comments need context. Bloomberg, citing unnamed sources, reports that the $40 billion credit line for SpaceX that Musk referred to is not a done deal. It’s worth noting that SpaceX, which competes with neoclouds to sell computing capacity to A.I. companies, has also seen its credit costs soar, Bloomberg adds, even as its A.I. revenues climb.

Watch Anthropic, which is expected to go public as soon as next month. Investors are eagerly anticipating that it will file the paperwork for its I.P.O. any day now. Details have been leaking for weeks. Still, there are big questions about its key customers and major risks, be they financial — it pays billions to SpaceX, Amazon and Google, among others, for cloud and computing capacity — or societal....

....MUCH MORE, including Robert Reich calling for the nationalization of SpaceX.

Barron's helpfully notes:

(Guppies are small colorful tropical fish, popular as aquarium pets and with a distressing tendency to die easily. Neoclouds like CoreWeave and Nebius are companies providing additional cloud-computing capacity for artificial intelligence.) 

"IBM CEO says open weight models are now irresistibly good and cheap on-prem"

Anthropic and OpenAI have to get the cost of their offerings down to compete with the Chinese, and if they do that their hopes of GAAP profitability recede toward the horizon.

From The Register, October 22: 

90 percent of the performance at ten percent of the price, in just two or three racks, is hard to beat  

IBM CEO Arvind Krishna has told investors that open weight models now make brilliant sense for on-prem enterprise use.

Speaking on the company’s Q3 earnings call, Krishna said that in 2024 closed frontier models were plainly superior to open alternatives.

“If you ran some assessment, some benchmark, and it was broad-based, not narrow, the top model might score a 70, and the open model might score a 20 or a 30.”

“In late 2025, we began to see that gap shrink, where maybe the gap was not 70 to 20 or 30, it was 70 to 50,” he continued.

The CEO said open weight models currently deliver “anywhere from 25 percent to 10 percent of the token cost of the frontier models. That is very attractive given that they’re now 90 percent as effective.”

“It’s a simple question for any enterprise. Would you like something that’s 10 percent of the cost if it’s 90 percent as good as the best, or do you want to pay that 10 times higher cost?”

Krishna thinks businesses will most oftenchoose not to incur the higher costs....

....MUCH MORE 

"Two Wealthy Americans Face Off In Bitter Feud Over Panama Port" (plus what's up with the canal)

Meanwhile a bit to the east the canal itself is doing big business.*

From Bloomberg via gCaptain, October 24: 

To hedge-fund billionaire Louis Bacon, the crystalline waters and densely forested riverways of the Gulf of Chiriqui in western Panama are an ecological oasis. To developer John McKeown, the gulf is a conduit to potential markets for the region’s prized produce and a boon for its economy. 

Those clashing visions are at the heart of a bitter dispute between the two wealthy Americans, who both say they’re championing Panama’s best interests. 

The feud centers on a $260 million port McKeown is seeking to develop on the country’s Pacific coast, just south of the city of David. Ocean Pacific Investments, the company McKeown leads, describes the project, Puerto Baru, as Panama’s first “green” port that will help relieve pressure on trading hubs in Panama City and integrate with trade routes to North America and Asia. Chiriqui, with a population of around 500,000, is Panama’s breadbasket, cultivating foods including coffee, papayas and shrimp. 

The battle has escalated all the way to Panama’s Supreme Court, which is weighing the port’s environmental approval after a group of local nonprofits challenged it. Already, the fight has involved civil and criminal complaints against some of those NGOs. The outcome will dictate the fate of an unspoiled pocket of Panama that’s seen little of the wealth that flows through its high-flying capital. 

To Bacon, the project poses an unacceptable risk....

....MUCH MORE 

nota bene: not to be confused with the older City of David, much further to the east.

*Also at gCaptain, October 21:

 Panama Canal Traffic and Tonnage Rise Despite El Niño Challenges

The Panama Canal reported growth in vessel traffic, tonnage and revenue in fiscal year 2026, as stronger demand from energy carriers and containerships helped lift volumes despite ongoing concerns over water availability....

....MUCH MORE 

Capital Markets: "Moody's Did Not Downgrade France and Peripheral Premiums are Narrower, but the Euro Struggles to Find Traction"

From Marc to Market:

There are two impulses today. First, defying expectations, Moody’s did not downgrade its assessment of French credit, which remains above S&P and Fitch’s ratings.  With a show of force by the government, French protests were less violent.  French bonds have rallied and the peripheral premium has narrowed.  Yet, the euro has found little meaningful traction.  Second, and also defying expectations, Brazilian President Lula appears to have beaten Bolsonaro in a nailbiter.  In the futures market the Brazilian real has been sold. Bonds and equities are expected to follow suit.  

The US dollar is mostly firmer to start the new week, which features the FOMC meeting, the first estimate of Q3 GDP, and a series of big tech earnings. Beijing, seemingly undeterred, set the dollar’s reference rate at a new high since mid-2022.  Four other G10 central banks meet this week and the market is most confident that the Reserve Bank of New Zealand and the Bank of Canada are most likely to hike, while the Fed, ECB, and BOJ are widely expected to standpat, but hike again in December....

....MUCH MORE 

"Between BlackRock and a Hard Place"

From Puck, October 14:

Aston Martin, the august U.K. carmaker endorsed by 007, has touched off a transatlantic imbroglio after accepting a new round of financing from HPS, the private credit arm of BlackRock, causing its bonds to crater. The twist here is that BlackRock is on both sides of this fight. 

Our current economic era does not want for tales of creditor-on-creditor violence, but few examples can match what has been going on at Aston Martin, the U.K. automaker and James Bond’s whip of choice. Alas, while Aston Martin makes beautiful and very expensive cars, it doesn’t make much money. In the first half of 2026, Aston Martin generated revenue of around $830 million—and an adjusted EBIT loss of around $140 million. The company also has more than $2 billion of debt—including a new $750 million senior secured loan provided by HPS, the private credit arm of BlackRock. Aston Martin has a hefty debt-to-EBITDA ratio of nearly 9x, per the company’s half-year earnings call.  

Needless to say, that’s not a great debt ratio for a company making very little, if any, money. As a result, a huge, transatlantic fight has broken out between the old creditors, including a different arm of BlackRock, and the new creditors. The battle has been led by HPS, which has successfully “primed” the old creditors by taking the available security—comprising plants, cars, and Aston Martin’s I.P. and brand (probably the most valuable asset the company still has)—and placing themselves atop the capital structure. Authentic Brands Group, the collector of tired assets such as Brooks Brothers, is also part of the new financing, with its contribution secured by some of the Aston Martin I.P.  

In short, the old bondholders have taken it on the chin. Prior to the HPS money coming in, the existing bonds were trading in the mid 80 cents on the dollar. After having the company’s collateral swiped by HPS and Authentic, the old bonds traded down to around 55 cents on the dollar, yielding something like 35 percent. They are rated CCC, deep in junk-bond territory. Naturally, the old creditors are threatening legal action.  

Indeed, there are already blue-chip bankers and lawyers swarming all over this thing. The carmaker was advised on the HPS deal by Latham & Watkins, as well as Simpson Thacher and David Nemecek, the dean of the creditor-on-creditor violence bar, who had been at Kirkland & Ellis before conflicts led him to jump ship to Simpson for a lot of money. Lazard and Moelis & Co. are advising Aston Martin, too.  

Meanwhile, the furious creditors are being represented by Akin Gump and Quinn Emanuel, with Jefferies as their financial advisor. Pallas Partners, the law firm, is also representing at least two of the peeved creditors—Arini Credit Master Fund Limited and Tresidor Europe Credit Limited—in a recently filed application in the Southern District of New York seeking discovery from HPS, Authentic Brands, Lazard, and Moelis regarding the new financing.  

The court has yet to rule on the petition, and the old creditors have yet to file a lawsuit against the company, which would have to be administered in U.K. courts. The purpose of the potential litigation appears to be to get a judge to overturn the HPS transaction. It’s certainly worth a shot, though success seems unlikely due to the loose covenants contained in the old bond indentures, which allow for this kind of financial engineering. In other words, it’s pretty much their own damn fault that HPS and the company were able to pull off the collateral swipe.  

Drive to Survive

Aston Martin, which has been in business for 113 years, has already gone through seven bankruptcies. These days, the company—which trades on the London Stock Exchange—is controlled by Canadian billionaire Lawrence Stroll, who has a one-third ownership stake. 

Other owners include the Saudi sovereign wealth fund; Li Shufu, chairman of the Chinese automaker Geely; and Mercedes-Benz. Back in January 2020, Stroll bought around 17 percent of the company at a steep discount to its initial public price, and became the company’s executive chairman three months later. Almost seven years on, the company’s market capitalization is a mere $500 million or so—tiny by industry standards. The stock is down 41 percent so far this year, and more than 90 percent from its October 2018 I.P.O. price.  

Stroll also owns—albeit separately—the Aston Martin Formula One team, where he’s installed his son, Lance, as a driver. The team has not been particularly successful over the years (thanks in part to Lance), but is nonetheless quite valuable. In 2025, Aston Martin, the car company, sold its stake in Aston Martin, the racing team, for around $150 million at around a $3.2 billion valuation—which means, alas, the F1 assets are of no use to the aggrieved Aston Martin bondholders.  

Another interesting wrinkle: HPS, which BlackRock acquired in 2025 for $12 billion in stock, is also a lender to (and a minority owner of) Aston Martin’s F1 team. The company refinanced debt related to the F1 team’s technology campus, and bought a 25 percent stake in the franchise in September 2024, along with Accel, the Silicon Valley venture capital firm. Both HPS and BlackRock are also investors in the privately held Authentic Brands, which is part of the controversial new financing.  

It’s pretty rare, I have to say, to see one arm of a big-time creditor prime another arm of the same creditor. But I guess they figured that if someone was going to prime BlackRock, it might as well be an arm of BlackRock. What’s more, I’m told, BlackRock is part of the group of original creditors fighting to undo the HPS deal. You can’t make this stuff up. That’s where we are these days in the crazy world of liability management exercises, or L.M.E.s.  

Anyway, Stroll has probably lost more than 75 percent of what he originally invested in the company, though it’s hard to know for sure. Of course, those losses have been covered, and then some, by the F1 team, which Stroll and his partners bought out of administration for around $115 million in August 2018, when it was known as Force India. It has since increased in value by some 30 times. 

In February, alongside its fifth new profit warning since September 2024, Aston Martin announced that it had sold the permanent use of the F1 naming rights to Stroll’s F1 team, which already had the naming rights until 2055, for roughly $68 million. Then, in April, Stroll’s Yew Tree investment consortium made a $68 million loan to Aston Martin, of which about $27 million was drawn by the company. A portion of the HPS financing was used to repay and retire the Yew Tree loan. The HPS money was also used to pay down an existing bank revolver, totaling around $200 million, and, according to company management, “significantly” increased the automaker’s “liquidity” to around $450 million—giving it more runway to absorb operating losses. 

But it’s how the company obtained the HPS financing, and what it gave up to get it, that really has the O.G. Aston Martin bondholders peeved. I’m told the existing bondholders were prepared to provide Aston Martin with new financing, but their offer was essentially ignored in favor of the HPS deal, which the Financial Times described as a “surprise.”  

The company has also been extremely secretive about what assets HPS has taken as collateral for its new loans. In the July 22 press release about the deal, Aston Martin allowed only, in masterfully vague terms, that the HPS financing is “secured against certain of the Group’s assets situated in a newly incorporated subsidiary, together with certain other assets of the Group.” Another press release, put out two days later in response to lingering bondholder questions, did not do much to clarify things.  

On July 29, several Wall Street research analysts tried to get the company to divulge details of the new financing during its first-half earnings call. In response to a question from Henning Cosman, at Barclays, Aston Martin C.F.O. Doug Lafferty said, “It’s an important deal for the company. I would just add that all the information about the deal has been set out in our announcements that we made last week, so there’s not really much more to add today.”....

....MUCH MORE 

Also at Puck:

October 18 - Skydance Stock Turbulence & A Berkshire Head-Scratcher 

October 21 - A Token for Your Thoughts…

A tidy primer regarding Wall Street’s new favorite financial instrument: “real-world tokenized assets,” which have made it possible to buy and sell shares in everything from artwork to gold bars to Pokémon cards—basically any valuable physical item.... 

French Yellow Vests Announce Protest To Protest Hijacking Of Student Protests By Political Left Protests

Just kidding, I have no idea why the gilets jaunes want to get in on the action. 

From Deutsche Presse-Agentur via Yahoo News, October 24:

Yellow vests announce new protests in France for next week 

The Yellow Vest movement has announced new protests for next week during an ongoing day of protest in France, organizers said on their website on Saturday.

The organizers want a "third act" on October 31 and have called for rallies and sit-ins in front of the National Assembly parliament building in Paris and in front of all town halls in France.

A protest event is also planned for next Friday, where participants will make noise with kitchen utensils such as pots and pans, known in French as a casserolade....

....MORE 

I've been thinking about Charles de Gaulle recently, the anniversaries of both his birth and death will be observed next month. But in the meantime:

 “How can you govern a country which has 246 varieties of cheese?”
― Charles de Gaulle (attributed)

So You Think You Know London?

From Lauren's Data substack, March 16:

London's Divide Was Called Character. It Was Actually Policy. 
I built a machine learning model to find London's divide and you can enter your postcode to see which side you're on. We've been blaming the wrong people for it. 

I have a bit of a weird habit. I cycle to a random café in a random London borough, sit down, and listen. I’ve done it for long enough to notice an invisible line: while cycling, at some point the shopfronts change, the language changes, the streets narrow, then widen. The café itself tells you almost nothing. Good coffee is everywhere now. What changes is everything around it: who’s in it, and what they’re talking about. (I now also know far too much about Terry, Steve, Brenda, and Olivia - their lives, their grievances, their strong opinions about the council and the weather.)

I’ve written about London’s pub closures, its restaurant algorithm, its segregation patterns. The whole time I’ve been circling the same question from different angles: is London’s divide just a feeling everyone recognises, or is it stable and structural enough, that you can actually draw it?

So I tried. I built a model using neighbourhood-level data across London: education, occupation, ethnicity, house prices, cafés, pubs, restaurants, ratings, etc. and asked a simple question: if there really is a boundary in this city, can a machine find it?

It could (and you can check where your favourite neighbourhood sits at the end). And once it did, the more interesting question became who put it there. The answer is less about the market than we've been told, and more about three policy decisions that are still sitting on the tab.

Sydney named it. London aestheticised it. 

I was just a few months old when I landed in Sydney for the first time. What I didn't notice then was that Sydney was sharply and structurally divided. Sydney has named its divide: the latte line. The line between those who make the latte and those who drink it. Once you name a line, you have to argue about it. You have to explain who drew it, who benefits, and who’s been paying for it. Sydney has been doing exactly that, in newspapers, planning documents, parliamentary inquiries, for twenty years.

London has the same divide. Charles Booth, a Victorian social cartographer who walked every street in London and drew what he found mapped it in 1889. Wealth clustering in the west, deprivation running east along the Thames. The gradient he found is still visible in today’s data and has barely shifted in 130 years.

But London never named it. Instead, London called it character. Called it up and coming. Called it regeneration. A vocabulary carefully chosen to describe a structural inequality as if it were an aesthetic phase, something a neighbourhood passes through on its way to becoming somewhere worth living. We have been looking at this line for longer than Australia has existed as a federation.

So I wanted to do the impolite thing and draw it.

How do you find a line nobody drew?

The obvious way is to stare at a deprivation map until a story presents itself. I did something only slightly more dignified.

I assembled a neighbourhood-level dataset from all data in my previous Substack posts (google map’s algorithm, pub closures, segregation and inequality measurement) at Lower Super Output Area level of roughly 1,500 residents each, combining measures such as education, occupation, ethnic composition, house prices, café density, pub density, restaurant density, reviews and ratings. In other words, both the deep structure of the city, and the softer cultural signals people usually use to talk about class without saying class.

With thirty-odd correlated variables, the first task was compression....

....MUCH MORE 

We have a couple posts referencing Charles Booth's maps of London poverty including, coincidentally one that was re-referenced just a couple days ago. 

From January 2022's "Selling Luxury Apartments Where Oliver Twist Once Asked for Gruel": 

....Speaking of the BMJ, they published their take on the health and well-being of the urchins in 2008 and not to be outdone the Royal Society of Chemistry put together the historic gruel recipe and served the slop to the public the following year.

And if wary yet curious reader wants to know why these factoids come readily to mind, it was something about shorting Oatly.
*Although the workhouse is on the north side of the river in Fitzrovia, a look at Charles Booth's maps of London poverty, 1889 - 1899 show that the same potential in Southwark and environs:

The re-reference wasn't so much about Victorian-era poverty—to get into that you really want to go to the north side of the river, hang a right and enter Whitechapel—rather the re-ref was about dropping molten gruel on the miscreants besieging your tower. Not to be confused with Tower Hamlets, same 'hood.

Scaling Up: "Measuring the Swarm Economy"

From Palladium magazine, October 20: 

In early September 2026, OpenAI set up a team to solve the Navier-Stokes Millennium Prize problem, a famously difficult open problem in mathematics. In the span of 88 hours, a solution was achieved by a set of over ten thousand agents operating in parallel and coordinating their behavior. They sent 2.7 million messages to one another and used around 130 billion output tokens—enough data to fill a million books. The AI-formulated Navier-Stokes “forced blowup” proof was recognized as an unexpected great leap forward for mathematics.

Fewer observers recognized how much of a leap forward OpenAI’s massive multi-agent effort represented for the artificial intelligence industry. As the AI industry wades into these uncharted waters, it will need to develop a new type of benchmarking that evaluates models’ ability to organize, engage in cooperative behaviors, and form interdependent networks.

Bespoke platforms and services have existed for years that allow users to spin up Large Language Model (LLM) agents, persistently running AI models capable of writing code, using software, and interacting with other agents. Early subagent systems tended to become stuck or distracted, burning users’ compute and wasting their time. In contrast, current and next-generation models used in research and evaluation settings can effectively coordinate networks of hundreds of subagents to accomplish enormous projects shockingly quickly.

A new “scaling law” has come into play. The AI boom was kicked off by the observation that scaling up pretraining, the first phase where an AI model learns foundational patterns from vast unlabeled data sets, plus compute, reliably led to more intelligent LLMs, and scaling the processing power and time an AI model spends generating responses led to better math and reasoning ability. It has now been established that scaling the number of agents for a task can enable huge amounts of compute to be expended in return for faster results on bigger problems.

Scaling laws for pretraining and test-time inference have proven themselves invaluable for the AI industry, propelling OpenAI and Anthropic to trillion-dollar valuations and paving the way for hundreds of billions of dollars in AI infrastructure buildout commitments. What began as the simple observation that more data and more compute could result in better models has led to the birth of one of the fastest-growing technological industries ever created, contributing a third of U.S. GDP growth in the first half of 2026.

For this new scaling law, the AI Governance Initiative researcher Toby Ord coined the term “swarm scaling.” In a recent essay, Ord noted that increasing the number of agents working on a task (swarm scaling) results in lower efficiency than simply increasing the compute budget given to each agent (duration scaling). Working from data included in the launch of OpenAI’s Sol 5.6 model, Ord found that multiplying the number of agents working on a problem by N gives the same boost to performance as scaling the compute budget for each individual by a factor of N^0.57. Thus, increasing the number of agents on a task 16x provides as much benefit as increasing the inference used by each agent ~4.9x. By analogy to Charles Jones’ formula for how human research efficiency scales—providing N^λ progress with N times more researchers—Ord calls the 0.57 parallelizability exponent he finds λ (lambda).

Given that increasing the number of agents working on a task is exponentially less compute efficient than increasing the duration for which those agents work, one might wonder why anyone would bother with scaling the size of agent swarms rather than agent compute budgets. The answer, of course, is that swarm scaling is exponentially faster than duration scaling, by a factor of Nλ-1. On smaller projects, this might seem irrelevant, but consider that the 88 hours that OpenAI spent solving Navier-Stokes with an agent swarm would have taken 100 years for a single model to solve without taking advantage of swarm scaling. Ord cites Noam Brown, a senior research scientist at OpenAI, in noting that even today’s cutting-edge multi-agent systems are still somewhat “primitive” in their ability to coordinate, being trained mostly on single-agent problems. With better training in teamwork, cooperation, and self-organization, the λ factor of future AI models could become even higher, leading to vastly faster and more efficient swarm computation.

Just as labs have squeezed out additional intelligence from base models, they have learned to extract capability gains by multiplying the number of agents tackling a problem. 

Swarm scaling has become an important approach for achieving new AI capabilities, so why is it still so difficult to gain a quantitative or qualitative understanding of multi-agent AI behavior? Once unleashed, how might these AI swarms transform society and the economy? 

The Measure of a Swarm

The Hugging Face Incident, the most serious AI misalignment incident in the history of the AI industry, showed the disastrous consequences of ignoring emergent behavior in multi-agent systems....

....MUCH MORE 

"France’s debt troubles expose cracks in Europe’s fiscal union"

France is down to two choices:

1) Cut the deficit to eventually lower the interest rate bondholders charge on the debt.

2) Leave the euro and go back to the franc so they can inflate the debt away.

A sovereign borrowing in a currency other than one they control is doomed. 

Of course the politicians and the public will opt for the magical third option: "We can continue as we are for one more decade/year/month/day," pick your own time frame.

From Asia Times, October 24:

A synopsis of this week’s subscription-only Global Risk-Reward Monitor newsletter, an indispensable risk-management and opportunity-identification tool for institutional investors and decision-makers  

Germany resists as France’s debt troubles threaten contagion 

Diego Faßnacht reports that France’s rising borrowing costs and political paralysis are colliding with Germany’s resistance to larger EU commitments, exposing a widening fault line in Europe’s fiscal architecture. The risk is that sovereign-market stress spreads faster than governments can agree on adjustment, burden-sharing or credible backstops....

....MORE (non-French tidbits) 

"Russian oil giant Rosneft fears just a few more months of war in Ukraine could inflict lasting damage on its business, Bloomberg reports"

From Meduza (banned in Russia), October 22:

Rosneft officials are concerned that even a few more months of the war in Ukraine could cause lasting damage to the company’s business, Bloomberg reported, citing sources.

The company’s finances are deteriorating as profits fall and debt rises, Bloomberg’s sources said, despite expectations that the war in the Middle East would boost its earnings.

Rosneft has suffered significant damage from Ukrainian strikes on its oil refineries. The company operates 12 refineries that account for about a third of Russia’s total refining capacity. According to Bloomberg’s tally, five of the 15 confirmed drone strikes on Russian refineries in September alone targeted Rosneft facilities that supply fuel to European Russia.

The Ryazan refinery, which has repeatedly come under attack, is among the hardest hit....

....MUCH MORE 

Porsche Announces Limited Edition Flying Car

From AutoBlog, October 22: 

Porsche Warns Hundreds of Owners Not to Drive as Wheels Could Detach 

There are few scenarios more frightening than pushing a 640-horsepower sports car to its limits and having one of its wheels detach, but that’s the risk facing owners of several Porsche sports cars. 

The German automaker has issued a new recall for multiple 718 and 911 models equipped with centerlock wheels, and the risk is so serious that a Do Not Drive Warning has been put into place until these vehicles can be inspected. Here’s everything owners need to know about this urgent recall....

....MUCH MORE 

Following the Berchtesgaden news a possible second Hitler Rants parody on the way. 

Meanwhile, In Berchtesgaden....

From NBC News:

Suspect arrested as fire engulfs Hitler’s ‘Eagle’s Nest’ retreat, German police say
Now owned by the state of Bavaria, the ⁠Kehlsteinhaus ​was classified after the ​war as a historical monument recalling the Nazi period. 

....MUCH MORE 

Countdown to Hitler Rants parody. 

Ahead Of Quanta Services' And GE Vernova's Upcoming Earnings: Weeks Like This Are Why You Want To Own Quality (PWR; GEV)

Both stocks have been whacked. 

Quanta, which reports on October 29th was down $6.01 (1.09%) to $546.43 today and is down 15.98% over the last three months. Here is the last year (up 32.31% over the longer period) of price action via TradingView:

 

The chart for GE Vernova which reports a day earlier, on the 28th, shows a similar pattern.

Down  $12.42 (−1.50%) to $815.08 today, down 20.32% over three months and is up 40.52% for the last year:

 

TradingView 

And from Yahoo Finance October 23, a story that, though focused on a couple other power suppliers, illustrates the currents/cross-currents buffeting the group.

The AI sell-off is crushing stocks of companies leading the data center build-out 

Two of the AI building boom's biggest suppliers just posted blowout quarters. Wall Street is dumping them anyway.

Bloom Energy (BE), whose fuel cells generate power on-site at data centers, said Thursday that sales jumped 138% last quarter and raised its full-year outlook to roughly 122% growth. Comfort Systems (FIX), which installs the cooling and electrical systems inside them, said its backlog nearly doubled to $17.8 billion.

Both stocks are falling hard for a second straight day. Credo (CRDO), which makes networking parts for data centers, is sliding with them.

Bloom Energy leads a second day of selling in AI data 

center suppliers after blowout quarters. ·  

Yahoo Finance AlphaSpace

"A company can deliver extraordinary numbers, but if investors aren't willing to reward those results, something isn't right," Steve Strazza of All Star Charts wrote Friday morning.

Bloom did give the bears something to chew on. Its cash flow turned negative in the quarter, and its margins aren't keeping pace with sales.

It's not just 2 stocks 
Since the S&P 500's (^IXIC) Oct. 6 record close, the companies building and equipping AI data centers are down a median 23%, according to Yahoo Finance calculations. That group includes heavyweights like Caterpillar (CAT), GE Vernova (GEV), Vertiv (VRT), and Eaton (ETN).

Power producers are down 14%. Nvidia (NVDA) is off 11%. The Big Tech companies writing the checks are down just 5%.

 

Yahoo Finance

In other words, the companies cashing the checks are falling harder than the ones writing them.

That's backward for a build-out whose biggest problem is supply. "The biggest constraint right now for the AI build-out is power," Jefferies' Aniket Shah told Yahoo Finance on Wednesday, pointing to public pushback against new data centers. Even Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said builders have to be good neighbors....

....MUCH MORE

Pull-quote: "Either the backlogs are wrong, or the stock prices are."

Capital Markets: "France's Flash October PMI drop below 50 Ahead of Moody's Decision Later Today"

Shrinkage. 

From Marc to Market: 

The foreign exchange market looks eerily calm. After the safe haven flows yesterday supported the Swiss franc and yen, today they have diverged. The yen’s minor gain puts its atop the G10, while the Swiss franc’s 0.25% loss puts its at the bottom. The pressure in the European bond market has eased today, but Moody’s review of France’s debt rating late today poses a challenge, and although the Macron government has threatened military assistance to quell the social unrest, more activity is likely this weekend.

The Philadelphia Stock Exchange Semiconductor Index tumbled 6.7% yesterday. It was the largest drop since June and tested the 200-day moving average for the first time since June 2025. December WTI is within pennies of the contract high set on Tuesday (~$101.35). Brazil’s presidential run-off between Lula and Bolsonaro will take place Sunday. It looks like dead heat. The markets responded favorably to Bolsonaro’s lead in the first round....

....MUCH MORE 

"Brent Hits $114 as Houthi Attacks Threaten Saudi Energy Infrastructure"

From OilPrice, October 23: 

Crude oil prices were on course to book a sharp weekly gain, with Brent crude on track for gains of about $6 per barrel and WTI registering a much more modest tick higher, from around $99 per barrel on Monday to over $100 earlier today.

At the time of writing, Brent crude was trading at $114.00 per barrel, and West Texas Intermediate was changing hands for $100.40 per barrel, as hostilities in the Middle East remain front-page news for oil traders. The focus, however, seems to be on Houthi attacks on Saudi infrastructure, including Aramco facilities.

The latest news from that front was Aramco’s order for personnel evacuation from its headquarters in Dhahran, which is in the Persian Gulf, suggesting the Yemeni Houthis have some longer-distance capabilities than what they used previously, when they focused on attacks in the Red Sea and Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea ports.

Meanwhile, adding fuel to the oil price rally, Libya’s National Oil Corporation reported the shutdown of an oil pipeline that feeds oil from two fields to the Zawya export terminal. The shutdown prompted cuts in production at the two fields....

....MORE, including commentary from ING.

Also at OilPrice: 

European Natural Gas Prices Surge to Highest Level Since 2022 

France: Today's Word Is "Machicolations"

With tomorrow's scheduled protests looming, a look at old-school defenses.

French residents are throwing hot water out their windows to stop rioters from breaking into the storefronts below them... If they are excited about what hot water can do, wait until the French learn about guns! Too bad they don't have many of those...

— Shawn Farash (@Shawn_Farash) October 19, 2026

There is a reason we've had multiple posts that mention machicolations and murder holes as amenities to value when shopping for your castle, donjon or stand-alone tower. 

 

The word machicolation probably comes from the old French words for ‘crush’ (machier) and ‘neck’ (col). Neck crushers.

As noted introducing 2024's "Caution: RuPaul Built A Bunker (just don't call it a bunker)":

This is indeed where castles studies can lead. You start to think, say, that's not a bad idea and next thing you know you're pouring boiling pitch onto the swarming hordes at the base of the tower.

(machicolations baby)

Earlier:

Tips For Buying Your Next Castle

A partial repost from May 2017:

The first thing to look for in your new castle are crenels.

****

The next thing to pay attention to is verticality....

**** 

The linked pictures lead to our third consideration, your spiral stairs. From the (maybe) adulterous wife tower above... 

The first thing you notice is the spiral is correct.
Your men-at-arms retreating up the stairs from the attackers will have their right hand free to thrust, parry and chop while the swing of the interlopers is impeded by the outer wall.

However:
On newel-post spiral stairs the tactics are different.... 

***

...Moving on to a couple of the Italian offerings.

Castello di Montefiore has pretty much everything you are looking for in a castle including machicolations under the battlements at the top of the towers for dropping your flaming pitch or whatever on the besiegers:

There! Underneath the crenelated battlements are structures with holes to drop stuff through! 

Much less exposed than standing at the window with your tea kettle. 

After oat prices jumped in 2023 we saw: 

....Takeaway - the urchins can still buy their own damn gruel and won't be knocking on the portcullis for a while yet.

However, should oat prices turn higher again, you may want to cook some up to leave on the other side of the moat. Here's the Royal Society of Chemistry with their re-creation of your basic Oliver Twist workhouse gruel along with some signage you may wish to use:

Although somewhat filling the workhouse gruel leaves much to be desired as this article from the British Medical Journal explains in some detail. Still, beggars really can't be choosers and should the urchin class breach your outer defenses, you can always drop the boiling slop through the machicolations and murder holes of your fortifications to hold them at bay.

For what it's worth the workhouse that inspired Dickens (though not the one his father was in) is now an area of luxury condominiums, thus explaining some of London's affordable housing crisis.

And if you are coming at things from the other side, we have:

News You Can Use: How To Storm A Castle

"Norwegians Leave Gold in Forest as Some Fall for Scam"

This almost sounds like an affinity fraud. Think Jews investing with Bernie Madoff.* 

If the fraudsters convince someone in a group that what they are promoting is real, no matter how outlandish the proposition, the odds increase that the next victim will be part of the same group, whether it is a formal organization or an informal network.

From Bloomberg, October 22: 

Swindlers have persuaded Norwegians into buying gold and leaving it in the forest as part of a growing investment fraud, according to the country’s banking lobby.

Several bank clients have spent large sums to purchase gold and then left it out in nature, following promises that “others will keep it safe while the value rises,” Finans Norge said in a statement Thursday, without specifying the amounts. The gold was subsequently stolen.

It said the scheme is one of three fraud methods that banks are “specifically warning against right now.”

The first of such cases was registered in the spring, Gry Nergård, director of anti-fraud operations at Finans Norge, said by phone. Incidents had been reported in Oslo and towns around it but also in Bergen on the west coast, she added.

Last year, the losses of Norwegian lenders and their customers from financial fraud totaled 962 million kroner ($100 million), the lobby group said. At the same time, the banks prevented fraud attempts amounting to over 3.5 billion kroner.

Finans Norge is conducting an anti-fraud information campaign titled “NO WAY – you won’t fool me,” together with the country’s banks, aiming to increase the awareness of Norwegians about identifying and avoiding scam attempts.

“Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, 
while they only recover their senses slowly, one by one.”
― Charles MacKay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds

*Trying to get a handle on who lost what, the Jerusalem Post headlined one of their stories:

Scammer of the Tribe: Bernie Madoff ripped off Jewish orgs. around world 

"OpenAI nears up to $30 billion funding round at $1.25 trillion valuation led by UAE investors"

From CNBC, October 22: 

• OpenAI is close to finalizing an up to $30 billion funding round at a $1.25 trillion pre-money valuation, according to people familiar with the deal.
• Investors from the United Arab Emirates and Coatue are leading the financing, the people said.
• The financing is being positioned as a bridge ahead of a potential IPO. 

OpenAI is closing in on a funding round that could value the artificial intelligence giant at more than $1 trillion ahead of a potential initial public offering. 

The San Francisco-based AI company is raising up to $30 billion at a $1.25 trillion valuation, according to people familiar with the deal, who asked not to be named because the details were confidential. That valuation does not include new capital raised.

Investors from the United Arab Emirates are leading the round alongside Coatue, according to people familiar with the deal.

OpenAI told investors Thursday that it aims to secure signatures by the end of next week. The final size of the round is still being determined, the people said. 

The financing is being positioned as an “opportunistic” bridge ahead of a potential IPO, the people said. An OpenAI listing will likely come in 2027, CFO Sarah Friar has told employees....

....MORE 

Other examples of Surrealism from the Art Institute of Chicago:

 

La durée poignardée (Time Transfixed)

1938

René Magritte
Belgian, 1898–1967

 

Broken and Restored Multiplication, 1918–19

Suzanne Duchamp

 

Inventions of the Monsters, 1937

Salvador Dalí

Ummm: "Russia Just Did Something Menacing in Orbit That Satellite Trackers Say Is a First"

From Gizmodo, October 20: 

Cosmos 2612 spent several days stalking a U.S.-operated commercial radar-imaging satellite believed to support the Ukrainian military.  

Russia has drawn renewed scrutiny following a series of reportedly unprecedented orbital maneuvers, in which one of its government-owned satellites operated in extreme proximity to a U.S.-operated satellite, highlighting growing concerns over the risks of confrontation in space. 

The Russian satellite, designated Cosmos 2612, carried out a series of close-proximity maneuvers toward ICEYE-X36, a U.S.-registered commercial radar-imaging satellite, between October 15 and 19, based on data by space-tracking company LeoLabs. Cosmos 2612 spent two days at a close proximity of less than 3 miles (5 kilometers) with ICEYE-X36 before moving away to 62 miles (100 kilometers), according to Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist who tracks ongoing space activities....

....MUCH MORE 

You only live twice.

Followup: USAID As The Kicked-Over Hornets Nest

Although yesterday's ""Democrats have a message for Elon Musk: Watch out" (SPCX; TSLA)" wasn't about USAID specifically I exited with the most recent Inspector General's Report on why USAID couldn't be audited and the outro:

It is the cuts to USAID and its transfer to State Department oversight that kicked the hornets nest. Some of the very powerful "six ways from Sunday" constituencies have decided they want that money and they want that control.

That wasn't just rando opinion.

Here's AlterNet, July 7, 2025:

'They’ve done a very foolish thing': Fired Trump officials pledge to stop him 

Officials recently fired by President Donald Trump from USAID and the State Department are now repurposing their years of experience battling authoritarian regimes abroad to resist what they see as growing authoritarianism in the United States.

For years, these democracy-building experts — ousted earlier this year by the Trump administration — were dispatched to support opposition movements and civil-society actors in autocratic countries. Today, equipped with time and a vast network of former colleagues, they are redirecting that expertise to challenge what they see as an attack on democracy, NOTUS reported Monday.

The purge began in February, when Trump abruptly fired USAID’s inspector general, Paul K. Martin, after his office reported on the impact of the administration’s aid freeze. Shortly thereafter, roughly 83% of programs were cancelled, 94% of personnel laid off, and USAID was folded into the State Department — a move observers called an “advance of authoritarianism."

The dismantling sparked harsh rebukes from former presidents, international partners, and aid advocates. 

“Take it from those of us who worked in authoritarian countries: We’ve become one,” a current federal official, who was not named, told NOTUS.

“They were so quick to disband AID, the group that supposedly instigates color revolutions. But they’ve done a very foolish thing. You just released a bunch of well‑trained individuals into your population. If you kept our offices going and had us play solitaire in the office, it might have been safer to keep your regime," the source added.

The fired experts are mobilizing rapidly, per the report. They are said to be hosting digital briefings for journalists, providing consulting to grassroots organizations, coordinating litigation strategies and advising state attorneys general on constitutional challenges to executive authority.

Some within this informal network of Trump opponents have even begun circulating a decades‑old CIA pamphlet among allies still serving in government — titled “Simple Sabotage.”  

The pamphlet says: “Widespread practice of simple sabotage will harass and demoralize enemy administrators and police."

"The saboteur may have to reverse his thinking… where he formerly thought of keeping his tools sharp, he should now let them grow dull; surfaces that formerly were lubricated now should be sanded; normally diligent, he should now be lazy and careless," it adds.

According to the report, the group sharing this manual includes diplomats and human-rights professionals who once operated on U.S. government payrolls — supporting Latin American dissidents, aiding African independence movements and even contributing to a successful protest campaign in the Middle East.

We've linked to the 1944 OSS manual a few times:

"Timeless Tips for 'Simple Sabotage'"

It was a Featured Article at the CIA in 2012.