AI Brothers

OpenAI, Anthropic, SpaceX

That sign used to say Lehman Brothers...

This Sunday, June 14th, both sides to the Iran – US War have announced some sort of deal to permanently end hostilities and open the Strait.

The fog of war dynamic is still strong so we will not take their word for it. Besides, trying to make money trading news is very difficult – unless you're the one making the news, wink.

Thinking about the Monday gap up in stocks made me consider today's analogies with the GFC of 08 - 09..

If you were around then, or studied some market history, you know the world was falling apart until the authorities decided to intervene decisively.

The setup today feels like the exact opposite. Let's look into the historical analogy...

Oh Eight – Oh Nine

Following the collapse of Lehman Brothers, policymakers scrambled to stabilize a system that was rapidly unraveling.

Think brink and back dynamics that we often talk about

With the Triad of Obama, Paulson and Bernanke, the authorities deployed extraordinary measures. These included TARP bank recapitalizations, emergency lending facilities, guarantees and liquidity programs designed to restore confidence and "save the system".

Investors were buying into a market that had already endured a historic collapse, reassured by the belief that Washington and the Fed would do whatever was necessary to prevent a complete financial meltdown.

The admission was that Humpty Dumpty had fallen off the wall and broken himself – and we had to do *whatever* was needed to put him back together.

In fact, it was an attempt to put him back together – because the prevailing narrative was that things were irreparably broken.

Even George Soros thought so.

The Great AI Boom of 2026

The setup today has practically zero similarities with the GFC: markets are booming, trust and confidence is at all-time highs and people are richer than ever.

Investors today are buying into a market that has staged a historic rally, reassured by the belief in American Exceptionalism, global Technological Supremacy, endless growth, infinite cash flows... and the future of AI as a technology that will make all that bigger and better.

If I had to point out one overarching similarity is that we still rely on interventionism to keep markets moving up and to the right.

Interventionism is the opposite of Market Fundamentalism, or 'Laissez-Faire'

Laissez-faire (derived from French, literally translating to "let [people] do") is an ideology describing a "hands-off" or unrestricted approach. It primarily refers to an economic system where transactions are completely free from government intervention, such as regulations, tariffs, and subsidies.

Unlike 2008, markets and business are now booming – but the Trump Administration is still actively intervening in the economy. Either by trying to influence the Fed or by enacting laws or creating SPVs to invest in a key sector or industry.

If you need examples, reference the war of words with former Fed Chair d J-Pow, Stargate Project, the Bitcoin National Reserve and recent talks of backstopping OpenAI – an idea that was swiftly shut down by the Federal Government.

After that, Altman went back home and re-worked on his pitch to make it more lucrative 👇

*Trump administration, OpenAI discussing possible government stake in the AI startup

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and the White House are in ongoing talks about a possible government stake in the company, CNBC confirmed.
The AI startup could donate equity to the U.S. government to seed something like the “Public Wealth Fund” that the company outlined in its April policy proposal, according to a source familiar with the discussions.
The talks have been in progress for more than a year, as Altman first shared the idea with the Trump administration in 2025, the person said.

From CNBC article here.

The discussion around Technological Supremacy and the Chinese threat is strong in the US – and political and public support will appear when required.

It's also convenient for any government as it supports the rhetoric of "spreading the wealth" to every citizen – especially at a time of mass paranoia that AI will take everyone's jobs.

More on 'Compute as Intelligence' in this piece.

The Setup Now

A wall of extremely speculative IPOs that have absolutely no relation to the Dot Com Bubble of 1999
A prevailing narrative that is increasingly being questioned...
...and the Damocles' Sword of cost and competition hanging above AI

The sword is there, if you look hard enough.

In a piece from this weekend, I made the case that this AI Cycle is now in its Twilight Period. That is to say, one click from the bust phase

For now, Semis and Memory are still moving up – and so is SpaceX.

In the 2000s, the market and investors were still preoccupied with risk and value – today the market's paradigm is to find the next bottleneck and retire by next year.

While the picks and shovels play has undeniably worked, in that AI infrastrucure companies are printing money – at the same time, those buying the infrastructure aren't making money from it...

I touched on this in a podcast interview I did with Michael Fritzell last week, that you can find here.

I keep talking about the Brute Force paradigm in AI, as opposed to elegance and minimalism. How would demand for AI infrastructure shift when AI kills its maximalist approach in an unavoidable race to the bottom?

LLM providers are ultimately commodity producers with no switching costs, it has already been a few times where users mass dump one lab to go to another – and the feature and value race will continue for a long time. In other words, expect more users to tsunami from one lab to the other.

The Alchemy of Elon

xAI's Grok hasn't managed to keep up the pace with the Big 2 AI labs, either in users or in features – despite xAI's advantage of distribution and scale through the X platform.

But this didn't stop Elon as he set out to:

1) destroy Sam for betraying (?) him and
2) dominate in AI...

How could he do that?

His cunning strategy was to take a capital-intensive commodity business like Data Centers and put lipstick on it.

Data Centers in Space
Rocket Launches
Asteroid Mining
Starlink
Starship
Futuristic promises and a built-in cult following

And that's how SpaceX got a 2 trillion dollar valuation.. on $20bln of Sales, for a ~100X multiple!

Btw, this is the same guy who promised to deliver FSD (full self-driving) cars for a good decade now. In the meanwhile he layered on Robots and other promises when the EV/FSD playbook was failing.

It seems Elon knows the playbook well, when things don't work out – pivot!

Yet the reality remains, in SpaceX's prospectus – >80% of the business is AI – a business that is becoming more capital intensive with time.

Starlink seems to be the most serious business, in the SpaceX stack – and here's how you can "replicate" it at ~4% of its price (less now, lol!) 👇

Equity Leveraging

This cycle has been first underpinned by equity leveraging, and then by debt leverage. And the former is definitely easier than the latter.

We will go into details in a follow-up piece dedicated to SpaceX where I analyse the presentation from a meme-y, range of outcomes POV.

In other words, we already know the company is expensive and speculative... but what can Elon do with it regardless of that?

Parting Thoughts

The play here seems to be using a space-high valuation to create value... (I will explain) – and mostly for POWER accumulation rather than PROFIT GENERATION.

I will leave you with some food for thought...

If SpaceX already has a $2 trillion valuation and an army of willing suitors (like Ron Baron etc.) ready to bankroll Elon's projects at will...

How dangerous is Elon & SpaceX to the existing incumbents of Big Tech & AI? And how does that change the balance of power, forcing alliances and strategic partnerships up and down the stack?

For more reading on this last part, refer to Stack Alliances (our inaugural issue of the series)