Elizabeth Lopatto is a senior writer at The Verge, where she covers how the internet is changing how we think about money: cryptocurrency, business, fintech and Elon Musk for some reason. She joined the site in 2014, as science editor, then deputy editor running science, transportation and social media, before she got tired of being an authority figure and went back to blogging.
Nvidia, which recently debuted “compute as an asset class” and definitely is not doing circular financing, is reportedly buying Hugging Face for almost $13 billion, according to The Information, which cites a single anonymous source. Almost an hour earlier, Business Insider reported that the two companies were in talks but had not yet reached a deal, also citing a single anonymous source.
You may recall Apollo is majorly involved in AI infrastructure financing; it even is one of the “compute is an asset class” consortium. Sounds like the hackers stole a bunch of the usual things, like employees’ social security numbers. If they stole interesting things, like internal data on the AI deals Apollo has been making, that wasn’t disclosed in the breach notification. If you know anything about the hack, hit me up on Signal: lopatto.46.
Jensen Huang wants you to think ‘ah, compute as an asset class’ not ‘oh no more GPU-backed loans.’
The end of USAID, which Elon Musk fed “into the wood chipper”, will cause an extra 14 million deaths through 2030, including 4.5 million in children under the age of 5. SpaceX shares are $141.10 as of this writing, above their IPO price of $135.
Correction: A previous version of this post referred to the journal article’s estimates as “new.” It was published in 2025.
A really excellent essay about how Philip K. Dick predicted our current day, “filled with deranged billionaires, machines that claim consciousness, hallucinated worlds and political breakdown. Musk and his brethren seem more like escapees from this universe than the Asimovian super-geniuses they imagine themselves to be.”
[Financial Times]
An AI future of sleek, streamlined, and totally empty relationships.
A lot of staffers subscribe just because we enjoy his work (and when he gets his vacation ruined). But today’s newsletter is about the SpaceX lockup expiring — how it should work vs what we will find out tomorrow about how it will work — and how the noted AI hedge fund Situational Awareness may have tanked the bets of noted AI hedge fund Situational Awareness.
[Bloomberg]
Mostly because I find it hilarious to watch people say out-of-pocket shit to under their own government names to people they are going to see at the farmer’s market and everywhere else. (The problem of people being mean online is not, it turns out, anonymity.) Here’s one woman’s story of the local consequences of a post.
[Oakland Review of Books]
Elon Musk’s exploding rockets are a front for the real moneymakers.
