Because, on those dates, Musk plans to take his space company SpaceX public, which will likely increase his fortune enough to break the trillion-dollar barrier. The company will be valued at around 1.75 trillion dollars (1.5 trillion euros), something that is not supported by SpaceX's fundamentals. Of course, that is not a problem for Musk, who has managed to make Tesla worth 1.5 trillion dollars by promising things that never materialize, such as self-driving cars and now humanoid robots. Tesla is a meme stock, meaning a stock whose price does not fluctuate based on fundamentals, but on what is said about it on social media. And SpaceX will be the same, but on a galactic scale.
Electric companies join the party of AI business deals
Probably the most important operation this week in the world of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has nothing to do with Nvidia, Google, OpenAI, or Anthropic. It is the acquisition, by the Florida electric company NextEx, of Dominion in Virginia, for 66.8 billion dollars (57.6 billion euros). What NextEx is interested in from Dominion is a strip of 4,700 square kilometers (slightly larger than the province of Pontevedra) near Washington, where the world's largest concentration of data centers is located, with between 250 and 400 facilities. More and more of these centers are AI-based, meaning they require tens of thousands of gigawatts of electricity. It is an irresistible feast for the Florida company, which, to obtain approval from competition authorities, has made a patriotically disinterested donation of 300 million dollars to the ballroom that Donald Trump wants to build at the White House.
Starmer allows Russian oil to 'disguise' as kerosene
On Tuesday afternoon, the British Department of Trade issued a statement titled 'General Commercial License for Sanctioned Petroleum Products.' That bureaucratic phrase concealed something much more explosive from a geopolitical point of view: authorization for the import of diesel and aviation fuel (kerosene) from third countries that have processed it from Russian crude oil. The measure, very similar to one from the United States, aims to limit the aviation fuel shortage due to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Unlike Washington, London has done so on the sly, due to the support that the cause of Ukraine has in the United Kingdom and also because the government of Keir Starmer had, until now, taken a very favorable position towards Kiev. The measure also questions Europe's willingness to pursue the Russian ghost fleet of tankers carrying crude oil from that country to India.
From Orbán to Deitz: Ukraine swaps a veto for a vulture fund
Now that Viktor Orbán, the Prime Minister of Hungary, has lost power and therefore stopped obstructing European aid to Ukraine, a new obstacle has emerged for the economy of that country. His name is Richard Deitz, he is American and lives in London, where he runs his hedge fund, VR Capital, although he is also a co-owner of the Israeli basketball team Maccabi Tel Aviv. VR Capital has acquired a large part of the debts of the Ukrainian state-owned railway (Ukrzaliznytsia) and gas (Natfogaz) companies, and is blocking their attempts to restructure their respective debts. This complicates the existence of both companies, which have been attacked an infinite number of times (Ukrzaliznytsia alone is bombed an average of three times a day) and are also indispensable for Ukraine. Other funds, such as BlackRock, have accepted 40% write-offs in similar cases. But for VR Capital, the war seems to be just a minor inconvenience.
When Altman (ChatGPT) looks in the mirror, does he see Elon Musk?
Every day that passes, Sam Altman resembles more his nemesis, Elon Musk. The co-founder and CEO of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) giant OpenAI - famous for its chatbot ChatGPT - has just dealt a legal blow to his former partner Musk, in a trial that has made it clear that, like the owner and CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, Altman has significant interests outside the company, which could pose conflicts of interest (although it is also true that ethics are very analog and outdated). Altman has over 2 billion dollars in investments in 14 companies, three of which have strategic agreements with OpenAI: the nuclear fusion company Helion, the fintech company Stripe, and the pharmaceutical company specialized in combating aging Retro Biosciences. Now, perhaps to overshadow SpaceX's IPO, OpenAI is preparing its own, with a valuation close to a trillion dollars.
Technology drinks even the water from the vases
Residents of Annelise Park neighborhood, on the outskirts of Atlanta, USA, noticed a few months ago that the water pressure in their taps was alarmingly decreasing. After a brief investigation, authorities discovered the culprit: an AI data center 35 kilometers away that had consumed over 100 million liters of water from the local aquifer to cool its computers. This is an example of the excessive water consumption by AI, which threatens to become one of the main obstacles to its development.