Christopher Abboud

@Stripe Comms

[Patrick Collison @patrickc]

New project: https://t.co/0mvpzkysHb.

More: https://t.co/G5af6WXdTL.

[Ernie Tedeschi @ernietedeschi]

Everyone’s talking about the K-shaped economy—the rich pulling away while everyone else stagnates.
In our inaugural Stripe Economics post, I take a look at @stripe + macro data, and I see the K on Wall Street, but not yet on Main Street:
• The most profitable third of US public companies now account for ~2/3 of total market cap—the highest on record.
• The S&P 500 rose 16.5% in 2025, and the top 1% own ~40% of all equities. So unsurprisingly the top 1% wealth share has risen (~2pp) since 2022.
• BUT, Stripe data suggest lower-income household spending has been growing faster than high-income households over the last few years.
• Wages tell a similar story: real earnings at the 10th percentile grew ~0.5pp slower than the 90th since 2022, but BOTH posted positive real wage growth.
• Why? 1) The wealthy hold lots of equities but only account for ~25% of consumer spending. 2) Real wages at the bottom have been supported by continued labor market tightness post-pandemic, though this may cool.
Read the full post below and subscribe!
https://t.co/MEVr1n0gU1

[Patrick Collison @patrickc]

We just published Stripe's 2025 annual letter: https://t.co/qVI1JgVxM7.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

France just went from “shut down 14 reactors” to “keep them all and build 6 more.” A 20-reactor swing in policy.

The math behind this reversal tells you everything. France gets 67% of its electricity from nuclear. Its CO2 intensity is 56g/kWh. Germany, which shut down its last nuclear plant in 2023 and spent over $160 billion on its renewable “Energiewende,” sits at 381g/kWh. Nearly 7x dirtier.

Meanwhile France’s household electricity costs €0.266/kWh. Germany’s? €0.3835. French households pay 30% less for power that produces a fraction of the carbon.

The new plan (PPE3, published this week) targets 380-420 TWh of nuclear output per year by 2035 and aims to cut fossil fuel consumption from 900 TWh to 330 TWh. That’s a 63% reduction in fossil dependence in a single decade. Six new EPR2 reactors get built, existing reactors get extended to 50 or 60 years, and they’re already scoping 8 more reactors with a decision this year.

Germany spent a trillion dollars over half a century trying to prove nuclear was optional. France just looked at the scoreboard and doubled down.

Cheaper power, cleaner grids, energy independence. France read the spreadsheet and picked the obvious answer.

[John Collison @collision]

New season of Cheeky Pint starts tomorrow! First up: @dwarkesh_sp and I sit down with @elonmusk to discuss space GPUs and much more.

[Sam Bowman @s8mb]

Nuclear power is back. After decades of stagnation, people are starting to wonder how we can build nuclear reactors as quickly and cheaply as we did in the 20th Century

I sat down with @chalmermagne and @bswud to talk about why nuclear power can be so good, why it flopped, and how to get it back again.

We discuss:

• The astonishing energy density of uranium – 100g of it produces the same energy as 1.5 tons of coal – and why it matters
• Why nearly every country in the world forgot how to do cheap nuclear at the same time
• How the French state built 37 reactors in ten years
• Why even solar power optimists should want a nuclear renaissance

Plus: Why nuclear meltdowns aren't as scary as people think!

Listen now. Links below!

Spotify: https://t.co/MImJfNyFtn
Apple: https://t.co/TjY5rNPTES
Youtube: https://t.co/2gktoydAfx

[Christopher Abboud @CAbboud]

It’s very hard to disagree with Jamie Dimon on this one.

[SMX 🇺🇸 @iam_smx]

JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon criticizes Europe’s growing bureaucracy, calling it a serious obstacle, and adds that it’s their own bureaucracy that has driven business out, they’ve driven investment out, they’ve driven innovation out.

"Europe has a problem. It takes 27 nations, you know, to make a decision. they let their military drop dramatically, It's very bureaucratic

They've gone from 90% of the GDP of America to 65, that's not because America did anything bad to them, It's their own bureaucracy, their own cost.

They do some wonderful things in their on their safety nets, but they've driven business out. They've driven investment out. They've driven innovation out"

[Patrick Collison @patrickc]

Klarna is launching KlarnaUSD, powered by Bridge + Tempo.

We're delighted to deepen our work with @klarnaseb and the excellent Klarna team.

[Christopher Abboud @CAbboud]

Replace « the UK » by « France » and rethink current political deadlocks (also works with most European countries)

[Looking for Growth @lfg_uk]

"Whatever you care about, whatever your vision for this country, it will be much easier to achieve it if we make the UK rich again."

@matthewclifford at LFG: Make or Break 🚀

[David Galbraith @daveg]

Both the Left and Right in France have lost their minds.

[Stripe @stripe]

https://t.co/n3bvdBBdEz

[Patrick Collison @patrickc]

We have three cool announcements today:

(1) @OpenAI is launching commerce in ChatGPT. Their new Instant Checkout is powered by @stripe.
(2) We're releasing the Agentic Commerce Protocol, codeveloped by Stripe and OpenAI.
(3) @stripe is launching an API for agentic payments, called Shared Payment Tokens.

It's clear that internet purchasing modalities are going to change a lot, and we're excited to start to lay some of the foundations.

Links below!

[Christopher Abboud @CAbboud]

@edwinarbus Congrats Edwin!! Please do take that well deserved break this time :)

[Patrick Collison @patrickc]

Introducing @Tempo.

At Stripe, we care about high-throughput, low-latency payments use cases. As the use of stablecoins (and crypto more broadly) grows across Stripe, Bridge, and Privy, we found that existing blockchains are not optimized for them.

For example, it's valuable for real-world financial applications that fees be denominated in a fiat currency that makes sense to the user, but existing blockchains denominate their fees in blockchain-specific tokens. Batch transfers are very useful in payments, but much less important in trading. Bitcoin does ~5 TPS; Ethereum does ~20 TPS, some (like Base and Solana) get to ~1k TPS, but Stripe peaks at >10k TPS. And so on.

As such, we decided to incubate Tempo, a new blockchain, in partnership with Paradigm. We think of Tempo as the payments-oriented L1, optimized for high-scale, real-world financial services applications.

Tempo is an independent company, with Stripe and Paradigm as the first investors. To ensure that Tempo serves a broad array of needs, we're excited to be working with Anthropic, Coupang, Deutsche Bank, DoorDash, Lead Bank, Mercury, Nubank, OpenAI, Revolut, Shopify, Standard Chartered, and Visa as initial design partners. We will start with an independent and diverse validator set, and plan to move towards permissionless validation. Tempo will have a built-in stablecoin AMM to enable platform neutrality with respect to different stablecoins, and Stripe itself will of course continue to work with many chains as first-class partners.

We hope that Tempo makes it easier for things like payment acceptance, global payouts, remittances, microtransactions, tokenized deposits, agentic payments, and more, to move onchain.

The Tempo team is 15 people today, led by the terrific @matthuang. If you're interested in building Tempo, get in touch! And if you're interested in partnering, reach out to [email protected].

[Patrick Collison @patrickc]

https://t.co/dhXRnjtV1H

[Sam Bowman @s8mb]

NEW at WORKS IN PROGRESS ☢️⚡️🔋

France built forty nuclear reactors in ten years across the 1970s and 1980s, for a fraction of today's prices.

For the first time in English, we tell the story of how they did it — and what the rest of the world needs to learn to do the same.

[John Collison @collision]

Anthropic is one of the fastest-growing businesses of all time. @DarioAmodei and I chatted about flying past $5b in ARR, Anthropic's focus on B2B, payback economics of individual models, talent wars, AI market structure, and lots more. And you all said that you all want longer episodes, so this is an hour!

Timestamps
00:00 Intro
00:51 What’s it like to start a company with your sibling?
01:43 Building Anthropic with 7 cofounders
02:53 $5 billion in ARR; vertical applications
07:18 Developing a platform-first company
10:09 Working with the DoD
11:13 Proving skeptics wrong about revenue projections
13:14 Capitalistic impulses of AI models
15:44 AI market structure and players
16:56 AI models as standalone P&Ls
20:48 The data wall and styles of learning
22:20 AI talent wars
26:04 Pitching Anthropic’s API business to investors
27:49 Cloud providers vs AI labs
29:06 AI customization and Claude for enterprise
33:01 Dwarkesh’s take on limitations
36:12 19th-century notion of vitalism
37:28 AI in medicine, customer service, and taxes
41:00 How to solve for hallucinations
42:41 The double-standard for AI mistakes
44:14 Evolving from researcher to CEO
46:59 Designing AGI-pilled products
47:57 AI-native UIs
50:10 Model progress and building products
52:23 Open-source models
54:43 Keeping Anthropic AGI-pilled
57:11 AI advancements vs safety regulations
01:02:04 How Dario uses AI

[Patrick Collison @patrickc]

What will agentic commerce mean for the world? Emily covers this, Stripe's new foundation model, and more.

[Christopher Abboud @CAbboud]

Growing the G

[John Collison @collision]

OpenAI co-founder @gdb talks about integrating research and product development, the scaling hypothesis, and his AI predictions. Subscription links for future episodes: https://t.co/C3EMVuiblP

[John Collison @collision]

One of the best parts of Stripe is working with the world's most interesting businesses. Taking advantage of this, we're launching a podcast where we host founders and leaders for a cheeky pint in our hastily-constructed office pub. Coming soon: episodes with @gdb, Meta’s Susan Li, @kvogt, and @levelsio.

Let me know if you have suggested interviewees. We'll likely include a bunch of interviews with people you've never heard of but whose business stories are fascinating.