Oh, I forgot the best part.
Months before the IPO, SpaceX took $17.5 billion of old junk debt from xAI and X and parked it on its own balance sheet through a $20 billion bridge loan.
The terms? Repaid within six months of listing.
So part of the $75 billion that retail and index funds just handed over is already spoken for. Not for Mars. Not for rockets. To clear debts piling up at Elon's other companies.
You bought the rocket ship.
You're on the hook for the loans.
BEST. ENGINEERING. EVER.
🚨 SpaceX just pulled off the greatest financial engineering feat of the century. In about a week.
Here's everything that happened, in order:
– Folded xAI into a rocket company, turning "space logistics" into an "AI infrastructure" story overnight
– Priced the IPO at a flat $135. No book-building, no range. Take it or leave it
– Floated just 4% of the company. 556 million shares against 13 billion
– Raised $75 billion at a $1.77 trillion valuation, near 100x revenue
– Lobbied to get into major indices in ~15 trading days. Amazon took years. Forced buying, by law
– Handed an unusually large slice of the float to retail. Tiny supply, an army of buyers
– Watched the stock rocket past $200, up nearly 20% in a single session
– Saw ~46% of the entire float trade hands in one day
– Then announced a $60 billion all-stock buyout of Cursor, the AI coding tool
– Structured it so the higher the stock trades, the fewer shares it has to print to pay
A company losing $4 billion a quarter is now buying AI startups with paper it manufactured out of a 4% float.
The scarcity that pumped the stock now makes its shopping spree cheaper.
This isn't aerospace. It isn't even AI.
It's the finest financial engineering of the century, and it's only week one.
Did you know that the .png format was created out of spite? Or that .jpeg just discards like half of the colours in your image because you won't notice?
To celebrate last week's launch, I published a chapter on image compression.
https://t.co/IwwPF9l1LK
In 1966, All African counties boycotted the World Cup to protest apartheid and how black South Africans were marginalized
In 2026, All African countries supported Mexico against South Africa in protest against their xenophobia
Live long enough
Today my first book, THE YAHOO BOYS: Love, Deception and the Real Lives of Nigeria’s Romance Scammers (FSG), is finally out in the US.
The book follows four love scammers in Lagos as they scam lonely Westerners while dealing with the worst economic crisis in Nigeria in a generation.
It started with my mum falling for an American soldier who was, in fact, a Nigerian scammer. But it grew into something much bigger.
I’ve spent the last four years of my life working on this: travelling to and living in Lagos, reporting, taking notes, reading, writing and rewriting. I did more than 250 interviews and spent countless hours with the main characters of this book. I poured tens of thousands of euros into the project, to the point where I was dead broke by the end.
I’ve seen the best and the worst of human beings. I’ve laughed and cried and eaten so much jollof and egusi. I’ve had a gun pointed at me in Kentucky. I’ve read conversations with too many people talking about taking their own lives because they were lonely. I’ve met Nigerian families who split an egg four ways for dinner. Many interviewees broke into tears in front of me.
I’ve learnt that being a human being is a difficult business.
I hope you buy and read the book, so you can experience some of this for yourself.
No entiendo cómo puede ser. Vi a Michael Jackson morir, a Maradona morir, a Pelé morir, a la reina Isabel morir; vi pasar a tres papas. Sobreviví a una pandemia, vi el comienzo de internet. Vi el CD cambiar a Spotify, vi cambiar el DVD a Netflix, vi pasar del teléfono fijo a un iPhone. Y estoy viendo el surgimiento de la IA. Y solo tengo 30 años.
▪️First Ghana player to score at a World Cup
▪️Most World Cup goals by any African player (6)
▪️Scored in every World Cup he's played in
▪️Scored Ghana's fastest World Cup goal (68 seconds)
▪️Most World Cup appearances for Ghana (11 games)
Asamoah Gyan 👑🇬🇭
Accra has a traffic problem.
Over the past 2 months we’ve been digging for secrets on how Accra got into this mess, and more importantly how we dig ourself out.
and we’re finally ready to share it.
Our first explainer - Accra, the City that Can’t Move, premieres on YouTube today at 6pm.
see you thereee.
525,000 a year
10,000 a week
1,400 a day.
These are the number of men that die by suicide.
Happy Men's Mental Health Month.
To every man reading this: you are not a burden, and you do not have to carry the weight of the world alone. Speaking up is real strength.