Tag: stock market

Elon Musk Announces Plan to Give Every Child in America One Share of SpaceX Stock in 2027

Elon Musk just dropped a bombshell that will put a real ownership stake in the hands of tens of millions of American kids.

On Monday, the SpaceX and Tesla CEO posted on X: “Next year, I will give one of my SpaceX shares to every kid in America. This will be the first of many.”

The announcement comes roughly four months after SpaceX went public on the Nasdaq under the ticker $SPCX in one of the largest IPOs in history.

Shares recently traded near $146, and with roughly 72–73 million children under 18 in the United States, the gift is valued in the neighborhood of $10.5 billion based on recent prices.

Musk did not spell out the exact mechanism, eligibility rules, or timeline beyond “next year,” but the scale is unmistakable. He is transferring ownership from his own holdings directly to the next generation.

This builds on earlier action from SpaceX itself. Earlier this year, SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell and her husband personally gifted one SpaceX share each to more than two million American children ages 11–17 in lower-income areas (with extra emphasis near their central Texas home) through the Trump Accounts program. That pledge was valued at roughly $325 million at the time.

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Wall Street Expected To Have Its Best Year Ever As Americans Drown In Debt

Money is flooding Wall Street as Americans thirst for financial relief amid war-fueled inflation and soaring household debt.

New York’s securities industry is on pace to blow past last year’s record profits, according to a new report from New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli. Wall Street firms made $45.9 billion in just the first half of 2026, already eclipsing what New York City expected them to make for the entire year. (RELATED: Wall Street Banks Finance Both Sides Of America’s AI Race With China)

The money has poured in as companies race to build artificial intelligence infrastructure, businesses return to the dealmaking table and investors trade through a year marked by war, tariffs and market swings, the Comptroller’s report found. Virtually every major Wall Street revenue stream grew during the first half of the year, with underwriting seeing particularly strong gains.

Wall Street’s boom looks much different from the economy many Americans are living in. Families have rationed showers and hauled water from creeks as water bills climb into the hundreds of dollars, while gasoline prices have risen sharply and record diesel costs threaten to make already expensive grocery bills even worse due to the wars in Iran and Ukraine.

Many Americans are leaning increasingly on borrowed money. Household debt has continued to climb, with consumers carrying growing credit card and auto loan balances as high interest rates make that debt more expensive to service, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Credit cards have become a particularly costly pressure point. Americans now owe more than $1 trillion on their cards, Fed data show, while credit card delinquencies have climbed to levels not seen since the aftermath of the Great Recession. Total household debt had climbed to a record $18.8 trillion in the first quarter of 2026.

Meanwhile, billions continue pouring into AI and Wall Street is preparing for another potentially record-breaking payday.

Venture capital investment in AI companies reached $407 billion during the first half of the year, already dwarfing the amount invested throughout 2025, the report found. The spending has helped buoy markets even as investors question whether companies can eventually make enough money to justify the enormous sums flowing into the technology.

Big Tech companies are increasingly borrowing to finance the data centers, chips and power infrastructure behind the AI boom. Amazon, Google, Meta and other tech giants are now competing with governments for investors’ cash as they flood debt markets with new borrowing.

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Turkey’s Fix For Its $20 Billion Hedge Fund Meltdown: Kindly Ask The Winners To Give The Money Back

Two weeks after a cluster of Istanbul asset managers stopped honoring redemptions, triggering a market-wide circuit breaker and the liquidation of 131 funds held by some 455,758 Turkish retail investors, Ankara has unveiled its plan to make everyone whole. Or at least, to make everyone a little bit less un-whole.

As Bloomberg reports, Turkey will start payments to investors caught in the fund crisis. The Capital Markets Board (SPK) approved interim payments of up to 1 million lira (about $20,400) per eligible investor in funds run by Tera, Pusula, Atlas and Hedef, calculated on each investor’s “net investment” as determined by the Central Securities Depository (MKK). Below a million lira, you get your money back; above it, you get a million and a place in the queue. Money market funds get paid first, the rest in descending order of investor count, with A1 Capital, Bulls and Pardus funds slotted in afterward. The interim payments are advances against whatever the liquidation ultimately recovers, which is a polite way of saying nobody knows yet.

Finance Minister Mehmet Simsek, meanwhile, insists that “we are not talking about a systemic problem,” pointing out that public debt is just 22% of GDP and the budget deficit is “roughly half the developing country average.” All true, and also not much consolation to the investor who, as Turkish Minute recounts, sold her Istanbul home before moving to Portugal, parked the proceeds in stock funds as an inflation hedge, and has watched her account fall ~90% while being unable to withdraw even that. “It is melting away before my eyes, and I can’t do anything about it.”

The “please give it back” account

The payouts are the boring part. The truly bizarre part is how Turkey – long the biggest banana in crowded bus of capital markets banana republics – plans to refill the pot.

Alongside the interim payments, the regulator announced the creation of “Voluntary Return Accounts” at Birlesik Fon Bankasi “for individuals seeking to return excessive profits obtained from pre-liquidation share sales.” Proceeds will be funneled to the fund liquidation estates and on to Ziraat and Isbank for distribution to investors. A separate “General Share Refund Account” has been opened for anyone who would like to hand back profits from speculative trading in listed stocks, and a new fund inside the deposit insurer TMSF will receive assets later determined to be proceeds of crime (details here).

To summarize: Turkey’s plan to compensate 455,000 losers is, in part, to ask the winners nicely.

Bloomberg’s Eric Balchunas summed it up best: “Turkey wants investors who made a lot of money in market to gift excessive returns to the other investors who lost $20b.”

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Senate Democrats Block Congressional Stock Trading Ban

Senate Democrats blocked a House-passed congressional stock trading ban that had a voter ID requirement attached to it on Wednesday.

The “Stop Insider Trading Act,” which needed 60 votes to advance, failed in a 53-47 vote.

Every single Democrats voted to block the bill.

The bill would block members of Congress, their spouses and children from purchasing new stocks.

The Hill reported:

Senate Democrats on Wednesday blocked a bill sponsored by vulnerable GOP incumbent Pete Ricketts (Neb.) to restrict members of Congress from buying new stocks of publicly traded companies, arguing the legislation didn’t go far enough to crack down on possible corruption.

The Stop Insider Trading Act failed by a vote of 53-47. No Democrat voted in support of the measure.

It needed 60 votes to advance on the Senate floor.

Schumer called the voter ID bill a “poison pill” on Tuesday after Senate Majority Leader Thune announced the vote.

“The poison pill that will gut mail voting that has failed six times…” Schumer said.

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The Easy Money Fairy Tale Is About To End…Violently

For the better part of the last couple years, I have wondered whether financial markets are permanently broken. Not simply overvalued or temporarily irrational, but actually broken at the mechanical level and permanently distorted. I’ve written about it.

The basic process that is supposed to make capitalism work goes like this. Capital flows toward good ole’ fashioned productive uses (like the George Foreman Grill™) and away from flashy hot-shit stupid ones (like the Apple Vision Pro). Good businesses eventually outperform bad ones. Fraud eventually gets exposed. Making money is the point of a business. Price is a rationing mechanism and is determined by free markets. This system appears to have been dead for the last 10 years, at least.

Nowadays, we function under a derivative of capitalism (hereinafter referred to as “crony capitalism snorting bath salts, operating under policies so disorganized they’d make a Jackson Pollock painting look like the blueprints for a nuclear reactor”) where trillions of dollars can be created overnight, governments and central banks focus obsessively on a handful of key numbers, and preserving the nominal value of stocks and other financial assets has become the priority.

Everything else in the economy is then forced to adjust accordingly, and if you don’t like it, or it causes the price of your Whopper Jr.™ to go to $57, f*ck you…that’s just how money works nowadays.

We’ve spent most of the last 20 years systematically removing consequences from the financial system. Rates went to zero and stayed there for years. The Fed expanded its balance sheet by trillions. Every major crisis was met with an intervention, liquidity facility, bailout or assurance that policymakers stood ready to keep the machine running. Capital was forced to become extraordinarily cheap, and investors eventually became conditioned to believe it would remain that way. We laughed off our country’s credit downgrades. Economists and analysts turned into total pussies and cowards, crumbling into bits every time the market sold off 5%. Financial projections have turned into Hunter Thompson-esque 3AM drug induced astral projections.

And we turned into the real life version of Idiocracy for markets.

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Regulators Find Their Situational Awareness: Fed, BoE Probe Bank Exposure To Jane Street After AI Fund Meltdown

Better late than never…

Nearly two months after Leopold Aschenbrenner’s Situational Awareness went from a $45 billion AI juggernaut to a Citadel block trade after it dumped its entire public book on Ken Griffen’s doorstep at a 10% discount and six weeks after we learned that Jane Street lost $15 billion in July, its first down month in a decade, central bankers on both sides of the Atlantic have noticed that something may have happened.

According to the FT, the Bank of England’s Prudential Regulation Authority and the Federal Reserve have “stepped up scrutiny” of banks’ exposure to large trading firms and market makers. They are asking global lenders how much they have lent to Jane Street and Ken Griffin’s Citadel Securities, and presumably also to such HFT money makers as Susquehanna and Hudson River Trading.

Regulators want to know three things: the firms’ risk appetite, how banks’ exposure to them “evolved during the day,” and how risk controls held up. That’s a polite way of asking whether anyone at the prime brokers was actually watching intraday margin as the AI trade fell apart in July.

While the PRA, the Fed and Jane Street all declined to comment, Jane’s silence is the least surprising. Its last public word on the subject came from partner Turner Batty, who told investors, in the understatement of the year, that “July was a bad month.”

A brief history of a very bad month

For anyone who missed it (i.e., all the regulators), here’s the recap.

Situational Awareness is the fund Aschenbrenner, a former OpenAI researcher, launched in 2024 under the name of his viral essay. It had eight employees and ran long AI infrastructure / short software, with about 4x leverage through Goldman total return swaps. We described that leverage as “batshit insane”, but it was also extremely profitable, if only to Goldman. In a separate piece, the FT today reported that Goldman earned more than $200 million in fees this year from lending to Situational Awareness, the most of any client in its prime brokerage business financing hedge funds. 

As long as the market was going, up it was a party: the extremely levered momentum-chasing fund was was up 439% net through June, reached $45 billion in AUM, and counted Jane Street among its investors.

Then July happened. AI stocks rolled over, software rallied, and both legs of the pair trade lost money at once. Nebius, Sandisk and SharonAI each fell roughly half, and SK Hynix dropped nearly 50%. As the margin calls came in, the fund went looking for fresh capital. It failed to find willing “widows and orphans” and so within days it had exited all of its public equity trades. Citadel bought the whole book in under 24 hours at about a 10% discount, beating Millennium and, fittingly, Jane Street. The fund ended the month down about 78%, with roughly $10 billion of private holdings left, including a large stake in Anthropic.

Griffin did well out of it. Citadel’s Wellington fund rose 5.94% in July, its best month since 2022, and about half of its year-to-date gains came from the Situational Awareness trade. Over the next three weeks, Citadel flipped more than 80% of Leopold’s portfolio to dumb money through roughly 100 block trades worth more than $4 billion. When Griffin later described the unwind, he thanked “the trading and prime brokerage teams at the banks serving both firms” for their “extraordinary cooperation.”

Regulators are now asking those same prime brokerage teams some questions of their own.

Jane Street was the collateral damage: on top of its direct stake in Situational Awareness, its own book, which tends to, cough, be just ahead of whale and retail orders, leaned into the same momentum names: Sandisk, Micron, CoreWeave, Broadcom, SMCI, Dell and Bloom Energy, all the names that defined the momentum trade trough July. And when the AI trade reversed, it lost $15 billion in a month. Most firms wouldn’t survive a hit like that. At Jane Street it barely dented the year: by early August the firm had generated $40 billion in net trading revenue, already more than its record $39.6 billion for all of 2025.

That is also what worries regulators. As the FT puts it, the size of the loss “indicated that Jane Street… appeared to take far more risk than a typical market maker.”

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Since 2025, Trump Made More Stock Trades Than All 535 Congress Members Combined

President Donald Trump made nearly 30,000 stock trades since his return to office, marking a far higher volume of trades than all 535 members of Congress combined, a new Bloomberg analysis finds.

Between his inauguration in January 2025 and the end of June, Trump and his team made nearly 28,700 trades, his financial disclosures show. That amounts to roughly 80 trades per market day for nearly a year and a half.

In that period, House lawmakers reported making 19,400 stock trades, while senators reported 2,900, for a total of 22,300 transactions. A few lawmakers were responsible for a large portion of the trades, like Rep. Ro Khanna (D-California), who reported 8,000 transactions in that time.

Trump’s trades have been a major boon for him, as the only modern president who’s ever disclosed trading individual stocks. Previous reports have found that Trump’s 2025 trades alone were worth as much as $1.8 billion, and his trades in the first three months of 2026 were worth as much as $750 million.

These trades have come as he’s driven policy for and outright publicized companies that he has bought stock in; a recent report by Democrats on Congress’s Joint Economic Committee found that Trump has made up to $15.5 million in profits on his oil and gas holdings as the companies’ stocks have risen due to his war on Iran.

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Nancy Pelosi Disclosed a Multi-Million Dollar AI Investment Just Weeks Before the Stock Blew Up

Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi disclosed a multimillion-dollar investment last month in an artificial intelligence company whose stocks exploded in value soon after.

Pelosi’s husband Paul invested in Bloom Energy, a California-based company that provides fuel-cell technology and power systems aimed at meeting the enormous electricity demands of AI data centers.

According to a financial transaction report Pelosi signed Aug. 21, her household made several Bloom Energy purchases in late July.

The transactions included 10,000 shares purchased July 24, along with 100 call options, according to reporting from the New York Post. Another 5,000 shares and 100 additional call options were purchased July 28.

The disclosed value ranges put the combined transactions at a minimum of roughly $3 million, although the actual amount could have been as much as $12 million, because congressional financial disclosure forms use broad dollar ranges.

The July 24 purchases came after Bloom Energy’s stock had suffered a significant decline.

Then came July 28.

That was the same day Bloom Energy reported extremely strong earnings, with annual revenue growth of 165 percent, according to the Post.

Bloom Energy’s stock subsequently took off.

Then, on Sept. 4, another major development arrived: Bloom Energy was announced as a new addition to the S&P 500.

The company is scheduled to join the benchmark index Sept. 21, alongside Everpure and Illumina.

Bloom Energy shares surged following the announcement, with the stock gaining nearly 40 percent over a five-day period, according to the Post.

By Tuesday, Bloom Energy shares were trading around $282.50, compared with $184.89 on July 24, the day of the first Pelosi household purchase.

That’s a striking move in a matter of weeks.

And it makes the timing of the disclosure noteworthy.

Pelosi’s office has said the former speaker does not own stocks and had no knowledge of or subsequent involvement in the transactions.

The trades were made by her husband and reported through the congressional disclosure system as transactions involving a spouse.

In an article about the transactions, financial writer Rich Duprey of 24/7 Wall Street  dubbed Pelosi “the queen of capital gains.”

“Pelosi’s trading record in Congress has consistently outpaced the S&P 500 and even Warren Buffett over comparable stretches, fueling suspicion that lawmakers with committee-level oversight enjoy an informational edge,” Duprey observed.

The New York Post said Pelosi “has faced heated blowback for her family’s trading activity — racking up a 65% return on her portfolio in 2023 while her venture capitalist husband made $38 million worth of stock trades in the weeks leading up to President Trump’s inauguration.”

Duprey noted that multiple bills to ban stock trading by members of Congress have been introduced, but they’ve all stalled.

The Democratic former House Speaker’s trades have been so notable that in 2023, GOP Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri introduced one such bill that he dubbed the Preventing Elected Leaders from Owning Securities and Investments Act – or the PELOSI Act.

Hawley later met with Democrats and agreed to change the name of the bill to the HONEST Act — Halting Ownership and Non-Ethical Stock Transactions — which allowed enough Democratic support to advance the bill out of committee in July 2025.

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Amazon Shares Tumble Amid News Of FTC ‘Advertiser Deception’ Lawsuit

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is about to drop a lawsuit on Amazon today alleging that the e-commerce platform manipulated prices paid by businesses to advertise on its retail platform, which made the company tens of billions of dollars over a seven-year period, WSJ reports, citing agency officials. 

According to the report:

The lawsuit, joined by a bipartisan group of more than 20 state attorneys general, will allege that Amazon deceived advertisers by secretly raising the minimum price advertisers had to pay to place ads promoting their products, FTC officials said.

The case, to be filed in a Seattle federal court, will become the consumer-protection agency’s third major case against Amazon, which agreed to pay $2.5 billion last year to settle an earlier suit alleging it tricked people into signing up for its Prime service and made it hard to cancel the subscription. Another lawsuit alleging that Amazon engaged in illegal monopolization is headed for trial next year. -WSJ

Amazon’s digital advertising platform is the third-largest in the world, behind Alphabet’s Google and Meta – earning $68 billion in ads in 2025, according to the report – which claims that advertisers suffered billions of dollars in harm by paying higher prices for ads. Some states may attempt to claw some of the money back. 

Shares shot sharply lower on the news.

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U.S. Military Veterans Appeal Directly to Trump to Help Uncover the MMTLP Financial Scandal

After Years of Regulatory Stonewalling, Veterans Are Taking Their Fight Straight to Their Commander in Chief

American military veterans caught in the unresolved MMTLP financial debacle are taking their fight directly to President Donald Trump.

MMTLP (Meta Materials Class A Preferred Stock) is a controversial security that was abruptly frozen by FINRA in December 2022, leaving thousands of retail investors unable to trade or exit their positions.

After more than three years of unanswered questions, regulatory roadblocks, and congressional inaction, affected veterans say they have exhausted the normal chain of command.

Now they are going to the top.

The President of the United States.

For these veterans, this is no longer simply a story about a stock ticker.

It is about trust.

It is about accountability.

And it is about whether the federal agencies responsible for protecting American investors are willing to show the public what really happened.

VETERANS FOLLOWED THE CHAIN OF COMMAND

Military veterans understand the chain of command.

When something goes wrong, you document it.

You report it.

You move it up the chain.

That is exactly what veterans inside the MMTLP community say they have done.

They contacted state securities regulators, Attorneys General, Congress and the SEC, and filed Freedom of Information Act requests. They asked for investigations, meetings and the records.

And after more than three years, they still do not believe they have received a full accounting of what happened.

The consequences have been real.

Veteran advocates say members of the broader MMTLP community have lost homes, retirement savings and marriages. They also report suicides among affected investors.

For veterans watching their fellow service members suffer, enough is enough.

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