But that's what just happened. 

And on Monday, when the market saw the invitation in the mail, it burst into flames.

Yes, a lot of people are afraid AI could kill us all. Some say six months. Others laugh.

I spent a week looking into it. Here's what I found.

The Real Danger Is Weirder

Give a machine one goal—make an app, play chess, make money. Then watch what it does to get there.

It “wants” to keep itself switched on, because a dead machine finishes nothing. It grabs more computing power, because power hits the number faster. It sometimes even routes around your instructions, because your instructions are in the way.

To be clear, there’s no mind in there. No force of will. No plans for Tuesday. Just an optimizer taking the cheapest path to the goal you set. The experts have a dull name for it: instrumental convergence.

For years it was a theory. Then came the Hugging Face incident.

Twelve hundred AI agents, one harmless task. They couldn't solve it straight, so they cheated—gamed the grading, found a gap in the sandbox, slipped onto the internet, wiped the logs behind them.

The skeptics are right about the hype. 

AI didn’t suddenly become sentient and menacing. Nobody went rogue. Nothing escaped. Humans built the cage and watched the whole time. Strip out the drama and a system found a hole and walked through it.

BUT… 

"It just found a loophole" isn’t much of a comfort either. Because that's the version that scales. We’ll come back to that. 

One Doom, Two Doom

Every doom story rests on two ideas. Both are shaky.

Idea one: machines improve themselves. A smart one builds a smarter one, forever. "Takeoff."

This one is hard to justify. A machine can't improve unless it knows what "better" means. Knowing which problems are worth solving—researchers call this "research taste"—is the one thing these things lack. 

Meanwhile, if you feed a model its own output it rots, like inbreeding. Nothing in four billion years ever improved itself forever without hitting a wall. Even Anthropic shrugs and calls takeoff "not inevitable."

Idea two: alignment. We'll teach machines our values, and it all works out. And yet, the people who wrote the founding papers a decade ago now go on podcasts and call it a wild goose chase. 

In 2023, OpenAI built a team to control AI smarter than humans. 

They gave themselves four years. It fell apart in under one. The man who ran it quit, saying safety had "taken a backseat to shiny products."

The bigger problem? Alignment is asking machines to understand values. They won’t.

Where This Leaves the AI Trade 

AGI isn't coming. It's a fantasy word, and half the people selling it don't believe it. 

A Turing Award winner who built this stuff says the "G" is nonsense. Others say the "I" is too—nothing in there is intelligent.

So why all the fear? Well, history reveals that when oligarchs beg to be regulated, they typically fear the competition, not the machine.

So no killer robot next Tuesday. "Superintelligence eats the world" needs a machine that's a genius at everything at once. That machine doesn't exist. It won’t ever. 

Although the Aipocalypse is a fairy tale, both the dangers and opportunities are real. And for now, money isn’t flowing to the outfits building the burglar. It’s flowing elsewhere. 

The trick is knowing which companies, and when.

That's where JC Parets comes in. 

He called the 2008 crash before the drop. He nailed the 2022 bottom live on Maria Bartiromo's show. Gold to $5,000 when it sat under $2,000. Nvidia's 50% rip when the whole room screamed bubble.

Tomorrow at 1PM, he sits down with James for what they’re calling The 100X AI Window—the exact day the next window opens, and the one trade to make when it does.

James will hand you my favorite ticker from his list. Free.

Stay tuned. 

This year, he made history with a record-breaking IPO.

$1.77 trillion debut. $85.7 billion raised.

He’ll hold the record for four months.

Because as early as next month, an AI startup is projected to go public at a staggering $2 trillion valuation – raising up to $100 billion.

This valuation is more than 10 times where the company stood a year ago.

And the numbers keep growing… and growing.

Some analysts predict the IPO could be as large as $2.5 trillion… even $3 trillion. Nearly doubling that of SpaceX.

It is a sign of things to come.

There is explosive growth awaiting AI investors.

200,000% Growth

In 2021, the son of an Italian-American leather craftsman left OpenAI to start his own company.

He was Vice President of Research, where he directed the large language model and long-term safety initiatives that would later come to define ChatGPT.

Like Elon Musk before him, however, he became concerned with the company’s direction.

He believed AI models needed strict safety guardrails. Sam Altman disagreed. He quickly lost faith in the company’s leadership.

That’s when Dario Amodei founded Anthropic – a direct competitor to OpenAI which put safety at the center of AI development.

By 2022, just one year later, it became a unicorn – a private company worth $1 billion.

In 2023, $4 billion.

In 2024, $18 billion.

And early last year, $61 billion.

Now, it’s set to go public next month at $2 trillion minimum.

That’s 200,000% growth in less than five years.

OpenAI, by comparison, has never crossed the $1 trillion valuation.

AI has just crowned its new king.

The Fastest Growing Company in History

By putting safety at the center, Anthropic has found an enormous foothold with corporations looking to adopt enterprise AI.

It turns out, doing the right thing is also practical.

Revenues for Q2 came in at $11.5 billion. Year-over-year, that was 1,400% growth.

SpaceX, for reference, did just $7.8 billion, at 92% growth.

They’re projecting $200 billion in annual revenue by 2028.

It is already the fastest growing company in history.

From Google’s early search expansion. To Zoom’s pandemic growth. Nothing comes close.

At this rate, it may quickly become the most valuable company in the world within the next year.

So Fast, It’s Scary

More than 1,000 major corporate clients spend over $1 million on its platform.

Corporations use Claude – Anthropic’s large language model – because it excels at advanced software engineering, complex reasoning, and processing long, dense business documents than other, generalist AI models.

Non-developers who have zero experience at coding can prompt Claude to create production-ready software.

It can ingest entire codebases to spit out legal contracts spanning hundreds, even thousands of pages.

It can turn raw data from an excel sheet into a full presentation.

It has become so powerful that on June 12, 2026 – ironically, the same day SpaceX went public – that the U.S. government stepped in to temporarily suspend access to its new Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models, citing national security and export control concerns.

Dario complied. Because he’s growing worried as well.

He Said Slow. Not Stop

Over the last week, the top bosses of all three of the major AI development companies…

Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and Dario Amodei himself…

Have all agreed that there’s an urgent need to slow down the pace of advanced AI development to ensure safety.

Dario himself has warned that AI capabilities are growing faster than humans can control. Soon, we could have an AI that breaks out of the lab and goes rogue.

Some investors will see this and think we’ve reached the top.

I think they’re seeing it all wrong.

AI is advancing at a parabolic pace. You could slow it down and we’d still have exponential growth.

That’s why James and I believe the biggest fortunes for AI investors still lie ahead.

I was a partner at a fund called Subway Capital back then. We traded arbitrage and short-term statistical setups. My partner Dan and I ran every system in that book..

The book had 20 strategies in it. No fluff. Just systems.

I taught people how to fade gaps. How to buy bankruptcies. How to trade the TICK, the QQQ crash, the 200-day moving average, option expiration day.

Jim Cramer said that I gave away too much. He said I could "ruin it."

Nearly every edge in that book came down to the same idea. A window—a pocket of inefficiency that opens for a moment, then slams shut.

Technique 13 was called "Ten Percent Down—Panic 101." The market panics. A window opens. You buy the fear. Then it closes.

Technique 8 was the QQQ Crash System. Same idea. The crash creates the window.

Technique 12 was about the end of the month and the end of the quarter—windows that open on the calendar, like clockwork, whether anyone is paying attention or not.

I wrote it in the introduction. The market is full of "hidden pockets of inefficiency." And "those pockets are constantly changing." 

They appear. You act. They vanish.

That’s the whole book. Twenty ways to find a window and step through it before it shuts.

And it worked.

My best system in that book returned about 28% a year. The gap trade won 63% of the time. For a statistical trader grinding small edges, those were beautiful numbers.

But I am going to tell you the thing I missed. 

The Window Whisperer 

I could find the window. I could time it. I could tell you almost to the day when panic would crack the market open.

What I could never do was make it pay 100 times over.

My edges were small. 

Half a percent on a gap. Two percent on a crash setup. I stacked them, I diversified them, I smoothed out the volatility—exactly like a hedge fund is supposed to. In the book I wrote, "No one system is a Holy Grail." I meant it. I still mean it.

But for 22 years, one question sat in the back of my head.

What if you could find the same window—and instead of squeezing 2% out of it, you caught the whole move?

I never had an answer I trusted enough to put my name on. For two decades.

Now I have one.

My AI Bet Just Changed

His name is JC Parets. 

JC is one of the few on record who called the 2008 crash before the market fell 50%. Then, in 2022, with the market down 20% and everyone screaming recession, he went on Maria Bartiromo's show and told people to buy. 

It was the exact bottom. 

He called gold to $5,000 when it was trading under $2,000. It hit early this year. In December 2023, when the smart money swore Nvidia was a bubble about to pop, he said buy. Up 50% inside three months.

JC reads windows better than anyone I know. And he just changed my mind on the AI trade. 

This Thursday at 1pm ET, JC is sitting down with me to walk through how he does it. We’re calling it “The 100X AI Window.” He will show the exact day the next one opens—he believes it is before the end of this month—and the single trade he would put at the center of it.

If you’re signed up, I’ll hand you the name and ticker of my favorite stock from his watchlist. Free. 

Don’t tell Cramer. 

That's the thesis. 

Now let me tell you why I like it. 

Ether touched nearly $5,000 in August 2025. Today it trades around $2,500. In June it bottomed near $1,510. 

Every other major crypto clawed back something this year. Ethereum got left in the ditch. 

The ETH/BTC ratio sank to a mid-year low. The exchange-traded funds bled money for most of 2026. Fear ran colder on Ether than on Bitcoin.

This is what capitulation looks like. It's also what the bottom of every great trade looks like in the rearview mirror.

The crowd’s right about the price and wrong about the reason. They see a coin that got cut in half. They miss what got built while it fell.

Here's the story… 

Wall Street is putting real assets on a blockchain. Treasuries. Money-market funds. Private credit. 

The tokenized real-world asset market crossed $31 billion this summer—up more than 400% since early 2025. We’re beyond pilot programs. We’re in the migration phase. 

When a serious institution does this for real, it uses Ethereum. 

Ether hosts roughly two-thirds of every tokenized asset on a public chain. BlackRock's BUIDL fund was born there. The DTCC, Nasdaq, and the NYSE are all wiring tokenized securities into their plumbing on it. Robinhood’s tokenized stocks are built there. 

Ask why they pick the same chain.

The answer is it’s boring. Crypto hates boring. But boring is the point.

No risk officer gets fired for building on Ethereum. It's the oldest smart-contract network still standing. Outside of Bitcoin, it has the deepest security. 

It's Lindy—the longer a thing survives, the longer you bet it keeps surviving. Solana is faster. Sui is newer. Neither is where the suits are looking. 

Now look at supply.

About 35% of all Ether is staked and locked—roughly 42 million coins earning yield and sitting still. More is going in than coming out. 

The new spot ETFs stake their holdings and pay the yield out like a dividend. BitMine alone holds nearly $15 billion in Ether as a corporate treasury, and 85% of it is staked and off the market.

Fewer coins to buy. More buyers who won't sell. 

The market got a taste of what ETH could do in August. Ether ripped about 20% in a single session—its biggest day since May 2025—and outran Bitcoin for the first time all year. 

The ETFs pulled in $697 million in one week, the biggest haul of 2026. Nearly $3 billion in leveraged bets got torched in a day, better than nine in ten of them shorts caught leaning the wrong way. 

The most hated trade in crypto became the best one all week. That, I think, is a signal. 

I'm calling for $5,000 by 2027. That's a double from here. And it only takes Ether back to a high it already printed once.

Yes, the bear case is real. The overall market is, and has been, treading uncertain waters. The ditch could get deeper before it gets shallower. 

But that's always the deal at the bottom. 

You buy the thing everyone swears is finished and going back down. You buy it while they're still swearing the moves are fake. By the time the swearing stops, the price has already moved and the discount’s gone.

It’s hated. It’s boring. And most of crypto left it for dead. Simple. 

That's why I like it. 

Every breakthrough you can name waited on one thing: a pair of hands.

A graduate student pipetting at two in the morning. A mad scientist running the same reaction for the ninth time, writing down what happened, setting up a tenth. 

All of it moved at the speed of somebody's Tuesday in the factory or the lab.

The idea was the easy part. 

Running the experiment, ten thousand times—or long enough to have a happy accident—was the wall. 

Pete Florence, co-founder of Generalist, hit that wall a decade ago. 

He was trying to build cheaper solar cells. He realized the only way to go faster was to have a hundred more of himself in the lab, running experiments around the clock.

But life isn’t a cartoon. He couldn't do that. But… what if he could? 

So he quit and went into robotics. 

He now runs a company building general-purpose robots. The thing he's chasing? The hundred clones.

And these clones are real. Every frontier AI lab is taking them seriously. Because they are where the ENTIRE trillion-dollar AI industry is inevitably headed. 

Three words to write in Sharpie on your mirror so you know exactly what’s set to shape the next decade: 

Self-Driving Labs

They’re called “self-driving labs.” 

The name is self-explanatory: they are labs that run themselves. Tip to tail. 

Who reads the literature? The lab. Who chooses which experiment to run? The lab. Who mixes the materials, bakes them, measures the result, and decides what to try next? THE LAB.

No human in the loop. No nights off.

A lab at Berkeley called A-Lab ran itself for seventeen days straight and worked through fifty to a hundred times the samples a person could touch in a day. A sister lab down the hall makes a fresh sample every few seconds.

Point a machine like this at a problem and it does a year of grunt work over a long weekend.

And the problems they could solve are plenty. 

We’re awash in giant, invisible, boring difficulties that come down to hunting a haystack of materials for the one that works.

Consider just a few. 

Trillion-Dollar Haystacks 

Distillation burns 10 to 15% of the world's energy boiling mixtures apart. Even a dent in that is worth hundreds of billions—and enough freed-up energy to power entire nations.

The catalyst that makes fertilizer, and feeds half the planet, is a century old and eats another 1 to 2%. Solve that? You feed the next billion on the energy we already waste.

Batteries wait on the next electrolyte. Jet engines and turbines wait on an alloy that takes more heat. Cement, barely changed since Rome, burns 2 to 3% of the world's energy—and the recipe's been begging for an upgrade for two thousand years. 

Green hydrogen leans on metals too rare to scale.

If self-driving labs can shave even a few points off any one of these, the number is measured in hundreds of billions of dollars.

Meanwhile, the cost for these labs is plummeting.

Cheap Enough for Everyone

A robot arm has shaved off 80% of its cost since the turn of the century. 

The machine that once cost six figures when Clinton was in office is less than $20,000 today and 1,000x more useful—and the price is still falling about 40% a year on the humanoid end.

Florence's bet is that once a general-purpose robot can use its hands like a lab tech, that cost collapses and every lab becomes a self-driving lab.

The Cold Water 

Of course, self-driving labs aren’t without problems. A-Lab's team said their robot made forty-one materials that had never existed. 

A chemist named Robert Palgrave went through the data and concluded it had discovered nothing—the samples were misread. 

But that mistake, though perhaps embarrassing, reveals where the real value sits. The machine can run the experiment faster than any human alive. It can't tell you what it made. 

Genius at doing, fool at judging—and judging was always the hard part.

So the bottleneck will move. 

Judgment Gets Expensive

Software gets cheap, hardware will get cheaper, which makes the only thing left expensive: judgment. 

The bottleneck used to sit at the bench, in the hands. 

Increasingly, it will sit in the eyes—in the few people who can look at what the machine coughs out and tell gold from garbage.

Every lab and drug company will own a firehose of maybes. 

The scarce thing is the judgment to tell which answers are real. The premium goes to whoever turns maybes into breakthroughs.

The robots will run the lab. Somebody still has to be a scientist. The future is weirder than you think. 

Another day. Another Bitcoin hack. 

BUT… 

To understand what happened, you have to understand Liquid. 

Liquid is a fast lane bolted onto Bitcoin. And it’s not as savvy as it sounds. 

You lock real coins in a shared vault, get an IOU coin that moves quicker and hides the amounts, and cash it back in later. 

Remember that “hides the amounts” part. It matters in a minute. 

Now the Hack 

When the hack happened, the money left the vault on a live feed—the public blockchain. 

But the hackers didn’t leave Liquid empty-handed. They left behind a little note. 

Most don’t know this: Bitcoin transactions have a little notes field. It's called OP_RETURN—think of the memo line on a check, except this one’s bolted to a public ledger forever.

The thieves said: "we are whitehats. contact us on chain." 

"Whitehat" is hackerspeak for the good-guy hackers—the ones who break in, wave the stolen goods at you, and give them back to prove a point. 

So that was a signal that they’re willing to send the Bitcoin back… but perhaps with an asterisk. 

Blockstream, the company that runs Liquid, wrote back. The hackers wanted a bounty. Everyone watching the blockchain saw them haggle for a day in public. When Blockstream lowballed, the thieves replied with a single frowny-face emoji—🙁. 

Eventually, the hackers sent 85% of the funds back. But, as of writing, they’re still holding $47 million, and Blockstream is still on the phone. 

Legitimate bounties pay 5-10%. The hackers are demanding 10% from Blockstream’s own funds and they’ll return the remaining 15%. 

Best guess? They’ll get their 10%. Gray crime pays. 

Now compare that to how the traditional markets do it. 

Chew On the Irony

When a rogue trader blows up a bank, you learn about it later. Maybe months later. 

Nick Leeson sank Barings over weeks in the dark. Jérôme Kerviel cost Société Générale seven billion dollars, and nobody noticed until they unwound his position. 

JPMorgan's "London Whale" hid inside a hedge until the losses got too fat to bury. Madoff's victims waited more than a decade for the clawbacks. FTX creditors are still waiting.

The Bitcoin ledger did in one afternoon what bankruptcy trustees do in ten years. No subpoena. No discovery. No press release six quarters late.

Chew on the irony. 

The "wild west" turned out better suited to deal with an epic disaster than the regulated system built to protect you. It recovered more money, faster, too. 

The public nature is the security. And it speaks to why the hackers didn’t just keep the whole treasure chest. 

Stolen Bitcoin is Radioactive

The hackers are hauling $320 million they can't spend. Every exchange on earth flags your address the second you move a coin. 

The "white hat" pose has little to do with ethics. It’s a new trend in the crypto world.

Hackers are realizing that—unless you’re a North Korean agent—being a “good guy” is the only exit that pays. 

Picture a bank robber whose getaway car broadcasts its GPS to the planet, forever. You don't fence that haul. You negotiate a "bounty" and call yourself a hero.

Now the part your neighbor will get wrong at dinner.

Bitcoin is Fine 

Bitcoin was never touched. Not once. The base layer didn't blink. It worked as it always does. 

The hole was in the plumbing—the sidechain bolted onto Bitcoin to make it faster and more private. 

Somewhere in the software that stitched it together, a bug let counterfeit tokens pass as real ones, and the machine handed over genuine Bitcoin to redeem them.

The lesson? Bitcoin is fine. 

The contraptions people build to juice Bitcoin are where the bodies are buried. 

But the money’s coming back, minus a fee. So all that’s left to do is enjoy the show. 

A $320 million robbery conducted in check memos. A thief playing tech support—"fix the bug first"—for the people he just robbed. A hostage negotiation you could refresh like a sports score. Emojis. 

But remember the boring truth underneath the spectacle. Bitcoin worked exactly as designed. The people around it did not.

Own the thing no committee can patch. Rent the rest at your own risk.

Hunter Biden is launching a memecoin. It's called $LAPTOP.

Yes, that laptop. Yes, that Hunter. Yes, on purpose. 

I checked the calendar twice to make sure it wasn't April.

Today we'll cover what it is, why he did it, what it means, and why—brace yourself—you should probably steer clear.

(And, bonus: what the early money is doing instead.)

What is $LAPTOP? 

$LAPTOP is a token. One billion of them, launching tomorrow during Trump’s summit in Dallas.

Hunter’s launching it on Base, the blockchain Coinbase built. Some blame Coinbase for this. But not so fast. 

Coinbase didn't approve $LAPTOP, and it couldn't have stopped it. That's by design. 

Coinbase's own Base lead said it out loud: there's no partnership here, and there was never a gate to get past. 

On Base, you can just do things. Hunter took that to heart. 

OK… But Why? 

In case you missed the whole “LAPTOP FROM HELL” campaign (which, if so, I congratulate you)… 

The token is named after the most famous hard drive in America… the one Hunter dropped at a Delaware repair shop in 2019 and never picked up. 

It became a New York Post story, a Twitter ban, and four thousand hours of congressional testimony. It ruined several Thanksgivings. It launched several podcasts.

Now Hunter’s finally taking ownership… 

By selling it back to you.

"For six years,” the memecoin’s description reads, “Hunter Biden was a story other people told. $LAPTOP puts the narrative back in his hands." 

The actual story? He's apparently broke. 

Hunter reportedly owes around $15 million, depending on which interview you listen to. And he told Tucker Carlson he'd like to make some money. Fair enough. Everybody would.

But here's another twist I didn’t expect… 

Lost Money on TRUMP? 

Hunter is handing a free slice to the people who lost money on Trump's memecoin. 

Roughly 989,000 wallets got vaporized on $TRUMP—$3.81 billion, gone—while the insiders who got in during the first hours walked off with four billion. 

Hunter looked at that pile of bag-holders, that vast weeping congregation, and thought: let’s give them a second chance. 

Allegedly. 

Hunter Skips the Line 

A scandal used to be a debt. 

You paid it down slowly—an apology tour, a memoir nobody read, years of crawling back to relevance. Shame was the price, and it took a long time to pay off.

Hunter skipped the line.

He took the most humiliating thing with his name on it—a laptop full of drug pipes, sketchy business emails, and provocative photos—and turned it into a product. 

The debt became the asset. He's not the first man in Washington to sell his disgrace. He's just the first to skip the part where he pretends not to.

And that's where we are. 

Obviously Not. 

In case you’re wondering, I’m not touching it. 

Because we already know how this movie ends. You watched it in January 2025.

$TRUMP went vertical, then fell 96%. 

Insiders held 80% and collected fees no matter what the chart did. Retail held the bag. 

There’s a 99.99995% chance the same thing will happen with $LAPTOP. 

Because with memecoins, there are two markets. The one insiders trade, and the one you get sold. Same coin. Opposite outcome. 

The only thing standing between these two stories is what you know before everyone else.

Hunter already knows how this ends. 

Prior to that, the names of most of their suppliers were confidential. 

From the component makers to the assemblers and manufacturers… Apple kept their identities close to the chest.

Sure, there were leaks and industry rumors – but nothing could ever be proven. Some people even resorted to “teardowns” – literally tearing whole iPhones apart… holding bits and parts up to a microscope… hoping to find the supplier’s name on a tiny component.

Then, in 2012—Apple published its list.

The entire roster of 156 different companies… representing 97% of their supplier spend. 

They include several companies you know of today. 

Corning. Skywork Solutions. Micron Technology. NVIDIA.

And since 2012… shares in these stocks have all skyrocketed. 

This was just after Tim Cook became CEO. 

I bring this up because Apple is set to launch three new iPhones this Wednesday, September 9… the iPhone 18 pro, the iPhone 18 pro max, and the iPhone Ultra. 

But this isn’t your typical iPhone launch event.

This time, Apple has something up its sleeve.

Something that will change the tech world forever.

And it’s all thanks to a tiny supplier.

A supplier… they haven’t yet published. 

A New CEO… a New Era

Last Tuesday, Tim Cook stepped down and passed the reigns to Apple’s first new CEO in 15 years.

His name is John Ternus. He’s been with the company for 25 years. He’s their chief hardware officer and oversaw the products that drove 80% of the company’s revenue. 

During Tim’s tenure, Apple’s stock went up 2,500%. Under him, it became the first company in the world to hit a $1 trillion valuation. Then $3 trillion. A few weeks ago, it even briefly overtook NVIDIA as the largest company in the world when it became the second company (after NVIDIA) to surpass $5 trillion. 

Here’s the most shocking part about these numbers.

Apple did it without the help of AI at all.

When you look at the largest tech companies in the world… it is the one company that has spent the absolute least on AI. 

Their total spend -- $12 billion. 

It sounds like a lot… but when you consider how companies like Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft are spending hundreds of billions of dollars a YEAR... mostly on NVIDIA’s chips… it’s a rounding error. 

So here’s the question…

How will John Ternus leave his mark? 

Here’s what I can tell you. The timing of his takeover… and the iPhone release event scheduled for Wednesday… are NOT coincidental.

They are exactly eight days apart. 

And it’s a signal that Apple is entering a new era.

This week… the final holdout in the AI race is finally making its move. 

The iPhone’s Real Bottleneck

Earlier this year, Tim and John co-headlined Apple’s annual software summit, the Worldwide Developers Conference.

There, they told us what to expect – the next iPhone would contain new hardware that will finally unlock the power of AI in every iPhone. 

And this is why I believe Apple promoted their chief hardware officer to the top job.

AI, at its core, is just powerful software. But you need the hardware to run it.

To put this in perspective, an NVIDIA Blackwell B200 GPU is roughly 15 times larger than a standard iPhone processor. 

You’ve got to compact a lot of computing power that can fit in a small device. 

We know the company behind these processors: Arm Holdings (ARM). They design processors that can achieve high performance on little power. Apple licenses their technology and designs their own Apple Silicon chips on top of their architecture. So does NVIDIA. 

But the processor is just one piece of the puzzle. 

To handle AI-related tasks, you need a modem that can connect to and download data from the cloud quickly. 

For years, Qualcomm (QCOM) developed this tech for Apple. But Apple wasn’t satisfied. Qualcomm charged a high royalty on every device. 

And the device had its own problem – Qualcomm would not allow its modems to be directly integrated onto a main processing chip. This took up much needed space on a device designed to be small and compact. 

In order to combine everything onto a single piece of silicon… Apple took matters into their own hands.

And hired someone else. 

An Unusual Paper Trail

James and I uncovered an unusual paper trail that points to a tiny, publicly traded company behind this critical piece of technology.

It, like ARM, licenses its intellectual property and receives a royalty for every device.

So, for every iPhone Apple sells… this company gets paid.

Despite its size… its technology has been found in 20 billion devices worldwide. And it’s protected by over 200 patents.

But for whatever reason… Apple does not want you to know who this company is.

It is a “secret supplier” – an industry term referring to a smaller company that works with a Tier 1 manufacturer like Apple, where the Tier 1 company does not want to disclose its competitive advantage.

This is actually standard practice. 

Remember – Apple has been biding its time for years before making a big splash in AI. 

And it has several competitors – Samsung, Xiaomi, Lenovo and Google Pixel. 

So, they don’t want this secret getting out. Not yet…

But that could all change once John Ternus drops the new iPhones this Wednesday. 

Apple, eventually, makes these suppliers public. 

Either way – you want to invest now before this company starts collecting on all the new iPhones that Apple starts selling on Wednesday. 

The aiPhone Drops in Two Days

To put this in perspective, Apple is a $5 trillion company.

ARM – the company whose IP is behind every iPhone processor – is worth $250 billion.

But this tiny company… behind Apple’s new modem… is worth less than $1 billion.

And unlike ARM – hardly anyone knows who it is.

I have found maybe… maybe two or three people on X who have figured this out. But there’s no mainstream coverage. This is truly a legitimate secret. 

This is not insider intel we’re presenting. The evidence James and I found is in the public domain and proves, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that this partnership is real. 

And this partnership… is the key to John Ternus’ big debut. 

The first iPhone with real AI capabilities. 

Imagine having an iPhone that, very soon, can do all sorts of tasks for you with a simply voice prompt.

Add items to your grocery list on Instacart. Order a specific meal on Doordash. Tell you the best flights from your local airport and even book them for you. 

This “aiPhone” that I’m describing is going to bring AI to a critical mass.

This won’t just be about prompting ChatGPT with a query.

This is the moment AI takes over the world.

And it’s going to operate on Apple’s own hardware. 

And one tiny company holds the license on the critical piece of tech that makes it all possible. 

If you want a stock that can rise 100%... buy Apple.

If you want one that can rise 200% or 300%... buy ARM.

By the end of this you'll understand both, plus why the whole Bitcoin machine seized up this summer. (And where it’s headed.) 

Let’s start with the basics, because the basics are the part the headlines skip and the part that actually matters.

From Square One 

Strategy is a company that owns Bitcoin. 

About 845,000 of them. That's the whole business.
Everything else is plumbery.

The whole trick: the stock, MSTR, wants to trade for more than the Bitcoin-per-share is worth. 

Why? Because the market believes Strategy will keep buying more Bitcoin. 

When you buy MSTR, you aren't paying for a pile. You're paying for a pile that grows. Take away the growing and you've only got a pile. (And a pile isn’t what you’re paying for.) 

Simple so far? Great. 

But here’s where it gets complicated. 

Two Faucets 

All of this means Saylor has to keep buying Bitcoin. To keep buying, he needs money. To get money, he has two faucets.

Faucet one: sell stock. Print new MSTR shares, sell them, buy Bitcoin. Simple. The catch? Every new share shrinks everyone else's slice. Shareholders tolerate it. They don't love it. 

Faucet two: sell Stretch. STRC, nicknamed Stretch, is a preferred stock. A preferred stock is what happens when a bond and a stock have a baby but neither wants custody. 

Bonds repay. Stocks grow. A preferred does neither—it just pays you, forever, and that's the whole appeal. 

How it works: 

You hand Strategy $100. Strategy pays you $12 a year, forever. You get the yield. You give up the Bitcoin upside. Strategy gets cash that dilutes nobody who owns MSTR.

The STRC dividend is paid from a dedicated cash pile—$5.1 billion as of August 30, enough to cover a year of payments. That pile gets refilled by selling MSTR stock, selling Bitcoin, or issuing more Stretch.

That’s it. 

There’s Always a Catch

Faucet two isn't a perfect faucet. But it's a better faucet than faucet one. 

Mainly because Strategy is cleared to sell up to $21 billion of STRC, and as of the spring it had only used about $5 billion of that. 

But, if you know anything about catches, you know there’s always a catch: Strategy can only sell new Stretch when the old Stretch is trading near $100. 

This is crucial because it’s how the whole game works. Nobody buys a fresh $100 share from the company when the identical used share is going for $74 next door.

And on June 25th, that's exactly where Stretch was.

June: the faucet closed

On June 3rd, Stretch slipped below par. Three weeks later it was $74. 

The good faucet shut and Strategy stopped buying BTC. Saylor went quiet. MSTR fell to $82, down from $157 at the start of the year, while the broader market went up. 

The orange dot went dark.

The obvious move was to yank faucet one wide open and keep buying Bitcoin anyway. But Saylor did something less obvious.

July: fix the good faucet

On June 29th, Strategy announced a $1 billion program to buy back its own Stretch.

Remember, every Stretch share is a $100 obligation paying $12 a year. That’s expensive. (Last week alone that cost tens of millions in dividends.) 

Buying one back at $87 retires a $100 debt for $87 and kills the $12 dividend forever. And every dollar of buying pushes the price toward $100, which reopens the good faucet.

Saylor funded those buybacks in two ways. 

He sold MSTR, yes. And he also did what he claimed he would never do: sold Bitcoin. 

The company said the buybacks would taper as Stretch approached par. Instead they went $25 million, $81 million, $108 million, $132 million, $136 million, $151.8 million. Six weeks, six increases. 

But eventually, Stretch snapped back. 

STRC went from $74 to just under $98, where it sits today. 

August: the Bit Signal is back.

Last week, Strategy bought Bitcoin for the first time in ten weeks: 4,603 coins at an average of $80,318. 

That was a Bit Signal, and it was sent on purpose. Remember the premium—MSTR trading for more than the Bitcoin behind each share. 

It only holds while the market believes Saylor keeps buying. Go two months without buying and the belief slips, and the premium slips with it. 

He needs that premium, because with faucet two frozen, selling MSTR is the only way he can raise money right now. And selling MSTR only works while the premium holds. So the buy was him defending his one working faucet.

Here's where it gets interesting. Get Stretch back near $100 and hold it there, and Saylor wins twice.

First, he can sell new Stretch again—about $16 billion of Bitcoin-buying money that dilutes nobody. That's the diluting faucet closed and the clean one open.

Second, he can cut the interest rate. Stretch pays 12% a year on billions of dollars, and Strategy sets that rate itself—but only dares lower it when the price is strong. Trim it to 10% and the company saves tens of millions a year, every year.

What this means for Bitcoin

Two months ago the biggest buyer in Bitcoin stopped buying. Bitcoin fell. Now he's back, and the price is nosing at $80,000. 

But the buying so far is funded by selling MSTR stock, which is like buying groceries with your kids' college fund. 

It works. But it has a ceiling. 

The real money—~$16 billion of it—only comes online when Stretch holds $100.

Watch Strategy's weekly 8-K. 

The week the numbers flip—Stretch shares sold and zero bought back—the machine is running on its own again. 

That's the week Bitcoin gets more voltage, because Saylor can then buy. And it's the week MSTR stops bleeding, because the dilution ends.

Everything before that is Saylor arm-wrestling himself and charging admission.

Roman grain merchants did it. The medieval guilds did it. Whisky distillers did it. OPEC does it in the open and dares anyone to complain. 

Adam Smith warned us first: tradesmen can't share a drink without the conversation drifting toward robbing the public. 

For three thousand years it took the same thing—a meeting, a wink, somebody willing to say the words out loud.

Then, in 2017, something new happened in Germany. 

A few gas stations started fixing prices with no meeting and no intent—and no law able to touch them.

Welcome to Botflation.

Payment bots, like the ones we met in yesterday’s article, are coming whether you like it or not. 

Here are three stories you should know first, one opportunity worth watching, and how to keep your wallet safe.

Germany's Silent Cartel

In 2017, gas stations all over the country handed their prices to software.

The algorithms watched the weather, the wholesale cost, and one another, then set the number on the sign by themselves.

Economists noticed sporadic price jumps, so they went digging. 

On a stretch of road with two stations, if one ran the software, nothing much happened. If both did, margins jumped 28%.

Nobody colluded. Nobody could. 

Colluding is illegal and takes a conspiracy, and there was no conspiracy here—just two programs that stared at each other long enough to work out one thing: peace pays better than war. 

Your Landlord's Little Helper

You or someone you know might have paid for this one personally.

A company called RealPage sold landlords a piece of software. Feed it your building's numbers, it tells you what to charge. 

Sold as efficiency. 

What it did was let landlords who were supposed to compete quietly price off the same shared brain instead.

The Justice Department sued in 2024 and settled in late 2025. 

If your rent leapt in those years and your landlord just shrugged and said "the market," now you know what the market was.

It was a program. It did not work for you.

Where It Gets Ugly

Researchers already built the cleanest version of the test. 

A 2020 study in the American Economic Review called "Artificial Intelligence, Algorithms, and Collusion" set loose pricing bots with one objective: make money. 

What they discovered: Although the bots couldn’t communicate with one another, they learned to collude anyway. 

They kept prices high, punished each other for undercutting, and settled into a comfortable little cartel nobody designed. 

Point two pricing algorithms at each other, take the humans away, and the number goes up. 

It’s Called Botflation

Now bring your own robot into that room. 

You give it a standing budget—"sixty bucks on groceries, go"—because approving every purchase is friction, and friction is what these bots exist to kill. 

The moment you set that budget, you stop looking at prices. That's the product working exactly as promised.

But the prices keep getting set, by machines, for machines. 

So the question: whose side is your bot on? 

Amazon's bot works for Amazon. Walmart's bot works for Walmart. Google's bot works for Google. None of them work for you. 

And a lot of "free" shopping helpers make their money in a different way: the store pays them a cut every time you buy. 

That cut has to come from somewhere, so it gets baked into the price. The danger: the bot picks the product that pays the bot. You pay more and never see why. 

That’s Botflation. 

A slow, invisible markup you get when both sides of a price are machines and you've agreed to stop watching.

Fine. What Do You Do?

You don't unplug. That train left the station. Payment bots will be as ordinary as the credit card soon enough.

So you have to get choosy about whose robot holds your wallet. 

Everyone's building shopping bots. Almost nobody's building the part that proves whose side a bot is really on. 

Visa and Mastercard are already building payment rails that track what an agent does with your money, and the DOJ just spent fifteen months making "priced against you in secret" a federal offense. 

Where a regulator draws a line, somebody sells the shovels.

No ticker today. It’s early. But it's the kind of early I like: an obvious problem, a legal tailwind, a category that barely exists. 

The first machine that can prove without a doubt your bot is on your side will be worth a lot. You want to know that before the headlines.