The onomatopoeia of shivering, cold, and the involuntary bodily reaction to something that causes your body to tense up makes naming your stock ticker BRR almost intentionally provocative. It’s unclear if that’s a coincidence or deliberate commentary on Bitcoin’s volatility. What is evident is that ProCap Financial, the Bitcoin treasury company founded on Anthony Pompliano’s unique brand of loud, conviction-driven crypto enthusiasm, is doing something that most well-established financial firms have been reluctant to openly attempt: feeding its Bitcoin balance sheet data directly into AI systems and asking those systems to produce the kind of financial research that analysts used…

When you stand in downtown Stockton on a Tuesday afternoon, you will see a city that simultaneously carries two California stories: the older, more difficult story written into the shuttered storefronts two blocks off the main drag, where foot traffic quickly thins and the windows remain dark, and the gleaming new civic investment visible in freshly painted street markings and updated transit stops. Last October, at the California Economic Summit in Stockton, Governor Gavin Newsom spoke to a group of business executives and regional leaders about the state’s economic accomplishments. The figures he presented were truly astounding. It becomes complicated…

Walk through any serious shipyard — the kind where workers in hard hats navigate steel corridors still warm from the welding torch, where the smell of cut metal hangs in the salt air — and you get an immediate sense of how far removed this world has always felt from Sand Hill Road and its venture capital conversations. Shipbuilding is loud, physical, exacting, and deeply human in a way that software has never quite reached. Until now, that distance has protected it. It’s possible that protection is ending. AI startups are raising extraordinary sums to build what the industry is…

The man at the top of the ladder was carefully repairing a worn wooden sign, demonstrating how people prefer to work on things they truly care about over things they are paid to fix. Photographer and multitasker Matt Parker was repairing the signage at the Bagdad Cafe in Newberry Springs, California, a serene, sandy section of Route 66 where the Mojave Desert absorbs rather than surrounds you. He stated, “The patina on this building is for real,” without lowering his gaze. “You deserve it. It’s not covered in paint. It’s real. I thought it was a line that could be…

A particular type of investor has been made to feel somewhat foolish at dinner parties for the past two years. The type that still pays attention to price-to-earnings ratios, reads annual reports, and feels uneasy when someone calls a company’s balance sheet full of bitcoin a “treasury strategy.” They grinned courteously as Michael Saylor amassed more than 640,000 bitcoin and saw MicroStrategy, which has since changed its name to Strategy, become the favorite of both momentum traders and cryptocurrency enthusiasts. They didn’t say much. They held out. There is a feeling that the patience is beginning to pay off in…

The morning following a regulatory bombshell, message boards for biotech stocks experience a certain kind of silence. In January, when ImmunityBio shares were tripling over the course of three weeks and short sellers were suffering paper losses of almost half a billion dollars, the happy retail traders who had been posting price targets went silent. The doubters, who have never been convinced that the rally was firmly established, become more vocal. On March 24, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued a warning letter accusing ImmunityBio and its billionaire founder, Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, of making false or misleading claims about…

The terms “AI personalization,” “social commerce,” “immersive shopping,” and “autonomous delivery” will be used repeatedly in any e-commerce conference in 2026. Everyone is investing money in features that most customers won’t notice, creating complex tech stacks, and chasing the next big thing. However, a different type of seller is quietly gaining ground. Laundry detergent is being moved. containers for storage. paper towels. sponges for the kitchen. items that no one takes pictures of for Instagram. No one develops a brand narrative around these products. They are earning more money than many of the brands that are featured in trade publications.…

Programs for reintroducing wildlife are associated with a certain optimism, an almost idealistic conviction that nature will rebuild itself if you simply put the missing piece back. For the first time in almost eight decades, Colorado officials stood on a mountain ridge in the northwest of the state in the winter of 2023, unlatched a row of metal crates, and watched ten gray wolves cautiously enter public land. It was a true conservation milestone by all standards. Since then, a much messier situation has emerged. Since that release in December, 25 wolves have moved to Colorado; more than half of…

In October 2024, Tequila Turner received her final regular salary. Since then, she has been sending out applications that mostly go unanswered, moving in with friends to make rent work, and delivering for DoorDash in between phone calls. She worked in corporate IT. She made six figures. She is currently driving through Kansas City’s surface streets while she waits for the next callback and ping. Compared to the other, one of those pings is much more consistent. Turner is not an anomaly; she is 47 years old. More and more, she is the narrative. Approximately 1.8 million Americans, or one…

If you know where to look, you can find a specific type of building on the outskirts of Sihanoukville, Cambodia. tall walls. The top has barbed wire. windows that are closed from the inside. From the street, it might look like a cheap logistics warehouse or a dorm. You wouldn’t give it much thought. Naturally, that was the whole point. Workers inside those walls, many of whom were migrants who were tricked by false job postings and imprisoned against their will, were made to bombard targets on social media and messaging apps while manning call center floors lined with phone…

Michael Fincke was having dinner on the International Space Station on January 7, 2026, when he suddenly lost the ability to speak. not having trouble coming up with words. not experiencing symptoms of illness that could have served as a warning. Just—gone. A 59-year-old NASA astronaut and retired Air Force colonel with 549 days of spaceflight experience from several missions sat in the orbital laboratory, about 250 miles above Earth, for about twenty minutes without being able to speak. His crewmates saw right away. “It was all hands on deck within just a matter of seconds,” Fincke subsequently reported to…

David Sacks announced his resignation as the White House’s AI and cryptocurrency czar on Bloomberg Television on March 26, 2026. He described the change as a natural result of a federal employment rule that restricts special government employees to 130 days of service in a twelve-month period. He was composed, articulate, and almost noticeably composed about it. His days were over. The time ran out. Nothing more to observe. The way it was framed was neat, and when a departure is presented that way in Washington, it usually prompts a second glance. Sacks became the first person to hold both…

Katie Porter learned that a group known as Fairshake was going to spend about ten million dollars attacking her California Senate primary campaign one morning in February 2024 while she was sitting in bed and going through messages from her campaign team. For the duration of her race, Porter had raised thirty million dollars over several years. She later stated that it seemed nearly unreal that an organization she had never heard of would emerge in the last three weeks and use a third of that amount against her. She looked up the name on Google. What she discovered was…

An Alaska Airlines 737 MAX 9 was scheduled to depart Portland International Airport on a routine flight to Ontario, California, on the evening of January 5, 2024. A door plug, a panel meant to conceal an unused emergency exit, blew out of the fuselage at about 16,000 feet shortly after takeoff. Suddenly, nearby passengers were staring up at the sky. Luck and the fact that the seats next to the opening were empty contributed to the fact that no one perished. In practically every situation, the incident would have been extraordinary. For Boeing, it was just the point at which…

Researchers spent months cataloguing the genetic identities of individual cells extracted from donated human brains, one nucleus at a time, across more than a hundred different regions of the organ in a lab at the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle. This task sounds almost unbearably tedious. Three adults who had consented to donate their brains to science before they passed away provided the tissue. The result of that process, along with concurrent research at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, was something that neuroscience had been striving for for decades but had not quite reached. A map. An actual…

In portfolio management offices, a discussion is taking place that seldom appears on the front page. It has nothing to do with the Fed’s upcoming meeting, Nvidia’s most recent earnings, or which megacap will reach $4 trillion first. Because it touches on one of the most dependable long-term assumptions in investing—that small businesses eventually outperform large ones given enough time and patience—it is quieter and, in some ways, more unsettling. It appears that this assumption is becoming more and more tenuous. Since its peak in 2021, the Russell 2000, which most investors use as a shorthand for the small-cap universe,…

On March 5, 2026, traders were having a rough afternoon on the New York Stock Exchange floor. At its lowest point, the Dow had dropped more than 700 points. The jobs report that morning came in so far below expectations that the term “stagflation” was already appearing in analyst notes before lunchtime, and oil had broken above $90 per barrel—its largest weekly gain since crude futures trading started in 1983. The unemployment rate had risen to 4.4%, nonfarm payrolls had decreased by 92,000, and in the background, Qatar’s energy minister warned that Gulf producers might declare a force majeure within…

Between 2021 and 2023, there was a time when a shorter workweek seemed truly inevitable. Every presumption about where and how people worked had been disrupted by the pandemic. Even seasoned HR professionals were concerned about the number of employees quitting. There were pilots operating in Japan, the UK, and Iceland. Keynes’s well-known forecast that workers would be freed from a 15-hour workweek by 2030 was cited by economists. The four-day workweek had data, momentum, and the support of the Great Resignation. That was back then. Nowadays, the atmosphere at most San Francisco AI startups is quite different. Key information:…

Paying $450 for silence seems a bit ridiculous. Just the elimination of sound, not calls, music, or spatial audio. And yet here we are in 2026, standing in opposition to that very idea because Bose and Sony have determined that’s the current value of quiet. Depending on how many open-plan offices you’ve endured, you may find that offensive or unavoidable. Over the last eighteen months, the market for noise-canceling headphones has divided into two distinct discussions. One is taking place at the top, where flagship models from the two biggest names in the industry are getting close to $500 and…

800,000 brain cells once learned to play Pong while seated inside a thumb-sized dish filled with nutrient solution in a Melbourne, Australia laboratory. Not in a symbolic sense. In actual Pong, the 1972 arcade game in which a white ball bounces between paddles on a black rectangle of a screen, the neurons receive electrical signals indicating the location of the ball, produce their own electrical pulses in response, and gradually improve at not missing over the course of roughly five minutes. This is not in some loose, abstracted sense of the word “play.” On a silicon chip that was linked…

The past two years have been especially frustrating for a certain type of investor, the kind who has been keeping a close eye on the AI sector and is aware of its activities but is unable to actively participate. The world’s most significant tech firms have stubbornly maintained their privacy. ChatGPT is available for use every morning. Claude can assist with document editing, email drafting, and contract analysis. Grok’s news summary is available for viewing. After that, you can shut down your laptop and acknowledge that you have no ownership stake in the business that makes those goods. None of…

It takes a certain level of self-control to watch a market decline for five weeks in a row without giving in to the urge to either completely run away or buy everything at once, assuming that the bottom has been reached. In most cases, neither response is effective. Paying close attention to which stocks are not declining tends to work, at least according to the framework that Investor’s Business Daily has developed over decades of market analysis. It’s important to comprehend the names that are holding their ground in a market where the Dow has fallen more than 10% from…

Wall Street rarely discusses a certain type of investor. They don’t attend tech conferences. They’re not pitching to venture capitalists or raising seed money in San Francisco offices with glass walls. They are quietly calculating quarterly returns while watching rows of front-loading machines go through their cycles in a room that has a subtle detergent and warm cotton odor. Laundromats are owned by them. Additionally, they are succeeding by the majority of metrics that are truly important for small businesses, such as survival rate, cash flow predictability, and return on investment. In the US, the laundromat sector brings in more…

On a Tuesday afternoon, if you walk through any mid-sized American office with open floor plans, standing desks pressed up against the windows, and the low hum of a coffee maker that has been running since eight in the morning, you’re probably not going to see misery. People appear to be doing fairly well. Perhaps even content to be there. Data turns out to corroborate that impression. The Conference Board’s 2025 survey of 1,700 American workers found that job satisfaction had increased to its highest level since the survey’s inception in 1987, marking the biggest single-year increase in the nearly…