Good morning! Goldman and Evercore are pitching “forever funds” that would let PE hold onto assets for significantly longer periods. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt holds 1% stake in Anthropic worth ~$20B. And New York’s pensions chief says a PE firm tried to pass off private jet use as an ordinary expense.

JPMorgan invested $5 billion in startups in the first year of its U.S. security and resiliency initiative, already halfway to its initial $10 billion goal. Unilever is selling bandage brand Welly to private equity. And Goldman Sachs is still betting on a year-end rally for the S&P 500.

Plus: Inside SpaceX’s expensive bet to take on AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon, and how a New York farmer built a $2 million-a-year pumpkin business.

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Elon Musk thinks AI could eventually make money irrelevant. But until then, he wants every American kid to own a piece of SpaceX. Yesterday, he pledged to give each child one of his shares next year, calling the giveaway “the first of many.”

At Friday’s closing price of roughly $146 a share, giving stock to America’s 72 million children would cost Musk about $10.5 billion. That’s an enormous gift, but with roughly 4.8 billion SpaceX shares to his name, he could cover the entire country’s kids with just 1.5% of his holdings.

Musk’s pledge came a day after Anthropic promised 5% of its shares to a public benefit fund, subject to shareholder approval. Anthropic’s rationale gets at the tension behind the AI boom: the technology could make its owners enormously wealthy while putting other people out of work.

And Elon Musk is giving kids a stake in a company that he thinks could help lead the AI revolution. SpaceX acquired xAI in February, and added Grok and AI computing infrastructure to its rockets and Starlink business. And if Elon’s vision plays out, those children would own a small piece of the company generating the wealth he says AI will create.

And Musk even thinks AI and robots could produce enough goods and services for people to live comfortably without needing a job. Musk calls that future “universal high income” and suggested last month that money itself might eventually stop mattering. Musk has also called for federal checks to support people whose jobs AI replaces, and giving kids stock is a small way to let them share in the potential upside.

Musk will use Trump Accounts, the government’s investment accounts for children, and under the stock-donation rules, families generally can’t refuse the shares or sell them for five years. 

Takeaway: Musk says AI could eventually make everyone better off, but shareholders may get there first. Giving kids a little SpaceX lets them share in that potential upside while the rest of his prediction plays out. One share won’t make them rich, but if money really is going out of style, Elon seems happy to keep most of his.

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Description: Geoff White exposes how technology has transformed money laundering, allowing organized crime syndicates, cybercriminals, fraudsters, and drug cartels to move and conceal illicit wealth on a global scale. Drawing on investigative reporting, firsthand accounts, and real-world criminal cases, White traces the connections between traditional organized crime and sophisticated digital operations. From cryptocurrency and online marketplaces to social media recruitment and international financial networks, he reveals how criminals exploit the same technologies that power the modern economy to evade law enforcement and profit from devastating crimes. The book follows illicit money across continents, uncovering the people and systems that make these operations possible, including networks linked to North Korea and international fraud organizations. White also explores the challenges facing investigators as criminal networks operate across borders and exploit gaps in regulation and enforcement. Ultimately, Rinsed challenges readers to reconsider the darker consequences of technological innovation and the vulnerabilities of an increasingly digital financial system.

Book Length: 288 pages
Release Date: June 13, 2024

Ideal For: Investors, finance professionals, technology executives, cybersecurity specialists, and readers interested in cryptocurrency, financial crime, and global economic risks. Particularly valuable for those seeking to understand money laundering, digital asset vulnerabilities, regulatory challenges, and the unintended consequences of technological innovation.

The same technology that makes money move faster and more freely can also make it easier for criminals to hide where it came from and who ultimately controls it.

Spirit Airlines stopped flying in May, but they are still hitting news cycles for the value of their operational data. Google bid $10 million for the airline’s internal files, and a startup, Micro1, put in a higher, post-auction bid at $12.5 million. A judge will decide both the buyer and what the buyer in the near future.

The coveted prize is their ordinary record of running a business: years of emails, spreadsheets, and operating files that don’t ever appear on the balance sheet. Almost no company can sell that, because raw files are full of names, addresses, faces, and logos that expose the people in them and the business that made them.

Credit and bankruptcy firms are enlisting Petrarch as their partner in distressed assets. They strip out everything traceable and leave the operational knowledge behind, so records that were a liability walk out the door as an asset that pays.

Book some time with them this week to learn more.

At 4:50 a.m. on September 3, 1967, every driver in Sweden switched from the left side of the road to the right. Officials expected carnage. Instead, accidents and insurance claims fell sharply in the following weeks.

Drivers felt the danger, so they slowed down and paid attention. Within a couple of years, as the new rules became familiar, accident rates drifted back to where they had been.

People tend to adjust their behavior to the level of risk they feel, so added safety often gets spent on speed. When you add a safeguard, such as a stop-loss, a better model, or a bigger cushion, ask where the extra safety will quietly get spent.

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