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🍋 Goldman Joins $1T Club

🍋 Goldman Joins $1T Club

Plus: Bain made 20x ($15 Billion) on a chip bet, four MIT grads in their mid-20s just became billionaires, and SpaceX passed Amazon in market cap.

Short Squeez
June 17, 2026

Together With

“Greatness does not come out of intelligence, it comes from character. Character is not formed out of smart people: it is formed out of people who have suffered.” — Jensen Huang

Good Morning! Bain Capital is about to secure one of the largest PE windfalls ever: a $15 billion profit (20x return) on Japanese chipmaker Kioxia. SpaceX's $60 billion acquisition of Cursor minted four mid-20s billionaires, all MIT Class of 2022 dropouts. And SpaceX jumped for a third straight day, passing Amazon in market value.

A star of Rich Kids of Beverly Hills was sued for $80M+ over an alleged Ponzi scheme. Apple is planning camera AirPods, a foldable iPhone, and a 20th anniversary iPhone for 2027. And Yum Brands sold Pizza Hut to PE firm LongRange Capital for $2.7 billion.

Plus: Apollo Commercial Real Estate Finance plans to liquidate its assets, and why the people who want to become managers are usually the worst at it.

This new AI platform reduces the cost for commercial due diligence by 10x. Get access here.

SQUEEZ OF THE DAY

Goldman Joins $1T Club

Goldman Sachs has advised on more than $1 trillion of mergers and acquisitions so far this year, the fastest any bank has ever reached that milestone. For context, during the record M&A boom of 2021, Goldman didn't hit $1 trillion until mid-July. This year it got there in mid-June, a month ahead of the previous best. Its closest competitor is still roughly $300 billion behind.

And in a year that's already being called one of the greatest dealmaking environments in a generation, Goldman is running away with it.

The megadeals did the heavy lifting. Roughly 200 advisory roles got Goldman to $1 trillion, but a handful of giants drove the pace: advising Dominion Energy on its $118 billion sale to NextEra Energy, Unilever on the $44.8 billion sale of its food business to McCormick, and the $33.4 billion buyout of AES by BlackRock's Global Infrastructure Partners and EQT. Those three deals alone represent nearly $200 billion of volume.

The broader M&A market is matching the energy. There's been roughly $1.7 trillion in deals announced globally so far this year, about the same pace as 2021's high-water mark, thanks to a favorable regulatory environment, ample financing, and shareholders who are actually receptive to deals again.

Goldman's M&A head Stephan Feldgoise put it simply: "It's been the year of the big deal." He also noted that AI is pushing companies toward scale in a way that makes M&A feel not just attractive but necessary, "a steady ship in uncertain seas," as he put it, which is either genuine strategic insight or the best pitch line investment bankers have had in years.

Takeaway: Goldman sliding into Elon Musk's DMs to win the SpaceX IPO mandate was the headline that defined the bank's 2026 so far, but hitting $1 trillion in M&A advisory by mid-June is the number that defines the year. The dealmaking boom that everyone predicted after the rate cycle turned is not just arriving; it's arriving faster than anyone expected.

PRESENTED BY DILIGENCESQUARED

How to Skip the $500k McKinsey Bill

Most funds skip commercial due diligence early on. Not because it wouldn’t help, but because at $500K to $1M a pop, they can’t afford to. So they wait until after initial IC and first-round bids, go deep on a few late-stage bets, and pray the thesis holds.

DiligenceSquared runs AI-native CDD at a fraction of that cost. Built by ex-Blackstone and BCG operators, it delivers investment-grade market and customer insight, so funds screen more targets earlier, reach conviction before the competition, and save the heavy spend for deals that already cleared the commercial bar.

Help your fund win deals faster. Book a demo today.

HEADLINES

Markets Rundown

Market Update

Markets closed mixed, with the Dow Jones gaining 0.6% while the S&P 500 and Nasdaq finished lower.
Falling oil prices and optimism surrounding the U.S.-Iran ceasefire continued to support sentiment.
Treasury yields edged lower ahead of the Federal Reserve's policy decision.
Investor focus has shifted from geopolitical developments to the upcoming Fed meeting.

Market Leadership

The agreement to reopen the Strait of Hormuz is expected to help normalize energy flows and contain oil prices.
The rally since March has been led primarily by technology stocks.
Investors are watching for broader participation from cyclical sectors, mid-caps, and equal-weight indexes.
Lower oil prices have also supported international markets that are more sensitive to energy costs.

Fed Watch

The Federal Reserve announces its policy decision Wednesday and will release updated economic projections.
Markets expect the Fed to leave interest rates unchanged.
Updated forecasts may reflect higher inflation and lower unemployment expectations.
Investors will be closely watching comments from Fed Chair Kevin Warsh for clues on the path of monetary policy.

Movers & Shakers

(+) Rackspace ($RXT) +5% after formalizing its definitive agreement with AMD to deploy 30 MW of AMD-based AI compute across its global data centers through 2028.
(+) Huntsman ($HUN) -17% because Olin agreed to acquire the company in an all-stock merger.
(–) Gildan Activewear ($GIL) -19% after a short seller published a report questioning whether analyst revenue expectations for 2026 are overly optimistic.

Prediction Markets

Although it’s a 98% chance the Fed maintains their rate, we have to include it.
Trade on real-world events with Kalshi. Use code OWS to get a $10 bonus when you trade $10.

Private Dealmaking

SpaceX exercised a call option to acquire Cursor, an AI coding startup, for $60 billion
LongRange Capital agreed to buy Pizza Hut from Yum! Brands for $2.7 billion
Sarvam, an Indian AI model and infrastructure developer, raised $234 million
Hydra Host, a GPU management startup, raised $100 million
Wordsmith AI, an AI platform for in-house legal teams, raised $70 million
GPS Renewables, an Indian biofuel developer, raised around $66 million
Radical Numerics, an AI research lab for biological data, raised $50 million

For more PE, VC & M&A deals, subscribe to our Buysiders newsletter.

BOOK OF THE DAY

Prophecy

Description:
A thought-provoking exploration from Carissa Véliz of humanity's long obsession with predicting the future. Spanning from ancient prophets and oracles to modern algorithms and artificial intelligence, the book examines how prediction has always been tied to power, influence, and control. Blending philosophy, history, technology, and ethics, it investigates who benefits from forecasting the future, what the limits of prediction are, and how AI is reshaping society's relationship with uncertainty.

Book Length: 320 pages
Release Date: April 7, 2026

Ideal For:
Readers interested in AI, technology, philosophy, decision-making, and the intersection of prediction, power, and human behavior.

The ability to predict the future has always been less about certainty and more about who gets to shape what comes next.

DAILY VISUAL

Solar > Coal

PRESENTED BY T-REX

SpaceX Just Went Public. SPAX Is the 2X Version.

SpaceX (Nasdaq: SPCX) went public this week in the largest IPO in history. REX Shares launched SPAX, the T-REX 2X Long SpaceX Daily Target ETF, now trading on NYSE Arca.

SPAX seeks 200% of SpaceX's daily performance, before fees and expenses. If SPCX moves 1% in a day, SPAX targets 2%. One ticker covering rockets, Starlink, and xAI, built for active traders.

SPAX is part of the T-REX lineup of daily 2X long and inverse ETFs across 40+ tickers from REX Shares and Tuttle Capital Management.

Visit rexshares.com/spax for the prospectus and risk disclosures. Investing in SPAX is not equivalent to investing in SpaceX.

DAILY ACUMEN

Two Way Doors

Most decisions are reversible, and the few that are not deserve almost all of your deliberation. People get this exactly backwards. They agonize over choices they could easily undo and rush through the rare ones that actually lock them in.

The framing that helps is simple. Before deciding, ask whether you can walk back through the door if you are wrong. If yes, decide fast, because the cost of a mistake is just the cost of reversing it, and speed is worth more than certainty. If no, slow all the way down, because this is one of the few moments where caution genuinely earns its keep.

Most of life is two-way doors that people treat like one-way doors, and a small number of one-way doors that people stroll through as if they could come back. Sorting the two correctly might save you more time and grief than any other single habit.

ENLIGHTENMENT

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Stop running from conflict at work
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What causes a runner’s high?

MEME-A-PALOOZA

Memes of the Day

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