Good Morning! OpenAI is weighing delaying its IPO until 2027 to give itself a better shot at hitting a $1 trillion valuation. Bond traders are nursing roughly $305 million in paper losses on SpaceX's new $25 billion debt offering. And the median starting salary for MBA graduates is projected to fall to $120,000 this year.

Novak Djokovic joined General Atlantic as a global strategic adviser. Private equity firms are snapping up Portugal's family businesses. And Berkshire Hathaway CEO Greg Abel became a US citizen.

Plus: Goldman bankers say the next AI boom is in the physical economy, and five tips for boosting your confidence in public speaking.

Build custom deployments around your firm's unique workflows with Endex.

SQUEEZ OF THE DAY

Private Equity’s Zombie Problem

Private equity’s latest problem is not just that exits are slow. It is that some funds may never die.

More than half of private capital investors expect “zombie funds” to increase over the next two years, according to a new Coller Capital survey of 108 investors overseeing roughly $2 trillion. That is up from just 28% in 2024. A zombie fund is exactly what it sounds like: an old private equity fund that should be winding down, but keeps limping along past its expiration date while the manager continues collecting fees.

PE firms bought companies at huge valuations during the free-money era, and now they are stuck. Higher rates crushed dealmaking, IPO windows stayed narrow, financing got more expensive, and buyers are not exactly racing to pay 2021 multiples for software companies that may get kneecapped by AI. Bain put it bluntly: a growing number of companies are basically trapped in portfolios. So the exit math is ugly, and nobody wants to be the partner who sells at a bad mark.

That creates a fun little standoff between GPs and LPs. The private equity model is supposed to work like this: raise fund, buy companies, improve companies, sell companies, return cash, raise next fund. The current version is more like: raise fund, buy companies, hold companies, explain macro uncertainty, ask for patience, collect management fees, maybe launch a continuation vehicle. LPs are not thrilled. Most would rather avoid a fight and ask for fee cuts or revised economics that actually incentivize managers to exit investments.

Continuation vehicles are becoming the escape hatch. Instead of selling an aging asset to the market, a GP can roll it into a new vehicle, bring in fresh capital, give existing LPs a choice to cash out or stay in, and pretend this is all part of the plan. But last week, the SEC announced it would investigate CVs, so it may not be a quick fix either. 

Takeaway: Private equity’s zombie fund problem is really a distribution problem. LPs want cash back. GPs do not want to sell assets bought at peak valuations into a weak market. So the industry is stuck in the awkward middle, with old funds living longer, fees getting questioned, and continuation vehicles becoming the new favorite workaround. The good news is PE assets are not literally dead. The bad news is some of them are starting to smell like 2021.

PRESENTED BY ENDEX

Coinbase Makes Waves "Usage Limits Aren't the Answer"

This week, Coinbase's Brian Armstrong shared that the company nearly halved its AI spend. Their employees' token usage, however, has continued to climb exponentially.

Ballooning AI invoices are everywhere right now, and many companies are responding by capping employee usage. Coinbase took a different path: route each request to the right model, and reserve frontier models for the narrow slice of tasks where incremental intelligence actually moves the needle.

Wall Street firms are partnering with Endex to do the same. Endex evaluates each task and routes it to the most efficient model for the job, so firms stop paying frontier prices for work a smaller model handles just as well, creating cost optimizations by default.

Endex brings AI agents directly into Excel, with custom deployments built around each firm's workflows and precedents.

HEADLINES

Top Reads

• AI trade hits a wall amid report that OpenAI will delay IPO until 2027 (Yahoo Finance)

• Bond traders stunned as losses on SpaceX's new debt keep growing (BB)

• M.B.A. pay is drifting down — and so is demand for the degree (WSJ)

• Novak Djokovic joins General Atlantic in his Wall Street debut (BB)

• Private equity firms are snapping up Portugal's family businesses (BB)

• Berkshire Hathaway CEO Greg Abel becomes a U.S. citizen (Axios)

• Goldman bankers say the next AI boom is in the physical economy (Axios)

• Why U.S. corporate profits are surging (Axios)

• Michael Saylor's Strategy faces no easy way out as bitcoin prices continue to drop (Yahoo Finance)

• Red-alert heatwaves are becoming Europe's new normal. Investors are paying attention (CNBC)

• Hospital ERs' new approach to psychiatric patients faces payment risk (BB)

• Friendship startups for loneliness have a business model problem (BB)

• Relative newcomer Banner Capital lands backing from GCM Grosvenor (WSJ)

• Leon Black refuses to answer questions on NDAs at Jeffrey Epstein hearing, Rep. Comer says (CNBC)

• Rise in memory chip costs puts pressure on electronics retailers (CNBC)

• Investors in public companies are losing their voting rights (NYT)

• The ever weirder world of venture capital (FT)

CAPITAL PULSE

Markets Rundown

Market Update

• Stocks finished modestly lower, with health care leading gains while technology and industrials lagged.

• The technology sector fell roughly 5% for the week amid concerns over higher hardware prices.

• U.S. small- and mid-cap stocks posted modest weekly gains.

• The 10-year Treasury yield edged down to 4.37%, while WTI crude oil settled near $69 per barrel.

Technology Pullback

• Apple and Microsoft announced price increases on select hardware products, raising concerns about consumer demand.

• The recent weakness follows a strong rally, with the S&P 500 up more than 15% and the Nasdaq up more than 20% since late March.

• Semiconductor stocks have gained more than 90% over the same period, making a period of consolidation notable.

• S&P 500 earnings remain on track to grow more than 20% this year, while forward valuation multiples remain below where they began the year.

Movers & Shakers

• (+) Moderna ($MRNA) +13% after FDA advisers voted to back its mRNA flu vaccine for adults 50+.

  (+) Crocs ($CROX) +7% because Piper Sandler upgraded the shoemaker to Overweight, arguing the stock's recent pullback created an entry point.

• (–) On Semiconductor ($ON) -24% after announcing a nearly $7B acquisition of Synaptics to expand into physical AI and edge computing.

Prediction Markets

• When will the infamous Fable 5 (retail’s version of Mythos) become available again?

• Trade on real-world events with Kalshi. Use code OWS to get a $10 bonus when you trade $10.

Private Dealmaking

• General Intuition, an AI lab that uses gaming content for training, raised $320 million

• Mirendil, a frontier lab founded by Anthropic vets, raised $200 million

• MSCI acquired First Street, a climate risk data startup, for $120 million

• Taktile, an automation startup for financial institutions, raised $110 million

• Trase, an OS for AI agents in highly regulated industries, raised $107 million

• Runpod, an AI developer cloud, raised $100 million

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

BOOK OF THE DAY

Why Nothing Changes

Description:
A systems-based approach to personal transformation from Daniel Newman that argues lasting change rarely fails because of weak discipline. Instead, the book explores the hidden psychological, biological, and environmental forces that quietly shape behavior and keep people stuck in familiar patterns. Rather than relying on motivation or willpower, it offers practical frameworks for redesigning habits, environments, and daily systems so meaningful change becomes easier, more consistent, and sustainable over time.

Book Length: 304 pages
Release Date: March 29, 2026

Ideal For:
Anyone looking to break unproductive habits, improve performance, and create lasting personal or professional change through systems rather than willpower alone.

The hardest part of changing your life is not changing yourself it is changing the invisible forces that shape your behavior every day.

DAILY VISUAL

Real-World Asset Tokenization Reaches an Inflection Point

PRESENTED BY PRIMER

How to Equip Yourself for the Three Trillion Dollar IPOs

With three trillion dollar companies IPO’ing in the next several months (Anthropic up next?) and a flood of headlines, investment-grade tools are becoming essential for the everyday investor. Very few people can - and have time to - read an S-1 (we did a deep dive here), but now you don’t have to.

Primer, an institutional AI platform for hedge funds, has just launched that same platform for retail. It can read filings, build a model, and compose detailed analyses for any public, or soon-to-be public, company. In analyst modeling tests, it scores nearly twice as well as any other AI model. Conduct institutional-level analysis on SpaceX, Anthropic, OpenAI, or any other company in your portfolio to find what is real and what is noise.

For a limited time, get your own hedge fund analyst for a free week.

Try Primer today.

DAILY ACUMEN

Illusion Control

People will pay more for a lottery ticket they chose themselves than one handed to them at random, even though the odds are identical. The act of choosing creates a feeling of control that has no effect whatsoever on the outcome.

This small absurdity reveals something large about how the mind works. We systematically overvalue the things we influence and underweight the role of everything we do not.

This shows up everywhere money and ego meet. The trader who feels in control because they are active. The investor who confuses a bull market for their own skill. The illusion is comfortable, which is exactly what makes it expensive.

The antidote is uncomfortable but clarifying. Separate the part of any outcome you actually controlled from the part the world handed you. The humility that follows is not weakness. It’s the beginning of seeing clearly.

ENLIGHTENMENT

Short Squeez Picks

• Five tips for boosting your confidence in public speaking

• How 24-hour micro-retreats can be effective

• 5 phrases to be more memorable as a public speaker

• Best summer books of 2026: Business

• The no. 1 habit that slowly destroys self-confidence

MEME-A-PALOOZA

Memes of the Day

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