Good morning! Rocket Lab surged 16% on an $8 billion deal to acquire Iridium, taking aim at SpaceX. Josh Kushner and former Disney CEO Bob Iger are exploring a bid for a new NBA team in Las Vegas. And Trump bought up to $5 million in Axon stock two weeks before ICE sought a $220 million Taser deal.

The Zepbound craze has fueled $1.3 billion in Lilly endowment gifts to religious causes; consulting firms are rethinking their pricing as AI threatens the billable hour; and Comcast jumped after announcing it will spin off its media and tech wings into two separate public companies.

Plus: How some private equity managers collect big fees on paper gains, Super Micro's office was raided as Taiwan widens its chip-smuggling probe, and how PE squeezed a pool empire dry.

The chips that store AI’s data are running short, and the trade has been on fire. Learn more about the new REX Shares memory ETF.

SQUEEZ OF THE DAY

The Bots Don’t Sleep

AI was supposed to give everyone their life back. But in Silicon Valley, the opposite is happening. Founders are running swarms of AI agents, keeping laptops open at kids' soccer practice, on vacation, and apparently through the night because the bots keep asking what to do next. 

One founder said AI was supposed to do his work for him, but he has "never worked harder" and now has "100 times the output." That is the central absurdity of the AI productivity boom: the tools are making people faster, but they are also raising the expected pace of everything around them. If an AI agent can draft, code, summarize, test, and iterate while you sleep, sleeping starts to feel like falling behind.

The stories coming out of Silicon Valley right now are genuinely unhinged. Engineers are working until 4 a.m. to prove they can keep pace with the same agents they deployed. Founders are sleeping at the office. Venture investors are fighting deals from the hospital after having a baby because in AI, missing one day allegedly feels like losing a month. The machine does not need sleep, so the human starts negotiating with midnight, telling themselves that just one more prompt, one more review, one more deployment, and then they can close the laptop. 

The deeper problem is that AI does not just remove grunt work. It removes the downtime hidden inside grunt work. Admin used to be annoying, but it also gave your brain a break. Now managers can ask employees to focus on strategy all day; which sounds like a promotion until you realize that sustained strategic thinking is cognitively exhausting in a way that filing expense reports was not. The work did not disappear. It got compressed, upgraded, and handed back with higher expectations and no recovery time baked in.

The AI labor story was always framed as "robots coming for jobs." The more immediate story is "robots making the remaining humans feel like they have to become robots." If your peer is 10x more productive with Claude Code, your manager wants to know why you are not. If your competitor is shipping faster, your startup needs to move faster. If your AI agents are waiting for prompts at midnight, logging off starts to feel like negligence. The productivity gains are real, but so is the anxiety that comes with them.

Takeaway: AI may be the first productivity tool that makes workers more efficient and more burned out at the same time. It can eliminate busywork, accelerate output, and make tiny teams feel superhuman, and then immediately reset expectations so that superhuman is the new baseline. AI is not killing work-life balance but it’s making logging off feel like a career risk.

PRESENTED BY REX SHARES

One Ticker for a 2X Daily Play on the Hottest Trade in Chips

Memory chips (DRAM and NAND) are what let AI systems hold and move data, and right now demand from data centers is blowing past what manufacturers can produce. That shortage has sent memory prices, and memory stocks, soaring in 2026.

The Roundhill Memory ETF (DRAM) launched in April and rode that wave to become the most successful ETF debut in history: up roughly 180% and past $20B in assets in just over two months. Last week its top holding, Micron, posted the best quarter in the memory industry’s history, with gross margins north of 80%.

Now there’s a leveraged version. The Roundhill T-REX 2X Long DRAM Daily Target ETF (RAM) is live, seeking 200% of DRAM’s daily performance. It comes from the same T-REX franchise behind the first 2X NVIDIA ETF, built in partnership with Roundhill, the issuer of DRAM. RAM resets daily, and monthly options are available.

Visit rexshares.com/ram for the prospectus and risk disclosures. Investing in RAM is not equivalent to investing in DRAM.

HEADLINES

Top Reads

• Rocket Lab expands space biz with $8 billion Iridium deal (Axios)

• Bob Iger, Joshua Kushner explore bid for NBA expansion team (BB)

• Trump bought as much as $5 million in Axon stock before ICE sought $220 million Taser deal (CNBC)

• Zepbound craze fuels Lilly endowment gifts to Christian causes (BB)

• Inside consultants' messy shift from hourly billing (WSJ)

• Comcast announces it will spin off media and tech wings into separate public companies (CNBC)

• How some private equity managers collect big fees on paper gains (WSJ)

• Super Micro office raided as Taiwan expands chip smuggling probe (Yahoo Finance)

• Bridgepoint to buy Kayne Anderson Real Estate for $1.4 billion (BB)

• 'Magnificent 7' stocks are having a dreadful year (Yahoo Finance)

• Rocket Lab buys Iridium in $8 billion deal to take on SpaceX (Yahoo Finance)

• High gas prices and home prices make Atlanta, Nashville less affordable (BB)

• The uphill battle facing revitalizing Dulles Airport (BB)

CAPITAL PULSE

Markets Rundown

Market Update

• U.S. equities moved higher, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average reaching another record high as technology stocks rebounded.

• Communication services, consumer discretionary, and technology led gains, while Alphabet rose 5% in its first day as a Dow component.

• WTI crude oil climbed back above $70 per barrel, though prices remain well below recent highs following progress in U.S.-Iran negotiations.

• Treasury yields were little changed after a Supreme Court ruling reinforced the Federal Reserve's independence.

Quarter-End Rally

• Global equities are on track for their strongest quarterly gain since 2020, supported by easing geopolitical tensions and strong corporate fundamentals.

• Forward S&P 500 earnings have increased roughly 18% this year, even as valuation multiples have contracted.

• Second-quarter earnings season begins in mid-July, with expectations for approximately 12% revenue growth and 22% earnings growth.

Movers & Shakers

• (+) Axon Enterprise ($AXON) +10% after a report President Trump purchased up to $5M in Axon stock in February, two weeks before ICE sought a five-year, $220M TASER contract.

• (+) Comcast ($CMCSA) +5% because the company announced it will spin off its cable TV networks, including MSNBC, CNBC, and USA, into a separate publicly traded company.

• (–) Verizon ($VZ) -5% after being removed from the Dow Jones Industrial Average, replaced by Alphabet.

Prediction Markets

• Earnings Call Special (after markets close): Nike

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

Private Dealmaking

• Rocket Lab agreed to acquire Iridium Communications for $8 billion

• Bridgepoint agreed to buy Kayne Anderson’s real estate business for about $1.4 billion

• Quantifind, a provider of risk intelligence solutions for financial crime and national security, raised $200 million

• 8090 Labs, an AI-enabled software factory, raised $135 million

• RQ Bio, a developer of long-acting antivirals for influenza, raised around $115 million

• Scaled Cognition, an AI lab focused on reliability, raised $100 million

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

BOOK OF THE DAY

Life is Luck

Description:
A thought-provoking exploration from John Morgan of the role luck plays in shaping careers, wealth, relationships, and success. Challenging the popular belief that outcomes are driven solely by talent and hard work, the book examines how chance, timing, and randomness influence our lives, and how recognizing that reality can lead to better decisions. Blending psychology, economics, and real-world examples, it offers practical ways to maximize opportunities while staying humble about the factors beyond our control.

Book Length: 256 pages
Release Date: April 22, 2025

Ideal For:
Entrepreneurs, investors, and anyone interested in understanding the interplay between skill, luck, and decision-making in achieving long-term success.

Luck favors the people who consistently put themselves where opportunity has the greatest chance of finding them.

DAILY VISUAL

Audiences Still Obsessed with Old Content

PRESENTED BY BLUEFLAME AI

BREAKING: Product Launch

Blueflame AI launches Amp, a specialized AI agent for dealmakers.

Speak to Amp in plain language, and it coordinates the right AI models, tools, firm content, data sources, and finance-native skills to get it done. Amp is built for private and public investing, investment banking, and corporate strategy teams.

Most importantly, it is multi-model. In other words, it will optimize for which model to use based on the task.

It moves firms from scattered AI experimentation to repeatable, institutional capability.

Schedule a call with Blueflame and try Amp today.

DAILY ACUMEN

Bet Sizing

You can be right on the vast majority of your decisions and still end up with nothing, if you bet too much on the few times you are wrong. This is the part of risk that almost nobody internalizes.

Being correct is only half the equation. How much you stake on each call is the other half, and it’s the half that determines whether you survive long enough for being right to matter.

The trader who wins nine times out of ten and bets the house on the tenth is not a good trader. He is a bankruptcy waiting for the right Tuesday. Accuracy without discipline around size is just a longer runway to the same crash.

The people who compound over decades are rarely the ones with the best calls. They are the ones who never let a single wrong call take them out of the game. Survival first, returns second. You can’t win if you’re not still at the table.

ENLIGHTENMENT

Short Squeez Picks

• When did white-collar work start to look so bleak?

• We really can multi-task, according to a new study

• How private equity squeezed a pool empire dry

• Why the smartest people stop taking risks at work

• The next longevity retreat is rewiring your mind

MEME-A-PALOOZA

Memes of the Day

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