CHINA'S BIGGEST CHIP IPO EVER DROPS MONDAY. And it's... aimed directly at the three companies that control 90% of the world's memory. ChangXin Memory Technologies lists on Shanghai's STAR Market on July 27 at 8.66 yuan a share. About $1.28. They're raising $8.5 billion, close to $9.8 billion if the overallotment gets exercised. That values the company around $85 billion. Largest Chinese semiconductor IPO on record. Biggest chip listing in Asia this year. The demand numbers are wild. More than 9.4 million retail accounts applied. The online tranche was oversubscribed about 244 times. Institutions came in at roughly 570 times. And on Hyperliquid the pre-IPO perp has been trading near $7. Five to six times the issue price. That's people who can't buy A-shares paying whatever it takes for exposure. Now here's why this actually matters. Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron control almost 90% of global DRAM revenue. Samsung 38%, SK Hynix 29%, Micron 22%. For two years they've been starving the market of regular DDR5 while chasing AI memory. That's a big part of why memory prices went through the roof. CXMT is already the fourth largest DRAM maker on earth by capacity. By year end they're on pace to nearly match Micron's wafer output. Every dollar from this IPO goes into more fabs, better DDR5 and LPDDR5X yields, early HBM3 work, and the next process node. In plain English: a state-backed Chinese player is about to push serious volume of cheaper memory into a market that's been kept deliberately tight. The former head of Samsung's chip division already warned that a Chinese capacity surge like this could flip the entire pricing cycle by late 2027. I’ve been in this game for a long time, and every move I make gets posted in The Assembly. We’re a team of 8 analysts and we have one of the BEST track record. You also get access to my full portfolio. I want to keep it exclusive so I will close access shortly. You can join from my bio. A lot of people will regret not joining once we officially stop accepting new members.show more

The world just paid $2 trillion for a rocket... company that lost $4.9 billion last year. And the rockets are not why it lost the money. They are the only part making any. SpaceX went public Friday, the largest IPO in history. Up 19%, a $2 trillion valuation, Elon Musk the first trillionaire. Then you open the filing. Three businesses sit inside it. Starlink, the satellites, brought in $11.4 billion, 61% of all revenue, and $4.4 billion in profit. It is the only piece that earns a dollar. The rockets that land themselves run a small loss reinvesting in Starship. And the AI arm, Grok plus the app once called Twitter, folded in this February, lost $6.4 billion in a single year on $12.7 billion of spending. Read that again. The satellites pay for everything. The AI loses more than the satellites make. And the AI is the part the market fell in love with. It gets bolder. The prospectus claims a total market of $28.5 trillion, the largest any company has ever put in a filing. Larger than the GDP of the United States. That is the number underwriting a $2 trillion price tag built on a division bleeding $6 billion a year. Now the structure. About 4% of the company trades. That sliver sets the price for all of it. Musk is locked up for 366 days and holds roughly 80% of the votes. The public bought a company they cannot steer, priced on the one segment losing the most. This is the whole year in one ticker. The profit is satellites. The story is AI. The market bought the story. The rockets were never the risk. The risk is a $2 trillion price resting on the one bet that has yet to make a cent.show more

The next iPhone will cost more, and the reason... has almost nothing to do with Apple. The chip that stores your photos cost Apple about 13 dollars last year. This year it runs around 51. Multiply that across every phone, laptop, and console on earth, and you are looking at the first consumer bill for the AI boom, arriving in the pocket of someone who never asked for it. Tim Cook, who has run Apple's supply chain for forty years, called it a hundred-year flood, something he has never seen. Memory prices have quadrupled in places. The cause is brutally simple. AI data centers are now expected to swallow roughly 70 percent of the world's memory production this year. Seven chips in ten go to server farms. Phones, cars, and laptops fight over the three that are left. This is one force wearing two faces. The same AI demand making the device in your hand more expensive is minting record fortunes for the handful of companies that feed it. Memory makers in Seoul just hit all-time highs in the same week Apple warned you to brace for higher prices. The shortage and the windfall are the identical event, seen from opposite ends. Then comes the part almost no one traces all the way down. Beneath the chips sit rare earth minerals, and one country controls them. China processes around 90 percent of the world's rare earths and makes roughly 94 percent of the high-performance magnets that spin inside every fab and cooling system. The polishing compound that finishes a wafer, the magnets in the machines that build it, run through Beijing. And through 2025, China has been turning that grip into leverage, licensing what leaves. So the chain is complete. AI wants memory, memory needs minerals, and the minerals answer to one government. The price of your phone is now a foreign policy.show more

Morningstar ran a discounted cash flow model on SpaceX... and got $780 billion. Damodaran's range tops out near $1 trillion. The market says $2.65 trillion. Same company. That gap is not a verdict on rockets. It is about who is doing the buying. Retail was handed more than 20 percent of this IPO, against a 5 to 10 percent norm, and threw over $100 billion of orders at it. Then the index funds, fast tracked into the benchmarks, forced to buy an estimated $22 to $27 billion of the stock at any price, because a rule says so, not because anyone ran a model. Now the calendar. About 4 percent of the company trades today. The first insider unlock opens around August and keeps coming through December, eventually freeing multiples of that float. So the forced money and the chasing money arrive at almost exactly the moment the earliest investors and employees can finally sell. A loss-making company at 140 times sales, trading at roughly three times the value those cash flow models can find, held up by buyers who mostly had no choice or no spreadsheet. Whether that demand swallows the unlock or chokes on it is the only open question left. The supply was always going to arrive. The piece is about who is on the other side of that trade.show more

🚨 DUMP BELOW $80,000 WILL BE CRUEL I’ve been... trading for more than 20 years and have never seen this much long-side liquidity stacked in a single zone. More than $5 billion in longs gets wiped out if the price loses $80,000. Do you understand what that means? $5 billion is about to get liquidated. Once it happens, the cascade will be unstoppable. Your favorite KOL who said, “Bitcoin has only one way to go: up,” is about to get liquidated. And here’s the part nobody wants to hear: This is the only right moment when you should buy. Exactly when it feels the most painful and brutal. When that liquidity gets taken, the best buying opportunity comes. This is how we make money in the market. For context: I’ve been trading markets for 20+ years. I’ve seen every kind of bubble, crash and liquidation. I only care about the moves that matter. When the next one comes, my followers will see it first. Follow and turn notifications on. You won’t get a second warning.show more

AI just hit a wall that no amount of... money can move. The planet itself. There is not enough power, water, or land on Earth to build the data centers the AI race now demands. So the most valuable bet in artificial intelligence is no longer a chip company or a model. It is a rocket company. The plan is to leave. In January, SpaceX filed with the FCC to launch up to 1 million solar-powered data center satellites into orbit. In February it bought xAI, the maker of Grok, folding an entire frontier AI lab into a rocket company in the largest corporate merger ever recorded. On June 8 it unveiled the AI1, a compute satellite with a 70-meter wingspan, wider than a Boeing 747, powered by the sun, cooled by the vacuum of space, and wired to the ground through Starlink. Four days later it went public in the largest IPO in history, near 1.77 trillion dollars, touched 2.1 trillion on its first day, raised close to 86 billion, and made one man the first trillionaire alive. Now read the direction of that merger, because it is the whole story. A rocket company bought the AI lab. Not the reverse. For three years everyone assumed the constraint on AI was chips, or data, or talent. It is none of them anymore. It is energy and heat and dirt. The head of Anthropic said his company grew faster than the exponential, 80 times in a single year, and that is exactly why it ran out of compute. The answer was not to build more data centers in Virginia. It was to leave the atmosphere, where the sun never sets and a solar panel does five times the work. The moat in artificial intelligence is no longer the model. It is the launch. And the first rent is already being paid. A rival lab, Anthropic, is reported to be sending roughly 1.25 billion dollars a month to Musk for compute. Google near 920 million. If intelligence moves to orbit, the company that owns the only affordable road there becomes the landlord of the next layer of the internet, the way one bookstore became the landlord of the cloud. The merger is the proof of concept. The IPO is the war chest. Those monthly checks are the lease. Here is the part the price tag does not want you to read. Close to a trillion dollars of that valuation rests on orbital data centers that do not yet exist, and on a chip factory, Terafab, that SpaceX's own public filing calls a general framework with no binding deal, one that may not achieve commercial viability. Musk said it on camera. This is not a promise. The largest IPO ever written is priced on a future the filing itself cannot verify. The other side is just as real. Compute in orbit costs about four times what it costs on the ground today, and the curve may not cross for fifteen years. The machines that print the chips are backordered for years. Shedding heat in a vacuum at this scale has never been done. Musk's timelines have a long history of meaning later. And Bezos is racing the same orbit with a constellation of 51,600 satellites of his own. But strip it all away and the trade underneath is one sentence. Earth has run out of room for intelligence, and whoever owns the road off the planet owns whatever gets built next. Call it the most expensive science fiction ever sold, or the first time the map of the internet pointed up.show more

BREAKING: Eight days ago the White House paraded Apple... as the champion of bringing chips home to America. This week Apple is quietly asking that same White House for permission to buy memory chips from a Chinese company sitting on the Pentagon's military blacklist. The decoupling did not break because anyone lost their nerve. It broke because AI made the chips too expensive to keep choosing sides. Watch the timing, because it is almost too perfect. On June 18, Trump announced an Apple and Intel partnership to build chips on American soil, the poster child for reshoring. Days later the Financial Times revealed Apple had spent over a month lobbying the administration for assurance it could buy DRAM from CXMT, a firm the Pentagon flags for alleged ties to the Chinese military. The same company, the same week, standing on both sides of the line Washington drew. What pushed Apple to the edge was pure cost. AI data centers have swallowed the world's memory supply and prices have rocketed. When Apple finally raised MacBook and iPad prices to cope, investors erased 263 billion dollars from its value in a single trading day, its worst since April of last year. The squeeze became unbearable, so the company went looking for the one supplier everyone else is warned away from. This is the part the chip war never priced in. Decoupling assumed American firms could afford to pick a side. That holds right up until a shortage gets severe enough that picking a side becomes unaffordable, and AI just found that point. The most valuable company on earth would rather approach the blacklist than keep paying the bill. A memory chip shortage did not just raise the price of a laptop. It bent the security policy of the United States until its flagship company walked up to a line it was told never to touch. Scarcity, it turns out, has no flag.show more

🚨 WARNING: JUNE 12 WILL BE THE WORST DAY... OF 2026!! You need to see this, because... SpaceX IPO is the biggest CASHOUT in history. No ragebait/fud or any other bullshit. SpaceX valuation: $2T, revenue: $18.7B Samsung valuation: $850B, revenue: $230B To justify that price, SpaceX would need around $1.1T revenue by 2035. That means 50% growth EVERY year for a decade. No slowdown. No bad quarter. No miss. Now look at the real story. Insiders own around 95% of shares and sit on $1.6T of paper wealth. By November, 93% of eligible insider shares could be free to sell. This isn't just an IPO. It's one of the biggest liquidity grab events Wall Street has ever seen. I’ve been in finance for more than 15 years. When I EXIT the markets completely, I’ll say it here publicly, like I always do. Turn notifications on. If you’re not following yet, you’ll understand why that was a mistake later.show more

🚨 WARNING: SPACEX IPO OVERSUBSCRIBED 4X!! 4 TIMES more... demand than available shares. Every institution on the planet is fighting for allocation. But this level of oversubscription doesn’t protect retail buyers. It guarantees insiders a stronger opening price to sell into. Here’s the math everyone is ignoring: $1,660,000,000,000 sitting in insider hands right now. 95% of every SpaceX share that exists. All of it is legally locked until the clock starts ticking after listing. 4x oversubscription means day one opens strong. A strong open means insiders begin distributing from the highest possible price. More retail FOMO = More supply gets absorbed. Rocket Lab was oversubscribed in 2021. Everyone wanted a piece of the space revolution. It dumped 82% from its peak within twelve months. Think about what 4x demand actually means in practice. It’s the mechanism that makes the insider exit cleaner. Institutions that don’t get full allocation will buy in the open market. That buying pressure gets front-run by the people who have been waiting years for this exact moment. By November, 93% of eligible insider shares are free to sell. The oversubscription just handed them a better entry point for their exit. SpaceX is a real company with real technology. The valuation has nothing to do with the technology. $1,750,000,000,000. For a company losing $4,280,000,000 per quarter. Retail money waiting to absorb insider supply. This sounds SCARY, but I’ll keep you updated on everything here. When I rotate money, I will post my moves here so my FOLLOWERS can SAVE their money. Follow me and turn NOTIFICATIONS ON, as I will share my strategy soon. Many will regret not following me earlier...show more

🚨 96% OF SPACEX SHARES ARE STILL LOCKED Right... now you're trading on 4% of total supply the rest is sitting behind a lockup agreement counting down to zero. Here's what the calendar looks like: > August 6 → Q2 earnings, 20% of insider shares unlock instantly > Every 2 weeks after→ another chunk hits the market > By September → float goes from 4% to nearly 10x overnight For every 1 share trading today, 10 more are about to show up. Facebook IPO at $38 in 2012 lockups expired, supply showed up, buyers ran out six months later it was trading at $18. SpaceX is the same movie on a much bigger screen. My target: $74-85 before year-end. Keep in mind: I’ve called every major market top and bottom for over 10 YEARS. I was one of the only people who called the top in October, and I’ll do it again, that’s literally my job. If you still haven’t followed me, you’ll regret it.show more

Contact in the desert was the biggest ever this... year and so was the sky watch. We witnessed dozens of orbs. With 5 minutes left before the hotel turned the lights on, I told more than a 1000k people present why pointing my laser in a certain direction that the phenomenon may give us a grand Finale and it may be an orb with wings. Within seconds a glowing orb with wings appeared and flew past the crowd. No it’s not a bird if you If you want to learn something about the phenomenon and 20 years of research with scientists and not speculation , join us on one of our adventures you will never be the same. We have this on several cameras from full spectrum to cell phones to Two types of night vision. Also scientists from NASA and Lockheed the NSA and The CIA were standing next to me during the filming of this orb and has witnessed this many times.show more

🚨 WARNING: TOMORROW WILL BE THE WORST DAY OF... 2026!! In 24 hours, SpaceX goes public at a $1.75 TRILLION valuation - the biggest IPO in history. I've been trading for 10+ years, and I've never seen the financial system bend its own rules for ONE private company. Nasdaq. MSCI. America's largest brokerages. All changing long-standing rules for a single company. That doesn't happen by coincidence. Let me tell you what's really going on: First, Fidelity slashed its minimum account requirement from $500,000 to just $2,000. A 99.6% reduction. Think about that for a second. One of Wall Street's most exclusive gates was suddenly opened to millions of everyday investors - right before the biggest market debut of all time. Why do they suddenly want YOU involved? Because someone needs buyers. SpaceX set aside 30% of the offering for retail investors. That's THREE TIMES the typical allocation. And despite that, many investors still received only partial allocations. Which means anyone wanting more shares will be chasing them when trading begins. To do that, they're selling other positions TODAY to raise cash. That's one side of the selling pressure you're seeing. The other? Institutional money positioning ahead of July. Here's the part most people are missing: SpaceX won't enter the Nasdaq 100 immediately. It gets added 15 days later. Why? Because Nasdaq shortened its own waiting period from 3 months to just 15 days. Specifically for this event. The second SpaceX joins the index, every fund is REQUIRED to buy shares. That's an estimated $22–27 billion of automatic demand. The big funds are selling assets now to build cash reserves. Retail is selling. Institutions are selling. Both at the same time. THAT is what's driving this selloff. Now for the part nobody wants to say publicly: When the most powerful money managers in the world create a $1.75 trillion liquidity event and invite the smallest investors to participate at the last minute... That's not generosity. That's distribution. We've watched this play out before: → Dot-com bubble (2000) → COVID crash (2020) Insiders exit at extreme valuations. The crowd rushes in chasing momentum. Something doesn't add up. So over the next 24 hours, you have two options: Buy into the most expensive IPO ever at the opening bell... Or dig into the prospectus and consider the possibility that YOU are the liquidity event. The next few days are going to be wild. I've publicly called some of the biggest tops and bottoms of the past decade. And I'll call this one too. I’ve spent decades studying markets, and I’ve called most major tops and bottoms along the way. And I’ll call it again in 2026. Follow me and turn notifications on before it’s too late. Don’t become exit liquidity.show more

Von Miller when asked if the Cowboys have the... talent to reach the Super Bowl: “I’m probably the most optimistic player that we got on this team, so yes, I think we have what it takes. There are a lot of teams in the NFL that have what it takes. There are a lot of teams with great quarterbacks, great defenses. “One of the things that I’ve been focused on is really just the mindset. I feel like the mindset is the difference between a great team and a Super Bowl team. When the bullets are flying and it’s fourth-and-1 for the game, where’s our mindset at? And we’ve been talking about those situations, whether it’s offense, defense. And that’s one of the joys I’ve had as well. You know, not every team that I’ve been on has had that aspiration to be a Super Bowl champ.”show more

🚨 WARNING: CHINA'S BIGGEST COLLAPSE IS STARTING. China’s real... estate market just crashed to a 20-year low. About 25% of the market is already gone. And this collapse is NOT over. If you think this is just another China headline YOU ARE COMPLETELY WRONG. This is NOT just about apartments. This is about one of the biggest engines of Chinese growth staying broken for years. While household wealth, confidence, and demand keep getting hit at the same time. That one fact explains a lot. Because property crashes do NOT stay inside property. - They hit spending. - They hit credit. - They hit local government finances. And then they hit the whole economy. Now look at how deep this already is. New home prices fell 3.2% year over year in February. 53 out of 70 cities were still falling month over month. Property investment has now declined for four straight years. And in December 2025, that drop reached a record 17.2%. That is NOT a market that is stabilizing. That is a market still breaking. And it gets worse. Home prices are expected to fall another 4% in 2026. The downturn is now expected to run into 2027. Even after a 40% national property price fall from 2021 to 2025, the system is still under pressure. Now connect the dots. When a housing market this big keeps falling, the damage does NOT stay local. - China’s households get poorer. - Consumption gets weaker. - Developers stay trapped. - Local governments lose land-sale revenue. And global markets get another reminder that one of the biggest growth engines in the world is still in deep trouble. This is NOT a small problem. This is a REAL slow-motion collapse that keeps feeding into growth, confidence, and risk. I’ve studied macro for 10 years and I called almost every major market top, including the October BTC ATH. Follow and turn notifications on. I’ll post the warning BEFORE it hits the headlines.show more

If they have to, the Chinese will cut through... the Himalayas to find the dead. From Lhasa to Shigatse to Gyirong Port, Highways 219 and 216 on the roof of the world are packed with excavators from provinces across China—about 15 kilometers of machines, a lot of them staged as relief crews waiting to rotate onto the front. Civilian flights keep pouring people and supplies into Lhasa. The mud the machines have already pulled out has been piled into a 200-meter hill behind the line. In 48 hours, mechanized units have dug six kilometers toward the port. They’ve fully uncovered buried Highway 216. One kilometer left to Gyirong. At the gate itself, hundreds in the advance team are searching around the clock for anyone still alive. Temples across Tibet are praying. Ordinary Chinese people have donated on their own. A handful of Indians have smeared China and Nepal online. That is not the weight or the values the Ganges civilization is supposed to stand for. Politics is a tumor in human history. No force on earth can run a dig-and-rescue like this at Gyirong, in the Himalayas. If anyone can—it’s the Chinese people.show more

🚨 WARNING: CHINA'S COLLAPSING IN REAL TIME. China’s real... estate market just crashed to a 20-year low. About 25% of the market is already GONE. And this collapse is NOT over. If you think this won't affect anything... YOU ARE COMPLETELY WRONG. This is NOT just about apartments. This is about one of the biggest engines of Chinese growth staying broken for years. While household wealth, confidence, and demand keep getting hit at the same time. That one fact explains a lot. Because property crashes do NOT stay inside property. - They hit spending. - They hit credit. - They hit local government finances. And then they hit the whole economy. Now look at how deep this already is. New home prices fell 3.2% year over year in February. 53 out of 70 cities were still falling month over month. Property investment has now declined for four straight years. And in December 2025, that drop reached a record 17.2%. That is NOT a market that is stabilizing. That is a market still breaking. And it gets worse. Home prices are expected to fall another 4% in 2026. The downturn is now expected to run into 2027. Even after a 40% national property price fall from 2021 to 2025, the system is still under pressure. Now connect the dots. When a housing market this big keeps falling, the damage does NOT stay local. - China’s households get poorer. - Consumption gets weaker. - Developers stay trapped. - Local governments lose land-sale revenue. And global markets get another reminder that one of the biggest growth engines in the world is still in deep trouble. This is NOT a small problem. This is a REAL slow-motion collapse that keeps feeding into growth, confidence, and risk. I’ve studied macro for 10 years and I called almost every major market top, including the October BTC ATH. Follow and turn notifications on. I’ll post the warning BEFORE it hits the headlines.show more

Timeframe matters a lot, but over the past 6h,... $moo finally passed that 40% watermark for total $MU vol on Robinhood Crypto And happy to see many more 🐄🐄🐄joined the holder base $MU is in an interesting spot as a tokenized stock. The real equity stock has huge volume and liquidity in TradFi, but compared with other popular tokenized tech stocks, its onchain liquidity is really really thin, which is actually part of the reason why the memory cow has been obsessed with the idea of moving equity market by onchain volatilities. You need a couple of things to achieve this: - High attention in equity market - Easy to pitch narrative to onchain natives - A very skewed liquidity&volume onchain vs. offchain $MU ticks all the boxes: - Memory is THE bottleneck for AI advancement and is in SEVERE shortage all the way through the next 1.5 to 2 decades. Micron Technology is the only American player that can take a dominant stance in global memory chip market, and also is the most USA🇺🇸 aligned company, proven by their massive $250B investment plan in America ($10B in Idaho already), and the recent praise from Donald J. Trump and The White House - Onchain has just had a taste of stock pairing, and the narrative is obviously working. Also, $MU -> moo, come on, it's funny and cute as hell🐮 - $MU has the least amount of onchain liquidity and volume among popular tech stocks, which means now there is an great opportunity to do the funniest thing Anyways, sorry for the rambling Plan stays the same Memory Supercye Moo thatshow more

JUST IN: Bank of America just told its clients... to take profits. About 70% of its bear-market signals are flashing, a level it typically reaches only near market tops. Weeks earlier, BofA's own fund manager survey showed the largest one-month jump into stocks ever recorded, with cash down to 3.9%, under the 4% line the bank treats as a sell signal. Read those together. Investors made their biggest dash into equities in the survey's history at almost the exact moment BofA's own indicators say the top is near. But the number that should actually stop you is buried in the note, and almost nobody is quoting it. The companies driving this entire rally, the AI hyperscalers, are on track to spend nearly 100% of their operating cash flow on capex by year-end. In 2023 that figure was 40%. Sit with that. Big tech used to throw off cash and hand it back through buybacks, which lifted the stocks. Now it is pouring almost every dollar it generates into chips and data centers. BofA notes buybacks have slowed and cash conversion has flat-lined. The engine of the rally is consuming the fuel that powered the stocks. It is the same $725 billion build that companies are now blaming for layoffs. The whole market is priced on one bet, and that bet has grown large enough to eat the cash that used to support the share prices. This is not a crash call. BofA's year-end target is 7,100, about 4% below today, and the median outcome after this cash signal since 2011 has been a 1% dip, not a collapse. The posts screaming sell everything are wrong. The real message is quieter. You are being paid less and less to stay, while the engine runs hotter and hotter.show more

The past year has seen me have a renaissance,... in the truest sense… I won’t go into details now but will at some point before long. What has brought so much happiness to my life and those around me this past year has been my falling back in love with sport. Cycling has, and always will be, my number one. Yet I’d forgotten that I simply love sport, not for results but for the sheer joy of doing it, I’d completely forgotten that the health of my mind is intrinsically connected to the health of my body. I’ve rediscovered the love I had for sport that existed before the world of professional cycling took over in the way it did. I’ve been pushing myself and trying new things this past year, indifferent to the results, just out having fun and at times going deeper than I thought I was capable of anymore. Last week I got on a TT bike for the first time in a decade, Factor Bikes built me a bike, I’ve been looking at it for two years and decided it was time to get fitted, getting back on it felt like going home. Anyway, the long and the short of this is that it’s inspired me to create a club to inspire and be inspired. A community for us to share our love for getting out there and doing it, because I’ve realized that although I spend most of my sporting life on my own I derive the most pleasure when feeling part of something. It’s in its early days, I’ve called it Sporting Club CHPT3 aka SCC3, I’d love you to check it out and join. It’s still in its infancy, but I hope it’s going to grow into something that will inspire you as much as me.show more

One football league is spending money at a scale... the rest of the world cannot match. With the transfer window still open, Premier League clubs have already spent more than about 1.9 billion dollars this summer, and they are on track to beat last year's record of about 4 billion dollars. A handful of clubs drive most of it. This summer the British transfer record was broken twice in three weeks. Manchester City paid about 156 million dollars for Elliot Anderson, then Chelsea topped it with about 158 million dollars for Morgan Rogers. Tottenham alone spent more than about 270 million dollars rebuilding their squad. To put it in perspective, at the start of 2026 the combined value of Premier League squads was around two and a half times that of Spain's La Liga. The gap is not about talent alone. It is about who controls the television money, and right now one league is pulling away from everyone else.show more

A very good morning. Welcome to The Council Benji... This marks the third Skull in a little run. The first went to a fund I've never met. The second: through Eli Scheinman to a new collector/foundation who has been quietly entering the space in a very significant way across a number of collections whom I’ve never spoken to. Their new entrance enabled a wedding and start of a new married life for Conviction. In my very first conversation with him, we spoke about curses and commitments to the people we love. Since meeting got to talk through each step on that path, from letting go, what is imbued in the ring and ceremony of it all, a proposal, and on the way to the most important of the steps in pursuit of a blessed life. It is easy to get a little cynical on the over-leveraged exit stories that spring up from time to time, so it is a treat to watch one go towards a celebration that’s been building up in his life since the Skull was first acquired. And now: this. The third Skull and the first I can really write about as a shared story across both source and destination. An exit and an entrance. The exit: The Skulls of Luci were awarded as gifts 4 years ago. But before I'd minted Birth of Luci or painted the other 49, the first person in this space I showed the sketch of The Blueprint Skull to was actually Casey💎, when he was working at SuperRare . Casey was the very first person who onboarded me to NFTs, helping me navigate the early days of whatever it meant to even mint something. I explained the idea of gifting one to each person who bid in my first auctions. Though most of the Skulls went to the bidders, Casey's didn't. He didn't ask for one. I didn't tell him I'd give him one. But he helped me take my first steps here, and it's hard to imagine any of this making sense, or unfolding the way it has, without him. Since then, we've broken bread across continents, seen quite a lot of chortling margarita consumption, watched the rise and fall of a lot around us, weathered inter-Council dramas. He brought Laura El into The Monument Game, played as a Player, wore a Mask. Most of the vibe that started all of this, the wild west of it, feels faded in the broader space at times. But every Skull has a story and a person who helped us get here. Casey will always be the one who was there before any metric muddled the reason to care. The entrance: Last fall, Benji came over for a studio visit. We walked through Luci, the works, structure, and dream, as anyone who visits does. But we mostly talked about being a father and having a father. We discussed the very idea of "collection" stripped of accumulation, value, or signal, located more in the act or ceremony of it. What it was to grow up with a curious father who studied the edges of each thing he saw to know the next layer beneath why anyone might look or ignore it. That to pass this on is to pass on questioning, more than it is to pass on any kind of answer. The process of collecting can be perceived as an individual act of hoarding. For some it is maybe. But at its best, it's a way to bind through shared questioning, to bond in cooperation and competition with friends and family, it is the swapped story and meme of it all, and each object gathered along the way carries some shared memory that can, often does, and with intent: should; drift out of the object entirely. All in the psalm, always has been. The studio visit came and went. Soon after, a package arrived in the mail with two of the softest stuffed animals added to my daughter's own collection, now among her favorites. The Skull is a bonus to that, in the scheme of shared memory. For Rachel and I, while we are heads down making a body of work that unsettles us and excites us but demands unknown time to accomplish, it means a great deal to have this kind of support from long term people in the quiet process of making work we want to leave behind ourselves. Enormously grateful to Casey for the many years of support and friendship, to Benny for being a true patron, and to Benji for entering the arena for what I'm working on next. Welcome.show more