Monday Market Open

We got a treat for you today fellas. News is hitting faster than we can write but here’s the top shit you gotta know.

Musk Industries
ELON MERGES SPACEX AND xAI

Elon Musk has formally merged SpaceX and xAI, with the notice quietly posted on SpaceX’s own site. This is not a partnership, not a JV, not a handshake—this is vertical integration taken to its logical extreme. Compute, launch, power, data, and now intelligence all sit under one roof.

The ambition is obvious: AI infrastructure unconstrained by terrestrial limits. Power from solar, cooling from space, data pipelines fed by Starlink-scale networks. It sounds insane until you remember this is the same guy who normalized reusable rockets. The real question isn’t feasibility—it’s focus. Can one organization execute flawlessly across aerospace, energy, and frontier AI at the same time?

From a market lens, this reframes the AI arms race. Compute is no longer just about GPUs and data centers—it’s about infrastructure sovereignty. If this narrative sticks, the value chain shifts toward power, memory, cooling, and logistics. Musk isn’t betting on better models. He’s betting on owning the ground they run on.

AI Technology
AI WARS: TROUBLE IN PARADISE

The AI war has quietly moved away from flashy demos and toward developer lock-in and infrastructure depth. Anthropic leaned hard into coding workflows, and the result is that Claude has become the default tool for a growing slice of builders. Terminal-native, execution-first, no theatrics—just shipping.

OpenAI, meanwhile, is dealing with two problems at once: user dissatisfaction with recent product changes and public friction with NVIDIA over chips and investment expectations. That’s messy, but it’s not fatal. OpenAI’s real edge isn’t optics—it’s infrastructure positioning.

Here’s the underappreciated part: memory. OpenAI locked up large future supplies months ago, and that matters more than most people realize. As models scale, memory bandwidth and storage throughput become the bottleneck, not raw compute. That’s why SanDisk has been quietly printing while “AI” as a trade chops sideways. GPUs get headlines. Memory decides who can actually scale.

Bottom line: Google and Anthropic have momentum, OpenAI has assets, and Nvidia is no longer the uncontested kingmaker. This war is far from over—it’s just moved underground.

World News
EPSTEIN FILES… WHO CARES?

Let’s be honest. Who gives a rat’s ass at this point. Every powerful person on earth had some level of contact with Jeffrey Epstein—that doesn’t mean they were all involved in crimes. An email, a calendar entry, or a second-degree connection is not guilt, but Twitter is treating this like it’s open-and-shut court.

This whole thing feels like reading your sister’s diary in fifth grade. You might find some spicy gossip, maybe a name that makes you go “huh,” but it’s mostly a waste of time. People who did nothing wrong are getting absolutely cooked because their name showed up once in a document dump with zero context. That’s not justice—that’s content farming.

If crimes were committed, arrest the people who actually did the wrong. Full stop. But as a distraction, this is elite-tier. Anyone who leaned conspiracy ten years ago already knew all of this. Now the normies are catching up, and somehow we’re supposed to act shocked? It’s old news, repackaged for clicks.

VHLA Select
VELO3D: CAN’T BELIEVE THIS NEWSLETTER IS FREE

Velo3D is a U.S.-based metal additive manufacturing firm focused on high-complexity parts that traditional machining can’t touch. Its Sapphire printers specialize in laser powder bed fusion for aerospace, defense, and space applications—rocket engines, jet components, advanced munitions. This is not hobbyist 3D printing. This is industrial infrastructure.

The business model has quietly improved. Beyond one-time printer sales, Velo3D is scaling Rapid Production Services—printing parts for customers in-house—which shifts revenue toward recurring and more predictable streams. Since Arun Jeldi took over, the company has gone from insolvency risk to Nasdaq relisting. That alone tells you the internal trajectory changed.

Strategically, the timing is perfect. The FY2026 NDAA restricts the Department of Defense from using additive manufacturing systems tied to hostile nations. Velo3D claims to be the only U.S.-based industrial OEM with domestically developed LPBF tech. That matters. This is policy tailwind meets supply-chain reality.

Then there’s the SpaceX angle. Velo3D-qualified parts are already used in Raptor engines, and customers include Anduril. Add a defense-experienced board and accelerating government contracts, and you get a rare small-cap that sits directly at the intersection of space, defense, and reindustrialization.