Jacob Firek

People underestimate xAI at their own peril. They’re the real wild card in the AI race, and the bigger picture reveals an actual strategy to not just leapfrog the competition but to become the only winner in AI. It’s eerily similar to the playbook John D. Rockefeller ran with Standard Oil. If you look at the funding picture today OpenAI just raised $122B (that they’re lighting on fire) and Anthropic has raised ~$72B in its entire lifetime. xAI in comparison has raised meaningfully less than either. But xAI somehow already has the most compute online right now, and the capital structure is about to flip that’s going to turn them into one of the largest free cash flow machines in history. SpaceX filed its S-1 last week targeting a ~$75B raise at a 1.72 trillion valuation and although most of that is going to go to Starlink and Starship, the detail many are missing is that xAI now sits inside a public-company balance sheet with access to huge institutional debt markets that pure AI labs don’t have. OpenAI and Anthropic have to keep selling equity to fund compute while xAI can issue investment-grade paper against Starlink’s $4.4B in operating income, giving it a dramatically lower effective cost of capital which is critical in this gold rush to expand compute infrastructure and capture market share. If you then look closer at the Colossus deal with Anthropic xAI gets ~$40B to rent out their old infrastructure which allows them to monetize a depreciating asset at a higher rate than they were getting from internal use, as well as control a competitor’s inference economics, and recycles the cash into Colossus 2. This is a Rockefeller move no doubt. What many don’t understand is that Standard Oil didn’t just refine oil. It owned the rail rebates which in turn made their competitors pay them every time they shipped a barrel. Rockefeller’s rivals literally funded the monopoly’s expansion and similar to today with a severely supply constrained compute market anyone with cheap power right now can pull such a move (Colossus taping into the Natural Gas pipeline was another genius move for many other reasons). This matters a lot more than people think right now because we are still in the blitzkrieg part of the AI build out but as we shift from training to inference, compute capacity will directly equal revenue capacity. The pre-training benchmark game the AI labs are playing right now is hitting marginal returns. The customer-serving game is just starting, and whoever has the most power online and the best economics wins it. When you factor in the SpaceX IPO, public debt access, $40B of incoming Anthropic revenue (and many more deals to be announced soon I believe) as well as the first operational gigawatt cluster with Colossus 2 we are going to see a sea change in the industry. Power, uptime, and compute access will be all that matters. If I am right I expect consolidation with the big AI labs and AI services. The recent mergers & buyouts with SpaceX are just the start.

The Arbitrum Security Council has taken emergency action to freeze the 30,766 ETH being held in the address on Arbitrum One that is connected to the KelpDAO exploit. The Security Council acted with input from law enforcement as to the exploiter’s identity, and, at all times, weighed its commitment to the security and integrity of the Arbitrum community without impacting any Arbitrum users or applications. After significant technical diligence and deliberation, the Security Council identified and executed a technical approach to move funds to safety without affecting any other chain state or Arbitrum users. As of April 20 11:26pm ET the funds have been successfully transferred to an intermediary frozen wallet. They are no longer accessible to the address that originally held the funds, and can only be moved by further action by Arbitrum governance, which will be coordinated with relevant parties.