Our Crazy Unhinged Now

A confluence of events prompted me to quip on Twitter:

What amazing times we live in now. A $16 billion funding for @Waymo (congrats team, the product) is an afterthought thanks to the mega deal between @SpaceX & @xai It might be the smartest deal of the year or simply the best value enhancement since the Kardashian Clan discovered Botox. By the way, @Walmart is now a trillion dollar company. Go ahead and laugh now. Seriously, and be grateful for the amazing times we are living in.

I was being very ironic, sardonic even.

Waymo raised $16 billion this week. Sixteen billion dollars. At a $126 billion valuation. Those are some serious numbers. I have covered technology long enough to classify that as a jaw-dropping amount of funding raised by a company. Sixteen billion into a $126 billion valuation is roughly 13% ownership. That is a private equity-sized bite wearing the garb of a venture capital investment. FWIW, I love Waymo. A lot. I use it multiple times a week. I think it is the cat’s meow.

And I can see why investors are clamoring to invest in the company. But let’s pause for a minute. It still only does 400,000 rides a week across six cities, and has tripled ride volume in 2025. Sure, it plans to expand to twenty more cities this year, including London and Tokyo. But laws of physics don’t change. In the realm of reality, there is a limit to how many rides are possible. So that is why I gulped at the money and the valuation.

Sixteen billion smackeroos is a gigantic amount of money. If you were to stack that much money in $100 bills vertically, you would be well past the cruising altitude of commercial airplanes. Roughly 11 miles.

And yet, Waymo was the secondary story of the day.

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Why? Because on the same day (though first reported on January 31), Elon Musk announced that SpaceX was acquiring xAI, creating a combined entity valued at $1.25 trillion. The deal, on paper, could create a true full-stack company. Starlink for access. Million satellites for orbital compute. Space-based data centers. Oh my. SpaceX has already filed with the FCC, by the way. Musk claims that within two to three years, the cheapest way to generate AI compute will be in space.

I love the vision. I buy the direction. I just don’t buy the timeline. But then, as Plato said, “Rhetoric is the art of ruling the minds of men.”

The past decade has taught us this about Musk. The man loves his hyperboles. A million robotaxis by the end of 2026. A billion humanoid robots. Just last week, on Tesla’s earnings call, he announced the end of the Model S and Model X production lines, giving them an “honorable discharge.” The Fremont factory will be retooled to build Optimus robots instead. A million units a year, he says, on the same floor space that used to produce 100,000 cars.

What that announcement really masks is simpler. Tesla’s EV sales fell 9% in 2025. The Model S and X accounted for just 3% of deliveries. The EV game, as a game of excitement and disruption, is pretty much over. It is now a boring business where Chinese manufacturers are going to dominate and push Tesla into increasingly marginal territory. The honorable discharge is really a quiet retreat dressed up in the language of the future. But hey, we are all living in the new Announcement Economy.

And that is Musk’s real genius. Not the cars. Not the rockets. Not even the AI. It is the storytelling. He understands that the real money comes from spinning the vision of the future, getting people excited about possibilities, making them invest in what could be rather than what is. Reality is too real. What you need is future fantasy. And nobody in the world is better at selling future fantasy than Elon.

“Musk makes you money” has been a good dictum. And investors know it. xAI alone has raised $42.1 billion in venture capital, second only to OpenAI. Firms like Gigafund, a16z, Valor, and Sequoia keep coming back for more. Some of them bet on Musk’s takeover of a social network and now they find themselves on the cap table of a $1.25 trillion company planning to put data centers in orbit. Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund and Fidelity signed on for xAI’s $20 billion Series E just last month. They could be celebrating an IPO within months. Possibly the largest in Silicon Valley history.

I don’t have the telescope to see into the future to tell you if this will be a good IPO or a good investment. It will be great for one person. Elon. In the end, that is what it is all about.

The only other founder playing this game well right now is Sam Altman. He learned it from Elon, who was at one time part of OpenAI. OpenAI has perfected the same art. The announcement economy, the perpetual promise of what’s next, the breathless reveals calibrated to keep capital flowing toward tomorrow.

Let’s face it. The last generation of future-tellers has left the stage. Jeff Bezos used to play this role. He was the soothsayer, the one who could paint a picture of what was coming and make you believe in it. These days he wants to be a rich guy, ringing in 2026 on a $500 million superyacht in St. Barts, partying with Leonardo DiCaprio. He should be paying more attention to what’s happening at Amazon. Because suddenly that company feels like a place where the future is no longer being invented.

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Which brings us to the quietest bombshell of the week. Walmart crossed $1 trillion in market capitalization. The first traditional retailer ever to join the trillion-dollar club, a list dominated entirely by tech companies. Walmart. The company that started with a single store in Rogers, Arkansas, in 1962. I have a tough time seeing Walmart as “exciting,” no matter how much “AI” they might adopt and how many drones they want to fly for deliveries. It is not a company I think about when looking at the future.

For me, the Walmart story is really a meta-story. About Amazon.

Amazon just laid off 16,000 people. That’s on top of the 14,000 cut in October 2025. Thirty thousand corporate jobs gone in four months. The company is reaching the outer limits of what it can extract from commerce. Temu and Shein have eaten into the low end and created a brand-new model of commerce. Amazon is scrambling to win against them. Walmart is proving it can be good enough to compete at the middle. Amazon has too many balls in the air, and the cracks are starting to show. A lot of what the company does is “mid.”

When was the last time Amazon launched anything that can be called future forward?

As a refresher, Amazon launched Amazon Web Services in 2006, Kindle in 2007, and Alexa in 2014. These are the last products the company launched that evolved into genuine platforms and cash machines. Even within that trio, momentum has shifted. Alexa’s early lead in ambient computing has been eroded by the rapid rise of large-scale AI systems that reframe voice as a feature, not a platform.

AWS is still a great business and will be for a while. But it won’t be the perpetual money machine most people assumed. Microsoft’s Satya Nadella set out to make Google dance. Turns out he tickled the hell out of Amazon instead. Azure is growing faster. The AI race is burning cash at a rate that makes even Amazon’s $125 billion capex forecast for 2026 look like a down payment on uncertainty. Amazon’s last truly profitable platforms are now a decade or more old.

So here we are. In a single week, a $16 billion fundraise for robot cars became a secondary news story. A $1.25 trillion merger built on orbital compute dreams. A discount retailer from Arkansas joining the same valuation tier as Nvidia and Apple. The future-tellers are selling visions of space data centers and humanoid robots. The quiet operators are racking up 400,000 rides a week and selling groceries at scale.

We are living in amazing, bewildering, possibly unhinged times. Enjoy the show!

February 4, 2026. San Francisco