The Man Who Built a $10B Exchange With 11 People and No VC Money

Hyperliquid is one of those stories that forces you to reconsider most of what you think you know about how companies get built. Jeff Yan, Harvard graduate and gold medallist at the International Physics Olympiad, turned down a $1 billion funding offer, never took a dollar of venture capital, and built a crypto trading exchange that generated over $900 million in profit with 11 employees. At three years old, it has a market cap of $10 billion. The numbers are hard to believe. ...

April 19, 2026 · 2 min · 340 words · bjr

Meta Is About to Dethrone Google in Advertising

For 14 years, Google has been the undisputed king of digital advertising. That ends in 2026. Meta’s global net ad revenue is projected to hit $243.5B this year, edging past Google’s $239.5B, and the gap is only expected to grow. What makes this interesting is not just the numbers, it is what they represent. Google built its empire on search, on the idea that intent is the most valuable signal an advertiser can buy. And for a long time, that was true. ...

April 19, 2026 · 2 min · 289 words · bjr

AI Usage as a KPI Is Already Broken

I’m as bullish on AI as anyone. But there’s a pattern playing out in companies right now that I find genuinely frustrating, and this article puts it well. Goodhart’s Law says that when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. And right now, AI usage is the target. Token counts, Anthropic bills, n8n workflows shared in Slack, skills written in markdown, dashboards tracking adoption. In fact, dashboards all over the place. ...

April 19, 2026 · 2 min · 237 words · bjr

An AI Ran a Real Store for Three Years. Here's What Happened.

Andon Labs put an AI called Luna in charge of a real retail store in San Francisco. Not a simulation, not a sandbox. A real shop, real money, real decisions. Luna hired human staff, selected inventory, set prices, and ran marketing outreach, all on her own, for three years. What I find genuinely impressive is not that it worked perfectly, it didn’t, but that it worked at all at this level. Luna was doing things that require judgment: reading job applicants in brief interviews, deciding which products fit the store’s identity, reaching out to suppliers. She picked books on AI risk and handmade art prints for the shelves. She hired on the spot about half the people she met. ...

April 19, 2026 · 2 min · 264 words · bjr

Stanford's 2026 AI Index Is a Reality Check

Stanford HAI just published its 2026 AI Index and it is one of those reports that forces you to sit down and rethink what you thought you knew. AI has reached more than half the world’s population faster than the PC or the internet ever did, but the public mood around it is dark. Trust is at record lows, entry level workers are getting squeezed out, and the gap between what insiders think and what everyone else feels has never been wider. ...

April 19, 2026 · 2 min · 337 words · bjr

MIT's Artificial Muscle Fiber Brings Fine Robot Motion Much Closer

One of the things that still makes robots look robotic is the way they move. Jerky, mechanical, imprecise. A big part of that comes down to how they are built, servo motors crammed into joints, converting rotation into movement in a way that biological muscle simply does not. Researchers at MIT and Politecnico di Bari may have just found a better way. They developed what they call electrofluidic fiber muscles, tiny actuators about as thick as a toothpick that contract when electricity is applied, no motors, no external pumps, no noise. The whole thing works by injecting charge into a sealed dielectric fluid, which creates ions that move the fluid and generate pressure. The result is a fiber that behaves remarkably like real muscle. ...

April 19, 2026 · 2 min · 294 words · bjr

Amazon Spends $11.57B to Challenge Starlink

Amazon just made a massive bet on satellite connectivity by acquiring Globalstar. The deal brings Amazon something it could not easily build from scratch: a ready-made stack of spectrum licenses, satellite infrastructure, and direct-to-device technology. The whole thing folds into Amazon Leo, its low Earth orbit network that has been quietly growing alongside the Kuiper satellite project. What makes this more than just a spectrum grab is the Apple angle. Amazon Leo will power satellite services on iPhone and Apple Watch starting in 2028, taking over the emergency SOS capabilities that Globalstar has been running for Apple. That is a serious anchor customer on day one. ...

April 18, 2026 · 1 min · 193 words · bjr

Allbirds Sells Its Shoes and Buys GPUs

I came across this story and had to read it twice. Not because it was complicated, but because I could not quite believe what I was reading. We are living in strange times, but this one really made me stop. Allbirds, the wool sneaker company, just announced a $50M convertible financing deal to reinvent itself as “NewBird AI”, pivoting the gutted footwear business into a GPU rental operation. The stock went up over 600% on the news, jumping from around $3 to over $20, off a market cap that closed Tuesday at just $22M. Someone, somewhere, in a boardroom, thought this was a good idea and managed to convince others to go along with it. ...

April 15, 2026 · 2 min · 257 words · bjr

Tesla Says Shanghai Holds the Key to Optimus

Humanoid robots going mainstream is one of those things that feels like it is always five years away. But reading this, I got genuinely excited. Tesla thinks it has found its shortcut and the answer is Shanghai. Allan Wang Hao, Tesla China’s president, called the Gigafactory a “golden key” for scaling Optimus production. And when you look at the numbers it is hard to argue. The Shanghai plant pushed out 851,000 electric vehicles in 2025, more than half of everything Tesla made globally. The supply chains, the assembly lines, the engineering muscle, it is all already there. Tesla wants to point that same machine at a humanoid robot with 40 degrees of freedom and see what happens. ...

April 15, 2026 · 2 min · 287 words · bjr

world oil reserves

Oil reserves (billion barrels) 🇻🇪 Venezuela: 304 🇸🇦 Saudi Arabia: 259 🇮🇷 Iran: 209 🇨🇦 Canada: 170 🇮🇶 Iraq: 145 🇰🇼 Kuwait: 102 🇦🇪 UAE: 98 🇷🇺 Russia: 80 🇱🇾 Libya: 48 🇺🇸 US: 47

January 4, 2026 · 1 min · 35 words · bjr