Quick timeline: back in 2024, Apple and OpenAI announced a partnership to build ChatGPT into the iPhone. Sam Altman even showed up at Apple HQ for it. Good vibes, big handshake. Then things turned. OpenAI bought Jony Ive's startup for $6.4 billion and started building its own hardware. In the process, it started poaching Apple's people — at least 10 engineers have jumped from Apple to OpenAI. Now Apple is suing OpenAI over stolen secrets: A senior Apple engineer, Chang Liu, allegedly kept his work laptop after leaving for OpenAI and used it to download confidential hardware files. So what should investors take from this? 1. Timing. OpenAI has been circling an IPO. A federal lawsuit alleging systemic theft is exactly the kind of headline that ends up in a prospectus risk section, and discovery could drag on for a year or more. 2. The hardware bet gets shakier. If Apple wins even a narrow injunction, OpenAI could be blocked from using specific designs or manufacturing techniques right before its planned device launch. For a company betting heavily on a physical product, that's not a small risk. 3. This points to a bigger pattern. Apple isn't framing this as one bad actor — it's framing it as systemic. If that holds up, it says something about how aggressively AI labs are recruiting out of hardware incumbents, and how exposed that strategy is to exactly this kind of suit. Bottom line: this doesn't kill OpenAI's hardware ambitions, but it adds real legal risk and a timeline drag right when the company can least afford either.

Here's something nobody tells you before you start investing or building a business: the beginning is going to feel like everyone else is ahead of you. You'll put money into your first stock, and someone in your group chat will already be up 40 percent on something you never even considered. You'll launch your business, and someone else will land the client you've been chasing for three months, or announce funding you didn't know was even possible this early. It's tempting to read this as a sign. Maybe you picked the wrong stock. Maybe your idea isn't as good as theirs. Maybe everyone else just figured something out that you haven't. But this isn't a sign. This is just what the start of any real commitment looks like. You're only seeing the highlight reel. You don't see the losses that came before their win, the pitches that got rejected, the accounts that sat flat for two years before anything happened. Comparison at the start is almost always comparison against an edited version of someone else's story. Investing and entrepreneurship don't reward the person who found the perfect path from day one. They reward the person who stayed on their own path long enough for it actually to work. That's a different skill than picking correctly. It's the ability to keep going before you have any proof you were right. That's what conviction actually is. Not certainty. Just the willingness to believe in your own process before the results show up to justify it.

Most founders fail for one reason: they fall in love with the wrong thing. They get attached to their solution — the app, the feature, the idea they've been building for months. So when the market says "this isn't working," they don't listen. They double down. Because admitting the solution is wrong feels like admitting they're wrong. The best founders flip it. They're married to the problem. The solution is just whoever they're dating this week. Solution flops? Break up with it. The problem's still there, still worth solving — you just need a better way to solve it. Stay loyal to the problem. Stay ruthless about the solution.

You are a product. Start acting like one. Every product has a target market. So who are you built for? What problem do you solve? What makes someone choose you over everyone else? Most people never ask themselves these questions. They just exist — no positioning, no value proposition, no story. The people who win? They treat themselves like a brand. They're intentional about their skills, their reputation, their network. Your resume, your handshake, your Instagram — that's your packaging. Are you premium or are you generic? Start thinking like a product and watch how differently you carry yourself. What's your value proposition? Drop it below 👇

Starlink is extraordinary. $11.4B in revenue, 39% operating margin, 10 million subscribers. If that were the whole company, this would be a straightforward conversation. But in February, Elon merged xAI into SpaceX right before the IPO. SpaceX made $791M in profit in 2024. They lost $4.9B in 2025. Starlink's cash is now funding a GPU buildout competing with OpenAI and Anthropic. And the governance: Musk holds 85% of the voting power. Public investors get one vote per share. He gets ten. There's also a billion shares granted to him that vest when there's a permanent Mars colony with a million people. You're not buying a rocket company. You're buying a non-voting stake in whatever Elon decides to do next. At 93x trailing revenue, the price assumes everything goes right. That's a tough entry.