Civitas Snippets - April 19, 2026
Issue 53
Dear friends of Civitas Growth Partners,
Tax Day 2026 landed this week, and the government's ledger did not improve upon inspection. The federal deficit came in at $1.8 trillion for fiscal 2025 - the fifth consecutive year above $1 trillion. The national debt has cleared $37 trillion. Annual interest on that debt crossed $1 trillion for the first time in history, surpassing the defense budget and gaining fast on Medicare. Americans filed their returns, funded roughly 72 cents of every dollar the federal government spent, and put the rest on a tab with no stated due date. The bipartisan consensus, unspoken but durable: spend what you spend, tax no one any more than you have to, and trust that the bond market will remain politely patient. So far, it has.
As Will Rogers once observed:
"The income tax has made more liars out of the American people than golf has."
With that, let's get to it…
Politics and Current Events
The WSJ reports the Trump administration is muscling countries including Taiwan, Malaysia, Argentina, and Indonesia into accepting American producers' right to call their cheese Parmesan, feta, and Asiago, in direct defiance of parallel EU trade deals protecting those names for European producers. The Consorzio del Formaggio Parmigiano Reggiano estimates fake Parmesan sales outside the EU hit 2 billion euros last year. American cheese exports rose 20% to a record 613,000 metric tons. Turns out geopolitical soft power now runs on grated dairy, and the Italians are not amused.
The FBI's 2025 Internet Crime Report clocks $21 billion in cyber-enabled fraud losses, with crypto complaints alone topping $11 billion across 181,565 filings. AI-enabled scams made their debut in the report at $893 million across 22,364 complaints. Americans over 60 lost $7.7 billion, up 37% year over year. IC3 is now taking 3,000 complaints a day. The most productive sector in the American economy, on a run-rate basis, is convincing your grandmother her grandson is stuck in a Mexican jail - or that Nigerian royalty needs her bank account number.
Per a viral post from @wallstreetmav, Canadians are now founding twice as many businesses outside Canada as inside, and roughly 40% of Canada's top 1% have already left, mostly for the US. Pierre Poilievre's linked observation: Carney's first months have produced bigger deficits than Trudeau's and the same tax burden. The brain drain is priced into every US immigration conversation, but the fact that Canadians are now opting into American regulation is the starkest possible scorecard on a decade of Ottawa policy.
Trump posted an AI-generated image of himself as Jesus on Truth Social this week, triggering the expected MAGA-Christian civil war about whether depicting the president as the Son of God counts as a meme, blasphemy, or both. The cultural center cannot hold when the president generates himself with a free image tool and the base spends the week debating iconography. As @itsdeaann put it: "How could you POSSIBLY defend this?" Which is, in the end, the question every faction of the American coalition is now asking every other faction every single week - or daily.
After two years of failed relocations and sterilizations, Colombia has ordered the euthanasia of 80 of the at least 169 "cocaine hippos" that escaped Pablo Escobar's private zoo after his 1993 death. Scientific American notes the population could reach 500 by 2030. Seven countries refused to take any; a single sterilization requires a crane and runs $1-2 million; the animals now kill people and fish alike. The political class finally did the unpopular thing thirty years too late. The externality tax on narco-eccentricity, paid in arrears.
Maine just became the first US state to pass a full data center construction moratorium, freezing any new 20MW+ project until late 2027. Per the FT, $156 billion of projects have already been killed nationwide by local opposition, and Bernie and AOC have filed a federal companion bill. Maine has some of the highest electricity rates in the country, and "powering the AI revolution" gets less popular when it shows up on your utility bill. The first rule of running for Senate: don't let a hyperscaler stand between voters and their light.
Per a viral Charlie Bilello chart, a 25-year-old married couple earning $150k pays over $3,000 more in federal income tax than a 65-year-old couple with identical income, thanks to senior deductions and a boosted standard deduction. The tax code was written for a world where wealth accrued with age, but millennials now hit peak earnings while financing kids, mortgages, and student debt at interest rates their parents never saw. A political third rail waiting to get touched.
The WSJ reports Daniel Moreno-Gama, the 20-year-old Texas college student accused of hurling a Molotov at Sam Altman's mansion, had mused about "Luigi-ing some tech CEOs" in an online chat months earlier. His public defender calls it a "property crime at best," driven by an acute mental-health crisis. The broader problem: the Mangione subculture keeps producing copycats, and "AI will kill us all" makes a convenient rationalization for anyone already reaching for a lighter. The rhetoric tax is no longer hypothetical. As previously stated, please stop canonizing a cold-blooded murderer; America, we can do better.
Economy, Markets, and Business
Per The Information, Sam Altman and CFO Sarah Friar are openly diverging on OpenAI's IPO timing, with Altman pushing Q4 2026 and Friar privately telling colleagues the company is not ready. Friar stopped reporting to Altman in August and now answers to head-of-applications Fidji Simo, an unusual arrangement for a company preparing a historic offering. OpenAI has committed $600 billion in spend over five years, will burn over $200 billion before generating cash, and just pulled in a $122 billion round. One of these two executives is going to be right.
Forbes reports Abu Dhabi's government has quietly owned a passive minority stake in Insight Partners' management company since January 2025, disclosed via a wrongful-termination lawsuit rather than any voluntary filing. Insight sits on Anthropic, Databricks, Writer, and the $122 billion OpenAI round. Silver Lake and Carlyle have similar structures. The Gulf has gone from LP to GP cap-table in less than a decade, and the SEC disclosure that actually opened the book was a retaliation claim. LP democracy, it turns out, runs on whistleblowers.
Per @TurnerNovak's chart of Setter Capital Q1 data, Anthropic just bumped SpaceX as the most-desired startup secondary. Five of the top six are IPO candidates in the next 12-18 months. Kalshi and Polymarket are both rising; Perplexity, Crusoe, and Figure are sliding. The average last-round valuation on the list is $120 billion, essentially identical to the average S&P 500 market cap of $122 billion. The private markets are no longer a farm system. They are a parallel league with a higher median multiple.
Per Axios, the Fed now estimates the breakeven rate of job creation, the number needed to hold unemployment steady, has collapsed from 250,000 a month in 2023 to near zero today. Boomers retiring, smaller generations aging in, and a sudden reversal in immigration (net outflow of 55,000 unauthorized workers per month in H2 2025) is the driver. Negative payroll months are now statistically routine even at full employment. The single most reliable macro guidepost of the last 60 years just stopped being a signal.
The WSJ documents AI companies pivoting their messaging from godlike transformation to "we come in peace" as public polling turns hostile. OpenAI just proposed a national wealth fund, capital-gains hikes, and taxes on automated labor - policy ideas that read like a Bernie Sanders white paper rewritten by a communications team. When Quinnipiac shows 55% of Americans think AI will do more harm than good, and net favorability lands below ICE's, you start talking about the social safety net.
The Information reports UBS HOLT's quantitative model, a veteran cash-flow-return system dating to 1985, says Nvidia should trade 400% higher, a $22 trillion market cap versus $4.5 trillion today. Nvidia's cash-flow return on investment is 73% against a 6% average, top 0.1% of all companies. Returns have continued to rise when the model predicted they should fade. Meanwhile most large software names, weighed down by stock-based comp at 20%+ of sales, are priced for under 5% growth. The model that called the dot-com fade says this time is actually different.
Anthropic told The Information it has topped $30 billion in annualized revenue, up from $19 billion in February and roughly $9 billion at the end of 2025. That puts Anthropic ahead of OpenAI's $24 billion run rate for the first time. Gross margin projections are being lowered as the company pours capex into infrastructure; new deals with Broadcom and Google TPUs are in motion. Although there are some questions about revenue recognition, Anthropic's growth last quarter may be unparalleled in the history of capitalism.
Per Food Dive, MGP Ingredients is idling two Kentucky distilleries through at least May 2027 and cutting 33 jobs as American whiskey production fell 28% over the first eight months of 2025. Suntory has already paused Jim Beam's main Kentucky facility; Diageo and Brown-Forman are cutting back too. Aged spirits require years of production planning, tariffs are eating exports, and consumption keeps falling. The bourbon glut is the cleanest cyclical-to-structural shift happening in American consumer staples right now, and it will take years to clear - so please have an Old Fashioned this weekend; it's the patriotic thing to do.
The WSJ reports surcharges are now everywhere. 34% of small businesses now add credit-card fees, 20% of restaurants tack on wellness or service charges, airlines are hiking baggage prices, and landlords are billing trash collection as a line item. Behavioral research calls it the "lock-in effect": consumers commit mentally to a price, then eat the surcharge at checkout. University of Michigan consumer sentiment just printed its lowest reading ever, beating 2008 and COVID. Turns out drip pricing is the stealth inflation vector of 2026.
James Lavish's Informationist lays out the gambling boom in numbers: Americans wagered $167 billion on sports last year, up 15x in six years. Kalshi did $10.4 billion of prediction-market volume in the first three weeks of March alone. Zero-day options went from 5% of S&P volume in 2016 to 59% in 2025. The median 30-year-old makes $52k and sees a $430k home. When the safe path stops compounding, the dangerous one starts looking rational. 24% of Gen Z now consider gambling a form of investing.
New SpaceX financials leaked to The Information show the company is really one business wearing three hats. Starlink: $11.4 billion in revenue, 50% growth, 63% EBITDA margins, the only line producing cash. Rockets: 8% growth on $4.1 billion. AI (X and xAI combined): $3.2 billion on a $14 billion cash burn. Net income was a $5 billion loss. At a $1.25 trillion mark, the IPO is priced at 266x EBITDA against 16x for Meta and 25x for Alphabet. The pitch is Starlink; the tax is everything else.
Axios reports Amazon is buying satellite operator Globalstar for $11.6 billion to feed its Amazon Leo constellation and, eventually, to put cellular coverage directly into iPhones. Globalstar itself is tiny: $273 million in 2025 revenue with 85% of capacity already rented to Apple for emergency SOS. Compare that to SpaceX's estimated $15-16 billion. What Bezos is really buying is regulatory spectrum, an Apple customer relationship, and a license to chase Starlink. The space oligopoly is narrowing to two, and both founders bring very different personality discounts (Elon-Altman kerfuffles are old news - we can't wait for the Elon-Bezos beef).
United CEO Scott Kirby reportedly pitched a United-American merger directly to President Trump in February, per Axios and Reuters. Combined share would be 34.1% of US domestic flying, nearly double Delta's 17.8%. For context, the Biden DOJ blocked JetBlue-Spirit at a combined 8%, and Spirit has since filed for bankruptcy twice. The new DOJ may take a very different view if the deal is framed as saving an "industry champion." The M&A question of 2026: how much consolidation is the right amount before the Big Three collapse into a single airline called Amerilunited.
The WSJ reports Delta's Pennsylvania refinery is adding $300 million to Q2 earnings as jet fuel roughly doubled since late February. Delta bought the plant for $150 million in 2012 when energy experts called it a boondoggle; the crack spread has since blown out to a record and industry peers are absorbing billions in unhedged fuel costs. Even United's Scott Kirby publicly acknowledged the edge. Sometimes the right call is to vertically integrate the commodity that drives your biggest cost line, and sometimes analysts will mock you for it for fourteen years before admitting it.
Per the Verge and FT, Meta is training an AI avatar of Mark Zuckerberg on his image, voice, and mannerisms "so that employees might feel more connected to the founder through interactions with it." Creators may get the same self-cloning toolkit if the experiment goes well. Zuckerberg himself is coding 5-10 hours a week and running a separate AI agent to handle his personal tasks. If employees are talking to AI Zuck about their work while human Zuck is writing code, we've finally found the use case for the metaverse.
Morgan Stanley's review of Q1 earnings calls, per Axios, shows 25% of S&P 500 companies cited a quantifiable AI benefit, nearly double a year ago. Finance jumped from 15% to 40% in twelve months. Hasbro: 80% faster prototyping. BofA's Brian Moynihan said AI "saves us about 2,000 people" and he plans to "let headcount drift down." 75% of the index still reports nothing, and Goldman's parallel study finds only 10% with specific use cases. The capital cycle is already 5x ahead of the P&L.
The most on-brand pivot of the year: Axios reports Allbirds is rebranding as NewBird AI after selling its footwear assets to American Exchange Group, positioning itself as "a fully integrated GPU-as-a-Service and AI-native cloud solutions provider." The stock soared 582% to $16.99 on the news. A shoe company whose shoes nobody wanted is now a GPU company whose GPUs it doesn't own, trading at an AI multiple, run by people whose last P&L line was wool sneakers. The AI bubble gets a new entry in its permanent record.
Society and Culture
Bloomberg Businessweek revisits MLB's long-running experiment in the independent Atlantic League: bigger bases, robot umps, the pitcher's mound pushed back a foot, even letting batters steal first. MLB's own research says fans want "more baseball in the baseball game," which means triples, steals, and balls in play. Theo Epstein, patron saint of optimizing baseball out of baseball, is now leading the reverse-engineering. The irony is admitted openly. Pure Moneyball produced the second-most-boring product in American entertainment, ahead only of the regular-season NBA.
Mental Floss resurfaces the 100-Year Rule of baby names: old names fall out of favor, get shelved for a century as "grandparent names," then come roaring back. Eleanor bottomed out in 1986 at rank 700 and is now top 20. Charlotte, Theodore, August, Oliver, and Violet all pulled the same trick. Jennifer and Jessica are currently in the basement, so book those 2076 birth announcements now. Naming conventions, like PE vintages, mean-revert on a cycle long enough that most practitioners forget the cycle exists.
The Chronicle reports Harvard's Jewish undergraduate enrollment has fallen from roughly 25% for much of the 20th century to about 7% today, the lowest since before World War II and the lowest in the Ivy League. The Harvard Jewish Alumni Alliance report is inconclusive about causes; constitutional law professor Noah Feldman points to a mix of "diversity" frameworks and the post-October-7 campus climate. The Trump administration wants Title VI enforcement; Feldman says the legal case is thin. The one thing everyone agrees on is the number. Explanations are now a choose-your-own-narrative exercise.
The WSJ reports US fertility hit a record low of 53.1 births per 1,000 women aged 15-44 in 2025, with the total fertility rate at 1.57 against a 2.1 replacement threshold. For the first time in history, birthrates for women in their late 30s exceeded those for women in their early 20s. Teen births fell 72% since 2007. The below-replacement trajectory is global, but the US demographic cushion (the births-over-deaths surplus) runs out within a decade. The 21st-century population question is now an immigration question, full stop.
Real Simple reminds readers not to shower during a thunderstorm because lightning can travel through metal plumbing. Roughly one-third of lightning injuries happen indoors. The CDC also advises against washing dishes, using wired electronics, or lying on concrete floors during storms. The full advisory is either prudent public-health guidance or a perfect description of how most of us in the PE business spend a normal Tuesday evening. Either way, the next thunderstorm in your region is an excellent reason to stare at the wall for twenty minutes.
CBS News reports the LendingTree estimate of raising a child through high school just crossed $300,000 for the first time, at $303,418, or $16,857 a year. That excludes college, which adds roughly another $150,000. A CBS poll finds 77% of Americans believe raising a family is harder today than for prior generations. The total now approaches the median US home price of $356,000. The two largest outlays of adult life (kids and a house) have converged on roughly the same price tag. Neither pencils out on a median income.
The WSJ documents Midwesterners losing the ground war against Asian carp, which leap ten feet out of the water and have broken noses, knocked a fisherman unconscious, and cost Nate Wallick a full-speed hit to the side of his own head. Illinois pays $0.10 per pound; kids now tube the Illinois River in football helmets. The state is trying to rebrand the fish as "Copi," short for copious, to get chefs and consumers interested. Invasive-species economics, helmet-based leisure, and a consumer-marketing rebrand. A three-panel triptych of the American condition.
Cal Newport takes apart Thomas Friedman's NYT column calling Anthropic's new Claude Mythos model a "terrifying warning sign." Security researchers replicated Mythos's flagship exploits using cheap open-weight models within days. Bruce Schneier: "You don't need Mythos to find the vulnerabilities they found." Mythos scores 83% on a cybersecurity benchmark against Opus 4.6's 67%, which is solid incremental progress, not a nightmarish leap. What Anthropic is actually announcing is a marketing campaign. What Friedman is actually doing is helping them run it.
Palantir CEO Alex Karp bluntly told BlackRock's Larry Fink at Davos that philosophy PhDs (he has one) will not fare well in the AI era unless they have another marketable skill. Palantir's Maven tool is run by a former cop who went to junior college. Karp's Meritocracy Fellowship bypasses the university pipeline entirely. Youth unemployment is at 10.4% and 47% of current college students say they've seriously considered switching majors because of AI. The signaling value of an elite generalist degree is being repriced in real time.
Per Adam Singer, a DARPA-funded seven-year project tested 3,900 social-science papers and found that only about 49% replicated with statistical significance. Of 600 papers where researchers tried to reproduce the original data, only 145 contained enough detail to even try. A sliver of hope: papers from 2022-23 replicated at 85%, suggesting transparency norms are helping. Half the body of research informing immigration, education, and criminal-justice policy does not hold up under scrutiny. The bias conversation and the replication conversation are the same conversation.
A University of Massachusetts/YouGov poll of 1,000 Americans found Dolly Parton leads the world in US net favorability at +65, lapping Obama (+14) and Zelenskyy (+12) by more than 50 points. W. Bush nets +5; Trump -18; Biden -19; Putin -65. Parton's Imagination Library has mailed 270+ million books, and she's given $12 million to Tennessee wildfire victims and $1 million toward what became the Moderna vaccine. The only durable political alpha left in America is being nice and refusing to pick a side.
Per the FT, Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund is on the verge of cutting support for LIV Golf, five years and roughly $5 billion into a project that turned men's golf into a civil war. LIV's UK entity lost $500 million in 2024 alone. CEO Scott O'Neil emailed staff that "our season continues exactly as planned." PIF's governor told the FT the Iran war is forcing priority resets. The lesson for PE: even sovereign wealth has a DPI clock when the underwriting premise is "a decade of patience and unlimited losses."
One Final Thing
In our last issue, we asked: Given the recent societal momentum and the New Mexico jury decision, do you think the government should regulate teenage social media usage, or is this something that should be left to families? 86% said both government and families have a role to play, and 14% said leave it to families. The near-unanimity is notable - even among a readership not known for its reflexive enthusiasm for government intervention, the "leave it to parents alone" position barely cleared one in seven respondents. Nine-figure jury verdicts have a way of clarifying the debate.
This issue's question is simpler. SpaceX has filed for what would be the largest IPO in history, targeting a June listing at a $1.75 trillion valuation priced at 266x last year's EBITDA, with AI-division cash burn running at $14 billion a year and Starlink single-handedly subsidizing the rest. Assuming SpaceX completes its IPO in 2026 as planned, will its stock be higher or lower than the IPO price by year-end 2026?
We're Looking for Exceptional, Overlooked Businesses
At Civitas Growth Partners, we invest our own capital in founder-led B2B businesses with $1M to $4M in recurring revenue, strong retention, and best-in-class products, but that fall outside the traditional VC or PE mold. These businesses are often bootstrapped, breakeven, and haven't yet invested meaningfully in sales and marketing. Growth is steady (0–25% annually), and the product quietly leads its niche.
This is a category of company that is often overlooked, but we see tremendous opportunity. Our model is to help these businesses scale to $10M or more in revenue by providing flexible capital (minority or control), supporting both organic and M&A growth, and deploying an operational playbook honed through years of work with capital-efficient founders. Because we invest our own capital — not institutional LP funds — we bring no artificial timelines or exit pressure. That gives founders room to build enduring value. Our partners have achieved more than 6x equity outcomes without compromising what makes their companies special.
We're actively looking for our next great partner. If you know a founder or operator building something exceptional — and overlooked — we'd be grateful for an introduction. We value the relationships that lead us to great companies and are always happy to have a conversation about referral arrangements. Reach out anytime at team@civitasgrowth.com.
Cheers,
The Civitas Team