Civitas Snippets - February 22, 2026
Issue 49
Dear friends of Civitas Growth Partners,
Before we jump into the typical shenanigans everyone expects from the Snippets, we would be remiss if we did not start by including this powerful and moving interview of former Senator and University of Florida President Ben Sasse, who was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer in December. We can often get caught up in the details, controversy and busyness of life, but please take 60 minutes to listen to this and marinate on the simplicity and wisdom in it.
In a week when America is contemplating multi-trillion dollar deficits, Pokémon cards are selling for $16.5 million, and $3,000‑an‑hour lawyers are abundant, the following quote from Benjamin Franklin seems to be prescient:
“Beware of little expenses; a small leak will sink a great ship.”
With that, let’s get to it…
Politics and Current Events
The GOP is getting shellacked in special elections, with Democrats outpacing their 2024 performance by an average of 10.5 points across 20 state legislative races this year. Party operatives are warning of a "fired-up Democratic base and a sleepy GOP base," which is Washington-speak for "we have a problem." Whether this translates to a 2026 midterm wave or merely a series of off-cycle tremors remains the billion-dollar question.
A new group is forming to boost centrist Democrats ahead of 2028, led by former Rep. Cheri Bustos. The centrist lane is simultaneously more viable and more contested than it's been in a generation. Whether "moderate Democrat" is a winning brand or an oxymoron depends on which primary electorate you ask.
NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani faces a $12 billion budget shortfall while proposing a $127 billion budget — more than Florida's $117B for a population three times the size. DeSantis helpfully pointed this out on X, because nothing brings a Florida Man more joy than dunking on Gotham's math.
The Pentagon used Anthropic's Claude during the raid that captured Nicolás Maduro, and Anthropic is not happy about it. The philosophical irony — a company built on AI safety watching its creation deployed in a military operation — writes itself. One viral tweet put it more succinctly: "The government doesn't want you to know that you can literally text your AI agent and say 'Capture Maduro.'"
DOGE has released the largest Medicaid dataset in history as Musk's government efficiency initiative continues its transparency push. Whether this leads to meaningful reform or simply gives X users new chart material remains to be seen, but that genie doesn't go back in the bottle.
Homicide rates have plunged dramatically in major U.S. cities, continuing a stunning post-pandemic crime crash. The decline is broad-based and difficult to attribute to any single policy. Sometimes the most important trends are the ones nobody can explain.
The FBI says its Georgia search warrant for 2020 election records was based on "substantiated" irregularities in Fulton County's tabulation process. The source and context warrant the usual caveats, but "substantiated" is a specific word with specific legal weight. Why does it feel that more and more the “crazy” conspiracy talk has proven to be “less crazy” over time?
China's latest Arctic icebreaker is the centerpiece of Beijing's push to create a "Polar Silk Road". For those keeping track, we've progressed from "climate change might open Arctic shipping routes" to "three nuclear powers are actively competing to control them."
A federal jury will decide whether Centerview Partners illegally fired a junior analyst who asked for nine hours of sleep to manage a medical condition. The bank's defense: 24/7 availability is an "essential function." The judge's rebuttal: they never actually codified that expectation. The fact that a federal court is adjudicating whether sleep is a reasonable accommodation tells you everything about Wall Street's relationship with human biology.
The Smithsonian profiled eight presidents who made their mark outside the White House — from Lincoln's patent to Garfield's geometry proof. A pleasant reminder that "what did you do before politics?" once had answers beyond reality television, social media influencer, or attorney.
Economy, Markets, and Business
OpenAI is closing in on a funding round that would exceed $100 billion, valuing the company north of $850 billion — more than the GDP of Switzerland. For context, the entire U.S. oil and gas industry invested $570 billion in exploration last year. We are now spending more to train language models than to find hydrocarbons. Whether that's visionary or insane depends entirely on your time horizon.
OpenAI has hired Peter Steinberger, the founder of OpenClaw, as it bets heavily on the "agents that do things" paradigm over "chatbots that answer questions." The talent war in AI has moved from researchers to infrastructure builders.
The Economist makes a compelling case that GPUs are ripe for financialization — derivatives, spot markets, collateralized bonds. If Wall Street can securitize subprime mortgages, it can certainly bundle Nvidia H100s into a CDO. Whether it should is a different question entirely.
The CBO projects annual U.S. deficits topping $3 trillion by 2036, with debt surpassing 120% of GDP by decade's end. The drivers are boringly predictable — Medicare, Social Security, interest — and the proposed solutions remain politically radioactive. A separate Axios visualization tells the same terrifying story. Two outlets, same chart. Repetition doesn't make it less true – or less scary.
Despite the "Sell America" narrative, foreigners poured $1.55 trillion into long-term U.S. assets in 2025. The notable exception: China dumped $209 billion, bringing its Treasury holdings to the lowest since 2008. Everyone is hedging America's decline except, apparently, everyone's portfolio managers.
Top lawyer hourly rates have entered the absurd. Elite partners now charge up to $3,400 an hour, with one telecom specialist pushing $6,000. AI is squeezing fees for routine associate work while rainmakers face zero pushback — perfectly mirroring the economy at large.
Apollo counted 857 U.S. unicorns, up from 114 in 2016. The once-mythical beast is now "kind of basic, actually." Our personal favorite new taxonomy entry: "soonicorns" — companies on the brink of a valuation that increasingly feels like a participation trophy.
Anthropic's data center ambitions are taking concrete shape, led by ex-Google executives. The scale of investment required to compete in frontier AI is now measured in billions per quarter, which effectively narrows the field to a handful of players with government-scale capital or the willingness to burn cash at government-scale rates.
Anthropic's Super Bowl ad drove an 11% boost in Claude traffic. Taking a swing at the market leader in the most expensive ad slot in television is either bold brand strategy or the AI equivalent of picking a bar fight, but the numbers suggest it worked.
The Ivies are having second thoughts about PE. Princeton is lowering return expectations, Yale's private capital portfolio has underperformed. When your most sophisticated LPs start publicly wavering, the fee compression conversation gets louder.
The AI boom belongs to capital, not workers. Productivity gains are accruing overwhelmingly to shareholders rather than flowing through to wages — historically consistent with transformative technologies that take decades to distribute gains broadly. This trend is not a new one in the 21st-century U.S., thanks to the Fed’s overly active monetary policy since the Great Financial Crisis.
Matt Shumer's viral thread — "Something Big Is Happening" — draws an explicit parallel between February 2026 and February 2020: the signals are everywhere if you're paying attention. The "something big" genre has a mixed track record, but the underlying data is hard to dismiss.
The first signs of AI burnout are emerging from the people who embraced it most enthusiastically. The early adopters who automated their workflows are now discovering that "doing more with less" often just means "doing more." The efficiency treadmill has no off switch.
Healthcare jobs have quietly become the engine of America's labor market, adding hundreds of thousands of positions while tech, manufacturing, and finance stagnated. The labor implications are circular: we spend more on healthcare, which creates more healthcare jobs, which supports the economy that funds more healthcare spending — however, does anyone really think that jobs which overwhelmingly service non-economically productive members of society are actually “productive”?
U.S. health spending reached $5.3 trillion in 2024 — roughly $16,000 per person. Spending is rising faster than GDP, outcomes aren't improving proportionally, and the demographic trajectory guarantees the curve steepens from here.
The mystery of declining office jobs in a growing economy may finally have an explanation: AI. White-collar positions are quietly being absorbed by automation while displaced workers shift into service and healthcare roles. The economy isn't shrinking — it's reshaping, and the reshaping is happening in cubicles, not factories.
Detroit automakers have taken a collective $50 billion hit as the EV bubble bursts. And yet, they simultaneously want to bring back the sedan. We admire the contrarian instinct, but convincing F-150 drivers to downsize is a harder sell than convincing Ivy endowments to stick with PE.
Bill Ackman's Pershing Square revealed a significant Meta stake, calling it "one of the clearest beneficiaries of AI integration." Ackman's track record is... colorful, but on this particular bet, consensus seems to be forming behind him.
The 35 countries with the highest household debt make for sobering reading. Switzerland, Australia, and South Korea lead the pack at over 100% of GDP. Low rates for a decade made borrowing rational; the hangover is now structural.
Pizza Hut is closing 250 stores as Yum! Brands considers selling the chain. Separately, Pizza Hut is testing a vertical pizza box in London. We'll let you decide which headline better captures the state of the brand: the one where they're closing stores, or the one where they're reinventing the box.
Job hunters are now paying recruiters to get hired — not the other way around. When the supply-demand dynamics of professional recruiting invert, it tells you something about where the leverage has shifted.
American farmers are aging out of their profession, and their kids don't want in. The average farmer is 58, land prices are prohibitive, and the next generation is choosing finance over fertilizer. The implications for food security, rural communities, and agricultural PE are largely ignored until there's a supply shock.
Big Tech is buying up America's land, outbidding residential developers for parcels slated for hundreds of homes. The irony: the same companies building AI to make housing more efficient are making housing harder to build by cornering the land market.
SpaceX has delayed Mars to focus on the Moon for NASA's Artemis program. We've learned to apply a Musk Discount™ of approximately 18-24 months to all stated timelines, but the shift in prioritization is real: the Moon is a paying customer, and Mars is still an aspiration.
The S&P 500 is barely recognizable compared to a decade ago. The top 10 companies hold a historically unprecedented share of total market cap. Either this concentration is the natural outcome of winner-take-all dynamics, or it's the kind of top-heaviness that precedes a rotation.
Entrepreneurship is skyrocketing among young founders — "founder" LinkedIn titles up 69% in 2025, driven by AI tools that lower the barrier from "I need a technical co-founder" to "I need a laptop." Whether this produces durable businesses or a generation of failed startups remains to be seen.
Babysitting rates have soared across the U.S., making childcare one of the most inflation-resistant line items in the family budget. When even informal, cash-basis labor markets reprice this aggressively, "transitory inflation" needs a new chapter.
A CFO explains the history of EBITDA — invented to justify leveraged buyouts in the 1980s, became the lingua franca of enterprise valuation, and remains the single most manipulated line item in any CIM. For our readers, a charming origin story for the number that pays the bills.
The WSJ profiled Anthropic's philosopher Amanda Askell, who has spent years teaching Claude how to have morals. She knew at 14 she wanted to teach philosophy; she didn't know her only pupil would be a language model. The most unusual philosophy department on earth.
Japan's largest toilet maker, Toto, is apparently an "undervalued AI play" thanks to semiconductor-grade ceramics transferable to chip production. We've now reached the point in the cycle where toilet manufacturers are pitched as AI infrastructure plays. Draw your own conclusions.
Society and Culture
Harvard is proposing to cap A grades at 20% after a report found a majority of grades were A's. Grade inflation is to academia what fee compression is to asset management: everyone knows it's a problem, and nobody wants to be the first to fix it.
The Winter Olympics have been rocked by a cheating scandal — in curling. A Canadian player is accused of deliberately double-touching a stone during a gold medal match, sparking the kind of international incident only the most genteel sport could produce. When curling has an integrity crisis, one wonders if anything is sacred.
Hundreds of singles descended on a San Francisco Trader Joe's clutching roses and looking for love among the frozen dumplings and Two Buck Chuck. When your best option for meeting people is a grocery store at 7 PM on a Thursday, the apps have truly failed us.
NYC has opened what it claims is the "world's first" companion café — a Hell's Kitchen spot redesigned for people who have AI partners and want to bring them on a proper date. Table for one, phone propped up, chatbot across the table. We report this without editorial commentary because frankly none is needed.
A Pew survey across 25 countries explored what makes people proud of their nations. Americans cite freedoms and military strength; Europeans lean toward social safety nets. The meta-observation: pride is less about what a country is than about the story its citizens tell themselves.
Europe is edging closer to social media bans for children, with France leading the charge. The proposals face two familiar obstacles: implementation (kids are better at VPNs than legislators) and the inevitable collision with U.S. tech companies whose business models depend on adolescent engagement.
Colostrum supplements are booming despite thin evidence. Gwyneth endured bee stings; Victoria smeared bird droppings on her face. Bovine first milk seems almost reasonable by comparison, which is perhaps the most damning indictment of the wellness industry imaginable.
Scientists built "Smart Underwear" to measure flatulence with scientific precision. We include this because (a) it appeared in Scientific American, lending a veneer of respectability, and (b) science without a sense of humor is just accounting.
Logan Paul sold a Pokémon card for $16.5 million, sparking controversy over its grading legitimacy. The alternative asset class that once seemed like a punchline now involves eight-figure transactions and authentication disputes worthy of the art world. Whether a Pikachu Illustrator card is "worth" $16.5 million is the wrong question — someone paid it, and in markets, that's the only answer.
Researchers are proposing social media algorithms that challenge your views rather than reinforcing them. It's a lovely idea that ignores the fundamental business model of every major platform: engagement is driven by outrage. Building a less addictive feed is like building a less profitable casino — technically possible, commercially suicidal.
Global shark bites returned to near-average levels with 65 incidents in 2025, including the first confirmed fatality from a dusky shark. You remain far more likely to be struck by lightning, but we suspect that fact provides limited comfort waist-deep in the surf.
One Final Thing
In our last issue, we asked whether Tesla would combine with SpaceX prior to an IPO. Of the 25 respondents, 56% said No while 44% said Yes — a narrow but decisive vote of skepticism that even Elon’s empire-building instincts have limits.
For this week’s survey question, in a slightly more philosophical posture than usual as a follow-up to the Ben Sasse interview: when you are on your deathbed, do you want to be remembered for your beliefs, your actions, or your relationships?
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