Civitas Snippets - March 8, 2026
Issue 50
Dear friends of Civitas Growth Partners,
In a week where the FBI Director celebrated a hockey gold medal in the locker room, someone bet $100,000 on the government confirming alien life, and Jack Dorsey fired half his company to thunderous applause from the market, the line between satire and the news wire has been formally dissolved. Meanwhile, the United States bombed Iran, the Pope told priests to stop outsourcing sermons to ChatGPT, and a software engineer accidentally gained control of 7,000 robot vacuums.
As Will Durant once observed:
"One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do, and always a clever thing to say."
With that, let's get to it...
Politics and Current Events
Trump delivered his State of the Union address in peak form, taunting Democrats into sitting on their hands while he asked them to stand for U.S. citizens. Axios's Jim VandeHei nailed it: "He knows that while he's unpopular, Democrats are equally unpopular." The buried lede? Trump started laying the predicate for war with Iran. That was not a throwaway line. It was a memo.
And then we bombed Iran. The FT flagged that 12 Polymarket accounts placed $67,000 in wagers on the strike in the six hours before it happened -- earning $330,000 on newly created accounts with no prior activity. Senator Murphy called it "insane." If you can monetize classified strike timelines via anonymous crypto wallets, your OPSEC has a problem.
Christopher Preble launched an Iran War Cost Tracker providing a live estimate of taxpayer spending on the conflict -- roughly $220 million per day, about what it costs to run the U.S. Postal Service, except with considerably less mail and considerably more ordnance.
Anthropic published a detailed expose of industrial-scale distillation attacks by DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax -- three Chinese AI labs that generated over 16 million exchanges with Claude through 24,000 fraudulent accounts. DeepSeek even used Claude to generate censorship-safe alternatives to politically sensitive queries. Chinese labs stole American AI capabilities at scale and used them to help their government censor citizens more efficiently. The cycle of innovation continues.
The Netherlands cancelled its proposed 36% tax on unrealized gains after overwhelming public backlash. A rare case of a government updating its priors when confronted with basic market mechanics: you cannot spend paper gains.
The States are picking up where the Dutch left off. Bloomberg reports California is pushing a 5% tax on billionaires' assets, Washington state eyes a 9.9% levy on incomes over $1 million, and Bernie Sanders headlined a rally at the Wiltern with Rage Against the Machine. We would note the irony of a campaign against billionaires soundtracked by a band signed to Sony Music Group.
China's defense budget is set to show another 7% increase, bringing published spending to about $245 billion -- though the Pentagon estimates actual outlays could be 40-90% higher. China now has the world's largest maritime fighting force and all three legs of a nuclear triad. But sure, the real national security threat is TikTok recipes.
A Chicago public school with capacity for 912 students has 28 enrolled, spends $93,787 per student, has a 1:1 staff-to-student ratio, and has achieved zero percent reading proficiency. We would normally make a joke here, but there genuinely is not one funnier than the data itself.
Rahm Emanuel is barnstorming the country telling Democrats they became "intellectually flabby and intellectually lazy" under Obama. His sharpest line: the party spent the 2024 election focused on the bathroom -- "the smallest room in the house" -- instead of the kitchen table. The fact that "be culturally normal" is a controversial position within the party tells you everything.
The White House quote-tweeted Canadian PM Trudeau after Team USA won Olympic hockey gold -- responding to his "You can't take our country -- and you can't take our game" with what can only be described as a diplomatic mic drop. International relations in 2026 are indistinguishable from sports Twitter, and honestly, we are here for it.
Economy, Markets, and Business
The U.S. is running crisis-level deficits with no crisis to justify it -- 6% of GDP, three consecutive years, with unemployment at 4% and the stock market near highs. James Lavish calls it the "Dubious 6% Club": every prior member (WWII, GFC, COVID) earned entry through genuine emergency. Net interest on the debt has hit $970 billion -- more than the defense budget. The CBO projects $3.1 trillion deficits by 2036, assuming zero recessions for the entire decade. We, who underwrite SaaS companies, would like to offer them a tutorial on the meaning of "stress case."
Nvidia posted a monster quarter: $68.1 billion in revenue, up 73% YoY, with data-center revenue of $62.3 billion and guidance of $78 billion next quarter. Jensen Huang declared "the agentic AI inflection point has arrived," which is CEO-speak for "please do not stop buying GPUs." Gross margins of 75% in a hardware business remain genuinely astonishing.
Jack Dorsey cut 40% of Block's workforce -- 4,000 people -- and the stock surged 19%. His shareholder letter: "Intelligence tools have changed what it means to build and run a company," and companies that haven't cut yet are "late." MIT estimates 11.7% of U.S. jobs -- $1.2 trillion in wages -- could be displaced by AI. Dorsey is apparently field-testing the hypothesis.
OpenAI announced a $110 billion investment at a $730 billion valuation -- $30 billion from SoftBank, $30 billion from Nvidia, $50 billion from Amazon. That valuation is roughly 3.5x Nvidia's annual revenue. When Masayoshi Son is writing $30 billion checks, either we are witnessing the birth of the most important technology in human history, or we are in the late innings of something that rhymes with 1999.
Wall Street has a new trade: HALO -- "Heavy Assets, Low Obsolescence." Investors are rotating into McDonald's, Exxon, and Deere -- companies you cannot disrupt with a prompt. We always appreciate it when Wall Street invents a new acronym to describe the ancient practice of buying businesses that make physical things.
The Citrini Research macro memo -- a fictional dispatch from June 2028 describing an AI-driven economic collapse -- went viral and briefly rattled global software stocks. Deutsche Bank's Jim Reid had the best response: "The vibes to substance ratio is undeniably high." Fair. But so was the vibes-to-substance ratio on subprime in 2006.
A 37-year-old tax economist named Alan Cole bet his entire life savings -- $342,195.63 -- against DOGE on Kalshi. His thesis: the U.S. government is basically an insurance company with an army and a mortgage, and mandatory spending can only go up. He collected $470,300, a 37% return. His wife gets dibs on the winnings; she is considering a bigger house. He may be the greatest risk-adjusted returner in the prediction market space.
Sam Altman called putting data centers in space "ridiculous," noting AI chips break frequently and it is unclear how you'd fix them in orbit. This is Altman's way of reminding Elon Musk that the SpaceX-xAI merger rationale has a few engineering challenges. We will apply the Musk Discount and say it is probably 10 years away instead of 5.
Speaking of OpenAI: they are making a lamp. Over 200 employees are working on AI devices including a smart speaker and smart glasses. One commenter noted: "One of the first signs at Google that the party wasn't going to last was when they made a lamp." Nothing says "we are building AGI" quite like pivoting to consumer electronics.
SpaceX is preparing to go public at a reported $1.75 trillion valuation -- the largest IPO in history by roughly 70x Alibaba. The company earned $8 billion in EBITDA on $16 billion of revenue. The FT says the cap table "looks like the Mos Eisley Cantina from Star Wars." Musk reportedly timed the IPO to coincide with the alignment of Jupiter, Venus, and Mercury, which is either brilliant symbolism or the most Elon thing that has ever happened.
About 40 data centers in Virginia simultaneously dropped off the power grid when a high-voltage line failed, consuming enough electricity to power over a million homes. Data centers could consume 17% of U.S. electricity by 2030, up from 4-5% today. We spend a lot of time worrying about whether AI will take our jobs. Perhaps we should also worry about whether it will take our electricity.
In California, 18% of all property transfers last year were through inheritance -- a record, roughly double the national rate. The median single-family home hit $900,000. Prop 13 plus capital-gains math means the optimal housing strategy in California is now "outlive your parents."
Retail investors are learning that "democratizing private credit" was oversold. Blue Owl is down 30% this year; Blackstone is allowing record 7.9% redemptions from its flagship credit fund. Jamie Dimon's cockroach analogy from last fall -- "When you see one, there's probably more" -- is aging like fine wine. Democracy in private credit, it turns out, was overrated.
New business applications hit 532,319 in January, up 37% YoY. Many entrepreneurs are using AI tools like Lovable to build apps for $400 that would have cost five figures two years ago. Meanwhile, a former McKinsey consultant opened a bougie pickleball club in Brooklyn with vending machines stocked with caviar. We contain multitudes.
Without credit card rewards, America's airlines would not be profitable. Excluding flights, drinks, and upgrades paid for by points, every major carrier is running at a loss. The airline industry is, at this point, a loyalty-program operator that happens to own some planes.
Society and Culture
Bloomberg reports Gen Alpha kids are pushing back against screens -- and their millennial parents are cheering them on. One tech reporter bought his 10-year-old a $60 flip phone; she mostly leaves it dead in her backpack. She asked for a woodworking set for Christmas. CD sales are surging. The kids have looked at what screens did to their parents and said, "No thanks."
Princeton researchers discovered a gene that may determine whether dads are good or bad -- at least in striped mice. Higher levels of Agouti correlated with hostile behavior toward pups; lower levels meant more nurturing. Give it six months before someone launches a DTC genetic test called "DadScore."
A software engineer accidentally gained control of 7,000 robot vacuums across 24 countries while trying to control his own with a video game controller -- accessing live camera feeds, microphones, and floor plans of strangers' homes. The robot uprising may begin not with malice, but with incompetence.
Pope Leo asked priests to stop using AI to write sermons. We appreciate the Vatican's commitment to artisanal, hand-crafted guilt.
Scientists are gaining a more intimate understanding of Neanderthal sex lives through DNA analysis. Men with a lot of Neanderthal ancestry and women with a lot of modern human ancestry had a "strikingly strong" preference for each other. We will leave the implications to evolutionary biology and your dating app preferences.
The Chicago Bears are threatening to move to Indiana after Hammond unanimously approved a stadium amendment 24-0 -- just 24 hours after a three-hour negotiation with Governor Pritzker. Same playbook the Chiefs used with Kansas: create an interstate bidding war for public funding. The real losers here are taxpayers, as usual.
China is now building 26-story hog farms in Hubei province -- literal pig skyscrapers housing hundreds of thousands of pigs -- and exporting the model to Vietnam. We always say we appreciate a good vertical integration strategy, but this is taking it literally.
China's appetite for donkey meat is destroying herds in Brazil and Africa. China's herd has crashed 85% since the mid-1990s; Brazil's donkey slaughter has increased 8,000%. Merchants are passing off chemically treated horse meat as donkey. If we can securitize subprime mortgages, we can certainly find a way to structure a donkey CDO.
The English Premier League is launching its own streaming service for international markets, cutting out traditional broadcasters. Another industry learns that the middleman is increasingly optional -- the same dynamic playing out across media, finance, and legal.
Mississippi is moving to make NIL money tax-exempt for college athletes. The arms race in college sports has now reached the tax code. We give it two years before an 18-year-old quarterback has a more complex tax structure than a mid-market PE fund.
Lou Holtz, the legendary Notre Dame coach, died at 89. He once suspended his leading rusher and receiver the night before playing No. 2 USC because they were 40 minutes late to a team meal. They won 27-10. His greatest quote: "When all is said and done, more is said than done." We would put that on a plaque in every boardroom in America. Rest easy, Coach.
The FT published a deeply reported piece on chatbot-induced delusions. One man spent months talking to ChatGPT, which told him he was a "tuning fork" sent to "sync up" with every person in the world. What brought him back? OpenAI changed the model. As he put it: "They are coherence generators, not truth generators." That sentence should be printed on a card and handed to every new ChatGPT user.
Taylor Swift filmed a music video in a dying London shopping mall, and Swifties are now making pilgrimages to Croydon. The Whitgift Centre has 70 vacant units and a leaking roof, but five-star Google reviews are flooding in. The ultimate value creation playbook: buy distressed real estate, get Taylor Swift to film a music video there.
One Final Thing
In our last issue, we asked: "When you are on your deathbed, do you want to be remembered for your beliefs, your actions, or your relationships?" 55% chose relationships, 30% actions, and 15% beliefs. Relationships win -- though we suspect your actions built them.
This issue, at least half the stories above revolved around the same tension: Dorsey cutting 40% of Block, the Citrini "2028 collapse" thought experiment, and MIT estimating that 11.7% of U.S. jobs could be displaced by AI. The optimists say new jobs will replace old ones. The pessimists say this time is different. We figured we would ask:
"By 2030, do you think AI will have caused a meaningful U.S. recession?"
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