Civitas Snippets - June 28, 2026
Issue 58
Dear friends of Civitas Growth Partners,
So, we wanted to start this edition with a moment to celebrate our flawed, yet incredible republic and its quarter of a millennium birthday. At CGP, we have been discussing how the reaction of visitors to the World Cup has served as a surprising reminder of all the things (big and small) that make America great (our scale, our diversity of people and landscape, our hospitality – and most importantly, our ranch dressing). Our country be as old as the average pub in Oxford, but this re-centering has been refreshing – and encouraging. Yes, it is okay to be patriotic about the idea of America (even if our execution often falls well short of these lofty ideals). Here's the next 250 years, which hopefully can reflect this quote from French philosopher, historian and diplomat Alexis de Tocqueville:
"The greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults."
With that, let's get to it…
Politics and Current Events
The Atlantic surveys the steel gladiator dome erected on the White House lawn for UFC Freedom 250 and finds it insufficiently committed to the bit: no gladiator school, no arena pardons, none of the public health Rome bundled with its blood sport. When the complaint about your imperial cosplay is that you didn't go far enough, you've arrived somewhere genuinely new.
The Wall Street Journal reports Xi Jinping's enforcers are now hunting officials who consult mystics and borrow too freely, folding superstition and personal debt into the test for party loyalty. A regime worried its cadres are calling fortune-tellers has a confidence problem money cannot fix.
Axios marks America's 250th with a steep slide in national pride, retreating across patriotism, religion, and shared identity – and cutting across party, most sharply among the young. A country can compound GDP indefinitely and still struggle if each cohort believes a little less in the joint venture.
The Wall Street Journal documents the fermented-foods craze sweeping the cabinet, with Trump, Vance, Lutnick, and RFK Jr. all on the sauerkraut. Every era gets the wellness fad its leaders deserve.
Axios Pro Rata reports Bernie Sanders wants Washington to take 50% equity stakes in the largest AI companies, funded in shares, on the theory that taxpayers underwrote the research and should own the upside. Once Washington normalized golden shares as a policy tool, the maximalist version was only a matter of time; AI is creating interesting bedfellows with the progressive crowd on the left and the MAGA labor constituents on the right.
The Wall Street Journal tracked the president's whipsawing Iran rhetoric from imminent victory to studied ambiguity, while Forbes reports the Senate voted to bar further action without its sign-off. One story, really: a war whose justification shifts faster than the legislature can respond, and a legislature reaching belatedly for the one lever the Constitution actually handed it.
The Wall Street Journal anatomizes the breakup of Britain's two-party system as Reform, the Greens, and a fractured center splinter a century-old duopoly. Stable two-party equilibria are a feature of a particular media era, not a law of nature – and the American read-across writes itself.
Forbes reports the Senate passed a bill restricting institutional investors from buying single-family homes, a rare bipartisan swing at Wall Street landlords. Banning the buyer is simpler than fixing the supply – big funds own a low-single-digit slice of the market – and far more popular.
The Wall Street Journal reports Mamdani-aligned socialists swept New York's primaries, with Brad Lander unseating Rep. Dan Goldman. The organizational lesson is real: a disciplined faction with a clear ask beats a diffuse establishment every time, and New York is once again the test kitchen for the Democratic coalition.
Axios frames the next phase as a global AI arms race among the U.S., China, and the Gulf, with capital and compute as the new theaters. AI has graduated from product category to instrument of statecraft, and once governments treat model weights like enriched uranium, the regime that follows is a national-security one, not a consumer-protection one.
Economy, Markets, and Business
Bloomberg reports Ice Cube's Big3 three-on-three league is going public via SPAC at a $290 million valuation, with Fortress and Founders Fund on the cap table and Clyde Drexler as commissioner. A SPAC, in 2026, for a niche basketball league – the vehicle everyone declared dead keeps finding second acts. We admire the hustle and would read the redemption assumptions very carefully.
Elon Musk had a banner fortnight (although some of these figures have become stale with the recent SpaceX sell-off): an X post noted a single 20% SpaceX pop made him more in a day than Warren Buffett earned in a career, and ZeroHedge put his net worth at roughly 40% of all U.S. currency in circulation. James Lavish's The Informationist asks if he's the richest man in history and concludes the paper answer is yes – though against Rockefeller's $1 billion in real terms (relative to GDP and inflation), the margin is more like 50% larger, not 1,000x. Separately, Bloomberg reports SpaceX bankers are prepping a bond sale of at least $20 billion: the same name that is mostly paper wealth on the equity side can, it turns out, conjure very real cash on the credit side.
The Financial Times tells the story of a KKR buyout the AI boom turned into one of the most lucrative in history, an unglamorous pre-AI bet that caught the compute updraft. Better to be lucky than good – although how many PE guys would ever attribute success to luck vs. instinct and knowledge?
Forbes profiles a Chicago accountant who quietly built a billion-dollar fortune buying humdrum, cash-generative businesses that never make a pitch deck. This is our entire worldview rendered as a personal-net-worth story – "boring" compounds precisely because nobody is bidding against you for it. Congrats to Larry Gies and the compounding of his humble, midwestern roots.
Axios reports a rate spike has spooked homebuilders, with permits and starts sliding in May, while Axios separately breaks down why owning a home now costs so much more – mortgage rates, insurance, taxes, and maintenance stacked on a price that already doubled. It is the affordability problem writing itself in real time: the cure for high prices is more building, and high rates are precisely what stop it. Housing has become the clearest expression of the K-shaped economy – an asset for those who got in, a tollbooth for everyone else.
The Financial Times reports OpenAI burned through $34 billion last year on its march toward an IPO, and Scott Galloway's Prof G Markets walks the leaked financials line by line. The numbers describe a company spending like a sovereign and monetizing like a startup – the purest version of the wager the entire sector is making, just with the largest denominator.
Axios Pro Rata argues the K-shaped economy is reshaping dealmaking itself, pushing capital up-market toward luxury, wealth management, and premium everything – while Axios documents the stock rally making the rich richer and largely skipping everyone else, since the top decile owns most equities. It is rational at the level of any single fund and a little ominous in aggregate: a market that only knows how to serve the winners eventually runs short of customers, and a boom that never reaches the checkout counter is a strange kind of boom.
The Wall Street Journal examines how the yuan is becoming the currency of choice for sanctions evasion, greasing the trade the dollar system is designed to block, Iran included. Every sanction is also an advertisement for an alternative, and each workaround that proves durable is a small withdrawal from a very large reserve of trust.
The Economist explains why the big AI labs are suddenly hiring philosophers, as alignment and agency stop being abstract. There is something poetic about the most quantitative companies on earth discovering they need ethicists the moment the machines start making consequential choices – though "we employ philosophers" also makes excellent regulatory cover.
Bloomberg reports Blackstone defaulted on a $343 million loan tied to a Chicago skyscraper, the latest data point in a CRE reckoning that refuses to resolve quickly. We have been waiting a while for the office building apocalypse to hit – and wondered how long the lenders and owners could keep this out of the news.
Axios Closer clocks a meme-stock revival, this time in Wendy's, as retail traders hunt the next short squeeze in a fast-food chain of all things. The meme trade never died; it just rotates tickers and waits for the next quiet summer.
Fortune's Term Sheet notes the venture seesaw has tipped hard: mega-funds now grab 72% of all capital raised, starving the smaller managers who do the early, unglamorous work. Capital concentration in our own industry mirrors the markets it chases – the barbell gets more barbell-shaped every year, and the middle keeps quietly disappearing.
Bloomberg reports Micron soared after an AI-fueled forecast blew past estimates, with memory demand described as effectively insatiable. Memory was the commodity backwater of chips for a decade – and commodity cycles are undefeated against the word "insatiable."
Bloomberg reports Google is poised to lose two more senior AI researchers to Anthropic, while The Information reports enterprise customers are already trimming their Anthropic and OpenAI bills by routing to cheaper models and caching tokens. Talent flows toward focus and equity upside; pricing power at the top is real but rarely permanent. When the company that invented the transformer keeps exporting its best minds – and the frontier labs watch customers optimize their way down to the cheapest thing that works – the org chart and the invoice are both telling you something the earnings call will not.
The Financial Times lays out China's bet on robots to offset its demographic collapse, automating the factory floor faster than its workforce shrinks. Whether a society can robot its way out of a baby bust is the great experiment of the century, and China has volunteered to run it first.
Society and Culture
Baillie Gifford's investment team argues AI is coming not for your job but your mind, calling it "the next great rewiring" of the brain on the scale literacy once was. The people who thrive will be those who can still think without the tool – a fund manager quoting neuroscience is unusual, but the point stands.
Bloomberg reports a trader lost a million dollars when Cabo Verde pulled off a shock World Cup tie, the kind of tail event prediction markets exist to punish. Size your position for the outcome you did not model, because the minnow occasionally holds the giant to a draw.
A Polymarket post flags a startling stat: Americans now spend twice as much time on AI companion apps as on dating apps. An always-available, infinitely agreeable synthetic companion out-competes the friction of actual people – and the long-term social bill for this is large and not yet itemized.
The World Cup has introduced European visitors to American excess, and the results are joyful: Yahoo reports fans losing their minds over Taco Bell, ranch dressing, and the bottomless refill. Taco Bell even rolled out an "emotional support taco" program for fans of eliminated teams – the unlimited soda machine may do more for American soft power than a decade of diplomacy.
The Wall Street Journal revisits the time a single stray line of code nearly erased a classic Pixar film, saved only because an employee kept a copy at home. Decades of beloved animation, very nearly undone by one command and a missing backup policy.
The Athletic answers a question you didn't know you had: why World Cup players are cutting holes in their socks (circulation and calf-pressure relief). We appreciate any story where the highest-paid performers in a sport solve a problem with scissors.
The Conversation diagnoses the "drawer problem" – why we hoard dead phones and old cables instead of recycling them. A tidy behavioral lesson: we systematically overvalue what we already own, even when what we own is a drawer of obsolete chargers.
BestColleges offers a brief history of the SAT, from its uncomfortable origins to its identity crisis as schools go test-optional and then quietly reverse. The test keeps dying and keeps coming back, which tells you it solves a problem nobody likes admitting they have.
Popular Science explores why humans appear to be the only species that sleepwalks, a quirk of how our outsized brains manage the boundary between deep sleep and waking. Evolution, as ever, ships features and bugs in the same release.
Mental Floss ranks the most and least stressful airports in America, and the results will surprise no one who has connected through a major hub in summer. Stress, it turns out, is just demand meeting a fixed runway (also known as any day at O'Hare).
The Wall Street Journal profiles the Harvard-educated data nerd now defending the U.S. goal at the World Cup, a keeper who studies angles the way a quant studies order flow. The edge increasingly belongs to whoever models the game best, even between the posts.
Axios reports the American South is dodging the youth implosion hollowing out other regions, as families and young workers migrate toward cheaper housing and warmer politics. Capital follows the cradles – the Sun Belt's quiet accumulation of young people is the single most important map for anyone deciding where to build for the next thirty years.
One Final Thing
In our last survey, we asked readers to call the World Cup winner. Argentina and France tied at the top with 25% each — a coin-flip consensus — while Portugal, Spain, and the Rest of Field split the remaining 50% evenly at 17% apiece. The field appreciated the neutrality.
This week the World Cup has the whole country in a soccer fever. The USMNT is making noise, Taco Bell is launching "emotional support tacos," and European fans are discovering unlimited refills for the first time. So we want to know: the tournament has turned the U.S. into a temporary soccer nation, but will it stick?
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