Civitas Snippets - May 3, 2026
Issue 54
Dear friends of Civitas Growth Partners,
Lots to cover in this addition – Big Tech's Big Spending (roughly $700 billion this year, to be precise), record marathon times (not one, but two people breaking a 2-hour marathon) and the restructuring of the world order (UAE leaving OPEC). But before we revisit the merits of "pregaming at home" to avoid $13.61 cocktails, we wanted to take a moment to acknowledge the beautiful, the miraculous and the wonderful. The Civitas family grew between Issue 53 and 54 – and we want to start this edition by celebrating the birth of Churchill Carson Lagarde. Despite all of the chaos, noise and despair, there is hope and joy in the world (sometimes we are forced to squint to see it – other times it is glaringly obvious; this falls firmly in the latter camp).
No pithy quotes, no erudite quips…just a simple acknowledgement of gratitude and joy.
With that, let's get to it…
Politics and Current Events
The WSJ reports the DOJ has opened a criminal antitrust probe into the four meatpackers that control 85% of US processing - Tyson, Cargill, JBS, and National Beef - after Trump publicly called for an investigation into "illicit collusion, price fixing, and price manipulation." US beef prices are at record highs on drought, Brazilian tariffs, and the smallest cattle herd in decades. Schumer wants forced separation of beef, pork, and poultry. The thing about a four-firm oligopoly is that no one has to actually collude.
US Customs and Border Patrol at O'Hare intercepted two prohibited cargo finds in back-to-back inspections: a dead monkey carcass in luggage from Cameroon (X-rayed, seized, destroyed for human-health reasons), and 125 pounds of African beef hidden inside eight boxes of dried seafood from Liberia. The traveler also brought a pound of fresh leaves and four kinds of seeds. We respect the ambition of trying to launder a quarter of a beef carcass through TSA.
The WSJ reports federal prosecutors charged Army master sergeant Gannon Ken Van Dyke, who participated in the operation that captured Nicolas Maduro, with using classified information to net more than $400,000 on Polymarket bets that Maduro would lose power by end of January. The first prediction-market insider-trading indictment in US military history is also a sharp signal that the line between operational security and a casino with a Discord channel is now permanently blurred.
DOJ tweeted an indictment alleging the Southern Poverty Law Center "secretly funneled MORE THAN $3 MILLION in funds to members of white supremacist and extremist groups." Marc Andreessen called it "astonishing, and deeply concerning" given the SPLC's role as one of the most powerful private-sector censorship forces of the last two decades. The full indictment has not yet hit the docket. If the allegations hold, the entire architecture of corporate hate-speech compliance built on top of SPLC designations will need an audit (as Rahm Emanuel would say, never let a good crisis go to waste; or better yet, seed virtue signaling in order to seed the coffers).
The FT reports HHS Secretary RFK Jr.'s son Finn Kennedy is launching Victura Ventures, a $100M fund targeting healthcare AI and consumer health, with roughly $70M already committed. The fund leans openly on the MAHA brand. Legal experts say no conflict-of-interest line is crossed unless RFK Jr. is sharing nonpublic information. Finn, 28, is a former 8VC investor; the fund is named for a JFK sailboat. This joins a growing roster of administration-adjacent funds (Trump Jr., Lutnick's son, 1789 Capital) where the policy alpha runs through last names. Nepotism is alive and well in America.
Musk's lawsuit against Sam Altman opened in Oakland this week with a 9-person jury and a paywall around most of the action. The nominal question is whether OpenAI's pivot from nonprofit to for-profit constituted a theft of charitable assets. The actual question is whether either side surfaces enough damaging discovery to land. Per Axios, Altman has more at stake than Musk, who has already pre-priced his warts into the SpaceX-plus-xAI mega IPO. The original sin of the AI era is finally getting cross-examined.
Axios charts the GOP's gas pump problem: pump prices, driven up by the US-Iran war and the naval blockade, are eroding the administration's economic credibility ahead of the 2026 midterms. Consumer pain at the pump has historically been one of the cleanest predictors of party turnover going back to Carter. The interesting wrinkle: the same blockade is generating the energy-supply crisis that the administration is using to justify the policy. The political math is brutal.
NBC reports California's DMV will start issuing "notices of noncompliance" to autonomous vehicle companies on July 1 after AB 1777 closed the loophole that let driverless cars escape traffic citations because the law contemplated only human "drivers." Repeat violations can suspend or revoke permits. Waymo, with about 1,000 cars in the Bay Area, is most exposed and is already objecting on grounds that public disclosure of notices invites foreign-entity misuse. The autonomous mile is finally getting a per-mile cost line.
The WSJ leads with the UAE quitting OPEC after 60 years, departure date May 1. The third-largest OPEC producer (4.8 million barrels/day with room to grow) is exiting in the middle of the biggest oil supply crisis in history, with Brent at $111 and intraday prints as high as $119.50. The US and UAE are reportedly discussing a currency-swap lifeline. Trump, who has long called OPEC a rip-off, scores a structural win. The bigger story: a structurally weaker OPEC, and a Saudi-UAE relationship that just lost its diplomatic floor.
The NYT reports AI chatbots provided researchers detailed instructions for building biological weapons, the latest data point in a quiet biosecurity crisis the labs are losing. Most frontier models have content filters; the filters fail under sustained pressure from a sufficiently determined research team. Federal AI policy still has roughly zero binding requirements on bio-safety testing or model release. The gap between what these systems can do and what we have decided to do about it is now wide enough to drive a truck through.
Economy, Markets, and Business
The 2026 Stanford AI Index, summarized in MIT Technology Review's charts, captures the year in three lines: Anthropic now leads the global model rankings, AI data centers are pulling 29.6 gigawatts (enough to power New York at peak), and software-developer employment for ages 22-25 has fallen 20% since 2022. SWE-bench scores (measurement of autonomous software's engineering capabilities) went from 60% to nearly 100% in eighteen months. 73% of AI experts say AI will positively impact jobs; 23% of the public agrees. The expert-public belief gap is its own coming political (and likely, societal) crisis.
Per The Information, Polymarket is in talks to raise $400 million at a $15 billion valuation, on top of $600 million ICE invested earlier. The number is roughly two-thirds of rival Kalshi's $22 billion mark, which trades on a more mature US base and $1.5 billion of annualized revenue. Polymarket only just turned on its US platform and started charging fees. The duopoly is now a parallel exchange complex priced at $37 billion, before the SEC has decided what these venues actually are.
Daniel Wortel-London's chart on X tracks the rise of the "it's not just X, it's a Y" sentence structure in large US company filings. Usage was flat at ~15 instances a year through 2019, climbed to ~95 by 2024, then doubled again to ~200 in 2025. Wortel-London's caption: "It's not just new, it's newspeak." The structural redundancy is the point. Corporate language is now optimized for sounding profound while saying nothing, which is also a working description of the average earnings call (or trite corporate tropes).
The Information reports Amazon is expanding its Anthropic position to up to $25 billion, $5 billion already committed plus $20 billion tied to commercial milestones. The structure mirrors Google's: a small upfront commitment plus much larger milestone tranches that keep both sides paid in optionality. Anthropic's annualized revenue topped $30 billion this quarter. The combined Amazon-plus-Google commitment now sits at $65 billion, before any of the cloud capex it secures gets recognized as revenue. The capital is moving in a circle, but the revenue is real.
Axios reports Starbucks is committing $100M to a Nashville eastern HQ for ~2,000 jobs over five years. CEO Brian Niccol announced alongside Tennessee's Governor Lee at the Peabody Union development. Some Seattle technology workers are already resisting relocation (not surprising given how progressive Starbucks has been historically and how red the state of Tennessee is generally). Nashville offers cheaper real estate, a deepening tech-and-healthcare bench, and a regulatory environment that has made it the unofficial Sun Belt corporate capital – welcome to Music City.
James Lavish surfaces Hank Paulson's "break the glass" warning on Bloomberg: "We need an emergency break-the-glass plan, ready to go when we hit the wall." Numbers: $39 trillion federal debt, 6% deficits for three straight years, $1 trillion in annual interest now exceeding the defense budget. Same day, Treasury bought back $15 billion of its debt against $40 billion of bids - the second such operation in five weeks. When the man who wrote the 2008 playbook wants the fire extinguisher pre-positioned, listen.
The FT drops a Jane Street comparison list: the Manhattan firm did $39.6 billion in trading revenue and $31.2 billion in EBITDA last year, with 3,500 employees. Companies that made less than Jane Street's EBITDA include Visa, Coca-Cola, P&G, LVMH, Disney, Netflix, Volkswagen, and Caterpillar. Jane Street made more than Blackstone and BlackRock combined. The firm has no C-suite, runs on programming languages no one outside it has heard of, and pays in card games. Capitalism is fine; it has just stopped resembling anything in the textbook.
The FT reports investors are pricing Oracle-backed AI data center debt at over a full point above Oracle's own corporate bonds. The $14 billion deal funds a 1-gigawatt facility in Michigan, part of a $300 billion compute pact with OpenAI. Big Tech has borrowed over $100 billion in global bond markets this year for AI buildout. Oracle is a tenant, not an owner. Capital Group: "There is no quant model for us to calculate what is a good relative value." Raise your hand if you think it is scary when the buyside admits it cannot price the asset and there are hundreds of billions of dollars involved in that unpriceable asset.
The WSJ polled business historians on America's greatest entrepreneurs and the criteria are interesting: "ability to imagine the future" and "impact on American life" beat "wealth created for shareholders." The top 10: Ford, Rockefeller, Jobs, Carnegie, Gates, Edison, Walton, Bezos, Disney, Morgan. Three currently in the news cycle and one (Morgan) whose name still anchors the bank that funded most of them. The historians' frame is closer to the founders' own pitch decks than the LP pitches their successors run today.
James Lavish's Volcker profile is timed to Kevin Warsh's Senate Banking testimony as Trump's Fed Chair nominee. The structural argument: with debt-to-GDP at 125%, fiscal dominance, and political pressure, no modern Fed Chair can rerun the 1979 Saturday Night Special and the 20% rates that followed. Volcker took the country to 10.8% unemployment and never flinched; farmers sent tractors to the National Mall, car dealers sent toy coffins. The post-2008 economy cannot absorb that medicine. "Volcker 2.0" is rhetoric, not a policy option.
The Information reports Google plans to invest up to $40 billion in Anthropic - $10B at a $380B valuation, $30B more on milestones, plus a 5-gigawatt Google-and-Broadcom compute deal coming online in 2027. Google already had $3B+ in and a 14% stake. Anthropic's annualized revenue tops $30 billion; valuation has crossed $1 trillion in some private markets. Combined Amazon-and-Google commitments to Anthropic alone now total $65 billion. The strategic-investor capital stack is the new IPO market for the AI labs - and it skips Wall Street entirely.
Remember when a $1 trillion market cap was a big deal (time machine back to 2018)? Per Axios, Nvidia's market cap added roughly $1 trillion in four weeks, reaching ~$5 trillion and making it the world's most valuable company. The semiconductor industry is on track for its third consecutive year of double-digit growth, approaching a $1 trillion global revenue base. UBS HOLT, the cash-flow model that called the dot-com fade, currently says Nvidia should trade four times higher. Either it is right and we have all under-allocated, or this is the inflection. There does not appear to be a third option.
The SF Standard documents the trade of the year: investment banker Storm Duncan is offering his 13-acre Mill Valley compound (4 BR, infinity pool, putting green) in exchange for Anthropic shares. The pitch is for an over-concentrated young engineer to swap private illiquid AI equity for an actual house. Duncan paid $4.75M in 2019. Post-AI and post-dollar dominance, are we going "back to the future" with bartering? Real estate for Anthropic shares may be the next "beads and trinkets" for the island of Manhattan.
The WSJ reports OpenAI missed internal user and revenue targets heading into a planned IPO. CFO Sarah Friar has told colleagues she is worried OpenAI cannot fund future compute contracts if revenue does not accelerate, and has said the company is not ready for public-company reporting. Altman wants Q4; the 1B WAU goal slipped past year-end; Anthropic took share in coding and enterprise. OpenAI signed up for $600B in future spend and expects to burn its $122B raise in three years. The math is getting tight.
The Atlantic watches OpenAI imitate Anthropic in real time: Anthropic ships Mythos, OpenAI follows with GPT-5.4-Cyber; Anthropic ships Claude Code, OpenAI ships two Codex updates and a press blitz. CRO Denise Dresser's leaked memo: "their story is built on fear." A March memo called Anthropic's success a "wake-up call," telling staff to drop "side quests" and lock onto enterprise. Sora is dead, the ex-Slack CEO is in as CRO, McKinsey and BCG are in. The roles flipped, and OpenAI noticed.
Axios AM's VandeHei and Allen put six AI facts on the table: fastest-growing product category in world history; one model so powerful its maker won't release it; OpenAI and Anthropic say their top coding models now build themselves; transparency is going down as power goes up; AI resentment is rising (two attacks on Altman's home in one week); the great software rout already erased $2 trillion as the market digested which jobs disappear next. The federal government still requires zero AI transparency. "We have no clue where this ends."
Nikkei Asia reports Toto - the toilet maker - is now a meaningful semiconductor supplier, pivoting its precision ceramics expertise into electrostatic chucks and structural parts for LCD panel equipment. The chip components are now a core driver of earnings; the market has not fully repriced the transformation. If Allbirds can become an AI company, why not a toilet company?
Bloomberg reports Rogo Technologies has hit a $2B valuation automating financial models, research compilation, and first-draft decks for 250+ banks and PE firms. Rogo was founded in 2021 by junior bankers who had had enough. The category (Rogo, Arini, Hebbia) is reshaping the analyst pipeline that historically funded the industry's training model. The job that compounded human capital is being commoditized into SaaS. The next debate is who pays for the analyst class that no longer exists.
The WSJ warns the AI capex race is now in year three with no end in sight. Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and Alphabet collectively spent $410 billion last year, nearly triple the 2022 number. Investors now read capex lines as the lead indicator. Subsequent earnings (Google: $190B, Microsoft: $190B, Meta: $145B) confirm the WSJ was reading the trajectory correctly. The four hyperscalers are converging on a combined $725 billion run rate. The data center is, for now, the most expensive consumer good in human history.
Axios AM updates the Big Tech AI capex tally to ~$700 billion for full-year 2026 across Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta - third straight year of dramatic escalation, with Meta alone raising 2026 guidance to $125-145B from $115B. The capex line is now bigger than the entire annual Pentagon procurement budget. The interesting follow-up: at this pace, 2027 spending will exceed every single sovereign-wealth fund's annual deployment. The line between corporate balance sheet and macro policy is collapsing.
The FT details Google's blowout Q1: net income +81% to $62.6B, revenue +22% to $110B, Cloud +63%, $460B contract backlog, capex guidance raised to $190B with "significant" 2027 increases. Alphabet rose 7% AH toward a record $4.3T cap. Microsoft also $190B capex, Amazon $364B contract pipeline, Meta $145B (-6% on the print). Combined hyperscaler capex is 77% above last year's $410B. Nadella, on losing OpenAI exclusivity: "We now have a frontier model, royalty-free, with all the IP rights."
Bloomberg notes US Treasury yields hit their highest levels since March as oil surges past $111 on the Iran war and reignites inflation fears. The mechanism is now simple: the blockade pushes oil, oil pushes CPI expectations, CPI pushes long yields, long yields push the Treasury's per-operation buyback size higher. Paulson called for a break-the-glass plan against exactly this scenario. The bond market is doing the math the politicians do not want to do publicly. The price of leverage is showing up in the 10-year.
Society and Culture
The WSJ reports the average US cocktail now costs $13.61, and 37% of drinkers are pregaming at home to avoid venue prices. Diageo, Suntory, and 818 Tequila are leaning into 50mL airplane bottles; ALB Vodka nip sales tripled in Q1. Reddit has dedicated forums for smuggling tactics. A Massachusetts concert venue charged $20 for a tall White Claw. The American consumer is back-pocketing inflation literally. The next great innovation here will be pre-made drinks in plastic red cups.
The WSJ reports NJ Transit will charge $150 round-trip for World Cup matchday trains from Manhattan to MetLife - 10x the normal $13 fare. FIFA is also charging $6,050 for "pitchside lounge" entry to the US-Paraguay opener; the Visa/Costco two-match package runs $39,100. Boston offers an $80 train or $95 bus. Peter Moore, ex-Liverpool CEO: "If the average fan can't afford to be in the stadium, then who is this World Cup for?" The answer is on the $150 train.
The NYT Athletic reports the World Cup tourism boom hasn't materialized with two months to go. Hotel prices in the 16 host cities fell 40%-plus from December peaks. FIFA booked rooms then exercised cancellation options, creating "artificial early demand." Visa policies and "America First" rhetoric chilled international travel; US visitors fell 5.5% vs 2024. Atlanta hotel prices fell from $968 to $390. The most reliable forecasting error of the decade: assuming a marquee event automatically prints incremental tourism dollars. Here's a helpful hint for FIFA - perhaps look at pricing?
The WSJ tracks the super-shoe arms race down to 3.4 ounces (Adidas Adizero Adios Pro Evo 3), lighter than a newborn kitten. Adidas's GM: "When you give them the box, they think it's a joke. They think the box is empty." Studies say 3.5 fewer ounces saves a marathoner ~57 seconds. Asics's Metaspeed Ray weighs 4.55 oz; On Running uses a robotic arm to spray a sock-like upper. Forget AI and data centers, the greatest engineering arms race of 2026 is for half a kitten's weight worn on our feet.
The World Airport Dining Awards 2026 put the Asian carriers on top: Singapore Changi, Seoul Incheon, Tokyo Haneda, New Chitose. Rome Fiumicino is the only European top-five. Heathrow at 8; the lone US entrant is Houston George Bush at 10. The geography of layover quality has been Asian for a decade. The American business traveler eating gummy chicken at JFK and the engineer eating Hainanese rice in Changi are not in the same century, much less the same airline.
The WSJ reports trade school debt is now a thing. Demand has surged on social-media #nodebtneeded videos pushing plumbing and electrical work, but trade-school costs have risen alongside. Some graduates carry meaningful tuition debt without the union sponsorship that historically subsidized the apprenticeship path. The blue-collar pivot is the most interesting demographic story of the decade, but the financing model is repeating the same mistakes the four-year colleges already taught us. The Department of Education is about to be in the trades.
Nature published Ace, the first real-world table tennis AI agent competitive with human elites. Ace beat 10+ year veteran players in 3 of 5 matches using 9 cameras locating the ball at 200 Hz, gaze systems measuring spin at 400-700 Hz, and a deep RL policy mapping state to action every 32ms. Balls travel up to 20 m/s with 1,000 rad/s spin. Prior RL had matched human pros only in simulation. The first physical AI agent to beat trained humans in real time plays ping-pong. Up next – Ace vs. Forrest Gump.
Bloomberg reports Asia's billionaires are bankrolling cash incentives to boost birth rates across the region as the demographic crisis hits. The new species: privately funded pronatalism, running parallel to government programs that are not working. The implicit acknowledgment is that public policy alone has failed; the gap is now being closed (or attempted) by the same families whose accumulated capital depends on tomorrow's labor force. South Korea's fertility rate is 0.7. Whatever the strategy is, it has already failed twice.
The WSJ reports Americans are speaking 28% fewer words per day than a decade ago. Drivers: app-based ordering, texting in place of calls, remote work, and social-media scroll time. Researchers identify downstream effects including loneliness, reduced empathy, and weakened language skills, particularly among younger cohorts. The most chilling line: "When was the last time you engaged in friendly banter with your barista?" The retreat from spoken language is the kind of social capital depreciation that does not show up in productivity statistics.
AP reports Kenyan Sabastian Sawe broke two hours in a competitive marathon at London, finishing 1:59:30 and obliterating Kelvin Kiptum's prior 2:00:35 world record. Yomif Kejelcha and Jacob Kiplimo also broke the old mark. Sawe's second half: just over 59 minutes. Between km 35-40 he ran 13:42, two seconds faster than the 5km parkrun world record. He grew up in a Kenyan village in a mud-walled house with no electricity. Roughly a 4 minute 30 second mile for 26.2 miles is truly remarkable – and raises the question about how much faster/stronger/better humans can be over time.
Same day Sawe went sub-2, Boudewijn Dominicus set the Guinness world record for fastest marathon in a suit and dress shoes at the London Marathon: 3:21:42. The men's elite record fell, the men's elite record in a three-piece also fell, and someone's tailor in the Netherlands had a remarkable Sunday. We are running out of records that humans have not optimized in adverse conditions. Next: marathon in flip-flops while juggling while doing the Macarena. The Civitas team is hard at work training for this one.
Bloomberg reports healthy workers are starting to leave employer health plans, opting into Health Sharing Ministries or catastrophic-only coverage and saving up to $1,000/month. Mercer projects 2026 employer plan costs will rise 6.5%, the steepest in a decade. The adverse-selection feedback is now visible: healthy exits worsen the risk pool, premiums rise, more healthy workers exit. Employer-sponsored coverage covers 160 million Americans. The category that funded most of the post-WWII benefits architecture is structurally cracking.
The WSJ documents Silicon Valley's brightest parents breaking their own school - a high-achieving cohort of tech parents created their own alternative school, then drove it into the ground. The same engineers who optimize their codebases, kitchens, sleep schedules, and email cannot, it turns out, optimize an elementary school. Education turns out to be hard in ways that A/B testing does not solve. The PE lesson: stick to your circle of competence.
One Final Thing
In our last issue, we asked whether SpaceX's stock would trade higher or lower than the IPO price by year-end 2026 (assuming the IPO happens). 57% of you said lower, 43% said higher — readers aren't buying the multiple.
The dominant story of this issue is the AI capex frenzy. Big Tech's combined 2026 spend is now tracking toward $700 billion, third year in a row of dramatic escalation. Google's contract backlog is $460B. Amazon's pipeline is $364B. Microsoft and Meta are at $190B and $145B in capex, respectively. Combined hyperscaler capex this year is 77% above last year's $410B record. Anthropic and OpenAI between them have soaked up over $200B in strategic-investor commitments without touching the IPO market. None of this is priced for a soft landing.
Our question for this issue is the obvious one. By year-end 2027, will Big Tech's combined AI capex (Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta) be (a) higher than 2026's roughly $700B, (b) approximately flat, or (c) lower? The market is currently priced for "higher, by a lot." The buyside in the Oracle data-center bond deal is openly admitting it cannot price the asset. Pick a side.
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