Civitas Snippets - May 31, 2026
Issue 56
Dear friends of Civitas Growth Partners,
This issue arrives in a week where the Pope wrote a 43,000-word encyclical warning humanity to slow down AI, an OpenAI reasoning model autonomously disproved an 80-year-old Erdős conjecture, SpaceX filed an S-1 asking for a $1.75 trillion valuation, and Anthropic agreed to pay SpaceX $1.25 billion per month for compute through 2029. Korean stocks are up 100% year-to-date on the memory chip supercycle, the 30-year Treasury closed at 5.06%, and Iran has launched a Bitcoin-backed shipping insurance product.
When the headlines move this fast, it helps to ask what actually stays put. Markets will reprice. Models will improve. Geopolitical arrangements will be redrawn. And yet none of it touches what most of us already know to be the real stuff of a human life: the people sitting across from us at dinner, the friends we call without an agenda, the communities that hold us in place while everything else shifts. Institutions - economic, political, technological - are only as meaningful as their effect on those scenes.
C.S. Lewis put it more plainly than we ever could:
"To be happy at home... is the end of all human endeavour. As long as we are thinking only of natural values we must say that the sun looks down on nothing half so good as a household laughing together over a meal, or two friends talking over a pint of beer, or a man alone reading a book that interests him; and that all economics, politics, laws, armies, and institutions, save in so far as they prolong and multiply such scenes, are a mere ploughing the sand and sowing the ocean, a meaningless vanity and vexation of spirit."
With that, let's get to it…
Politics and Current Events
The Kobeissi Letter reports Iran has launched "Hormuz Safe", a Bitcoin-backed shipping insurance service for Strait of Hormuz transit projected at $10B+ in revenue. Sanctioned out of the dollar system and at war with a US-backed coalition, Iran has built a sovereign reinsurance line on a permissionless ledger - does this make their leadership officially bitcoin bros?
The WSJ reports how Zyn took over Trump World: RFK Jr. endorsed pouches as "probably the safest way to consume nicotine," the FDA eased authorization rules after a tobacco-exec lunch, and the product went from 4% to 44% of the oral-nicotine market in five years. Make America Healthy Again, like many things in the Trump administration, makes its own rules.
The FT reports the DOJ has granted Trump and his sons "forever" immunity from IRS audits the day after standing up a $1.8 billion "anti-weaponization" fund - a combination the former Biden-era IRS commissioner called unprecedented. Thom Tillis called it "stupid on stilts."
Axios reports Trump disclosed more than 3,500 stock trades in Q1, including $1M+ buys of Nvidia, Oracle, Microsoft, and Boeing. In the pursuit of alpha, are you taking the Trump or Pelosi tracker?
The NYT reports Tennessee called off the execution of Tony Carruthers after staff could not find a suitable vein - the latest botched attempt as lethal-injection drug supplies have collapsed nationwide. The system is making the case against itself faster than any abolitionist could.
Axios reports the Trump administration is taking equity stakes in nine quantum computing companies tied to $2 billion in CHIPS Act grants. Taxpayers, how do you feel about being on the cap table of a category where revenue largely does not yet exist?
Bill Gurley pointed out California almonds use 4-7x more water than every North American data center combined. "Almonds should cost $100 a package," he added - while AOC shared video of discolored Georgia tap water near a Meta data-center site, prompting one observer to ask whether she thought "the data centers are fracking." The AI infrastructure water war has two fronts, and both sides have a point.
Axios covers Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical, "Magnifica Humanitas" - 43,000 words urging governments to regulate AI and repudiating autonomous lethal weapons, with Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah in attendance. The Industrial Revolution got Rerum Novarum in 1891; the AI Revolution got its reply 135 years later.
Yahoo Sports covers the Cantwell-Cruz bipartisan college sports reform bill - NCAA antitrust protection, a $21.3M-per-school cap, 5% agent fee limits, and the "Lane Kiffin Rule." The SEC and Big Ten will now negotiate their cap the way a Bermuda reinsurer negotiates surplus capacity.
Economy, Markets, and Business
The WSJ reports Kentucky is sitting on 16.1 million barrels of bourbon - roughly 10 years of supply - as Jim Beam idles its main still through 2027, with used-barrel prices falling from $200 to $50. So much for a recession-proof asset class...
Axios Pro Rata reports Democrats introduced the "Let Kids Play Act", banning PE from youth sports and forcing existing holdings to divest within two years. Vertical-integration playbooks read fine on a deck and miserably on a soccer-mom Facebook group.
Andrej Karpathy announced he has joined Anthropic, calling the next few years "especially formative." The single most-followed AI educator is now inside the lab that just got blessed by the Pope.
AP News reports NextEra agreed to buy Dominion for $67 billion, creating a $249 billion utility with 30+ data-center hubs planned along the Virginia data-center belt. The regulated monopoly is once again, after a 40-year detour, the most coveted asset on Wall Street.
Unusual Whales points out per Gallup that 89% of corporate leaders say AI has not improved labor productivity, while Fast Company reports 85% of workers can't connect AI training to their job. Somewhere out there an enterprising McKinsey consultant is building a deck with words like “change management”, “value creation”, and “synergies”.
Bloomberg reports the Cleveland Browns sold 10% to Arctos Partners at a $9B valuation as Arctos accumulates pieces of 30+ pro sports teams. The asset class everyone wanted ten years ago is now the asset class everyone has.
Bloomberg reports WashU's ~$50M SpaceX bet is now more than 10% of its $17B endowment - a 3,000%+ return ahead of the IPO. Adios David Swensen, hello Scott Wilson. Vive concentration!
@americapartyx reports Anthropic will pay SpaceX $1.25 billion per month for compute through May 2029 - roughly $45 billion for access to Colossus. Interesting times when the largest AI safety lab is funding the compute buildout of a chief rival's company...
Axios reports Nvidia raised its dividend 25x and authorized $80B in buybacks against Q1 data-center revenue of $60.4B. Nvidia is starting to behave more like Apple in 2016 than Apple in 2010.
Bloomberg reports Jamie Dimon expects JPMorgan to hire more AI specialists and fewer bankers - the kind of statement that ages either very well or very badly.
Bloomberg reports Larry Fink expects a futures market for computing power, calling it "a new asset class" - BlackRock's GIP just paid $40B for Aligned Data Centers and $10.7B for AES to back the claim. Whoever wins the standardization war owns the next CME.
OpenAI announced its general-purpose reasoning model disproved the 80-year-old Erdős planar unit-distance conjecture, verified by external mathematicians and called "a milestone" by Tim Gowers.
Bloomberg reports Kroger is planning its biggest price cuts in years with 70-80 new stores ahead — the Walmart-style cost-out playbook that consumer-staples sponsors hoped Kroger would not run. EBITDA compression at the channel leader cascades to every supplier deck.
And as for the SpaceX IPO: Mostly Metrics breaks down the SpaceX S-1: $18.7B revenue, a $1.5-1.75T target valuation, and Musk comp tied to a self-sustaining Mars colony. Starlink is the cash machine (63% EBITDA margins); xAI burns ~$1B per month; and the S-1 recasts xAI and Twitter as if they'd always been part of SpaceX, which is creative even by S-1 standards.
The WSJ documents the new generation of weird ETFs: UFO Disclosure, Midnight Bitcoin (BTC only when stocks are closed), palladium 2x daily, and a Tepper-tracking option overlay - average expense ratio 0.69%, 20x a plain index. The ETF wrapper is now what the SPAC was in 2021.
The FT Lex profiles Lincoln International's IPO - the PE advisory boutique trading up nearly 20% since debut while bigger peers stagnate, with a 50% pay ratio vs. 60%+ at peers. Humility (the Midwestern way), evidently, can be a moat. Congrats to the folks at Lincoln - an incredible run over the last 25 years.
Max Salazar resurfaces a 2018 survey: 70% of operating partners think they add "significant value"; 20% of CEOs agree. The OP role is the fee-compression conversation no one has wanted to start.
Axios Macro warns the $145 trillion global bond market is flashing red: US 30-year at 5.06%, Japan 30-year at an all-time high, UK longs at 5.85%. The bond vigilantes have come back to work; hate to say we told you so.
Business Insider reports ground beef hit a record $6.90/lb as the US cattle herd sits near a 70-year low while MAHA red-meat enthusiasm collides with GLP-1 protein preferences. This supply curve doesn't solve this decade.
Bloomberg reports the KOSPI is up 100% YTD, outpacing even the Nasdaq's 1999 surge on AI memory demand - while Axios notes the rally is built on record margin loans, with middle-aged Koreans borrowing retirement savings to chase chipmakers in a country where older-adult poverty is already 40%. "This time is different" remains the most expensive phrase in capital markets.
TechCrunch reports Robinhood is enabling agentic stock trading via MCP server, removing the last layer of human deliberation from an already-gamified brokerage. We will be watching the first agent-induced flash crash.
Society and Culture
Axios charts college-educated fathers spending more time on child care and less on paid work, with the shift accelerating post-pandemic. The household production function has quietly changed; the public policy response has not caught up.
Prof G Markets documents the $200-date / free-AI-girlfriend opt-out: only 31% of young adults date regularly, the average date costs $189, and high-school senior dating has fallen from 90% to 46% since the 1980s. The demographic implications run for thirty years.
Scientific American reports the Surgeon General's screen-time advisory urging family media plans and calling out everything from chatbots to social media. Advisories are not policy, but phone-free school is now a bipartisan winner.
The WSJ reports men over 40 are training their glutes for longevity, with Equinox's "Best Butt Ever" class up 17% in male bookings. The CGP team can’t claim to have participated in this trend… yet.
@bryanrbeal points out that more Europeans die from summer heat than Americans die from guns - two statistics frequently cited in isolation, never as a comparison. Risk perception is profoundly culturally driven.
Eric Church delivered the 2026 UNC Chapel Hill commencement - two CGP team members independently recommended it, which is enough for us. The country singer is an unlikely choice for a graduation podium and delivered well above expectations. Worth twenty minutes on a Sunday.
Axios reports the pickleball court boom is slowing - 4% growth in 2026 vs. 13-14% prior years. Any sport whose business case rested on retired boomers and a three-year aesthetic moment was always going to mature; padel watches this with quiet satisfaction.
The Free Press publishes Sasse's daughter's essay on how her father raised her after his stage 4 pancreatic cancer diagnosis - her three-true-things framework arrived in our inboxes from multiple readers this week. Worth a read for any parent.
The Vatican has published the full text of "Magnifica Humanitas", invoking the Tower of Babel against transhumanism and naming "new forms of slavery" in AI labor on the 135th anniversary of Rerum Novarum. The Catholic Church's 1.4 billion-person mailing list now has an AI policy.
The WSJ reports the Midwestern exodus is finally ending, with the region gaining 16,000 people last year as median Cleveland homes at $237K draw boomerangers back from coasts. The South's job-magnet advantage has cooled; the Midwest's cost-of-living advantage has not.
The Guardian reports the Enhanced Games delivered one tarnished world record - a doped swimmer in a banned skinsuit at a cost of tens of millions. The actual play is the telehealth funnel, not the event. Maybe some “Best Butt Ever” classes on the horizon?
The Atlantic documents Stanford's "inside Stanford" where VCs hand 18-year-olds pre-idea funding, Sequoia scouts freshmen, and Sam Altman calls the dinner circuit "a big anti-signal." The next great fraud trial of this decade has a non-trivial probability of starting at a Coupa Café meeting.
Scientific American reports Anthropic is consulting religious thinkers on shaping Claude's constitution - Anthropic told them "the power is kind of outstripping their in-house wisdom." Whether this is genuine humility or ethics-washing, we will know inside a year.
One Final Thing
In our last issue, we asked whether the 10-year Treasury yield would still be above its current level by the end of 2026. The vote was a near-three-way split: 38% said the Fed cuts bring it back down, 31% said it would be close (within 10bps either way), and 31% said yes, rates stay elevated. The honest takeaway is that this readership has unusually balanced priors on long rates, which is more than we can say for either the bond desk or the rate-cut consensus on cable news.
Our question for this issue: 89% of corporate leaders say AI hasn't improved their labor productivity. What's your experience?
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