The Rip Current with Jacob Ward

In 1602, Dutch merchants invented the stock market — and built it so no one who bought in could ever get their money back. Today, that same machine lists on the Nasdaq as SPCX.SpaceX just raised $75 billion in the largest IPO in history — nearly triple the previous record. But strip away the size and look at what a share actually buys: no vote that can change anything, money the company keeps permanently, and one man holding 82% of the decisions. That structure wasn't invented by Elon Musk. It was invented four hundred years ago by a company that ran a private army, signed treaties with kings, and secured its monopoly through massacre.This is the story of the Dutch East India Company — the world's first IPO — and what it tells us about the machine being offered to the public today.Members get early access to this and all my analysis. For written reports, including all the source documents, consider becoming a subscriber at https://theripcurrent.com.

SpaceX goes public this Friday in what could be the largest IPO in the history of capitalism. But before you invest — or find out your 401(k) already has — there's something you should understand about what you're actually buying.Elon Musk's S-1 filing gives him 85.1% of the voting power in the combined SpaceX/xAI company. That means your money goes in, his rules stay permanent.

This isn't a quirk of one founder's ego — it's the fullest expression yet of a two-decade market structure that Google started in 2004, that Meta and Snap refined, and that SpaceX is now applying to a company whose customers include NASA, the U.S. Department of Defense, and governments fighting active wars.

In this video: the fourth rocket that shouldn't have worked. The profitable cash machine that became the wallet for a money-losing AI race. The compensation package that pays Musk out only if he colonizes Mars. The Danish pension fund and the S&P 500 committee that said no. And the man I watched in a federal courtroom in Oakland — not defending a business decision, but defending his place in history.

A few weeks ago I covered the Musk v. Altman federal trial from the courthouse. What I saw there changed how I read this IPO. The full written analysis — with sourcing, further reading, and everything I couldn't fit here — is at TheRipCurrent.com.

Today the Vatican published Magnifica Humanitas — Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical and the Catholic Church's official moral teaching on AI. I woke up at 5am to read it, and it's remarkable.It names algorithmic systems making decisions about credit, jobs, and welfare benefits. It names data extraction from poor countries as a new form of colonialism. It describes the invisible human labor underneath every AI response. And on autonomous weapons, it establishes a three-part accountability framework that maps directly onto the targeting systems the U.S. military is using right now. Never thought I'd feel true ideological kinship with the leader of the Catholic Church.135 years ago, Pope Leo XIII published Rerum Novarum — a document that named the horrors of industrial capitalism and eventually became part of the intellectual foundation for the New Deal. Leo XIV named himself after that, and he's trying to accomplish the same thing today.Whether it works depends on who carries it from here.My full written analysis — including a speculative bibliography of the tech journalism that may have shaped Leo's thinking — is at The Rip Current:🔗 https://www.theripcurrent.com/p/the-vaticans-indictment-of-aiMembers get early access to this and all my analysis. For written reports, including all the source documents, consider becoming a subscriber at https://theripcurrent.com.

Elon Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI was supposed to be a referendum on the company's soul — whether it had abandoned its founding promise to develop AI for the benefit of humanity. Instead, it was thrown out on a statute of limitations.
Two days later, it's reported by the NYT, WSJ, and CNBC that OpenAI is preparing to file for an IPO, perhaps this week. The company is valued at $852 billion — roughly 35 times its annualized revenue — and is projected to lose $14 billion in 2026 alone. Its own CFO has reportedly urged delaying until 2027. Sam Altman is pushing ahead anyway, likely because Anthropic and Elon Musk's xAI are eyeing the same investor dollars.
In this video, I look at what going public actually does to a company's principles — using Google and Facebook as the clearest historical examples — and why the fact that OpenAI's red lines have already moved, before a single earnings call, should worry all of us. Plus: what Andrej Karpathy's surprise move to Anthropic might tell us about where the serious research is actually happening.
For written reports, including all the source documents, consider becoming a subscriber at The Rip Current.

A jury in Oakland took less than two hours to dismiss Elon Musk's lawsuit against Sam Altman and OpenAI Monday morning. The verdict was on a narrow technicality — the statute of limitations — and didn't touch the substantive questions: whether Altman lied to co-founders, whether the nonprofit-to-profit conversion was a betrayal, whether the company violated the charitable trust Musk said he was funding.What closes with the case is the only real window the public has ever had into how the AI industry operates. The discovery documents generated by this lawsuit — Brockman's diaries, the Altman-Musk email chains, Sutskever's 52-page dossier — exist as public record only because adversarial litigation forced them into the open. That lever is now gone.I've been covering this trial from inside the Oakland courthouse since it started. This is my assessment of what the verdict actually forecloses — and what OpenAI's path to a trillion-dollar IPO looks like from here.For written reports, including all the source documents, consider becoming a subscriber at https://theripcurrent.com.