Nov 18, 2025 5 min read Daily Rundown

⛵ ASTS Challenged SpaceX’s Monopoly

Plus: Buffett Meets AI, Peter Thiel Sold Nvidia

Good Morning, Early Adopters!

ASTS just took a swing at SpaceX’s orbital dominance — a rare moment when a newcomer dares to challenge the most vertically integrated space operator on Earth.

SPACE

ASTS Just Challenged SpaceX’s Quiet Monopoly

👀 What’s the move: AST SpaceMobile is pushing a direct challenge by introducing a completely different playbook. It just walked onto SpaceX’s turf with a provocation: a new class of orbital infrastructure — skyscraper-sized phased-array satellites powerful enough to talk to unmodified phones. While SpaceX floods LEO with cheap nodes and regulatory muscle, ASTS is betting that one ultra-high-power bird can beat a hundred low-power ones. And global carriers, tired of SpaceX’s creeping dominance, are paying attention.

💡 Why it’s not boring: SpaceX’s moat—mass manufacturing + mesh density + government alignment—finally has a counter-narrative. ASTS offers carriers something they haven’t had in a decade: leverage. A way to keep spectrum, roaming revenue, and user ownership out of Elon’s end-to-end stack. Engineering teams must now design for two incompatible link budgets; finance teams must model two different orbital cost curves; regulators suddenly have a non-SpaceX option they can bless.

⛵ Key takeaway: ASTS isn’t catching up; it’s attacking the monopoly from an angle SpaceX didn’t optimize for.

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Buffett’s Last Lesson: Value Investing Meets AI Hype

👀 What’s the move: Alphabet stock jumped nearly 6% to a record high after Berkshire Hathaway quietly bought a $4.9 billion stake — a rare Silicon Valley play for the famously tech-averse conglomerate. The move lands just weeks before Warren Buffett’s planned retirement at the end of 2025, marking one of his final and most symbolic bets: a value investor walking into the AI casino, but counting the chips first.

💡 Why it’s not boring: Buffett didn’t chase OpenAI, Anthropic, or Nvidia. He picked Google, the one already minting profit from its own models through ads, search, and cloud — not future promise, but present cash. Microsoft may dominate partnerships, but Google owns the full stack and turns its LLMs into measurable returns. It’s the clearest sign that even in the AI gold rush, Buffett still prices reality over narrative.

⛵ Key takeaway: The Oracle’s final lesson — in the end, value investing still wins, even when the market speaks in code.

MARKET

Peter Thiel Walks Away from Nvidia

👀 What’s the move: Peter Thiel’s hedge fund quietly dumped its entire $100 million Nvidia stake last quarter, right on the heels of SoftBank’s massive selloff. For months, Nvidia’s trillion-dollar run has been the centerpiece of the AI bull market — but now two of its earliest and shrewdest backers have left the table. The timing isn’t random; it’s a message.

💡 Why it’s not boring: If it were only Masayoshi Son trimming exposure, you could call it portfolio hygiene. But Peter Thiel exiting too — a man who used to build fortunes by spotting bubbles before the crowd — feels heavier. Thiel rarely moves for noise. His exit signals a belief that the AI trade may have crossed from exponential growth into speculative excess. All eyes now turn to Nvidia’s earnings this week to see whether the faith still holds.

⛵ Key takeaway: When both the gambler and the cynic cash out, the table’s probably colder than it looks.

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AI speech-to-speech translation that preserves tone and emotion across calls, chats, and meetings in 30-plus languages.
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🧸 FoloToy
“LLM-powered plush with a personality.”
Conversational smart toys built on GPT-class models for interactive play, storytelling, and kid-personalized voices.
→ Singapore and China-based team; early-stage funding; 2025 recall after unsafe dialog outputs pushed the company to tighten its AI safety pipeline.

🤖 Sakana AI
“Evolution-shaped models for Japan.”
Biologically inspired model-merging and self-evolving techniques tuned for Japanese language and industry workflows.
→ Founded 2023 by David Ha, Llion Jones and Ren Ito; raised a ¥20B (~$135M) Series B in 2025 at a $2.65B valuation as Japan’s flagship frontier-model lab.

BAY AREA MEMOS

YouTube TV and Disney ended a two-week blackout with a new deal restoring all channels and adding ESPN’s DTC service at no extra cost.
Apple was ordered to pay Masimo 634 million dollars for infringing its blood oxygen patent, keeping the long-running Apple Watch dispute alive.
Ramp raised 300 million dollars at a 32 billion valuation as its AI-driven finance automation platform continues rapid revenue and customer growth.
Ford is adding certified used vehicles to Amazon Autos, enabling buyers to shop and complete purchases online through participating dealers.
Cisco has acquired real-time translation startup EzDubs and will integrate its tech into Webex and other enterprise communication products.

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