Dec 16, 2025 4 min read Daily Rundown

⛵ Musk Skips Fusion

Plus: Telecom Decoupling, The AI Rotation

Good Morning, Early Adopters!

This is a moment defined less by technological possibility than by economic urgency, strategic control, and the places where computational, electrical, and political power can be deployed fastest.

ENERGY

Fusion’s Politics Problem, Musk’s Solar Bet

👀 What’s happening: Elon Musk publicly dismissed terrestrial nuclear fusion as “utterly foolish,” arguing that Earth already runs on energy from a free fusion reactor: the sun. His comments cut against decades of fusion optimism, a field long sustained by government funding, national labs, and political timelines rather than commercial delivery. Fusion has repeatedly slipped schedules while absorbing public capital, often framed more as strategic signaling than near term infrastructure, with no specific recent failure prompting Musk’s timing.

🔥 How this hits reality: Musk’s critique lands where it hurts. Fusion’s progress has depended less on market pull and more on state budgets, policy narratives, and institutional inertia, including well documented inefficiencies and misuse of funds. By contrast, solar already scales, ships, and prices down. Pushing energy collection toward space and continuous sunlight reframes the problem from physics breakthroughs to deployment and logistics. That trade favors builders over committees and execution over promises.

⛵ Our take: Chasing the sun may look unromantic, but it beats waiting decades for a politically funded miracle that never has to ship.

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TELECOM

US Moves to Finish Telecom Decoupling

👀 What’s happening: The FCC is moving to remove China Mobile, China Telecom, and China Unicom from the US robocall mitigation database, a step that would effectively sever their remaining connections to US networks. While framed as a compliance issue tied to fraud prevention, the orders repeatedly cite national security and public interest. The two week self certification window reads less like remediation and more like due process, closing a chapter that began with years of prior bans and license revocations.

🔥 How this hits reality: This shifts telecom from infrastructure to sovereignty. Cross border voice traffic, enterprise call centers, fintech verification, and IoT routing now sit inside geopolitical guardrails. Chinese carriers lose their last technical footholds. US and allied operators gain leverage and margin. For multinationals, connectivity planning starts to resemble export control compliance. The idea of neutral global telecom pipes quietly collapses, replaced by bloc aligned networks and higher operating friction.

⛵ Our take: Robocalls are the cover story. The real move is the US asserting telecom sovereignty and finishing the decoupling it already decided on.

FORCAST

Citi Calls the AI Rotation

👀 What’s happening: Citigroup set a 2026 year end S&P 500 target of 7,700, matching UBS and implying a roughly 13 percent gain, and kept AI as the core growth driver, but shifted the center of gravity. Citi argues the market is moving past AI builders toward AI adopters, meaning companies that actually embed models into operations and earnings. The forecast assumes $320 in index EPS and treats AI less as a theme and more as a filter that separates monetizers from passengers.

🔥 How this hits reality: This is a warning shot for infrastructure and tooling names living on narrative multiples. Capital rotates toward firms that cut costs, speed decisions, or expand output with the same headcount. CIO budgets favor integration over experimentation. Management teams now have to show where AI hits margins or risk compression. Quiet incumbents with distribution and messy data stacks benefit while pure AI exposure without payoff starts to leak.

⛵ Our take: Citi is saying the subsidy era is over in 2026. AI only matters now if it shows up in operating income.

BAY AREA MEMOS

Disney’s three-year deal with OpenAI includes just one year of exclusivity before its characters can be licensed to other AI firms.
Ford is repurposing EV battery capacity into a new LFP-based energy storage business targeting data centers and the power grid.
Lightspeed Venture Partners announced a record $9 billion fundraise, the largest in the firm’s history.
Lidar-maker Luminar filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy after layoffs, customer losses, and mounting legal and financial troubles.
Netflix defended its $82.7 billion bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, pledging no studio closures or job losses amid growing antitrust scrutiny.

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