Dec 22, 2025 5 min read Daily Rundown

⛵ Musk Wins Leverage

Plus: A Quiet Chip Split, SoftBank All In OpenAI

Good Morning, Early Adopters!

The balance of force in tech is shifting fast—and not waiting for anyone.

TESLA

Musk Regains Tesla Pay and Rewires Corporate Control

What just happened is simple but heavy. The Delaware Supreme Court overturned a lower court ruling and restored Elon Musk’s 2018 compensation deal at Tesla. That package was once framed as outrageous and symbolic. Today it is worth about 139 billion dollars because Tesla stock kept rising while the case dragged on. The court said rescinding it was improper and left Musk unpaid for six years of work. Musk called it vindication and moved on.

Why this matters is not the number but the control math behind it. If Musk exercises the options, his stake rises from roughly 12.4 percent to 18.1 percent. That is real leverage. It reduces board risk, calms exit threats, and weakens shareholder lawsuits. Tesla also already shifted incorporation to Texas, where suing requires owning 3 percent of the company. That threshold is around 30 billion dollars. Only Musk qualifies.

Here is the direction this points to. Founder leverage is being reasserted in public markets, not trimmed back. Courts appear reluctant to override shareholder votes even when governance looks strained. Expect more aggressive pay structures, more reincorporation moves, and tighter legal moats around control. For AI, chips, and capital heavy tech, founders just learned the ceiling moved higher.

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CHIPS

A Quiet Wafer Switch Hints at a Deeper Chip Split

Here is what just happened. The China unit of Nexperia locked in all wafer supply it needs for 2026 IGBT power chip production from local Chinese firms. This followed a corporate and political standoff in which the Dutch government took control of Nexperia from its Chinese owner Wingtech and European management suspended wafer shipments to China. Two months ago the China unit declared itself independent. This move turns that statement into an operating reality.

On paper this looks minor. IGBT products were only about 0.1 percent of Nexperia revenue last year. In practice they sit inside electric vehicles, industrial drives, and factory equipment. Wingsky can supply around 30,000 twelve inch automotive wafers a month, with additional eight inch supply tied to fabs linked to SMIC. When Beijing briefly halted finished chip exports, automakers felt it immediately. Honda Motor has already flagged production disruptions.

The bigger signal is direction, not scale. This looks like decoupling driven by survival rather than policy slogans. Once China based fabs qualify and lock in capacity, the incentive to reconnect weakens. If this pattern spreads, Western firms may keep brands and IP while China builds parallel supply chains underneath. That is how global chip systems fragment without a formal break.

SoftBank Locks Itself Into OpenAI Before the Exit Window

What just happened is a financing sprint. SoftBank is racing to close a $22.5 billion commitment to OpenAI before year end. To raise the cash, it sold its entire Nvidia stake, reduced T-Mobile exposure, delayed the PayPay IPO, and prepared to draw margin loans against Arm. Internally, dealmaking has slowed to near zero. This is not opportunistic timing. It is SoftBank meeting a contractual deadline while keeping its position intact ahead of OpenAI’s next phase.

Why this matters is that SoftBank is no longer just backing a model company. It is underwriting a supply chain. Chips through Arm exposure. Compute via data centers. Power, cooling, and long term capex through Stargate style infrastructure. OpenAI’s ambition runs to tens of gigawatts of compute, with each gigawatt costing north of $40 billion. Once SoftBank made itself central to that stack, stepping back was no longer an option. Missing this round would weaken every other linkage.

My take is this is forced conviction. With an eventual OpenAI listing looming, SoftBank cannot afford partial exposure or signaling doubt. It has to arrive at the IPO as the indispensable partner. That means all in now, leverage included, and living with the balance sheet risk until the exit finally opens.

BAY AREA MEMOS

Waymo paused all San Francisco services after a blackout disabled traffic lights and stranded its autonomous vehicles.
Google Cloud and Palo Alto Networks have expanded their partnership with a long-term AI-focused security deal approaching $10 billion.
SpaceX has reportedly bought over 1,000 Cybertrucks, drawing attention to Tesla relying on internal demand to absorb sales.
Paraplegic German engineer Michaela Benthaus became the first wheelchair user to fly to space aboard a Blue Origin suborbital mission.
Mercury has applied to U.S. regulators for a national bank charter and FDIC insurance, aiming to become a fully licensed national bank.

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