Sam Altman took the stand today in the Musk v. OpenAI trial and described what he called a "particularly hair-raising moment" from the early days of the company. During board negotiations in 2017, Altman testified that he opposed Musk becoming CEO or majority stakeholder of any for-profit arm of OpenAI. When other co-founders asked Musk what would happen if he had majority control and then died, Musk responded: "I haven't thought about it a ton, but maybe control would pass to my children." Altman told the jury he believed that if Musk had gotten control of OpenAI, he never would have relinquished it. He said OpenAI did not create a for-profit arm while Musk was still involved. Musk left the board in 2018. Altman also testified that Musk told the team they had "a 0%, not 1% chance of success." After Musk stopped funding OpenAI, Altman said he found other donors including Reid Hoffman and Dustin Moskovitz. No donor besides Musk has ever complained that OpenAI deviated from its mission, according to Altman. Musk sued Altman and co-founder Greg Brockman in 2024, alleging they are enriching themselves at the expense of what was supposed to be a charity. Altman and Brockman say the lawsuit is harassment of a competitor after Musk launched xAI in 2023. Closing statements are scheduled for Thursday.

Block and Spiral just launched Loupe, a free AI-powered vulnerability scanner for open-source Bitcoin projects. The tool scans Bitcoin codebases for security flaws across millions of lines of code. It is available as a free "scanning-as-a-service" tool for any open-source Bitcoin developer. As Bitcoin secures hundreds of billions in value and the codebase grows more complex, automated security scanning is no longer optional. Block and Spiral say it is "mission-critical" for the ecosystem, especially as open-source developers face growing pressure to secure infrastructure that most of the world's financial system is increasingly building on.

Braiins, one of the oldest Bitcoin mining companies in the industry, acquired CAMMS Capital, a CFTC-registered commodity asset management firm originally built inside ETG, a global commodity conglomerate. CAMMS brings over 75 years of combined commodity expertise. Braiins brings 15 years of operational experience in Bitcoin mining. The company says it plans to apply commodity risk management tools, the kind built for oil, gas, and grain, to Bitcoin and energy markets. Braiins describes Bitcoin, hashrate, and energy as digital commodities and says the financial infrastructure for managing them does not yet exist in the way it does for traditional commodities. This is one of the first acquisitions of a regulated commodity management firm by a Bitcoin-native company.

Eric Trump on incoming Fed Chair Kevin Warsh: "Not only will he be fantastic for the [crypto] industry, he actually understands it."

The House Oversight Committee is demanding documents from OpenAI over potential conflicts of interest tied to Sam Altman's personal investments. Committee Chairman James Comer sent a formal letter to OpenAI requesting documents related to governance, conflict of interest policies, and business deals connected to companies Altman holds a personal stake in. The central allegation: Altman proposed that OpenAI invest $500 million into Helion, a nuclear fusion company he personally invested in. That deal, still ongoing, would value Helion at $35 billion, significantly boosting the worth of Altman's own stake. This is not the first time Altman's overlapping interests have raised concerns. He was briefly forced to step down as CEO in 2023 partly over potential conflicts between his personal portfolio and his operation of OpenAI. He was reinstated days later. The Wall Street Journal also reported that Altman encouraged OpenAI to work with other companies he holds personal investments in, including space company Stoke Space. The Oversight Committee's letter cites this reporting directly. The timing matters. OpenAI is preparing for an IPO. Altman is currently testifying in the Elon Musk lawsuit. And now Congress is asking whether the CEO of the most valuable AI company in the world has been using that company to inflate the value of his personal investment portfolio.

You shouldn't have to sell bitcoin to spend money. (AvenCard) lets you borrow against it instead. Up to $1 million credit line. Up to 10-year fixed terms. Unlimited cash back. Your bitcoin stays your bitcoin.

Aven Bitcoin Visa Card

Apply now

"No healthy business can be destroyed by a tweet." CZ on the FTX collapse. He announced Binance was selling its FTT tokens. FTX imploded days later.

Senate confirms Kevin Warsh to 14-year term on Federal Reserve Board of Governors in 51-45 vote.

"He was very high EQ. He knows what to say, when to say it, in front of whom. He was saying all the right stuff." CZ on meeting Sam Bankman-Fried.

40 million Kenyans can now receive bitcoin through the phone number in their pocket. Built on Lightning by Tando.

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong is on Capitol Hill this week lobbying senators ahead of Thursday's Senate Banking Committee vote on the CLARITY Act. He was seen at the office of Senator Catherine Cortez Masto, a key Democratic negotiator on the bill. Armstrong is also scheduled to address Republican senators on Wednesday.

CME Group is launching a futures market for computing power. CME and Silicon Data, an AI compute market intelligence firm backed by trading giant DRW, announced today they will launch the first compute futures contracts later this year, pending regulatory review. The futures will allow traders, financial firms, AI companies, and cloud providers to hedge against volatility and price swings in computing resources. The same way oil futures let airlines hedge fuel costs or grain futures let farmers lock in prices, compute futures will let AI companies manage the cost of the GPU hours their models run on. Computing power is becoming a commodity. It was only a matter of time before Wall Street built a derivatives market around it.

Trump is bringing 17 of America's most powerful executives to Beijing this week for his meeting with President Xi. The delegation includes Elon Musk, Tim Cook, Larry Fink, Stephen Schwarzman, Larry Culp, and Dina Powell McCormick, spanning tech, finance, aerospace, manufacturing, and payments. Forbes estimates that just five of the executives on the list are worth a combined $870 billion. Musk's inclusion is notable. He and Trump had a well-documented falling out in 2025. US officials say Trump wants to discuss the creation of a board of investment and a board of trade with China. The business leaders may end up as much in the spotlight as the bilateral meeting itself. The timing matters. Chinese independent oil refiner margins have gone deeply negative, Chinese crude imports have fallen, and behind the scenes China has reportedly been pressing Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Trump arrives in Beijing with more leverage than most expected six months ago, and he is bringing the CEOs of the companies China needs most.

The 7 companies selling picks and shovels into the AI buildout are up 107% this year. The 5 companies actually buying them are up 4%. That 180% spread is the widest gap between infrastructure sellers and buyers in market history. Wider than dot-com. And it tells you exactly where the money is flowing. Coatue's May 2026 Public Markets Update breaks it down: NVIDIA, Broadcom, Micron, TSMC, SK Hynix, and GE Vernova are printing money selling scarce inputs. Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Oracle are spending $680 billion in capex this year just to keep up. Semiconductor free cash flow: $525 billion. Coatue projects $12 trillion in cumulative AI capex from 2026 to 2031. But here's what most people are missing: Coatue studied 30 market bubbles across 400 years and says AI is still in the displacement phase. Not euphoria. Not a bubble. The Nasdaq peaked at 90x earnings in 2000. Today it trades at 28x, backed by actual profits. The dot-com era had 500+ IPOs a year. Today: fewer than 60. The next phase isn't better chatbots. It's autonomous agents that execute tasks, manage workflows, and transact independently. Coatue calls this the token economy, where AI workloads are measured and monetized per computation. That's the unlock that turns the adoption curve vertical. The infrastructure is being built right now. The speculation hasn't even started.

Founders, fund managers, and devs open the Bitcoin Brief every morning before markets. They told us: "other Bitcoin media is too surface-level." We go deeper. On-chain, macro, freedom tech. Free.

TFTC

TFTC — Truth for the Commoner

Bitcoin, freedom, and truth in the digital age. A daily newsletter and podcast.

Wall Street’s last 2026 rate cut hope just got buried. BofA pushed its first Fed cut call to July 2027, not September 2026, after April payrolls came in at +115K vs +65K expected and inflation stayed sticky. That gives Kevin Warsh a brutal inheritance: a Fed that cannot ease without looking politically desperate or economically reckless. The labor market is the tell. Unemployment has not moved off its trough in 38 months, something no post-WWII business cycle has seen. This is not the setup for emergency cuts. Meanwhile, positioning is weirdly conflicted. Deutsche Bank says investors are only at the 61st percentile despite a 16% rally off the March lows. Call skew is at the 99th percentile. Money market funds just took in $136 billion, the biggest inflow in four months. The market is being forced to chase while the cash pile keeps growing. CPI Tuesday and the Fed Chair transition Thursday are the pressure points. Either inflation breaks, or the cuts fantasy does.

US CPI just rose to 3.8%, the highest level since May 2023, as oil prices rip higher and gas prices climb 65% in six months.

Buried on page 230 of the CLARITY Act is arguably the biggest win for the digital asset industry in the entire 309-page bill. Section 604: The Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act. If you build open-source blockchain software and don't have unilateral control over users' funds, you are not a money transmitter. Not under FinCEN rules. Not under federal criminal law. Not under state registration requirements. Writing code ≠ money transmission. Building self-custody tools ≠ money transmission. Running node infrastructure ≠ money transmission. For years, developers have operated under the threat that publishing code could expose them to money transmission charges. Section 604 eliminates that ambiguity entirely. It establishes a clear, codified legal protection for the people who actually build the open-source infrastructure this industry runs on. Senate Banking markup is Thursday. Read the bill.

U.S. Senate votes 49-44 to advance Trump nominee Kevin Warsh to the Fed Board of Governors.

TanStack, one of the most widely used open-source JavaScript libraries in the world, just disclosed a supply-chain attack. 42 TanStack npm packages were compromised earlier today. 84 malicious versions were published in a 10-minute window. The payload exfiltrates AWS credentials, Google Cloud credentials, Kubernetes secrets, Vault tokens, GitHub tokens, npm authentication tokens, and SSH keys. Anyone who installed a TanStack package during the 10-minute window between 19:20 and 19:30 UTC should treat the host machine as compromised and rotate all credentials immediately. TanStack packages are dependencies in millions of projects. React Query alone has over 10 million weekly npm downloads. This is not a niche library. It is infrastructure that sits inside applications at companies of every size. The malicious code was smuggled in through a git-resolved optional dependency whose install script runs a 2.3 MB payload hidden at the package root. npm's unpublish policy is blocking removal of most affected packages because third-party projects depend on them. All 84 versions are being deprecated and npm security is working to pull the tarballs at the registry level. Supply-chain attacks on open-source software are no longer theoretical. The dependencies that modern applications are built on are maintained by small teams, distributed through centralized package registries, and automatically installed by build systems that most developers never audit. One compromised publish token and 10 minutes is all it takes.