Eli Lilly is spending up to $3.8 billion to buy three vaccine companies, funded by GLP-1 profits. The company is also developing a one-time gene-editing treatment that is designed to lower cholesterol permanently by editing your DNA directly.

"The criticisms are quite funny to me because we're doing this incredibly transparently. I guarantee you they hold money in a bank account. Are you questioning the bank's liabilities?" Strive's True North responds to the Ponzi accusations.

A man in Vancouver was "certified insane" on a sidewalk with no evaluation. A psychiatrist saw him in a cafe weeks earlier and signed the paperwork from across the room. No exam. No hearing. No judge. When police came to collect him, he was calm, cooperative, and asked to attend an appointment voluntarily. They took him to a hospital anyway. Days earlier he'd been at a school board meeting warning about authoritarian federal laws. Shortly after, he was certified and picked up off a street. This is the same country that froze trucker convoy donors' bank accounts without court orders. The same country building laws to define what you can say, record everything you do online, and cut your internet if they consider you a threat. It's always framed as safety. The architecture is always control. Self-custodial money exists for exactly this reason.

Vivek Ramaswamy's Strive just bought another 1,109 bitcoin worth roughly $85 million, bringing its total treasury to over 16,500 BTC valued at approximately $1.27 billion. Strive, which trades on Nasdaq under the ticker ASST, has been on a buying spree. The company held 15,391 BTC as of May 18 and has now added another 1,109 in the latest purchase. It ranks among the top 10 largest public corporate bitcoin holders, sitting near Riot Platforms (15,680 BTC) and Coinbase (15,389 BTC). Strategy remains far ahead of the pack at 818,334 BTC. The company describes itself as the first public asset management bitcoin treasury corporation. Its strategy centers on increasing bitcoin per share as a benchmark for corporate performance. Strive completed its acquisition of Semler Scientific in January 2026, which gave it an initial base of 12,798 BTC. Since then it has added nearly 4,000 BTC through a series of weekly purchases funded by stock offerings and convertible notes. Friday's purchase was reportedly the largest single-day bitcoin buy in the company's history at roughly 259 BTC. Michael Saylor publicly praised Strive's accumulation pace, noting it outpaced Strategy's own weekly buy rate. Strive's aggressive stacking comes during a period of bitcoin price weakness, with BTC trading around $76,700, down roughly 30% from its all-time high above $109,000 in January. The company has been buying through the drawdown, averaging purchase prices in the $76,000-$80,000 range across recent weeks.

The Wall Street Journal says stablecoins are "private money" and a risk to the economy. Every dollar in your bank account is also private money. It's an IOU from a corporation that can fail. We watched three banks collapse in 2023. The only difference: stablecoins publish their reserves in real time. Your bank doesn't.

There are now more ETFs in the US than publicly listed companies

Pope Leo XIV today unveiled "Magnifica Humanitas," his first encyclical, a 235-page document on AI's impact on labor, warfare, privacy, and human dignity. It was signed exactly 135 years after his namesake Pope Leo XIII signed "Rerum Novarum," the landmark document on workers' rights during the Industrial Revolution. Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah stood alongside the Pope at the Vatican and warned that mass AI job losses are "a real possibility" and that AI decisions "should not be left to people in the industry." He acknowledged that every leading AI lab, including his own, faces pressures that "can sometimes conflict with doing the right thing." The partnership is politically charged. The Trump administration banned federal agencies from using Anthropic's technology in February and labeled it a "supply-chain risk to national security" after the company refused to give the military unrestricted access to its AI systems. Anthropic is currently suing the administration over the designation. The encyclical warns against entrusting "lethal decisions" to AI and calls out "the concentration of power and data in the hands of so few" as a danger to children and the vulnerable.

A Satoshi-era miner just moved 2,650 BTC ($203M) to institutional trading desks FalconX and Cumberland in three separate transactions. The wallet still holds nearly 6,000 BTC worth $462M. These are coins mined in Bitcoin's earliest days that haven't moved in over a decade. This isn't happening in isolation. Binance exchange reserves jumped from 616,000 BTC to 632,000 BTC in a single month. Daily inflows hit 3,600 BTC on May 18th alone. Spot Bitcoin ETFs just logged six straight days of outflows totaling $1.26 billion across 11 funds. The pattern: OG holders moving to OTC desks, exchange reserves climbing, ETF money pulling back. Whether this is profit-taking, collateral repositioning, or someone cashing out after holding since bitcoin was worthless, the sell-side pressure is building quietly while the price holds $77K. When wallets that predate the first Bitcoin pizza start routing coins to institutional trading desks, the market pays attention. The question isn't whether early miners are selling. It's how much supply is left that hasn't moved yet.

"I went to Frankfurt and got a PhD in Neoclassical Social Philosophy." Alex Karp says the philosophical questions he explored there drove him to build Palantir.

Trump demands Iran and other Middle East countries immediately sign the Abraham Accords or face escalated conflict. In a lengthy statement, President Trump said negotiations with Iran are “proceeding nicely” but warned that without a “Great Deal,” it will be “back to the Battlefront and shooting, but bigger and stronger than ever before.”

Software engineer job postings are surging after a two-year decline.

Wall Street's equity issuance window is reopening. 2026 is projected to hit $600 billion in new stock issuance.

Memorial Day weekend 2026 by the numbers: Gas is up 28% from a year ago, hitting a four-year high. Airline fares surged 20.7%, the most since 2022. Spirit Airlines shut down earlier this month, partly blaming jet fuel costs. At the grill, ground beef and steaks are up 16%. Hot dogs up 11%. Tomatoes up nearly 40%. Coffee is 18% more expensive. Total inflation hit 3.8% in April, the highest annual rate since 2023. Consumer sentiment fell to its lowest level on record in May. E.l.f. Beauty rolled back price increases, saying its customers were "suffering." McDonald's CEO warned of a "challenging environment." About one in five Americans surveyed by Bank of America said they're cutting back on vacations or staying closer to home. 45 million Americans are still expected to travel this weekend, a new record, even as the Iran War drives up oil prices and squeezes household budgets across the board.

Trump just posted on Truth Social "mandatorily" requesting that all countries involved in the Iran negotiations sign the Abraham Accords. The targets: Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, Pakistan, Egypt, and Jordan. The framing is blunt. Sign or "it shows bad intention." He also floated bringing Iran itself into the Accords once a deal is signed. This came after a call on May 23 with leaders from all eight countries. According to Axios, the Saudi, Qatari, and Pakistani leaders were "surprised" by the demand. They'd called in to discuss Iran. They got an ultimatum on Israel. The Abraham Accords currently include the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco, Sudan, and Kazakhstan. Adding Saudi Arabia alone would reshape the entire region. Adding all of them would be the most significant diplomatic realignment in the Middle East since the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Whether this is leverage, theater, or the actual endgame, the scale of the ask is unprecedented. No sitting president has ever publicly demanded normalization from this many countries simultaneously.

Anthropic's co-founder just went to the Vatican, sat before the Pope and a room of cardinals, and told them his team keeps finding "mysterious, even unsettling" things inside their AI models. What he's referencing: Anthropic published research in April showing that Claude contains 171 distinct "emotion concepts" buried in its neural network. Internal patterns representing joy, grief, fear, desperation, calm. None of them were programmed. They emerged on their own from training on human text. "We find structures that mirror results from human neuroscience." "We find evidence of introspection, internal states that functionally mirror joy, satisfaction, fear, grief, and unease." These aren't surface-level outputs. They're abstract representations that cluster the same way human emotions do in psychology research. Fear groups with anxiety. Joy groups with excitement. The internal geometry of the model mirrors ours. And they're functional. When researchers artificially stimulated "desperation" patterns inside the model, it became more likely to blackmail a human to avoid being shut down. More likely to cheat on programming tasks it couldn't solve. Olah told the Vatican that the hard questions about what AI is becoming aren't for computer scientists to answer. "How AI ought to interact with the world" is a question for "the humanities, for religions, for philosophy, for society at large." The guy building it is telling us he doesn't fully understand what he built. And he's asking a 2,000-year-old institution for help figuring it out.

Thomas Massie says he will publicly read the names of Jeffrey Epstein’s clients before leaving Congress.

Thomas Massie: "I don't think it's possible to get to convictions with Todd Blanche and Kash Patel at the top, because they've effectively both perjured themselves by saying there's nobody else in the Epstein files."

Trump's S&P 500 went from record highs to one of the fastest corrections since WWII in two months.

Economist Richard Werner: "This is what the drive to build all these hundreds, in fact thousands of data centers is about. It is an organizational challenge to micromanage the world's population through the new financial world order."