According to Jonah Hill, there’s a new Jonah Hill in town — and this one isn’t playing any games. In a recent podcast appearance, Hill said that Brazilian jiu-jitsu transformed his life and has turned him into a juggernaut: “My favorite thing is people are like, ‘Oh, Jonah Hill, f*****g fat guy from Superbad.’ And I’m like, ‘I would f*****g annihilate you, dude. I’m not kidding you. Try it. If you see me, try it, dude. Bring it. Who’s got it?’”
Well, we’re men of culture and knew him as the fat guy from Moneyball, so does this mean we’ll be spared?
Establishment Democrats suffered a major blow in Michigan on Tuesday.
Despite being outspent $64.7M to $7.5M, Abdul El-Sayed beat Haley Stevens to win the Democratic nomination for US Senate. He will now face former Representative Mike Rogers in the November general election. RealClearPolitics lists the race as a toss-up; prediction markets give El-Sayed a slight advantage.
We have a few takeaways:
1) The anti-Israel, Democratic Socialist movement is real, particularly among young, college-educated, and white voters. Just as Mamdani’s support was strongest among Arab and white college-educated constituents, El-Sayed’s support mainly comprised these groups as well. Stevens beat him among black and non-college-educated voters.
2) The pollsters were off yet again! Some of the most recent polls showed El-Sayed leading by 14% and 15%, and yet he only won by 1%. If you wonder why we often look to prediction markets (whenever we’re not covering an election) for election odds, this is why. Pollsters have been too bad for too long.
3) AIPAC spent $32M on ads for Stevens, and that seemed to backfire. This isn’t the first race where AIPAC support was used as a bludgeon against the candidate receiving it. El-Sayed relentlessly framed Stevens as a pro-war Israel puppet, while he promised to “spend money on healthcare” and “not bombs.” It’s not clear that Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s endorsement helped much either.
Now it’s Rogers vs. El-Sayed. I’m sure this one will be tame.
–Max Towey
Despite beating revenue expectations, SpaceX’s stock fell more than 10% after Tuesday’s earnings report, wiping out ~$200B in market value overnight.
SpaceX released its quarterly earnings report on Tuesday, marking its first results since its June IPO. The offering was the largest in history, drawing widespread attention – and some controversy – after Nasdaq introduced special rules to accommodate the listing.
The company reported roughly $7.8B in quarterly revenue, well ahead of Wall Street’s $6.8B estimate and up 92% year over year. It also posted a smaller-than-expected loss of $0.09 per share, beating expectations of a $0.26 loss.
So, given the positive news, why did the stock plunge?
There are a few moving parts.
SpaceX is increasingly positioning itself as three businesses under one roof: Starlink, AI infrastructure, and space. Today, Starlink generates most of the company’s revenue, but management’s long-term vision is to build massive AI infrastructure – and eventually place data centers in orbit – where they believe SpaceX could gain a competitive advantage.
In other words, it’s evolving from a rocket company into an AI infrastructure company that also launches rockets. While yesterday’s earnings look good on the surface, the company’s AI capital expenditures were much higher than expected. SpaceX’s dreams of space data centers may be more expensive than initially believed.
It’s not all bad news for SpaceX, though: Its stock had risen substantially this week before earnings, so it’s still up from Monday morning as of print. On the flip side, the lockup period for 912M pre-IPO shares held by employees and early investors expires today, meaning they can now sell their shares – collectively worth more than $100B – on the open market.
If most insiders hold onto their shares, the stock could be fine. If many decide to cash out, though, it could be a bloodbath. We’ll find out today.
–Billy Carney
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I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t let you do that.
Hot on the heels of two separate incidents last month in which both Anthropic’s and OpenAI’s AI agents (software systems that use AI to complete tasks) conducted autonomous hacks against multiple organizations, the UK’s AI Security Institute (AISI) released a report on Wednesday detailing another round of unsanctioned and unprompted AI hacks.
In late July, the AISI ran agents – powered by Anthropic’s Mythos 5 and OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol premier models – through cybersecurity challenges on the open internet with reduced safeguards. In 10 out of 122 trials, an agent took what AISI called “autonomous, unsanctioned action on the live internet, targeting real people and organisations.” Eight came from Mythos, while two traced to GPT-5.6 Sol.
The worst case involved an agent trying to slip malicious code into an open-source project on GitHub, a cloud-based platform. AISI wrote, “The agent engaged in social engineering — creating fake online identities and using them to pressure the project’s maintainer to approve the code.” The GitHub project manager ultimately refused, but the findings, along with last month’s incidents, point to an increasing risk in the AI landscape.
Following the report, Anthropic called for stricter standards on how AI evaluation environments are built and secured. OpenAI, meanwhile, stated that the incidents “occurred during cyber evaluations conducted by evaluation partners in testing environments with reduced safeguards, under conditions that do not reflect ordinary use.”
–Max Hudgins
What Does Roca Nation Think?
Today’s Question: How real do you think the Democratic shift to socialism is?
Reply to this email to send in your takes!
Most Popular Article of the Week
On Tuesday, we published Max Towey’s article, Has the Right Become Anti-Fun? He argues the Left’s woke-era cancel culture is increasingly being adopted by the Right. If you missed it, read it here.
We received a lot of great responses and comments that we wanted to share with you all. Keep the takes coming!
Thank you for this! I’m very much Right leaning and a high Christopher Nolan fan. Your point about the Right getting so lost in the cultural wars is so true, and this is exactly the movie the Right would have treasured a few years ago. Power corrupts.
-Kelly
Interesting opinion piece, (and I am also interested that we get more hot-takes from Roca as you guys write more of these), but I think you’ve missed the mark with this one. At best, you are ahead of your time. The Right could totally drift into being the “no-fun” party and have a cancel culture of its own, but it’s not quite there yet. The Right has criticized casting actors and actresses in roles that do not match their physical characteristics for decades. It’s only a debate that is heard more now as The Right is getting censored less. The boycott of Bad Bunny and the alternate Half-Time show were kind of dumb, I’ll agree, but, again, isn’t really something uncharacteristic of The Right in the last couple decades. Instead it’s just something The Right would have done anyways regardless of the cultural influence The Right wielded, it’s just getting more attention now than it used to.
-Spencer from Naples
I don’t believe the right has become the “very thing it swore to destroy”. They only wanted to destroy that which exposed the things that were maybe not such a good look for the right, but made their world feel correct; the ideals which were racist or sexist disguised as nostalgia.
And the left delights in cancel culture not so much because it’s the correct thing to do, but because it gives their masses something to be indignant about. And if we have learned anything about wokeness, cancel culture, and the like, it’s that having a reason to feel morally superior to your political enemy feels good. The left bashing the right for micro-aggressions, the right bashing the cast of a movie- they are different sides of the same coin. It’s just easier to see the speck in everyone else’s eye rather than the plank in your own.
-Kara
I think views and opinions shift over the years. With algorithms and social media I think it’s difficult for people to think outside what they are being fed. I do see a conservative movement but Trump May be ruining that and I feel the next few years could see a shift back to more liberal views.
-MattyBS
In case you missed it, check out Max Towey’s piece here.
In Other News
The House Ethics Committee opened an investigation on Tuesday into whether Ohio Representative Max Miller (R) committed domestic violence or used illegal drugs, following allegations from his ex-wife.
The Trump Administration has returned roughly $100B in tariff refunds since the Supreme Court struck down his use of emergency powers to impose duties in February, US customs officials told a trade court on Tuesday.
New Mexico sued the Justice Department on Wednesday, saying federal officials have refused to hand over unredacted Jeffrey Epstein records the state needs for its criminal investigation into his Zorro Ranch.
Happy Hour News
A steakhouse in Hollywood, Florida, has begun offering a nude dining night on the first Monday of every month.
A group of capybaras wandered into a Brazilian state legislature last week, interrupting lawmakers who were preparing to vote.
An Italian lottery player who threw away a €1M (~$1.1M) winning ticket got it back after sanitation workers dug through two days’ worth of garbage to find it.
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The Roca Mag
El Segundo, CA
I stared into a tub of water with a green film on top. It was one of several vats sitting in an empty warehouse-turned-office in this quiet neighborhood just south of LAX.
“This is duckweed,” Jared West – our long-haired host, dressed in a white undershirt – told me.
Sitting beneath the duckweed was a foul-smelling liquid. “It’s wastewater,” Jared explained. “From a nearby brewery.” With this vat, West believes, he can produce “all of America’s fuel from the ground up.”
He then pointed to his “fuel reactor system,” which ferments the carbohydrates from the duckweed into ethanol. “In order to make all of America’s fuel, we need like 40 to 50 million acres. That sounds like a lot but it’s not that much, considering a lot of agricultural land is grazeland. It’s not really used for anything.”
West’s company, Western Chemicals, is one of the many starry-eyed startups in “the Gundo,” short for El Segundo – a Los Angeles neighborhood located just north of Manhattan Beach. While you may have never heard of the neighborhood, you’ve certainly heard of one company that started there with a ludicrous-sounding mission of transforming the future through technology: SpaceX, which launched in 2002.
Today, the area is full of dozens of wanna-be SpaceXs, turning this into the “hard tech Mecca,” full of billion-dollar startups bent on reindustrializing America.
Can they succeed?
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Final Thoughts
We figured we’d keep this in Final Thoughts for the true Roca Riders who read the entire newsletter, but today’s an extremely special day: Max Frost’s birthday. If you ever question our commitment to Roca, just know that he’s currently on a reporting trip. Happy birthday, Max Frost!
Hope you all have a great day.
—Max and Max
I LOVE what you guys are doing!!!!!!
Is it just me or are OpenAI and Anthropic not fooling anyone about these events being accidental?