In today’s newsletter I discuss the death of the “Song Of The Summer”, a new survey says most Americans believe AI companies should give the government 50% of their stock, the trailer for Tom Cruise’s new movie ‘Digger’ just dropped, Funflation is back and I’m loving it, If you bought SpaceX at its IPO price (like me) then you're getting dangerously close to the stock slipping below your break-even price, Wealthy families are opting to dine in with their own private chefs, Chipotle is opening their first restaurant in Mexico, and the estate of Paul Allen has reached an agreement to sell the Seattle Seahawks.

Let’s get into it!

Whatever happened to the “Song of the Summer”? I’m dating myself, but back in my day there would be one universal "Song of the Summer" that seemingly the entire country was listening to and blasting out of their car windows. These days it’s silence, or more accurately everyone has their own personalized soundtrack to the Summer fed to them by the algorithm in 30-second clips on TikTok and IG.

The "Song of the Summer" is dead. RIP.

Welcome to a million popular hits playing this Summer on a million people’s personal feeds, and you can thank social media for sticking a stake in the heart of the "Song of the Summer".

But what led to its downfall, and is there any hope of resurrection?

First, we have to address what killed the "Song of the Summer". IMO there are 3 things I can point to that led to the demise of the "Song of the Summer".

So thanks to fragmentation, TikTok, and streaming services we as a collective society will never again all be listening to the same thing, which means we won’t be able to agree on a consensus “Song of the Summer”, and that’s a major cultural loss that I don’t think we’ll be able to recover from, or at least (apparently) I haven’t been able to.

A few weeks ago I wrote about the government making investments in AI companies, and how I’m all for the government investing in companies in critical industries like rare earths and quantum computing to secure both resources and technical expertise in industries that we need to dominate for national security purposes, but I don’t believe AI is one of them.

Hear me out.

Right now we have a mix of private AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic that have both filed to go public at some point in the not too distant future, and then we have established companies with trillion dollar valuations like Meta, Alphabet, SpaceX, and Microsoft that are leaders in AI and publicly owned. I just don’t see the use case for the government investing in AI companies, when these companies have no problems raising billions of dollars with trillion dollar valuations.

Now only a few weeks later there’s a new survey by Verasight that says that 69% of Americans support the idea of “forcing” AI firms, like some of the MANGOS companies I mentioned above, to give the U.S. government 50% of their stock that would be put into a yet to be created public sovereign wealth fund similarly modeled after Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF), China’s Investment Corporation (CIC), and Norway’s Government Pension Fund Global (GPFG), or as the rowing Norwegians lovingly refer to it as the "Oljefondet" (which literally translates as “the Oil Fund”.

I know you’re dying to hear what I think about this, so here I go. I feel like it’s one thing if the U.S. government wants to invest taxpayer money into an AI company as long as that company and their shareholders approve of the investment. It’s another thing altogether if the U.S. government were to demand that AI companies give them a 50% equity stake.

There’s no possible way I, or any red blooded American, should be ok with that! That’s the very definition of Nationalization, and it's one slipper step away from Communism. As a proud card carrying Capitalist I take a very strong laissez faire attitude toward the government interfering in the free markets. As a serial entrepreneur there is no way you’re going to convince me that it's ok for me to toil for years to startup and fund my own business, grow it, and somehow while avoiding going bankrupt in the process miraculously become successful through hard work, and then be expected to just give the government 50% of my company.

Nope. Not gonna happen. That's a hard pass for me.

The trailer for Tom Cruise’s new movie ‘Digger’ just dropped, and it’s unlike anything he’s ever done before!

According to Wikipedia, “Digger is an upcoming satirical black comedy film directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu” about how “the most powerful man in the world races to prove he is humanity's savior before the disaster he unleashes destroys everything.”

If you guessed that the most powerful man in the world is played by none other than Tom Cruise, then you’d be right.

Digger is scheduled to be released on October 2, 2026 by Warner Bros. Pictures.

Funflation is back as inflation rears its ugly head again, and the seemingly never ending War in Iran is back in the headlines.

Funflation, which obviously combines the words "fun" and "inflation" into a fun-to-say word that just rolls off your tongue, is an economic term that describes the rapidly rising cost of leisure and entertainment. We're talking about our hard earned discretionary spending that we spend on things that bring us joy like shopping, movies, concerts, and travel.

The term funflation wasn't created by a single person. It was originally popularized by financial industrial complex that is Bank of America's media and entertainment equity research team back in September 2023 in a research report that they entitled "Funflation in Full Force", which describes how consumers are prioritizing their spending on experiences over goods.

How's that for a nerdy origin story of the term that today is being used to describe how Americans are escaping the 24/7 news cycle of ever increasing inflation, seemingly never ending wars, and undulating gas prices?

And my family isn't immune to the escapism of funflation either.

It used to be that when my kids were young we’d just plan that family’s Summer vacation, book our travel and AirBnB, and go. It wasn’t a democracy, it was a monarchy with my wife and I making all the decisions. Now we have two teens living and consuming all of our resources under our roof, and nothing is as straightforward anymore. Everyone has an opinion, and my job has become herding everyone into at least one direction we can agree on, until we get to where we’re going for vacation and everyone wants to go off in their own direction. During this week’s Summer vacation we opted for some low-key beach days, followed by dinner out at a local taco spot, then headed over to our go-to local ice cream spot for dessert. Stack a couple of days like that together and they make for a pretty low-cost vacation, but they’ve been heavy on lots of family time and experiences including my first time completing the 3.5 mile Cliff Walk in Newport, Rhode Island that we’ve been walking for years but had never done from start-to-finish. This year I did the entire thing with my son, who when I asked him what the number one thing was he wanted to do on vacation he answered “Hike the entire Cliff Walk”, and the only response I knew he’d understand was “Bet.”

So I see you funflation, I understand you, but I’m choosing to fight back by embracing experiences with my family that don’t cost anything more than the time we get to spend together, and to that I’m eternally grateful.

If you bought SpaceX at its IPO price (like me) then you're getting dangerously close to the stock slipping below your break-even price.

I got a small allotment at $135, not as much as I requested but maybe that’s for the best. then I also bought some around $157. So I'm underwater, but I bought in a long term stock account as well as in my IRA, so my investment horizon is long. #diamondhands

Imagine being the person who bought at a high of $225.64!!!!

None of this changes the fact that I, along with a LOT of other investors, are showing red.

But I have a serious question for you:

How many people invested in SpaceX, and how many people invested in Elon Musk.

Wealthy families are opting to dine in more, without sacrificing the opulence and cuisine of Michelin star restaurants. Enter the private chef and estate staff to service their every needs.

The demand for private chefs has picked up, with some chefs commanding salaries between $100,000-$300,000 a year. The splurge in private chefs comes on the heels of rich people purchasing multiple estates, and they need someone to manage, cook, and clean them. Now they’re taking a page from the British and hiring butlers, who can command salaries as much as $180,000 dollars a year, and personal assistants, who are making up to $250,000 dollars a year, and are responsible for remembering all their butlers and private chefs' names.

Damn, I choose the wrong career!

I won’t bury the lead: Chipotle is opening their first restaurant in Mexico. Mexico people! The birthplace of Mexican food. And an Americanized fast casual restaurant has the gumption to think they can open a quasi-TexMex restaurant in Mexico?!?!

They’re probably right.

My guess is it’ll either be a complete flop, because Chipotle is overpriced and won't be able to compete in the market with real authentic Mexican food , or Chipotle will be just as popular as every other American fast food brand around the world like McDonalds and KFC for the simple indisputable reason: it's American.

I know next time I’m in Mexico there’s no way I’m passing up authentic street tacos for something I can get at 3 different Chipotle locations within 15 minutes of my house. Nope!

But I’m not the target market. The non-American target market of Mexican citizens hungry for a more cosmopolitan and "American" (whatever that means) meal are who marketers are targeting, and they’ll probably be wildly successful!

The estate of Paul Allen, one of the co-founders of Microsoft, has reached an agreement to sell the Seattle Seahawks to an investment group led by Vinod Khosla, “an Indian-American billionaire, entrepreneur, and venture capitalist” who co-founded “Sun Microsystems and is the founder of Khosla Ventures” according to Wikipedia.

When Paul Allen passed away in 2018 he dictated that his sister Jody Allen would overseer the sale of all his assets including sports teams like the NBA Portland Trailblazers and the NFL Seattle Seahawks, the 414-foot megayacht Octopus and the 303-foot superyacht Tatoosh, a multi-billion dollar commercial and residential real estate portfolio managed through his Vulcan Real Estate holding company, and over 150 masterworks including Georges Seurat’s 1888 painting “Les Poseuses, Ensemble” that sold at a record-breaking Christie’s auction for $149.2 million dollars in November 2022.

Paul Allen purchased the Seattle Seahawks in 1997 for $194 million dollars, and his estate is reportedly selling the team for an NFL-record $9.612 billion dollars. That’s a 4,855% return on investment over 29 years, with a CAGR of 14.41% over that period.

You have to be one of the luckiest people in the world, or be Elon Musk, to be that successful!

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The Business Behind The News is written, edited, and published by Chris Thompson.