Q: What's Up, Doc? A: Succession.

$110.9 billion — what Larry Ellison's Paramount Skydance is paying for Warner Bros. Discovery, signed February 27, approved by WBD shareholders April 23, closing inside ninety days. The price includes every Looney Tune ever drawn, every episode of Real Housewives and Survivor and Naked and Afraid and Succession itself. The trade of 2026 isn't AI agents. It is owning the behavioral data the next-generation models need to learn from. Bugs Bunny just became training data. So did 90 Day Fiance. Eh, what's up, doc? Succession is up.

Stop signing video-content vendor contracts longer than twelve months. Google I/O ships Veo 4 and Google Omni Tuesday morning, May 19. Stock photography, stock video, agency production, motion graphics — anything where the audience does not care whether the output is real — is about to reprice by an order of magnitude. The smartest procurement teams in software already tripled their sub-one-year deals between 2023 and 2026 for the same reason. Don't underwrite a vendor's duration risk on their behalf.

Add Larry Ellison to your strategic-risk register. Inside ninety days, one cap table — Paramount + Skydance + WBD + Oracle's cloud + a personal Anthropic stake — will own the largest behavioral-video corpus on the planet, hosted on its own data centers, with the Trump-era TikTok-on-Oracle hosting deal as a quiet adjacency. If you license content, license rights, or compete for talent the combined entity will employ, your negotiating leverage just shifted. Map your top three relationships. Get to the table now, not in 2027.

Treat the SpaceX IPO as a calendar event, not a sentiment trade. Pricing as soon as June 11, listing June 12 under ticker SPCX, targeting $1.75 trillion — the largest IPO in human history. The catch nobody is talking about: SpaceX merged with xAI in February 2026 in a $250 billion all-stock deal. That means SpaceXAI is what IPOs. The Musk stack — Tesla plus SpaceXAI plus X — clears $3.5 trillion of publicly visible equity that day. Decide now what you would do differently if Musk had $50 billion of post-IPO dry powder. Then assume you have to act on it before Christmas.

Keeping up with AI is hard. We know — we do this daily. If any of these action items strike a chord, or you simply want an Outsider perspective on how to position your business through Tuesday's keynote and June's IPO, we'd love to hear from you.

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Sunday, May 17

1. Larry Ellison just bought the largest behavioral-video archive in human history. Paramount Skydance's $110.9 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery cleared the WBD shareholder vote on April 23 and now sits with the FTC and EU regulators. Once it closes, one cap table owns HBO, CNN, Cartoon Network, Discovery's entire reality-TV portfolio (Deadliest Catch, Gold Rush, Naked and Afraid), TLC's (90 Day Fiance), and the Looney Tunes vault — yes, including Bugs Bunny. The 81-year-old who personally guaranteed $43.3 billion of the equity is not buying cable channels. He is buying the only video training corpus on the planet that AI cannot generate from scratch. (Full analysis below.)

2. The Sphere is about to become a chain. Sphere Entertainment (SPHR) currently trades at $134 with a $4.8 billion market cap — up six times from its 2023 spin-off. The Vegas-prototype story has been priced. The franchise re-rating has not. Today, a 43-minute Sphere show costs $8M–$50M and takes 12–18 months to produce. With Veo 4 and the immersive-mapping pipelines being built by Cosm and Felix & Paul Studios, that drops to ~$200K–$1M and 8–12 weeks. Twenty to thirty bookable classic-album residencies per year suddenly pencil. Dark Side of the Moon on the Sphere is not a thought experiment — it is the Q3 board deck. (Full analysis below.)

3. The Zero-Day Factory officially opened. Presidio's Justin Tibbs published the cleanest essay of the weekend: "the artisanal era of exploitation is ending; the industrialized era has already begun." Anthropic's Mythos cleared a 32-step simulated corporate-network attack (The Last Ones) in 6 of 10 attempts. The same week, Anthropic retired its bug bounty program — the cleanest possible signal that the operating assumption has shifted. Google confirmed the first criminal AI-assisted zero-day exploit. TanStack got hit with 84 malicious npm packages via GitHub Actions. The hygiene playbook isn't slow — it is obsolete.

4. The power grid backlash just became politics. Six states — Arizona, Indiana, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania — are actively challenging utility rate increases driven by AI data centers. Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro pressured PECO to withdraw a 12.5% rate hike ($20/month for the average residential customer). NJ's BPU president called this week's regulatory review "one of the most consequential in a generation." 60+ groups asked the NJ governor to pause every AI data center project in the state. Your data-center build is no longer a permitting question. It is an electoral one.

5. Robotics had its Bessemer-curve weekend. Figure F.03 livestreamed a humanoid robot autonomously sorting 88,000 packages over 72 nonstop hours. Siemens and NVIDIA ran their HMND 01 humanoid in a real factory in Erlangen — 8+ hours, 90% task completion, 60 containers per hour alongside human workers. A 10-DOF robotic hand launched on Kickstarter for under $1,000 — a 20x price drop from the $20,000 industry rate. AheadForm raised hundreds of millions of RMB on viral humanoid-face-robot demos. Ciridae closed a $20M Accel/a16z seed for back-office physical-economy automation. The price curve on the hardware just broke; the constraint moved from "can we build it?" to "where do we deploy it?"

Down Three Rabbit Holes

On Friday morning, Tomasz Tunguz of Theory Ventures named the cleanest articulation we have read of where capital is actually flowing in this cycle. The fastest-growing companies in AI and software are either selling inference directly or reselling it. At worst, they are the first derivative of inference. Anthropic booked $9 billion and $10 billion in consecutive months. Google Cloud is growing 63% at an $80 billion run rate. The only two pre-AI public software companies posting Tunguz-grade share-price runs — Twilio and Datadog — sell voice and observability adjacent to inference, not inference itself. "The number of spans sent to our LLM Observability product nearly tripled quarter over quarter," Datadog's Olivier Pomel said on the Q1 call. "6,500 customers — 20% of total customers, 80% of our ARR." That is the first rabbit hole, and for public-market investors it is largely already priced.

The second hole opens Tuesday morning at 10 a.m. Pacific in Mountain View, when Google ships Veo 4 and Google Omni at Shoreline Amphitheatre. The same Tunguz logic moves one layer up the stack to video. If Veo 4 prices the way the leaks suggest, video generation becomes commodity infrastructure the way text inference became commodity infrastructure in late 2024. The cleanest illustration is the Las Vegas Sphere: a $2.3 billion venue whose programming-cost ceiling has been the public-market knock on the stock. Veo 4 plus the immersive-mapping pipelines Cosm and Felix & Paul Studios have been quietly building drops that ceiling by two orders of magnitude. Sphere Entertainment (SPHR) at $4.8 billion is priced as a Vegas curiosity; it should be priced as a franchise. Cloudflare (NET) at $67 billion is the Twilio of video distribution and not a trillion-dollar company. Reddit (RDDT) at $30 billion is the humans-as-feature trade once the text-training-data run finishes harvesting. Adobe (ADBE) at $99 billion, down 25.7% year-to-date, is the Intel of this cycle — great distribution, uncertain product longevity. Getty Images (GETY) at $0.88 is the eulogy; the 14% senior notes due 2028 are where the credit conversation lives now.

And then, beneath the floor of the second hole, the third hole opens. The text-training-data run is over. The video-training-data run has barely started. Yann LeCun's AMI Labs raised $1.03 billion for world models in March. Fei-Fei Li's World Labs raised another billion. Google DeepMind's Genie 3 is the leading interactive world model. And the largest reality-TV-plus-Hollywood-plus-cable-news video archive in history is, as of February 27, 2026, being purchased for $110.9 billion by an 81-year-old who watched his best friend die at fifty-six. Larry Ellison's empire — Oracle ($555 billion), Paramount + WBD (closing), TikTok hosted on his data centers, personal Anthropic stake — is being assembled in real time as a vertically integrated AI-and-content stack. The empire is being built now, while the deals can still be closed personally.

The succession piece is the one nobody at the cocktail party has connected yet. Ellison watched Steve Jobs die in 2011 at 56. He has lived fifteen years longer than his closest friend. The empire he is building needs an operator on the technical side who can match him, and there is exactly one — Elon Musk. SpaceXAI (the SpaceX-xAI merger from February) IPOs June 12 at $1.75 trillion under ticker SPCX — the largest IPO in history. When it prices, the Musk stack clears $3.5 trillion of public-market equity in one day. That is the funding event that lets the Ellison-Musk chessboard close. Tesla owns the largest physical-world dashcam corpus on Earth. Ellison owns the largest behavioral-video corpus. The two halves of the same picture are sitting on adjacent boards waiting for the moment they integrate. Bugs Bunny just changed hands. So did 90 Day Fiance. The audience answered the synthetic-content question 86 years ago — and the only question that matters now is whether you, the human reader, can keep up with what just got assembled.

At COAI today: the full long-form Signal/Noise — three rabbit holes, six tickers, and the SpaceX IPO that closes the trade June 12 — is live at getcoai.com.

— Harry and Anthony

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