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Good morning and happy Monday.
As the father of 14 publicly known children, Elon Musk must know what it’s like when the whole family’s vying for your attention. Tesla shareholders want Musk to keep his eyes on the road. SpaceX shareholders want him to keep gazing skyward. Musk just wants everyone to understand he knows exactly what the going rate for his mind-share is.
As SpaceX prepares for an IPO worth as much as $1.75 trillion this year, the world’s richest man is negotiating a pay package structure that could net him $1 trillion, the Financial Times reported last week. Like Musk’s other trillion-dollar pay package over at Tesla, the SpaceX compensation plan is pegged to several lofty goals, such as building a massive network of space-based data centers and establishing a Mars colony with a population surpassing 1 million. Part of Musk’s Tesla pay package also depends on the company producing 1 million humanoid robots. It’s a hedge against Mars turning out to be truly uninhabitable for humans.
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Earnings at $5.5 trillion Nvidia are no longer just a simple update from head office, not when it’s the world’s most valuable company by roughly $700 billion (an Exxon Mobil’s worth, basically).
When executives report on its fiscal first quarter this Wednesday, markets will be looking for what the numbers tell us about semiconductor demand, capital spending by mega-cap technology firms, the near-term trajectory of the Nasdaq, the AI trade that is the engine of this year’s market rally and the fate of civilization generally. Okay, we made up that last one. Sort of.
Competitive Advantage
While CEO Jensen Huang was one of the powerful executives who joined President Donald Trump at a summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping last week, the meeting ended without any major deals. The US did approve 10 Chinese firms as buyers for the H200, Nvidia’s second-most powerful AI chip but, major caveat, Trump told reporters no purchases have been made because China is increasingly developing and relying on its own advanced AI chips.
There remains concrete business at home. Projected 2026 capital spending by AI hyperscalers like Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft has risen from $531 billion in December to $725 billion, according to BNP Paribas, underscoring just how dramatically AI investment, which requires semiconductors, is accelerating. That means even if Nvidia cedes some of its roughly 85% market share to established competitors like AMD and Qualcomm, upstarts like the newly public Cerebras and hyperscalers launching their own chips, there’s still plenty of forecasted money to be made. Take the fourth quarter of its 2026 fiscal year, when revenue rose 73% year over year to $68 billion or the $78 billion forecast executives offered for this week’s report. It’s enough to mean that China doing its own thing and competitors finding their feet are unlikely to fluster bullish analysts:
- Wells Fargo forecasts Nvidia’s data center capacity will increase from 9.2 gigawatts in the previous fiscal year to 15.7 GW in the current one. They see annual data center revenue topping $500 billion in fiscal 2028 and $600 billion in fiscal 2029, and earlier this month, set a $315 target price for the stock. Bank of America analysts are even more bullish, with a $320 target.
- The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index, which tracks the sector, is up 64% this year, compared with Nvidia’s 23% advance, highlighting the explosive growth of rivals. But a more notable broader market concern is how both trounce the S&P 500’s 8.7%.
  Seesaw: Still, there’s a lot riding on the immediate term. Depending on whether Nvidia meets or beats expectations, Saxo investment bank strategist Koen Hoorelbeke wrote that options traders are pricing in an 8% move in either direction for Nvidia shares. Buckle up.
Written by Sean Craig
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Photo via Fisher Investments
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Investors seem to be pining for 2013, and not because they want to put on a peplum top, scarf a cronut and blast Lorde’s debut hit “Royals.” Instead, they’re boosting a cryptocurrency based on bitcoin but tweaked with the idea that bitcoin has strayed from its original intent.
Zcash zoomed ahead 55% over the month to Friday and nearly 1,200% over the past year, per CoinMarketCap. Crypto enthusiasts could be tired of poking bitcoin with a stick and saying, “Do something,” as the coin hovers around $80,000. Meanwhile, bitcoin’s mainstream-ization has investors looking to Zcash as an alternative they think might stay truer to crypto’s privacy promise.
Bitcoin, But Actually Anonymous
Ten-year-old Zcash is nearly a carbon copy of bitcoin with a supply that’ll never exceed 21 million tokens, a mining system for adding new tokens, and a four-year halving cycle. But its key difference is the option to hide all transaction details by encrypting them. When using bitcoin, users have pseudonyms connected to public addresses; other details, like amounts, are viewable by anyone peeking at the blockchain. A little sleuthing can often suss out who’s who, and critics say that makes it easier to monitor users.
Josh Swihart, the CEO of Zcash Open Development Lab (a company that works on Zcash), told Consensus Miami audiences this month that bitcoin as a peer-to-peer payment method is fundamentally broken. Now, it mainly functions as a store of value and a wrapper for ETFs. That’s a far cry from its early roots as a way to anonymously buy pizza or drugs.
Zcash’s privacy-above-all attitude has attracted investments but also pushback:
- Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss ponied up $50 million last fall to launch Cypherpunk Technologies. It’s basically a Zcash holding company with 300,000 of the tokens. Cypherpunk also has a stockpile of Zcash’s competitor Monero.
- On the flipside, Binance held a delisting vote for Zcash last year. The largest crypto exchange globally, Binance could be concerned about Zcash’s regulatory status. The EU’s anti-money laundering regulation will ban privacy coins like Zcash starting next summer.
Fundamentally Opposed: The US has been friendly to privacy coins so far, with the SEC recently closing a review of Zcash without taking any action. But crypto is moving toward more transparency, not less, after the aptly named Clarity Act got pushed to the full Senate for a vote. Privacy coins like Zcash may appeal to crypto’s early users, but they’re a tough sell to regulators looking to crack down on financial crimes.
Written by Jamie Wilde
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Photo via SmarterAuto
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Revolut is trading its startup hoodie for a suit worthy of Logan Roy.
The London-based firm is preparing to launch a private bank later this year after securing approval from UK regulators to expand its investment offerings, according to the Financial Times. The UK’s most valuable fintech, which got the green light from regulators to expand its services, plans to offer a “broader product suite, spanning leveraged products, managed portfolio solutions and private wealth services,” according to a statement shared with The Daily Upside.
“Private banking is an area we’re exploring as part of our ongoing efforts to expand and enhance our product offerings,” a Revolut spokesperson said.
The US-Europe Gap
European banks are navigating a tricky landscape due in part to strict capital rules that they say make it tough to compete with Wall Street. Earlier this year, the president of industry group European Banking Federation warned European Commission officials that “the regulatory and supervisory landscape has grown increasingly complex and fragmented,” Reuters reported. The Trump administration, on the other hand, has been focused on deregulation in the banking space.
European firms BNP Paribas and SocGen saw softer investment banking revenues in their first quarters. Across the pond, US firms including JPMorgan, Wells Fargo and Citigroup are raking in the dough, thanks in part to higher income from trading and assets under management.
Revolut isn’t the only European firm hoping to capitalize on the high returns and stable fee income that wealth management promises:
- Last year, Lloyds Banking Group took control of a wealth management venture it had launched with Schroders to target affluent clients, and Deutsche Bank said it planned to hire 250 bankers to grow its wealth management offerings.
- Swiss bank UBS has also been expanding its wealth management practice and is increasingly tapping artificial intelligence to help. In February, UK lender NatWest struck a deal to acquire wealth manager Evelyn Partners.
ECB Not Buying It: The European Central Bank (ECB) doesn’t appreciate EU banks huffing that the US goes easier on banks. In fact, the US places stricter limits on large lenders, and even proposed lighter rules would only narrow that gap, not reverse it, the ECB staff said in a recent paper.
Written by Mallika Mitra
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- PE’s Blondie Bestie: Private equity firms including Blackstone and CD&R are considering bidding for Ben & Jerry’s parent Magnum Ice Cream, which was spun off from Unilever just five months ago.
- Take a Hike: Despite the dovish rhetoric of new Fed Chair Kevin Warsh, traders now expect a rate hike to be the Federal Reserve’s next move due to the recent uptick in inflation.
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