James Altucher:

For 217 Years, Cryptographers Couldn't Decode Napoleon's Secret Letter. Then an AI Cracked It in Six Hours.

AI may now offer all that's needed to crack historical codes. Carter Church, an AI engineer at cybersecurity firm SentinelOne, provided the example, using OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra to decipher a coded letter sent to one of Napoleon's generals in 1809.

All Church supplied was a single prompt and a scanned image, and about six hours later, he had the answer to the 217-year-old challenge.

"What makes this impressive isn't actually the codebreaking, but that Astra completed the entire multi-modal workflow in [about] six hours from a single image and goal," Church posted on X. In that time, he added, Astra transcribed 1,300 hand-drawn signs, found a partial key that had never been connected to the letter, cracked the rest with its own simulated annealing solver, and cross-referenced surrounding letters to correct the document's published date.

Napoleon had wanted the letter to spell out the positioning of every French and allied army to one of his generals, and he had told his stepson Eugène, the Viceroy of Italy, to send it by an intelligence officer and to put it in cipher in case it fell into the wrong hands. The enciphered letter that Astra read is the surviving result of that order.

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Ray Blanco:

A Chinese Rocket Deorbited Over Minnesota and Left This in a Farmer's Cornfield

About a month ago, a Chinese rocket took off from a remote spaceport in the Gobi Desert, released 10 satellites into orbit, then reignited its engine and put itself on a trajectory to rain down debris over the American Midwest.

The rocket's flight on September 15 lasted between 75 and 80 minutes, and it came down without completing a full orbit of the Earth. Social media posts at the time showed streaks of fiery debris falling from the sky, heading north over Kansas toward Minnesota. The overnight spectacle was also visible on the western horizon from Wisconsin.

The incident was largely forgotten until the last few days, when a farmer in rural Minnesota discovered something unusual while combining his cornfield for the fall harvest. A circular metal object about 11 feet in diameter lay amid the forest of corn stalks in Scott Township, a community in west-central Minnesota.

What makes the debris in Minnesota unusual is its size – it's larger than most objects that survive reentry – and the fact that it likely originated from a rocket that fell from space the same day it launched. The upper stage of the Zhuque-2E rocket has a diameter of 11 feet, or 3.35 meters, perfectly matching the size of the object found in Minnesota.

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Davis Wilson:

I Just Bought $40 Billion of SpaceX for $25 Billion

I bought telecommunications company EchoStar (ECHO) in my Million Mission portfolio last week. I believe the stock could double.

EchoStar's biggest asset is one you should be very familiar with: SpaceX. EchoStar owns 262 million shares of SpaceX after selling wireless spectrum to the company. At current SpaceX prices, those shares are worth right around $40 billion.

EchoStar still owns Dish, Boost Mobile, and Hughes, which generate billions of dollars in annual revenue. But to be clear, I'm not buying EchoStar because I expect Dish Network to suddenly start growing again or Boost Mobile to take over the wireless industry. I'm buying EchoStar for the assets it already owns.

Even after subtracting the company's debt and potential liabilities, I estimate those assets leave $49–$59 billion in value for shareholders. Compare that with the $25 billion valuation today, and there's a lot of room for my estimates to be wrong and still make money.

Plus, I get one more thing I'm very happy to own along the way: those 262 million shares of SpaceX. If SpaceX continues climbing, so does the value sitting inside EchoStar.

That's a setup I'm willing to bet on.

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