Ray Blanco:

Elon Musk’s SpaceX, Tesla, and xAI in Talks To Merge, According to Reports

Three of Elon Musk’s companies – SpaceX, xAI, and Tesla – are in play for a potential merger. While the talks appear to be in the early stage, according to reports from Bloomberg and Reuters, it could eventually lead to at least one company folding into SpaceX.

Two scenarios are being hashed out. In one, SpaceX and Tesla would merge, per Bloomberg, citing unnamed insiders. In another, SpaceX and xAI (which already owns Musk’s social media platform X) would combine.

According to reporting by Reuters, a merger between SpaceX and xAI could take place ahead of a planned SpaceX IPO this year. This would bring products like the Grok chatbot, X platform, Starlink satellites, and SpaceX rockets together under one corporation.

Company representatives from SpaceX and xAI have not discussed this possibility in public. However, recent filings show that two new corporate entities were established in Nevada on January 21, which are called K2 Merger Sub Inc. and K2 Merger Sub 2 LLC. This suggests that Musk is keeping all options open.

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Chris Campbell:

What Trump’s Fed Pick Kevin Warsh Means for Crypto

U.S. President Donald Trump nominated financier and former Federal Reserve governor Kevin Warsh to succeed Jerome Powell as Chair of the country's central bank on Friday.

The nomination comes during a turbulent stretch for digital assets. Bitcoin fell sharply this week, sliding from a recent high near $90,400 to about $82,800, declining 7% over the past week. The broader crypto market has weakened alongside it, with investors pulling back from riskier assets as expectations around the pace of future Fed easing shift.

The Fed’s decisions matter for crypto markets because digital assets tend to behave like so-called risk-on investments. 

When interest rates are high, safer yields such as U.S. Treasurys become more attractive, drawing capital away from volatile assets like cryptocurrencies. Lower rates, by contrast, increase liquidity in the financial system and often push investors toward higher-risk bets.

Warsh is seen as more hawkish than Powell, especially given his past criticism of quantitative easing and the Fed’s balance sheet expansion.

"That’s raising concern about how aggressive [Warsh] might be with rate policy if inflation ticks up again. For crypto, the real issue is uncertainty right now," according to Shady El Damaty, CEO and co-founder at Holonym.

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Davis Wilson:

Apple’s ‘Remarkable’ Record Quarter Shows the iPhone Still Beats AI Fears

After weeks of investors interrogating Big Tech about AI capital expenditures, margins, and diminishing returns, Apple showed up Thursday with a very old-fashioned flex: It sold an enormous number of very expensive things, very profitably, very much on time.

In its fiscal 2026 first quarter, Apple reported $143.8 billion in revenue, up 16% from a year earlier, and earnings per share of $2.84, up 19% – records on both counts and above Wall Street’s expectations (revenue of about $138 billion and EPS around $2.67). 

iPhone revenue hit an all-time high; Services did, too; margins held up; and China flipped from lingering overhang to headline-strength growth. Going in, expectations were already elevated for the holiday quarter. Beating those by this much gets you a lot more room to run.

For a company that has spent the past year being asked whether its best days are behind it, the numbers arrived without any qualifiers. Or as Apple CEO Tim Cook called the earnings: “remarkable.”

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