Reading
Articles, essays, and other things I’ve been reading online.
October 2026
- No Signs of AI Payoff Outside the Tech Sector | The Daily Spark apollo.comApollo’s Torsten Slok argues that the massive AI buildout hasn’t brought any measurable gains to non-tech sectors in the U.S. “The AI story will be decided in the S&P 493, not the Mag 7, and so far, there is no evidence that revenue growth or margins are improving outside the tech sector,” Slok writes.
- Musk’s bet of the century ft.comThis week, Elon Musk confirmed that Tesla and SpaceX are exploring a merger, which would combine “most of his business interests into what amounts to a single publicly traded Musk Inc.” This potential conglomerate could grant the world’s richest man even greater powers, including majority voting control over Tesla, where he now holds only about a fifth of the shares.
- Living off assets? European household incomes in the ‘asset economy’ academic.oup.comAn empirical assessment of the “petit-rentier” class in the “asset economy” across 23 European countries. Perhaps unsurprisingly, “the ‘asset economy’ appears to consolidate trajectories of income concentration rather than democratisation.”
- Warhound raises $200M to engineer war dogs and arm them with Anduril gear techcrunch.comThe tech right’s dreams are truly the stuff of nightmares: Warhound “combines advanced cloning and genetic engineering to develop the next generation of working dogs for military use. The dogs will then get high-tech hardware developed by Anduril.”