On April 10, 1849, Walter Hunt patented the safety pin and then sold the rights for $400, which is one way to invent something useful and immediately fumble the bag. A reminder that creating value is great,** but keeping some of it tends to work better.**
The More You Add,
the Worse It Gets****The future of driving might…skip the driver?Space Tourism:
**Still Ridiculous. Still Selling.**Americans may not love EVs,
but they sure as hell hate gas prices**Welcome to the Upper Middle Class:**Please Hold for AnxietyAmerica’s Retail Graveyard Gets a
Second Act****MoreRefunds,MoreFalse Confidence**And From Around the Web:**Bare feet, bad roads, and supervised cybercrime
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There’s a point in business where adding more stops looking ambitious and starts looking like a yard sale with payroll. More offers, more services, more customer types, *more random side quests. *
For a while, it feels like growth. Then your margins get weird, your team gets slower, and suddenly the business is held together by Slack messages, caffeine, and denial. **The real move is not doing everything. **It’s getting brutally clear on what actually makes the business better, then cutting the rest before it cuts into your sanity.
What happens when getting around no longer requires owning a car, or even having a human behind the wheel? That question is starting to leave the lab and enter traffic. Robotaxis are getting closer, and the pitch is simple: lower costs, higher vehicle usage, and a transportation model that could end up cheaper than owning a car for a lot of people.
Waymo is already putting pressure on Uber and Lyft in San Francisco, and Tesla has positioned itself well with Full Self-Driving and the ability to produce vehicles at scale. Early on, the math comes down to vehicle cost. After that, utilization becomes the real game. The more hours these cars stay in motion, the lower the cost per mile gets.
The numbers are where it gets interesting. Uber still makes up less than 1% of urban miles traveled in the U.S. Yet economists estimate around **140,000 **robotaxis could handle current ride-hail demand. To cover most urban miles traveled in the country, the figure jumps to roughly 24 million robotaxis, still less than 10% of today’s registered U.S. vehicle fleet.
That is why this matters. **If the tech works at scale, this is not just a better taxi. It is a rewrite of how urban transportation gets priced, delivered, and owned. **And if the forecasts are even close, the payoff could be absurd. Some economists are predicting robotaxis could create around $34 trillion in enterprise value by 2030. The big question is whether anyone besides Tesla can build enough of them fast enough to matter.
The Takeaway:If robotaxis scale, transportation stops being a product you own and starts becoming a service you tap, which is bad news for old models built around drivers, fleets, and car ownership.
➡️ Read the full piece before your next car payment starts looking like a nostalgic hobby.
**Space is having another moment, **and this time Wall Street noticed. Artemis II just sent four astronauts farther from Earth than any humans have traveled before, reaching about 253,000 miles and edging past the Apollo 13 record from 1970.
That little milestone gave the commercial space crowd something to cheer about. Virgin Galactic shares jumped 21% on Monday as the company tries to claw its way back into relevance. It says commercial suborbital flights will resume later this year, and tickets are now going for $750,000 each, up from $600,000. (Because apparently inflation has reached outer space too.)
Virgin says 50 new tickets will go on sale, joining a backlog of 650 would-be “astronauts.” With a mothership and two Delta spacecraft, the **company thinks it could eventually do 125 flights a year **and pull in around $450 million in annual revenue. It also wants a second launch vehicle and two more Delta ships ready by 2030.
**So yes, the business of leaving Earth is picking up again. **The science is inspiring. The price tag is obscene. The demand, somehow, is still there.
The Takeaway:Space tourism is still absurdly expensive, but the money says rich people remain very committed to finding new ways to leave the planet.
➡️ Click through if you’d like to see how a moonshot turns into a business model with a boarding list.
EV hype cooled off when the tax credits disappeared and new electric car sales started sliding. Funny how people get less romantic about the future when the discount vanishes. But now gas is back above $4 a gallon, used car prices are climbing, and suddenly plug-ins are looking a little less smug and a little more practical.
The Manheim Used Vehicle Value Index hit 215.3 in March, up 5% from a year ago and the highest level since May 2023. At the same time, national gas prices reached $4.14 a gallon. That got people browsing. Searches for used all-electric cars jumped **26% **in late March on Cars.com. Used plug-in hybrids rose 7%, and traditional hybrids were up 4%.
Sales followed. Used EV sales climbed to **93,500 **in the first quarter, up from under 84,000 a year ago, even while new EV sales fell off a cliff. Americans bought about 213,000 new electric cars in Q1, down from nearly 300,000 last year. Dealers are now stocking up on used EV inventory, betting drivers will start doing the math. Used EVs still cost more upfront than used gas cars, but they are cheaper to run and maintain, with annual savings estimated around $1,000 to $2,000 depending on electricity prices. And with more 2023 EV leases ending, supply could rise and prices could loosen up a bit too.
Turns out people do care about the environment. They just care a lot more when filling the tank starts to feel like a felony.
The Takeaway:When gas gets expensive, ideology takes a coffee break and operating costs start making the sales pitch.
➡️ Watch the used EV market get a little revenge on gas prices here.
The American upper middle class is no longer some niche ZIP-code species. It is now the country’s largest income group. A recent economist’s report says 31% of U.S. families were upper middle class in 2024, up from just 10% in 1979. In other words, more Americans climbed the ladder, even if half of them are still complaining in airport lounges.
The report defines upper middle class as a family of three earning between** $133,000 and $400,000** in 2024 dollars. At the same time, the share of households living in or near poverty fell from nearly **30% **in 1979 to under 19% in 2024. A lot of that growth came from dual-income households, rising wages in white-collar jobs, and boomers sitting on pension income and stock market gains that aged very, very well.
**This group has also become a major force in the economy, driving demand for the nicer stuff: *first-class seats, premium services, upgraded everything, and all the polished nonsense that comes with modern comfort. But before we start tossing rose petals at the data, * there is a catch. Inequality also widened, with higher-income households seeing stronger gains while the
Here’s a tip, folks: a balance sheet has two sides of the ledger: income and expenses. If expenses rise higher than revenue… well, let’s get back to our bougie lunch meeting!
The Takeaway:More households may be earning their way into the upper middle class, but if lifestyle costs eat the raise, the view from the top starts looking pretty average.
The mall is not dead. It just got repurposed. The Arcade in Providence, Rhode Island, widely considered America’s oldest shopping mall,** has been turned into a mix of retail and affordable micro-apartments**. So yes, the mall rat dream is back. It just comes with a lease.
The bigger story is what this says about real estate. As dead malls, empty offices, and old factories sit around waiting for a better idea, developers are turning them into housing. The Arcade converted the upper floors of its 1828 Greek Revival building into 48 tiny apartments starting at $550 a month. Since the pandemic, at least 33 malls have added housing and roughly 192 more have similar plans. New Jersey malls are adding hundreds of apartments. A Colorado mall is building 347 units. Los Angeles is even making it easier to convert underused offices, industrial buildings, and parking garages into homes.
If this sounds familiar, it should. Andy Weiner joined us on the podcast last year and made a pretty strong case that “dead” retail often is not dead at all.** It is just waiting for somebody to stop being sentimental and start being useful. (🎧 Listen to it here.)**
And it is not just malls. **Former factories, schools, and office buildings are all getting dragged into a second act. **Turns out the fastest way to solve part of the housing crunch may be to stop pretending all this half-empty real estate still has a better purpose.
The Takeaway:When old commercial real estate stops making money, housing starts looking a lot more attractive.
➡️ Read the full piece and see how America’s saddest buildings are getting a new job description.
with Matthew R. Meehan
Tax refunds are up more than 10% this year, with the average refund landing around $3,571. Nearly half of filers also claimed at least one of the new deductions created by last year’s tax law. Nice. But before anybody starts acting like they beat the system, a bigger refund usually means one thing: the government held your money all year, then gave it back with no tip.
Listen. A refund can feel great. I’m not here to ruin the parade. But if you own a business, the better move is not waiting until April to find out you had extra cash all along. Good planning beats a surprise check. Every damn time. If your personal or business cash flow only starts breathing again at tax time, that’s not strategy. That’s a seasonal hostage situation.
**👉 Read the full story here **if you want the numbers behind the bigger refunds, and a reminder that “
**Bare Feet, Cold Beer:**In Annapolis, spring arrives not with flowers, but with a public sock execution., a tradition that started in 1977 when a sailor got sick of winter, torched his socks, andEvery year, hundreds gather for the Oyster Roast & Sock Burningbasically turned seasonal frustration into a waterfront festivalwith booze, oysters, music, andjust enough pyromania to keep things memorable.**Campaigning in the Deep End:A 75-year-old candidate for mayor of Johannesburgto protest the city’s infrastructure failures. Apparently thewent snorkeling in a giant pothole filled with muddy waterfastest way to get a burst pipe fixedwas not filing paperwork, butputting on a wetsuit and turning municipal decay into performance art.****Built to Help. Also Terrifying:**Anthropic unveiled an AI model that is apparently so good at finding and exploiting software bugs,Their solution is to let a small circle of tech giants use it defensivelyeven Anthropic decided it should stay locked up.beforethe rest of the world catches up, which feels a lot like saying, “Don’t worry, only the responsible superhackers have it for now.”
