Twenty years ago today, Google announced it was buying a little video website called YouTube for $1.65 billion.
At the time, YouTube was barely a year and a half old, wasn’t profitable, and $1.65 billion sounded like a wildly irresponsible amount of money for a website full of homemade videos.
Twenty years later, YouTube is one of the biggest media platforms on the planet, and that $1.65 billion price tag looks almost adorable.
Which feels like a good time to mention that ** The Liquid Lunch Project Podcast and Credit Banc both have YouTube channels.** Google has yet to offer us $1.65 billion (rude), but until then, subscribing is free.
Anyway, onto the news…
SpaceX Gets Smarter.(At least on the letterhead.)The Doctor Will
Not See You NowHouston, We Have
Revenue****K-CupsGet a ConscienceTax extension season is
officially coming to an end…**And from Around the Web:**Mozzarella Sticks, Magic, and a Nobel Sandwich
The news shaping business, finance, and technology, for better or considerably worse.
At SpaceX, artificial intelligence is apparently out. Super intelligence is in.
Elon Musk recently posted, “No more AI, SI. It’s better,” then said SpaceXAI would be renamed SpaceXSI.
The change follows President Trump’s push to replace “artificial intelligence” with “super intelligence.” In September, he signed an executive order telling federal agencies to use SI instead of AI.
It’s part of a broader renaming streak. The Defense Department now also uses the Department of War title. U.S. users of Google and Apple Maps see Lake Ontario as Lake America, and the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America.
Corporate America is adjusting too. Raytheon recently referred to the “Department of War” in an investor announcement.
Meanwhile, SpaceX picked up bullish ratings from TD Cowen and CLSA, and shares entered the week well above their $135 June IPO price.
So call it AI. Call it SI. If the stock keeps climbing, investors probably won’t care what letters are on the door. 🤷♂️
Names change. Investors still tend to care about the same boring little details: growth, earnings, and whether the stock goes up.
🔗 See why two letters suddenly needed a rebrand.
Utah is letting an AI system do something normally reserved for doctors: write prescriptions.
Nolla Health has launched a pilot that uses its app to evaluate adults with mild-to-moderate acne and issue prescriptions for a limited list of topical treatments. Patients scan their face, fill out a medical history, and the AI scores the acne and recommends a treatment. No office visit required.
The rollout is gradual. For the first 100 patients, two licensed physicians review every prescription before it goes to the pharmacy. For the next 400, the AI can send prescriptions first, with a physician reviewing every case afterward. If the pilot advances again, doctors will review at least 10% of prescriptions each month.
That matters because Utah normally requires a licensed professional to prescribe medication. The state gave Nolla Health a narrow exception through its AI pilot program. The company also has to carry malpractice coverage for AI-issued prescriptions, with rules spelling out who is responsible if something goes wrong.
For now, this is acne cream, not open-heart surgery. But it’s a real test of how much routine medical work states are willing to hand over to software.
Only time will tell whether AI doctors catch on…or whether this experiment “breaks out” in a different way.
Utah is testing whether AI can make routine healthcare cheaper and faster without removing too much human oversight.
🔗 Meet the AI that may be writing your next prescription.
SpaceX’s Starship finally reached orbit last week, and naturally, it made things interesting on the way.
During Flight 14, one of Starship’s Raptor engines shut down early, briefly raising questions about whether SpaceX would continue. It did.
Starship reached orbit and deployed 26 next-generation Starlink V3 satellites, each designed to add about 1 terabit per second of network capacity.
That’s roughly 26 Tbps from one launch. Based on SpaceX’s recent revenue per terabit, Luigi’s math puts that added capacity at potentially around $560 million in annualized revenue once it’s up and running.
Not bad for a flight that briefly looked like it might be having engine trouble. But the bigger story is what comes next.
SpaceX wants Starship to be fully reusable, including catching and reusing the upper stage. Flight 15 could be the first attempt. If SpaceX pulls that off and eventually gets launch costs anywhere near its targets, putting satellites, communications equipment, and even AI data centers into orbit gets much cheaper.
That could also create opportunity for everybody SpaceX doesn’t launch for.
The company has** enormous plans for Starship**, including thousands of annual launches and its proposed StarMind orbital computing network. If demand grows anywhere close to that quickly, companies such as Rocket Lab and Stoke Space could have plenty of business serving governments, telecom companies, and competitors that would rather not hand SpaceX the keys to the entire parking lot.
Flight 14 proved Starship can get there. Flight 15 may start showing us how cheaply it can keep coming back.
Fully reusable rockets could slash the cost of getting infrastructure into orbit, creating entirely new markets while opening room for competitors to handle all the demand SpaceX can’t, or shouldn’t, own.
🔗 Watch what happened on Flight 14 and why the next launch could matter even more.
Keurig is trying to make your morning coffee a little less guilty.
Its new AltaRounds are plastic- and aluminum-free coffee pucks wrapped in a plant-based coating made from seaweed. They’re fully compostable and work with Keurig’s new Alta brewer, which can make both drip coffee and espresso drinks.
There is, naturally, a catch: you need the new machine.
Keurig has plenty of reason to rethink the K-Cup. The company controls roughly 80% of U.S. coffee pod sales, but those little plastic pods have become an environmental headache. Keurig even paid a** $1.5 million penalty** over claims about K-Cup recyclability.
The Alta system is Keurig’s attempt to disrupt itself before somebody else does. The brewer still works with regular K-Cups, while AltaRounds come in several roasts and espresso options, with more brands expected to join.
**There are other options: **Brewbird, which raised $32M in Series A funding, uses compostable cups with whole beans. San Francisco Bay Coffee features roasts in compostable pods. Compostable envipods feature organic brews. CoffeeB (which licensed its alginate coating tech to Keurig) offers compostable coffee balls in the UK and Ireland.
So, while your coffee plastic concerns may soon be put to rest, your carbon footprint is probably still less than ideal. We highly recommend composting and staying off the grid except for your periodic fix of The Weekly!
Keurig is betting that the best way to protect its grip on single-serve coffee is to replace its own bestselling product before customers or competitors force the issue.
🔗 Go meet the coffee puck Keurig hopes can clean up the K-Cup problem.
One minute of money talk. Several expensive mistakes avoided.
with Matthew R. Meehan
Remember back in April when you filed a tax extension and bought yourself six months of not thinking about taxes? Well, congratulations. You have successfully used all six.
October 15 is the deadline for most individuals who requested an extension to file their 2025 federal tax return. That includes a lot of sole proprietors and **single-member LLC owners **whose business income runs through their personal return.
And here’s the part people occasionally misunderstand:
If you owed money, that bill was generally due back in April. Any unpaid balance may already be collecting interest and penalties because the IRS is damn good at remembering who owes them money.
Don’t turn one problem into two. Filing late and paying late can create separate headaches. Get the return filed and figure out the balance from there.
If you owe money but can’t cover the whole thing, paying something can help reduce what continues piling up. The IRS also offers payment plans for taxpayers who qualify.
If they’ve been asking you for bank statements, K-1s, receipts, or that mystery document you swear you already sent, this is your reminder to go find it.
And if you’re a business owner, there’s another reason to get this cleaned up: tax returns matter when you need financing. Lenders routinely ask for them, and “my accountant is still working on it” is not what they want to hear when you’re asking them for money.
The extension was useful. The extension is also over. Time to open those emails from your accountant.
The internet’s least supervised corner. Useful? Debatable. Entertaining? Always.
Fridays Wants Saturdays Back:After closing about80% of its U.S. locationssince 2020, TGI Fridays just signed itsfirst new American franchise dealin more than a decade: five restaurants, all in New York. It remains to be seen if this is a sign of the franchise’s revival…*or a growing trend of all losers now flocking to New York State.*Wizards Welcome. Wallets Required:Former tech consultant Justin Kersey quit his job to buildHarry Potter-inspired vacation cottages,complete with potion cabinets, sorting hats, and fairy villages. Each costs about$700K to build, rents for $200–$700 a night, and runs near90% occupancy. Turns out adults will pay handsomely to pretend taxes and email don’t exist for a weekend.Nobel Prize, No Day Off:This year’sNobel Prize in Medicinewent to three scientists who developed optogenetics, atechnique that uses light to control individual brain cellsand has helped researchers study everything from behavior to blindness. After Stanford’s Karl Deisseroth got the news,**he paused the interviews to pack his kids’ school lunches,**proving that even a Nobel Prize does not outrank morning duty.
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