BIG MONEY: SpaceX heads into a record-shattering IPO with the ‘deepest moat that exists today’ as investors vow to ‘never bet against Elon.’

SpaceX could file publicly for the IPO as early as Wednesday, with a roadshow kicking off on June 4, the report said. The prior timeline put the IPO near the end of June.

The company had already filed confidentially and is seeking to raise up to $75 billion at a valuation of $1.75 trillion. That would surpass the current record holder for the biggest IPO ever: Saudi Aramco, which $29 billion raised at a $1.7 trillion valuation in 2019.

Since its founding in 2002, SpaceX has taken over the market. It claimed more than 80% of global rocket launches last year and has over 10,000 Starlink satellites in orbit, providing space-based internet connections to businesses and militaries.

SpaceX is a top launch provider for NASA and the Pentagon, which is also looking to the company to help develop President Donald Trump’s “Golden Dome” missile-defense shield.

“It’s a truly unique business with the deepest moat that exists today,” an investor told the Financial Times. “This company launches over 90% of Western payload into space each year. It’s like if you own the only undersea cable from the U.S. to Europe, it’s the only way you can get internet.”

Nobody has yet to beat Falcon 9 on price, and that’s before Starship undercuts Falcon 9.

DON’T TRUST GOOGLE: Why Did Torched Ghost Homes of Palisades and Altadena Just Miraculously Reappear on Google Maps?

TAXES: Europe tried wealth taxes. Most gave up.

Economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman estimate the Sanders proposal would raise $4.4 trillion over a decade. Competing estimates from the Tax Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute project significantly lower totals of $3.3 trillion and $2.3 trillion, respectively.

Saez and Zucman’s estimate for Warren’s proposal has more than doubled since the legislation was first introduced in 2021, which the economists attribute largely to the rapid growth in billionaire wealth during that period.

Zucman has estimated that U.S. billionaires pay an effective tax rate of about 23%, though Magness disputed that figure, arguing broader accounting methods place the rate closer to 40%. A 2025 paper by IRS economist David Splinter estimated effective tax rates as high as 45% for top earners.

Wealth taxes have largely disappeared across Europe. Twelve European countries imposed wealth taxes in the 1990s, but only Spain, Norway and Switzerland still maintain them today.

“In practice, these measures have almost never delivered on their promised tax revenue,” Magness told The Center Square.

According to Magness, countries including Austria, France, Sweden, Finland and Denmark repealed their wealth taxes between 1994 and 2018 because of low revenue yields and concerns that high-net-worth residents would move assets or relocate abroad.

We’ll see if California voters figure this stuff out before or after they drive out even more wealthy taxpayers.

THE ENEMY WITHIN (ITALIAN EDITION):

Salim El Koudri, the terrorist who committed an atrocity in Modena had sent a job application in 2021 to the university he had graduated in Business Economics from:

"You have to hire me as an employee. Fucking Christian bastards.

You and your Jesus Christ on the cross, I'll… pic.twitter.com/BwEllEj8OQ

— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) May 18, 2026

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: It’s Awesome to Have the Feds Focusing on Real Criminals Again. “In the Democrats’ morality-free, topsy-turvy world, you and I are the bad guys. When the drooling moron Joe Biden was doing his puppet thing in the Oval Office, his handlers tasked various federal law enforcement agencies with going after almost anyone except the actual bad guys. As I wrote on more than one occasion duing that dark time, I didn’t feel like a domestic terrorist, but the government kept insisting that I was one.”

NICE WORK, FELLAS: Hamas commander who helped plan Oct. 7 attacks has been killed, Israel says.

A long-serving Hamas commander who replaced Mohammed Sinwar and helped plan the October 7 attacks in Israel was killed on Friday, Israeli officials said Saturday.

Izz al-Din al-Haddad was the head of Hamas’ military wing, the Israel Defense Forces said in a news release. The IDF said he “was involved in the holding of many Israeli hostages in Hamas captivity” amid the war in Gaza and “surrounded himself with hostages to prevent his elimination.”

A coward and a war criminal, and now a corpse.

THEY’RE ALWAYS IMPORTANT, BUT YES:

I cannot stress enough how important local elections are going to become in the years ahead https://t.co/YioWkZixg9

— Oilfield Rando (@Oilfield_Rando) May 16, 2026

The Left has played this game — particularly with Soros DAs — with impunity long enough.

HOW VERY FRENCH: California Bureaucrats Meet the Four-Day Office Week and Start Complaining.

GAS LINES IN AN OIL GIANT:

And there are still people saying the US Blockade of Iran is failing. 🤡 https://t.co/vzHQ7zbwOd

— Trent Telenko (@TrentTelenko) May 16, 2026

YOU’RE GONNA NEED A BIGGER BLOG: Nicholas Kristof and the Collapse of Journalistic Standards.

Kristof himself offers a telling hedge in his column. He writes that “it’s impossible to know how common sexual assaults against Palestinians are” – which is an interesting disclaimer in a piece that also calls the assaults “systematic,” “widely practiced,” and “frequent.”

Adding to all of this, the timing of the piece is highly suspect: published the day before the release of a major Israeli report on Hamas sexual violence during the October 7 attack, which, unlike Kristof’s piece, is deeply sourced with documentary evidence. It’s difficult to view Kristof’s column as anything other than an attempt to shift focus and paint a false moral equivalency.

Ultimately, this is not just another case of Hamas propaganda being laundered for the Western masses. It is a striking example of the disintegration in journalistic standards that is eroding trust in the press. I know many who have published opinion pieces in the New York Times, usually representing moderate viewpoints, and they describe a strenuous fact checking process – but it appears to be selectively enforced.

The Times should have applied particular scrutiny to Kristof given his recent ambitions.

Scrutiny in pursuit of accuracy is no way to push the NYT’s preferred narrative, as Walter Duranty showed the paper almost a century ago.

Nothing has changed since.

A REMINDER THAT EUROPE’S ELITES ARE COMPLETELY DETACHED FROM EUROPEANS:

Croatia stormed into the Eurovision final with a song about Ottoman rule and the ancient Christian tradition of tattooing young girls to protect them from Muslim captors.

The song, performed in Croatian, has absolutely nothing to do with the usual “progressive” Eurovision… pic.twitter.com/PhYR9vqrYj

— Olena Rohoza (@OlenaRohoza) May 16, 2026

GET OFF MY LAWN: Here We Go Again: WHO Says Ebola Is Global Emergency as U.S. Virologist Smuggles in Pathogens.

AND THEN THEY WOULDN’T LET HIM — OR HARDLY ANYONE ELSE — REBUILD:

You live in a $2 million mansion.

He lives in a hotel because democrats burned his house down. https://t.co/mnZJHJsKz4

— EducatëdHillbilly™ (@RobProvince) May 17, 2026

YES:

A thought on Cassidy’s defeat.  Donald Trump’s philosophy of practicing politics is simple: “If you hit me, I’ll hit you back 10 times harder.”  This is his way of imposing discipline so he can get things done.  Many Republicans mistake this for childish petulance.  The ironic…

— Margot Cleveland (@ProfMJCleveland) May 17, 2026

This is the keeper: “The ironic thing is that when these oh-so-high-minded Republicans (Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, Thom Tillis, etc.) get their comeuppance, they are the ones who react with truly childish petulance.”

DON’T MISS THE LATEST FROM SALENA ZITO:

Appalachia is not just a place on a map or a forgotten talking point for the elite; it is a vast, complex culture rooted in dirt, grit, and enduring faith. It is the beating heart of the American working class, where the love of God, country, and family still reigns supreme.

It…

— ZitoSalena (@ZitoSalena) May 16, 2026

YES:

This real-time 1948 article from The Economist completely destroys the modern “Nakba” narrative that was invented decades later as political propaganda.

Straight from British eyewitnesses in Haifa, October 2, 1948:

“Jewish authorities urged all Arabs to remain in Haifa and… https://t.co/WIcnerXMmQ pic.twitter.com/pifBTXIzey

— Captain Allen (@CptAllenHistory) May 16, 2026

YOUR OCCASIONAL REMINDER THAT ANYTHING THE LEFT CAN’T CONTROL, IT WILL DESTROY, AND IF IT CAN’T BE DESTROYED, THEY’LL DISCREDIT IT:

You get the game here, right?

They file an absurd motion asking the Supreme Court to rule on a case where it clearly has no jurisdiction. Then when it obviously refuses (w 0 dissents), they accuse it of corruption to justify trying to stack the court.

Shameful. https://t.co/VwUlPiF41l

— AG (@AGHamilton29) May 16, 2026

CORN, POPPED: Israel Knows a Defamation Case Won’t Fly. That’s Not the Play.

Which brings us to the real mechanism: 28 U.S.C. § 1782.

Once an Israeli proceeding is in reasonable contemplation, an interested person can apply in the Southern District of New York (where the New York Times is headquartered) to compel evidence production from a U.S. entity for use in foreign litigation. A properly framed § 1782 application does not ask the court to adjudicate the case; it simply asks the court to order the Times to produce the factual basis for one published allegation.

The subpoena categories write themselves: documents identifying the source and evidentiary basis for the dog allegation; fact-checking notes and editorial review records; communications with cited human rights organizations about this specific claim; internal discussions of reliability or corroboration. The Times will obviously raise reporter’s privilege. That is expected. But the answer here is a measured response: Nobody is asking for every source on every story. The request is for the factual foundation for one allegation the Times has publicly called corroborated and extensively fact-checked and “deeply reported.” Either show the corroboration or explain why you cannot. Both answers are informative.

None of this is a technical defamation case, but the critics declaring the claim dead on arrival are focusing on the colloquial use of the word “defamation” expressed in a spokesperson’s tweet and missing the tree for the forest. The real question is whether there exists a narrow, disciplined legal theory that forces the Times to produce the evidentiary basis for one of the most inflammatory factual allegations it has ever published. And there is.

Clever.

THIS “TRUMP VINDICATED” THING SEEMS TO HAPPEN AN AWFUL LOT: Trump vindicated as OPEC faces collapse following UAE departure. “The price of gasoline is set to drop as the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) appears poised to collapse, experts predict. OPEC has long kept crude oil prices higher than they would otherwise be. If this pans out, it will be a major victory for the Trump administration, which is resetting global energy markets.”

Exit question: What would we do without experts?

NORMAL IS PRACTICALLY A FREAKSHOW IN TODAY’S LA:

Everyone's going on about how Spencer Pratt is running an incredible campaign.

In reality, he's literally just being a normal human being & mocking all the insane things out of touch politicians say/do. He's either one of the boys, or he's the greatest actor of all-time. People… https://t.co/BHmjYmH5Sp

— Jason Howerton (@jason_howerton) May 15, 2026

FLORIDA MAN FRIDAY [VIP]: That Guy Is SO Going Back to Venezuela. “It’s time for your much-needed break from the serious news, and this week, we’ll learn why they call it blow, what not to do to your boss’s Subaru, and when to stop drinking on that flight to Cuba.”

CHANGE YOU CAN BELIEVE IN:

18 months ago we were doing diversity and inclusion vignette training.

Today we’re obliterating terrorists, sinking entire navies, and snatching rogue leaders during their sleep.

Fort Benning is using bayonets again.

Understand how far we’ve come.

Not a step back.

— InfantryDort (@infantrydort) May 15, 2026

THE LOCKDOWNS CERTAINLY DIDN’T HELP: Down in the dumps: ‘Learning recession’ started in 2013.

REDISTRICTING DIDN’T LEAVE HIM MUCH CHOICE:

BREAKING: Longtime Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN) announces he will not seek re-election. pic.twitter.com/UUEVOgLazZ

— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) May 15, 2026

You’re in MAGA country now, Congressman.

COWARDS: COVID-19 Lies Exposed, Democrats Go Into Hiding.