Greg Abel's first week is a masterclass in deployment

May was an extraordinary month for markets. The S&P 500 posted its ninth consecutive weekly gain and closed up 5.3%. The Nasdaq gained 8.4% for the month alone. Corporate earnings grew 29% year-over-year for S&P 500 companies. The AI infrastructure trade, which looked shaky in March, is back with full force.

And then the calendar flipped to June…and within twelve hours, three things happened that made May look like a warm-up act.

Greg Abel, who inherited Warren Buffett's seat at Berkshire Hathaway at the start of this year, deployed nearly $17 billion in a single Monday. Jensen Huang flew to Taipei and announced that Nvidia is coming for Intel's last stronghold: the PC. And SpaceX filed its full IPO prospectus with the SEC, putting the largest public offering in the history of capital markets on an eleven-day countdown.

June also began the way May ended, with the AI trade in full command of the room.

But there are numbers underneath the surface that deserve equal attention. Manufacturing is booming. Prices paid are surging. The housing market is distressed. And oil moved higher on fresh Iranian drone exchanges over the weekend, a reminder that the ceasefire MOU is still unsigned and the street is still a live wire.

Let's get into it.

For the past three years, every major tech narrative has eventually looped back to one place: Nvidia's (NVDA) data center. The GPUs. The AI training clusters. The hyperscaler contracts. The $150 billion Taiwan investment. The whole story has been about what happens in the rack.

But on Monday in Taipei, Jensen Huang changed the channel.

At Computex 2026, Huang unveiled the RTX Spark Superchip which is Nvidia's first processor designed to run Windows PCs. Co-developed with Microsoft and MediaTek, RTX Spark combines an ARM CPU with a Blackwell-generation GPU on a single die, with 128GB of unified memory, capable of running AI agents locally and entirely on-device. It ships this autumn across a new line of machines from Dell, HP, Microsoft Surface, ASUS, Lenovo, and MSI.

Huang's framing was characteristically grandiose. And for once, the substance matched it. "This reinvention of the computer," he said, "is as big of a deal as the reinvention of the phone into what we now know as the smartphone."

The Intel implication is immediate and brutal. You see, Intel has dominated the PC processor market for decades. AMD and Qualcomm have been chipping away at that dominance. Nvidia entering, with the full CUDA software stack, a GPU that outperforms anything in today's laptop category, and the backing of every major Windows OEM simultaneously, is not a gentle competitive nudge. Intel (INTC) fell more than 6% on Monday. Dell (DELL) and HP (HPQ) followed Nvidia higher.

The Vera CPU for data centers is also in full production now. The early customers? Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceX's xAI, Dell, Oracle, and CoreWeave. "This is going to be our new major growth driver," Huang said.

For investors, RTX Spark answers a question the market has been carrying quietly: what does Nvidia's TAM (total addressable market) look like when the AI buildout matures and data center growth slows? The answer, perhaps, is: it expands into every PC on the planet.

The market signal for us? The PC market ships roughly 280 million units per year. Even modest market share in that category, priced at Nvidia's margins, is a meaningful additional revenue stream. And every PC sold with RTX Spark extends Nvidia's CUDA software moat into consumer computing. That moat is the real prize. We’ll keep tracking this space closely. 

Pull up Tesla's most recent SEC filing. Page 5.

And you'll see a single line showing $12 billion in revenue from a brand-new "super startup" Elon Musk has been quietly incubating inside Tesla.

This new "super startup" has nothing to do with cars or robots or space or AI…

But it sits at the center of what Blackstone calls "a $23 trillion investment opportunity."

And on July 22, Elon is expected to pull back the curtain and reveal exactly what he's building.

But Adam O'Dell already knows… and he reveals it all in this urgent video. 

The ISM Manufacturing PMI for May came in at 54.0 on Monday. That’s up 1.3 points from April, and the highest reading since May 2022. Manufacturing has now expanded for five consecutive months. New orders hit 56.8%, and production hit its strongest level since April 2022.

That is unambiguously good news. American factories are busy.

The only caveat? Well, it’s in the subindex nobody wants to talk about at a dinner party: the Prices Paid component is running at its highest level in nearly four years. Input costs are surging driven by energy, shipping insurance, and material costs that all trace back to the Strait of Hormuz. Companies are stockpiling materials to hedge against further disruptions, which is pulling forward demand and inflating activity readings. Some of Monday's manufacturing boom is real organic demand. Some of it is fear-buying.

Put it alongside the S&P Global Manufacturing PMI, also released Monday, which came in at 55.1 for May. 

This was the strongest expansion in four years but noted that employment fell for the first time in nine months, even as output surged. So, companies are producing more with the same number of people. That is either a productivity story or the beginning of a cautious hiring freeze. Or probably both?

The market signal we’re looking at is that the manufacturing numbers give the bulls something real to point at. But the prices-paid surge gives the bears something to worry about. A manufacturing boom that runs hot on input costs without a supply-chain resolution feeds directly into the PCE readings the Fed watches most carefully. Keep a close eye on what the Fed indicates in its next commentary.

Warren Buffett spent years building a reputation for patience. He sat on $397 billion in cash. He said he was waiting for the right pitch. He handed the keys to Greg Abel at the start of 2026 and wished him luck.

Abel has been busy.

Sunday: Berkshire agreed to acquire Taylor Morrison Home Corporation, a national homebuilder based in Scottsdale, Arizona, for $72.50 per share in cash. That’s a 24% premium to the prior close, valuing the company at $6.8 billion, or $8.5 billion including debt. Taylor Morrison (TMHC) shares jumped 22% on Monday. The deal is the first major strategic acquisition under Abel's leadership, and he wasted no time signaling it is not the last. He said Berkshire plans to consolidate Taylor Morrison with Clayton Homes into a unified site-built homebuilding platform. That is a departure from Buffett's famously hands-off operating philosophy, and it is deliberate.

Buffett, 95, told CNBC: "Greg did that faster than I could have done it, smoother than I could have done it, and I never talked to the CEO. He has launched."

Monday: Alphabet (GOOG) announced an $80 billion equity raise to fund AI infrastructure expansion. Berkshire is the anchor investor, committing $10 billion (split evenly between Class A and Class C shares) in a private placement. This adds to a position Berkshire has been rapidly building over three quarters. Google Cloud posted $20 billion in Q1 revenue, up 63%, with a $460 billion contract backlog. That is the business Abel is betting on.

Two deals. Two industries. Two very different signals. 

Housing is a bet on rates eventually falling and American household formation continuing. Google is a bet on the AI infrastructure cycle having years, not months, left to run. Together, they say something about how Abel thinks: he is not going to sit on the cash pile and wait for a once-in-a-generation crisis. He is going to deploy it steadily into businesses he understands.

The market signal? Every major investment institution is now watching Abel's next move. With $370 billion still in reserve after Monday's activity, he is just getting started. The Berkshire premium, the idea that what Abel buys is worth watching, is being rebuilt in real time.

Donald Trump has cheated death.

He’s overcome insane and criminal vote rigging.

And survived every indictment and impeachment thrown at him.

But his next move could make him a legend – and perhaps the most popular president in U.S. History.

Former Presidential Advisor, Jim Rickards says, “Trump is on the verge of accomplishing something no President has ever done before."

And if he’s successful, it could kick off one of the greatest wealth booms in history.

We recently sat down with Rickards to capture all the key details on tape.

For the moment, you can watch this interview free of charge – just click here.

On Monday, SpaceX filed its full IPO prospectus with the SEC. The roadshow begins Thursday, June 4. Pricing is on June 11. The listing is June 12 on Nasdaq, under the ticker SPCX.

Let's just sit with the numbers for a moment. SpaceX is targeting a raise of up to $75 billion at a valuation of approximately $1.75 trillion. Saudi Aramco's 2019 IPO, the previous record, raised $29.4 billion at a $320 billion valuation. SpaceX would surpass that by a factor of 2.5 on capital raised, and by a factor of 5.5 on valuation at listing.

At $1.75 trillion, SPCX would immediately be among the six most valuable publicly traded companies on earth, sitting alongside Nvidia, Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, and Amazon. It would be the most valuable company ever to go public on a US exchange on day one.

The business underneath the number: SpaceX generated $15-16 billion in revenue in 2025. The company is profitable. Its Falcon 9 rocket has become the world's dominant launch vehicle. Starlink, the satellite broadband service, is the fastest-growing part of the business and the primary reason for the premium valuation. The xAI merger in February added Grok and AI computing to the mix, though that integration is still early.

A Nasdaq rule revision effective May 1, 2026 means SpaceX will automatically enter the Nasdaq 100 on its 15th trading day (roughly July 6). Every index fund and ETF tracking the Nasdaq 100 will be forced to buy SPCX on that date. That is involuntary buying pressure baked into the structure of the market itself.

Elon Musk will not sell a single share. Dual-class structure gives him full voting control. So this isn’t a liquidity event for the founder but a capital raise for the company.

The market signal? The roadshow pricing process this week will tell you more than the valuation target. Watch the demand signals from institutional allocations on Thursday and Friday. Oversubscription of 5-10x or more would be a signal of genuine institutional conviction, not just index-forced buying.

Iran shot down a US drone over the Persian Gulf over the weekend. The US responded Monday morning by bombing radar and drone sites in southern Iran. Tehran launched a retaliatory strike. Kuwait reported incoming fire.

That happened on the same day that US-Iran ceasefire negotiations were described by both sides as "making progress."

President Trump went on Truth Social Monday and said, "Iran really wants to make a deal." He urged critics to "sit back and relax, it will all work out well in the end."

Markets took the comments at some face value. Oil rose but not sharply. Stocks held their gains. The market is behaving as though the deal is delayed rather than dead.

The calculus is simple but tense. Iran needs sanctions relief and $24 billion in frozen funds. The US needs Hormuz open. Both sides have a structural reason to reach an agreement. But the diplomatic track and the military track are running simultaneously in opposite directions, and that is not a stable configuration.

The market signal? The Iran trade is not dead. It is deferred. And the SpaceX IPO, the Nvidia PC launch, and the Berkshire spending spree are all very good at keeping attention elsewhere. Watch oil inventories quietly on the side. They are the number that doesn't lie.

While the rest of the market goes crazy for "the mother of all IPOs", a new Elon Musk innovation is quietly being rolled out nationwide. It's been 27 years in the making, and it could have a radical impact on how millions of people manage their money… and even collect Social Security. Here's everything you need to know.

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Alphabet didn't just raise $80 billion on Monday, it also made a structural admission.

The company has $125 billion in cash. It generated $174 billion in operating cash flow over the past twelve months. And it still needs to raise $80 billion in equity — including a $40 billion at-the-market program that will drip shares into the market over months — to fund its AI infrastructure expansion.

CEO Sundar Pichai's stated concern in Monday's announcement: "compute supply." The company's $460 billion cloud contract backlog is real and growing. But power, land, and supply chain constraints are throttling the rate at which it can fulfill that demand.

So Alphabet is effectively issuing new shares to fund a buildout it cannot finance entirely from operations, even at $174 billion in annual cash flow. That is the number that made the stock drop 1% on the news, even with Berkshire as the anchor buyer.

The tension at the heart of the AI infrastructure trade is this: demand for AI services is real and expanding. But the capital required to meet that demand is so enormous that it is outrunning even the most cash-generative companies in history. Alphabet, Google Cloud growing at 63% with a near-half-trillion-dollar backlog, still has to dilute its shareholders to keep up.

The market signal? The Alphabet equity raise is not a weakness signal. It is a race signal. The companies that can fund the buildout — Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon — will capture the AI application layer. The ones that can't will license their way in. That bifurcation is already happening and Monday made it visible.

Taipei, Taiwan. Population: 2.6 million. Home of Computex, the world's largest PC and electronics trade show, which opened Monday to Jensen Huang's keynote.

But here is the part that deserves more attention than a product announcement. Taiwan is not just the location of a conference. It is the single most important piece of physical infrastructure in the global technology economy. TSMC, the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, fabricates the chips that power roughly 90% of the world's most advanced semiconductors. Nvidia's GPUs. Apple's M-series chips. Qualcomm's mobile processors. AMD's data center CPUs. All made in Taiwan.

Huang's announcement Monday that Nvidia is building the RTX Spark there, and constructing a new campus in Taipei is not incidental geography but a strategic commitment. The world's most valuable company in the most strategically sensitive supply chain on earth is doubling down on its dependence on a 36-kilometre-wide island that sits 180 kilometres from mainland China.

The insurance industry has a quiet name for this risk: Taiwan concentration. Some version of it appears in the risk disclosures of nearly every major technology company.

Sure, none of this is new. But all of it becomes more acute every time a major tech company plants another $10 billion in Taiwan.

Meme of the day

That's it for today's Slate.

Big week ahead, stay close to the feed.