Hello and welcome to Alts Cafe.
A curated pour of the week’s most important alt investing stories, customized and brewed to your liking.
Table of Contents
Highlights
- Startups & VC: The SpaceX-Anthropic-OpenAI mega-listing trifecta is asking markets to absorb $200 billion in new equity, more than all US IPO proceeds from 2022-2026 combined.
- International Investing: Korea’s KOSPI plunges 8% and trips a circuit breaker as the AI chip trade unwinds
- Sports: Real Madrid opens the door to a stake sale at a €10 billion valuation
- Prediction Markets: Kalshi traders say Hormuz shipping won’t normalize until 2027
- Music & Film: YouTube overtakes Netflix in daily watch time for the first time
- Crypto: Bitcoin cracks $60,000 after a record 13-day ETF outflow streak
- Collectibles, Culture and Luxury: The finest known He-Man hits the block as the new movie opens
- Private Equity & Private Credit: Redemption gates spread from private credit into private equity
- Real Estate: Home sales surge as the median price hits a record $429,300
- Precious Metals and Gems: China halts sulphuric acid exports, squeezing global copper supply
- Artwork: A $60 million Modigliani nude leads Europe’s most valuable collection ever auctioned
- Farmland: The US confirms its first screwworm case since 1966 with the cattle herd at a 75-year low
- Wine, Whiskey & Spirits: Pickle shot maker Dirty Dill invites its customers onto the cap table
- Other: Trulieve becomes the first US cannabis company on the NYSE
International Investing
Around the world…
- 🇰🇷 Korea‘s KOSPI plunges as much as 8.8% and triggers an emergency trading halt, with Samsung and SK Hynix leading a tech rout that spread across Japan, Hong Kong, and Shanghai
- 🇮🇳 India scraps taxes on foreign investors in government bonds, eliminating a 20% withholding tax and removing ownership caps in a bid to attract capital and steady the rupee
- 🇨🇳 Beijing drafts a $295 billion plan for a nationwide AI data center network built on at least 80% domestic chips, squeezing out Nvidia and AMD
- 🇹🇭 Thailand touts a $31 billion land bridge across the Kra Isthmus as the Hormuz crisis revives appetite for chokepoint workarounds
Why it matters: South Korea’s market crash
Monday’s South Korea market crash is all about concentration risk.
Samsung and SK Hynix together account for roughly half of the index’s market cap, so when Broadcom’s soft guidance and a hot US jobs report hit the AI trade, an entire national stock market went into circuit-breaker territory in an hour.
Korea recently overtook India as the world’s sixth-largest equity market on the back of that same chip rally.
Watch how quickly foreign capital returns. The answer will reveal whether investors still treat Korea as a market or as a trade.
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Startups & VC
- SpaceX lists Friday on the Nasdaq at a fixed $135 per share, at a $1.77 trillion valuation in the largest IPO in history
- Equity crowdfunding posts its weakest month since 2021 as Reg CF raises just $11.1 million and investor attention shifts to public markets
- OpenAI files its confidential S-1 a week after Anthropic, putting roughly $3.6 trillion of combined valuation in the IPO pipeline
- Anthropic’s gross margin is being called the most important number in tech
- Fusion startup Helion raises $465 million at a $15.5 billion valuation, nearly triple its January 2025 mark
- DeepSeek nears a $7.4 billion first funding round at up to $59 billion
- Quantinuum raises $1.68 billion in quantum computing’s biggest IPO, then closes its debut flat
- Trump’s $100,000 H-1B fee was meant to slow foreign tech hiring, but top unicorns are hiring more visa holders than before
Why it matters: SpaceX’s fixed-price IPO
This the most unusual feature of the most consequential listing of the decade.
By setting $135 a week early instead of running a normal book-build, Musk replaced price discovery with a take-it-or-leave-it signal of confidence, and any downward adjustment now would read as a stumble.
The bigger story is supply: SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI could together ask public markets to absorb around $200 billion in new equity, more than all US IPO proceeds from 2022 through early 2026 combined.
Founders of the world’s most valuable private companies are all selling at once, and that asymmetry rarely favors the buyer.
Where does the cash come from, and what gets sold to fund it?
Sports
- Real Madrid entertains selling a stake for the first time, with Perez floating a €10 billion valuation
- EQT becomes the first official private markets partner of the ATP Tour, activating across 15 tournaments
- Ronaldo tops the Forbes athlete list for a fourth straight year at a record-tying $300 million
- Knicks fans are clearing out team stores daily as the Finals run turns merch into MSG’s fastest-growing revenue line
- Women’s fanwear brand DannijoPro grows 120% a year on an official NBA license, filling a supply desert in the $36 billion sports merchandise market
Why it matters: Real Madrid
Real Madrid testing the waters at €10 billion is the clearest data point yet on how far sports valuations have detached from traditional multiples.
Nine times revenue is nearly double what Apollo paid for crosstown rival Atletico and triple where Juventus trades.
The real pitch is that the club is a cultural asset, closer to a work of art than a cash flow stream, and Perez has framed any stake as more like a sponsorship than ownership.
That logic has worked in US leagues, where no relegation risk supports 9x multiples, but European football carries existential downside that Real’s price ignores.
If a sovereign fund or PE firm pays it anyway, every storied club in Europe just got marked up.
Prediction Markets
- Kalshi traders now say Strait of Hormuz traffic won’t return to normal until at least year-end, with reopen-by-August odds collapsing from 66% to roughly 21% in two weeks
- DraftKings turns profitable as prediction markets become its key growth engine, with annualized event-contract volume hitting $2.3 billion
Why it matters: The Hormuz repricing
This is prediction markets doing the job Wall Street research is supposed to do, faster and in public.
Odds of the strait reopening by August fell from two-thirds to one-in-five in a fortnight, front-running JPMorgan’s warning that operational oil inventories hit stress levels in late June.
With Brent holding in the mid $90s, the market’s calm rests entirely on finite buffers, and event contracts are now the cleanest real-time gauge of when that calm breaks.
Prediction markets have crossed from novelty to market infrastructure in under two years.
Music & Film
- YouTubers Kane Parsons and Curry Barker are turning Hollywood upside down as Backrooms and Obsession both cross $200 million worldwide on a combined $11 million in budgets
- Broadway wraps a record $1.91 billion season at 90.8% capacity, powered by celebrity-led plays grossing double what the category did two seasons ago
- Hollywood locks in labor peace through 2030 as the DGA reaches a four-year deal in 29 days
- YouTube overtakes Netflix in average daily watch time at 99.1 minutes to 93.4, with the fastest growth among men 55 to 64
- AI music startup Suno raises $400 million at $5.4 billion while still fighting copyright suits from Universal and Sony
- One in three Spotify streams now goes to songs at least a decade old, with Billie Jean topping global charts 43 years after release
- Netflix’s film chief says the streamer has accepted it won’t work with directors who want theatrical
- Bill Ackman’s Pershing Square dumps its entire Universal Music stake days after UMG rejected his $64 billion bid, netting $600 million in profit
Why it matters: The Backrooms and Obsession phenomenon
This is the best ROI story in entertainment right now.
Curry Barker made Obsession for $750,000 and it has grossed over $220 million, while 20-year-old Kane Parsons turned a 4chan-inspired YouTube series into A24’s highest-grossing release ever.
The structural shift is that YouTube has become Hollywood’s farm system: the platform now beats Netflix on daily watch time, mints directors with built-in audiences, and supplies pre-validated IP with tens of millions of views as proof of demand.
Studios buying that pipeline are effectively outsourcing development risk to the internet.
For investors, micro-budget horror with attached creator audiences may be the most asymmetric bet in media. Heck, Blumhouse built a whole studio on that.
Crypto
- Bitcoin sinks below $60,000 for the first time since October 2024 after a record 13 straight days of ETF outflows drained $4.4 billion, leaving BTC at roughly half its all-time high
- Crypto VC deal count falls to a five-year low of roughly 50 deals in May as investors rotate to AI
- The Trump family has made $2.3 billion from crypto since retaking the White House
- The average cost to mine one Bitcoin now sits near $85,000, leaving the network mining at a loss with BTC in the mid $60,000s
- Bybit and Kraken open tokenized access to the SpaceX IPO as exchanges race to wrap the listing in perps and tracker tokens
Why it matters: Bitcoin’s break below $60,000
This is less about crypto and more about competition for capital.
The same week BTC cracked, SpaceX priced the largest IPO ever, Alphabet raised $80 billion, and AI startups absorbed billions more
The record ETF outflow streak shows institutions funding those trades by selling their most liquid risk asset.
Meanwhile the mining economics have inverted: at an estimated $85,000 average production cost, the network is operating underwater.
The contrarian setup is that crypto infrastructure keeps being adopted even as the token prices fall, with the CFTC approving perps, exchanges tokenizing IPO access, and stablecoins displacing CBDCs.
BTC price is in a bear market; but the rails are not.
Collectibles, Culture and Luxury
- The finest known 1983 He-Man figure, graded AFA 90, headlines LCG’s Spring Premier auction with a $50,000 estimate timed to the Masters of the Universe movie release
- US demand for Panini World Cup stickers is running three to five times above 2022 levels, with retailers selling out within a week of release
Why it matters: The He-Man sale
This is a clean case study in how Hollywood release calendars have become pricing catalysts for vintage toys.
LCG sold a sealed Castle Grayskull for $209,000 last year, and it is now running the finest known He-Man figure against the exact weekend a new Masters of the Universe film hits theaters, betting that a fresh generation of fans rediscovering the franchise will bid nostalgia to new records.
The mechanism is the same one driving Panini stickers to three to five times 2022 demand: scheduled cultural events create predictable demand spikes for scarce physical collectibles.
Ironically, the movie itself flopped with the under-12s it targeted and skewed toward 45-to-54-year-olds.
This is bearish for Mattel but arguably bullish for the auction, since the people showing up are precisely the ones with childhood attachment and disposable income
Private Equity & Private Credit
- Blackstone’s $79 billion BCRED caps withdrawals at 5% against 10% in requests, Cliffwater faces 17%, and Partners Group extends limits into private equity
- Apollo and Blackstone anchor a $35 billion loan secured against AI chips leased to Anthropic, treating computing power itself as collateral
- PIMCO’s Ivascyn warns the first sustained credit default cycle in years has begun, with shadow defaults and PIK interest building beneath record-tight spreads
- New private credit lending drops 40% to the lowest level since 2023 as the default rate hits a record 6%
- Blackstone closes its largest Asia fund ever at $13.1 billion, double its predecessor
- Even the liquidity providers need liquidity, as Blackstone looks to bundle $2 billion of secondaries stakes into bonds via a record collateralized fund obligation
Why it matters: The gating wave
This is the first real stress test of the semi-liquid fund structures that brought private markets to retail, and the contagion just jumped asset classes.
What started in private credit, with BCRED honoring half of redemption requests and Cliffwater barely a third, has now spread to private equity via Partners Group’s gate.
These funds were sold on quarterly liquidity that was always conditional, and wealthy individuals are discovering the conditions mid-cycle.
Retail inflows were the growth story the entire industry priced itself on. So the real question is whether the wealth channel keeps allocating once it has seen the exit doors narrow.
Real Estate
- Existing home sales jump 3.2% in May to the year’s strongest pace as the median price hits a record $429,300, the 35th straight month of annual gains
- Hold the luxury line to a constant standard and Atlanta and Philadelphia are genuinely moving down-market
- National rents rise for a fourth straight month
- Core real estate funds post a steady 1.25% total return for Q1, with office logging its first positive annual return since 2022
- Seven in ten Americans now oppose a data center near their home, a 49-point swing in nine months that makes AI infrastructure less popular than nuclear plants
Why it matters: The K-shaped housing market
This is the story underneath the record headline price.
New analysis from Home Economics sets each metro’s luxury bar at its 2019 top-decile price and floats it with local appreciation, and the result is striking: in Atlanta and Philadelphia, two of the hottest appreciation markets in the country, the genuinely high-end share of sales has shrunk from about 10% to 7 or 8%.
The record $429,300 median is not a luxury boom, it is appreciation dragging ordinary homes over a frozen line while actual transaction activity shifts toward the middle and bottom.
Meanwhile the true luxury bid has concentrated almost entirely in AI-wealth geographies like the Bay Area and Miami.
For investors, that argues for the unglamorous trade: affordability-driven volume markets, not trophy coastal assets, are where the demand actually lives.
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Resources
Artwork
- Modigliani’s 1917 nude leads Sotheby’s sale of the Joe Lewis estate at a $60 million estimate, the most valuable collection ever auctioned in Europe
- New York’s spring sales close a $2.5 billion auction week, up more than 100% from last May, with Pollock fetching $181 million and 17 artist records falling
- A rare Tiffany Studios waterfall window from a Connecticut church could fetch $2 million at Christie’s
Why it matters: The art market just delivered its strongest evidence of reflation since 2022
May’s New York sales doubled last year’s haul, set records for Pollock, Brancusi, Rothko, and a dozen others
The supply side responded instantly: the Lewis estate is coming to market in London with the highest presale estimate for any single-owner collection in European history.
Estates that sat on the sidelines through three soft years are reading the Pollock print as their window.
The demand side is equally legible, with hundreds of billions in AI and IPO wealth being minted and trophy assets historically serving as the diversifier of choice when the ultra-wealthy get liquid.
If the Modigliani clears $60 million on June 24, the trophy art bull market is officially back; if it stalls, May was a head fake.
Precious Metals and Gems
- China moves to halt sulphuric acid exports, compounding a war-driven sulphur shortage that threatens copper, nickel, and uranium production from Chile to Indonesia
- A startup backed by Tesla co-founder JB Straubel plans a $70 million plant to mine copper from waste, the first new US copper refining capacity in over 50 years
Why it matters: The sulphuric acid story
This is how a shipping chokepoint becomes a metals supply shock.
The Middle East provides about half of seaborne sulphur, Hormuz has been closed since March, and now China has pulled the last flexible supply valve by banning acid exports to protect its own farmers.
Roughly 20% of Chile’s copper output depends on acid-intensive leaching, and Chile imports over a million tonnes of Chinese acid a year, so the world’s biggest copper producer is now competing with Indonesian nickel plants for the same scarce barrels.
This lands on a copper market already staring at a projected 10-million-tonne shortfall by 2040 from data center and electrification demand.
That is the backdrop that makes scrap-to-rod recycling ventures like Red Metals suddenly look less like climate plays and more like strategic infrastructure.
Farmland
- The USDA confirms the first US screwworm case since 1966 in a Texas calf, ramping sterile fly releases with the cattle herd already at a 75-year low
- The WMO warns of an 80% chance of El Niño by August, threatening 10 to 20% yield drops across Asian palm oil, rice, sugar, and cocoa while disrupting the Panama Canal
- With fertilizer prices up 30%, a Swiss startup is turning urine into approved fertilizer already deployed at the European Space Agency
- Farm influencers now out-earn their fields, with aginfluencer content bringing in six figures against $5,000 in a bad crop year
Why it matters: The screwworm
Detection is a volatility event, not yet a herd event, and that distinction is the whole trade.
The single confirmed case in a Texas calf does not change the dominant price driver: the smallest US cattle herd in 75 years plus a Mexican import ban that has erased roughly 1.5 million feeder cattle a year since January, with no meaningful herd rebuild possible before 2028.
The parasite infects animals, not meat, so this is an animal-health scare layered on a structural scarcity story.
As long as containment holds, headline-driven dips in feeder cattle futures look like buying opportunities, and the USDA is throwing $750 million and 300 million sterile flies a week at keeping it that way.
The thing to watch is a second breeding population or an export ban from a trading partner, either of which flips the picture from scarcity-bullish to demand-bearish.
Wine, Whiskey, and Spirits
- Pickle shot maker Dirty Dill rides 260% growth into thousands of liquor stores and now invites its drinkers to invest through a community crowdfunding round
- Liquor retail software startup Scotch pours a $20 million Series A after 500% growth and $1 billion in processed payments for liquor stores
See you next time, Stefan
Disclosures
- This issue was sponsored by Institutional 1031
- This issue contains no affiliate links.
