We do not cover the day-to-day; we document the pulse of civilization.
Radical innovation, artificial intelligence, and the systems the modern world runs on.
One company in the Netherlands holds one hundred per cent of the market for the machine without which no advanced chip exists. In 2012 its three largest customers, who compete with each other, jointly funded its development and took non-voting shares so that none of them could control it. This is how that happened and what depends on it.
Its ten largest customers are 78 per cent of its revenue, and several of them are each other's declared enemies. One company manufactures the chips that Nvidia sells, that Nvidia's competitors sell, and that Nvidia's own customers design in order to stop buying from Nvidia. Its filings explain why it does not have to care who wins.
On 28 January a regulator authorised, for the first time in history, a human trial of a therapy whose purpose is to reset the biological age of cells. Behind it stands close to six billion dollars in a single company, two walls that have nothing to do with biology, and the first lifespan drug ever accepted by a regulator, which is for dogs.
On 28 September a Starship reached orbit for the first time and left 26 satellites there. The flight matters less than the machine that made it: a 350-bar engine, a heat shield of 20,000 ceramic tiles, and a refuelling manoeuvre nobody in history has performed.
Its own filings name the bones: $279 billion committed to the factories, $108.5 billion guaranteed to the builders, and eight companies that between them are assembling a planet. What each of them is actually trying to do, how they fit together, and what that leaves behind on the ground.