Jane Seidel

After moving to Taiwan and taking up scuba diving, I recently started shopping for an underwater camera. What began as a simple search quickly turned into an exploration of the rapidly shifting geography of consumer technology. There was a time when the answer would have been obvious: buy a GoPro. The California company basically invented the action-camera category when it first launched in 2002. Twenty years later in 2022, GoPro still controlled an estimated 75% of the global market.

Ten years ago, interesting pieces of journalism could find interested audiences with a lot more ease than they can today. Search surfaced high-quality reporting directly from publishers, before AI summaries and rewrites started intercepting readers along the journey. Social platforms amplified good journalism to curious people. Independent publishers could reach an audience without knowing all that much about who that audience was. So much has changed.

Poring over the SpaceX IPO prospectus, a recurring theme surfaces: the massive, quiet influence of Middle Eastern finance in the most ambitious IPO in history. Sovereign wealth funds of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, their AI subsidiaries and the technology companies building data centers as part of these deals were all in the document. SpaceX lists on Nasdaq June 12 at a $1.75 trillion valuation.