Quick pulse for Monday, November 2. If you run a BTCPay Server with a hot wallet, stop reading and check it. Then: OpenAI is raising less money at a lower price, Big Tech has signed up for more than $3T of AI bills, and Musk keeps adding buildings in Memphis. Tesla is 15 cars from matching Waymo in Texas. Italy wants to tax people on the way out. US midterms are tomorrow.

BTCPay: shut down your server#

BTCPay Server, the free self-hosted tool many merchants use to take bitcoin, told operators late Sunday to switch off their instances. “We are receiving reports of hot wallets on BTCPay Servers being swept by unauthorized attackers,” the project posted, asking everyone to run ./btcpay-down.sh until the investigation ends, per CoinDesk.

What we know so far:

  • Old versions are the target. The project says it found an attack vector in 2.4.1 and earlier (released July 23). It has no credible drain reports on the latest release, 2.4.7.
  • Attackers got admin access. Co-founder Nicolas Dorier says the attacker logged in as an administrator on hit servers. How they got in is still unknown.
  • No numbers yet. No loss amount, no count of affected servers, no technical write-up.
  • Some hosts already pulled the plug. If you use a hosting provider, your instance may already be down.

Hot wallets keep the seed on an internet-connected server so it can sign payouts by itself. Convenient, and exactly what an intruder wants. Update to 2.4.7, keep as little as possible in the hot wallet, move the rest to cold storage, and send logs to [email protected] if you were hit. InvestAnswers’ advice to patrons was blunter: empty them.

The AI money is getting more expensive#

Three numbers from the weekend tell the same story.

  • OpenAI is raising less. It now wants up to $20B, down from about $30B, at a $1.25T post-money valuation instead of $1.4T, per the Financial Times and CNBC. Some investors cut their allocations before Friday’s deadline, so the first close may come in under $20B. A UAE group including MGX leads, with Coatue.
  • Big Tech owes more than $3T. Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon and Oracle have over $3T in signed future AI commitments, per Bloomberg: about $1.3T in leases that haven’t started and $1.9T in equipment, energy and other purchases. Alphabet alone is past $1T, nearly 8x a year ago. Meta is past $800B.
  • Anthropic has ~$637B of compute deals. That’s the sum of the seven contracts named in its S-1: Broadcom, SpaceX’s AI unit, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Nscale and Lambda. Some are minimums, some are caps. Its IPO could trade as early as Nov 16, with reports pointing to about $1.5T.

OpenAI’s raise now competes with Anthropic’s listing for the same investor money, in the middle of a tech selloff. InvestAnswers’ read: the whole stack is a “house of cards” if money flow slows, and Anthropic pays its bill first from revenue, then investors, then debt. He flags the neoclouds, Nscale and Lambda, as the most exposed if a lab can’t pay.

The counterpoint is demand. IA’s Jevons post puts the price per million tokens at $20 → $0.15 while tokens consumed rose about 500x (his figures). Cheaper AI gets used more. The bottleneck is chips, memory and power, not appetite. He also notes only SK Hynix, Samsung and Micron make HBM, and all three are sold out.

Musk adds Spam and Gun Range to Colossus 2#

Musk said on X he is expanding Colossus 2 with two more sites. Gun Range, once owned by the local police, should run by end of November. Spam, a former Hormel warehouse in Southaven, Mississippi, follows in December, per Business Insider. Musk says he’s in Memphis up to four days a week.

The targets, from SpaceX’s Oct 20 earnings call:

  • ~200K GB300s a month brought online for the rest of 2026, mostly Vera Rubin chips next year.
  • 2.5-3 GW of compute by end of 2026.
  • +10 GW in 2027, so about 13 GW by end of 2027. “I would be surprised if we brought on less than 13 gigawatts.”

SpaceX reported 1.7 GW installed as of Sept 30. Getting to 13 GW means roughly tripling the GPU count again in one year, and HBM is already the constraint above.

InvestAnswers ran the numbers his way. His estimates: at 13 GW, at least $650B of annual recurring revenue, and a SpaceX price target of $846 a share at 3x 2027 sales. He also argues one SpaceX AI campus is worth 2.4-3.6x the replacement value of the whole bitcoin mining fleet. Treat all of that as projection, not guidance.

Tesla is 15 cars from Waymo in Texas#

Line chart of Tesla robotaxis registered in Texas rising from 314 on Sep 1 to 1,244 on Nov 1, just under Waymo at 1,259

Source: Texas DMV automated-vehicle roster via FSD Database, TeslaNorth, TSN and Robotaxi Pulse.

Tesla Robotaxi added 124 Model Ys to the Texas roster late Friday, taking it to 1,204, 55 behind Waymo’s 1,259, per TSN and TeslaNorth. Two trackers show 40 more Tesla entries since, for 1,244. The mix: 631 Model Ys, 573 Cybercabs, and 40 entries spelled “Modey Y.” Tesla had 578 on Oct 1 and 314 on Sep 1.

The catch: these are registrations, not cars carrying riders. The roster shows VINs, not where a car drives, whether anyone supervises it, or how many trips it takes. Waymo is still the one running a mature driverless service. But on paper, the next update could put Tesla level.

Italy drafts an exit tax#

Italy’s 2027 budget bill, cleared by the cabinet on Oct 28, would tax unrealized gains when a wealthy resident leaves. The rules, per Il Sole 24 Ore and la Repubblica:

  • Who: Italian tax resident for at least 6 of the last 10 years, holding at least €800K in shares, bonds and other financial assets.
  • Rate: 26% on gains not yet realized. Government bonds get a reduced base.
  • When: from Jan 1, 2027. Pay within 180 days, or defer by paying 50% up front with a guarantee if you move within the EU or a cooperating country.

The state expects only about €6.7M a year from it. That makes it a signal more than a revenue line. It isn’t law yet: Parliament votes by the end of December and can change or drop it. InvestAnswers notes California is weighing something similar, while the UK, Portugal, Switzerland, the UAE, Singapore and Hong Kong have no general exit tax.

InvestAnswers: midterms and a halved CAGR#

US midterms are tomorrow, Nov 3. IA’s base case is gridlock, which has usually been fine for stocks. The risks he lists are policy noise, inflation and deficits. He’s sticking with the AI builders. In Friday’s Weekly Edge he said the AI story hasn’t changed, only sentiment: QQQ sat on its 200-day average, about 10% down in a month.

His Sunday live Q&A asks whether bitcoin’s growth rate has halved.

Video: InvestAnswers, “Bitcoin’s CAGR Halved?” (live Q&A)

Quick hits#

  • ETH ETFs had a bad October. US spot ether ETFs lost $1.61B for the month, bitcoin ETFs $515M, per CryptoETF’s monthly recap. Milk Road had flagged $1.32B for ETH vs $26M for BTC as of late October.
  • Lyn Alden’s new top worry. She thinks bitcoin’s bottom is likely in, but now fears AI finding a math shortcut that breaks cryptography more than quantum. If bitcoin’s crypto survives about six more months of AI attacks, she expects that fear to fade, per Milk Road. Last week two AI labs claimed to refute a core complexity assumption.
  • Turn your effort dial down. A Johns Hopkins and Together AI paper found that max reasoning effort in agents cost up to 42x the lowest setting on easy tasks, and sometimes failed tasks low effort solved. Their fix: start low, raise only after a checked failure, per Every.
  • Crowded shorts. Milk Road’s Melvin, citing Goldman data, says hedge funds sold stocks at the fastest pace in a decade and short leverage hit the 99th percentile of the past five years. Squeeze fuel if earnings or the Fed surprise.

-Q

Sources#