Good Morning. Iran closed the strait. Trump opened fire. Gas hit $4.46. Let’s talk about yesterday’s escalation in Hormuz.

We also include Anthropic going Wall Street, ocean-powered AI nodes, and a Pulitzer sweep (forwarded this email? Join 523k readers).

The US-Iran standoff erupted yesterday in the Strait of Hormuz, with Apache helicopters sinking six Iranian fast-attack boats while Iranian drones and missiles struck a UAE oil hub at Fujairah, several tankers, and a residential complex in Oman (WSJ).

The flare-up followed Trump's launch of Project Freedom, an effort to escort stranded ships out of the Persian Gulf. Iran has blocked the strait since February 28, choking off roughly 20% of global seaborne oil and pushing US gas prices to $4.46 per gallon.

Brent crude jumped to around $111 a barrel before paring gains. Hundreds of vessels remain stranded, and analysts warn the conflict could settle into a slow-burn maritime fight echoing the 1980s Tanker War, with Trump's Beijing trip looming next week.

▲ Missiles fired in Dubai

Anthropic announced yesterday a roughly $1.5 billion joint venture with Blackstone, Goldman Sachs, Hellman & Friedman, and several other Wall Street firms to sell AI tools to companies owned by private-equity sponsors.

Anthropic, Blackstone, and Hellman & Friedman are each contributing about $300 million, with Goldman adding $150 million and General Atlantic, Apollo, Leonard Green, GIC, and Sequoia rounding out the deal. The new entity will embed engineers inside portfolio companies to redesign workflows.

The move puts Anthropic in direct competition with Big Three consulting firms and mirrors a similar $4.5 billion OpenAI venture called DeployCo. Anthropic is reportedly eyeing a public listing as soon as this year, fueled by surging Claude Code revenue. Timeline and how to invest.

BlackBerry is profitable again, and you've probably been using its software without knowing it. The company's QNX operating system now powers safety features in roughly 275 million cars, including lane assist, adaptive cruise, and collision warnings.

QNX, acquired in 2010, has quietly become BlackBerry's growth engine. The division generated $268 million in fiscal 2026 revenue, nearly half the company total, with a $950 million royalty backlog. Recent wins include Mercedes-Benz, BMW, and Volvo partnerships.

BlackBerry shares jumped roughly 50% since its last earnings call and 6% Monday alone, hitting a one-year high. The stock remains down 96% from its 2008 peak, but the company has now strung together eight straight profitable quarters.

▲ Watch the Blackberry origin movie on Netflix

The Book of Elon by Eric Jorgenson (podcast interview) curates Musk's most useful ideas in his own words, organized as a practical guide to purpose and success.

Here are 7 tactical ideas you can apply to your business today:

1. Run the utility math on every project. Musk's measure of success: "How many people you helped, multiplied by how much help you provided each person, on average. How many people you helped, and how much, that's the total utility (usefulness)" (p. 33). Before you ship another offer, ask yourself: is this moving the needle for a lot of people, or barely moving it for a few?

2. Use the Idiot Index to find hidden margin. Musk made his SpaceX engineers calculate how much more a finished part cost than its raw materials. One rocket nozzle jacket cost $13,000 but was made from $200 of steel (p. 62). "If the ratio is high, you're an idiot." Apply this to every line item in your business: software stack, contractors, ad spend. Where are you paying 50x the underlying value?

3. Reason from first principles, not analogy. "The normal way we conduct our lives is reasoning by analogy. That means we do something because it's similar to something else, or what other people are doing. When you think this way, you only get slight iterations" (p. 58). Most business owners copy what worked for someone else. Your real edge is asking what is fundamentally true in your specific situation.

4. Aspire to be less wrong. "It's OK to be wrong. Just don't be confident and wrong. Aspirationally, you want to believe things proportionate to the evidence. Not inversely proportional to the evidence" (p. 68). Run your beliefs through this filter weekly. What are you confident about that the data does not actually support?

5. Assume you're losing, even when you're winning. "That's why I always assume we're losing, even when it looks like we might win" (p. 57). Comfort is the enemy of compounding. The moment your business feels stable is the moment you should be hunting for what is about to break.

6. Feel the fear, ship anyway. "It's not as though I have the absence of fear. I feel it quite strongly. But when something is important enough and you believe in it enough, you do it in spite of fear" (p. 47). Fear is not a signal to stop. It is a signal that the work matters.

7. Create more than you consume. "It's much better to work on adding to the economic pie. Create more than you consume" (p. 42). The richest builders aren't shuffling money around. They're producing value that didn't exist before. Ask yourself at the end of every week: did I add more to the world than I took from it?

Want Part 1 for free? Grab "The Book of Elon: Part 1" here.

Buy the full book here.

▲ Birmingham tops ADP's 2026 graduate hiring rankings as Sunbelt cities dominate, with six Southern metros in top 10

▲ Panthalassa raises $140M Series B led by Peter Thiel to deploy ocean-powered AI inference nodes | Data centers, water consumption

▲ Harvard doctor challenges cholesterol orthodoxy, arguing statins are overprescribed despite carrying LDL above 18 mmol/L plaque-free for seven years

▲ Coronado beaches close as 30 million gallons daily of Tijuana sewage foul California's coast, with cleanup estimated at $1 billion

▲ Pulitzer Prizes honor Washington Post, AP, Reuters and Minnesota Star Tribune among 2026 winners for 2025 work

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