The Phone Call That Changed Everything
Notes from an Open Source Family Office. R&D for a sovereign life.
A tweet went viral this weekend with over 33,000 likes claiming something extraordinary: Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman called President Trump at the last minute and begged him not to end the war with Iran.
Trump had apparently intended to declare a complete ceasefire in exchange for reopening the Strait of Hormuz. Then the phone rang.
What MBS allegedly offered in exchange for continuing the fight:
· $100 billion to directly finance American war costs
· Full normalization with Israel after Iran’s regime falls
· A direct oil pipeline from Saudi Arabia to the port of Ashdod, turning Israel into a major energy hub
· ~$1 trillion in U.S. economic investment + $500 billion in American weapons purchases
· A new regional defense alliance — Israel, Saudi Arabia, and “moderate countries” under an American umbrella
· A joint naval force to control the Strait of Hormuz and Bab el-Mandeb
· Funding for strategic U.S. bases in Israel
· A joint reconstruction fund for a post-regime “secular and moderate” Iran
This isn’t just some fringe theory. The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Nation have all reported that MBS has been privately urging Trump to “keep hitting the Iranians hard” and push for regime change. Wikipedia’s own entry on MBS now cites the Washington Post confirming “multiple phone calls urging Trump to attack Iran.”
The result? Trump announced a temporary ceasefire — not the full end to hostilities that was expected. And today, Monday, the U.S. Navy has been ordered to fully blockade the Strait of Hormuz after Iran peace talks collapsed in Islamabad. CENTCOM says the blockade begins at 14:00 GMT.
Oil is back above $100 a barrel.
Here’s what I think most people are missing: this isn’t just about Iran anymore. This is the architecture of a new Middle Eastern order being negotiated in real-time — with American blood and treasure as the down payment, and Saudi money as the insurance policy. The Abraham Accords were the appetizer. This is the main course.
Whether you think it’s brilliant geopolitics or catastrophic overreach, one thing is clear: the people making these decisions are not thinking in quarters. They’re thinking in decades.
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The Signals
1. Terafab: Intel Joins Musk’s $25B Bet on Orbital AI
Elon Musk’s most ambitious project yet isn’t a car or a rocket — it’s a semiconductor megafactory called Terafab.
Announced March 21 at Giga Texas, Terafab is a joint venture between Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI targeting one terawatt of AI compute per year. Last week, Intel signed on as the primary foundry partner, contributing its most advanced 18A process node (1.8nm — the most sophisticated chip manufacturing capability made entirely in the U.S.).
The numbers are staggering:
· $25 billion initial investment (analysts at Bernstein say the real cost to hit targets is closer to $5 trillion)
· 100,000 to 1 million wafer starts per month at full scale
· 80% of compute output directed toward orbital AI infrastructure — SpaceX’s “AI Sat Mini” constellation
· The remaining 20% for ground-based applications: Tesla FSD, Cybercab, Optimus robots
This is vertical integration at a scale we’ve never seen. Design, lithography, fabrication, memory, packaging, testing — all under one roof. And Intel, the company everyone left for dead, just landed the most important foundry contract of the decade.
For Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan, this is the marquee customer win he’s been searching for since pivoting to foundry-first. Intel shares popped 4% on the news.
Why it matters: The AI race is no longer just about who builds the best model. It’s about who controls the silicon. Musk is betting that owning the full stack — from chip fabrication to orbital deployment — is the only way to build at the scale AI demands. If Terafab works, it reshapes the entire semiconductor supply chain. If it doesn’t, it’s still the most fascinating industrial experiment of the decade.
Sources: [The Next Web](https://thenextweb.com/news/intel-terafab-elon-musk-foundry-partnership) · [Forbes](https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmarkman/2026/04/10/intel-joins-terafab-to-build-elon-musks-25b-ai-chip-project/) · [Data Center Knowledge](https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/data-center-chips/intel-joins-musks-terafab-as-ai-compute-war-heads-to-space)
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2. Muse Spark: Meta Closes the Gap — and Goes Proprietary
On April 8, Meta launched Muse Spark — and quietly ended the open-source AI era it helped create.
Muse Spark is Meta’s first proprietary large language model. No open weights. No community forks. No fine-tuning access. It was built by Meta Superintelligence Labs, led by Alexandr Wang (the former Scale AI CEO that Zuckerberg brought in as Chief AI Officer in a $14.3 billion deal).
The model claims benchmark parity with GPT-5.4 and Claude Sonnet 4.6, and will power AI features across Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Ray-Ban glasses — reaching 3+ billion users.
The real story isn’t the benchmarks. It’s the strategy shift.
For four years, Meta championed open-source AI through Llama 1, 2, 3, and 4. Thousands of developers built businesses on those open weights. Then Llama 4 underperformed, developer traction fell, and Meta found itself in third place despite leading the open-source movement.
So Zuckerberg did what Zuckerberg does: he pivoted. Fast and without apology.
The developer community — especially the r/LocalLLaMA crowd — feels abandoned. Wang’s statement that Meta “hopes to open-source future versions” reads more like a placeholder than a promise.
Why it matters: The frontier AI race is now entirely proprietary. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and now Meta — all closed. If you were betting on open-source as the future of AI, this week you lost your biggest champion.
Sources: [Meta AI Blog](https://ai.meta.com/blog/introducing-muse-spark-msl/) · [Axios](https://www.axios.com/2026/04/08/meta-muse-alexandr-wang) · [247 Wall St](https://247wallst.com/investing/2026/04/12/meta-platforms-finally-releases-muse-spark-is-the-ai-model-worth-the-wait/)
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3. OpenAI at $852B: Testing a New IPO Playbook
OpenAI’s CFO Sarah Friar confirmed last week that the company will “for sure” reserve a portion of its IPO shares for retail investors.
This is not how Silicon Valley IPOs normally work. Typically, institutional investors — hedge funds, pension funds, sovereign wealth — get the vast majority of shares at offering price. Retail gets the scraps, if anything.
OpenAI is flipping the script. Here’s the context:
· Last funding round: $122 billion raised at an $852 billion valuation — the largest private tech raise in history
· Investors included Amazon, Nvidia, SoftBank, and Microsoft
· For the first time, they opened participation to individual investors and saw $3 billion+ in retail demand
· One bank’s system literally broke after opening access to the data room
· IPO filing expected H2 2026, potentially valuing the company at ~$1 trillion
Why it matters: This signals something bigger than one IPO. If OpenAI proves retail allocation works at this scale — and SpaceX is reportedly eyeing 30% retail allocation for its own eventual listing — we could see the most meaningful democratization of tech IPO access in a generation. The era of retail being locked out of the best deals might finally be ending.
Sources: [Reuters](https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/openai-will-reserve-portion-ipo-shares-retail-investors-cfo-tells-cnbc-2026-04-08/) · [CNBC](https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2026/04/08/openai-ipo-sarah-friar-retail-investors.html)
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4. The Helium Trade Nobody Can Make
Here’s an investment thesis that keeps nagging at me: helium.
You probably haven’t thought about helium since your last birthday balloon. But it’s one of the most critical industrial gases on Earth — and right now, the supply chain is in crisis.
Why helium matters:
· It’s irreplaceable in semiconductor fabrication (cooling, lithography, leak detection)
· It’s essential for photonics manufacturing, MRI machines, and precision optics
· Once used, it literally escapes Earth’s atmosphere — there’s no recycling
· It requires cryogenic tanks to transport — you can’t just reroute a tanker
What happened:
· The bombing of Ras Laffan (Qatar’s primary industrial port and source of ~30% of global helium) took that supply offline almost overnight
· Spot prices have surged 40-100%
· Qatar’s output expected to stay 15% below pre-war levels for at least 5 years
· Meanwhile, demand is forecast to grow 50% over the next four years, driven by semiconductors and AI infrastructure
Taiwan’s TSMC, the world’s most important chipmaker, depends on steady helium supply. Its CoWoS advanced packaging lines — critical for AI GPUs and sold out through mid-2026 — are among the most helium-sensitive processes in the industry. Any extended disruption could force allocation measures across the entire chip supply chain.
The problem: You basically can’t invest in helium directly. No futures contract. No ETF. The only equity exposure is through micro-cap Canadian exploration companies — First Helium, Desert Mountain Energy (up 100%+ YTD), Pulsar Helium — all extremely speculative.
I haven’t found a clean way to play this yet. But the thesis is strong: a non-substitutable, non-recyclable commodity with supply getting destroyed and demand accelerating. If anyone finds a better vehicle, I’m all ears.
Sources: [Reuters](https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/helium-shortage-has-started-impacting-tech-supply-chains-execs-say-2026-03-26/) · [Forbes](https://www.forbes.com/sites/tiriasresearch/2026/04/07/helium-crisis-tightens-grip-on-global-chip-supply-chain/) · [Tom’s Hardware](https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/semiconductors/the-global-helium-shortage-is-a-direct-threat-to-chipmaking)
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5. Photonics: Where the Next Asymmetry Lives
Speaking of things most people aren’t paying attention to — photonics.
The team at Citrini Research (yes, the same Citrini that sent an analyst into the Strait of Hormuz in the middle of a war to write a field report) published a deep dive called “Let There Be Light” in March on the optics and AI connectivity trade.
Their thesis: as AI infrastructure scales, the bottleneck shifts from compute to connectivity — specifically, the photonic components, substrates, and optical interconnects that move data between chips, between racks, and between data centers.
Their connectivity basket has more than tripled since they first called it, with a 35% return YTD. Lead name: Lumentum (LITE). But they argue the next asymmetry sits further down the stack — in the companies enabling next-generation photonic components.
This connects directly to the helium thesis above. Photonics manufacturing requires helium. Semiconductor fabrication requires helium. The entire AI supply chain — from the silicon to the light that carries the data — runs through a gas that’s literally floating into space.
The bottleneck stack keeps going deeper. First it was GPUs. Then power. Then cooling. Then interconnects. Now it’s the raw materials that make the interconnects possible. Each layer reveals the next constraint.
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Worth a Click
· 📖 [The Last Lecture](https://www.amazon.com/Last-Lecture-Randy-Pausch/dp/1401323251) by Randy Pausch — A dying professor’s lessons on living. Quick, powerful, and the kind of book you come back to.
· 🔬 [Citrini Research: Let There Be Light](https://www.citriniresearch.com/p/let-there-be-light) — The photonics deep dive. If you want to understand where AI infrastructure is heading, start here.
· 🐦 [The MBS Phone Call Tweet](
— 33K likes. Whether fully confirmed or not, the details align with reporting from NYT, WaPo, and The Nation.
· 🏭 [Intel Joins Terafab (The Next Web)](https://thenextweb.com/news/intel-terafab-elon-musk-foundry-partnership) — The best deep dive on what Musk is actually building in Austin.
· 🤖 [Meta Muse Spark (Meta AI Blog)](https://ai.meta.com/blog/introducing-muse-spark-msl/) — Meta’s first proprietary model. The end of an era.
· 💰 [OpenAI IPO Retail Access (Reuters)](https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/openai-will-reserve-portion-ipo-shares-retail-investors-cfo-tells-cnbc-2026-04-08/) — CFO confirms shares reserved for everyday investors.
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Cheers to the Freedom Fighters.
— Jordan Fried