Wow, this is going to be a great weekend.
What's the market doing?
Unchanged from the opening. All is good.
Oracle up $10 / share. Holy mackerel. Closed much higher than that.
The chain:
OpenAI --> blades --> Nvidia --> TSMC --> AMSL --> data centers --> energy --> nerve center --> Oracle --> ChatGPT -->
OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, originally began as a nonprofit organization with the mission of ensuring that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.
However, to support the substantial costs involved in developing and maintaining powerful AI, OpenAI established a for-profit arm. This for-profit entity is called OpenAI LLC.
Important Note: OpenAI's structure is somewhat complex, involving a partnership between the original nonprofit and this for-profit arm, OpenAI LLC.
The nonprofit maintains oversight and control of the for-profit division to ensure that the mission remains paramount. While the for-profit entity can earn revenue and make distributions to investors, these are capped to limit the pursuit of profit over the nonprofit's mission.
OpenAI has recently transitioned this for-profit arm into a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC), a structure that balances shareholder interests with a public benefit interest, and the nonprofit will continue to control and be a large shareholder of this PBC.
Most notable investor in OpenAI: Microsoft.
Most important thing an investor can do is explore AI. Start with asking ChatGPT two questions.
- first: how are OpeAI and ARM related?
- second: how are Apple (AAPL) and ARM related?
So, enough of this.
My weekend will be spent reading poolside.
For those hoping to read about the market, the Bakken, current events, those folks will have to look elsewhere.
Warning: blogging this weekend will be all about reading. Regular readers should avoid the blog until Monday morning.
Photos from 10:13 a.m. CT, Friday morning, June 13, 2025, poolside, Grapevine, TX.
*****************************
The Book Page
From Yesterday -- Re-Posting
Three works:
- The Hare With Amber Eyes, Edmund De Waal, c. 2010, the link;
- The White Road: Journey Into An Obsession, Edmund de Waal, c. 2015, the link;
- Portrait of a Lady, Henry James, serial published in 1880 - 1881, and then as a book, 1881.
From a recent issue of The New York Review of Books, June 12, 2025, p. 21, "Anecdote of the Teapot," Christopher Benfey writes:
Henry James has one of the best opening sentences of any novel:
In England a teapot like this was part of a long-established domestic ritual.
“Under certain circumstances,” Henry James wrote in the opening sentence of The Portrait of a Lady, “there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.”
For me, that opening line competes with
"I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills," from Isak Dinesan's Out of Africa.
The comma after Africa made all the difference. All the difference.
I think I could do a blog on "opening lines."
Here's another one, link here:
I was talking with a friend last night about great opening sentences—you know the ones that grip you right away. I always thought A Prayer for Owen Meany opened up beautifully. In fact Irving has called it his favorite first sentence:
"I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice—not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother's death, but because he is the reason I believe in God."
No one I know has ever mentioned A Prayer for Owen Meany to me, but I discovered it on my own, and enjoyed it immensely.
From that same link, a long paragraph broken up:
"California, Labor Day weekend ... early, with ocean fog still in the streets, outlaw motorcyclists wearing chains, shades and greasy Levis roll out from damp garages, all-night diners and cast-off one-night pads in Frisco, Hollywood, Berdoo and East Oakland, heading for the Monterey peninsula, north of Big Sur ...
...The Menace is loose again, the Hell's Angels, the hundred-carat headline, running fast and loud on the early morning freeway, low in the saddle, nobody smiles, jamming crazy through traffic and ninety miles an hour down the center stripe, missing by inches ...
... Little Jesus, the Gimp, Chocolate George, Buzzard, Zorro, Hambone, Clean Cut, Tiny, Terry the Tramp, Frenchy, Mouldy Marvin, Mother Miles, Dirty Ed, Chuck the Duck, Fat Freddy, Filthy Phil, Charger Charley the Child Molester, Crazy Cross, Puff, Magoo, Animal and at least a hundred more ...
... tense for the action, long hair in the wind, beards and bandanas flapping, earrings, armpits, chain whips, swastikas and stripped-down Harleys flashing chrome as traffic on 101 moves over, nervous, to let the formation pass like a burst of dirty thunder ...I mean if you're gonna write a book about guys on motorcycles then why not just blow the reader away with something like that?
But it wasn't just the opening line for Hunter S Thompson. He had so many great lines. I used one of his lines in my remarks at my retirement ceremony, after 30 years in the USAF. To wit:
So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”Of course, nothing beats Jane Austen:
― Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream.
Jane Austen's most famous opening line, from her novel Pride and Prejudice, is "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife."
This line has become a literary landmark, recognized for its witty and satirical tone. The opening lines of other Austen novels include: "The family of Dashwood had long been settled in Sussex" from Sense and Sensibility and "Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence" from Emma.
One could go on and on.