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The American Economic Rollercoaster

May 8, 2026

Happy Friday.

We’re live on YouTube and 𝕏.

The current thing in tech and business continues to be the bull frenzy around memory and Situational Awareness stocks.

Today’s lineup

Gusto Co-Founder & CEO Josh Reeves at 11:45 AM
Sweetgreen Co-Founder & CEO Jonathan Neman at 12:00 PM
Refactor Capital Founder & Solo GP Zal Bilimoria at 12:30 PM
Airbnb Co-Founder & CEO Brian Chesky at 1:00 PM

The American Economic Rollercoaster

by John Coogan

Plenty of ink has been spilled about the split between AI and everything else in the American economy. The stock market is at all-time highs, Intel is up almost 20% today on the news that they will be making chips for Apple. Economic value and financial performance are highly concentrated in just a handful trillion-dollar tech companies. Greg Ip writes in the WSJ: “The AI economy grew 31%, the non-AI economy just 0.1%,” after citing several recent economic statistics:

Personal consumption, the biggest component of GDP, grew a relatively muted 1.6%. Investment fell in housing, business structures such as office buildings and factories, and transportation equipment like trucks and aircraft. Meanwhile, investment soared 43% in tech equipment, 23% in software and 22% in data-center buildings.

On the flip side, another headline hit the Journal yesterday: U.S. Adds 115,000 Jobs in April With Solid Hiring Across Sectors. Retail, transportation, warehousing, and healthcare all showed strong growth and led to expectation-beating jobs growth.

Digging in deeper, there are K-shaped dynamics playing out within the “real economy” as well. Two recent earnings reports tell the story pretty cleanly.

Whirlpool, which has been making appliances for over a hundred years and has been paying dividends consistently since the 1950s, is in real trouble. The stock is down 80% over the past 5 years and they have suspended dividend payments until further notice.

On the other side of the “real economy” you have Six Flags, which reported higher first-quarter revenue as attendance and customer spending both increased. Six Flags is not exactly a juggernaut of a business, it’s worth just $2.3B and the stock is down about 50% over the past two years. But the business is growing, despite rollercoaster rides being much less of a necessity than refrigerators.

But Whirlpool sells big-ticket deferrable necessities. A new refrigerator can be put off if money is tight, but your kids are only rollercoaster age for a limited time. Whirlpool also faces brutal global competition, and existing-home sales are down 3.6% month over month, which drives fewer appliance upgrades.

It might sound funny, but Six Flags actually fits nicely into a new barbell thesis of investing for an AI future I’ve been seeing pop up more and more. The Ellison family is now extremely long both AI infrastructure (through Oracle) and also legacy media like Batman and Superman (through Warner Bros.). Josh Kushner is in a similar boat with OpenAI and the San Francisco Giants. Roller coasters are anti-slop. You can’t vibecode Space Mountain.

Headlines

Anthropic: “We’ve signed an agreement with SpaceX to use all of the compute capacity at their Colossus 1 data center. This gives us access to more than 300 megawatts of new capacity (over 220,000 NVIDIA GPUs) within the month.”

Apple, Intel Have Reached Preliminary Chip-Making Agreement

CNBC: Nvidia and PulteGroup are helping this startup put mini data centers on homes

Ahead of Race to IPO, OpenAI Discussed Spinning Out Robotics, Hardware Divisions

AMD stock soars on Q1 earnings beat, better-than-expected outlook amid strong AI chip demand

Ebay’s board to meet this week on GameStop’s offer

OpenAI: “OpenAI has partnered with AMD, Broadcom, Intel, Microsoft, and NVIDIA to develop MRC (Multipath Reliable Connection): a novel protocol that improves GPU networking performance and resilience in large training clusters.”

OpenAI launches ads.openai.com

GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen “selling stuff on eBay to pay for eBay”

U.S. and China Pursue Guardrails to Stop AI Rivalry From Spiraling Into Crisis

Billionaire 49ers Investor Vinod Khosla Prepping Seahawks Bid