Platformonomics TGIF is a weekly roll-up of links, comments on those links, and perhaps a little too much tugging on my favorite threads.
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CAPEX season is here! The anticipation got so intense I forgot to write last week.
My Writing
Cleveland’s Big Lesson for Seattle
I return to Cleveland (only figuratively) and theorize about urban success on GeekWire.
My next piece in this series will be a practical guide for local politicians and policymakers navigating economic change. The working title is “Just stop doing stupid things”.
Previous:
A Warning to Seattle: Don’t Become the Next Cleveland, , The City of Seattle Responds to “Don’t Be Cleveland”, Seattle City Light: “Run to Failure”, Talking Cleveland on KIRO, Previous KIRO Appearance, Governor’s new economic council snubs startups, forgets AI, Hello Cleveland: The Podcast, Hello Cleveland!, Don’t Be Seattle: Taxing Jobs Results in Fewer Jobs
News
Meta CAPEX – Q3 2026
$34.91 billion in CAPEX, up 12% from last quarter and 80% from a year ago. We’ll see if we can track all the off-balance sheet shenanigans.
CAPEX guidance for 2026 narrowed from $130-145 billion to $135-145 billion.
Full report after all the other hyperCAPEX companies report next week.
Previous:
Follow the CAPEX: Q2 2026 Scoreboard, Follow the CAPEX: Q1 2026 Scoreboard, Follow the CAPEX 2025 Retrospective, Meta CAPEX – Q3 2025, Meta CAPEX – Q2 2025, Meta CAPEX – Q1 2025, Meta CAPEX – Q4 2024, Meta CAPEX – Q3 2024, Q2 Meta CAPEX, Q1 Meta CAPEX, CAPEX Clues: Enter LlamaGate, Meta AI: Founder Mode or “Win Now” Mode?, Is This Founder Mode? Meta AI Edition, Attention Meta AI Employees…, Never Take a Dependency on Crazy Mark: Here’s Your Chance, Never Take a Dependency on Crazy Mark: Episode 2, Never Take a Dependency on Crazy Mark, The Neocloud Stock Pump, Cloud Computing: How Hard Can It Be?
Never Take a Dependency on Elon Musk: Just a Matter of Life and Death
The archive of reasons why you would be foolish to take a dependency on Elon Musk keeps growing.
We probably will never know who made this decision, but Trump is throwing Elon under the bus. These two have deep dependencies on each other, yet both are also the proverbial scorpion. Hard to imagine they ride off into the sunset together.
In the meantime, who wants an Elon phone? The bars will measure mood, not reception. Coverage maps will morph depending on what’s trending on late night Twitter.
Previous:
Never Take a Dependency on Elon Musk, Space (Twitter IPO Index) Jam, Jammed, Space Twitter: A Boon for Direct Indexing?, Never Take a Dependency on Elon Musk: Space Twitter S-1 Edition, The Price-to-Elon Ratio, Follow the CAPEX: Space Twitter, Never Take a Dependency on Elon Musk, I was beaten to dubbing it Space Twitter, The great Matt Levine on Space Twitter, Useful Idiots, Fellow Travelers and Unregistered Foreign Agents: Elon Musk Part II,Elon/Twitter
San Francisco “Bans” Data Centers
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Actual Data about Data Centers, This is Your Community with a Data Center, Data about the actual impact of data centers, Wherever Will We Put Data Centers?, Good News for Nuclear Power, Bad News for Data Centers, You Can’t Blame Data Centers in Seattle for Our Skyrocketing Electricity Prices, Release the (Electrical) Scapegoat!
Safety First: New York City Edition
This week’s essay question: rationalize this move with New York’s ban on autonomous vehicles.
Private Equity in Action: Time to Rebrand the Asset Class?
Private Equity was a rebrand from Leveraged Buyout after that term accumulated too much baggage. Is it time for another rebrand?
If you want to rebrand to escape what you’ve created without fixing the causes of the bad reputation, the telcos offer a good model.
Private Equity in Action: Foursquare
Translation: The Foursquare acquisition was a $0 outcome for equity holders – $0 for preferred, $0 for common. It’s bittersweet to see these details surface publicly – at least now there’s an opportunity to comment on them.
Foursquare raised capital from The Raine Group, a private equity firm, in 2019. Less than two years later, Gary Little became CEO. Little was one of The Raine Group’s managing directors.
And six years after that leadership change, we now know how the story ends – as a zero dollar outcome for equity holders. Leadership was unable to preserve the value it inherited or create new value during those six years.
Previous:
Private Equity in Action: Seeking a Government Bailout, Perfidious Private Equity, Software Migration Alerts for Private Equity Owned Companies, Private Equity in Action: “We’re ‘AI Winners’, Really”, Private Equity in Action: You Can’t Spell Extraction without AI, Private Equity in Action: Medallia, Private Equity in Action: Come for the Subpar Returns, Stay for the Illiquidity v2, Private Equity in Action: Come for the Subpar Returns, Stay for the Illiquidity, Private Equity in Action: From Famed to Fraught, Private Equity in Action: I’m Lovin’ It, Private Equity in Action: Narrative Collapse?, Private Equity in Action: The Great Garage Door Service Wars, Private Equity in Action: Having to Show Their Math is New Experience, Private Equity in Action: Underperforming
Private Equity in Action: Xbox
The short-lived discussions by the private firms were exploratory and didn’t turn into a negotiation with Microsoft
There is a lesson that you don’t have to go all-in on every hand as a technology company. You can always dabble in new things or make them hobbies, while waiting for a real wave to come along. The AI wave (and its resource demands) makes Microsoft’s gaming acquisition binge look terrible, and Meta rebranding itself after the metaverse even more absurd.
Previous:
Plenty of Room at the Bottom: Great White North Edition
Quick(er) Hits
Bronny Bonds: Larry Ellison Went on Borrowing Spree to Bankroll His Son’s Warner Bros. Bid
What We Call a Good Start: Private Equity Fundraising Is Down for the Fourth Year in a Row
Domain Name Idea: simpering-idolatry.si