Plus: Lululemon squeezes out its CEO December 15, 2025 Sign Up | View online IN THIS ISSUE 8 min read 🏦 Fed succession 🎥 Tinseltown tensions 💣 Battlefield tech SpaceX could command a US$1-trillion IPO next year. Maybe that’s enough for Elon to visit Mars and convince them not to attack. | Warner Bros. THE WEEK IN MARKETS AI’s winners — and losers — are starting to emerge Shhh — hear that? It’s the sound of … not much happening. Trading volume was down last week. Daily swings in the market were smaller than they’ve been all year. The loudest noise on Wall Street was the low chant of weary fund managers counting down the days to 12/31, when they can lock in their bonuses on a baller year for their clients. Not even some awfully sour news from cloud-computing giant Oracle (more on them below) and chip-maker Broadcom — the sort of project delays and revenue misses that would’ve sparked an AI bubble panic a month ago — did much to disrupt the holiday calm. Nvidia and Google — the Amex Platinums of AI — held firm. For the moment at least, investors seem to be shedding their fears about an AI bubble and starting to pick winners and losers of the AI boom. THE CHART OF THE WEEK WHAT HAPPENED LAST WEEK WHO’S UP 📈 SpaceX. Elon Musk used one of his down-market companies (that’s an X joke) to confirm the rumours that SpaceX is gearing up for a late-2026 IPO with a valuation somewhere north of US$1 trillion. If it happens, Musk would be at the helm of the ninth and 10th most valuable companies in Polytopia the world. Lululemon. All it took for the Vancouver-based athleisure giant to reverse its recent fortunes was sacking embattled CEO Calvin McDonald: its stock is up 10% since the news broke (though it’s still south 45% YTD). Lulu has been losing customers to Costco and upstarts such as Alo Yoga and Vuori. Now the search begins for a new CEO to help claw them back. Future Fed chairs named Kevin. For weeks now, top Trump economic advisor Kevin Hassett has been the strong betting favourite to replace U.S. Fed chair Jerome Powell when his term ends in May, in part because Hassett keeps pounding the table for Trump-endorsed rate cuts. But then last week a dark-horse Kevin emerged: former Fed governor Kevin Warsh, who either impressed Trump during an Oval Office interview or left him confused about which Kevin was in the room. The president will announce his pick early next year, which leaves plenty of time for yet another Kevin to emerge. WHO’S DOWN 📉 Oracle. Three months ago, its stock surged by 36% in a single day and momentarily made Larry Ellison the wealthiest person on Earth. Since then, meh earnings, (reported) project delays, and AI bubble fears have wiped out all those gains. Shares plunged by another 11% on Thursday morning alone as Ellison’s cloud-computing company — you know, the one that’s effectively bankrolling a bid by his son, David, to buy Warner Bros. Discovery (more on that below) — fast becomes a vessel for investors’ darkest AI anxieties. Canadian housing. More gloominess: there’s a widening “bid-ask spread” — the price gap between buyers holding out for lower prices and sellers who think their properties should be getting way, way more. The stalemate is driving down transaction flows. That said, RBC suspects the market will rebound in 2026, thanks in part to the BoC’s string of interest-rate holds. Hollywood. Everyone’s mad about the “apocalyptic,” art-form-of-cinema-ending NetflixBros deal. Jilted Paramount, led by new nepo-baby owner David Ellison, is putting a US$108-billion hostile bid in front of WBD’s shareholders and urging them to reject the board’s deal with Netflix. This battle will likely stretch on for a year or more, but no matter who ultimately swallows WBD, Hollywood seems bound to lose: synergies will shrink jobs, fewer movies will get made, theatre attendance will fall. —Srivindhya Kolluru FROM OUR SPONSOR THE FOMO INDEX by Stacey Woods IMPORTANT 🍼 OpenAI CEO says he can’t imagine raising his baby without ChatGPT. You heard that right: we have AI because Sam Altman has no friends. Source ♻️ New guidelines will allow Ottawans to recycle hand cream tubes but not alcohol bottles, so plan your weekends accordingly. Source 📱 Australia bans social media for kids under 16. Patience, please, as they come to terms with having to text their friends “67.” Source 🍔 McDonald’s pulls AI-generated commercial after backlash. They promise to return to the cinematic epics they usually make. Source CRASH & BURN TO THE MOON 🥤 Pepsi will eliminate 20% of its products but hasn’t said which ones. Could be why your Funyuns have seemed a little less fun. Source 🐶 Study finds Wham!’s “Last Christmas” is the most stressful holiday song for pets. George Michael’s death was only 63 dog years ago. Source 🇺🇸 “You idiots, I said we need to present a united front!” U.S. State Department switches from Calibri back to Times New Roman. Source 🛸 Alberta man seeking “serious buyers” for his homemade time machine. If you can’t operate a manual flux capacitor, don’t even bother. Source WHO CARES THE BIG IMPORTANT STORY BRAVE NEW WORLD Technology Is Changing Warfare. A Battlefield Investor Told Us How Since Russia began its invasion in 2022, Ukraine has become a laboratory for rapid, at-scale innovation — especially when it comes to drones. Justin Zeefe is one to know. A former U.S. intelligence officer who spent years tracking Russian cyber threats, Zeefe volunteered to come to Ukraine shortly after the invasion to help move aid to the front. Astounded by Ukraine’s technical prowess, he soon co-founded Green Flag Ventures, a US$20-million VC firm that funds battlefield tech. Its investments include Swarmer, an AI startup that has partnered with Ukrainian forces. We spoke with him to better understand how technology is changing the nature of war. Lesson #1: Success hinges on fast, nimble manufacturing. In the war’s early days, Ukraine discovered that it could offset Russia’s advantages by deploying drones at scale. “When $500 drones are overwhelming multimillion-dollar weapon systems” — like tanks — “the old system is not going to rule the day anymore,” Zeefe says. Ukraine internalized this lesson. After striving to produce a million drones in 2023, it now produces some four million annually in basement workshops and secret factories. Ukraine has innovated along the way, developing deep-strike drones and naval drones. Just last week, it used sea drones (photo below) to strike tankers carrying Russian oil. Western militaries must learn from Ukraine, Zeefe says: “You can no longer spend 15 years on R&D to develop a single weapon and then have Raytheon make it for 30 years.” Lesson #2: Data is a weapon. The two sides currently deploy some 10,000 drones daily. Many are used for attacks, while others collect battlefield footage. The benefit of this data, Zeefe says, is that it allows for better pattern recognition with AI. Does a particular troop movement prefigure an enemy offensive strike? With enough data, Zeefe says, you can make a good prediction and act accordingly. And with drones always overhead: “There’s no crossing the Delaware in the middle of the night.” Lesson #3: We’ve entered the swarm age. Ukraine, running low on drone pilots, is racing to develop AI-driven autonomous drone swarms that can carry out complex attacks with minimal human involvement — like identifying and overwhelming an enemy plane on an airfield. “The intelligence must be in the software, not the hardware,” Zeefe explains. Swarmer says that it has already deployed groups of 25 drones in Ukraine. The Wall Street Journal has corroborated such claims, reporting that Swarmer’s tech was first used to lay mines in 2024. More recently, a single Ukrainian operator reportedly used three drones to carry out an attack — a step into a new era of both AI and warfare. Lesson #4: Humans will be part of the ‘kill chain’ for a while. With Russia and China also developing swarm capabilities, autonomous drone attacks will only become more common. “I would trust taking the human out of the loop if the objective was simply to launch 100 drones at an airfield,” Zeefe explains. But would he trust a drone to identify the right person through a tinted window at speed? “Probably not,” he says. The stakes are too high, and the tech isn’t quite there. Lesson #5: Stable communication lines are still critical. Maintaining fast, stable comms has been a battlefield challenge since the telegraph era. Ukraine has proved no different: GPS- and Wi-Fi-guided drones quickly proved vulnerable to Russian jamming. “So you have to come up with countermeasures,” Zeefe says. In 2024, both sides began using fibre-optic-tethered drones to maintain connectivity for up to 60 kilometres. Another radical innovation is AI-powered drones that navigate autonomously by comparing the battlefield below to pre-stored terrain maps. The pace of innovation is accelerating: just days ago, China launched a mothership built to release 100-drone swarms over enemy positions. Western governments are developing similar platforms; Canada is spinning up a drone fleet, too. Zeefe is bullish that the free nations of the world will meet the moment since “war creates incentives for urgency and speed.” —Andrew Leonard The video above shows a recent Ukrainian drone attack on a Russian drone warehouse. OTHER VERY GOOD READS 📊 How Microsoft Excel Conquered Corporate America Forty years of being synonymous with the best — and worst — of late-stage capitalism. | The Big Take Daily 🪩 The Daily Realities When Your Career Is ‘Global Pop Star’ Charli XCX on a life spent in green rooms, airports, and “soulless liminal spaces.” | Substack 🫣 Jinx: Time Person of the Year If a CEO appears on the cover of Time, there’s a decent chance trouble lies ahead. | Spectra Markets Posts of Wisdom Only two more weeks until 2026! Thoughts on Today’s Issue? Love it Good So so This week’s newsletter contributors: Brennan Doherty (writer), Devin Gordon (writer), Srivindhya Kolluru (writer), Andrew Leonard (writer), Stacey Woods (writer), Ambrose Martos (fact checker), Ciara Rickard (copy editor), Maude Campbell (copy editor), Sara Black McCulloch (fact checker), Mohini Tailor (product engagement manager), Eva Grace Clement Cruz (product engagement associate), Setareh Sarmadi (senior editorial producer), Matthew Karasz (markets editor), Jared Sullivan (senior editor), Peter Martin (senior editor), and Devin Friedman (editor-in-chief). Disclosures: Contributors to this newsletter own shares in Google and Broadcom. Photos in the BIS via Ukrainian media presses. Wealthsimple Media Inc. 80 Spadina Ave Suite 400 Toronto, ON, M5V 2J4 Have questions? Contact us. 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