So. In July, a Tyrannosaurus rex named Gus (or rather his skeleton) sold at Sotheby's for $50.1 million. The most expensive dinosaur ever auctioned, to a mystery bidder, at nearly double the estimate.

Bloomberg then ran a long feature on billionaires’ obsession with skeletons.

Now. Rich people have their quirks, you will say. Leave them alone. Some collect watches, some collect wine, some collect 66-million-year-old carnivores. Let them do their thing.

I, of course, respectfully disagree and think this specific fetish is another example of how our current K-shaped economy works.

As per Bloomberg's own reporting, one collector started because a billionaire dinner guest told him dinosaurs were cheap. The market has no regulatory oversight and no professional standards. Bloomberg's phrase is "Wild West."

Fossil prices, they report, are now set much the same way as paintings by famous artists.

Which is — nothing. There is no cash flow in a dead theropod. There is no book value in a femur. There is, however, a story, scarcity, and the other bidder. This is all you need to know about the IPO valuations these days.

When an asset has no fundamentals, the price is pure narrative, and narrative is the one commodity our economy currently produces in surplus.

So the ladder went up: Stan the T. rex, $31.8 million in 2020. Apex the stegosaurus, $44.6 million in 2024, to Citadel's Ken Griffin. And now Gus at $50.1 million.

And as always with the K, the fun upstairs has a bill downstairs. The Smithsonian did not bid on Gus. Neither did three other major natural history museums NPR contacted. The institutions built to hold these things for everyone, for science, for the eight-year-olds, have been priced out of their own field by a single anonymous paddle.

Now, the irony of it all. Marc Andreessen, in his Techno-Optimist Manifesto, the founding scripture of our new corporate faith, declared:

The alphas of this new religion are, of course, those who control the compute, the data, the models. The spice, for my fellow Dune readers.

And here we have the apex predators of techno-optimism spending fifty million dollars to collect the bones of the previous apex predators, mounting them in living rooms as the ultimate flex.

Sixty-six million years ago, that skeleton was the most dominant creature on the planet.

Every apex predator in history has ended up as either sediment or décor. Our current ones are buying the décor.

You would think the object itself should be a reminder to its owners… alas.

Also, what happened the same week I was reading about Gus.

A researcher named Jacob Coxon resigned from Anthropic after three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic, and posted why:

Then Anthropic's own alignment science lead, Evan Hubinger, replied in public: "Jacob is correct here." His personal estimate of the risk that AI kills all humans: above ten percent within the next decade.

His admission: "we do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and are not clearly on track to." In July, roughly 1,400 researchers across the major labs signed a letter asking the government to build the capacity to manage the pace.

In other words: while the apex predators collect the bones of their predecessors, the engineers in the basement are raising their hands to say we may be building the next one, and we would rather our bones not end up in whatever virtual museum it curates.

And of course, normal people looking at this are at best… baffled. The 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer, which we discussed last week, reports economic anxiety at an all-time high in the survey's 26-year history.

Seven in ten people now hesitate to trust anyone different from them. The Conference Board finds 43 percent of American CEOs naming "uncertainty" itself as their top threat. CEO confidence is the lowest in five years.

Consumer sentiment is down a third while the index funds set records.

In times like these, the job of a manager is to be the calm one in the room. Your people cannot read the economy, but they can read you, and they do it every single day, in every meeting, with the precision of children reading parents.

Emotions travel down hierarchies faster than any memo. If the person who controls their financial future walks in with panic on his face, no all-hands deck will undo what that face just announced.

And if he walks in steady, honest about the fog, unhurried in it, that steadiness gives confidence. That is the entire trick.

One of my bosses, when a data point suggested a possible global financial crisis was coming, simply responded: "Let it come."

He most certainly had no solution for a global economic collapse, but the simple confidence of that reply did more than a 100-page, well-edited contingency plan ever would.

So, the world is buying trophies of the last extinction. Fine. We cannot control that floor of the building.

On our floor: steady voice, honest fog, no panic face.

Talk soon,
Sultanbek