Good morning & happy Friday! What a week in FinTech we just witnessed' ' The good news is that it's not over. Today we're diving into rockets, AI, and payment rails, or how Musk's building the closed-loop economy no bank can touch (deep dive into SpaceX & xAI [& X Money] merger, what everyone's missing about the biggest IPO of all time + bonus deep dive into Elon's Super App ambitions); Revolut, which just allowed AI to touch your money (why their partnership with ElevenLabs is brilliant & what's next for AI & Finance + bonus dive into Revolut's bet that AI will kill checkout & ElevenLabs pitch deck teardown inside); and Nubank's US charter that's now a stress test for every neobank's unit economics (why it's huge & who has to worry + bonus deep dive into NU's latest financials inside). Let's jump straight into the fascinating stuff '' The BIG News '' Undoubtedly one of the biggest news in tech this week is that Elon Musk's SpaceX is in talks to merge with Elon Musk's xAI (that also owns social media giant X) ahead of a planned SpaceX public debut later in 2026. And this merger has been framed as financial engineering before an IPO, or an empire-builder's instinct to consolidate....

Through the MITx MicroMasters Program in Data, Economics, and Design of Policy, Munip Utama strengthened the skills he was already applying in his work with Baitul Enza, a nonprofit helping students in need via policy-shaping research and hands-on assistance. Utama's commitment to advancing education for underprivileged students stems from his own background. His father is an elementary school teacher in a remote area and his mother has passed away. While financial hardship has always been a defining challenge, he says it has also been the driving force behind his pursuit of education. With the assistance of special programs for high-achieving students, Utama attended top schools and completed his bachelor's degree in economics at UIN Jakarta ' becoming the second person in his family to earn a university degree. Utama joined Baitul Enza two months before graduation, through a faculty-led research project, and later became its manager, leading its programs and future development. In this interview, he describes how his experiences with the MicroMasters Program in Data, Economics, and Design of Policy (DEDP), offered by the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) and MIT Open Learning, are shaping his education, career, and personal mission....

The last week of January 2026 has arguably been the most consequential week for AI infrastructure since the release of the first H100. Within days of each other, two major commercial entities emerged from the UC Berkeley ecosystem to stake their claim on the 'Inference Stack.' Inferact, the commercial vehicle for the vLLM team, launched with a massive $150M seed round led by a16z and Lightspeed, valuing the project at $800M. Simultaneously, the team behind SGLang officially spun out as RadixArk, securing a $400M valuation in a round led by Accel. These aren't just venture rounds; they are a declaration that the 'operating system' for the model'the layer that manages memory, scheduling, and kernels'is now the primary battleground for AI dominance. In 'LLM time,' we are moving from the 'show-and-tell' phase of R&D into the 'unit economics' phase of production. The problem is no longer just training the largest model, but serving it efficiently. Inference is an unpredictable, asynchronous sprint where the GPU's VRAM is the most contested real estate on Earth....

A tool that has helped to transform modern social-science research is under threat thanks to artificial intelligence. Researchers are warning that a wave of chatbots impersonating people could corrupt or invalidate the online surveys that power thousands of studies every year. They are urging the companies that run the surveys to do more to address the problem. Since the early 2000s, online surveys that allow people to participate in research studies from the comfort of their own desktops have been used in fields such as ecology, psychology, economics and politics. They have become 'essential infrastructure' of the social sciences, says Felix Chopra, a behavioural economist at the Frankfurt School of Finance and Management in Germany, who uses such surveys in his research. People get paid to participate in online surveys ' anywhere from pennies to US$100 or more per hour. And an industry was created to administer the surveys and manage vast pools of potential respondents. Between 2015 and 2024, the use of online surveys in published studies increased four-fold, and with that explosion came people trying to game the system, from simply giving fake answers to deploying bots that impersonate individuals; the industry has had to build in checks and tools to root out fraud....