Peak 2025

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Vanta gets you audit‑ready in weeks, not months — so you can move fast without risk.

Join Vanta’s live demo on August 20th to see how it works and get your questions answered in real time.

We are SO back.

2025 is giving 2021 a real run for its money. If you squint hard enough you’d barely be able to tell the difference.

Crypto is once again at all time highs, with Bitcoin up 90% in the past year.

Then: NFTs
Now: Shitcoins

The president of the United States launched a shitcoin days before the inauguration. After it soared to a $27B market cap, First Lady Melania got in on the action a few days later with a shitcoin of her own. There was (allegedly) hundreds of millions of insider trading, which makes those NFT projects look like child’s play.

Latin America needed to act swiftly to regain the spotlight of corruption from the U.S.

Argentine President Javier Milei wasted no such opportunity. He launched $LIBRA on Valentines Day, which briefly reached a $4B market cap before crashing 90%.

Nothing says “I love you” like violently fucking millions of your constituents out of their hard-earned cash. Nearly 75,000 investors reportedly suffered major losses, while insiders walked away with tens of millions. Your move, President Trump.

But it’s not just crypto — the IPO market is back from hibernation:

2025 is shaping up to be a rebound year for SPACs too. Just a little past the halfway point of the year, 61 SPACs have raised $12.5B, nearly matching the full-year total from 2024.

The standout SPACs of today match the same themes that we saw back in 2021: fintech and space.

Then: Sofi and Virgin Galactic
Now: Webull and AST SpaceMobile

Same shit, different toilet. Can we take a quick moment to acknowledge that Virgin Galactic peaked at $1,075 in 2021. Let’s see where she’s at now…

It’s only a loss if you sell.

…And now might be a good time, because the casino is back and open for business. Who needs to spend their summer in the South of France when you can hangout on WallStreetBets from your parents basement.

In just the past few weeks…

My biggest takeaway from the latest meme stock mania was learning that Kohl’s is still in business. It looks like they had the right playbook (their CEO got fired for misconduct) but poor execution (should have gotten caught at a Coldplay concert).

Fundamentals are for boomers anyway. Today, all you need is a collaboration with Sydney Sweeney.

The brilliantly played “Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans” campaign had shares of American Eagle rally as much as 25%. That’s nearly $1B of market cap (temporarily) added due to a single campaign.

Dr. Squatch also launched a viral campaign with her… which led to Unilever forking over $1.5B to acquire them back in June.

beehiiv has inquired about a "Sydney Sweeney Sends News” campaign, but we haven’t yet heard back from her team.

Now introducing some new wrinkles that 2021 didn’t have…

AI researchers are now receiving deals that would make professional athletes jealous.

Meta plans to buy their way back into the AI race by offering top AI researchers more than $100M per year. There have even been rumors of $1B+ packages that have reportedly been turned down.

Meta also acquired a 49% non-voting stake in Scale AI for $14B. That move brought Scale CEO Alexandr Wang on board to lead Meta’s Superintelligence AI Lab.

The former is the equivalent of the Yankees being the only team in the league without a salary cap and buying all of the best players. The latter is the equivalent of the Yankees acquiring part of the Dodgers so they could use Shohei Ohtani whenever they wanted.

The Scale AI investment was clearly structured to avoid any sort of antitrust scrutiny. It’s the latest playbook for big tech in the heat of the AI race.

Microsoft did something similar when they licensed Inflection AI’s technology for $650M. That allowed them to hire their key employees (including their founders) without acquiring the company outright.

And just a month ago: the infamous Windsurf debacle.

After a failed acquisition attempt by OpenAI, Google licensed their IP and hired their entire leadership team and top engineers… royally fucking leaving behind the rest of the employees to fend for themselves. Cognition eventually swooped in to buy what was left of Windsurf for a cool $300M.

Mind you, Windsurf was once a vibe-coding golden child— scaling from zero to reportedly $82M ARR in just a few years, pacing slightly behind Lovable and Cursor.

There’s more froth in today’s private markets than baby oil at a freak off.

Anthropic is in talks to raise $3-5B at an estimated $170B valuation (up nearly 3x from March of this year). That would make Anthropic the fourth most valuable private company in the world, behind SpaceX, ByteDance, and OpenAI.

Ramp just raised $500M at a $22.B valuation. That was just 45 days after raising $200M at a $16B valuation. If your valuation isn’t jumping 40% in just 6 weeks time, you’re not trying hard enough.

Meanwhile, every time you log into X you’ll stumble across a new viral launch video for the latest AI product. You can count on two things: it being built by some 22-year-old “cracked” engineer, and it not working remotely like it shows in the video.

…But that won’t stop VCs from preempting a $30M post-money term sheet.

From non-working ChatGPT wrappers to the return of meme stocks, it’s “risk on” for just about everyone right now. Margin debt exceeded $1T for the first time since, you guessed it, late 2021. Increased margin debt signals speculative behavior and risk tolerance (or so ChatGPT tells me).

What could go wrong?

Fortunately, I learned my lesson the last time. I won’t be fooled again into purchasing a cute digital bear for $6,000.

Although, perhaps that’s the real test as to whether or not we’re actually all the way back. Reply to this email if you’d like to take this little guy off my hands.

If you enjoyed this post or know someone who may find it useful, please share it with them and encourage them to subscribe: mail.bigdeskenergy.com/p/peak-2025

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