CES 2026: Amazon Intel
“The Next Starlink”
“Amazon is quietly building the next Starlink,” writes Paradigm editor Davis Wilson. “And the best part? The market is completely missing it.”
That’s the kind of insight you only get when you’re on the ground — while CES 2026 is still unfolding — not weeks later when the headlines have already moved on.
For several days now, Davis Wilson of sister e-letter The Million Mission has been navigating the chaos of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, deliberately looking past the spectacle to find ideas investors will still be talking about years from now.
Amazon, Davis reports, didn’t bother with a traditional CES booth this year.
Instead, the company rented out a private conference room — a deliberate move that kept the real story off the showroom floor and away from casual passersby.
Inside were familiar Amazon products: updated Kindles, new Ring doorbells, even an AI wearable assistant.
And then, off to the side — almost hiding in plain sight — was the most important thing in the room.
Leo.
Photo courtesy: Davis Wilson
“Leo is Amazon’s low-Earth orbit satellite network,” Davis explains, “its answer to SpaceX’s Starlink.”
Rather than relying on cell towers or buried fiber, “Leo beams broadband directly from space to homes, businesses, ships, aircraft and remote regions.”
The implication is massive. Connectivity stops being a local utility and becomes a global subscription service.
What surprised Davis most wasn’t the ambition — it was the progress.
- Amazon already has 175 satellites in orbit
- 80 launches are scheduled for 2026, each capable of carrying 25–35 satellites
- The end goal: a 3,000-satellite constellation.
“Put that together and it’s clear Amazon is approaching meaningful global coverage much sooner than most investors realize.
“Yet Leo receives almost no attention,” Davis notes, even though “the market already understands how valuable this type of business can be.
“Just look at SpaceX.”
Rockets may grab headlines, but analysts agree that Starlink is the profit engine — a recurring-revenue business with software-like margins once the infrastructure is in place.
It’s why SpaceX is rumored to be considering an IPO as early as 2026, “at a valuation as high as $1.5 trillion,” Davis points out.
“But when it comes to Amazon?” he adds. “Leo gets no such credit.
“It is not meaningfully reflected in Amazon’s valuation. It is barely discussed. Most investors don’t even know it exists!”
After seeing Leo up close at CES, Davis’ takeaway: “Amazon is exactly the kind of stock I want to own long term — while the market looks the other way.”
The OpenAI Scare
As promised on Wednesday, we’re back with four more of pro trader Enrique Abeyta’s 2026 insights, and he starts with a shift few investors are prepared for: After years of dominance, Enrique believes the “Magnificent Seven” are nearing an inflection point.
The group of tech stocks jumped about 75% in 2023, gained around 60% in 2024 and still posted returns above 20% in 2025. But last year was the first time the cracks showed — with about half of the group trailing the S&P 500’s ~17% gain.
“I think 2026 will be the first year in a long time these stocks underperform as a group,” Enrique says. The pressure point, in his view, is the pace of AI spending.
“At some point in 2026, I think OpenAI will run into difficulties getting the financing for its trillion-dollar buildout.” When that happens, he expects a sharp pullback across AI-related stocks.
But that doesn’t mean the AI cycle is over. “AI is much bigger than OpenAI,” Enrique says. As spending slows, many large tech companies could see cash flow improve as capital expenditures level off.
By year-end, he expects the OpenAI-driven sell-off to keep Mag 7 from leading the market, despite several individual big tech names still setting up well.
On interest rates, Enrique argues the environment shifts in 2026. Inflation and long-term yields have been easing, and he expects the Federal Reserve to respond more forcefully.
“We could see 100bp–150bps cuts in the next 18 months,” driven by softer employment, political pressure and market instability tied to AI.
That backdrop points to a choppier market, he says, but not a lower one.
Enrique expects earnings growth and lower rates to push stocks higher by year-end 2026, even if the ride is rough. The midyear catalyst may resemble an “OpenAI-pocalypse,” replacing last year’s tariff scare.
He closes with a call on crypto. After missing the mark in 2025 — “It was the only 2025 stock market prediction that I got wrong,” he says — Enrique still expects Bitcoin to reach $250,000 in 2026, driven by lower rates, rising liquidity and renewed risk appetite.
The U.S. labor market ended 2025 with a whimper.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, employers added 50,000 jobs in December, falling short of expectations for 70,000. Even so, the unemployment rate slipped to 4.4%, slightly better than the 4.5% economists forecasted.
The disconnect reflects what many economists now describe as a “Great Freeze” in the job market. Hiring has slowed markedly, but large-scale layoffs, the usual signal of a deeper downturn, have yet to appear.
Notably, December’s job growth was well below the 150,000–200,000 jobs per month typically needed to keep pace with population growth, suggesting labor-market slack continues to build beneath the surface.
That slack shows most clearly in underemployment. Over the course of 2025, the number of Americans working part-time for economic reasons rose by nearly 1 million compared with 2024. By December, 5.3 million people were stuck working part-time, not by choice, but because hours were cut or full-time jobs weren’t available.
Taken together, the December report points to a labor market that’s still cooling — not yet freezing — heading into 2026.
Looking at futures this morning, all three major U.S. stock indexes are waking up on the right side of the bed. The tech-heavy Nasdaq is up 0.40% to 25,800 while the Dow and S&P 500 are both up around 0.30% to 49,645 and 6,985 respectively.
As for commodities, oil’s up 0.85% to $58.23 for a barrel of West Texas crude. And precious metals are hitting the ground running. Gold’s up 0.70% to $4,494.10 per ounce, and silver’s up 4.15% to $78.32.
The crypto market, on the other hand, is sinking into red. Bitcoin’s down 0.55% to $90,220; Ethereum’s down 0.60% to $3,075.
Of course, everything is subject to change if the Supreme Court tariff ruling comes out today. We promise follow-up coverage on Monday.
Trump Targets “Dark Landlords”
It began in the wreckage of the 2007–09 housing bust. Millions of foreclosed single-family homes landed on the federal government’s balance sheet. In 2012, Washington quietly decided it didn’t want to be a landlord.
Under a program known as REO-to-Rental, the government sold large bundles of foreclosed homes at steep discounts — but only to buyers who could deploy enormous amounts of capital at once.
If you were a hedge fund or private-equity shop willing to write a billion-dollar check, you were welcome. If you were a small investor hoping to buy the empty house down the block, you weren’t.
The result was predictable. Firms like Blackstone amassed tens of thousands of homes, concentrated especially in fast-growing Sun Belt markets, and turned them into rental empires.
Once the easy money was made, many of those portfolios were spun into publicly traded REITs, including Invitation Homes (INVH). Wall Street had discovered a new asset class: single-family homes as yield instruments.
That model thrived in the years after 2020 when home prices surged and mortgage rates locked would-be buyers out of the market. But even then, cracks were visible.
As Paradigm’s value investor Zach Scheidt noted last year, higher rates don’t last forever. When rates fall, pent-up housing demand tends to reappear — and renters try to become owners. That dynamic threatens occupancy rates and pricing power for single-family rental giants.
Now the politics are catching up…
This week, President Donald Trump said he would move to ban large corporate investors from buying single-family homes, arguing that homeownership has drifted out of reach for younger Americans.
“People live in homes, not corporations,” Trump said on social media, adding that he would 1) press Congress to put the proposal into law and 2) expand on it at Davos later this month.
The reaction was immediate. On Wednesday, shares of Blackstone fell more than 5%. Invitation Homes dropped roughly 6%. Builders FirstSource slid as well.
Skepticism followed just as quickly. Some economists caution that banning the biggest players may simply open the door to smaller and midsized investors, not first-time buyers.
Additionally, institutional investors own a very small share of all single-family homes nationally — about 0.5%, according to Blackstone’s own figures.
But when looking only at the rental segment of single-family homes, institutional ownership rises to around 4%, per Urban Institute data.
Still, the symbolism matters. No sitting president has singled out large institutional buyers of single-family homes as a central policy problem
For years, these “dark landlords” — as our managing editor Dave Gonigam calls them — have been an uncomfortable footnote to the housing crisis, tolerated and then normalized.
Trump’s proposal signals that patience for this arrangement may finally be running out. Whether it changes prices? Debatable.
The Fate of Venezuela’s Gold
About 31 tonnes of Venezuelan gold have been held at the Bank of England since the 1980s, part of the long-standing practice of storing national reserves in London, one of the world’s major bullion hubs.
Since 2018, however, Venezuela has been blocked from reclaiming it — and the dispute over who controls the gold has only grown more complex.
The standoff started after Venezuela’s contested 2018 presidential election. Western governments, including the U.K. and the U.S., refused to recognize Nicolás Maduro as the country’s legitimate leader.
When Caracas later requested the return of its gold, the Bank of England declined. Bloomberg reported at the time that U.S. officials had encouraged their U.K. counterparts to help cut Maduro off from overseas assets.
That stalemate sparked some creative — and risky — workarounds. In 2019, Venezuelan officials entertained a back-channel plan pitched by a U.K. national who said he represented a Swiss firm and could persuade English officials to release the gold for a discounted sale through European banks.
The plan collapsed when the intermediary disappeared, leaving behind false contact details — a vivid illustration of how isolated and cash-strapped the Venezuelan government had become.
By 2020, the fight had moved to the London courts. Venezuela sued to recover the gold — valued in court filings at roughly $1.95 billion — arguing it was needed for pandemic relief.
At the same time, opposition leader Juan Guaidó, recognized by the U.S. and U.K. as acting president, asserted his own claim to the reserves. Legal gridlock followed.
Now, The Guardian reports the case has taken on new urgency after Maduro’s detention by U.S. authorities. While former vice president and current acting president Delcy Rodríguez once denounced the gold freeze as “blatant piracy,” her tone has recently, heh, softened.
Still, Venezuela is unlikely to want its gold stranded indefinitely, especially in light of Russia’s sanctioned central-bank assets, frozen since 2022.
With Venezuela’s political future uncertain and foreign courts split over legitimacy, the bullion remains in limbo — locked in London vaults.
The Peacock’s Put out to Pasture
CNBC has officially lost its peacock.
On Dec. 13, 2025, the network quietly rolled out its new logo, the result of NBCUniversal’s corporate shell game that spun CNBC into a new entity called Versant. The name stays. The bird does not.
The replacement logo, with a fused N and B, is a nod to CNBC’s original 1989 logo:
After…
Anonymous designer: “I’m sure everyone involved was simply relieved to call it done.”
If this seems familiar, last year MSNBC got its own makeover into MS NOW. Different network, same minimalist logo drained of all personality.
And if Cracker Barrel is any indication, when legacy brands shed their familiar graphics, it’s usually not just a design change. It’s a complete vibe shift.
Happy Friday, reader! Watch your inbox for Saturday’s recap issue. Take care…
