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Greetings lovely people,

We hope this email finds you well, and not in the passive-aggressive corporate way.

We’re very grateful that over 20,000 of you now choose to spare a few minutes of your precious Fridays to enjoy our memes, 40% of which we made sitting on a toilet.

Just kidding. Maybe not. Whatever, moving on.

Let’s get you up to speed with what happened in the news.

⏰ Today's reading time is 5 minutes

Residents of Moscow and other major Russian cities have been left scrambling to find fuel this week, as Putin admitted during an interview on state TV that the country is facing a gasoline deficit. 

Until now, ordinary Russians hadn’t really felt the effects of the conflict.

However, Ukrainian forces have targeted infrastructure deep in Russia in an attempt to cut the economic base out from Russia’s war effort and limit how much oil Russia can sell to finance its war effort. 

But things are totally fine, don’t worry. 

An export ban on diesel is rumoured to be coming into force in Russia, and Moscow has also asked Kazakhstan for gasoline in July and August as ‘humanitarian aid’, to temporarily plug supply shortages. 

Meanwhile, videos on X show motorists queueing for hours for fuel.

The number of searches in Russia for “how to be a Romanian entrepreneur siphon fuel” also rose more than ten times from May to June. 

Perhaps of more concern for Putin is that farmers may not be able to harvest crops later this summer due to fuel shortages, which could turn public opinion about the conflict sour very quickly. 

For a man who wants to rebuild the Soviet Union, bringing back rationing for bread and fuel is about as authentically Soviet as it gets, so that’s a plus!

Long-embattled automaker VW announced this week that up to 100,000 jobs at the group are in danger.

VW had already announced plans this year to cut up to 50,000 jobs, but the situation has clearly deteriorated and the group’s shares are trading at their lowest level since July 2010, when they were dealing with the fallout from their cars’ “glitch” during emissions testing. 

VW’s CFO warned as early as 2024 that the “roof [was] on fire”, but the company is now in full panic mode as both European and Chinese consumers have realised that now they can buy cars with functioning software packages from other manufacturers. 

The planned cuts and factory closures still need approval from VW’s supervisory board next week in order to go ahead.

Trade union and government representatives hold a majority of the supervisory board votes and have in typically European fashion, committed to defying economic reality by resisting the cuts. 

It’s looking bleak for VW, and potentially for other European industrials titans, as rising costs, and competition from China may leave them in a similar situation - selling high quality assets to professional leeches private equity funds at friendly valuations, while slashing headcounts. 

Does anyone know how to say “almond or oat?” in German?

Meta is reportedly building out a cloud infrastructure business, internally dubbed Meta Compute, to sell its excess AI computing power.

The plan would put Meta in direct competition with AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure, offering both raw compute capacity and access to its own AI models.

As the old saying goes, “if you can’t help but waste the GDP of a mid-sized African country on recreating the Wii lobby, just sell extra compute.”

The move blatantly copies follows a similar pivot by xAI/SpaceX, which has been leasing out spare capacity at its Colossus data center to Anthropic, Google, and Reflection AI.

Meta has committed $182.9 billion to AI infrastructure, including massive builds in Louisiana and Ohio (the latter reportedly the size of Manhattan), but hasn't disclosed meaningful standalone revenue from their LLM, Alpaca Llama.

Probably because there isn’t any.

Zuckerberg confirmed in May that a cloud business was "on the table" as a way to monetise the spend.

Everyone’s favourite lizard may have to get some of that spend under control, as the company burned $2.65 billion on AI tokens last year.

At $300K for a Meta engineer, that's enough to pay around 9,000 engineers for a full year.

Some other useful things that money could have bought:

Andy Burnham used his first major speech as a Labour leadership contender to unveil "No 10 North," a Manchester-based Downing Street unit meant to drive the "biggest rebalancing of power" in UK history.

The move is just one part of a wider push for more devolved control over utilities, employment support, and business rates to help pubs and high streets, plus deeper devolution in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland.

Once you drown out the sounds of Telegraph columnists screaming about pesky northerners coming for your parents' second home in East Sussex, the policy sounds fairly reasonable.

The UK is notoriously a geographically unequal country. London alone produces nearly a quarter of UK GDP with about 13% of the population. More devolution could be a step towards correcting that, but that remains to be seen.

Burnham is currently the only declared candidate to replace Keir Starmer and could become PM as soon as the 20th of July.

Well placed sources from No 10 North an abandoned car park in Salford have told us that Liam Gallagher is a shoo-in for Culture Secretary.

OpenAI is reportedly in early talks with the Trump administration about handing the government a 5% equity stake, with other major US AI firms potentially following suit.

CEO Scam Altman has framed it as a way to let the public share in AI's financial upside, and a 5% OpenAI stake would be worth roughly $42.6 billion at its March $852 billion valuation.

The proposal reportedly resembles the Alaska Permanent Fund model, channelling equity into a vehicle that pays public dividends, and would likely need congressional approval.

Despite most of the American establishment collectively shitting their pants when Bernie Sanders something similar, Comrade Trump said he considers government stakes in private firms "very American”.

He pointed to the US's 10% stake in Intel (taken in August, now worth far more after a stock surge) as a template.

To be fair, he did call himself the world’s greatest communist this week, so it makes sense that he’s suddenly taken a shine to state ownership.

Curiously enough, he didn’t point to the fact that he’s made over £1.7bn ($2.2bn) from various investments in his first year back in office.

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Despite losing his top two ministers over the government’s unwillingness to invest in the department, Still Here Starmer’s back at it in his favourite policy area, defence. 

Starmer has committed to £15bn of extra spending on defence between now and 2034 as part of the Defence Investment Plan. However, about £1.2bn per year of the spending increases are an unfunded gift to Starmer’s successor, i.e. the treasury has said “You’ll have to find the money somewhere, pal”.

Although Andy Burnham has commented that the UK must take defence spending “very seriously”, needless to say that his team were seething when the unfunded spending commitments were announced.  

According to analysis from our data team, Burnham will now have to either a) raise income tax rates; or b) cancel three annual bank holidays for the government to be able to afford a kestrel for everyone who lives north of Birmingham. 

This isn’t a government U-turn by any means, however. John Healey and Al Carns resigned from their posts because they thought £28bn in extra spending was needed to shore up the UK’s defences. 

Against a total government spending bill of over £650bn this year, we’re somewhat confused as to how the funds needed couldn’t be found. In the words of Polish Foreign Minister Sikorski: “lucky you, you must not be feeling any danger”. 

While he may not go down as the most popular Prime Minister in British history, Keir Starmer has given us a few zingers in his time.

Although “Mr Speaker, I am a gooner” and “Meep Meep” deserve their plaudits, his most recent quote takes the cake.

To top it all off, he was introduced to the stage at the event as a “Lesbian style icon”.

If people had known he was this cool from the start, we might not be saying goodbye to Keir quite so soon.

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Thanks to Faris & Harry