Apple is renting its brain

Yesterday at WWDC, Apple confirmed the new Siri runs on Google's Gemini, at a reported $1 billion a year. The company famous for owning everything, down to the atoms in its chips, decided the frontier AI model was not worth owning.

The same week, the capital ran the other direction. Anthropic filed for an IPO. SpaceX targets June 12 at a valuation near $2 trillion. OpenAI is reportedly moving soon.

Analysts think the three could raise $200 billion from public markets, more than four times the total raised by all US IPOs in 2025.

Record money flooding into a layer, the smartest buyer on earth just declared a commodity.

We have seen this movie. Electricity was the miracle technology of 1900, and almost nobody got rich generating it. The fortunes went to the people who figured out what cheap, ubiquitous power made possible: assembly lines, appliances, skyscrapers, and suburbs. The generator became the grid. The grid became boring. Boring became the foundation.

Meanwhile, corporate America is hitting AI sticker shock. Companies that bought tokens by the truckload are discovering that capability without imagination is just an invoice. Microsoft is canceling licenses. CFOs are asking questions. The "we use AI" era is ending because everyone uses AI, the same AI, rented from the same three or four landlords.

Which means the only interesting question left is the founder's question.

If intelligence is now a utility, what are you building that only you could build with it?

Enjoy the ride + Plan accordingly.

-Marc

You can always reach me @ marc@brigadoon.live

Brigadoon | Know What's Next.

Three unique opportunities to Know What's Next.

Brigadoon exists because the best conversations in the world aren't happening at conferences. They happen around dinner tables, on countryside walks, and by fireplaces, between people curious enough to show up, think out loud, and share their knowledge.

We've got three rooms on the schedule. Here's where.

Detroit | Salon Dinner — September 24, 2026

Twelve seats. One conversation. No PowerPoints. A single evening, a single table, and the kind of dialogue that only happens when the room is small enough and the people curious enough. No lanyards, no badges, no agenda slides. You'll leave on first-name terms with experts from finance, government, media, and design. $500.

Scotland | Remote — November 9-13, 2026

Four days working from a Scottish estate, structured exactly as inspiration strikes. Write by the fireplace. Strategize in the sunroom. Whiteboard a breakthrough with someone who sees the world differently than you do. Each evening ends in a chef-prepared dinner where the conversation drifts from global affairs to the ideas shaping commerce and culture. Accommodations included. From $2,850.

Utah | Winter Camp — February 21-23, 2027

Our ninth gathering at Robert Redford's Sundance Mountain Resort. A maximum of 55 visionaries beneath Mt. Timpanogos for three days of whiteboard sessions, fireside dialogue, and strategic thinking across 5,000 acres of wilderness. Ski with an investor. Breakfast with a doctor. Art class with an author. No panels, no name tags, Chatham House Rule throughout. $1,950.

The Triple Threat Ticket — all three, $4,500.

Booked separately, the three run $5,300. Limited to ten spots, the Triple Threat Ticket locks all three for $4,500 and secures your seat at every one before they fill. One decision now, and the whole year is settled: Detroit, Scotland, and Utah. It's the deepest way into Brigadoon short of Brigadoon Professional membership.

Every gathering stays small, and we never record a thing. So each one happens once and never again.

Reserve the Triple Threat: marc@brigadoon.live or book à la carte: brigadoon.live/events.

The trillion-dollar disagreement

Here is something worth contemplating. This week, SpaceX priced the biggest IPO in history at a $1.77 trillion valuation. The same week, Morningstar put a number on the same company: $780 billion.

Less than half.

Both are looking at the identical filing.

Same revenue, same launch cadence, same Starlink growth, same xAI merger. They roughly agree on the value of the rockets and the satellites. They are a trillion dollars apart on everything else.

What founders should notice is where the disagreement lives.

It is not in the parts of the business you can measure. SpaceX did $18.7 billion in revenue last year and launched most of the mass that went to orbit from this planet. Nobody disputes that. The entire gap is the AI business that came in through the xAI deal, an asset that one of the two firms flatly admits it cannot value. Indeterminate, they called it.

So the most expensive question in the biggest IPO ever is one nobody can answer with a model. The price is being set by something else. By Musk's record. By a thin float engineered to spike on day one. By the gravitational pull of forced index buying. By a story about the largest market in human history.

That is the part worth pulling on.

Because somewhere in your own company, there is a number that the market, or your board, or your next investor is going to fill in with a story rather than a model.

The founders who do well are usually not the ones with the best fundamentals. They are the ones who understood which number would be decided by the narrative and got there first.

When a trillion dollars of value rests on an asset nobody can price, is the market valuing the business, or the storyteller?

Enjoy the ride + Plan accordingly.

-Marc A. Ross

Founder @ Brigadoon

Brigadoon | Know What's Next.

Why This Book - 50 Negronis

"That first sip is confusing and not particularly pleasant. But man, it grows on you." --Anthony Bourdain

The first Negroni that mattered was at Hotel Il Pellicano, on the Tuscan coast, where Matt Hranek was giving one of his book talks. Hranek, the man behind Wm Brown, has built a whole life around doing ordinary things with great care, and he made the Negroni look less like a cocktail and more like a way of paying attention. Equal parts gin, Campari, and sweet vermouth. Stirred. Ice. An orange peel. That's the entire recipe. I watched him talk about it like a small religion, and somewhere between the first sip and the last, his obsession became mine.

So I kept ordering them. Everywhere. It became the thing I did walking into a new bar in a new city: order the Negroni, see what came back. Bourdain was right that the first one is confusing and a little unpleasant. He was also right that it grows on you. Mine

grew into a habit, then into something I couldn't stop noticing.

The project started with a bad one. San Francisco International, Terminal 3, a seafood joint called Yankee Pier. I ordered a Negroni and got back something served in a glass built for a West Coast IPA. A woman next to me watched it land and offered a wry "bold choice." She was right. An airport pier is no place for a bitter red classic, and I should have known better. But that botched, mystery-ingredient drink and that stranger's two-word verdict convinced me the obsession was worth a chronicle.

Here is the thing about the Negroni. It is the same drink in Buenos Aires, Detroit, and Edinburgh. Three ingredients, equal parts, a hundred-year-old formula nobody owns and everybody borrows. Which means the recipe isn't the story. The room is the story. The person making it is the story. What a place does with three fixed ingredients — the personal swirl, the local touch — tells you almost everything about it: its taste, its ambition, whether it's showing off or telling the truth.

This book is not a ranking. I am not here to crown the best Negroni. I am here to document fifty of them, in fifty rooms, and the people and cities attached to each. Some were perfect. A few were disasters. All of them were worth the trip.

The drink was never really the point. The drink is the excuse to sit down, stay a while, and pay attention to the room and the stranger in it — even the one who tells you your glass is wrong.

When everyone gets the same three ingredients, what are you actually building with yours?

Coming soon. Like June 16. A book. A hat. A tote. And an open invitation for me to come run a Negroni evening for a charity or staff occasion of your choosing.

Enjoy the ride + plan accordingly.

-Marc

You can always reach me @ marc@brigadoon.live.