To The Moon

Hello everyone! Today i want to share some investing stories and targets with you! Hope you can enjoy it!

1 Can AI answer the $3 trillion question?

Three years ago, Sequoia partner David Cahn was one of the first people to do the math and put a number on the implications of Silicon Valley's titanic spend on AI infrastructure.

In 2023, he was reacting to $NVIDIA(NVDA)$'s reported annual GPU revenue of $50 billion. Starting with that figure, and adding in the implied costs of operating the data centers and the margins for their operators, he deduced that $200 billion in revenue would be required to pay back the up-front investment.

He took it as a challenge, asking entrepreneurs to come up with AI products and services to make use of, and generate revenue from, all that infrastructure. Fast-forward to today, adding up three years of hyperscaling, and Cahn's got a new number on AI infrastructure spending for 2026: $1.5 trillion.

All told, he calculates that the AI industry will have to earn $3 trillion to justify all those chips and other data center expenditures. And that's probably an underestimate — the rising costs of memory and the increasing use of exotic or inference-specific chips will drive that number up. "Recently," he writes, "the required revenue per GW of CapEx has sharply increased due to these bottleneck dynamics and rising costs of construction."

On the other side of the ledger, Anthropic is thought to have hit $60 billion in ARR, while OpenAI reportedly earned $13 billion in 2025 (although in November 2025, it said it was at $20 billion ARR) and is presumably making more this year. But there's clearly a large gap to be closed.

Someone minding that gap is Torsten Slok, the chief economist at Apollo, the giant asset manager. In a recent note, he points out that the hyperscalers — Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon — are all predicting massive accelerations in their free-cash flow in 2028. That is, they expect to see the payback from all those chips they bought.

2 How Your Income Compares With the Top 10% in the U.S.—Net Worth, Salaries, and Savings

How much does it take to count as one of America's top earners? More than many households bring in—but the answer depends a lot on your age and where you live.

To be in the top 10% of U.S. households, you'd need at least $210,000 in annual income or at least $1.8 million in net worth, according to a November 2025 report from Visa. That income threshold is 24% higher than it was in 2019.​

But national benchmarks can hide a lot. A $210,000 income may stretch much further in Cleveland than in San Francisco, where housing alone can eat up more than half a paycheck.

Age matters, too. Americans under 35 need about $372,000 in net worth to rank in the top 10% of their age group, according to Federal Reserve data. For people ages 55 to 64, the threshold rises to about $2.96 million. That means a 30-year-old with $400,000 in net worth may be well ahead of peers, while a 55-year-old with the same amount may be further behind than they think.

Why Top Earners May Not Feel Wealthy

But crossing into the top 10% doesn't necessarily mean feeling rich. Nearly one in three households earning $200,000 or more per year said they felt financially "stretched," "struggling," or "drowning," according to the 2025 Harris Poll. Another 64% of six-figure earners said they were in "survival mode."

That can make a top-tier income feel less comfortable than it looks on paper. The U.S. median household income was $83,730 in 2024, according to the Census Bureau, putting the $210,000 threshold at about 2.5 times the typical household income.

How People Actually Build Top 10% Wealth

The path to the top 10% usually takes decades of steady saving and investing. Vanguard's How America Saves 2026 report tracked 4.6 million retirement plan participants and found that 69% now use professionally managed allocations, such as target-date funds or managed accounts.

The report also found that 45% of workers increased their savings rate in 2025, the highest share in the 25 years Vanguard has published the report. The broader lesson: automation and consistent investing can help build wealth over time, often more reliably than trying to time the market.

Important

Homeownership remains a major wealth builder for many households, largely because home equity can grow over time as owners pay down their mortgage and property values rise.

Fidelity's retirement guidelines suggest having three times your salary saved by age 40 and 10 times your salary by retirement. That implies saving 15% of your income starting in your 20s, which can be difficult for workers balancing rent, debt payments, and other costs early in their careers.

Federal Reserve data shows the top 10% typically hold wealth in retirement accounts, taxable investments, and real estate. They're also less likely to carry debt that drags on cash flow, such as credit card balances or auto loans. Avoiding major financial mistakes can help protect the gains that steady saving and investing create over time.

3 Best 3 Vanguard Bond ETF Picks for the Second Half of 2026

$Vanguard Short-Term Treasury ETF(VGSH)$

Treasury bill yields generally follow what the Federal Reserve does with interest rates. The Vanguard Short-Term Treasury ETF (NASDAQ: VGSH) moves one step up the maturity ladder by targeting bonds with one to three years remaining. The 3.9% yield at recent prices means you're getting a meaningful income premium over T-bills, but it's essentially still an investment based on the belief that the Fed won't be cutting rates anytime soon.

If the Fed follows through on its indication that rate hikes are possible in the near future, you want to consider removing duration risk from your bond portfolio. There is still some here in this ETF, so there is the possibility of share price declines should rates rise. But it's generally pretty minimal. With the Vanguard Short-Term Treasury ETF, consider capturing the yield and letting things settle in the background.

$Vanguard Short-Term Corporate Bond ETF(VCSH)$

If you're feeling a little more optimistic about bond market and economic stability, you can introduce some credit risk to the equation for another income boost. The Vanguard Short-Term Corporate Bond ETF (NASDAQ: VCSH) keeps maturities short and only invests in investment-grade securities. The recent 4.4% yield represents another increase in income to account for the added risk above and beyond short-term Treasuries.

Overall, the corporate bond market credit profile still looks pretty good. Defaults are low, and the odds of any one issue causing trouble in a portfolio of more than 3,000 bonds are minimal. But yields are likely to move higher should inflation, slowing growth, the Iran war, or rising rates start to cause more problems. I think there's enough stability in the economy with strong corporate profits in the background to help insulate against some of these risks. That makes going for the higher yield here a reasonable risk to take.

$Vanguard Short-Term Inflation-Protected Securities ETF(VTIP)$

Yes, another short-term bond fund. As you might have been able to tell at this point, I'm not terribly optimistic that rates are coming down anytime soon. The Fed has essentially said that rate cuts won't happen in 2026. Inflation is already above 4%, and that won't allow for rate relief anytime soon.

The Vanguard Short-Term Inflation-Protected Securities ETF (NASDAQ: VTIP) is designed to provide portfolio protection in these situations. Principal amounts will adjust according to inflation, which could be a very important feature over the next six to 12 months. Despite several ceasefire announcements, it doesn't look like this conflict is ending soon. Falling oil prices have eased some of the short-term price burdens, but I think there's a medium to high risk that they flare up again. With inflation spreading beyond just the energy market, it would be wise to layer on a little protection here in case stubborn inflation rates don't move back down. The yield at recent prices is 3.6%.