Happy Sunday! Homer run: Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” is already proving to be a box office hit, with the premiere date set for July 17… 2026. Indeed, tickets for the epic adaptation have mostly sold out across 16 IMAX theaters in the US a whole year in advance, in a first-of-its-kind move for movies.

Today we’re looking at two other tales of titans: Bitcoin’s dominance and Palantir’s sky-high valuation.

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Bitcoin ft. everything else

Given it was the House’s inaugural “Crypto Week,” which brought with it landmark legislation to regulate stablecoins and helped boost the value of the entire crypto market to a Nvidia-nudging $4 trillion on Friday, we thought it was high time to look at how 2025 is shaping up to be a huge year for the asset class… or at least for one coin in particular.  

On Monday morning, bitcoin briefly flew past a record $123,000 price point, before climbing down a little later in the week, as a handful of meme coins and altcoins started to steal the show. However, when it comes to the bigger (often messier) crypto picture, Bitcoin is still very much the main focus — accounting for a whopping 63% of the total crypto market’s value. 

Unlike the early days, when 10,000 bitcoin would pick you up a couple of large pizzas if you were lucky, the asset has become seriously big — and somewhat seriously stable — as business, and institutional investors started taking notes in a major way.

Indeed, even bitcoin’s latest record surge is less to do with individuals looking to park their cash away from the governing and corporate powers that prop up the centralized financial system, and more closely related to some of those entities themselves getting into BTC. 

Read more online: The crypto world is starting to look like just bitcoin again

 

Other great stories from the week

  • A look inside Slate’s Michigan design studio and prototype facility
    Sherwood got a behind-the-scenes look at the Bezos-backed EV maker.
  • The Oval Office is getting even more shiny and gold
    When it comes to interior design, the president’s going for gold. 
  • Ride-hailing giants’ electric promises are stalling worldwide
    Behemoths like Uber, Grab, and Bolt aren’t meeting their public pledges, per Rest of World. 
  • Two more top OpenAI researchers defect to Meta
    The company behind ChatGPT is becoming Mark Zuckerberg’s deepest talent pool.
  • Gen Z trades stocks the same way it gambles
    Young people have high risk tolerance. In other news: water is wet.
 

Karpe diem

Palantir is one of the most insanely valued companies in recent market history. 

Hyperbolic? Maybe. Strictly speaking, it is possible to find money-losing small-cap stocks, biotech long shots, or penny stocks that look even loopier on some basic valuation metrics. 

But in terms of real companies — we’re talking large-cap, profit-producing members of the blue-chip club known as the S&P 500 — there are few precedents for such a stratospheric market value, at $350 billion, being precariously balanced on such a narrow base of earnings and revenue.

While there’s a lot for people to dig into, and our colleague really did, the TL;DR is that Palantir is clearly the most “expensive” stock in the S&P 500 by the most widely used measures. Here are the top stocks in the index ranked by their price-to-earnings multiple.

From common measures of stock pricing, to comparisons with similarly frothy predecessors and some classic back-of-the-envelope math on the company’s finances, Sherwood went deep into Palantir’s dizzying valuation and what it means for investors and wider market onlookers alike. 

Read online: Palantir’s valuation: Just how insane is it?

 

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