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ZEITGEIST

April 24, 2026

The blockade of Iran settled into its cat-and-mouse rhythm overnight. An Iranian-flagged oil tanker called the Dorena slipped past a U.S. Navy cordon, switched off its location signal and went dark in the Indian Ocean — until a Navy destroyer chased it down off the west coast of India early Thursday morning local time. Central Command said it also intercepted two other Iranian ships and boarded a fourth, the Majestic X, full of Iranian oil. But Iran's shadow fleet — hundreds of sanctions-evading vessels that spoof their signals, transfer oil at sea and hide behind shell-company ownership — is too large to stop entirely. "It will be very hard to go after all of them," said Emmanuel Belostrino of shipping-intelligence firm Kpler. Ship-to-ship transfers in the Gulf of Oman represent a loophole: the blockade covers Iranian ports, not every patch of open water.

Above the theater, a different kind of surveillance is stirring alarm. Chinese satellite imagery of the conflict zone has proliferated since the war began, with a Hangzhou-based AI company called MizarVision claiming on social media to track American aircraft carriers, F-22 stealth fighters and B-52 bombers by analyzing satellite data. A December Pentagon assessment noted that Chinese commercial satellite firms have engaged in business exchanges with Iran's Revolutionary Guard. An American satellite operator said it was withholding images of the conflict zone indefinitely at the U.S. government's request, while Chinese operators face no such restrictions. "The Iranians are still getting the data they need, but the public is getting cut out," said Bill Greer of the nonprofit satellite service Common Space.

The war's economic fallout keeps escalating. Spirit Airlines, already in bankruptcy for the second time in less than a year, has been crushed by soaring jet-fuel costs — and on Thursday Trump floated something more dramatic than the $500 million loan his administration had been negotiating. "I think we'd just buy it," he said from the Oval Office, suggesting the government could sell the airline for a profit when oil prices fell. A key bondholder group voiced opposition, and JPMorgan analysts warned that a rescue would invite other struggling carriers to line up next.

Meanwhile, more detail emerged about Wednesday's firing of Navy Secretary John Phelan. After the phone call from Hegseth, Phelan drove to the White House and waited in the West Wing lobby for more than an hour to see if his longtime friend the president would overrule the decision. Trump backed Hegseth. The episode confirms the defense secretary retains presidential support despite the churn — but some West Wing officials are frustrated with the pace of Pentagon firings while the Navy enforces the blockade.

The AI economy, meanwhile, is consuming and reshaping the companies that build it. Meta will lay off 10% of its workforce — roughly 8,000 people — on May 20 to fund up to $135 billion in AI infrastructure spending. But the layoffs are only part of the story. A new internal tool records employees' keystrokes, mouse movements and click locations to teach AI models to use computers; employees can't opt out. On Blind, the anonymous workplace forum, more than 80% of posts about Meta this year have been negative, up from roughly 20% in 2024. Technology chief Andrew Bosworth wrote in a memo that the company is building toward a world where AI agents do the work: "Our role is to direct, review and help them improve."

Microsoft is offering voluntary buyouts for the first time in its history, with roughly 7% of its U.S. employees eligible, as it reshuffles around AI. Elsewhere, the restructuring has different roots: Nike is cutting 1,400 workers, mostly in its technology department, as part of its turnaround plan, and KPMG is shedding roughly 10% of its U.S. audit partners after a push for voluntary early retirement fell short.

Out of China, DeepSeek broke months of silence with preview versions of its V4 model. The company says V4-Pro beats Anthropic's Sonnet 4.5 in coding user experience and costs $3.48 per million output tokens, versus $25 for Anthropic's Opus 4.6. The model also validated a key efficiency technique on both Nvidia GPUs and Huawei's Ascend chips — the latter a milestone for China's domestic-chip push.

The infrastructure to power all this AI needs electricity, and the first commercial nuclear-power projects in over a decade are now under construction in the U.S.: TerraPower started construction Wednesday on a Wyoming plant using liquid sodium as coolant, and Kairos Power broke ground last week in Tennessee on a plant that will supply the Tennessee Valley Authority, part of a broader deal in which Google has agreed to buy power from several Kairos reactors over the next decade. Both aim to avoid the cost overruns that plagued Georgia's most recent reactors, which took over a decade and more than $30 billion. TerraPower's CEO says his 345-megawatt plant will be built in 42 months.

Financing the boom has limits, though. Oracle's $300 billion megadeal with OpenAI has clogged bank balance sheets with so much Oracle-linked debt that lenders balked at one data-center expansion — developer Crusoe had to lease the site to Microsoft instead. Morgan Stanley estimates Oracle still needs $100 billion or more for 2027 and early 2028.

SpaceX, heading toward a June IPO, plans to give Elon Musk supervoting shares with 10 votes each, consolidating the control he didn't secure before Tesla's 2010 listing. On Tesla's earnings call Wednesday, Musk acknowledged that older Hardware 3 vehicles — produced before 2024 — can't achieve unsupervised full self-driving despite years of promises. "We did think at one point it would have that," he said. The company will set up "micro factories" to upgrade those cars, with no timeline or cost given.

The Trump administration on Thursday began moving marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule III, the most significant softening of federal cannabis policy since states began legalizing recreational use in 2012. The order applies immediately to FDA-approved products and state-regulated medical marijuana, with a June hearing set to address broader rescheduling. For covered companies, the move eliminates tax burdens that made profitability an uphill battle, though recreational use remains illegal under federal law and banking access won't change much.

In the prediction-market frontier: a mystery trader profited from suspicious temperature spikes at a Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport weather station, turning a $120 Polymarket wager into more than $21,000 when the gauge showed an unexplained jump. Météo-France has filed a police complaint over possible tampering with the automated data system. Separately, a U.S. Army Special Forces soldier was charged with using classified information about the operation to capture Nicolás Maduro to make $409,000 on Polymarket — he spent about $33,000 on long-shot contracts, and hours after his last wager, U.S. Special Forces entered Caracas.

Also Thursday: Regeneron won FDA approval for the first gene therapy to restore hearing in children born deaf from a rare genetic condition, and said it would offer the drug free in the U.S. Former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has continued using a waterfront Coast Guard house on a military base weeks after her ouster, with the current commandant telling associates he plans to move in imminently. And Ken Griffin is threatening to reconsider a $6 billion Midtown construction project after New York's mayor used his $238 million penthouse as the backdrop for a tax-the-rich video.

A blockade that leaks, a wave of layoffs and buyouts partly driven by AI spending, a government volunteering to buy an airline — the pattern this week is of ambitions scaling up while the mechanisms for controlling them struggle to keep pace.

ZEITGEIST DISPATCH — April 24, 2026

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