Israel is voting today in its first election since October 7th, and it’s too close to call. Anthropic’s IPO filing has revealed a $120 billion bill for computing power, payable to Elon Musk’s rocket company. And scientists in Germany have taken blood cells from an 80-year-old and made them molecularly younger than 20. Here’s what you need to know, and what our guests have told me about each one.
Israel votes on Netanyahu
Polls opened across Israel this morning in a pivotal Knesset election, the first since the October 7th attack and the three years of war that followed. Plenty of Israelis see it as a referendum on one man: Benjamin Netanyahu.
And it’s tight. The final polls put Gadi Eisenkot’s Yashar party narrowly ahead of Netanyahu’s Likud, at roughly 22 seats to 20. The two blocs are close to level, and neither is near the 61 seats needed to govern out of 120. Why so close? Israel’s system rewards fragmentation. Lots of parties are fighting over the same voters, and any party that falls just short of the 3.25% threshold wastes every vote it got. That alone can swing the result by a few seats. The Arab parties and a handful of small parties near the line may end up choosing the next prime minister. Exit polls land when voting closes at 10pm Israel time (8pm UK).
Two of my guests help explain why the country is so split. Alan Dershowitz is a close friend of Netanyahu. He had a three-hour lunch with him eight days before the attack. Yet when I asked him about Bibi, he didn’t dodge it: “he is the prime minister, and the prime minister bears ultimate responsibility for what is probably the greatest intelligence failure in modern history.”
▶ Watch Alan Dershowitz on Netanyahu from 23:50
Former CIA officer Andrew Bustamante sees what came next very differently. To him, Israel’s strategy since October 7th has been “extremely rational, very logical, and it’s timed intentionally”: systematically wearing down Iran’s ability to strike.
▶ Watch Andrew Bustamante on Israel and Iran from 13:56
That’s the choice in front of Israeli voters: who answers for the day the country was caught off guard, and who gets credit for the war that followed. When a country is weighing both at once, close is exactly what you’d expect.
Anthropic’s $120 billion bet on Musk’s rockets
On Monday I told you Anthropic had filed to go public. Dig into the filing and there’s an even bigger number. Anthropic has agreed to pay SpaceX up to $120.5 billion for computing power through 2029. That’s about $3.1 billion a month once the capacity is fully delivered, and far more than the $84.5 billion reported in September. The compute comes from SpaceX’s giant Colossus data centres in Memphis.
Think about that. The company that builds rockets is now one of the biggest landlords in artificial intelligence, renting brainpower to one of the world’s leading AI labs. Peter Diamandis told me how Musk keeps pulling this off. He goes back to the physics and works it out himself: “he had to convince himself that you could build reusable rockets, and he did, from first-principles thinking.”
▶ Watch Peter Diamandis on Musk’s first principles from 1:22:15
Everyone said reusable rockets couldn’t be done. Now the same company is selling the most valuable resource of the AI age. In a gold rush, the people with the infrastructure tend to get paid first.
The 80-year-old cells that turned 20
Researchers at the University of Bonn took blood-cell precursors from an 80-year-old donor and converted them directly into neural stem cells, the cells that can become neurons. Along the way, something unexpected happened: the cells’ molecular clocks reset to an age below 20. The work was published in Aging Cell. To be clear, this happened in a dish, not in a person. The team sees it as a tool for studying ageing and diseases like Alzheimer’s, not a treatment.
But it fits a pattern. When David Sinclair sat down with me, he described his lab doing something similar in living animals: “Nerves, it turns out, are very easy to reset the age of.” In old mice that had lost their sight, his team reset the eyes and got the vision back.
▶ Watch David Sinclair on resetting the age of cells from 1:08:39
Ten years ago, “reversing ageing” was science fiction. Now it’s a line in a peer-reviewed paper. That’s how fast this field is moving.
The week ahead
We’ll know Israel’s exit polls tonight. On Wednesday the Fed decides on rates, and Microsoft and Alphabet report. Amazon reports on Thursday.
Which of these stories are you watching? Tell me on X at @brianbrose.
P.S. Anthropic’s filing shows where AI money flows: to the founders and the infrastructure, long before the public can buy in. In our AI Investment Club, members meet the founders and review the deal before deciding. And in Dubai, true ultra-luxury homes are in short supply because so few operators can build them. That’s the gap our Luxury Property Investment Circle is built around.
This is commentary, not financial or medical advice. Do your own research.
