If you thought your Monday was bad, be thankful you don’t work at Meta. The tech giant’s next round of layoffs begin this week. This is the latest in Meta’s “year of efficiency” (not a zodiac sign you’d want to be born under), after laying off 11,000 employees last November and another 4,000 in its tech department in April. Now they’re coming for the business-focused positions. “What would you say you do here?”

The lowdown

• 🚀 Blue Origin wins NASA contract for crewed moon landers, kicking off Bezos-Musk space race.

• 🏦 Morgan Stanley CEO James Gorman – one of the longest-serving CEOs on Wall Street – to step down within the year.

• 🤹‍♀️ Facebook to be fined £648m for mishandling user information, setting record for breach of EU’s data protection rules.

Flex your finance muscle

The Carlson curve

Think Moore’s law, but for biology.

Moore’s law, if you’re unfamiliar, is the observation that the number of transistors on a microchip doubles about every two years – so foretelling the computing revolution.

The Carlson curve (coined by The Economist in 2006, and based on the work of scientist Rob Carlson) makes a similar point about the cost of DNA sequencing.

As you can see from the chart above, the cost of sequencing started profoundly outpacing Moore’s law from 2008. But, as Carlson himself points out, DNA is very different from transistors:

‘For the last forty years, the improved performance of each new generation of chip and electronic device has depended on those objects containing more transistors, and the demand for greater performance has driven an increase in the number of transistors per object. In contrast, the economic value of synthetic DNA is decoupled from the economic value of the object it codes for; in principle you only need one copy of DNA to produce many billions of objects and many billions of dollars in value.’

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Bearsh*t

The labor market is broadly fine, the Nasdaq 100 is up 23% this year, US regional banks experienced their strongest rally in two years last week, and Taylor Swift and Beyoncé are holding mega tours this summer – what recession? Even in the face of rampant inflation and repeated interest rate rises, consumers seem nonplussed. It seems most bearish predictions are being countered by the data.

That said, it’s not all rosy. The stock market rally is largely being buoyed by the promise of AI, the US federal debt ceiling remains unresolved, pushing US companies to hurriedly borrow from the bond market ($), and commercial real estate seems shaky ($), as concerns about the US economy push banks to tighten their lending standards for commercial real estate loans.

Maybe this is just the calm before the storm. Or the hibernation before the cocaine bear.

The content we're consuming today

• All-In: E129: Sam Altman plays chess with regulators, AI’s “nuclear” potential, big pharma bundling & more

• Odd Lots: We’re In the Midst of Trucking Bloodbath 2.0

• Acquired: Spotify CEO Daniel Ek

Off-balance sheet items

• Evolution usually takes a few billion years or so to work its magic, but this lab experiment managed to recreate one of evolution’s biggest moments ($) – the beginning of multicellular life – in a matter of years.

The bottom line