⛽ America's Oil Tank Is Empty

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America's emergency oil tank is running on fumes.

The Strategic Petroleum Reserve can hold more than 700 million barrels. It's currently sitting at about 289.7 million.

That's 40% full, and the lowest level in more than four decades. The fuel light has been on for an entire country.

Trump's fix, posted to Truth Social on Sunday: top it back up with Venezuelan crude. He called it "a Gift from Venezuela to the People of the United States" and blamed Biden for the empty tank.

Both administrations raided it.

Biden pulled hundreds of millions of barrels through emergency sales, including releases after Russia invaded Ukraine. Trump's team joined a coordinated plan in March to release another 172 million barrels once the Iran war started.

Refilling costs money, and Congress has been reluctant to authorise the billions needed to buy replacement oil.

Which makes "free oil from somewhere else" a very attractive idea.

Trump said Friday that the US has secured control over 65 billion barrels of Venezuela's proven reserves through a partnership with private companies.

US officials say the venture would become the world's second-largest privately operated oil company by reserves. Washington takes 55% of effective production and gets its oil at cost.

Chevron $CVX ( ▲ 1.05% ) is already in talks to expand its Venezuelan operations. Eni says it's working with Venezuelan authorities to restore production.

So far, so simple. Then the chemistry shows up.

Venezuela's Orinoco Belt pumps heavy sour crude. Thick, high in sulfur, and awkward to handle.

The reserve stores oil in underground salt caverns, and analysts say Venezuelan crude may not be able to go in directly.

The workaround: send it to US refineries built for heavy sour barrels and put better-suited domestic oil in the caverns instead. In January, the Energy Department said it wasn't considering that swap.

There's also the question of Venezuela producing more of anything. Years of degraded infrastructure, unreliable electricity and environmental liabilities mean output could take years to recover. Wells don't restart because someone posted about it.

Financing, transportation, timing: no details given. The Energy Department didn't respond to a request for comment either.

The near-term story here is refining, not the reserve.

US refiners set up to process heavy, high-sulfur crude are the ones with something real to gain, and the same goes for Chevron's and Eni's expansion plans in the country.

The reserve refill is the headline, but it's the slowest-moving part of the whole thing. Barrels in the ground aren't barrels in a cavern, and nobody has explained who pays to move them.

Worth watching how fast "very shortly" turns into an actual shipment.

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Nvidia added more than $400 billion in value in a single day this week.

Its CEO then failed to make a list of the 100 most influential people in AI.

A list that includes Paris Hilton.

Time released TIME100 AI 2026 on Thursday. Jensen Huang, the man running the company that makes the chips everything else in AI runs on, didn't make the cut.

He made all three previous editions: 2023, 2024, and 2025.

Who did make it? Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, and ByteDance CEO Liang Rubo.

Also on the list, in the non-tech section:

Bernie Sanders is now officially more influential in AI than the guy selling the shovels.

The timing is spectacular.

On Wednesday, Nvidia posted fiscal Q2 results that beat Wall Street forecasts across the board. Not "roughly in line." Not "beat on revenue, missed on guidance." Across. The board.

Shares jumped 9%.

That added over $400 billion to a company already valued at $5.1 trillion. Four hundred billion dollars of value created between one lunch and the next.

Most companies on earth would take that as their entire lifetime valuation and retire.

Twenty-four hours later, Time decided he wasn't one of the hundred most influential people in the field his company effectively runs.

Lists like this aren't scoreboards. They're editorial choices, and editors get bored.

Huang has been on it three years running. There's only so many times you can put the same guy on the same list before someone in an editorial meeting says "we did him already."

There's also a broader pattern worth noticing. The AI narrative is drifting from who builds the picks and shovels toward who builds the products people actually touch. Model labs, apps, agents, policy. The infrastructure guy becomes furniture. Very expensive, very load-bearing furniture.

Does that change anything about the business? Not remotely.

Media attention and market position stopped moving together a while ago, and this is a clean example of it.

The story of Nvidia right now is in the earnings, not the magazine. Q2 beat expectations, guidance topped estimates, and the market repriced the company by roughly the size of a mid-cap index in an afternoon.

What's worth watching instead of award lists:

A $5.1 trillion valuation prices in a lot of future. That's the real risk in the position, and it has nothing to do with who a magazine finds interesting this year.

Jensen will probably cope. He's got $400 billion of consolation.

Cooling a single data center in space would take 2.15 million square feet of radiators.

That's roughly 37 football fields of metal fins, floating in orbit, doing nothing but sweating.

Elon Musk wants to build them anyway.

SpaceX will launch its first AI satellites in Q4 2027, all running on Nvidia tech. Musk says the orbital network reaches "significant scale" in 2028.

His argument is simple. Running AI workloads in orbit could eventually cost less and carry a smaller environmental footprint than the power-hungry data centers we keep bolting onto Earth.

Free sunlight, no electricity bill, no town council meeting about the noise. On paper, lovely.

That paper pitch got a lot heavier on August 26, when Nvidia CFO Colette Kress said on the earnings call that the Vera Rubin system is in full production and shipping to Oracle, Amazon and SpaceX.

Being in the first Vera cohort is a flex. Being in Nvidia's cap table is something else.

Nvidia disclosed it owns 122.8 million SpaceX shares. Evercore ISI clocked what that means: Nvidia is now both a major supplier to SpaceX and a significant shareholder in it.

And Musk confirmed SpaceX data centers will run exclusively on Nvidia accelerators. So Nvidia sells the chips, then owns a slice of the company buying them.

The circle tightened again in August, when SpaceX closed its all-stock $60B acquisition of Cursor. The AI coding assistant is on a $1B+ annualised run rate, and Jensen Huang has said Cursor is used across his entire company.

Everyone here is a customer of everyone else. What could go wrong?

Not this decade, if Evercore is right.

They model zero orbital compute revenue in 2026 and 2027, with the first orbital gigawatt arriving in FY29 and that year ending at 8 GW orbital versus 10 GW terrestrial.

But pull that build forward into 2028 and the maths changes fast. At the $30 to $50 per watt economics Musk has floated, Evercore says an early unlock could drive significant upside to their numbers. They currently rate SpaceX $SPCX ( ▲ 0.45% ) Outperform with a $230 price target.

Which leaves the question Evercore keeps circling: does "significant scale" in 2028 mean revenue, or does it mean a very expensive technology demo?

Physics is voting for the second one. Brookings points out that Earth data centers dump heat into the air around them, and space has no air to dump it into. Thermal radiation may be the only option, hence those 2.15 million square feet of radiators.

Then add constant ultraviolet bombardment chewing through the hardware, a rising collision risk as orbits fill up, and regulators who have never approved anything like this.

Nvidia gets paid in 2027 regardless of whether a single orbital server ever turns a profit. That's the picks-and-shovels position, and it's the least exciting part of this story by design.

SpaceX is the one carrying the science experiment. Its 2028 promise is being valued today, three years before Evercore expects a dollar of it.

The gap between "we launched it" and "it makes money" is where this story either breaks or pays.