Old World Cracks. New World Declares Itself.
On March 21, Terafab was announced. On March 23, Iran closed the Strait. Two worlds are co-existing simultaneously. One at the verge of dying. One emerging. Which one are you a stakeholder of?
The Adaptive Economy · Issue 139 · April 2026
March 21, 2026: Terafab announced. $25 billion. 1 terawatt of solar-powered compute. Austin, Texas.
March 23, 2026: Iran deploys naval assets across the Strait of Hormuz. Shipping insurers suspend coverage.
April 1, 2026: NASA confirms Artemis II. Four astronauts. First crewed lunar mission since 1972.
April 3, 2026: Brent crude hits $112. Jerome Powell warns of “energy shock” on live television. The ECB, Bank of England, and Federal Reserve pause rate decisions in the same week, citing the same variable.
April 22, 2026: Aboard the USS Hornet… the ship that recovered Apollo 11… we are convening the largest gathering of family offices investing in climate infrastructure and frontier tech that San Francisco has ever seen.
These are not separate stories. They are coordinates on the same map.
The old world is cracking. The new world is being built. And for the first time in fifty years, humanity is dreaming again… not because the future looks easy, but because the present has become impossible to sustain.
“Finally, We Are Dreaming Again.”
I. Humanity Dreams in Cycles
In 1865, Jules Verne published From the Earth to the Moon. His spacecraft launched from Florida. It carried three men. It was named the Columbiad. It splashed down in the Pacific Ocean. He even got the cost right, $5.4 million in 1865 dollars, roughly $12 billion adjusted, against Apollo’s $14.4 billion through the circumnavigation mission.
One hundred and four years later, on July 23, 1969, Neil Armstrong quoted Verne during Apollo 11’s live television broadcast from space: “A hundred years ago, Jules Verne wrote a book about a voyage to the Moon. His spaceship, Columbia, took off from Florida and landed in the Pacific Ocean after completing a trip to the Moon.”
Humanity dreams in cycles.
We build toward something larger than ourselves. Then we stop. Then, eventually, we remember how.
For the first time in fifty years, we are remembering.
The First Dream: 1900
Paris, April 1900. The Exposition Universelle opens. Fifty million visitors walk through the gates over seven months.
The Palace of Electricity glows with five thousand incandescent bulbs, a beacon so bright it earns Paris the name “City of Light.” Visitors ride the trottoir roulant, the world’s first moving sidewalk: three platforms at three speeds, carrying 60,000 people per hour on a 3.5-kilometer loop. 50,000,000 people came from all over the world to visit Paris that year. They watched the Lumière brothers project films on a 21-meter screen. They tour a section dedicated to “flying machines”, contraptions that would become airplanes within three years.
This was the Belle Époque. Art Nouveau. Jules Verne’s optimism made physical. The future was not a threat. It was a destination.
Then came 1914. Then 1939. The dream collapsed into trenches and firebombs.
The Second Dream: 1969
We woke up again in the Space Age.
On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong stepped onto the lunar surface. On December 14, 1972, Eugene Cernan became the last man to walk on the Moon. Between those dates, twelve astronauts left footprints in lunar dust, and an entire generation believed Mars was next.
The architecture of the era reflected it. Googie diners with flying saucer roofs. TWA terminals that looked like spacecraft. Eero Saarinen’s Gateway Arch , finished 1965, the same year Verne’s predictions were being validated at NASA. The future was sleek, metallic, and inevitable.
Then came Vietnam. Then stagflation. Then Watergate. Then Three Mile Island.
The dream collapsed into cynicism.
The Third Dream: Never Came
For forty years, the future became something to survive, not to build.
The cultural record is unambiguous. In the 1950s, Hollywood made Destination Moon, a celebration of engineering. By 2010, the top-grossing genre was the zombie apocalypse.
The Walking Dead premiered in 2010 and ran for eleven seasons. World War Z grossed $540 million. The Hunger Games. Mad Max: Fury Road. Children of Men. The stories we told ourselves were not about building. They were about scavenging. Not about ambition. About survival.
The academic term is “the pessimistic turn.” After September 11, 2001, American cinema shifted from imagination of disaster to imagination of aftermath. The future was no longer something we reached. It was something that happened to us.
Then came 2008. Then came the decade of “software eating the world”, which mostly meant advertising technology and gig economy arbitrage. Then came COVID.
For fifty years, we optimized. We financialized. We offshored.
We turned the economy into a giant arbitrage machine. The marginal improvement replaced the moonshot. The spreadsheet replaced the blueprint.
The last time America built a new nuclear reactor from scratch was 1996.
The last time Europe broke ground on a major refinery was 2012.
The average age of the US electrical grid is 40 years.
We have been running on infrastructure our grandparents built.
The third dream never came. Until now.
The Fourth Dream: 2026
On October 13, 2024, a 233-foot rocket booster fell from the sky and was caught, mid-air, by a pair of mechanical arms attached to its own launch tower.
Watch the footage. Understand what you are seeing.
SpaceX launched 138 missions in 2024. That is more than half of all rocket launches on Earth. In 2020, they launched 25. In 2025, they hit 170. The first Super Heavy booster was reused on Flight 9 in May 2025, the same booster that had been caught in January.
This is not incremental. This is the return of civilizational ambition.
On March 21, 2026, Elon Musk walked into a defunct power plant in Austin, Texas, and announced Terafab: $25 billion, solar-powered, targeting 1 terawatt of compute capacity.
Not a chip fab, a civilizational asset.
The kind of thing governments used to build. The kind of thing we stopped building after the 1970s.
In parallel, NASA confirmed Artemis II: four astronauts will orbit the Moon for the first time since Eugene Cernan stepped off the lunar surface in December 1972. Fifty-three years between crewed lunar missions. Half a century of low Earth orbit. Half a century of incremental.
1900: Paris dreamed of electricity and flight. 1969: America dreamed of the Moon. 1985–2020: We forgot how to dream. 2026: The builders woke up, and this time, the capital is private.
II. The Builders Are Back
The results of the optimization era were spectacular in their own way. Global poverty collapsed. A billion people entered the middle class. Supply chains wrapped the planet in a web so tight that a cargo ship stuck in the Suez could halt automobile production in Bavaria.
But the ambition drained out. 🤯
We stopped building the future. We started managing the present.
Now look at the last eighteen months.
In compute, Terafab is not alone. TSMC has committed $65 billion across three Arizona fabs, the largest foreign direct investment in American history. Intel is deploying $20 billion in Ohio, with optionality for $100 billion across the decade. Anthropic, OpenAI, and xAI collectively raised north of $20 billion in a single year to build infrastructure that will obsolete software as we know it.
In energy, the numbers are even more striking. Commonwealth Fusion Systems has raised $2.86 billion to build SPARC, a fusion reactor the size of a tennis court that could match a traditional nuclear plant’s output. Google already signed to buy half the power from their first commercial facility. Fervo Energy, which filed for a $2-4 billion IPO in January, is delivering power from the first enhanced geothermal plant this year, the oil industry’s drilling techniques, repurposed to tap the Earth’s heat anywhere on the planet. Base Power closed a $1 billion Series C to deploy residential batteries at scale and build domestic manufacturing in Austin. Grid resilience is becoming a consumer product.
Pacific Fusion raised $900 million in a Series A, the largest seed-stage energy round in history. Helion Energy has raised $1 billion with Microsoft as first customer, targeting grid power by 2028. Twelve secured $645 million to build AirPlant One in Moses Lake, Washington… the first commercial facility in the US to convert captured CO2 into jet fuel. Alaska Airlines, United, and British Airways parent IAG are already customers. A 260-million-gallon SAF contract is signed. Aviation decarbonization is no longer theoretical.
Total climate tech venture investment in 2025: $40.5 billion. Fusion alone: $2.64 billion in twelve months, a five-fold increase since 2021. Nuclear fission startups: another $2 billion. The energy sector has not seen private capital deployed at this scale since the original oil boom.
The public markets are waking up. SOLV Energy IPO’d in February at a $6 billion valuation, the largest solar EPC contractor in the US. Terrestrial Energy completed its SPAC merger and trades on Nasdaq. Oklo, backed by Sam Altman, hit a $10 billion market cap. These are not speculative bets. These are companies with contracts, customers, and construction crews.
The builders are not asking permission. They are deploying capital at scales we have not seen since the interstate highway system.
👋 My thesis: The West is re-industrializing. The projects are multi-decade. The capital is private. And the ambition is back.
III. The Old World Is Cracking
Do not mistake this for a smooth transition.
The old world is not retiring gracefully. It is fracturing under its own contradictions, and the fractures are accelerating.
Three energy crises in four years.
2022: Nord Stream blow up. Europe’s energy sovereignty illusion shatters overnight. Gas to Europe cut by 80%. The continent that built its industrial model on cheap Russian energy had no alternative ready at scale. German chemical giants, BASF, Covestro, Lanxess, began relocating production to the United States and China. Electricity prices in Germany hit 3x the US average. The bet on Russian gas was over.
2023: Extreme weather events expose grid fragility across Texas, California, and Southern Europe simultaneously. Rolling blackouts. Infrastructure designed for a stable climate meeting a climate that is no longer stable. Southeast Asia followed: grid instability in Vietnam, rolling blackouts in the Philippines, stranded natural gas projects across Indonesia. The region built for export-led growth powered by coal and LNG. Both became liabilities in the same year.
2026: Iran threatens the Strait of Hormuz. Brent hits $112 per barrel. Jerome Powell issues an explicit “energy shock” warning on live television. Three central banks pause in the same week, citing the same variable.
The Strait carries 21% of global petroleum liquids every single day. Roughly 20 million barrels pass through a chokepoint 21 miles wide. The Houthis demonstrated, with cheap drones and Iranian guidance… that trillion-dollar naval fleets cannot secure commercial shipping in the Red Sea. The Strait was next. Not if. When. And now “when” is here.
At some point, the market stops waiting for governments to fix it.
That point was this year.
Businesses that absorbed three consecutive energy cost shocks in four years are now rebuilding their energy architecture from scratch, solar generation, battery storage, efficiency retrofits, not because of incentives but because dependency on the grid has become an operational risk they can no longer model around.
The crisis did what no subsidy program could: it made the alternative rational at every level of the market.
This is what a structural transition looks like from the inside. It does not announce itself. It shows up in procurement decisions, in capex reallocation, in three-year energy contracts being replaced by owned infrastructure.
The capital implications are severe. Sovereign wealth funds are rotating out of Treasuries and into hard assets. Family offices are pulling from public equities into direct ownership. Commodity exposure is no longer a hedge, it is a requirement. Energy independence is no longer a policy preference, it is a procurement decision.
This old world is not dying quietly. It is dying violently. And the turbulence will last years, not quarters.
IV. Two Worlds, One Portfolio
Here is the uncomfortable truth: both realities are happening simultaneously.
The builders are back. And the old world is cracking. These are not sequential. They are parallel.
This is not 1945, where a clear winner emerged from the wreckage to build the postwar order. This is 1971, the year Nixon closed the gold window, the year the Bretton Woods system collapsed, the year the rules changed and most people did not notice for a decade.
The capital that thrives in this environment is not the capital that picks a side. It is the capital that builds the bridge.
On the infrastructure side, energy independence is no longer a policy preference, it is a survival requirement. Solar, nuclear, batteries, and grid-scale storage are not ESG plays. They are national security. Compute is the new oil. The nations and corporations that control semiconductor fabrication will control the next century. TSMC, Samsung, Intel, and now Terafab are not competing for market share. They are competing for civilizational leverage. Supply chain localization is the dominant theme of the 2020s. The CFO who optimized for “just in time” in 2019 is now optimizing for “just in case.”
✅ On the allocation side, family offices are moving. The Bessemer 2024 survey showed 62% of family offices increasing direct investments, 47% increasing allocation to alternatives, and only 18% maintaining legacy 60/40 structures. The LP-GP relationship is inverting. Limited partners no longer want to be passive. They want co-invest rights. They want governance. They want to see the asset. Real assets are repricing. Farmland, timber, water rights, energy infrastructure, and critical minerals are no longer “alternative.” They are core.
What could derail this? Regulatory backlash against AI compute. A capital discipline collapse in fusion. A geopolitical escalation that disrupts supply chains faster than localization can proceed. These are real risks. But they are risks within a structural transition that is already underway, not risks that would reverse it.
The synthesis is not a compromise. It is a recognition: the builders and the breakers are operating on the same timeline. The capital that wins is the capital that funds the builders while hedging the breakers.
V. The Gathering
This is why we built the Atlas Coalition.
On April 22, 2026, aboard the USS Hornet in Alameda, the ship that recovered the Apollo 11 astronauts from the Pacific, we are convening the largest gathering of family offices, institutional allocators, and frontier technology founders that San Francisco has ever seen.
This is not a conference. It is a coalition of the 0.1%.
In the room: single and multi-family offices actively deploying into climate infrastructure and frontier tech. Sovereign wealth fund representatives rotating into real-asset strategies. Founders building at civilizational scale in energy, compute, robotics, and biotech. The LPs and GPs who are reallocating capital from legacy holdings into the systems that will define the next century.
Why the USS Hornet: The Apollo 11 recovery is not nostalgia. It is a reminder. Fifty years ago, we did the impossible because we decided to. Then we stopped deciding.
We are deciding again.
The families in that room on April 22 are not spectators. They are the 0.1%, the movers and shakers who deploy capital with conviction, who take positions before the crowd arrives, who understand that the next decade will be won by those who build, not those who wait.
If this resonates, apply to join us.
→ [Request a seat at the Atlas Coalition SF Summit]
Founders. Families. Allocators. The fourth dream is taking shape.
We are gathering the people who are making it happen, with their optimism, their time, and their money.
Fight the Good Fight.
Djoann Fal