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A Picasso Rose 10% in Value. Did Its Owner Actually Make Money?

In November 2022, someone bought a Picasso at Christie’s in New York. The painting was Le peintre et son modèle , a large 1964 canvas by Pablo Picasso. The published auction price was: $10.35 million A little more than three years later, the same painting appeared at auction again. On March 5, 2026, Christie’s sold it in London for: £8.52 million — about $11.36 million On the surface, this looks like a successful trade. The published auction price increased by roughly: 10% HENI calculated that as an annualized return of about 2% . So the owner made around $1 million. Right? Not necessarily. Because a $10 million painting has something a stock price does not: An expensive ecosystem surrounding every transaction. And once we follow the money through that ecosystem, the return begins to look very different. First, Meet the Picasso Pablo Picasso painted Le peintre et son modèle in Mougins, France, on November 8–9, 1964. It measures roughly 130 by 195 centimeters. The...
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Why Is AI Making Cooling Companies So Valuable?

NVIDIA sells the chips. But every more powerful AI chip creates another problem: Heat. AI servers consume enormous amounts of electricity. And almost all of that electricity eventually becomes heat that has to go somewhere. If you can't remove the heat, the expensive GPUs can't keep running. That means the AI boom isn't creating demand only for chips. It's also creating demand for the infrastructure required to keep those chips alive. And some surprisingly old industrial companies are becoming part of the AI economy. Follow the heat, and another industry appears. Why Are AI Data Centers Getting So Hot? A traditional data center contains rows of racks filled with servers. For years, one of the main ways to cool those servers was relatively simple. Move cold air through the room. Let fans push that air through the equipment. Carry the hot air away. It worked. Then AI changed the density of computing. Instead of spreading computing power across large amo...
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How Is Anthropic Making So Much Money?

Almost everyone knows ChatGPT. Claude is less famous. Yet something surprising happened in the second quarter of 2026. Anthropic, the company behind Claude, generated about $11.6 billion in quarterly revenue . OpenAI generated about $6.7 billion . For that quarter, the less famous AI company made roughly 1.7 times as much revenue . And that may not even be the most surprising number. Anthropic's annualized revenue run rate — roughly what its current pace would look like over a full year — went from: About $9 billion at the end of 2025 to More than $47 billion in May 2026 to More than $65 billion by the end of July. That's more than seven times the year-end 2025 level. Now Anthropic has confidentially filed for a U.S. IPO, and a valuation around $2 trillion has been discussed. So there is a much more interesting question than how popular Claude is. Who is paying Anthropic all this money? The Answer Isn't Just Chatbots When most people think about Claude...
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