THE ECONOMY • THE MIDDLE-CLASS SQUEEZE
The average American earned $37.53 an hour last month. That’s up 3.4% from a year ago—sounds like a raise. But after you adjust for 4.2% inflation, your paycheck buys less than it did twelve months ago. Not the same. Less. In February, real wages were climbing at +1.3%. By April, they’d turned negative. By May… minus 0.7%. Three months is all it took for a real raise to become a real pay cut, and the war’s energy shock plus tariff-driven price hikes did the rest.
You got a 3.4% raise, and inflation charged you 4.2%—you showed up every day and still fell behind.
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics, Real Earnings Summary & Employment Situation (May 2026)
Everyone read the SpaceX S-1. Nobody read page 339.
Everyone celebrated the SpaceX IPO last week.
$1.75 trillion. The biggest listing in history.
But the most important line wasn’t the valuation.
It was the footnote Musk buried on page 339 of the S-1.
A 14-word disclosure revealing exactly what he plans to do with the $75 billion windfall from the IPO.
Not rockets. Not Starlink. Not the chatbot.
One small, publicly traded company that builds the permanent power infrastructure his empire can’t survive without.
Wall Street is still chasing the headline ticker at 80x sales.
The footnote points somewhere else entirely.
Dylan Jovine has the name, the ticker, and the full breakdown.
