Rockets, AI, and rails: the closed-loop economy no bank can touch 🚀🔒; Revolut just let an AI touch money 🤖💸; Nubank’s US charter is a stress test for every neobank’s unit economics 🏦🇺🇸

FinTech is Eating the World, 30 January

Hey Everyone,

Good morning & happy Friday! What a week in FinTech we just witnessed… 🤯 The good news is that it’s not over. Today we’re diving into rockets, AI, and payment rails, or how Musk’s building the closed-loop economy no bank can touch (deep dive into SpaceX & xAI [& X Money] merger, what everyone’s missing about the biggest IPO of all time + bonus deep dive into Elon’s Super App ambitions); Revolut, which just allowed AI to touch your money (why their partnership with ElevenLabs is brilliant & what’s next for AI & Finance + bonus dive into Revolut’s bet that AI will kill checkout & ElevenLabs pitch deck teardown inside); and Nubank’s US charter that’s now a stress test for every neobank’s unit economics (why it’s huge & who has to worry + bonus deep dive into NU’s latest financials inside). Let’s jump straight into the fascinating stuff 🌶️

Rockets, AI, and rails: the closed-loop economy no bank can touch 🚀🔒

The BIG News 🗞️ Undoubtedly one of the biggest news in tech this week is that Elon Musk’s SpaceX is in talks to merge with Elon Musk’s xAI (that also owns social media giant X) ahead of a planned SpaceX public debut later in 2026. And this merger has been framed as financial engineering before an IPO, or an empire-builder’s instinct to consolidate.

Both framings miss the point.

The merger is a response to a physics problem. AI is slamming into hard limits on terrestrial compute: power grids that can’t deliver gigawatts to training clusters, cooling systems that can’t dissipate the heat, permitting processes that take a decade while compute demands double annually. Every major AI lab is fighting for the same scarce resources. Musk just built an escape hatch that no competitor can follow through.

By combining SpaceX’s launch capability with xAI’s compute demands, he’s positioning to move AI infrastructure off Earth. Not as science fiction, but as an economic necessity that his companies are uniquely positioned to execute 🌍

Then there’s also Super App wannabe X, which, when put together, creates a closed-loop economy no bank or FinTech can touch.

Let’s unpack this, understand why it matters, and what’s next.