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Former All-Star closer Al Holland has died at 73, the Philadelphia Phillies shared on Monday.

"Arms Race Has Started": War Unicorns Enter M&A Phase As Ondas Snaps Up Kamikaze Drone Maker DZYNE

The writing is on the wall: defense-tech unicorns, particularly those focused on loitering munitions, autonomous drones, and counter-UAS systems, are positioned for years of growth as warfare changes forever. 

These "war unicorns," as we call them, are increasingly ripe for M&A as larger players race to consolidate across drones and counter-drone systems. The latest example is Nasdaq-listed defense and industrial technology firm Ondas Holdings moving to acquire DZYNE Technologies, a maker of drones, loitering-munition-type systems, and counter-drone technology.  

Ondas Drone Box 

Bloomberg reports private equity firm Highlander Partners will receive $200 million in cash and about $675 million in Ondas stock. Those shares will be locked up for six months.

"The arms race has started," Ondas CEO Eric Brock said in a Bloomberg TV interview. "Over the last 20 plus years we have de-industrialized in the United States. That means the supply chain has moved to China."

The deal expands Ondas' portfolio beyond the civilian drone market into systems developed for military surveillance and reconnaissance, as well as smaller kamikaze drones.

DZYNE BlitzBox Drone 

The American company Dzyne has introduced the BlitzBox system, a container for covertly launching a swarm of attack drones. On the outside, it looks like an ordinary cargo box, but inside, it can hold up to 100 Blitz drones, ready to launch in minutes.#DroneWars #UAS #UAV pic.twitter.com/w9aRaZYrCZ

— Drone Wars (@Drone_Wars_) May 27, 2026

Ondas said DZYNE is expected to generate $191 million in revenue this year and $300 million in 2027.

Recently, Needham analyst Austin Bohlig told clients of a potential drone procurement supercycle, as the US military prepares to spend billions of dollars on these low-cost systems.

Read the report:

• Congress Moves To Boost Drone Funding As "War Unicorns" See Possible Procurement Supercycle

Related:

• JPM Call With Axon Reveals Race To Fortify U.S. Data Centers Against Kamikaze Drone Swarms
• Goldman Sits Down With Anduril As 'War Unicorns' Reshape Defense Tech
• "Flying Beer Cooler": Pentagon's Next Kamikaze Drone Ushers In Era Of Cheap Mass-Produced Airpower

Separate, but more on war technology coverage:

• Ukraine Plans To Hyper-Innovate Humanoid Robot Soldiers

The Ondas-DZYNE deal further suggests that defense startups focusing on drones and counter-UAS are prime M&A targets for larger companies.

Tyler Durden Mon, 07/06/2026 - 15:25

The Los Angeles Lakers have completely revamped the roster this offseason. Rui Hachimura became the latest Lakers free agent departure after signing a two-year, $28 million deal with the Los Angeles Clippers Monday. Every player from the Lakers’ Game 1 starting lineup versus the Houston Rockets in the first round of the 2026 NBA playoffs...

It’s a love story, baby, they said, “Yes.” Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce said “I do” with a weekend full of extravagant wedding at Madison Square Garden. Even though the couple had some protocols in place to keep certain aspects of the festivities private, Page Six has the inside scoop on the star-studded one-thousand person...

It’s a love story, baby, they said, “Yes.” Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce said “I do” with a weekend full of extravagant wedding at Madison Square Garden. Even though the couple had some protocols in place to keep certain aspects of the festivities private, Page Six has the inside scoop on the star-studded one-thousand person...

Dramatic new footage shows NYPD rescuers rush to help eight passengers off a seaplane that made an emergency hard landing in the East River while returning from the Hamptons on Sunday.

The Los Angeles native came across the country to play and train with legendary players such as Spanish forward Raúl and Spain midfielder Marcos Senna.

Heart-stopping footage captured the moment the roof of a New Jersey BJ's Wholesale Club partially caved in -- sending torrents of water gushing into the store as vicious storms pounded the area Monday morning.

LeBron James seems to be near a decision.

She pulled out all the stops when it came to her sparkle.

She pulled out all the stops when it came to her sparkle.

Questions have been raised about the integrity of FIFA’s decision.

A TikTok user explained that cleanup crews had cleared the area by 6:30 a.m. and anyone attempting similar chaos in the future would be caught by police.

When The Monetary Laws Of Physics Change

Authored by Mark Jeftovic via BombThrower.com,

“You just wait until the next bear market…”

Last month, I talked about how many of the legendary investors I’ve long followed as well as many of my contemporary financial commentators (speaking specifically of the contrarian ilk), are almost unanimous in the opinion that the AI trade is well into bubble territory and stocks in general are overvalued. Hell, even I think that and I’m personally “all in” on AI and have a fair bit of equities exposure to it (not a tonne, but it’s there, and the biggest winners in the TSC portfolio lately have all been AI stocks and HPC stocks).

Angela sent me this Diary of a CEO interview with Jeremy Grantham – another legend – and she said it was scary. At his peak he managed something like $165B AUM, but he’s down to $80B or $90B now (he also says the only reason he’s still counted as a billionaire today, personally, is because they include the money he’s given away. Grantham has donated over 90% of his net worth to the Grantham Foundation, which invests and incubates primarily green-tech innovation to combat climate change.

Although Thomas Braziel, whose name you might recognize as a notable distressed asset investor who specializes in crypto i.e. Mt Gox claims, FTX, put out an interesting analysis of Grantham’s green tech foundation’s filings – and surmised that what he’s saying on the talk-show circuit isn’t lining up with where he’s actually allocating the foundation’s …money  )

Via: GMO Q4 2025 Letter

Grantham occupies an exalted perch in the pantheon of institutional investors, so when he opines on something, it tends to get picked up on, which one may find somewhat quizzical, given his lifetime batting average isn’t really in the same league as the likes of Buffett, Munger, Klarman, et al.

His lifetime average returns? The closest analog could be the lifetime average of the GMO Global Asset Allocation Composite, which he co-founded.

Their number? 8.43%. And 0.8% of that was because of a one-time litigation settlement received in 2024

Warren Buffett’s lifetime batting average is pushing 20% (19.8%).

The S&P itself, 10%.

In case you’re wondering how somebody became a billionaire by lagging the major index by 200bp over their entire career, it’s because Grantham is proficient at one thing in particular: not losing money.

The TL;DR from the DOAC interview? A lot of people are about to lose a lot of money.

When Stephen Bartlett told him he was invested in SpaceX, Grantham dead-panned, “Good luck with that”.

Bitcoin? “It’s a zero”.

The interview went a bit viral and I saw a lot of “Billionaire says Bitcoin is worthless” headlines in the mainstream financial press. Grantham has since been on a punditry tour (perhaps in promotion of his latest book, “The Making of a Permabear” – yes, really); and the soundbites that are being repeatedly teased out from them are his “Bitcoin is a zero” sermons, in one case getting into a somewhat heated exchange with Joe Kernen on CNBC – where Kernen, incredibly, makes some of my points far less diplomatically than I have here.

At least it’s not just Bitcoiners getting into scraps! pic.twitter.com/pfJyXM3ZFc

— JOEY (@JoeyTweeets) June 26, 2026

After Grantham trotted out the usual “no use case”, “there’s no there there”, “it’s a bubble”, Kernen straight-armed Grantham in the face with his underperformance over the past two decades,

“You’ve done a great disservice to anybody who’s listened to you over the last twenty years”.

Grantham’s response and attempt at a defence, combined with something else he said in the DOAC interview, are all leading up to my point here, while being 100% oblivious to it:

To Joe Kernen: he said “We’ve been in a bull market since 2009, let’s see how all this stuff holds up when the next bear market hits”

To Steven Bartlett: he cautioned how Amazon sold off a staggering 92% during the Dotcom bust.

During the drive to Hamilton for a board meeting, I listened to this short Alex Hormozi clip and his analogy (which he cribbed from Brian Johnson) hit me full force and I finally had a working metaphor that explained what I’ve been trying to articulate about these living legends of finance.

That they’re underestimating the significance of fiat debasement is true, but it doesn’t really explode in your brain as much as make your eyes glaze over.

The analogy is fish are swimming around in water.

Some of them become experts at swimming. They train their entire lives, they practice every day, they study the expert swimmers of yore, and they analyze nearly every aspect of the water they inhabit: it’s PH levels, alkaline, currents, flow – everything.

They know how a slight variance in one factor impacts the others – they know “which way the current is going”.

But over time, the water heats up; they may pick up on this, but they’re never quite prepared for what it means beyond a certain point.

When that point arrives, the water evaporates – and now it’s gas. Steam.

Setting aside for our purposes how this would fry the fish, imagine they’re still alive, but now they’re trying to apply everything they know about swimming in water to this new environment, which is gaseous, not liquid.

They would be flailing and flapping around like the proverbial “fish out of water”.

What happened?

They were never wrong about their fluid dynamics.

The physics changed and they had no model for the new reality.

Hormozi’s short clip was applying this metaphor to AI – which is certainly among the key drivers of the “monetary physics change” that we are now undergoing.

But the point of no return, when the phase shift started, was – I believe, and as Raoul Pal has always said – the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-2009.

That was when the water started turning to gas.

Grantham’s own yardstick measures the current bull market from then – when the central banks stepped in, when The Big Print started and when interest rate suppression and credit expansion became permanent features of the global monetary system (I would argue that the process started in 1980-82, and the GFC was a major tipping point).

Yes, Amazon came off 92% when the dotCom bubble burst. But anybody who had bought, even at the high right before that, is now up about 4,642.7 %

On the new Sovereign Capitalist site, we can model all this out interactively (see below).

Run the interactive widget here

On its surface, Grantham’s fixation on loss avoidance serves a purpose (recall Buffett’s top rules of investing: number one is “Don’t lose money”, number two is “See Rule number one”).

If I ever experienced a staggeringly huge life-changing windfall in one moment, I would carve out a “retire your bloodline”-type allocation and hand it to a guy like Grantham (more likely it would be Vito Maida  over at Patient Capital, here in Canada).

But being good at preserving capital has its own opportunity cost, which is far more pronounced now that we’ve traversed the inflection point into the Exponential Age.

The world has transitioned from flat to hyper-cubed – the architecture is completely different now, and the linear measuring stick known as fiat money is ill equipped for the task of describing it.

To Grantham’s point “you just wait until the next bear market”, there won’t be a next bear market, not until we change that measuring stick.

Until the monetary regime change happens – that “change in physics” – any drawdown, no matter how deep, will be papered over with incessant Big Prints until the system itself completes its metamorphosis.

Today’s post was an excerpt from The Sovereign Capitalist my recently relaunched premium service. This goes beyond a dashboard, it’s more of an operating system for high agency net-producers.  All members get access to the full pre-release version of my new book: The Blueprint – Survive & Thrive in an Overclocked Timeline.

Tyler Durden Mon, 07/06/2026 - 15:05

Singer Lauren Bennett, who gained famed as one of the voices on LMFAO’s hit “Party Rock Anthem” has died. Bennett’s death was confirmed Monday in a statement from GRL, her former group. “It is with great sadness that we share the passing of our beloved Lauren,” the statement read. Singer Lauren Bennett of G.R.L performs...

Built for extra hot days.

Penalties include fines and deportation to lifetime bans from entering Indonesia.

Video showed what appeared to be a large tree engulfed in flames across the street from the Rainbow Ballroom, with fire shooting into the sky and spreading toward a neighboring building

Oddsmakers give Los Cafeteros a slight edge over the Rossocrociati.

Hormuz In The Rearview As Asia-US Ocean Container Rates Soar Past $7,900

By Stuart Chirls of AmericanShipper

The container shipping market is being driven by geopolitics, rates, and network reshuffling, but freight-rate volatility and adjustments by carriers to protect schedules and pricing has supplanted Middle East disruptions as top-level concerns.

Asia-U.S. West Coast prices increased 8% to $6,175 per forty foot equivalent unit (FEU), according to Freightos, a data contributor to SONAR ocean market data.

Prices for Asia-U.S. East Coast transportation also rose 8%, to $7,998 per FEU.

SONAR‘s Ocean Supply/Demand Index reflects the surge in trans-Pacific demand, having recovered to year-ago levels

Iran has escalated steps to assert sole authority over vessel traffic in the Strait of Hormuz, writes Freightos Research Head Judah Levine, in a note to clients, even as it negotiates with the United States over terms of a final peace deal.

"Oil volumes out of the Gulf states are rebounding, though marine traffic was paused … following Iranian strikes on transiting vessels and sites in Bahrain and Kuwait,” Levine said. 

The United Nations abandoned ship evacuations after Tehran attacked a Mediterranean Shipping Co. vessel transiting a non-approved route.

As crude oil flows from the Persian Gulf resume, surging peak season demand – and not oil prices – are driving elevated container rates.

“The early start to this year’s peak has sent rates spiking on the main east-west lanes since mid-May,” Levine said, “with carriers shifting capacity from secondary lanes to service this demand, contributing to rate increases on secondary trades too.”

Zim recently launched a new Asia–East Coast South America service, while Hapag-Lloyd updated service rotations. Broader growth across fleets and new vessel orders with shipyards continues, suggesting carriers are still trying to balance network expansion with an increasingly uneven demand amid geopolitical events.

Since mid-May trans-Pacific prices to the U.S. West Coast have climbed 120%, and by 85% to East Coast gateways. By comparison, Asia-North Europe rates are up 70% in that time, and 85% to the Mediterranean.

In a remarkable show of importer confidence in projected consumer spending, “[t]rans-Pacific East Coast rates are now $1,000/FEU higher than last year’s frontloading-driven summer high,” wrote Levine, “with West Coast prices just above their 2025 peak. Europe and Mediterranean rates are $1,300- and $3,000/ per FEU above their 2025 peak season highs, respectively.

The National Retail Federation said 32% of surveyed consumers had started their back-to-school shopping in June, up from 26% in 2025, an indicator for retail spending later in the year.

The surge is delaying traffic at major hubs in South Asia, the Far East and Europe, shrinking available capacity and contributing to upward pressure on rates, Levine said.

The early rush is likely underpinned by an array of factors, from frontloading ahead of carrier fuel surcharges and manufacturer price increases, as well as approaching U.S. tariff deadlines.

“If enough shippers are indeed pulling peak season volumes forward, we could expect the early start to mean an early peak season unwind as well, possibly some time in July,” Levine said.

Volume strength may stretch on a little longer than many shippers may have preferred due to delays at congested ports, he added. “Carriers are set to introduce more rate increases to start July, so the degree of success carriers have with these price hikes should reflect where the market is in terms of this year’s peak-season peak.”

Tyler Durden Mon, 07/06/2026 - 14:25