Solar power held a record-high 12.8% share of US electricity supply in May, overtaking coal-generated power for the first full month on record, energy think tank Ember said in a report on Wednesday. As OilPrice notes, while the share of solar-generated power jumped to a record high for a full month, the share of coal in the U.S. electricity mix slumped to 12.2% last month, the fourth-lowest monthly share of coal ever.
Solar generated an all-time high total of 45.5 terawatt-hours (TWh) in May, up by 17% from a year earlier and surpassing the previous record set in July last year, according to Ember’s data. In May, solar also became the third-largest source of electricity in the U.S., behind natural gas and nuclear power generation.
At the same time, coal generation hit an all-time monthly low of 39.3 TWh in April 2026. Coal power output rebounded to 43.4 TWh in May, but still remained 11% below May 2025 levels.
“Overtaking coal for the first month on record shows just how far solar has come, from a niche contributor to the third-largest and fastest-growing source of power in the US electricity system,” said Nicolas Fulghum, Senior Data Analyst at Ember.
“From Texas to California, markets across the US are betting on solar to meet rising power needs,” Fulghum added.
Despite the Trump Administration’s assault on renewable energy and support for the coal industry, solar and wind power generation in the United States is booming, including in many red states that President Trump won such as Texas, Florida, Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Arizona, and Mississippi.
In a separate report also out on Wednesday, the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) and Wood Mackenzie said that despite changing tax policy and regulatory actions targeting clean energy, solar and energy storage represented 91% of all new capacity installed in the U.S. in the first quarter as utilities, homeowners, and businesses seek energy security amid global gas and gas turbine supply disruptions.
States won by President Trump accounted for 74% of all solar capacity installed in the first quarter, according to SEIA and WoodMac’s U.S. Solar Market Insight 2026 Q2 Report.
Tyler Durden Wed, 06/10/2026 - 16:40The tokenomics debate got its sharpest contrarian voice this morning, and it came from inside the building.
John Zito Photographer: Jeenah Moon/BloombergJohn Zito, co-president of Apollo Asset Management, sat for a fireside chat at the Morgan Stanley US Financials Conference on Wednesday, where he suggested to Bloomberg that measured per unit of intelligence delivered rather than per token, prices are collapsing - even as low-value usage drives the actual bills up.
"I think tokenmaxxing and token talk is - it's a lot of BS, honestly. Like, if you look at per unit of knowledge and cost per unit of knowledge, prices are collapsing. Prices are collapsing per unit of IQ, if you did it that way."
In other words: a token is not a unit of intelligence. Price the capability instead of the throughput - the way a 2026 laptop costs what a 2010 laptop did but is 50x more capable - and the cost of "IQ" is in freefall even while the bills explode.
He also suggested that we're screwed if AI isn't just hype:
"If AI is real, it's so hyper-deflationary to so many things over the long term that it's really hard to take risk."
So a few things are going on here - the spending problem is real. The metric everyone is using to describe it is wrong. And the resolution of that tension is where the entire AI trade goes next.
As Goldman's Rich Privorotsky noted five days earlier - consensus was already migrating to exactly this frame; that the relevant economic metric is not token volume but useful task completion per watt and per dollar; that customers facing usage-based pricing "will optimize for cost per completed task," routing simple work to local models, harder tasks to the cloud, and frontier models only when required; and, that we "maybe have allocated too much spend to the Data-Centric model." When Apollo and Goldman independently land on the same framework inside a week, we're looking at a new institutional consensus forming in real time.
The French toast economyZito's diagnosis of why enterprise AI bills exploded will sound familiar to ZeroHedge premium subscribers: too many companies pointing frontier models at tasks that don't remotely justify the compute.
"Our IQs are so low that we're actually using [AI tools] to check out the recipe for, you know, French toast. That's where you're seeing the prices go up."
Swap "French toast" for "checking the weather" and that is, almost verbatim, the tokenmaxxing reductio we documented at Amazon - employees routing busywork through agents to climb the KiroRank leaderboard, frontier reasoning models deployed against questions a search bar answered in 2009. Zito even joked that his own IQ is "not high enough" to need what Anthropic's next flagship model - and something that only "a handful" of users genuinely need, and can monetize, the bleeding edge.
So - the mismatch between task and tool doesn't persist forever - it gets arbitraged into what he called a new economy for the sector: "The AMD chip, the Nvidia chip, all these different chips will be used and optimized for a certain use-case to solve the spend problem." Citadel and Jane Street pay anything for the frontier because their ROI is, in his word, massive. Everyone else's French toast queries get routed to something cheap.
And of course we watched this unfold over the last month. Bloomberg notes Uber set usage limits on tools like Claude Code after incinerating its AI budget, and Walmart capped an in-house AI agent - the one that helps employees with spreadsheets and presentations - after demand ran too hot. The caps are landing on exactly the low-IQ-task tier Zito is describing, while the frontier spend stays untouched.
How we got hereFor readers just joining: this is the latest beat in a story that has moved very fast.
Last month we noted that the AI narrative had hit a serious snag, after Uber's COO Andrew Macdonald admitted the company couldn't draw a line between exploding token consumption and useful product output. This, after 5,000 engineers burned the entire 2026 AI budget by April. Data spanning 2,444 companies suggested only 18 cents of every AI dollar reaches users as stable product, with 44 cents going to fixing bugs the AI itself introduced.
h/t @Aiswarya_SankarThen came the $500 million mystery bill - an unnamed enterprise client, per Axios, torching half a billion dollars on Claude in a single month with no usage caps - landing the same week Amazon nuked its internal leaderboard and an SVP begged staff not to use AI for the sake of using AI.
Then, in Part II of our reporting: 'From Singularity To Tokenomics,' we noted that the subsidy formally ended: GitHub flipped Copilot to usage-based billing on June 1 - the same morning Anthropic confidentially filed its draft S-1 - and developers hit their monthly quotas before lunch. OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft all executed the same flat-rate-to-meter pivot within sixty days of each other. Sam Altman conceded that cost went from a non-issue in January to, in his words, a huge issue and a meme.
By Monday, Goldman's one-delta desk was flagging that the Silicon Data Token Spending Index had started to soften - Q1 may have been peak token-maxxing-as-KPI - and Citrini Research had coined the inevitable sequel: in a matter of weeks, the narrative went from tokenmaxxing to tokenpanic.
We're happy everyone is now looking at this chart... You're welcome?
The Silicon Data LLM Token Expenditure Index rolls over What enterprise customers are actually sayingFresh comments from UBS paint an interesting picture. After polling actual IT execs at enterprise AI customers, the bank reports that token costs have become a real issue for roughly 60% of the enterprises they spoke to - "this is not a made-up media story," in the bank's own words. One customer described the GitHub Copilot pricing change in a single word: "chaos." Another got their first AI bill and heard leadership say, flatly, "we don't have the money for this." A third admitted: "we overbuilt in certain areas and are starting to feel the wrath."
Source: UBS Evidence LabBut bears should pay attention to this part: not a single check was slamming on the AI brakes. UBS found the dominant behavior is guardrails, not retreat: caps, alerts, model-downshifting, pooled tokens - normal enterprise cost-containment. Several customers explicitly refused to throttle usage ("we don't want to throttle them... our aim is to just get our employees to start using AI") and are instead cannibalizing other IT spend - cutting external IT services, consolidating cloud, and notably, metering headcount growth - to make room for the AI line item. Even Uber, the poster child for budget incineration, has set per-engineer token caps around $1,500 a month - which, as UBS dryly notes, is still extremely high - and its CEO describes the company as full steam ahead.
So according to UBS, costs have been spiking because adoption is ramping, not because per-unit prices are inflating - the per-unit cost of intelligence is falling. Which is exactly Zito's "cost per unit of IQ" point.
Both things are trueSo is tokenmaxxing "a lot of BS"? Zito is right about the denominator. Cost per unit of intelligence is collapsing, relentlessly. Open-source and Chinese models deliver near-frontier capability at 10-25x lower cost; Cursor's new model matches frontier coding performance at a tenth the price per task. Measured per unit of IQ, this is the most deflationary technology in living memory.
Zito's denominator: inference costs collapse for a fixed level of intelligenceThe CFOs are right about the numerator. Gartner has found that even a 90% collapse in inference costs won't make enterprise AI cheaper, because agents devour tokens faster than prices drop and providers don't fully pass the savings through. It is also the lived experience of every company in the UBS checks. A collapsing unit cost times an exploding unit count is still a bigger bill.
Token expenditure is a meaningless productivity metric and a decisive revenue metric. Nobody underwriting a near-trillion-dollar AI IPO can dismiss it as a measure of revenue durability. That is why the rollover in the Silicon Data index is worth watching: the chart measures nothing about value created, and everything about the thing the valuations are built on.
The same logic applies to the narrative itself. Zito calls the token talk noise; that noise doubled the market value of the semiconductor industry in two months on the way up and is unwinding it now. A fundamental investor can dismiss what a narrative measures. A trader cannot dismiss what it moves.
What the 'noise' moved: semiconductor market value doubled in two months on the tokenmaxxing narrativeThe unresolved question for traders: The infrastructure complex is priced for token demand going up and to the right at the frontier - Goldman's 24x by 2030. But if Zito's use-case economy arrives, a large share of that volume migrates to commodity inference: cheap chips, open models, local hardware. Volume can keep growing while the dollars - and the margins - pool somewhere other than where today's valuations assume. The UBS checks already show the mechanism in motion: enterprises aren't cutting AI, they're cutting around AI, and routing down-market wherever good enough will do.
Meanwhile, the token expenditure index printed its sixth straight down day - the longest streak since January - with Citadel's read attributing the drop to adoption becoming "less about what frontier models can do and more about the price," a shift toward cheaper models. Note what that means for the chart: six red days on an expenditure index isn't necessarily usage falling - it may be the deflation itself arriving in the spend line, the same work bought cheaper. The numerator and the denominator, colliding in one print. And savor the garnish: Citadel is one of the two firms Zito named as gladly paying anything for the frontier - and it's their desk narrating everyone else trading down.
Token prices down 6 days in a row: longest streak since January.
"Adoption is becoming less about what frontier models can do and more about the price... the recent drop in the token index may reflect some of this shift toward cheaper models"- Citadel
Volume and value have decoupled. The desks have noticed. The repricing is the part that comes next.
Tyler Durden Wed, 06/10/2026 - 16:33Authored by Victor Davis Hanson via American Greatness,
In the #MeToo years, the Left’s signature slogan was “Believe All Women!”
That directive was used to bolster Christine Blasey Ford’s preposterous and easily refuted 2018 allegations that some 35 years earlier she had been sexually assaulted by Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, when both were teenagers.
Two years later, the Left quietly junked that “Believe Women!” credo when Tara Reade came forward and lodged a far more credible charge that 2020 Democrat presidential nominee Joe Biden had sexually assaulted her when she was a Biden senatorial staffer.
Seven other women alleged that Biden acted toward them in sexually inappropriate ways. The Left more or less ignored these serial charges, and in Reade’s case, demonized her. Suddenly, the new mantra was “Believe women only if they prove useful to the Left.”
Since then, the grotesque sexual misconduct involving Democratic politicians—from New York governor Andrew Cuomo to California Congressman Eric Swalwell—has finally put #MeToo to rest. We were reminded of its demise when it was revealed that Maine senatorial candidate and socialist heartthrob Graham Platner had been discovered to possess a long social media history of crude and pornographic put-downs of women.
Indeed, an entire gaggle of former girlfriends has attested to his Nazi fascinations, his contempt for women, and his occasional physical violence against them.
So what?
Or as feminist icon and former #MeToo-er Senator Elizabeth Warren put it, speaking at a Platner campaign rally in Portland, Maine, “I’m here because Washington needs fighters, and Graham Platner is the fighter we need.”
But a fighter for what cause—and on whose behalf?
The demise of Black Lives Matter (BLM) offers another example of a recurring left-wing phenomenon: movements that begin as moral crusades and end as self-parodies. Almost every BLM cause célèbre has proved fraudulent, following a long tradition that stretches from Al Sharpton’s Tawana Brawley myth to the Duke lacrosse scandal.
The ginned-up BLM riots that followed the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, were all based on an abject lie. Brown never said, “Hands up, don’t shoot.” In fact, he attacked a police officer repeatedly and was lethally shot as he charged toward the officer.
Failing actor Jussie Smollett was never attacked by white MAGA thugs in the wee hours of a cold Chicago night. Instead, the faker Smollett hired two Nigerian-Americans, decked out in MAGA hats, to stage a mock attack. Only by staging such an attack could Smollett claim victim status, attract national sympathy as a target of white hatred, and attempt to revive his fading career.
Yet, for a while, the con worked. Soon-to-be Vice President Kamala Harris, who would go on to praise the often-violent mass George Floyd demonstrations of 2020, raged that the attack by anonymous white “racists” was an “attempted modern-day lynching.” Right—and she never apologized for spreading that lie.
The aftermath of the death of George Floyd did lasting damage to the country that still reverberates. Floyd was a career criminal. He had been imprisoned for participating in a home invasion where he pressed a gun into the stomach of a terrified young woman, who was beaten by one of his fellow criminals.
At the time of his arrest, Floyd was in poor condition both physically and legally—attempting to pass counterfeit currency, high on drugs, recovering from COVID, and resisting arrest.
He died after a police officer restrained him using an authorized but controversial protocol that involved placing a knee on the prostrate suspect’s neck—and did not heed in time Floyd’s call that he could not breathe.
What followed was the high-water mark of BLM. Four months of nightly riots led to some 35 deaths; 1,500 injured law enforcement officers; $2 billion in property damage; 14,000 arrests; and the torching of a police precinct, a federal courthouse, and an iconic Washington, D.C., church. The current leftist habit of urban intersection takeovers, statue-toppling, name-changing, and violent demonstrations is a legacy of that summer of lawlessness.
So we still live with the toxic ripples from the aftermath and the canonization of Floyd.
Thousands of police officers nationwide were laid off in “defund the police” madness. Faddish “critical race” and “critical legal” theories led to no cash bail and the near-immediate release of hundreds of thousands of arrested violent criminals.
Our supposedly best universities, in Pavlovian fashion, dropped the SAT admission requirement and upped race-based admissions.
Racially segregated graduation ceremonies, dorms, and “safe spaces” proliferated—along with newly introduced remedial math courses at our top campuses. Indeed, professors began handing out A’s to 80 percent of the student body, as Ivy League schools now inflated grades far more than did community colleges.
Administrators and bureaucrats soon created thousands of DEI positions across universities and corporations.
This craze led to McCarthyite “diversity statements,” an epidemic of alleged victimhood, untold billions of dollars squandered, and workplace productivity diminished. And the result was certainly not better race relations.
We were just reminded again of the absurdity of the immediate post-Floyd years, after learning that the inverse of Floyd’s death had recently transpired in the United Kingdom.
Eighteen-year-old Henry Nowak, a white male student, was fatally stabbed by a Sikh immigrant with his “ceremonial” sword. In truth, the weapon was an eight-inch knife mysteriously exempted from Britain’s otherwise tough laws against possession of knives.
According to reports, Vickrum Digwa called police and falsely claimed that the dying Nowak had initiated the confrontation with racial slurs, while family members attempted to conceal the weapon. (Would a Scottish highlander claim that he too had the right to carry an eight-inch broadsword as integral to his race, religion, and indigenous traditions?)
No matter—the police arrived hungry to deal with a sensational case of George Floyd-style, white-on-non-white racial violence.
Instead, they reportedly treated Digwa as the victim and handcuffed the mortally wounded and bleeding Nowak as he pleaded—nine times in total—that he could not breathe and was dying. They therefore almost certainly ensured his death. The national reaction?
No British politician went into full George Floyd take-a-knee mode—as they had in 2020, even across the Atlantic, for the felon George Floyd. The ensuing unrest, so far, seems mainly to have been limited to Southampton; there has been no mass destruction of property; there have been no mass assaults. Nowak was on the wrong side of the left-wing race-based binary of victim/victimizer and thus offered no fuel for virtue-signaling by hollow politicians. Such racial reductionism always trumps matters of class, evidence—and the truth.
As for the fate of the BLM architects? The founders never accounted for how their $90 million in donations was actually spent, but they did disappear into their newly purchased multi-million-dollar homes and have hardly been heard from since.
The episodes of existential psychodramas that come and go—after doing enormous damage to the nation—are nearly endless.
A number of American and international agencies and “experts” have now, mostly quietly, sighed that global warming was never really the existential danger that the Left swore would put “Earth in the balance” in a mere decade.
Nonetheless, once again, the toll has been enormous. Germany wrecked its economy to seek mythical “net zero” carbon emissions—by dismantling natural gas, oil, and nuclear power plants and turning to costly, inefficient, and unreliable solar and wind power.
This green mania swept the Western world—as China built two to three coal-fired power plants a month.
The left-wing, postmodern, globalist notion of a borderless utopian world that would fuel endless “diversity” has done so much damage to Western nations that even the European Left now fears its own political suicide from the vast influxes of often hostile illegal aliens.
Millions of unlawful and unvetted entrants crashed the borders, with no desire to integrate, assimilate, or acculturate to their Western hosts. They have spiked crime, fueled anti-Semitism, and ensured unsustainable social welfare costs.
The transgender frenzy was to be the Left’s next civil rights crusade, as it constructed a new victimized class with reparatory claims against the guilty traditionalist majority.
It mattered little that gender dysphoria was an ancient phenomenon, documented even in classical literature as a rare and aberrant syndrome where physical sex was at odds with psychological sexual identification. That malady had also been well known to modern sexologists since the 19th century, who had documented it as rare, involving far less than 0.01 percent of the population.
Nevertheless, the Left invented the unnecessary Orwellian term “transphobe,” and suddenly we were off to the races with transgender biological men nude in gym showers with teen girls and transgender “women” with male musculoskeletal bodies dominating female sports.
Soon, an epidemic of teens began wondering whether they were in fact “trans” and pondering whether to undergo a battery of dangerous hormonal and chemical drug regimens—or calling themselves nonbinary, to the point where the new third sex sometimes seemed almost as numerous as the old two genders.
What accounts for these bouts of periodic, collective, and suicidal madness?
First, the craziness is almost always birthed in the contemporary, affluent, and leisured West, which alone has the capital and resources to afford such freakish sideshows.
Second, the frenzies are usually the creation of the Left, predictably birthed in universities, the media, and the bureaucracies. They appear with familiar symptoms. The irredeemable, deplorable, and “garbage” hoi polloi are supposedly too dense to be properly schooled and thus must be frightened to death in order to adopt agendas that otherwise appear to them as utterly insane.
Junk your natural-gas dryer and grill, or face massive floods on your coasts. Drop the SAT and defund the police or face endless race riots.
Hire thousands of race and gender commissars or be forever tagged as racists, sexists, homophobes, and transphobes. Open the border and let illegal aliens enter by the millions, and thus pay partial penance for “whiteness” as the nation “checks its privilege.”
The Left is correct that few Western voters will openly embrace the unpopular elite agenda of racial fixations, globalism, laxity on crime, and degrowth environmentalism.
So, their long-term solutions have four predictable aspects:
Open the borders to create a more diverse, impoverished, and needy constituency.
Create fake “working-class” pseudo-populist candidates like the pampered Graham Platner, the God-is-nonbinary “new Christian” Talarico, and, of course, the waxen effigy of “good ol’ Joe Biden from Scranton.”
Destroy time-tested systems by seeking to demolish the Electoral College, the 50-state union, the Senate filibuster, and the nine-justice Supreme Court.
Gin up these end-of-days, pseudo-existential crises whose solutions require massive new taxes, bigger government, and more dictatorial elite managers.
One good sign of growing antidotes is that increasingly Americans, and indeed all Westerners, are saying no to green haranguers, no to the gender and sex demagogues, no to the race-baiting industry, no to the open-borders conglomerate, and no to ungrateful immigrants.
Their pushback might be summed up as follows: “We are no longer going to allow you to destroy ancient traditions that ensured our prosperity, security, and liberty, and which were handed down to us by generations far better than your own.”
Tyler Durden Wed, 06/10/2026 - 16:20