“Before the fast food joints, 8th Street was all record stores and cool clothes. Before that, it was hippies and tour buses, right around the time Jimi Hendrix bought the old Village Barn and commissioned the Electric Lady Studios. It was even farther back, after Prohibition ended, that this whole area started mixing art and entertainment the way addresses now switch from West to East as 8th Street crosses Fifth Avenue.”
Patti Smith recorded “Free Money” in September 1975, at Electric Lady. Her band, hardened by months on the road, rolled in thick behind her during the grueling and legendary studio sessions with John Cale. By November, when the record came out, show business had already chewed up the likes of James Osterberg Jr., David Robert Jones, Richard Nixon. Punk wasn’t even a thing, yet. And here was the young and implacable Ms. Smith, scooping all the pearls in the ocean and cashing them in.
No one had ever seen anything like it.
In March 2025, OpenAI raised about 2.5 billion dollars from venture investors as part of a massive year-long fundraising plan. Around this time, SoftBank pledged up to another 30 billion by year-end to support the company’s growth. By August, OpenAI secured an oversubscribed 8.3 billion funding round led by Dragoneer Investment Group, lifting its valuation to 300 billion. New investors like Blackstone, TPG, and T. Rowe Price joined, alongside existing backers like Sequoia, a16z, Thrive Capital.
In September, Nvidia agreed to invest up to 100 billion dollars in OpenAI, primarily by supplying GPU hardware on a multi-year lease basis. In exchange, Nvidia receives equity, effectively underwriting the startup’s computing needs with its own capital.
Bankers and prophets seem to be driven by an almost poetic compulsion to push further, indifferent to scale. Maybe salvation and ruin are separated only by energy and bandwidth. No board meetings, no dilution.
Patti Smith, too, knew that the dollar bills were stolen, and she didn’t feel bad.