The Post-Partisan Emporium

  A Storied Russian Muckraker On Oil, Iran, Ukraine, and More Known for fearless journalism in the Yeltsin years, Leonid Krutakov resurfaces with an epic history of the oil business, at a time when war over energy has never been more relevant. Matt Taibbi Russian oil in the Phillipines this week In Moscow in July 1997, reporter Leonid Krutakov had a scoop. Anatoly Chubais, the Harvard-educated privatization boss and right hand of Boris Yeltsin, had been given a $3 million loan from Stolichny Bank just before that same bank — controlled by an intimidating “businessman” named Alexander Smolensky — won an auction for a state-owned agricultural property, Agroprombank. It was a great story, but Krutakov had to make an epic journey to print it. First fired from Chubais-friendly  Komsomolskaya Pravda,  he was rejected by  Moskovsky Komsomolets,  then appealed to the legendary editor of  Top Secret , Artem Borovik, before that magazine, too, turned him down. Finall...

  The Gazillion-Dollar Oops An update Three months ago I wrote about the AI spending binge and called it “The Trillion-Dollar Oops”. It felt cute at the time. The Trillion-Dollar Oops No1 · December 22, 2025 Read full story I owe you an apology. I was being generous. A whole year back, back  all  the way to December, the big five hyperscalers were spending $405 billion a year and I thought that number was already insane. I said it was accelerating. I said No1 knows what anything costs anymore. That these estimates kept getting revised upward so fast that by the time you finished reading the sentence, someone would have revised it again. I thought I was joking. But increasingly this dimension has other ideas with reality. I was being prophetic. The 2025 final tally came in at $443 billion for the top five, up 73% year-on-year. Fine. That’s the world we live in now. But the 2026 projections? CreditSights estimated about $600 billion in November. Then Q4 earnings calls hit a...