Reddit (RDDT) was the most-cited domain in May across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's Gemini and AI Mode, per Semrush data, beating Wikipedia and every major news publisher.

That may be why one user spent this year praising a single product, Honeydew Labs hypochlorous acid spray, in dozens of skincare threads about entirely unrelated topics.

In other words, the social media platform is becoming the new advertising frontier. And not through paid ads, but rather guerrilla tactics that are starting to impact the experience for everyday users.

In response, r/SkincareAddiction banned the account and set the brand to auto-filter. The platform says roughly 40% of its discussions are commercial, and it now claims to catch 25,000 spammy posts and comments a day.

RDDT largely trades on the idea that it’s the last human-first social media firm, with nobody's thumb on the scale. But the robots appear to be coming for it too. And its last line of defense are unpaid volunteers.

— Brooks & The Street Sheet Team

What: A trillion dollars of revenue by 2030 is a bold thing to promise on your first earnings call as a public company. But traders weren’t impressed by a firm calling its own moonshot. SpaceX (SPCX) fell hard in the wake of the call, and trades down some 20% since its debut.

Why: With capex surging 550%, SpaceX is spending a lot to achieve its lofty goals. But everything Elon Musk pitched runs through one project: Starship. And it’s far from a sure shot. Starship has flown 13 times, and five of those failed or raised significant flight concerns.

What Else: In theory, Starship makes it cheaper to put weight in orbit, which is what lets SpaceX fly the bigger Starlink satellites behind most of its revenue. Falcon 9 carries about 23 metric tons at roughly $2,700 a kilogram, per Evercore ISI, against Starship's 100 tons at a target of $185. That’s a big gap, and the firm will need to close it fast to meet its goal of a million computing satellites in orbit.

Watch: The next Starship flight is penciled in for later this month, with several more scheduled this year. Musk says one launch per day is a mere year out. Either the flight record bends fast, or the 28x forward sales does.

What: Detroit has found two businesses investors like better than cars. Ford (F) launched Ford Energy in May, a grid-scale battery-storage unit built for AI hyperscalers and utilities, and the stock has surged accordingly. General Motors (GM) followed with its own defense and storage details last week.

Why: The side hustles are an attractive diversion from a lagging core business. Fewer young people are getting licenses, new cars are out of reach for many Americans, and the ones already sold last longer. The same can’t be said for their new escape routes. S&P 500 defense names trade at 30x forward earnings. Ford and GM currently trade at 7.8x and 6.2x, respectively.

What Else: Detroit has run this play before. In the 1980s, with Japanese imports restricted and profits piling up, Ford bought financial-services firms including First Nationwide and Associates, while GM acquired Hughes Electronics and poured more than $40 billion into factory automation. GM's plant productivity fell over that stretch, per UCLA research. Both companies later took write-downs on EVs.

Watch: Ford Energy's first deliveries land in late 2027, and GM Defense books about $700 million this year against $186 billion of company revenue. The stocks moved on the announcements, not the execution.

What: Big Tech would like to borrow your money until 2075. Alphabet (GOOGL) has bonds running that far out and Amazon (AMZN) to 2065, both yielding around 6.5%, per FactSet. Meta (META) pays over 7% on 2065 paper.

Why: The appeal is credit quality without the skimpy yield that usually comes with it. Microsoft is rated triple-A, higher than the US government. And the high yields exist because supply is swamping the market, with Goldman Sachs credit strategists seeing roughly $400 billion of hyperscaler issuance globally in 2027. But the compensation is thinner than it looks. High-grade corporates maturing in 20 years or more pay about a point of spread over Treasurys, half the cushion they offered in 2022. 50 years of technology risk for the narrowest premium in years.

What Else: The better-paid risk may sit one step down the chain. Bonds sold to build data centers for those same hyperscalers, issued by joint ventures and firms backed by real-estate money like Blackstone (BX), carry half a point to nearly two points of extra yield over their future tenants' own bonds, per Morgan Stanley. Barclays analysts called them the sweet spot of AI funding.

Watch: Construction timelines and power hookups on the data centers already financed, plus local opposition where it is building. The bet there is not that AI pays off, only that the buildings go up.