Two signals:

OpenAI acquires a podcast: “OpenAI has acquired TBPN, a fast-growing daily technology podcast with a strong Silicon Valley following, featuring guests such as Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.”

Corgi launches a physical newspaper and café: Corgi, a Tekedia Capital portfolio company and one of the fastest-growing startups globally, has introduced a physical newspaper alongside a café experience.

Why are these companies doing this? Because in today’s web era, success is no longer defined by controlling supply; it is defined by influencing and shaping demand.

Supply has become effectively infinite. Anyone can build, publish, or distribute products and content online. The constraint is no longer production; it is attention, discovery, and preference. In a world of abundance, the winners are those who can guide users, shape narratives, and become the gateways through which demand flows.

This is a fundamental shift. In the pre-digital era, power resided with those who controlled supply. Think of newspaper publishers in the 1980s, they decided what information reached the public. By controlling distribution, they shaped narratives, influenced markets, and captured advertising value.

Today, that power has migrated. Platforms, media channels, and ecosystems that organize attention and influence demand now define modern dominance.

This explains why companies like OpenAI and Corgi are investing in media, physical experiences, and community touchpoints. They are not just building products, they are building demand engines. (In a lighter way, our Tekedia blog remains the One Oasis which powers everything we do in the market because it influences demand).

Modern empires do not just control supply. They control demand.

Tesla began 2026 with a delivery report that did little to calm investor concerns over the health of its core automotive business, even as the company continues to sell a long-term vision centered on robotaxis, humanoid robots, and energy infrastructure.

The electric vehicle maker delivered 358,023 vehicles in the first quarter, missing Wall Street expectations and coming in below both analyst estimates and the company’s own compiled consensus. Production, however, stood significantly higher at 408,386 units, leaving a gap of 50,363 vehicles between output and deliveries, the widest mismatch in at least four years.

That inventory build-up is likely to be the figure most closely watched by investors. While the headline delivery number represents a 6.3 per cent year-on-year increase, it masks a much weaker sequential picture. Deliveries fell 14.4 per cent from the previous quarter, making this Tesla’s weakest quarterly sales performance in a year.

For a company whose valuation still rests heavily on growth expectations, the widening gap between production and demand raises fresh concerns over pricing power, margin resilience, and the possibility of further discounting in the months ahead.

Tesla’s shares fell nearly 4 per cent after the release, extending losses for the year as the market increasingly questions whether the company can stabilize its vehicle business while simultaneously funding an expensive transition into artificial intelligence and robotics.

The core of the challenge remains demand.

The expiration of the U.S. federal EV tax credit has materially weakened the near-term demand environment, particularly in Tesla’s home market, where affordability remains a key driver of purchase decisions. At the same time, global competition has intensified sharply, especially from BYD, which has now overtaken Tesla on an annual basis as the world’s largest electric vehicle maker.

Tesla is no longer operating from the position of near-uncontested dominance that defined the earlier phase of the EV boom. Chinese manufacturers have accelerated product cycles, improved software capabilities, and maintained aggressive pricing, forcing Tesla into a far more competitive landscape.

The company’s delivery mix also underscores how narrow its revenue base has become. The Model 3 and Model Y accounted for 341,893 deliveries, once again highlighting Tesla’s heavy reliance on two mainstream models. With the Model S and Model X now effectively phased out, the company’s passenger vehicle lineup has narrowed even further.

This concentration risk is becoming more pronounced as Tesla moves factory resources away from traditional vehicles. Musk has already redirected production lines in Fremont toward Optimus humanoid robots, a decision that symbolizes the company’s strategic pivot. Yet these future-facing products remain largely pre-revenue at scale.

For now, the automotive business still provides the overwhelming majority of Tesla’s cash flow. That is why the current delivery miss matters beyond the headline. A softening in vehicle demand directly affects the company’s ability to fund its longer-term ambitions in autonomous driving, robotics, and energy storage without leaning more heavily on capital markets.

There is, however, one area of relative resilience.

Tesla deployed 8.8 gigawatt hours of energy storage products during the quarter, including Megapack and Powerwall systems. Although this was down from the previous quarter and below the same period last year, it remains a strategically important segment as utilities and data centers ramp up investment in grid-scale battery systems.

This division could become increasingly important as AI-driven data center expansion fuels demand for backup power and grid-balancing solutions. Still, the immediate market focus will remain on margins.

The large gap between production and deliveries suggests rising unsold inventory, which historically increases the likelihood of price cuts or promotional financing. Either route would pressure automotive gross margins, already a key point of concern for investors.

The broader narrative is that Tesla is in the middle of a difficult transition. Its legacy auto business is no longer delivering the kind of explosive growth that once justified its premium valuation, yet its next-generation businesses have not matured enough to replace that revenue stream.

In effect, investors are being asked to finance tomorrow’s AI and robotics vision with today’s increasingly volatile car sales. That tension is likely to dominate sentiment heading into the company’s April 22 earnings call, where investors will be looking for clarity not only on demand trends, but on how quickly Musk’s future bets can begin to translate into measurable earnings.

Oil prices rocketed above the psychologically important $110-per-barrel mark on Thursday after President Donald Trump signaled that Washington was preparing for a further phase of military action against Iran over the next two to three weeks, sharply reversing the previous session’s optimism that the conflict might be nearing a diplomatic off-ramp.

U.S. West Texas Intermediate crude for May delivery surged about 10% to $110.21 a barrel in early trade, while June Brent crude, the global benchmark, climbed roughly 8% to $109.25, as traders swiftly rebuilt a geopolitical risk premium into the market. The rally marked one of the sharpest single-session gains since the outbreak of the war and underscored how acutely energy markets remain tied to every signal coming out of Washington and Tehran.

The renewed jump came after Trump, in a prime-time national address on Wednesday, warned that the United States would hit Iran “extremely hard” in the coming weeks, while insisting that the campaign would be concluded quickly.

“We are going to finish the job, and we’re going to finish it very fast,” he said.

The remarks dampened hopes that the White House was preparing to scale back military operations or that tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz could resume in the near term.

For much of Wednesday, markets had moved in the opposite direction. Crude had retreated toward the $100 threshold after Trump suggested there were ongoing discussions with Tehran and hinted that the war might be nearing its final stage. Thursday’s violent reversal highlighted the fragility of that optimism and the extent to which the market is trading on headline risk rather than fundamentals alone.

The Strait of Hormuz, the narrow maritime corridor through which nearly one-fifth of the world’s seaborne crude and liquefied natural gas normally passes, remains the bone of contention. Shipping traffic through the route has been severely curtailed since the conflict escalated, effectively choking one of the world’s most critical energy arteries.

The implications extend well beyond the Middle East. Any prolonged disruption to Hormuz threatens export flows from Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar, tightening supply conditions for refiners across Europe and Asia. That has left traders increasingly focused on worst-case scenarios, including the possibility of a sustained blockade that could remove millions of barrels per day from global supply.

George Efstathopoulos, portfolio manager at Fidelity International, described the market’s positioning ahead of Trump’s speech as a wager on a “binary outcome” — either a clear signal toward de-escalation or confirmation of a more prolonged conflict. The president’s remarks, he said, appeared to point decisively toward the latter.

That view was echoed across broader financial markets, where the renewed oil spike fed a classic risk-off mood. Wall Street futures weakened sharply, with airlines and travel stocks coming under pressure, as investors rotated toward energy producers and safe-haven assets. The S&P 500 fell while the Dow shed hundreds of points as crude prices surged.

The inflation implications are equally significant, as a sustained period of oil above $100 a barrel risks reigniting price pressures globally just as central banks were beginning to gain confidence that inflation was easing. For economies already grappling with elevated fuel and transport costs, the latest move in crude raises the prospect of renewed pressure on consumer prices, freight rates, and industrial input costs.

Analysts say the rally is no longer simply about immediate supply disruption but about the market’s reassessment of conflict duration.

“It’s becoming increasingly clear that the U.S. position on what you do to get your oil out of and through the Straits of Hormuz is now something which Washington has largely washed its hands off. This is now something for those who take oil through the Strait to sort out for themselves,” Giles Alston, political risk analyst at Oxford Analytica, said on CNBC on Thursday.

The absence of a credible timetable for reopening Hormuz or securing tanker routes has shifted attention toward how long the risk premium will remain embedded in prices.

Iran, for its part, pushed back against Trump’s assertion that a ceasefire request was under consideration, insisting that the waterway remains under the control of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy and rejecting U.S. conditions for reopening the route. The contradictory messaging from both sides has only deepened market volatility, with prices swinging sharply on each new headline.

Political risk analysts now warn that even if direct hostilities were to ease, shipping insurers, tanker operators, and commodity traders may remain reluctant to fully restore flows through the strait until security guarantees are firmly in place.

That means the energy shock may outlast the military campaign itself.

For investors, the immediate question is whether this is a temporary wartime spike or the beginning of a structurally tighter oil market. If the Strait of Hormuz remains effectively closed for an extended period, some market watchers believe crude could test levels last seen during the 2022 energy crisis, with scenarios above $120 no longer being dismissed as extreme.

What Thursday’s price action made clear is that markets are no longer pricing a swift resolution. Instead, they are beginning to prepare for a conflict whose economic consequences could reverberate well into global inflation, trade, and monetary policy.