Travis Kelce Goes Activist | Trump’s Crypto Pardon | Nvidia Bets on Energy

Jana Partners has a new ally in its $200 million activist campaign at Six Flags: Kansas City Chiefs star Travis Kelce. The hedge fund and a group of co-investors have built a 9% stake in the theme-park operator, calling for refreshed leadership, better marketing, and potentially a sale. The stock jumped 18% on the news.

Kelce, a self-described theme-park “superfan,” joins a growing class of celebrities who’ve learned to turn cultural reach into corporate influence. Ryan Reynolds did it first, merging self-aware humor, media savvy, and storytelling into billion-dollar exits with Aviation Gin and Mint Mobile. 

The Kelce brothers have since followed that same playbook. Their Garage Beer brand, valued at $200 million after a recent round led by Durational Capital, has become a Gen Z cult hit built on authenticity, nostalgia, and active engagement.

The link between both ventures is unmistakable: the modern celebrity is no longer a spokesperson but a distribution channel, a marketing engine, and, increasingly, a balance-sheet asset. 

Activists and private equity firms are learning to wield that cultural leverage in place of traditional advertising.

For Jana, the Six Flags partnership with Kelce isn’t just an endorsement. It’s an experiment in celebrity-backed operational activism, using charisma to rebrand and revive a consumer business. 

With former Gap CEO Glenn Murphy and Reddit chair Dave Habiger joining as potential board nominees, Jana is assembling something closer to a modern entertainment turnaround team than a classic activist slate.

Six Flags has struggled with attendance and leadership churn, but Kelce’s involvement reframes the story from cost-cutting to cultural revival, one that might finally put emotion back on the balance sheet.

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The Kelce brothers’ ascent from gridiron to boardroom shows how cultural equity is evolving into financial equity. Their Garage Beer investment, alongside New Heights podcast fame and Travis Kelce’s expanding portfolio of brand tie-ups, represents a structural shift in how celebrity influence gets monetized: not through sponsorship, but ownership.

In Garage Beer’s case, the Kelces helped drive sales from under $20 million in 2024 to nearly $70 million this year, attracting Durational Capital and former Constellation Brands executives to the board. 

The formula is simple but powerful: authentic voice, direct engagement, and cross-platform storytelling. It’s the same loop that made Wrexham FC a global content franchise and Mint Mobile a case study in viral brand building.

The Six Flags investment fits into this same continuum. Activist funds have realized that celebrity investors can do what traditional financiers can’t, compress the awareness curve. A brand turnaround that might have taken years can now happen in a single news cycle, fueled by social amplification and parasocial trust.

For the celebrities, it’s even more efficient. Fame compounds faster when paired with equity. It’s no longer about endorsement deals or licensing. It’s about turning identity into infrastructure.

The next phase of this movement, the professionalization of cultural capital, will blur the line between entertainment and enterprise. The Kelce-Reynolds model is already spawning a new generation of “narrative investors,” where celebrity, capital, and content form a flywheel of perpetual relevance.

Investor Signal

Cultural capital is becoming a quantifiable asset class. The new alpha lies in emotional distribution, brands and funds that harness influence as infrastructure. Expect more deals where celebrity equity replaces marketing budgets, and private capital treats personality as a pricing power. The opportunity isn’t in chasing fame; it’s in engineering it.

President Donald Trump has pardoned Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, who pleaded guilty in 2023 to enabling money laundering at the world’s largest crypto exchange. 

The move comes just weeks after reports that Trump family crypto ventures benefited from a trading platform linked to Binance, adding fuel to accusations of political favoritism.

Zhao, known as CZ, thanked Trump on X, vowing to “make America the capital of crypto.” The pardon arrives two months after Zhao’s four-month sentence and a $4.3 billion settlement that marked one of the largest corporate penalties in U.S. history.

The political framing was immediate. The White House characterized the decision as “ending Biden’s war on crypto,” while Senator Elizabeth Warren called it “corruption in plain sight.” 

Markets, however, read it differently, as a signal that digital assets are being reabsorbed into the political mainstream. Bitcoin climbed nearly 3% on the news, extending its October rally and reinforcing crypto’s uncanny ability to thrive on controversy.

The optics may be polarizing, but the message to capital is unambiguous: regulation may still be fragmented, but access is reopening. 

The world’s most famous crypto founder just walked free with a presidential endorsement. The market’s translation, crypto isn’t fringe anymore; it’s back inside the building.

Investor Signal

Crypto’s next bull leg may be driven less by innovation and more by normalization. Pardons, political patronage, and campaign-linked partnerships are signaling that digital assets have crossed from rebellion into institution. Traders should watch Washington, not the blockchain, that’s where price discovery is now happening.

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Nvidia has joined Eclipse Ventures in a $350 million funding round for Redwood Materials, the battery-recycling company founded by former Tesla co-founder J.B. Straubel. 

The investment expands Redwood’s push into large-scale energy storage under its new division, Redwood Energy, which aims to supply the fast-growing power needs of AI data centers.

Straubel’s pitch is simple: the next constraint on AI isn’t compute, it’s current. With Goldman Sachs projecting data-center electricity demand to rise 165% by 2030, Redwood plans to harvest remaining charge from used EV batteries before recycling them, effectively turning waste into low-cost grid storage.

For Nvidia, the move underscores how energy security is now part of the AI stack. “AI is several things, energy, chips, and application,” CEO Jensen Huang told CNBC. “And we need more energy.”

Redwood already processes battery material equivalent to 250,000 EVs annually, or about 90% of North America’s recycled lithium-ion supply, and counts Toyota among its customers. The company says its hybrid approach, reuse first, recycle later, can unlock stranded capacity and ease grid bottlenecks that threaten to slow AI deployment.

The deal situates Nvidia not just as a hardware supplier but as a stakeholder in the energy transition its own chips are fueling. 

As AI models scale, the dividing line between tech infrastructure and industrial policy is dissolving, and battery recyclers may prove to be the new utilities of the digital age.

Investor Signal

AI’s next bottleneck is energy, and capital is already pivoting toward those who can bridge the gap between computation and power supply. Nvidia’s investment in Redwood Materials reframes battery recycling as grid infrastructure, an asset class that sits at the intersection of clean tech, data infrastructure, and national security. 

For investors, this marks the emergence of a new ecosystem: AI-adjacent energy. Expect acceleration in deals that blend battery storage, grid-balancing software, and circular-supply chains for critical minerals. Companies that can recycle, repurpose, or reallocate energy capacity, rather than merely produce it, are positioned to capture the premium of scarcity.

Shares of IonQ, Rigetti Computing, and D-Wave Quantum extended double-digit gains Thursday even after the Trump administration denied it was “currently” negotiating equity stakes in quantum computing companies. 

The nuance of that single word kept optimism alive across the sector.

The Wall Street Journal had reported earlier that Washington was exploring $10 million funding awards in exchange for ownership positions, a structure that would have mirrored the government’s recent investments in Intel and MP Materials. 

Commerce officials pushed back, but the market heard something else: a delay, not a dismissal.

Quantum computing sits at the intersection of national security and scientific ambition, and federal involvement appears inevitable. The technology remains pre-commercial, generating less than $750 million in total revenue last year, yet it is viewed as strategically vital. 

A fully functional quantum computer could decrypt military communications, accelerate drug discovery, and redesign encryption itself.

Governments from Washington to Beijing see that potential as a geopolitical lever. The Trump administration has already taken direct stakes in strategic industries, arguing that the public should share in the upside of taxpayer-funded innovation. 

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has described this approach as “national capitalism,” where strategic equity replaces subsidies.

Investors appear to agree. Even without confirmation of funding, traders priced in the possibility of future state-backed support. The market’s reaction hints that quantum’s next phase may not rely on commercial adoption but on political alignment.

Investor Signal

Quantum remains a long-duration bet, but state alignment is becoming its core catalyst. With the U.S. signaling willingness to take ownership in strategic technologies, expect quantum startups to benefit from a valuation floor tied to national interest rather than revenue. The next wave of returns may not come from utility, but from sovereignty.

This week’s through line is convergence, where influence meets infrastructure. Travis Kelce isn’t just investing in Six Flags or selling beer; he’s turning celebrity into market leverage, embedding personal brand equity into financial assets. In a culture-driven economy, visibility itself has become a form of capital.

Nvidia’s move into Redwood Materials highlights the next AI frontier: energy as compute. As data centers strain the grid, investors are shifting toward recycled power and circular supply chains that make intelligence sustainable. The boundary between tech and utilities is vanishing.

And in Washington, quantum computing’s speculative promise has already turned political. Even a denial of talks over equity stakes sent stocks higher, revealing how deeply state power and market ambition are intertwined.

The pattern is unmistakable. The winners of this cycle will be those who align influence, capital, and control, because in this new era, progress isn’t just about innovation, it’s about who owns the story behind it.