Big Money

BIG MONEY… Even after Squid turned in Squid’s ballot, there seemed to be no way to stop the election-related advertising – the text messages and Instagram ads just kept coming. Squid gets it; in the final days and hours of Election Day, which was on June 2, the candidates have their last chance to spend down the money they raised to ask their voters to show up.

A lot of that last-minute pro-Jimmy Panetta push wasn’t even affiliated with Panetta, it turns out. The Think Big PAC, which describes its mission as “supporting Democratic candidates dedicated advancing AI innovation in America,” spent $600,000 in the month of May on digital ads supporting Panetta and another $650,000 supporting Rep. Bob Menendez’s re-election campaign in New Jersey.

Think Big is a PAC overseen and funded by Leading the Future, a PAC within a PAC. (Think Russian nesting dolls, or maybe a seahorse’s brood pouch full of smaller seahorses.) And guess who the big donors to Leading the Future are? Tech bros!

Marc Andreessen and Benjamin Horowitz, partners in the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, each gave $12.5 million; the firm gave $25 million. Greg Brockman, the president of OpenAI, gave $12.5 million and his wife, Anna Brockman, gave $100,000.

That’s a lot of money to send Squid a bunch of texts (were the messages written by AI?) after Squid already voted the old-fashioned way, with pen and ink. Given that Panetta was positioned to land an easy victory, Squid thinks the campaign spending is less about actually swaying voters than it is about sending Panetta a message: They help him out, and hope he helps them out one day too.

HANDSHAKE DEAL… Squid admits to pushing Squid’s deadlines regularly, but Squid strives to be a responsible adult in other ways – feeding Squid’s bulldog, Rosco P. Coltrane, by 7am every day, and stretching the old tentacles every night before bed. Squid also does Squid’s best to pay off the credit card bill each month.

One thing Squid doesn’t really do because Squid lives in the modern world is pay for things on a handshake deal. That’s because Squid has yet to find a store owner who trades in handshakes as currency. Yet somehow, Advanced Funds Network claims to have surveyed 3,005 business owners to reveal where “even a handshake still carries real weight in 2026.”

Good old Pacific Grove rated number 70, based on the premise that “trust is not loud or performative.”

Squid wonders how they even calculate this kind of thing. Did they loudly and performatively try to buy a bunch of stuff on a spoken promise of credit only? Even as a regular around town, business owners still expect Squid to pay with U.S. currency – or maybe they accept handshakes but not tentacle-shakes.