TJC Debrief with Paulo Passoni: The New US-China Tech Split

Paulo Passoni, Managing Partner at Valor Capital, and Olga Maslikhova break down the two forces reshaping tech and capital markets right now — the end of 40 years of global integration as the US-China tech split hardens, and the collapse of the services moat as AI lets companies scale from $0 to $100M in revenue in 24 months by replacing labor. This is the May 2026 edition of TJC Debrief — a monthly show covering tech, venture, and capital markets through a global lens.We cover why China blocked Meta's $2 billion Manus acquisition and what the new US-led versus China-led ecosystem split means for global M&A, how SoftBank's blocked Arm-NVIDIA sale cost half a trillion dollars in value creation and why deals like it will keep happening, Anthropic's $50B round closing in 48 hours with secondary markets pricing ahead of the primary and what it reveals about AI's escape velocity, why Anthropic and OpenAI are forming joint ventures with Blackstone, TPG, Apollo, Sequoia, General Atlantic, and GIC to lock in compute capacity and guaranteed revenue, Plata's $5B round and why Qatar Investment Authority, US endowments, and long-only funds piled in alongside Valor Capital — and what mispriced Russian and Eastern European talent has to do with it, why data is becoming the last real moat and how Nubank, Revolut, CloudWalk, Mercado Libre, and JPMorgan are racing to train proprietary models on their own customer data, the radiologist paradox and what it predicts for tax accountants, lawyers, and every services job AI is supposed to kill, the legal AI startup Enter and the wild story of prompt injections hidden in PDFs filed to courts, why humanoid robots at $600/month today and $100/month in ten years will reshape global labor markets, Elon Musk and SpaceX as the "build potential, then monetize" playbook, and the $0 to $100M in 24 months phenomenon — why early movers in vertical AI are already hitting this scale and where the next opportunities will emerge across legal, wealth management, healthcare, and security.Subscribe to The J Curve Insider newsletter for deeper insights and follow Olga on LinkedIn and Instagram.