The Allbirds AI pivot is a fugazi. 🐑 Plus Altman vs Musk gets personal, and the latest brand news.

Issue 87 — Saturday, May 2, 2026

9:29 a.m. on Wednesday, April 15, 2026. The Linux servers of the NASDAQ blink to life. Allbirds, Inc opens with a market capitalisation of just $21.7 million.

It’s a plot twist for the makers of those weirdly comfortable merino sneakers. Four and a half years earlier, the footwear company rang the bell at $4.1 billion.

Maths even I can do:

4,100,000,000 - 21,700,000 = 4,078,300,000. 4 years, 5 months = 1,624 days

That’s two and a half million dollars lost, every, single, day since going public.

But that Wednesday, those NASDAQ servers are fired up for one final twist in the tale. A fugazi, as Mark Hanna calls it in The Wolf of Wall Street.

Allbirds, Inc. Announces Expansion into AI Compute Infrastructure.

Obviously.

Why wouldn’t a defunct woolly shoe company become an AI-native cloud solutions provider? I mean, the company is barely worth a fifth of what Meta will pay one AI hire this year.

But it works. NASDAQ:BIRD pops, a 582% gain in a single day, squeezing to $159 million in market cap, more than the company’s entire 2025 revenues.

We’re a long way from Allbirds’ dream to be the sustainable alternative to Nike.

And if you were hoping for a Shoe Dog-style ending, this is not it.

We’re in a horror movie bloodbath: A brand built with fast venture money fails, and gets taken apart by flesh-eating retail investors.

And yet.

There was a time we believed sustainable alternatives were going to change the world.

Oatly, Beyond Meat, BrewDog, Honest Co.

Back then, Allbirds looked well placed to win.

Tim Brown co-founded it, a former New Zealand footballer who’d grown up around more sheep than people. He’d watched the wool industry shrink as synthetics took over.

Brown: We founded Allbirds to help nature make a comeback.

The Wool Runner was a breakthrough. Worn without socks was its thing, at one with nature — but not in a Goop vagina candle kind of way — in a competent, “I’ve got a board meeting” kind of way.

Fact: The Wool Runner was made from the same moisture-wicking fibres NASA uses in spacesuits, meaning Allbirds had the cosiness of a slipper with the performance of a trainer.

Time Magazine called them The world’s most comfortable shoe.

Fashion, or lack of, did the rest.

Orthopaedic lines, and no logos, made them the perfect choice for a straight-leg chino, a white oxford, and a Patagonia fleece — the Silicon Valley uniform.

It’s 2018, and this is the peak of woke brands. Larry Fink, six trillion in assets under management, writes an open letter instructing CEOs to find a sense of purpose, a societal good. Colin Kaepernick has just appeared in a Nike ad.

Allbirds is seen as ultra-progressive:

I have money, I have power, but I’m uncomfortable about both.

Rich, but not an asshole.

Soon, the Wool Runner was papped on the feet of Barack Obama, Leonardo DiCaprio, Ben Horowitz, Larry Page, and Tim Cook.

I owned three pairs myself.

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My son and I are at Mum’s. He’s seven. She’s seventy.

A long sheet of brown paper is unrolled across kitchen tiles, with four letters in crayon and marker. N-O-N-A.

The first N is a man fishing from a boat. The O is a face, round with a triangle nose and a red tongue. The next N has a rocket on top. The A has wings, with a big Transformers robot standing next to it. Nona Prime.

My son has made a sign for her new bed downstairs.

It’s a lovely moment, but I’m annoyed: I’ve just unboxed my Wool Runners, white, and a dot of red marker has ended up on the lace. The box arrived at Christmas, with a sheep on the lid. Christmas was two months ago. I haven’t been to see Mum, so I’ve only just put them on and they’re stained already.

Outside, sat at the round wicker table on the stone terrace, Mum’s in her dressing gown. She has taken up smoking again with total joy. Nothing to lose, renal cell carcinoma is at final stage now.

I go out to sit with her. “Shoes look nice, son.”

We’re talking about a few things. I’m following just enough to notice her tone shift. She mumbles: “It’s a shame really, as there’s things left I’d like to have done.”

I’m checking the stain. I don’t want to be there too much longer. Mums can be a drain.

The news in the background is talking about a novel coronavirus. It’s the week before lockdown, but we don’t know that yet.

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There were 483 days of lockdowns. The skies emptied of planes and the birds came back. Long walks at lunch, and we were wearing soft clothes, comfortable shoes, all…the…time.

In these unprecedented times, we were grateful that the planet had been given a second chance.

By every measure, this should have been Allbirds’ moment.

But it wasn’t.

Allbirds’ growth rate halved, and net losses doubled.

Going to the office had died and the work uniform with it. No white oxford, no Patagonia fleece, no Allbirds, because…nowhere to wear them.

Socially distanced: We’d been alone with our screens for over a year. We came out parasocially bonded to TikTok creators and podcast hosts, not to our neighbours.

During that time, there was little else to do but go shopping online. Now, with 9% inflation, there was no spare change for that third pair of trainers.

The biggest transformation of all was Silicon Valley. It had grown tired of being apologetic and being seen to do the right thing. So had America. And a new technology was emerging, the starter gun for a new era of objectivism.

Being an asshole was back.

Grey hoodies became gold chains and Greubel Forseys. Lean In became cage fights. White House dinners. Trillion-dollar pay packages, and dictator salutes in front of the cameras. And data centres burning up the planet, promising we’re all going to be obsolete anyway.

Even Tim Cook, the most unassuming billionaire in Palo Alto, the guy you’d expect to retire in Allbirds.

He was last seen in $1,500 Tom Sachs x Nike Mars Yards.

As for being the sustainable alternative to Nike? Not worth thinking about. Not a chance. Nike is 330x the size of Allbirds and, post-pandemic, has enough problems of its own.

Let’s face it, the dream of a consumer brand world powered by Mother Nature was never going to work. You can’t consume your way back to her.

Still.

When I heard about the Allbirds AI pivot, I could see it immediately.

A neatly designed server rack in a minimalist natural wood frame with wool-felt panels muffling the hum, a small embossed sheep in one corner, the whole thing powered by South Island hydro and cooled by the winds of Wānaka, running smaller open-source models tuned for climate sims and soil sensors.

It was kind of beautiful.

But, also a fugazi. A whazi, a whoozi.

Just another venture-backed brand that should never have IPO’d. Allbirds dies because markets do what markets do, culture shifts when culture shifts, tech is always about to eat everyone.

But in the case of Allbirds, it’s something else too.

It’s a mirror to what happened before, during, and after those 483 days, and that mirror tells you exactly what you don’t want to hear:

The change was supposed to be us. We were going to come out of it all different, kinder, and more careful.

And we didn’t.

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The shoe cupboard needs clearing out. Behind a row of boots, squashed against the back wall, I meet those white Wool Runners again. One curled. The other with all its shape gone.

They smell awful. Too many sockless wears.

I turn one over to check, even though I know what’s there. The red marker on the lace. I hold the lace in my hand and run my thumb across the red dot, feel the threads, and like a button being pressed it plays the whole day back.

My little boy, no longer little, drawing Transformers on brown paper to cheer Nona on.

And I see Mum out on the terrace, turned away, her back to me. She’s wearing her dressing gown. Sitting at the wicker table, smoking joyously, looking up at the evergreens.

Then she’s gone.

You see, that turned out to be our last amazing day together.

And I wasn’t there.

The colour drained out of every picture after that and the indignities followed one after the other, after the other, until a sad ending.

I decide to put the shoes by the black bag for the dump.

Some time later, I move them.

Some time after that, I move them back. They were that guy, checking the stains. They can go.

I figure today might be one of those last good days and I’d best be in it.

for Nona Prime ♡

Let’s rise together with every issue.

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Market Moves

Why the stock market makes no sense right now | The New York Times

Five ways the Bank of England’s latest decision affects your money | BBC

Why Britain urgently needs a serious plan to rescue its economy | The Telegraph

Brand Beat

AI is replacing the ‘Mad Men’ era of advertising as we know it | Financial Times

CEOs viewing marketing as overhead has nearly doubled in a year | Adweek

Why UKTV gave its CMO responsibility for AI across the business | Marketing Week

What the future holds for marketing and brand strategy | Financial Times

Mark Ritson: Why PwC’s rebrand stands out from expensive corporate nonsense | The Drum

What the Walkman, Game Boy, Pokémon and Liquid Death have in common | Harvard Business Review

How Devil Wears Prada 2 built its curated roster of brand partners | Marketing Dive

How American Eagle nailed short-form social with Syd | System1

Marc Jacobs enters microdrama trend with luxury short-form series ‘The Scene’ | Marketing Dive

Tesco’s fruit giant character launches ambitious new school programme | The Drum

Go offline: Pinterest CEO announces new brand advertising | LinkedIn

Spotify shares fall as investors worry price hikes will hurt growth | Financial Times

Amazon surpasses $70 billion in ad revenue over the past year | Adweek

Paramount and Warner Bros set to become nearly 50% foreign-owned after $111bn deal | Financial Times

Social media documents chaos and calm after correspondents’ dinner shooting | The New York Times

Is Starbucks breaking up with Seattle? | Seattle Times

Is now a good time to buy shares in Sainsbury’s? | The Times

Meta is closing in on Google’s ad dominance — but not quite there yet | Mediacat

Starting Up

Scholly founder sues Sallie Mae after Shark Tank-backed startup acquisition | TechCrunch

Inside the pitch deck that helped a creator-founded energy drink raise $6 million | Adweek

Legora reaches $5.6B valuation as rivalry with Harvey intensifies | TechCrunch

Skunk Skin, the startup tackling smelly feet, has been acquired | Forbes

Shapes lets humans and AI mingle together in the same group chats | TechCrunch

Tech Tidbits

Apple surpasses earnings estimates on the back of strong iPhone sales | AP News

The attack on Sam Altman reveals something important about Silicon Valley | The New York Times

The Altman-Musk feud is getting very personal and very public | The Atlantic

Meta stock falls as AI spending forecast rises to $145 billion | Quartz

Why AI is making the future harder to see and plan for | Harvard Business Review

Tech bro’s viral NYC visit sparks internet mockery of Silicon Valley | Fast Company

Venture Vibes

KKR weighs $10 billion sale of Flora food group | Bloomberg

How Elon Musk used SpaceX to benefit himself and his other businesses | The New York Times

Nick Clegg calls UK’s sovereign AI ambitions ‘dishonest’ and marginal | City A.M.

This investor’s new fund is designed to convert private equity skeptics | Inc

City firms launch ‘savvy squirrel’ ad campaign to get Brits investing | The Guardian

Design Driven

Canva bets on AI in a risky transformation for the design unicorn | Bloomberg

Air’s manifesto argues AI will never replace human creativity | It’s Nice That

The Webby Awards Person of the Year goes to Claude AI | Instagram

This Bic print ad cleverly sells two products with one photo | Creative Bloq

Happiness

How to use your suffering as a compass to find true happiness | Big Think

A short meditation: Reflect on someone who inspires you | Greater Good Magazine

How to measure whether AI is actually boosting your productivity | Fast Company

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