Devon-Coterra Mega Merger, Data Center Cancellations Spike & Rubio's Mineral OPEC | BDE 02.06.26

Kirk Coburn, Mark Meyer, and Chuck Yates tackle Devon's $58 billion merger with Coterra—a Delaware Basin land grab with Marcellus as an afterthought. They break down why scale matters when your cost of capital beats everyone else's, why Oklahoma keeps building great companies Houston eventually swallows, and why data center cancellations reveal America's infrastructure crisis. The real insight? PJM's grid failures prove you can't bolt 21st century AI demand onto 20th century infrastructure with 19th century permitting. Plus: Trump's trade flurry, China's mineral monopoly, and why we have 2 icebreakers while Russia has 54.

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00:00 - Goldman's Jersey City building and Connecticut commuters
01:36 - Collide's IRR triples with software sales
03:19 - Why retail AI can't handle deep energy verticals
05:50 - Devon-Coterra merger breaks: $58B Delaware play
08:29 - $1B in synergies means AI replaces people
11:03 - No-premium stock mergers finally catch on
13:19 - Panther to WPX to Devon Delaware journey
15:11 - Oklahoma builds energy companies Houston acquires
17:12 - Grok's brutal take on the merger
20:15 - Scale drives cost of capital advantages
22:13 - Data center cancellations spike from 6 to 25
25:23 - Microsoft's Azure growth disappoints Wall Street
27:18 - Why AI compute costs become investor concerns
29:20 - Collide builds Spindletop for on-prem processing
31:40 - Data centers pivot from urban to distributed models
33:40 - PJM cancellations expose grid reliability crisis
36:31 - Trade policy lightning round begins
39:14 - US shipbuilding can't compete with China's 300x capacity
41:37 - Rubio builds OPEC for critical minerals

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