Pentagon Drops UFO Files

The Pentagon released its first tranche of declassified UFO files on Friday, posting 162 documents at war.gov/ufo following Trump's February executive order. The collection includes State Department cables, FBI documents, NASA transcripts, and military video files spanning sightings from the 1940s through January of this year. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth framed the move as overdue transparency. "These files, hidden behind classifications, have long fueled justified speculation," he said in a statement carried by Reuters. Trump posted on Truth Social that the public can now decide for themselves "WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?"

The files contain no clear evidence of extraterrestrial technology. According to the Associated Press, much of what was released has appeared in prior Pentagon disclosures, including a 2024 report from the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office that explicitly rebutted claims of recovered alien technology. Sean Kirkpatrick, the office's former director, told the AP that one widely shared 2013 video of a star-shaped object was "probably nothing more than a hot jet engine producing a diffraction pattern in the camera." UAP analyst Mick West told Reuters the files are "evidence of us not being able to identify a small white dot that's a long distance away."

The political subtext is harder to ignore. Critics pointed to timing. Former Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene posted on X that the release was "look at the shiny object propaganda," while the Guardian noted the disclosure landed amid mounting pressure on the administration over the Iran war and ongoing demands for the release of files tied to Jeffrey Epstein. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna said an additional tranche is expected in roughly 30 days, with releases continuing on a rolling basis.

For markets, UFO disclosures don't move multiples, but they do shape the political bandwidth available for substantive policy. The release lands at a moment when the same administration is renegotiating tariffs after the Supreme Court struck down most of Trump's emergency-law duties, escorting commercial ships through the Strait of Hormuz under live fire, and building a vetting regime for frontier AI models. Investors who track political distraction risk should note the pattern. As the New York Times put it, the initial files "show what could be anything."

The Jobs Number Looks Solid. On the Surface

US employers added 115,000 jobs in April, comfortably beating the 55,000 to 65,000 economists had forecast, with the unemployment rate holding at 4.3%. It marked the second consecutive month of upside surprises after March's revised gain of 185,000. The headline strength sent the S&P 500 up 0.8%, lifted the Dow 0.2%, and pushed Treasury yields lower. Average hourly earnings rose just 0.2% on the month and 3.6% annually, both softer than expected, giving markets the rare combination of solid hiring and cooling wage pressure.

Sector composition was uneven. Healthcare and social assistance added roughly 54,000 jobs, transportation and warehousing added 30,000, and retail added 22,000. Federal government payrolls fell 9,000 and are now down nearly 12% or 348,000 jobs since October 2024. The information sector lost another 13,000 jobs, putting it down 11% or 342,000 jobs since November 2022, a stretch that lines up directly with the AI rollout. The three-month average sits at just 48,000, in line with the breakeven rate needed to absorb new entrants to the workforce.

The U-6 underemployment rate climbed to 8.2% from 8.0%, the highest in five months and over a percentage point above pre-pandemic levels. The number of people working part-time who want full-time work jumped 445,000 to 4.9 million. The labor force participation rate fell for the fifth straight month to 61.8%, the lowest since October 2021. The household survey showed employment fell by 226,000. KPMG's Diane Robust framed it as "suspended animation," with workers staying put and job seekers frozen out.

Year-to-date payrolls are running at 76,000 per month, giving the Fed cover to keep policy restrictive. Markets now expect rates unchanged into 2027, according to Reuters. The April CPI print due next week is expected to show inflation accelerating to 3.9% from 3.3%, driven largely by the Iran war's energy spillover. Fed Chair Jerome Powell has indicated he will stay on as a governor after Kevin Warsh's confirmation. The Guardian reported Warsh is under White House pressure for lower rates but needs board support he doesn't yet have. Consumer sentiment hit a fresh record low in May per the Michigan survey, with gas at $4.55 a gallon.

OnlyFans Trades at a Discount as Architect Lands a Minority Stake

OnlyFans has agreed to sell a 16% minority stake to Architect Capital for $535 million, valuing the British adult-content platform at $3.15 billion. The deal was announced Friday by Fenix International, OnlyFans' parent company, and represents a meaningful step down from the $5.5 billion price tag that earlier sale talks had carried. The Wall Street Journal reported in March that Architect had been pursuing a 60% controlling stake at a $3.5 billion valuation. That structure collapsed after owner Leo Radvinsky died of cancer at 43 in March, and his widow Yekaterina Chudnovsky took control of the business.

The financials make the discount jarring. OnlyFans posted $7.22 billion in gross revenue in fiscal 2024, up 9% year over year, with net revenue of $1.41 billion and pre-tax profit of $684 million. Radvinsky collected close to $1 billion in dividends across the two-year period ending November 2024, according to UK filings cited by the Journal. The company has facilitated more than $25 billion of payments to creators since launching in 2016, with 4 million registered creators and 377 million registered fans. At $3.15 billion, the platform is priced at roughly 4.6 times pre-tax profit, an eye-catching multiple for a high-margin subscription business.

The discount reflects who can actually own this asset. Most institutional capital is ruled out by "vice clauses" that prevent investment in adult content, regardless of the financials. As Payment Nerds CEO Shawn Silver told Forbes, "It's a risk and reputation problem. It's not a financial problem." Sale talks have been circling for years, with Forest Road Company trying a takeover in 2024 and a 2022 SPAC merger floated. Many suitors walked away.

Architect's pitch is that it can solve the structural pain points. The firm wants to acquire a banking license to free creators and the platform from punitive credit-card fees, push OnlyFans toward more mainstream creator categories competing with Patreon, and build out new financial services. Cost of sales hit $549 million in 2024, with much of that going to payment processors who charge as high as 10% to manage regulatory risk.

The risks are real and durable. Visa and Mastercard could pull processing at any time, an existential threat the company has lived through before. UK regulators fined OnlyFans £1.4 million in March 2025 over age-verification disclosure failures. Rivals like Passes, Fanfix, and Patreon are pulling creators with smaller platform cuts. AI-generated adult content represents a new structural threat to demand for human creators. Architect's CEO James Sagan has now anchored a more modest deal that keeps control with the Radvinsky family trust. The minority stake at $3.15 billion is the price of certainty over upside — for a business minting nearly $700 million in pre-tax profit, that math still works if the credit-card backbone holds and the banking license materializes.