RJ Hamster
The $1.52 Billion Power Grab
KIYOSAKI’S PRIVATE PLAYBOOK
The Private Market Daily | Monday, May 4, 2026
Dear Private Market Insider,
Most people look at MARA Holdings and see a bitcoin miner. That is the wrong lens.
Last week MARA paid $1.52 billion to buy Long Ridge Energy and Power from FTAI Infrastructure. It is a 485-megawatt natural gas plant on the Ohio River. It sits on 1,600 acres with room for another full gigawatt of capacity. It throws off $144 million in annual cash flow.
That is not a crypto trade. That is a Rich Dad deal.
I have been doing this for decades. I have drilled oil wells, raised private capital, started businesses from scratch. I know what it looks like when a B-quadrant operator stops playing defense and starts buying hard assets with real cash flow. This week’s issue is about exactly that.
The private markets are moving fast right now. Power infrastructure, defense tech, AI-driven direct lending. The deals are getting bigger and the buyers are getting smarter. Let’s get into it.
THE DEAL FLOOR
MARA Holdings Buys Long Ridge Energy for $1.52 Billion
The headline called it a bitcoin miner buying a gas plant. Ignore that framing.
Here is what actually happened. MARA Holdings agreed to pay $1.52 billion to acquire Long Ridge Energy and Power from FTAI Infrastructure. The deal closes in Q3 2026. At close, about $1.16 billion of Long Ridge’s existing debt gets wiped out. MARA walks away with a vertically integrated power platform: a 485-megawatt combined-cycle natural gas plant, natural gas production rights, and 1,600 acres with over one gigawatt of future build-out potential.
The cash flow number is the one that matters. Long Ridge generates $144 million in adjusted EBITDA every year. That is a real, repeatable number tied to a physical asset you can visit, touch, and insure. It is not a token. It is not a multiple of projected ARR. It is kilowatts sold to the grid, every day, rain or shine.
MARA’s power capacity jumps 65% overnight. The company was already running some of the cheapest electricity costs in the bitcoin mining world. Now it controls the source. That is vertical integration. That is the B-quadrant move.
Here is the Rich Dad lens. The E and S players look at this and say: who buys a gas plant? The B and I players ask: what does $144 million in annual cash flow cost? At the deal price, MARA paid roughly 10.5 times EBITDA for a hard asset with captive demand. In private equity, power assets with this kind of profile trade closer to 14 to 16 times. The seller, FTAI Infrastructure, needed the liquidity. MARA had the capital and the strategic fit.
That spread, between the price a motivated seller accepts and what the asset is worth to the right buyer, is exactly how B-quadrant operators build wealth. They do not buy when everyone wants to. They buy when the seller has no other choice.
The AI angle makes this story bigger. Every major data center being built right now runs on power. Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Meta have committed over $650 billion in capital spending for 2026 alone, most of it for AI compute. Every one of those servers needs electricity. Long Ridge sits in the Ohio Valley, right in the middle of the heaviest data center build-out corridor in North America. MARA just positioned itself as a landlord for the AI power grid.
CASHFLOW QUADRANT TRANSLATION:
- E/S players see this as a corporate acquisition story. Big company buys big asset. They watch the stock price.
- B players see a vertical integration move. Control the input cost. Own the supply chain. Lock in the margin.
- I players see $144M in annual cash flow from a hard asset, at a price below comparable private market comps. They ask how to get the same exposure.
- Your angle: MARA is publicly traded. You can own a piece of this infrastructure deal today through the stock. For accredited investors, energy infrastructure funds and real asset BDCs are the private market path to the same thesis.
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THE CROWDFUNDING PULSE
Reg CF Is Contracting. The Average Deal Is Getting Bigger.
The first quarter of 2026 was a rough one for crowdfunding. Total capital raised under Reg CF fell 28% year over year, down to $87.8 million. New issuer filings dropped 32%. Investor checks written fell 23%. The number of active campaigns hit a multi-year low.
But here is the data point that matters. Average raise size jumped 66%, from $491,000 to $815,000. The small, unfocused raises are dropping out. The companies raising real money are getting more of it.
The market is sorting itself. Wefunder, DealMaker Securities, and StartEngine now hold a combined 66% market share. Republic’s Reg CF volume has fallen significantly over the past two years. The platforms that built real infrastructure for larger raises are winning.
The most important policy watch is SEC Petition No. 4-889, a formal request to raise the Reg CF cap from $5 million to $20 million. That single change would unlock a new tier of deal for crowdfunding platforms and bring accredited-investor quality companies into the retail market.
Top April Raises to Watch:COMPANYPLATFORMSTATUSSECTORGreen Coffee CompanyDealMaker Securities$1.32M raisedConsumer/FoodNine Line ApparelStartEngine$1M+ raisedVeteran apparelLiquidPistonStartEngineActive campaignAerospace/DefenseBiostate AIWefunderActive campaignHealth AIAvaWatzWefunderActive campaignDefense robotics
THE PRIVATE CREDIT DESK
Ares Sets a Q1 Record. Morgan Stanley Writes an $875M Check.
The private credit machine does not slow down. Ares Management just reported Q1 2026 earnings, and the headline is a record: $30 billion raised in a single quarter, up 46% year over year. The firm wrote $9.5 billion in new direct lending commitments across 70 separate transactions. On a trailing 12-month basis, that is $53 billion in direct lending volume.
Blue Owl Capital also beat on Q1. Assets under management hit $314.9 billion, up 15% year over year. Blue Owl’s BDC platform sold $1.4 billion of direct lending assets to a group of institutions at 99.7 cents on the dollar. That is a clean sale at near-par in a market where people are still nervous about credit quality.
The single largest direct lending deal last week came from Morgan Stanley Private Credit. They financed $875 million for Bridgepointe Technologies, a tech advisory platform. One deal, one lender. That is a club-free, single-name commitment. It is the kind of transaction that used to require a bank syndicate of six or seven firms. The private credit market is now doing it alone.
Rate environment check: spreads are holding firm. Ares called out “liquidity-generated opportunity” as the key theme heading into Q2. Translation: some borrowers who got used to cheap public market debt are finding that market closed. They are coming to private credit and paying up. For lenders, that is good.
PIK income remains the watch item. Payment-in-kind interest shows up on BDC income statements but does not generate cash. Investors should separate cash-paying yield from PIK accruals when comparing BDC dividend quality.
New Fund Closes This Week:FIRM / FUNDSIZEFOCUSMonroe Capital$6.1BLower middle-market U.S. direct lendingKKR Asia Pacific Credit II$2.5BFinal close, Asia credit mandateRRJ Capital (Singapore)$1.1BFirst private credit fund for the firmDavidson Kempner Income II$1.1BFinal close, global asset-backed
THE IPO PIPELINE
Defense SIGINT, Organic Juice, and the Biggest IPO in History Getting Closer
This week’s IPO slate is light but interesting. Four deals are pricing, led by HawkEye 360, a satellite company that collects radio frequency signals for the Pentagon. The ticker is HAWK. The deal size is $400 million at a $2.4 billion valuation. Expected pricing date is Thursday, May 7.
HawkEye is the kind of defense tech name that used to stay private forever. The company operates a satellite network that tracks radars, jammers, ships, and communication signals from orbit. Revenue hit $98.7 million in 2025, up roughly 100% year over year. The U.S. government accounts for 61% of revenue. Japan adds another 16%. The company turned a profit in 2025 after losing $29 million in 2024.
Also pricing Thursday: Suja Life, the organic juice and wellness beverage brand backed by Paine Schwartz Partners. Ticker SUJA, $200 million deal, Nasdaq listing. $326.6 million in 2025 revenue.
The bigger story is what is coming in May. Cerebras Systems, an AI chipmaker with a $10 billion compute deal with OpenAI, filed its S-1 on April 17. The company did $510 million in 2025 revenue, up 76% year over year. Target raise is around $2 billion at a $22 to $25 billion valuation. Mid-May pricing is the target.
And then there is SpaceX. The company filed a confidential S-1 on April 1. The public filing must drop by late May for a June roadshow to happen. The implied valuation at last secondary pricing was $1.29 to $1.75 trillion. The target raise is $75 billion. If it prices, it will be the largest IPO in history.
For private market readers, the pre-IPO secondary opportunity on Cerebras is the near-term play. SpaceX secondaries are trading but at valuations that have already baked in most of the upside.COMPANYTICKEREXCHANGESIZEDATENOTESHawkEye 360HAWKNYSE$400MMay 7Defense SIGINT satelliteSuja LifeSUJANasdaq$200MMay 7Organic beverage / PE exitRare Earths AmericasREATBD$50MMay 7Critical minerals explorationVernal Capital Acq.VECAUNasdaq$100M (SPAC)May 6China/APAC acquisition target
THE CASHFLOW QUADRANT APPLIED
Five Mega-Tech Companies Just Committed $650 Billion. What Quadrant Is That?
Last week five tech giants reported earnings. Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, and Apple. Combined, their 2026 capital spending commitments now exceed $650 billion. Most of it goes to one thing: AI compute.
Run that through the CASHFLOW Quadrant.
The E and S players look at those numbers and buy the stocks. They are paying top dollar for shares in companies already priced for a perfect outcome.
The B-quadrant operators are the ones building the data centers. They hire the engineers, sign the power purchase deals, and control the production system. They do not hope. They build.
The I-quadrant players look at $650 billion in capital spending and ask: who gets paid before the tech company does? The answer is power utilities, data center real estate investment trusts, fiber networks, and the private credit funds financing the construction. Those are the picks-and-shovels assets.
MARA’s Long Ridge acquisition is the I-quadrant trade in action. Before any AI company sells a service, it needs electricity. Long Ridge sells electricity. The cash comes first. The stock story comes second.
The lesson is not new. It is the same one from the gold rush. The people who got rich were not the miners. They were the ones who sold the shovels, the jeans, and the land the miners needed to operate. In 2026, the AI gold rush is real. The shovels are power plants and fiber cables.
SIGN-OFF
The private markets reward people who study the deal before they buy the story.
This week, the deal is power infrastructure. The story everyone else is telling is about bitcoin. Do not confuse the two.
MARA did not buy a gas plant because they gave up on crypto. They bought a gas plant because they know what every serious B-quadrant operator knows: cash flow from hard assets is the foundation of every lasting fortune. Everything else is built on top.
The AI power trade is real. The pre-IPO window on names like Cerebras is closing fast. And Ares just proved that the private credit market is attracting record capital for a reason. There is value in the private markets that public markets cannot price correctly. That is why you are here.
To your unfair advantage,
Robert Kiyosaki
Kiyosaki’s Private Playbook
P.S. Everyone is talking about Elon Musk’s Space X IPO.
CNBC even called it “the big market event of 2026.”
But according to tech investing legend Jeff Brown, this is NOT about launching rockets to Mars, satellite internet, or anything you’ve heard from the media.
It’s much bigger than that…
Because this IPO is a key part of Elon Musk’s secret AI masterplan (click here to see the details).
Click to see his investigation and discover how to get your stake.
© 2026 Kiyosaki’s Private Playbook, an imprint of Freedom Financial Research, LLC
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