Tom Kaye of Plymouth, Pennsylvania tops off his neighbor’s gas tank for them on at a gas station in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, U.S. October 19, 2022.
Aimee Dilger | Reuters
Oil prices are defying expectations and are barely higher on the year, as the outlook for oil demand continues to deteriorate for now.
West Texas Intermediate crude futures for January settled higher Monday at $77.24 per barrel, following a drop to $73.60 per barrel, the lowest price since last December. WTI was up 2.2% for the year, after briefly turning negative earlier Monday.
Gasoline prices at the pump have also been falling dramatically and could be cheaper than last year for many Americans by Christmas, according to an outlook from the Oil Price Information Service. On Monday, the national average was $3.546 per gallon of regular unleaded fuel, down from $3.662 a week ago but still higher than the $3.394 a year ago, according to AAA.
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‘Macro headwinds rather than tailwinds’
China’s lockdowns and the rare protests against Beijing this weekend have raised more doubt about the outlook for the country’s already weakened economy.
“We think the recessionary [forces] around the world, particularly in the three largest economies, are dominating the macro environment for the year as a whole, and we think that the issues we’ve been identifying as relatively bumpy in the period ahead are going to remain,” said Ed Morse, global head of commodities research at Citigroup. “Right now, we are looking at macro headwinds rather than tailwinds.”
Morse was one of the more bearish strategists on Wall Street in 2022, but he said the latest market developments and the hit to major economies made even his forecast too bullish. He had revised his outlook higher at the end of the third quarter, based on the shift by OPEC+ to focus on prices and the pending ban of Russian crude by Europe.
The oil market has been focused on those two potential catalysts for higher prices, but the impact on demand from the slowdown in China and new lockdowns has outweighed concerns about supply for now. The European Union’s ban on purchases of seaborne Russian oil takes place Dec. 5. The EU is also expected to announce price caps for Russian crude.
“We’re waiting to see if they signal even deeper cuts. There were rumors in the market about that happening,” said John Kilduff, partner with Again Capital. After dipping to the day’s lows, oil rebounded on Monday as speculation circulated about new OPEC+ cuts, he said.
Brent futures, the international benchmark, was lower Monday afternoon at $83.19 per barrel, recovering from $80.61 per barrel, the lowest price since January.
“Right now the target is below $60 [for WTI]. That’s what the chart is indicating… this is a new low for the move because previously the low for the year was late September and now we’ve broken that,” said Kilduff. “It all depends on what happens in China. China is as important on the demand side, as OPEC+ is on the supply side.”
Higher oil prices next year?
Analysts expect oil prices to increase next year. JPMorgan predicts Brent will average $90 per barrel in 2023.
Morgan Stanley expects the return of much higher prices mid-year, after China ends lockdowns.
“Our balances point to modest oversupply in coming months. Hence, we see Brent prices range-bound in the mid-80s to high-90s first,” the firm’s analysts wrote. “However, the market will likely return to balance in 2Q23 and undersupply in 2H23. With limited supply buffer, we expect Brent to return to ~$110/bbl by the middle of next year.”
Kilduff said he does not expect OPEC+ to make a big market impact this year with its cuts, though it is a wild card. Another factor that could drive prices would be if the war in Ukraine were to escalate.
“I’m not that worried about an OPEC+ cut just because the reality of it is most of the countries aren’t going to be cutting. It’s only going to be Saudi Arabia dialing back on the edges,” he said. “Everyone is so far into their quota. It’s a numbers game.”
Morse said market dynamics have changed and oil demand growth will be smaller as a percentage of gross domestic product. “We’re seeing a significant slowdown in global growth,” he said.
Oil demand growth for China turned out to be much less than expected. “We were thinking demand was sluggish. It turned out to be significantly more sluggish… We had thought this year was going to see 3.4 million barrels of demand growth. It actually grew by 1.7 million barrels,” Morse said. He noted that Europe’s demand is down by several hundred thousand barrels, and the U.S. was flat in 2022.
Morse said the demand decline is also part of bigger trend, tied in part to the energy transition toward renewables. “We are also looking for the peak of oil demand in this decade. It’s part of a longer term story,” he said.
The weather’s influence
Kilduff said La Niña’s weather pattern has also affected prices, with warmer weather in North America. He and other analysts say it could continue to impact the market.
“We keep getting cold outlooks, and then it falters. This is La Niña. You will get cold days, but then you get balmy stretches,” Kilduff said. He said concerns about winter heating fuel supplies have abated with a build in supplies in Europe.
The result for consumers could be a windfall at the pump during the holiday season. OPIS expects prices to keep falling into January before turning higher again.
“If you combine the Chinese demonstrations with the warm weather in the northern hemisphere, that’s kind of a double-barreled assault on the energy price at the moment,” said Tom Kloza, global energy analyst at OPIS. He said he expects gasoline to average between $3 and $3.25 per gallon at its low, but it will be below $3 in many parts of the country.
Kloza said by Christmas, the U.S. national average should be slightly below the $3.28 level it was at last year.
Diesel prices have also been falling. According to AAA, diesel averaged $5.215 per gallon nationally Monday, off by about 8 cents per gallon from a week ago.
“We’ve been counter-seasonally building distillate fuel supply so that’s been easing things. If the weather stays relatively benign here, we’re going to lose that upside catalyst and grind lower still,” said Again’s Kilduff.
The Taihuttus on a ski trip to Sierra Nevada in southern Spain. They sold everything they owned in 2017 to bet on bitcoin — and now travel full-time as a family of five.
Didi Taihuttu
A wave of high-profile kidnappings targeting cryptocurrency executives has rattled the industry — and prompted a quiet security revolution among some of its most visible evangelists.
Didi Taihuttu, patriarch of the so-called “Bitcoin Family,” said he overhauled the family’s entire security setup after a string of threats.
The Taihuttus — who sold everything they owned in 2017, from their house to their shoes, to go all-in on bitcoin when it was trading around $900 — have long lived on the outer edge of crypto ideology. They travel full-time with their three daughters and remain entirely unbanked.
Over the past eight months, he said, the family ditched hardware wallets in favor of a hybrid system: Part analog, part digital, with seed phrases encrypted, split, and stored either through blockchain-based encryption services or hidden across four continents.
“We have changed everything,” Taihuttu told CNBC on a call from Phuket, Thailand. “Even if someone held me at gunpoint, I can’t give them more than what’s on my wallet on my phone. And that’s not a lot.”
CNBC first reported on the family’s unconventional storage system in 2022, when Taihuttu described hiding hardware wallets across multiple continents — in places ranging from rental apartments in Europe to self-storage units in South America.
The Taihuttu family dressed up for Halloween in Phuket, Thailand, where they recently moved homes after receiving disturbing messages pinpointing their location from YouTube videos.
Didi Taihuttu
As physical attacks on crypto holders become more frequent, even they are rethinking their exposure.
This week, Moroccan police arrested a 24-year-old suspected of orchestrating a series of brutal kidnappings targeting crypto executives.
One victim, the father of a crypto millionaire, was allegedly held for days in a house south of Paris — and reportedly had a finger severed during the ordeal.
In a separate case earlier this year, a co-founder of French wallet firm Ledger and his wife were abducted from their home in central France in a ransom scheme that also targeted another Ledger executive.
Last month in New York, authorities said, a 28-year-old Italian tourist was kidnapped and tortured for 17 days in a Manhattan apartment by attackers trying to extract his bitcoin password — shocking him with wires, beating him with a gun, and strapping an Apple AirTag around his neck to track his movements.
The common thread: The pursuit of crypto credentials that enable instant, irreversible transfers of virtual assets.
“It is definitely frightening to see a lot of these kidnappings happen,” said JP Richardson, CEO of crypto wallet company Exodus. He urged users to take security into their own hands by choosing self-custody, storing larger sums on hardware wallets, and — for those holding significant assets — exploring multi-signature wallets, a setup typically used by institutions.
Richardson also recommended spreading funds across different wallet types and avoiding large balances in hot wallets to reduce risk without sacrificing flexibility.
That rising sense of vulnerability is fueling a new demand for physical protection with insurance firms now racing to offer kidnap and ransom (K&R) policies tailored to crypto holders.
But Taihuttu isn’t waiting for corporate solutions. He’s opted for complete decentralization — of not just his finances, but his personal risk profile.
As the family prepares to return to Europe from Thailand, safety has become a constant topic of conversation.
“We’ve been talking about it a lot as a family,” Taihuttu said. “My kids read the news, too — especially that story in France, where the daughter of a CEO was almost kidnapped on the street.”
Now, he said, his daughters are asking difficult questions: What if someone tries to kidnap us? What’s the plan?
One of the steel plates the Taihuttu family uses to store part of their bitcoin seed phrase. Didi etched it by hand using a hammer and letter punch — part of a decentralized storage system spread across four continents.
Didi Taihuttu
Though the girls carry only small amounts of crypto in their personal wallets, the family has decided to avoid France entirely.
“We got a little bit famous in a niche market — but that niche is becoming a really big market now,” Taihuttu said. “And I think we’ll see more and more of these robberies. So yeah, we’re definitely going to skip France.”
Even in Thailand, Taihuttu recently stopped posting travel updates and filming at home after receiving disturbing messages from strangers who claimed to have identified his location from YouTube vlogs.
“We stayed in a very beautiful house for six months — then I started getting emails from people who figured out which house it was. They warned me to be careful, told me not to leave my kids alone,” he said. “So we moved. And now we don’t film anything at all.”
“It’s a strange world at the moment,” he said. “So we’re taking our own precautions — and when it comes to wallets, we’re now completely hardware wallet-less. We don’t use any hardware wallets anymore.”
To throw off would-be attackers, Didi Taihuttu encrypts select words from each 24-word seed phrase — then splits the phrases into four sets of six and hides them around the world.
Didi Taihuttu
The family’s new system involves splitting a single 24-word bitcoin seed phrase — the cryptographic key that unlocks access to their crypto holdings — into four sets of six words, each stored in a different geographic location. Some are kept digitally through blockchain-based encryption platforms, while others are etched by hand into fireproof steel plates using a hammer and letter punch, then hidden in physical locations across four continents.
“Even if someone finds 18 of the 24 words, they can’t do anything,” Taihuttu explained.
On top of that, he’s added a layer of personal encryption, swapping out select words to throw off would-be attackers. The method is simple, but effective.
“You only need to remember which ones you changed,” he said.
Part of the reason for ditching hardware wallets, Taihuttu said, was a growing mistrust of third-party devices. Concerns about backdoors and remote access features — including a controversial update by Ledger in 2023 — prompted the family to abandon physical hardware altogether in favor of encrypted paper and steel backups.
While the family still holds some crypto in “hot” wallets — for daily spending or to run their algorithmic trading strategy — those funds are protected by multi-signature approvals, which require multiple parties to sign off before a transaction can be executed.
The Taihuttus use Safe — formerly Gnosis Safe — for ether and other altcoins, and similarly layered setups for bitcoin stored on centralized platforms like Bybit.
Didi Taihuttu during a recent visit to Sierra Nevada, Spain. The family’s lifestyle — unbanked, nomadic, and all-in on bitcoin — makes them outliers even in the crypto world.
Didi Taihuttu
About 65% of the family’s crypto is locked in cold storage across four continents — a decentralized system Taihuttu prefers to centralized vaults like the Swiss Alps bunker used by Coinbase-owned Xapo. Those facilities may offer physical protection and inheritance services, but Taihuttu said they require too much trust.
“What happens if one of those companies goes bankrupt? Will I still have access?” he said. “You’re putting your capital back in someone else’s hands.”
Instead, Taihuttu holds his own keys — hidden across the globe. He can top up the wallets remotely with new deposits, but accessing them would require at least one international trip, depending on which fragments of the seed phrase are needed. The funds, he added, are intended as a long-term pension to be accessed only if bitcoin hits $1 million — a milestone he’s targeting for 2033.
The shift toward multiparty protections extends beyond just multi-signature. Multi-party computation, or MPC, is gaining traction as a more advanced security model.
Didi, Romaine, and their three daughters live largely off-grid, managing crypto through decentralized exchanges, algorithmic trading bots, and a globally distributed cold storage system.
Didi Taihuttu
Instead of storing private keys in one place — a vulnerability known as a “single point of compromise” — MPC splits a key into encrypted shares distributed across multiple parties. Transactions can only go through when a threshold number of those parties approve, sharply reducing the risk of theft or unauthorized access.
Multi-signature wallets require several parties to approve a transaction. MPC takes that further by cryptographically splitting the private key itself, ensuring that no single individual ever holds the full key — not even their own complete share.
The shift comes amid renewed scrutiny of centralized crypto platforms like Coinbase, which recently disclosed a data breach affecting tens of thousands of customers.
Taihuttu, for his part, says 80% of his trading now happens on decentralized exchanges like Apex — a peer-to-peer platform that allows users to set buy and sell orders without relinquishing custody of their funds, marking a return to crypto’s original ethos.
While he declined to reveal his total holdings, Taihuttu did share his goal for the current bull cycle: a $100 million net worth, with 60% still held in bitcoin. The rest is a mix of ether, layer-1 tokens like solana, link, sui, and a growing number of AI and education-focused startups — including his own platform offering blockchain and life-skills courses for kids.
Lately, he’s also considering stepping back from the spotlight.
“It’s really my passion to create content. It’s really what I love to do every day,” he said. “But if it’s not safe anymore for my daughters … I really need to think about them.”
A wheel loader operator fills a truck with ore at the MP Materials rare earth mine in Mountain Pass, California, January 30, 2020.
Steve Marcus | Reuters
The rare-earth miner MP Materials will enjoy growing strategic value to the U.S., as geopolitical tensions with China make the supply of critical minerals more uncertain, according to Morgan Stanley.
The investment bank upgraded MP Materials to the equivalent of a buy rating with a stock price target of $34 per share, implying 32% upside from Friday’s close.
MP Materials owns the only operating rare earth mine in the U.S. at Mountain Pass, California. China dominates the global market for rare earth refining and processing, according to Morgan Stanley.
“Geopolitical and trade tensions are finally pushing critical mineral supply chains to top of mind,” analysts led by Carlos De Alba told clients in a Thursday note. “MP is the most vertically integrated rare earths company ex-China.”
Beijing imposed export restrictions on seven rare earth elements in April in response to President Donald Trump’s tariffs. It has kept those restrictions in place despite trade talks with U.S.
Trump removed some restrictions Wednesday on the Defense Production Act, which could allow the federal government to offer an above market price for rare earths. MP Materials is the best positioned company to benefit from this, according to Morgan Stanley. Its shares rose more than 5% on Thursday.
MP Materials is developing fully domestic rare earth supply chain in the U.S. and plans to begin commercial production of magnets used in most electric vehicle motors, offshore wind wind turbines, and the future market for humanoid robots, according to Morgan Stanley.
The investment bank expects MP Materials to post negative free cash flow this year and in 2026, but the company has a strong balance sheet should accelerate positive free cash flow from 2027 onward.
Tesla’s head of Optimus humanoid robot, Milan Kovac, announced that he is leaving the automaker after 9 years.
It leaves just as CEO Elon Musk claimed that the humanoid robot is going to make Tesla a”$25 trillion company.”
Electrek first reported on Tesla hiring Kovac back in 2016 to work on the early Autopilot program. At the time, we noted that the young engineer had an interesting background in machine learning.
He quickly rose through the ranks and ended up leading Autopilot software engineering from 2019 to 2022.
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In 2022, he started working on Tesla’s Optimus humanoid robot program.
Musk claimed that Optimus could generate $10 trillion in revenue per year and make Tesla a $25 trillion company. These claims are largely unsubstantiated as the humanoid robot market is still in its infancy.
Most market research firms currently estimate the size of the humanoid robot market to be in the low single-digit billions of dollars, with growth projections through 2032 ranging from $15 billion to $80 billion.
That would represent impressive growth, but nowhere near what Musk is touting to investors.
Today, Kovac announced that he is leaving Tesla for personal reasons:
This week, I’ve had to make the most difficult decision of my life and will be moving out of my position. I’ve been far away from home for too long, and will need to spend more time with family abroad. I want to make it clear that this is the only reason, and has absolutely nothing to do with anything else. My support for Elon Musk and the team is ironclad – Tesla team forever.
Kovac has been regarded as one of the top new technical executives at Tesla, which has seen a significant talent exodus of top engineers.
Kovac is not the only Optimus engineer to leave Tesla recently.
Figure, another company developing humanoid robots, has recently poached Zackary Bernholtz, a 7-year veteran at Tesla and most recently a Staff Technical Program Manager.
Electrek’s Take
This is a significant loss for Tesla. Kovac was one of Musk’s top technical guys and literally the head of the program he claimed would bring Tesla to the next level – although I think most people have been understandably skeptical about these claims.
I’ve been bullish on humanoid robots, and I could see Tesla being a player in the field, but it’s nowhere near the opportunity that Musk is claiming, and there’s also plenty of competition with no clear evidence that Tesla has any significant lead, if any.
In the US, Figure has also been making a lot of progress lately:
I think it’s a smart space to invest in for manufacturing companies like Tesla, but there’s going to be a lot of competition.
It’s too early to say who will come out on top.
As for Kovac leaving, I’m sure his personal reason is correct. However, we often see people claim that and then they quickly turn up at another company.
If he believed that his product would soon become a multi-trillion-dollar opportunity, I doubt he would be leaving, but you never know. 9 years at Tesla is some hard work and it’s impressive for anyone. Congrats.
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