Vibe Laundering, pt. 3: Back to the future with Citrini in the Global Vibe Laundering Memo from June 2029
A speculative memo about possible pathways in a future with vibe laundering where Grand Theft Auto VI has still not been released but everything else is printing
In Part 1, I introduced the concept of vibe laundering and its architecture mapped around disclosure and positions. In Part 2 I talked about language in edits to the authorship attribution for the fictional Citrini report. For part 3, I promised speculative fiction, so here it is as a memo from June 2029. That’s right, we’re going back to the future.
It is June 2029, which means Grand Theft Auto VI has still not been released, Tom Brady has once again decided to un-retire, Sam Altman has announced he believes AGI is six months away for the third year running, and Bill Ackman has announced a new SPAC targeting the vibes economy in a 47-part thread on X. It has also been over three years since a work of speculative fiction dropped on Substack and preceded a selloff that took the Dow down 821 points.
What happened after February 2026 depended on which version of Citrinitas was operating behind the scenes at the time of writing. All three possible imagined pathways were consistent with the public record. None could be eliminated without information that was not publicly available. Nothing could be known with certainty. But predicting the future through fictional speculative work was not a sleight of hand. It was just vibing, okay?
The public record showed Citrinitas Capital Management Inc. (CIK 2089797), a Delaware corporation doing business as Citrini Research and Citrindex, raised $5,050,000 from five investors through SAFE notes under Reg D Rule 506(b). Its site described the entity at the time as “an asset management and investment research firm” that “is not a broker-dealer or investment advisor” and “does not owe a fiduciary duty”.
From that moment on in February 2026, there were seemingly three possible futures for Citrinitas, none of which could be distinguished from the outside looking in. The only public filing for Citrinitas Capital Management Inc. was that Form D and the investment in the Robostrategy fund for the Citrinitas Inc. entity. Everything else, the Substack, the disclaimers, the site description, looked uniform regardless of which future was actually underway. What separated them was purpose, and purpose lives in documents that don’t become public until a registration, an acquisition, or an enforcement action forces them into daylight.
In one pathway, the disclosure gap was incidental. In another, it was temporary. In the third, the gap was the product.
This memo is speculative fiction built on public filings and inspired by the original. After all, none of these pathways may pan out, all of them might, and anything is possible. In at least one parallel universe, Citrinitas has already IPO’d and Van Geelen is on the cover of Forbes, and in another one he’s gone off to France to pursue a love of rapper. This speculative fiction is not about one company, but rather, it is about what vibe laundering architecture enables for any entity combining SAFE notes, Substack, no registration, and demonstrated attributed market-moving influence. Citrinitas is the case study that prompted the analysis. The future imagined here, June 2029, is one where vibe laundering has soaked from screens to synapses and we just got used to living in it. Because it’s not that serious, right, you knew that, yes?
In the choose your own adventure narrative of Citrinitas, three pathways for June 2029 exist (that’s because of multiple universes, duh).
In one version of June 2029, Citrinitas became a media empire. In a second version of June 2029, Citrinitas became a fund. In a third version of June 2029, Citrinitas continued as it was.
Pathway A: The media empire strikes back
In this version of June 2029, Citrinitas is a media company. Citrindex has become a Bloomberg Terminal competitor for retail investors with a $29/month pro tier and a free version that’s sticky enough to keep 400,000 subscribers opening emails at 6am while the podcast does 2 million downloads a month and forced Joe Rogan into retirement. There’s a yearly conference in Miami, naturally, because there’s always a conference. The inaugural CitriniCon 2028 sold out within nine minutes and Van Geelen gave the keynote in a custom gold bomber jacket inspired by the one Ryan Gosling wore in Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive with the Citrini logo embroidered on the back, which was either iconic or unspeakable depending on who you follow online.
The fictional memo from February 2026, in this version of events, was the most successful piece of content marketing in financial media history. It was attributed to moving billions because the audience was large enough and the thesis was sharp enough, not because moving billions was the business model. As the Citrinitas media empire became official, its original SAFE investors got a great return on a media bet, and new blood joined a storied path previously built by Morning Brew, The Hustle, and MarketSnacks.
After all, the financial newsletter exit had become a recognizable playbook by then. In 2015, two college students at the University of Michigan started emailing a newsletter about finance to their classmates. By 2020, Morning Brew had 2.5 million subscribers and was doing $20 million in revenue and Insider Inc. bought a majority stake for $75 million. Sam Parr built The Hustle into a newsletter operation that HubSpot acquired in February 2021 for $17.2 million. Robinhood acquired MarketSnacks in 2019 and relaunched it as Robinhood Snacks, a subsidiary with stated editorial independence from the brokerage while abrdn paid £75 million for Finimize in 2021. In every case, the enterprise value was the audience since the distribution was the product. Nobody questioned the model because nobody’s newsletter somehow crashed the market on a Monday morning.
This playbook had the historic precedent in building an audience, monetizing attention, and becoming a popular media platform or exiting to an acquirer. While Morning Brew influenced how people thought about markets over years of daily emails, the February 2026 report was attributed to influencing how markets priced twelve tickers over a single weekend. The difference is beyond scale because no perfect analogy exists, and the absence itself is a data point. In the vibe laundering era, anything goes.
Pathway B: The fund and its fundamentals
In this version of June 2029, Citrinitas is a registered investment adviser managing $800 million across two funds. The flagship is a long/short thematic equity strategy that returned 40% in its first year and has a waitlist where even the infamous doorman at Berghain, Sven, cannot get off of. After the flagship is a macro overlay fund that launched in 2028 after Van Geelen spent six months tweeting cryptically about “seeing things others don’t,” which the compliance team later determined was technically a marketing campaign though it resulted in a paltry $50,000 fine that nobody talks about. There’s a compliance team of four who have collectively aged fifteen years since joining with ironclad non-disclosure agreements and unlimited snacks. Every Substack post goes through legal review before publication and the comments section is full of people saying they miss the old Citrini. The February 2026 report has been scrubbed from the website and if you bring it up at the annual investor dinner someone from legal will materialize behind you like a vampire.
Every position is disclosed and every conflict is documented. Every piece of speculative fiction is run past at least four lawyers before it can be described as “for informational purposes only.” Van Geelen’s Bloomberg headshot is professional now. He hates it, but he’ll never tell you that. Somewhere in his closet is a gold bomber jacket with the Citrini logo that he’s never worn publicly.
Now, the transition from unregulated to regulated is a well-documented disaster for companies that built their value on saying whatever they wanted. In 2003, in what could charitably be described as the original reply guy type of energy, Dave Portnoy started distributing a free print publication at transit stops in Boston with gambling ads, fantasy sports projections, and anything you’d imagine in the tone of a guy who’d bet on anything. This endeavor, Barstool Sports, grew into a media empire valued at $450 million and when Penn purchased a 36% stake for $163 million in January 2020. Then they launched Barstool Sportsbook and entered the regulated world, and the content that made Barstool worth $450 million became a regulatory liability the moment it touched a licensed industry. State gaming commissions denied licenses because of Portnoy as content he’d posted years earlier resurfaced in regulatory proceedings. Penn eventually sold Barstool back to Portnoy for one dollar, taking a write-off reportedly approaching $850 million. Portnoy publicly said that the regulated industry was “probably not the best place for Barstool Sports and the type of content we make.“
Historically, DraftKings and FanDuel spent years operating as “games of skill” before legalization forced them into regulated licensing and fines like when the New York Attorney General announced $12 million in combined settlements over false and deceptive advertising while Massachusetts settled for $2.6 million resolution. In each case, the content and marketing that built the audience became the evidentiary record that regulators used upon entry into the regulated world.
Securities law is also direct about this, as seen in August 2023, when the SEC charged Titan Global Capital Management with violations of the Marketing Rule in what the agency explicitly framed as its first enforcement case under the amended rule. Titan had marketed hypothetical annualized returns as high as 2,700% for a crypto strategy. The claims that built the user base became the violations in the enforcement order.
Under the Investment Advisers Act, a registered adviser’s public communications become “advertisements” subject to the SEC’s Marketing Rule, which means every Substack post naming a ticker becomes a document that must be reviewed for compliance. That means, for example, every speculative work about a scenario involving say twelve publicly traded companies must be reconciled with the firm’s actual positions and trading activity. The result of that is that the voice that built the audience becomes the thing that gets your registration challenged. Penn learned this at a cost approaching a billion dollars while Titan learned it in an SEC enforcement order and DraftKings learned it in twelve million dollars of AG settlements across multiple states. The question for Pathway B is whether the thing that made Citrinitas valuable from their work, research, and output to their audience is the same thing that would make a Citrinitas-run fund un-registrable.
Pathway C: The company continues
In this version of June 2029, Citrinitas is exactly what it was in February 2026 with the same forms and the same Substack, though the subscriber count is higher, the brand is bigger, and there has been no acquisition, no registration, no Form ADV, no 13F, none of that. Van Geelen still posts when he wants, about what he wants, with who he wants, with no compliance team and no legal review. There is no bomber jacket, no conference, no fund. There is just a company that once moved the Dow and kept going.
Anyone applying a short-and-distort framework to the February 2026 report noticed the math since $5.05 million is nothing for a trading vehicle. If this had been a short-and-distort, it would have been the worst-executed one in history. One could retort that it is not even play money at that level, and that objection was valid if you assumed the trade was in the portfolio.
The trade was the company.
The five investors who put $5,050,000 into Citrinitas through SAFE notes did not need index puts to print nor did they need the model portfolio to generate alpha. They simply needed Citrinitas Capital Management Inc. to become something worth more than what they paid for it.
A SAFE is a Simple Agreement for Future Equity, so investors don’t buy stock. They buy the right to convert into stock at a future valuation event: the next priced round, an acquisition, or an IPO. The conversion price depends entirely on what the company is worth when the trigger occurs.
Imagine capturing the value of what that fictional February 2026 report did in a single weekend with over 16 million views, media coverage across 17+ outlets, a Bloomberg Terminal profile surge past Yogi Berra, a Fortune feature, and market moves attributed to them with the Dow down 821 points.
No valuation model on earth could have priced that in advance. No valuation model could capture the value of these intangibles in the vibe laundering era because no valuation model was prepared for the vibe laundering era. No valuation model on earth could have priced how content moved markets and markets proved the content worked.
The proof was in how it attracted subscribers, subscribers drove revenue, revenue drove enterprise value, enterprise value is what the SAFE converted into, and on and on and on. The mechanism fed and fueled itself beautifully.
The circularity of it, of course, had already been demonstrated before by WeWork when former CEO Adam Neumann raised $12.8 billion at a peak valuation of $47 billion for a real estate company he positioned as a technology company, all the while inventing a metric called “Community Adjusted EBITDA” that excluded most of the expenses involved in running the business in the nine years post-founding, with twelve billion dollars in, and no proof the underlying business justified any of it. Yet the narrative fed the valuation, the valuation fed the narrative, and the trade was never in real estate purely. The trade was in the demonstrated ability to raise the next round at a higher number through a grand story (which fell apart completely and made for serialized television putting Jared Leto in a wig. Or not. I can never tell with his hair.)
FTX ran the same architecture in crypto as the FTT token backed Alameda Research’s balance sheet, Alameda’s trading generated volume on FTX, and Volume supported FTT’s price. The price inflated the balance sheet which is how the Department of Justice charged Sam Bankman-Fried with conspiracy to commit wire fraud, commodities fraud, securities fraud, and money laundering. He received twenty-five years but none of this came to light until CoinDesk published Alameda’s balance sheet in November 2022 and then the circularity became visible. Tellingly, the prosecution did not use the language of reflexivity as they called it misappropriation.
Whether it is WeWork, FTX, or Theranos, for example, every circular loop has been compelled by an external force with the power to compel disclosure of forced truth.
No regulator has ever articulated a framework for identifying circular valuation structures before the collapse, nor has any SEC commissioner used the term “reflexive valuation” in an enforcement context. When circularity loops break, prosecutors tend to reach for the oldest tools in the drawer ranging from wire fraud to securities fraud to misappropriation and misstatement. The vocabulary of circularity does not exist in enforcement language as regulators name the fraud after the fact. They do not have a word for the architecture before it. They most likely have not even heard of the term vibe laundering yet.
Consider how the question regulators were trained to ask - such as did someone profit from positions in the securities affected - was the wrong question entirely. The profit was never in a securities position as the profit was in what the company became. No SEC rule currently in force addresses the scenario where a financial media company’s most valuable asset is its demonstrated ability to move global equities with a single publication. That’s vibe laundering for you, baby.
The question for Pathway C is what happens when the entity never tries to go public, never registers as an adviser, and never triggers the regulatory event that would force the disclosure distinguishing one pathway from another.
The speculative report was just the start.
The company told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command. Something like that.
2026 was just the start of the vibe laundering era.
This work of speculative fiction is just fiction. While it presents publicly available information, SEC filings, and the author’s analysis of regulatory frameworks, it’s just fiction. Literally. It does not constitute legal advice or allege that any individual or entity violated any law. All quoted statements are attributed to their sources. All regulatory interpretations are identified as such. If any sources or info used for this fiction have been incorrect, please let me know. Like and subscribe for updates, or dislike & subscribe for updates, but don’t mid-subscribe Contact: ani@anibruna.com