Almost 90 new unicorns, an almost-PLN 100 pizza, and an 'almost inside information' quip: how the language of 'almost' is rewriting the consumer-tech economy

Lead

Three short dispatches, none of them obviously connected, landed within roughly thirty hours of each other over the weekend of 5–6 July 2026. On 6 July, a Polish X account complained that a 60-centimetre pizza now costs almost PLN 100. On 5 July, TechCrunch published its running tally of unicorns minted so far this year — almost ninety new entrants, with AI the dominant driver. And on 5 July, a market-news account flagged a Donald Trump quote in which the US president observed that, when his children buy an energy-efficient truck, "they have inside information" — "almost anything they do," he added.

The connecting thread is not conspiratorial. It is linguistic. In each case, the operative word is "almost" — the rhetorical device that lets a speaker concede a fact while resisting its full implications. A pizza almost costs a hundred zlotys, an investor class almost believes in ninety new unicorns, a presidential family almost operates as an ordinary retail consumer of energy assets. The economy is increasingly described in the conditional.

Nut graf

Taken together, the three items sketch a consumer-tech economy that is still nominally functioning but has lost the habit of speaking in completed statements. Inflation is real but framed as "almost." Valuation milestones are real but cushioned by caveats about AI-driven froth. Conflicts of interest are real but restated as jokes. This article reads those three wires against each other — and asks what it means when the institutions closest to the money have stopped committing to plain sentences.

Pizza, price formation, and the high-income consumer

Start with the cheapest artefact and work outward. The Polish post from 6 July — from an account using the handle @sknerus_ — captures a small price-formation event in real time: a 60cm pizza, "almost PLN 100." PLN 100 is roughly the cost of a basic grocery basket for one in Warsaw in 2018. That the price of a single pizza now brushes against that figure is, in isolation, an unremarkable complaint about café inflation.

It is not unremarkable in context. Poland has run one of the European Union's tightest labour markets for three consecutive years, with nominal wage growth running ahead of inflation through 2024 and most of 2025. Service-sector pricing has followed. The pizza in question sits at the intersection of three pressures: dairy and grain pass-through from the war in Ukraine, energy costs in a country still partly coal-heated, and a hospitality labour market in which a line cook in Warsaw can credibly threaten to leave for a German contract. None of that requires a single global thesis. It does, however, explain why "almost PLN 100" has become a vernacular unit of complaint rather than an outlier.

For the consumer-tech economy, the implication is straightforward. The same wage pressure that pushes pizza prices up also pushes the cost of every subsidised service — food delivery, ride-hailing, streaming bundles — that a unicorn-class app depends on for unit economics. The deeper a company burrows into the daily budget of a Polish, Brazilian or American household, the more exposed it is to the polite, low-grade inflation now visible in items like a PLN 100 pizza.

The unicorn class, almost ninety strong

The second item is from TechCrunch's 5 July update to its running unicorn list for 2026. The headline figure is striking: almost ninety new unicorns minted so far this year, against a backdrop in which AI has become the dominant sector pulling capital. The publication's framing — "AI igniting an investor frenzy, more startups achieving unicorn status every month" — is itself a study in conditional enthusiasm. The word "frenzy" does a lot of work. It concedes that valuations are decoupled from revenue, while suggesting the decoupling is general rather than exceptional.

The structural read is plain. A unicorn is, by the standard definition, a private company valued at $1bn or more. The list in 2026 is being padded by AI infrastructure plays — model trainers, inference providers, vertical applications built on top of foundation-model APIs — whose revenue curves are steep but whose customer concentration is narrow. When TechCrunch groups these together with non-AI survivors from the 2021 vintage, the headline number reads healthier than the underlying composition. A handful of AI infrastructure rounds at multi-billion pre-money valuations will, by definition, pull the count up; the median new unicorn of 2026 is a less obvious object than the median new unicorn of 2021.

Two implications follow. First, the supply of late-stage private capital is, for now, ample enough to absorb a steady drip of $1bn-plus rounds even as public-market multiples compress. Second, the exit window — the path that turns a unicorn's paper mark into realised cash — remains narrow. IPO activity is concentrated in a small number of AI-adjacent names. Strategic acquirers are scarce. The "almost ninety" therefore also describes an almost-finished market: valuations are nearly settled, but liquidity is not.

The 'almost inside information' problem

The third item returns the analysis to politics. On 5 July, the market-news account @unusual_whales highlighted a Trump remark in which the US president observed that, when his own children consider buying an energy-efficient truck, "they have inside information" — and added that "almost anything they do" in such a market, "if they want to buy a truck … if they buy an energy efficient truck, they have inside information." The framing — playful, rhetorical — nevertheless names a problem the markets have spent three years trying to ignore: presidential families now sit on both sides of the regulatory line they themselves draw.

The structural point is not whether any individual purchase violates a statute. It is that the rhetorical move — "almost" inside information, "if" they buy — concedes the conflict while declining to act on it. The same conditional voice that Polish consumers use to describe a PLN 100 pizza, and TechCrunch uses to describe an "investor frenzy," is being deployed here to describe the boundary between public policy and private enrichment. Each speaker acknowledges the line; none of them agree to enforce it.

For the consumer-tech economy specifically, the stakes are concrete. Energy-efficiency subsidies, EV tax credits and grid-investment programmes shape the demand curve for a wide swath of consumer hardware — trucks, heat pumps, home batteries, rooftop solar inverters. When the family of the sitting US president is openly described as having "inside information" about where that curve is heading, two things happen simultaneously. Capital flows toward the president's preferred assets faster than it would in a clean-information market. And the regulatory architecture that determines what counts as a violation becomes harder to police, because the very language of enforcement has been softened to "almost."

Counter-read and what the evidence will not tell us

A charitable read of the three items would say the analysis is overwrought. Pizza prices are a local story; unicorn counts are a venture-capital story; presidential remarks are a political-story only loosely tied to either. The connecting thread, on this reading, is a coincidence of tense, not a structural pattern.

There is something to that. The Polish post is a single data point from an unverified account; TechCrunch's running list is an industry tally, not a forecast; the Trump quote is a snippet of public commentary, not a regulatory filing. None of the three items, individually, supports the heavier claim that the language of "almost" has become structurally dominant in the consumer-tech economy.

What the sources do support, more modestly, is a journalistic observation: the three institutions that touch the consumer-tech economy most directly — household budgets in Central Europe, the venture-capital industry, and the US executive — are now speaking in roughly the same register. They hedge where they used to assert. They qualify where they used to commit. Whether that registers as a transition or as a passing mood is the open question, and the source items do not resolve it.

Stakes

If the "almost" register is a passing mood, the underlying economy is more robust than this article suggests — pizza prices reset, unicorn vintages churn, regulatory lines hold. If the register is structural, the consumer-tech economy of late 2026 is one in which the marginal participant — a Polish diner, a Series C investor, an energy-efficiency regulator — is being asked to make decisions on inputs that have themselves been softened. The pizza buyer pays PLN 100. The venture investor writes a $50m cheque into a $1bn paper mark. The regulator signs off on a subsidy whose biggest beneficiaries include the family of the man who proposed it. Each transaction clears. None of them is, in the full sense of the word, settled.

Desk note

Monexus read the three wires together because their connective tissue is rhetorical, not topical — the same word doing structural work across a pizza complaint, a unicorn tally, and a presidential aside. Wire coverage has largely treated each item in isolation; this article treats the language of "almost" as the news.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

• https://x.com/sknerus_/status/