The SpaceX IPO

Top tech companies already use SERP API to power their AI agents, their market intelligence tools, and their automated research workflows. See how it can help you and your team. SERP API provides 250 free searches per month. Go check it out at SERPAPI.com. That's SERP-s-e-r-p API.com.

There's only one big story today, drowning out all the others, quoting Bloomberg. SpaceX has made history with the biggest ever IPO, sending it into the top ranks of the largest public companies and making Elon Musk the world's first trillionaire. SpaceX made its NASDAQ debut at one hundred fifty dollars after pricing its shares at one hundred thirty five dollars, giving it a market cap of one point nine trillion.

The company raised$75 billion in the IPO, pricing five hundred and fifty-five point six million shares at$135 each, according to a statement on its website Thursday. SpaceX's IPO is more than double the size of Saudi Aramco's

twenty nine point four billion dollar listing in twenty nineteen. Space Exploration Technologies Corp, as it is officially known, has given the underwriting banks an overallotment option to buy an additional eighty three point three million shares at the IPO price, the statement shows, which would increase the size of the deal to about eighty six billion dollars if fully exercised. The IPO drew demand for more than four times of the available shares Bloomberg News reported.

Elon Musk's fan base in the retail trading community is a crucial component of the deal. They have placed more than a hundred billion dollars in orders for the stock, people familiar with the matter said on Thursday, far more than the twenty percent of shares that had been reserved for them, end quote. So Elon is humanity's first ever trillionaire, but there are others who are seeing their bank accounts bulge today, quoting Bloomberg.

Founders Fund, a venture firm led by Musk's longtime associate Peter Thiel, owns a roughly three percent stake in SpaceX after investing six hundred million dollars in the company over several rounds dating back nearly twenty years.

At the company's one hundred and thirty five dollar per share IPO price, that stake was worth more than fifty billion dollars, according to a person familiar with the matter. Andreessen Horowitz will get the biggest return in its history from SpaceX, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The venture firm's stake in SpaceX would be worth more than ten billion dollars, the person said. And Sequoia Capital, which first backed SpaceX at the end of twenty nineteen, owns about one and a half percent of the company, according to a person familiar with the matter.

That's worth more than twenty billion dollars. Suquai invested some two billion dollars in SpaceX, including by putting eight hundred million dollars into X, the social media network formerly known as Twitter, that Musk acquired in twenty twenty two. The Wall Street debut offers virtually unprecedented returns for venture investors at a time when many syrups are choosing to stay private longer.

It also serves as validation for those who've bet early on Musk's ambitious plan to build a rocket company more than two decades ago, as well as his other ventures that have since been folded into SpaceX. The core lesson that everyone has learned from this experience is never bet against Elon. It's just a bad idea, said Trace Stevens, a general partner at Founders Fund, in a recent interview with Bloomberg Tech, end quote.

But not everyone is sold on SpaceX, according to the Times. Some investors question the valuation. citing its four point three billion dollars in losses on four point seven billion dollars in revenue in Q one, as well as concerns over space data centers. Quote. It really does feel very much like a don't look at the man behind the curtain situation, said Jim Chanos.

The founder of the investment firm Chainos and Company, who predicted the 2001 collapse of Enron, the energy company that was found to have engaged in accounting fraud. mister Chanos and others say they were concerned with SpaceX's finances. The company lost four point three billion dollars in the first three months of the year alone, and is spending heavily on AI development.

Revenue was four point seven billion dollars and growing, but it was far lower than that of tech giants like Meta, which brought in fifty six point three billion dollars in the same period and has a stock market valuation of one point four trillion. At the same time, SpaceX has promised that its total addressable market, which is its revenue opportunity if it captured all the demand across its various industries, is the largest in quote human history at twenty-eight and a half trillion dollars.

The figure, which depends on SpaceX proving that it can put AI data centers in space and develop factories on the moon, dwarfs China's annual gross domestic product by more than eight trillion dollars. Michael Burry, a hedge fund investor featured in the book The Big Short for his predictions on the 2008 financial crisis.

said in a substack discussion last month that any increase in SpaceX's stock after its IPO would be on hype and technicals. Nothing in that S1 suggests it is worth one trillion dollars, let alone two trillion. mister Burry wrote, referring to the company's IPO filing.

Even some SpaceX shareholders have doubts. Ross Gerber, the chief executive of Gerber Kawasaki, an investment firm that owns SpaceX stock, said the company's projections reminded him of unverified information that young startups use to woo investors.

He said he was alarmed by SpaceX's valuation of one point seven seven trillion, which would be more than four times the four hundred billion dollars that the company was valued at just thirteen months ago. Investors are paying an extremely high price for this stock, mister Gerber said.

Oracle said in the advisory that the bug can be exploited over the internet without needing any authentication, such as a password. The tech giant recommended that customers who use PeopleSoft software apply its mitigations to prevent exploitation.

On Wednesday, a Shiny Hunters member told TechCrunch that the gang compromised the companies by abusing an unpatched flaw in PeopleSoft servers. The bug is known as a zero day because the company affected in this case Oracle had no time to fix it before it was discovered and exploited. Mandiant confirmed that it has also notified more than one hundred global organizations, most of them in the United States in an effort to restrict access to the potentially vulnerable system.

The cybersecurity group said that about two thirds of these organizations are in higher education, which aligns with what Shiny Hunters previously claimed. While several organizations successfully blocked the ability or remediated the vulnerabilities, others experienced compromise resulting in stolen data being published on the Shiny Hunter's Data Leak website, Mandiant wrote.

The Shiny Hunters member told TechCrunch this week that some of the hacked organizations are universities and colleges. The hackers shared a message they said was sent to one of the victims' schools in which the hackers claimed to have stolen hundreds of thousands of student records containing full name. Home address, phone, email, date of birth, gender, ethnicity, enrollment status, GPA, major, and student ID across all campuses, among other data. End quote.

Founded in twenty twenty-three by researchers from Google DeepMind and meta platforms, Mistral, has sold itself as Europe's answer to Silicon Valley's dominance in AI. The company has focused on serving as an infrastructure provider for European governments and companies building cloud computing facilities it will manage in France and Sweden.

Recently, Mistral has pitched its AI services as tailor-made for engineering and manufacturing processes, signing deals with large European industrial firms such as Airbus and BMW. Still, the French startups models and chatbot have gotten far less traction with businesses and consumers than those from OpenAI and Anthropic, as well as Chinese competitors. Mishral has discussed offering European banks and other institutions its alternative to anthropics mythos.

An AI model adept at finding cybersecurity vulnerabilities. Mistral Chief Executive Officer Arthur Mensch has described this capability as a national security risk. We must have control over this technology, he said last month. BPI France and prominent US venture firms, including Lightspeed Venture Partners, General Catalyst, and Andreessen Horowitz.

Host Dan Priest sits down with people who work with AI on a daily basis. Together they discuss real stories, real strategies, and real takeaways for leaders. Get guidance from industry experts. Listen to the Intelligence Shift wherever you get your podcast.

Get 20% off your first purchase at viore.com/slash techbrew and discover the versatility of Viore clothing. That's viori.com/slash techbrew. Exclusions apply. Visit the website for full terms and conditions.

Uncanny Valley tackles the questions driving today's tech debates and lighting up your group chats. Listen to new episodes every Thursday, wherever you get your podcast.

While he was publicly reassuring customers, investors, and regulators that FTX customer funds were safe, he was simultaneously using FTX as his own personal piggy bank. Spending customer funds on real estate, political contributions and investments, circuit judge Barrington Parker wrote on behalf of the panel.

Bankman Fried's lawyers did not immediately respond to a request for comment. They may next ask all the active judges on the Second Circuit to hear the case or ask the US Supreme Court to take up the case. Bankman Fried is also seeking a pardon from President Donald Trump, according to the Justice Department's office of the pardoned attorney. Neither the White House nor the Justice Department immediately responded to requests for comment, end quote.

And we haven't spoken about Mr. Beast in a while, quoting the rap: Mr. Beast has broken yet another record. Jimmy Donaldson, aka Mr. Beast. Hit five hundred million subscribers on YouTube on Friday, becoming the first creator ever to reach that milestone. Naturally, Donaldson livestreamed the moment on his channel. Over six hundred thousand people watched the stream, which ran for about an hour and a half.

Donaldson previously livestreamed his channel when he was on the verge of hitting a hundred million subscribers. Just like when he crossed that threshold in twenty twenty two, Donaldson's fans messed with him a bit, unsubscribing from his channel when he was close to hitting this accomplishment before re-subscribing a few minutes later. When the MrBeast channel surpassed half a billion subscribers, Donaldson released confetti and celebrated before getting a bit more serious with his followers.

I shouldn't have half a billion subscribers. Like statistically I shouldn't. I didn't grow up with much, Donaldson said. Both my parents were in the military and we ended up going bankrupt back in two thousand eight in the financial crisis.

When I started this channel I couldn't afford equipment. I would have to save up money from my ad sense to buy a microphone or computer. I really shouldn't be where I am today. Donaldson went on to emphasize that he didn't grow up in New York or Los Angeles, but instead grew up in a very small town. I found what I loved at a really young age. I found YouTube at the age of eleven and gave it my all. I woke up every day and I asked myself

How can I make the best videos possible, Donaldson continued. I just want to take this moment to inspire some of you because if you don't like the position you're in, hopefully this could give you the fire to try something out.

It was a lot of work to get to this point. They say it takes 10,000 hours to master something. I think 10,000 hours is too little. I think it takes a hundred thousand hours to master something. And I'm like probably sixty to seventy thousand hours deep on making YouTube videos.

Go chase your dreams and you can do it. I'm grateful for every single one of you that is subscribed to this channel. Donaldson also teased that he will be releasing a 500 million subscriber special at noon Eastern time on Saturday, end quote.

That can reduce costs for some AI assisted work by as much as ninety-five percent, according to executives using the tools. Once we find something that is working well and engineers love, we find ways to make it cost effective, said Dan Robinson, founder of Detail, a startup that identifies bugs.

There's really an embarrassment of riches right now coming out of the open source labs. Robinson shifted ninety percent of details workload from Claude and Google's Gemini to custom models and GLM, a family of models developed in China. The shift to cheaper models appears to have played a role in a recent decline in a widely followed index that tracks AI spending, Citadel Security said in a report this week.

Even the most powerful technologies must pass through the prosaic discipline of cost curves, capacity constraints, and marginal returns, the report said. OpenAI is considering drastic cuts to the prices it charges AI users ahead of similar cuts the company expects at Anthropic, the Wall Street Journal reported.

The company sees itself as having an advantage in such a scenario because it spent massive sums in the past year to secure access to computing resources at far lower prices than what's available now. Pressure on AI prices is also a new data point in the longstanding debate over whether lower-cost competitors will commodify AI models in coming years.

Or if the biggest AI company's fast pace of improvements will keep them ahead. Both OpenAI and Anthropic also offer cheaper models to which they can steer customers to lower costs. You don't need a model that knows quantum gravity, said Vishal Misra, the vice dean of computing and AI at Columbia University's engineering school. These open source models are very capable and the ability to charge a big premium for AI is going to diminish.

Open source Chinese models have been rising in popularity across American businesses. Deep Seek's share of AI usage rose from one percent in April to 17% in May on the startup Vercells platform, the company said. On Open Router, another startup that processes AI queries, Deep Seek has been the most used AI company since mid-May. Among their highest spending customers, open source token usage grew four times faster than closed source between fall of 2025 and spring of 2026, OpenRouter said.

The company has also seen more than 500 organizations swap from proprietary to open source models, end quote. And the only other long read for you this weekend the definition of a long read really is also from the journal. Who sat down with 16 economists and asked them in great detail what AI will mean for the US economy, US workers, and workplaces. Their bottom line, they believe AI will boost productivity in the near term, but only two of the economists Expect AI to actually create more jobs.