Happy Friday! 😎 Tech news below!

🌎 Macro (Economic) and Trends

• 📉 Stocks were hit with a sharp sell-off on Tuesday but rebounded after the US said it would soon sign a deal w Iran.

• 💣U.S. forces launched a new wave of airstrikes on Iran on Wednesday. Secretary of Defense said the attacks were intended to persuade Tehran to make peace on terms agreeable to Trump.

• 🦠The Trump administration, fearing international travel could turn the World Cup into an Ebola superspreader, is pressuring Europe to dramatically step up infection prevention.

• 💼 A federal judge struck down the Trump administration’s plan to charge $100,000 for new H-1B visa applications. That matters because tech companies rely heavily on H-1Bs to hire foreign engineers and specialists; a six-figure fee would have made that talent pipeline much more expensive.

• 🤯A key Social Security trust fund could run out of money in 2032. It would have to cut benefits in roughly six years — three months earlier than expected — unless Congress intervenes with a funding plan.

• 📍Massachusetts is voting to pass new privacy rights bill that bans sale of precise location data. The bill is expected to blanket ban companies and startups from selling people’s precise location data across the state.

• 💰Investors have poured an unprecedented $255 billion into five AI hyperscalers — Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and Oracle — already this year, more than twice what those companies raised in all of 2025. Why it matters: Investors are more exposed to AI’s promises — and its risks — than ever. With savings dwindling and wages lagging inflation, portfolio gains are about the only place investors are making real money.

🔬 Micro (Tech Companies)

• 🥭It’s not FAANG anymore. It’s MANGOS.: Meta, Anthropic, Nvidia, Google, OpenAI and SpaceX.

• 🎙️Apple unveiled its overhauled AI-powered Siri at its Worldwide Developers Conference, WWDC 2026, on Monday. Apple spent much of its WWDC keynote highlighting fixes, performance improvements, and long-requested features before unveiling its upgraded AI-powered Siri, signaling that the company wants users to see AI as just one part of a broader effort to improve its software.

• Meta unveiled “America’s Workforce Academy,” a five-week program that trains people to become fiber technicians, welders, plumbers and electricians. Graduates will be guaranteed a job at a Meta data center.

• 📱 Meta is trying to build a subscription business beyond ads.

• Kalshi is planning to require that participants in some prediction markets disclose the identity of their employers, after an advisory committee recommended tighter security measures to combat potential insider trading and market manipulation.

• 📌Pinterest is adding support for Amazon Storefronts, allowing creators to earn affiliate commissions more easily while showcasing their product recommendations in one place.

• ServiceNow had a bug that left some of their data (including customer data) exposed to the internet.

• Nvidia and SK Hynix signed a multiyear deal for next-gen AI memory chips.

• 🌐 Starlink hit a security roadblock in India. Regulators are worried that satellite internet used in conflict zones, including Iran, could leave critical communications controlled by a U.S. company.

• 🚘 Tesla delayed its next-gen Roadster demo again, now to August or later.

• Layoffs: Tools for Humanity, Sam Altman’s identity verification company, is reportedly struggling to generate revenue and will downsize its staff. Microsoft Xbox is planning layoffs as margins reportedly fall to 3%.

🤖AI News

• OpenAI

  • OpenAI is preparing to transform ChatGPT into a “superapp” that prioritizes coding tools and agents.

  • OpenAI announced a new feature that it says will provide additional protection from prompt injection attacks, where malicious chatbot instructions are hidden in web pages and other content sources.

  • OpenAI is in advanced negotiations to lease a proposed 10 gigawatt data center campus on federal land in Ohio as part of a deal that could include financial backing from Nvidia.

  • 💸 OpenAI is reportedly considering steep price cuts to compete with Anthropic. The AI race is no longer just “who has the smartest model?” but also “who can make the monthly bill feel less cursed?”

• Anthropic

  • Anthropic released a “safe” version of its powerful Mythos model, called Claude Fable 5.

  • Anthropic is warning about recursive self-improvement, where AI systems help build their own successors.

  • 🧪 Anthropic launched a new model aimed at power users, but with safety rails that route some cybersecurity prompts to a weaker model. Very “you may build a video game from one prompt, but please do not build the bad thing.”

• 🏗️ Broadcom is putting together financing with Apollo and Blackstone for massive AI data-center buildouts tied to Anthropic and OpenAI.

• Lovable says it has hit $500M in annualized revenue, with 1 million new projects a week.

• 🚫 Alibaba, Baidu, and other Chinese tech firms were added to a Pentagon blacklist for allegedly aiding China’s military. Another reminder that AI infrastructure is also national-security infrastructure.

• $7500 —- what the most AI-obsessed firms are spending on AI per month, per employee.

🤝 Select M&A, Fundraises, IPO, Partnerships

M&A

• Waymo has acquired a massive 5,500-acre proving ground in Arizona owned by Route 14 Investment Partners LLC, a Delaware shell company associated with Apple.

Fundraising

• Databricks, a provider of database management software, has discussed raising more money in a funding round that could kick off within the next month.

IPO

• 🚀 SpaceX priced its IPO at $135 a share, valuing the company around $1.75 trillion.

• Bending Spoons, which owns Eventbrite and Vimeo, is filing to go public: Bending Spoons say its app caters to a user base of over 500 million monthly active users.

• 🚌 Zum, the electric school-bus startup, is reportedly interviewing banks for a potential IPO.

• 📈 OpenAI confidentially filed IPO paperwork and is also planning another employee share sale. The tender offer would use OpenAI’s March valuation of $852 billion.

Partnerships

• 💳 Visa is partnering with OpenAI so agents can make purchases on users’ behalf.

Share PostScript

⚱️ Gold Panning - For those who reached the bottom

• ⚽ FIFA World Cup kicked off its biggest tournament ever: 48 countries, three host nations, and 100+ games. The U.S. is hosting for the first time in 32 years.

• 🪐 Mercury, Venus and Jupiter will be visible near one another in a “mini parade of planets” Fri through Monday.

• 🏊Swimmer Catherine Breed will spend the next four months swimming the length of California (900 miles) — as long as great white sharks, jellyfish and elephant seals leave her alone.

• 🏆The Tony awards were last weekend and “Death of a Salesman” collected the most statuettes, with six wins, including for best play revival.

• 🎬 The Social Reckoning dropped its first trailer, with Jeremy Strong as Mark Zuckerberg and Aaron Sorkin returning to Facebook-world. The sequel-ish follow-up shifts from dorm-room ambition to whistleblower-era platform rot.

• 📺Is anyone else watching Widow’s Bay? Love! “What elevates it to the best new show is how it reinvents a well-worn TV trope — the cozy backwater full of adorable kooks — and how it turns the town’s history into its biggest monster.”

A new mural painted on the grass at Minneapolis’ Boom Island Park. It’s the first U.S. painting in the “Beyond Walls” handshake series by Franco-Swiss artist Saype.

Do you have any feedback? I’d love to hear from you! Just hit reply to this email

Happy Friday! 😎 Tech news below!

🌎 Macro (Economic) and Trends

• 📈The S&P 500 just had one of its best two-month run ever. Meanwhile, Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency assets are under pressure this week, furthering a recent rocky run that has wiped out all of Bitcoin’s gains since President Trump’s re-election in 2024. Bitcoin is down more than 45 percent from its October high.

• 🙅🏻‍♂️ Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth blocked the promotions of at least seven Navy officers in a move that targeted women and Black officers.

• ✍️President Trump signed a revised version of a long-anticipated executive order on Tuesday that creates cybersecurity guardrails around frontier AI models.

• 🐂A deadly cattle pest called New World screwworm has been found in Texas, raising fears of even higher beef prices.

• 🎶Trending - live event company stock: Live event companies (like AMC, LiveNation and IMAX) are delighting Wall Street as the trend toward in-person entertainment continues to accelerate in the AI era. Driving the news: For the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic, the movie production pipeline has remained consistent and strong, leading to a wide array of genres attracting bigger audiences.

• Trending - M&A: Lax regulatory oversight of deals at the federal level, combined with competitive pressure in the AI era, has ushered in a slew of new takeover opportunities across media, music and movies. But - Many of these deals are struggling to get over the finish line as companies and investors struggle to align on terms.

  • 🎙️iHeartMedia’s deal talks with SiriusXM have stalled

  • 🎵 Universal Music Group formally rejected a $65 billion buyout offer from Bill Ackman’s Pershing Square Capital

  • 🍿 Paramount is reportedly eyeing July as a closing date for its takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery

• Americans have a record share of their wealth in the stock market. That beats the roughly 30% during the meme-stock-and-SPAC mania of 2021 — and the 27% share reached in Q1 2000, just as the internet boom peaked.

• Job openings rose to their highest level in two years in April. It’s a sign that employers’ appetite to hire is improving. White-collar job postings accounted for most of the surge - a signal that AI isn’t sapping demand for traditional office workers.

🔬 Micro (Tech Companies)

• Google’s Dreambeans will turn your life into a cartoon: Dreambeans is a curated list of AI-illustrated “stories” culled from the personal data in your Google account

• 👑 Amazon has dethroned Walmart as the Fortune 500’s No. 1 company — ending the retailer’s 13-year reign atop the list. The top 10 are: Amazon, Walmart, UnitedHealth Group, Apple, Alphabet, CVS Health, Berkshire Hathaway, McKesson, Exxon Mobil, and Cencora.

• 🛍️Amazon Prime Day 2026 takes place June 23-26.

• Meta Platforms is scaling back elements of its employee tracking tool after staff raised concerns about the tool.

• 🚀SpaceX was awarded a $4.16 billion contract by the US Space Force as part of a program to deploy space-based sensors to track and target airborne threats.

• Amazon faces class action lawsuit over Ring facial-recognition feature. The class action lawsuit claims that Ring’s Familiar Faces feature stores images of passersby without consent.

• Apple is currently on track to launch its overhauled Siri in September, to run in part on Google’s cloud computing servers using Nvidia chips.

• Cash App launched a wand for tap-and-pay.

• Hackers hijacked Instagram accounts by tricking Meta AI support chatbot into granting access.

• Uber is capping employee AI spending after blowing through budget in four months. Uber’s cutback has occurred after the company had reportedly encouraged staff to use AI as much as possible.

• Shopify said that it would expand its share buyback authorization by $3 billion to a total authorization of $5 billion, becoming the latest software firm to unveil expanded share repurchase plans as AI fears have battered stock prices.

• Will kids even know what an actual mall is? A new app, The Mall, is building a universal feed for online shopping. The Mall lets shoppers build a personalized feed of brands, track sales and drops, and discover products across thousands of retailers.

• Campuswink, launched in March by a mom, pairs prospective college students with current students at their target schools for unofficial, unscripted tours and consultations — a 30-minute video call runs $45, a three-call package $120, and an in-person tour up to two hours $150.

• Layoffs: GitLab cuts 14% of staff as it scales its platform to serve AI workloads.

🤖AI News

• Apple approved Poke, the startup that lets people use AI agents through simple text messages, as the first AI agent on its Messages for Business platform.

• Microsoft launched Scout, an OpenClaw-inspired personal assistant. Microsoft Scout is a new AI assistant meant to bring the power and flexibility of OpenClaw into the Microsoft 365 system.

• Florida is suing OpenAI, Sam Altman, in first-of-its-kind lawsuit over violent incidents: The lawsuit partially revolves around a shooting at Florida State University last year, and ChatGPT’s alleged role in the incident.

• Anthropic is scaling Claude Mythos to critical infrastructure in 15+ countries. Anthropic is expanding Project Glasswing, its security vulnerability program, and access to Mythos to 150 organizations across 15 countries — targeting critical infrastructure in power, water, healthcare, and communications where a cyberattack could affect 100 million people.

• Knowledge workers now make up roughly one-fifth of Codex users and are growing more than three times as fast as developers. Codex, OpenAI’s platform for coding and workplace tasks, now has more than 4 million weekly active users — up more than five times since OpenAI launched a desktop app version in February.

• OpenAI said it will put Codex within its core ChatGPT app “in the next few weeks” as it moves towards its long-promised “superapp.”

• Alphabet plans to raise $80B to pay for AI buildout.

• SoftBank says it will invest up to €75 billion to build French data centers: The goal, the firm said, is to develop and operate up to 5 gigawatts of additional data center capacity.

• The CREATOR Act (Creative Rights for Artists’ Technique and Originality Are Reserved Act): A bipartisan group of members of Congress introduced a bill that would give visual artists legal protections against commercial AI imitation of their work without permission. Why it matters: There currently isn’t a legal framework that protects a creator’s style. Copyright laws protect registered works, but not someone’s likeness.

🤝 Select M&A, Fundraises, IPO, Partnerships

M&A

• Salesforce is acquiring Contentful, a provider of content management software for businesses, in the latest sign of its efforts to make its customer data more easily accessible to AI agents.

• Nvidia has bought Kumo AI, a five-year-old startup that sells predictive AI software to enterprises, for more than $400 million.

• Barry Diller’s business empire, People Inc. (which used to be IAC), is preparing an offer to buy MGM Resorts, the casino giant, that values it at more than $18 billion. Why Diller is betting on MGM Resorts: In a letter to People Inc.’s shareholders in April, Diller described the casino operator this way:

  MGM Resorts is an extraordinary operation powered by a compelling mix of iconic resort destinations, scalable digital platforms, premium brands, an expanding global presence, and, under its C.E.O. Bill Hornbuckle, an outstanding management team. MGM owns 40 percent of the Las Vegas Strip — an entertainment nucleus that simply cannot be replicated anywhere in the world.

  Combined with People Inc.’s digital media businesses, Diller wrote, MGM Resorts’ “very hard assets” represents a “perfect hedge in a world that is changing so unpredictively fast.”

Fundraising

• Ramp, a fintech platform, raised $750M at a $44B valuation.

IPO

• Anthropic has filed confidential initial public offering papers with the SEC.

• SpaceX is seeking a valuation of $1.75 trillion in its initial public offering next week, with share prices set at $135 each, including additional shares the underwriting banks could sell if investor demand is strong.

Partnerships

• Stripe, Visa, Mastercard and Coinbase are planning to form a consortium to issue a new stablecoin.

Share PostScript

⚱️ Gold Panning - For those who reached the bottom

Sneak peek at the Obama Center in Chicago, opening on June 18. The museum cost $850mill to build.

• DC: A summer of marquee events — the UFC fight this month, the Grand Prix in August and a July 4th fireworks show that aims to break a world record bc of America’s 250th bday — will pack downtown with hundreds of thousands of people this summer.

• 🎾Tennis superstar Serena Williams is returning to the pro game after nearly four years off the court. The 44-year-old, 23-time Grand Slam singles champ will play at an upcoming tournament in London, the WTA Tour announced today.

• 🎥The top two movies at the domestic box office this weekend were low-budget horror films from filmmakers who first became stars on YouTube: “Backrooms“, whose director is the youngest director by far to have the No. 1 film at the box office; and “Obsession,” which cost less than $1 million to make and has grossed $104.7 million domestically so far.

• ICYMI: Elmo just tried to be peaceful when it came to the Knicks vs Spurs but the internet wasn’t havin’ it: Knicks fans immediately flooded the replies, reminding him that neutrality is apparently no longer an option when the city’s first NBA Finals appearance in 27 years is on the line.

Do you have any feedback? I’d love to hear from you! Just hit reply to this email

Happy Friday! 😎 Tech news below!

🌎 Macro (Economic) and Trends

• 🦠The Ebola outbreak continues to wreak havoc: Uganda closed its border with the Democratic Republic of Congo, citing the Ebola virus outbreak; Americans who are exposed to the disease will be sent to Kenya for treatment, rather than to facilities in the United States.

• ✝️ Pope Leo XIV urged governments to slow the development of AI systems, warning they can spread misinformation, prioritize conflict, and risk leading the world down a path of unending war.

• 📉 CEOs of the world’s biggest companies lost confidence in the economy this month as the Iran war drags on.

🔬 Micro (Tech Companies)

• Meta:

  • Meta is rolling out paid subscription plans for Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp worldwide, while also testing new AI, creator, and business-focused offerings under its broader “Meta One” subscription brand.

  • Meta Platforms plans to place engineers and product managers inside large corporate customers as part of a new unit at the social-media giant to push businesses to use its AI tools and services.

  • Meta Platforms has quietly launched a new app called Forum, part of a new push by the Facebook owner to launch a lot of new apps. The app lets users select topics they’re interested in and customize their feed by choosing which topics they want to see more or less of. During a company-wide meeting last month, a recording of which was reviewed by The Information, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he discussed building as many as 50 new apps with Chief Product Officer Chris Cox. Earlier this month, Meta also launched Instants, an app that integrates with Instagram and lets users send disappearing photos. Instants and Forum are the first two apps Meta has released since it launched Threads in 2023.

• YouTube added new podcast features, including an AI recommendation tool and ‘Auto speed

• SpaceX held the first launch of the new version of its Starship spacecraft on Friday, successfully sending the craft from its Starbase Texas headquarters to space, where it deployed 22 test satellites.

• Snowflake, the database firm, said it has committed to spending $6 billion on Amazon Web Services over the next few years. Plus, its shares rose more than 30% late Wednesday after the database provider surpassed its earlier forecast for product revenue—its most closely watched sales metric—by around $125 million for the first quarter ending April 30. Snowflake said increasing adoption of its AI products, which include an AI coding agent and an agent for querying data in Snowflake and third-party applications, is helping to drive its sales.

• YouTube will now automatically label videos that use significant photorealistic AI, instead of relying solely on creators to disclose AI-generated content themselves. It’s also making AI labels more prominent.

• Salesforce lowered its projection for cash flow growth in its 2027 fiscal year, which ends January next year. It said the change reflects a hit from its recent $25 billion issuance of debt to repurchase Salesforce stock, which had fallen 33% through Wednesday’s market close as investors feared new AI tools could crimp its future growth or profits.

• 📈 Micron Technology crossed $1 trillion in market value for the first time Tuesday, as shares climbed 19% on rising demand for memory chips used in AI systems. It was Micron’s largest single-day gain since 2011. The rally came after UBS sharply raised its price target for Micron to $1,625 from $535, implying the stock could more than double from Friday’s close of $751. The bank cited long-term supply agreements with partially fixed pricing and said investors are likely to apply a higher valuation multiple as AI’s impact on the memory industry becomes clearer.

• Layoffs: ClickUp is laying off hundreds of employees and replacing w AI agents.

🤖AI News

• Anthropic passed OpenAI as the world’s most valuable AI startup: Anthropic said it raised $65 billion at a $900 billion valuation, putting it ahead of OpenAI’s $730 billion. Anthropic also released Claude Opus 4.8, an upgrade to its flagship AI model with better coding and knowledge work skills

• The White House is nearing a deal with Anthropic that allows the National Security Agency and other U.S. spy agencies to use the company’s advanced AI models for classified work.

• Kuaishou Technology, the Chinese social media giant, said that its Kling AI video business reached an annualized revenue of about $500 million in March.

• AI CEOs are splitting over whether their technology will gut white-collar work or supercharge it. Despite thousands of layoffs from Meta, Coinbase, Block, Pinterest and Shopify, software engineering job openings are up over 18% YOY.

🤝 Select M&A, Fundraises, IPO, Partnerships

M&A

• Uber is reportedly weighing a higher takeover bid for Delivery Hero, after a shareholder in the European food delivery giant rejected its €11.5 billion ($13.4 billion) acquisition proposal.

Fundraising

• Baseten, a startup that rents out Nvidia AI servers to application developers and helps them customize models, has recently been in talks with investors to raise $1 billion at an $11 billion valuation.

• Cognition, a coding startup, has raised more than $1 billion in a funding round that valued the company at $26 billion including the investment.

Partnerships

• American Airlines plans to start adding SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet service to around half of its main aircraft fleet beginning early next year.

• Qualcomm has reached a deal with ByteDance to supply chips for AI data centers to the Chinese tech giant.

• Visa has announced an undisclosed investment in AI coding platform Replit. The two companies are also exploring how to integrate Visa’s payment products into Replit, so that developers — and the AI agents they build — can accept payments directly from customers without leaving the platform.

Share PostScript

⚱️ Gold Panning - For those who reached the bottom

• 🎥 “The Mandalorian and Grogu” — the first “Star Wars” movie in nearly seven years — collected a strong $82 million in its opening weekend over the holiday, $102milll including Monday. While it’s significant for any movie to debut above $100 million, “The Mandalorian and Grogu” is the worst start for a “Star Wars” since Disney bought the franchise in 2012.

• Speaking of… people are sick of franchises. In a survey of Gen Z, teens are also rejecting live-action remakes.

• Trending - moody beach houses: waterfront homes are starting to use colors like deep-ocean navy, the slate gray of stormy seas, or the dark brown of old ship planks.

Do you have any feedback? I’d love to hear from you! Just hit reply to this email

Happy Friday! 😎 Tech news below!

🌎 Macro (Economic) and Trends

• 📈 Earnings season has been a blockbuster so far. Corporate profits have driven the S&P 500 to fresh records, muffling some of Wall Street’s worries about the economic fallout of the war in Iran. The artificial-intelligence giants’ $725 billion spending spree has helped. Consumers are feeling gloomy, but they’re continuing to spend. Households expect inflation and the job market to worsen this year, though retail sales remain robust.

• 🦠An Ebola outbreak in central Africa could last for months. “I’m deeply concerned about the scale and speed of the epidemic,” one W.H.O. official said.

• 🇨🇺The Justice Department charged Raúl Castro, the 94-year-old former president of Cuba and brother of Fidel Castro, with murder and a conspiracy to kill U.S. citizens. The accusations stem from the 1996 downing of two civilian planes.

• 💰Borrowing costs for governments around the world — including the U.S. — are nearing multi-decade highs as investors bet that the war with Iran will keep inflation elevated for longer

🔬 Micro (Tech Companies)

• Google is transforming Search from a list of links into an AI-powered experience filled with conversational answers, autonomous agents, and interactive interfaces — a shift that could further reduce traffic to publishers across the web. At the Google I/O event, Google also announced a new video model, Gemini Omni, and an expanded lineup of AI shopping tools.

• Uber lifted its stake in Germany-based food delivery firm Delivery Hero to 19.5%, with options to go to 25%, a sign the ride-hailing and delivery firm may be contemplating expanding further in Europe.

• Nvidia’s revenue grew 85% to $81.6 billion in the three months that ended April 26, the company said Wednesday. That’s 12 percentage points higher than the blistering growth the AI chip designer reported in the January quarter. It also projected revenue would grow 95% in the current fiscal quarter, suggesting that the AI boom is far from peaking and its Blackwell-series chips are hitting their stride.

• Layoffs: Intuit to lay off over 3,000 employees to refocus on AI

🤖AI News

• ⭐️Elon Musk lost in his lawsuit against OpenAI, delivering a major victory to CEO Sam Altman in Silicon Valley’s biggest grudge match.

• OpenAI announced one of its general-purpose reasoning models autonomously cracked a famous geometry problem that stumped mathematicians for 80 years.

• Anthropic’s explosive growth has the company on track for its first profitable quarter, with revenue projected to more than double to $10.9 billion in Q2. Anthropic expects to generate $559 million in operating profit at the end of the June quarter, becoming profitable on an operating basis for the first time.

• The White House’s Office of the National Cyber Director hosted a briefing Tuesday for companies including OpenAI, Anthropic and Reflection AI on a planned executive order on AI that will empower intelligence and other government agencies to review advanced models before the models are released. The executive order aims to establish a voluntary framework for developers of frontier models to inform the government about planned new AI releases.

• Figma added an AI assistant to its collaborative canvas.

• 🤖 Andrej Karpathy, one of the world’s best-known AI researchers and a founding member of OpenAI, is joining rival Anthropic in a major coup

🤝 Select M&A, Fundraises, IPO, Partnerships

M&A

• Analog Devices is in advanced talks to buy startup Empower Semiconductor for about $1.5 billion, in a deal that reflects demand for technology that can manage the intense energy needs of AI chips.

• Anthropic acquired Stainless, a dev tools startup used by OpenAI, Google and Cloudflare

• OpenAI bought Weights.GG, a small startup that made an AI voice-cloning tool called Replay, in January

• James Murdoch is buying Vox Media’s podcast network.

• Everlane will sell itself to Shein, a Chinese discount e-retail giant.

• SpaceX and Cursor expect to proceed with their planned acquisition 30 days after SpaceX begins trading publicly

Fundraising

• Mercury, a Fintech startup, said it raised $200 million at a $5.2 billion valuation shortly after receiving conditional approval from regulators for a bank license.

IPO

• SpaceX has finally made the contents of its IPO filing public, weeks ahead of what is expected to be the largest IPO ever. But the prospectus shows just how much the IPO depends on expectations for future growth and investor servility to Musk — not the current underlying business. SpaceX is wildly unprofitable, reporting a $4.9 billion net loss on $18.67 billion in consolidated revenue for 2025.

• Rumor has it OpenAI has been working with bankers to prepare to file for an initial public offering in the coming days or weeks.

Partnerships

• Anthropic will pay xAI $1.25 billion per month for compute. That deal, which would be worth about $40 billion through May 2029, would be one of the largest AI infrastructure deals on record, and help juice SpaceX’s suddenly slowing revenue growth.

Share PostScript

⚱️ Gold Panning - For those who reached the bottom

• 🛁 Hoarders rejoice: The Container Store and Bed Bath & Beyond dual branded stores are rolling out nationwide and the stores will honor old Bed Bath coupons. The company is even running a contest to see who has the oldest coupon.

• Juicy: Theo Baker, a Stanford history major and soon-to-be graduate, is out today with an exposé of the sometimes comical, at times seemingly corrupt, efforts by tech funders to seduce undergraduates who smell like future moguls and geniuses, and vice versa.

• 📺 An Ella Enchanted TV series executive-produced by Anne Hathaway is in the works at Disney+.

• ✨A touch of whimsy: Etsy searches for “whimsical jewelry,” “whimsical décor,” and “whimsy-related items” are up at least 50% year over year, which Etsy trend expert Dayna Isom Johnson calls “everyday escapism.”

• 🇹🇼 “Taiwan Travelogue,” a love story depicted as a rediscovery from the 1930s, won the International Booker Prize, the major British award for fiction translated into English. It’s the first book originally in Mandarin to win the prize, and the first by a Taiwanese author.

This is what $181 million can buy you: an 11-foot-long “drip” painting that Jackson Pollock made in 1948 sold this week, breaking auction records.

Do you have any feedback? I’d love to hear from you! Just hit reply to this email

Happy Friday! 😎 Tech news below!

Read more

Happy Friday! 😎 Tech news below!

Read more

Happy Friday! 😎 and happy belated Earth day! 🌎 Tech news below!

Read more

Happy Friday! 😎 Tech news below!

Read more

Happy Friday! 😎 Tech news below!

Read more

Happy Friday! 😎 I’ll be taking next week off. Tech news below!

Read more

Happy Friday! 😎 Tech news below:

TL;DR -

• 🌎 The Strait of Hormuz is still closed for business and the price of fuel is skyrocketing in response.

• After billions in investment, Meta Platforms is shutting down Horizon Worlds for its virtual reality headset users.

• M&A from Apple, OpenAI, Amazon and Mastercard.

Read more

Happy Friday! 😎 Apologies for the skip last week - I started a new gig! So I was getting acclimated. Tech news below:

TL;DR -

• 🇮🇷 The US-Israel war with Iran has oil skyrocketing 25% and the markets rocky.

• ⭐️ The Pentagon and AI saga continues - An OpenAI exec quit in protest to OpenAI’s contract; Anthropic sued the Pentagon for its designatio…

Read more

Happy Friday! 😎 Tech news below:

TL;DR -

• 📉📈A single Substack report tanked the market early this week before evening out.

• 📣 Corporate earnings shed light on how tech companies are faring in this new AI market. Despite optimistic results from Nvidia, less than solid results from Workday, Salesforce, and Snowflake made investors wary.

• ⭐️ Afte…

Read more

Happy Friday! 😎 big week - Ramadan, Lent, Lunar new year (Happy year of the Fire Horse! 🔥🐴🧧), solar eclipse, new moon all lined up on Tuesday. Hope you had a short week w President’s day this past Monday. Tech news below:

TL;DR -

• 🇮🇷 Apparently we’re close to a war in the middle east.

• An essay about the advancements in AI freaked a bunch of…

Read more

Happy Friday! 😎 Happy early Valentine’s / Galentine’s! 💕 Tech news below:

TL;DR -

• 📈 The jobs report announced this week was very positive, supporting a boost in the markets.

• ⭐️Anthropic raised another $30B in a Series G at a valuation of $380B

• 🚗Uber is acquiring the delivery arm of Turkey’s Getir.

• What’s a 401(k) mullet?

Read more

Happy Tuesday! I’ll be traveling tmrw through the end of the week (forgot Superbowl Sunday was happening hah 🤪) and was going to skip this week but enough happened in the past 48 hours it felt appropriate to do a quick highlights email before I left. See you next Friday!

Read more

Happy Friday 😎 Tech news below:

TL;DR -

• 📉 Americans’ economic confidence plunged to its lowest level in 12 years.

• 🚙 Quite a bit of news in the autonomous vehicle industry: Uber launches an ‘AV Labs’ division to gather driving data for robotaxi partners. Waabi, an AV startup, raised $1B and expanded into robotaxis with Uber. Plus, the Nationa…

Read more

Happy Friday 😎 Hope you had a good short week! The World Economic Forum happened this past week in Davos. Tech news below:

TL;DR -

• 🌎🇨🇭The World Economic Forum in Davos featured Trump, Greenland, AI and more.

• 🎧Hardware is getting a spotlight: OpenAI is planning to introduce its first hardware device in the latter half of 2026. Apple is devel…

Read more

Happy Friday 😎 Tech news below:

TL;DR -

• 🏥Anthropic announced Claude for Healthcare, a new set of tools and resources that healthcare providers, payers and consumers can use for medical purposes.

• 🤝Apple has struck a multi-year partnership with Google to help get its artificial intelligence products back on track. Google’s Gemini will power Appl…

Read more

Happy new year! CES was this past week. Quite a few 2025 data roundups reporting on trends. Tech news below:

TL;DR -

• 🇻🇪 Trump announced that the US has captured Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro.

• 🤖AI fundraises: XAI, Elon Musk’s AI lab, said it had raised $20 billion, and Anthropic, the developer of the chatbot Claude, plans to raise $10 bi…

Read more