Insights

SpaceX turns a week-old stock into an acquisition engine, paying USD 60B in shares for Cursor just four days after closing the largest IPO in history. Washington orders Anthropic to suspend Mythos and Fable for the public, rattling allies who arrive at the G7 with sovereign AI plans already in hand. OpenAI answers with its own move, folding Ona into Codex as weekly users surge 400%. DeepSeek raises USD 7.4B and admits, in an anti-poach clause, that talent rather than capital is its real constraint. Thoma Bravo writes a USD 5B check to zero on Medallia. And Anduril does something no startup has managed in half a century: it wins a US fighter jet program.

SpaceX prices at USD 135, opens at USD 150, closes day one at USD 160.95 — a 19% pop on the largest IPO in history, raising USD 75B at a USD 2.1T valuation. Anthropic opens its most capable Mythos-class reasoning to the public through Claude Fable 5, while carefully rerouting the dangerous queries. Prometheus closes a USD 12B Series B at USD 41B, and Bezos confirms it is now the “bulk” of his time. Mistral targets a €20B valuation as Europe places its biggest AI bet yet. Perplexity’s CEO names 2028 as its IPO date, agnostic of what Anthropic and OpenAI do before it. OpenAI files confidentially for a listing and declares war on token pricing simultaneously. And Revolut, now valued at USD 115B, turns out to have been operating under quiet ECB restrictions it never mentioned publicly.

SpaceX is expected to list at a valuation of around USD 1.8T, creating a final pre-IPO window before trading opens and public-market demand begins.

Jeff Bezos steps into the public eye for the first time as co-CEO of Project Prometheus, describing an “artificial general engineer” — not a chatbot, not a robot, but something altogether stranger and potentially more consequential. Anthropic approaches a trillion-dollar valuation and begins what may be its most diplomatically charged chapter yet, negotiating Mythos access with the EU while Washington holds the export key. Perplexity bets its future on orchestration over raw intelligence, takes Personal Computer to Windows, and triples annualised revenue in the process. Jensen Huang walks onto a Taipei stage with a six-foot Chinese humanoid robot and hands Unitree something more valuable than a hardware deal: a global research mandate. And Blue Origin’s launchpad may not be operational again until 2028 — a number that reframes the Amazon–Kuiper timeline considerably.

SpaceX clocks USD 14B in speculative inflows before it even prices, targeting a USD 1.8T IPO valuation that reframes the company as an orbital AI platform rather than a rocket maker. Anduril steps into the vacuum as Russia deputises its own banks to shoot down drones — a telling sign of how stretched Moscow’s air defences have become. Meanwhile Berlin’s Stark doubles its valuation to EUR 2.5B in the same calendar year it was founded, as European defence capital accelerates to startup speed. Anthropic closes a USD 65B round at a near-trillion-dollar valuation and approaches its first profitable quarter. Blue Origin’s New Glenn explodes on the pad — again. Private equity discovers that music royalties are now a spreadsheet, and Blackstone turns a 45k-song catalog into a USD 4B exit. And at the intersection of adventure, nostalgia, and alternative assets — an opportunity for those who believe the best investments come with a story attached.

SpaceX files its S-1 and the number that stops the room is this: Anthropic is wiring USD 1.25B per month to Elon Musk’s GPU farm through May 2029. That single line item nearly doubles SpaceX’s 2025 revenue base and converts its cash-burning AI division into a flagship revenue line — three weeks before the Nasdaq roadshow. Elsewhere, Google and Blackstone launch a USD 5B compute company to break Nvidia’s grip. Germany puts EUR 35B behind military space. And Anthropic prepares to brief the Financial Stability Board on the security vulnerabilities its own model just found. The week, in full.

Anduril doubles its valuation to USD 61B on a record USD 5B raise and proves its Apache drone concept in live military testing. Blue Origin eyes outside capital for the first time as it targets 100 launches a year. Anthropic clashes with the Pentagon over AI safety red lines inside US military systems. SpaceX enters the AI cloud market with a USD 5–6B Colossus deal. OpenAI hands employees up to USD 30M each in the largest liquidity event in AI history. Cerebras's IPO surges on 20x oversubscription. And China's industrial juggernaut accelerates. This week's edition covers it all.

Hong Kong is reclaiming its crown as the world’s top IPO venue with 400+ Chinese listings in the pipeline. Founders Fund closes a record USD 6B growth fund. DeepSeek seeks its first outside capital at a USD 50B valuation. Anthropic and OpenAI race to build enterprise AI joint ventures. And the Musk-Altman trial reaches new heights of personal acrimony. This week’s edition covers it all.