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The SpaceX IPO
00:20:13
SpaceX priced the biggest IPO ever at $135/share, raising $75B and debuting at $1.77T. ShinyHunters exploited an unpatched Oracle PeopleSoft flaw hitting 100+ organizations, Mistral seeks €3B at €20B, MrBeast hit 500M subscribers, and SBF lost his appeal.
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Welcome to the Tech We Write home for Friday, June 12th, 2026. I'm Brian McCullough. Today SpaceX had the biggest IPO ever with a $1.9 trillion valuation. Shiny Hunters exploited an unpatched PeopleSoft flaw, hitting more than 100 organizations. Mistral is still in the AI race. Mr. Beast hits 500 million subscribers and of course the weekend Long Range Suggestions here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Think you have to build your own search engine scraping infrastructure? Think again folks. SERP API can take care of all your search engine scraping needs. It lets AI products access real time web search data programmatically, no scraping infrastructure required. Their APIs offer structured JSON data from all the top search engines, including Google, Amazon and YouTube. 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@serpapi.com that's Serp serpapi.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 its Nasdaq debut at $150 after pricing its shares at $135, giving it a market cap of 1.9 trillion. The company raised $75 billion in the IPO, pricing 555.6 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 $29.4 billion listing in 2019. Space Exploration Technologies Corp. As it is officially known, has given the underwriting banks an over allotment option to buy an additional 83.3 million shares at the IPO price, the statement shows, which would increase the size of the deal to about $86 billion if fully exercised. The IPO drew demand for more than four times 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 $100 billion in orders for the stock people familiar with the matter Thursday far more than the 20% 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 3% stake in SpaceX after investing $600 million in the company over several rounds dating back nearly 20 years. At the company's $135 per share IPO price, that stake was worth more than $50 billion. 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 $10 billion, the person said. Sequoia Capital, which first backed SpaceX at the end of 2019, owns about 1.5% of the company, according to a person familiar with the matter. That's worth more than $20 billion. Sequoia invested some $2 billion in SpaceX, including by putting $800 million into X, the social media network formerly known as Twitter that Musk acquired in 2022. The Wall street debut offers virtually unprecedented returns for venture investors at a time when many startups are choosing to stay private longer. It also serves as validation for those who 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 Trey Stevens, a general partner at Founders Fund, in a recent interview with with Bloomberg Tech. But not everyone is sold on SpaceX. According to the Times, some investors question the valuation, citing its $4.3 billion in losses on $4.7 billion in revenue in Q1, 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 Chanos and company who predicted the 2001 collapse of Enron the that was found to have engaged in accounting fraud. Mr. Chanos and others say they were concerned with SpaceX's finances. The company lost $4.3 billion in the first three months of the year alone and is spending heavily on AI development. Revenue was $4.7 billion and growing, but it was far lower than that of tech giants like Meta, which brought in $56.3 billion in the same period and has a stock market valuation of 1.4 trillion. At the same time, SpaceX has promised that its total addressable market, which is its revenue opportunity if it captured across its various industries, is the largest in, quote, human history at $28.5 trillion. 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 $8 trillion. 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 nothing in that S1 suggests it is worth $1 trillion, let alone $2 trillion, Mr. 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 1.77 trillion, which would be more than four times the $400 billion that the company was valued at just 13 months ago. Investors are paying in extremely high price for this stock, Mr. Gerber said. End quote. Oracle is warning customers of a critical PeopleSoft flaw after Shiny Hunters claimed breaches of more than 100 organizations using PeopleSoft at the time of this writing, Oracle has not issued a patch. Quoting TechCrunch, Mandiant, the Google owned security unit that investigates cyber attacks, warned in a blog post that the new Oracle flaw is the same bug that the the Shiny Hunters group is abusing in its hacking campaigns targeting PeopleSoft customers. 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 100 global organizations, most of them in the United States, in an effort to restrict access to the potentially vulnerable systems. 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 Hunters 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 victim 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. There's still one big dark horse in the AI race, and we haven't spoken about them in a while. Sources tell Bloomberg that French startup Mistral AI is in talks to raise around 3 billion euro at around a 20 billion euro valuation. It was last valued at 11.7 billion euro during a funding round in September of 2025. Founded in 2023 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. Mistral has discussed offering European banks and other institutions its alternative to Anthropic's 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. Mistral's earlier backers include France's state bank BPI France and prominent US Venture firms including Lightspeed Venture Partners, General Catalyst and Andreessen Horowitz. End quote. AI is uncharted territory and many leaders are trying to navigate through without a guide to help them. That's why Morning Brew created the Intelligence Shift, a new podcast with PwC. It's all about how AI is fundamentally changing different industries. 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 and a couple of dudes we also haven't spoken about in a while Sam Bankman Fried has lost his bid to overturn his fraud conviction and 25 year prison sentence over the collapse of FTX quoting Reuters In a unanimous decision, a three judge panel of the Manhattan based 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals said prosecutors evidence against bank being freed, quote, was conservatively stated and robust. 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 2nd Circuit to hear hear the case or ask the U.S. 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 Pardon 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 500 million subscribers on YouTube on Friday, becoming the first creator ever to reach that milestone. Naturally, Donaldson livestreamed the moment on his channel. Over 600,000 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 100 million subscribers, just like when he crossed that threshold in 2022. Donaldson's fans messed with him a bit, unsubscribing from his channel when he was close to hitting this accomplishment before resubscribing a few minutes later. When the MrBeast channel surpassed half a billion subscribers, Donaldson released confetti and celebrated before getting a bit 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 2008 in the financial crisis. When I started this channel, I couldn't afford equipment. I would have to save up money from my AdSense 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 11 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 100,000 hours to master something and I'm like probably 60 to 70,000 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. First up in the long reads this week, what I said was going to happen is starting to happen. As companies are hit by rising AI costs, they are increasingly using tools that tap cheaper models, including some from China, thereby putting price pressure on OpenAI and Anthropic, quoting the journal. The ecosystem allows autonomous AI systems or agents to use cheap models, including those made by Chinese companies like Alibaba and Deep Seq, for many functions. The agents only tap the most capable versions of OpenAI's ChatGPT and Anthropic's Claude, for more complex tasks. That can reduce costs for some AI assisted work by as much as 95%, 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 90% of Detail's 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 long standing debate over whether lower cost competitors will commodify AI models coming years or if the biggest AI companies 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. Deepseek's share of AI usage rose from 1% in April to 17% in May on the startup Vercell's platform, the company said. On OpenRouter, another startup that processes AI queries, DeepSeek 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 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 U.S. economy, U.S. 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. No bonus episodes for you this weekend. Come on Nicks.