Part 1: Trending Thursday 50: SpaceX, AI Giants, Nvidia

Transcript

SPEAKER_1: SpaceX just filed its S-1 on Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX, and it's the first real look outsiders have gotten at the finances of Musk's empire. What are the headline numbers? SPEAKER_2: The company reported twenty twenty-five revenue of eighteen point seven billion dollars, up thirty-three percent year over year. But it swung to a four point nine billion dollar loss from a seven hundred ninety-one million dollar profit in twenty twenty-four. Capital expenditures nearly doubled, from eleven point two billion to twenty point seven billion. SPEAKER_1: And who controls the company? What does the ownership structure look like? SPEAKER_2: Musk's shares give him eighty-five point one percent of the voting power. Antonio Gracias, the founder of Valor Equity Partners and a longtime Musk ally, controls a seven point three percent stake, making him the second-largest holder after Musk. SPEAKER_1: So what's actually driving revenue inside SpaceX? Is it the rockets, or is it something else? SPEAKER_2: It's Starlink. The connectivity business generated eleven point three billion in twenty twenty-five revenue. Starlink had ten point three million subscribers in Q one of twenty twenty-six, a hundred and five percent increase year over year. That makes it one of the fastest-growing subscription businesses on the planet, rivaling the early trajectory of Netflix and Spotify. SPEAKER_1: Now the S-1 also revealed xAI's financials. What did we learn there? SPEAKER_2: xAI posted a six point four billion dollar operating loss on three point two billion in revenue in twenty twenty-five. Grok and X had five hundred fifty million monthly active users combined as of March twenty twenty-six, with a hundred and seventeen million using Grok's AI features. SPEAKER_1: And xAI is spending even more going forward? SPEAKER_2: Yes. The filing reveals xAI plans to buy another two point eight billion dollars worth of turbines for its data centers, including a two billion dollar deal for mobile gas turbines. That's the same type it's currently being sued over. SPEAKER_1: There's also some legal drama in the filing, right? SPEAKER_2: SpaceX set aside five hundred thirty million dollars for potential litigation losses, including lawsuits involving Grok's Spicy mode, which it described as a heightened risk. One overhang did clear though. A jury unanimously rejected Musk's claims against OpenAI and Sam Altman, ruling he filed outside a three-year statute of limitations. Musk says he'll appeal. SPEAKER_1: There's also a surprising connection between SpaceX and Anthropic buried in this filing. SPEAKER_2: Right. Anthropic is paying SpaceX one point two five billion dollars per month until May twenty twenty-nine under their compute deal. Anthropic says it's expanding the arrangement to include Colossus two capacity. That's fifteen billion dollars per year flowing from one AI lab to Musk's empire, making Anthropic one of SpaceX's largest single customers. SPEAKER_1: And the filing also mentions a planned acquisition. What's that about? SPEAKER_2: SpaceX plans to acquire Cursor thirty days after going public, which is expected around June twelfth. SPEAKER_1: Let's shift to Google I/O. This felt less like a developer conference and more like a scale demonstration. What did Google actually launch? SPEAKER_2: They launched Gemini three point five Flash, which they called their strongest agentic and coding model yet, in the Gemini app and Search's AI Mode. They also debuted Gemini Omni, a multimodal model that can create anything from any input, starting with video generation. SPEAKER_1: What about Gemini three point five Pro? Was that available? SPEAKER_2: It was only teased for next month. The audience actually audibly groaned at it not being available immediately. On pricing, Gemini three point five Flash costs one dollar fifty per one million input tokens and nine dollars per one million output tokens. That's three times the price of Gemini three Flash Preview. SPEAKER_1: And there were more products beyond just the models, right? SPEAKER_2: Yes. Gemini Spark is a twenty-four-seven personal AI agent powered by Gemini three point five that integrates across Gmail, Docs, and Slides. Google also launched Antigravity two point zero, featuring a desktop app for orchestrating agents, a CLI tool, and an SDK for custom workflows. SPEAKER_1: What else came out of I/O on the developer and infrastructure side? SPEAKER_2: AI Studio now lets users build native Android apps from the web, with publishing on the roadmap. Android Halo will make an AI agent's status visible at the top of the phone screen, coming later this year. And Blackstone and Google announced a joint venture to offer customers TPU access, with Blackstone making a five billion dollar initial equity commitment. SPEAKER_1: Now the scale numbers Sundar Pichai shared were genuinely staggering. Walk us through those. SPEAKER_2: Google is now processing three point two quadrillion tokens per month. That's up from four hundred eighty trillion a year ago and nine point seven trillion two years ago. That's a five hundred sixty-seven percent year-over-year increase. The Gemini app has over nine hundred million monthly active users across two hundred thirty countries, up from four hundred million at I/O twenty twenty-five. SPEAKER_1: And they updated pricing tiers as well? SPEAKER_2: They did. New tiers include a hundred dollars per month AI Ultra plan for developers, while the top Ultra subscription dropped from two hundred fifty to two hundred dollars per month. Google also overhauled its search box to accept longer queries with photos and videos, powered by Gemini three point five Flash-based agents. SPEAKER_1: Now let's talk Anthropic. They just had a massive quarter. What are the numbers? SPEAKER_2: Anthropic told investors it expects ten point nine billion in Q two revenue, up from four point eight billion in Q one. And a five hundred fifty-nine million dollar operating profit, its first ever. That's a hundred and twenty-seven percent quarter-over-quarter jump. SPEAKER_1: To put that in context, how does Anthropic stack up against the broader AI startup landscape? SPEAKER_2: Thirty-four top AI startups are generating nearly eighty billion in annualized revenue, with Anthropic and OpenAI capturing roughly eighty-nine percent of that combined. This disclosure came five weeks after Anthropic closed at a nine hundred billion dollar valuation. SPEAKER_1: And then there's the Andrej Karpathy hire. That's a big signal. SPEAKER_2: Very big. Karpathy joined Anthropic to help launch a team focused on using Claude to accelerate pretraining research. He co-founded OpenAI, led Tesla's Autopilot team, and most recently ran Eureka Labs. His announcement said he thinks the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative. SPEAKER_1: Anthropic also went on a buying spree. What did they acquire? SPEAKER_2: They acquired Stainless, the SDK generation startup used by OpenAI, Google, and Cloudflare, and plan to wind down its hosted products. A joint venture with Blackstone and Hellman and Friedman bought Fractional AI as its first deal. Sources say Fractional ended its OpenAI deal as part of that transaction. SPEAKER_1: What about on the compute and partnership side? SPEAKER_2: Anthropic is in talks to rent servers powered by Microsoft-designed chips, having steadily increased its Azure usage since November twenty twenty-five. And KPMG partnered with Anthropic to embed Claude into its global tax and advisory platforms. SPEAKER_1: There were also some notable developments around Mythos, Anthropic's cybersecurity tool. SPEAKER_2: Right. Anthropic changed its stance, now letting users responsibly share cybersecurity threats with others who face similar vulnerabilities. It agreed to brief the Financial Stability Board on global financial system vulnerabilities found by Mythos, after a request by the FSB's Chair. SPEAKER_1: And Cloudflare was involved in testing it? SPEAKER_2: Yes. Cloudflare tested Mythos against fifty-plus of its repositories, highlighting its ability to chain bugs into a single exploit. There's also a legal angle: an appeals court appeared skeptical of Anthropic's bid to block the DOD from designating it a supply-chain risk. SPEAKER_1: And there's a genuinely unusual item here involving the Pope. SPEAKER_2: Co-founder Christopher Olah will join Pope Leo on May twenty-fifth to launch the pope's first encyclical on AI. SPEAKER_1: Now let's get to Nvidia. The numbers were extraordinary. What did they report? SPEAKER_2: Nvidia reported Q one revenue of eighty-one point six two billion dollars, up eighty-five percent year over year, beating the seventy-eight point eight six billion consensus. Data Center revenue hit seventy-five point two billion, up ninety-two percent. Net income surged two hundred eleven percent year over year to fifty-eight point three billion, crushing analyst estimates of forty-two point nine billion. SPEAKER_1: And they made some big capital allocation moves as well? SPEAKER_2: They announced an eighty billion dollar share repurchase program and raised their Q two revenue forecast to ninety-one billion dollars. SPEAKER_1: But at the same time, Jensen Huang made a pretty striking admission about China. SPEAKER_2: He said Nvidia has largely conceded China's AI chip market to Huawei and should expect nothing regarding chip sale approvals. This landed during a week where China banned Nvidia's RTX five-oh-nine-oh D V two chip, aimed at gamers and animators, while Jensen was visiting China with Donald Trump. SPEAKER_1: And there were export control issues beyond just China? SPEAKER_2: Taiwan is seeking to detain three people for forging documents to export Super Micro servers with Nvidia chips to China, Hong Kong, and Macau. SPEAKER_1: What's happening more broadly in the chip industry with this geopolitical realignment? SPEAKER_2: AMD pledged to invest ten billion-plus in Taiwan's chip industry to make advanced chip packaging for AI, with TSMC ramping up production of its next-gen Venice chips. The US Commerce Department plans to award two billion in grants to nine quantum computing companies and will take equity stakes. IBM is set to get one billion of that. SPEAKER_1: And there were some notable moves from Samsung and Alibaba as well? SPEAKER_2: Samsung is set to distribute roughly twenty-six point six billion dollars to its seventy-eight thousand chip employees, approximately three hundred forty thousand dollars per person, in early twenty twenty-seven as part of a last-minute labor union deal. Alibaba's T-Head unveiled the Zhenwu M eight-ninety for AI training and inference, saying it's well-suited for agentic tasks. SPEAKER_1: And Russia is trying to navigate the chip shortage caused by sanctions? SPEAKER_2: Russia's Sberbank says it hopes to use Chinese chips to power its flagship GigaChat AI model, as sanctions continue to block its hardware access. SPEAKER_1: There was also a significant security breach this week involving GitHub. What happened? SPEAKER_2: GitHub was breached via a malicious VS Code extension. Three thousand eight hundred internal repositories were compromised. A group called TeamPCP has claimed responsibility. SPEAKER_1: And finally, a quick product launch to close out. Spotify announced something new. SPEAKER_2: Spotify Reserved is a new feature that partners with Live Nation to set aside concert tickets for the most dedicated fans, starting with Premium users in the US. SPEAKER_1: So to recap this week: SpaceX's S-1 revealed an eighteen point seven billion revenue business losing four point nine billion while Starlink carries the load; xAI is burning six point four billion to chase Grok users; Anthropic hit its first-ever profit with a hundred twenty-seven percent quarter-over-quarter revenue jump and landed Karpathy; Google is processing three point two quadrillion tokens a month; Nvidia posted the most profitable semiconductor quarter in history while conceding China to Huawei; and GitHub got hit by a malicious VS Code extension. In the next lecture, we'll go even deeper on what all of this means for founders building right now.