SpaceX fetish IPO, Trump’s Chinese phone, beef vs. Ebola, AI religious exemption
Story of the Week (DR):
SuperBroIpoDystopia: Some key facts: MM
a record-breaking $135 per share with$1.8T valuation
To make that math make sense, analysts estimate the company needs to grow its sales by 50% every single year for the next decade
SpaceX lost $4.9B last year
Wall Street is Being Treated Like Order-Takers: Musk pre-set the IPO price strictly at $135 and dictating exactly which investors got allocations. This forced major investment banks like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley to act as glorified order-takers without even knowing their exact compensation beforehand
Saudi Aramco $1.7T; Alibaba: $237B; Facebook $118B
Nasdaq aggressively pushed through "fast-entry" rule changes specifically to allow mega-caps like SpaceX to bypass the traditional year of seasoning and enter the Nasdaq-100 in just 15 trading days. This forces passive index funds to buy in blindly to avoid tracking errors
Meme stocker bros: $100B in share orders
30% of $75B offering is earmarked for individual retail investors. This effectively shifts late-stage, hyper-inflated valuation risk away from institutions and onto the public.
BlackRock $5B
Institutional investors admitted that when they bought into SpaceX privately, they were given high-level revenue figures but were denied a copy of the actual balance sheet—an unprecedented lack of transparency for a company raising tens of billions
University of Washington more than 10% of its $17B in assets
UNC about 10%
SpaceX will make $75B in proceeds
Saudi Aramco $26B; Alibaba $22B
Elon Musk’s Absolute Voting Tyranny (80% of voting power)
personal net worth has officially skyrocketed past $1.1T
SpaceX’s foundational scale was built on the back of the American public, securing over $20 billion in U.S. federal government contracts to fund its rocket development
Antonio Gracias: personally lent Musk $1M to keep him afloat; his PE firm Valor gave $76M
That $1M lifeline and early institutional backing from 2008 have compounded into what analysts are calling the most lucrative return on a personal favor in business history.
The Second-Largest Shareholder: Through various Valor entities, Gracias controls roughly 7.3% of SpaceX’s Class A stock (more than 500 million shares)
Gracias’s stake is officially worth anywhere from $91B to over $140B
This single corporate listing instantly catapults Gracias into the ranks of the world's 50 richest people.
The big party: combined valuation of $3.6T
Anthropic ($965B) filed confidentially on June 1
OpenAI ($1T) filed confidentially on June 8
"We have not decided on timing yet; it may be a while because there are things we want to do that are likely easier as a private company. But it's a complicated set of tradeoffs, and this gives us the option to go public sooner if that ends up being best."
What does it all amount to? 4 horrible objectives:
Funding a Sci-Fi Passion Project with Public Cash
Becoming the Pentagon's Irreplaceable War Machine
Forget the folksy narrative that Starlink is just for connecting rural schools or isolated communities: SpaceX is systematically turning itself into the ultimate military contractor
Project Starshield: Those satellites are the foundation for a highly classified, militarized version of the network designed for government surveillance, secure communications, and real-time battlefield tracking.
Too Big to Regulate: By launching the vast majority of the world's payloads and controlling the dominant orbital communications network, SpaceX is making the U.S. military entirely dependent on its hardware. The ultimate point is to become so deeply embedded in national defense that the government can never afford to regulate, penalize, or dismantle Musk's empire
An Orbital Real Estate Land Grab
Building a Borderless, Lawless Empire
SpaceX is attempting to build a tech infrastructure that exists entirely outside the jurisdiction of Earth
Ultimately, SpaceX isn't trying to save humanity from a dying Earth; it's trying to ensure that whoever controls Earth's future has to pay rent to Elon Musk
Iran threatens Elon Musk’s companies in Middle East: Iranian state media
All of Elon Musk’s companies in the Middle East are military targets for Iran as it retaliates against the U.S., Iranian state media outlet Fars reported.
The targets include a regional Starlink ground station, according to Fars.
Sen. Warren calls on SEC to delay SpaceX IPO, flagging concerns about valuation and governance
The letter to the heads of the Nasdaq, S&P Dow Jones Indices, FTSE Russell and Morningstar Indexes sent on Thursday asked the companies whether they had made or considered rule changes based on lobbying from Elon Musk, other SpaceX officials or officials from OpenAI or Anthropic, and asked for any communications between the companies and the indexes
LSEG, which owns the FTSE Russell, and Nasdaq declined to comment. Morningstar did not respond to a request from CNBC for comment.
S&P Dow Jones Indices didn’t comment on the letter, but the company noted it had decided not to change its rules regarding indexes: “S&P DJI determined that exceptions to these requirements should not be granted solely based on market capitalization,” it said in a statement to CNBC. “The decision not to adopt the proposed exceptions preserves core index principles by maintaining consistent application of these key requirements.”
Democrats ask Goldman Sachs CEO why he’s keeping lawyer who said she’d resign over ties to Epstein
Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon is facing new scrutiny from congressional Democrats over his reported effort to retain the bank’s top lawyer months after she said she would resign over revelations about her ties to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein
In a letter sent Wednesday:
U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Ranking Member of the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee
Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL), Ranking Member of the Subcommittee on Health Care and Financial Services on the House Oversight Committee
“Ruemmler ‘educated (Epstein) on how the law differentiates between underage victims of sex crimes and adult prostitutes…’”
In February, Ruemmler announced her resignation from Goldman Sachs, effective June 30, 2026: “At the time, you stated that you “reluctantly” accepted Ruemmler’s resignation. While Goldman Sachs has declined to comment on this matter, new reporting suggests that you ‘pressed’ her to reconsider her resignation and instead move to a new position within the firm.”
Teardown of Trump Phone Reveals Incredibly Embarrassing Secret
A recent teardown by repair company iFixit confirmed that the T1 is an almost entirely unmodified HTC U24 Pro, a two-year-old and mid-tier Android phone, with a cheap coat of gold coloration
Trump is selling an entirely Chinese smartphone, despite waging an economic war against the country.
Apart from minuscule changes to the speaker grille and a lengthened flex cable, iFixit concluded that “everything is the same, except the pattern of holes in the case.”
Goodliest of the Week (MM/DR):
DR: Google and Meta denied new trial in youth social media addiction case
MM: In the United States, Solar Energy is Outpacing Coal for the First Time Ever
Assholiest of the Week - SPEED ROUND (MM):
BP’s useless, reactionary board of directors: BP drops net zero division in wake of boardroom turmoil; BP’s new CEO Meg O’Neill rips up the energy giant’s playbook—and the ‘green’ era with it - 10
Ryanair blowhard CEO Michael O’Leary: Ryanair investigated over charging parents to sit with children - 5
EV killing GM and Mary Barra: GM is pivoting its battery expertise toward powering AI data centers and the grid - 10
Every company that fired employees and replaced them with AI: Unfortunate Company Accidentally Blows Half a Billion Dollars on Claude in One Month; AI sticker shock hits corporate America - 10
Everything out of Alex Karp’s fat mouth: Palantir CEO Alex Karp says executives who brag about their AI cuts might as well ‘sign up for the Bernie Sanders manifesto’; Palantir CEO says AI companies 'don't understand how unlikeable they are'; - 10
Sorry Liz, this is investors job: Sen. Warren calls on SEC to delay SpaceX IPO, flagging concerns about valuation and governance - 0
Every investor in SpaceX IPO: Franklin Templeton to participate in SpaceX IPO, CEO Johnson tells CNBC; SpaceX IPO demand is approaching four times oversubscribed, source says; Wall Street’s undignified SpaceX mania; SpaceX's president hints at a Tesla merger: 'That might make Elon's life a little easier' - 10
Billionaires: Billionaires’ Billions Are Increasing Faster Than Ever - 10
Beef (not Ebola): Elon Musk Faces Backlash as a Horrific Texas Screwworm Outbreak Follows Brutal DOGE Budget Cuts - 10
Mark: Meta Furious Over Bombshell Smart Glasses Revelation
“Last week, Wired reported that Meta discreetly moved to infuse facial recognition tech into its popular smart glasses, as evidenced by a piece of code discovered in the Meta AI app by the magazine’s journalists.” - 10
Headliniest of the Week
MM: You Can Now Get a Religious Exemption From Using AI at Work
“The funniest possible outcome of the AI mandate era is about to be HR departments discovering that ‘sincerely held religious belief’ under Title VII has a much lower bar than they assumed, and Pope Leo handed every Catholic employee a written excuse,” tweeted San Francisco-based startup founder Corey Quinn. (Title VII of the Civil Rights Act prohibits employment discrimination and retaliation based on race, color, national origin, religion, and sex.)
MM: Furious Judge Cancels Entire Trial After Finding Out Lawyers on Both Sides Used AI
Who Won the Week?
DR: HTC U24 Pro, a two-year-old and mid-tier Android phone. Or maybe it was the cheap gold paint?
MM: Everyone religious - what CAN’T you opt out of using a religious exemption?
Predictions
DR: Attacking dictator-run companies (i.e., Iran/Tesla) starts to enter the realm of normalcy
MM: Atheists adopt a religion to opt out of tech bro oligarchies
