Back in 2024, when Databricks released its open-source DBRX model, the data warehousing company bragged that it had spent $10 million on the training run that made that model possible.

Last week, in an expansive interview ahead of the release of a suite of new Databricks AI products, the company’s boisterous CEO, Ali Ghodsi, came clean: Databricks had actually spent about $20 million on the cluster to train the model. Only $4 million went to the training run that actually produced DBRX. The remaining roughly $16 million went to stumbling through the wilderness, downtime, and other mistakes of inexperience. They’d either underestimated or overestimated the cost depending on how you slice it.

The waste felt unavoidable.

“First of all the cluster is not running all the time — it’s idle,” Ghodsi told me. “You don’t just yolo and say hey let’s run the thing and then it comes out and it’s like after a month of training it’s like oh it was shit. So you do smaller training runs — so you work your way up to it.”

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Anthropic calls for foundation model regulations. SpaceX raised $75 billion in an IPO that requires several leaps of faith. Databricks reportedly taps the private markets yet again. Fable’s subterfuge stokes backlash and a course correction. Crusoe stumbles in Wyoming. OpenAI considers token price cuts as tokenmaxxing fever breaks and competitive pressure mounts. Big winners from the SpaceX IPO.

The Main Item

Anthropic’s Pro-Regulation Message Is Good Marketing Because It’s Sincere. We Should Listen.

Regulate us, please.

That’s the message from Anthropic this week.

The company has a new warning that foundation models — like the company’s freshly released Fable model — need to be regulated by governments at least as seriously as cars, airplanes, and drugs.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei wrote that models need to be treated like “powerful technologies essential to the modern economy, but capable of killing large numbers of people if designed or operated poorly.”

There’s a cynical, increasingly popular view in Silicon Valley, championed by David Sacks, that Anthropic’s desperate pleas for regulation are primarily self-serving. The argument goes that regulations would establish the current big foundation model providers, like Anthropic, as government-anointed winners, making it nearly impossible for new models to compete.

The argument continues that even if those regulations never go into effect, the case that Anthropic is making amounts to exceptional self-promotion. Anthropic’s ever-more-dire warnings serve as the best marketing money can buy (certainly better than their Super Bowl ad). Every company in the world wants to get its hands on models that are so powerful that they could crumble global security, create bioweapons, and build rogue superintelligence.

On one level, I understand the cynicism here: regulations often end up helping incumbents and there’s a long history of big companies lobbying to make the rules too complicated for new entrants. Facebook once ran the “regulate us, please” playbook in what felt like a calculated effort to push the responsibility for social media’s shortcomings onto legislators who were unequipped to resolve them. (The argument can have purchase even in pro-regulation leftwing and media circles because it fits nicely with the view that all companies are evil and trying to manipulate you.)

But there’s such a long record of Anthropic sincerity here. This is a company born out of safety concerns, incubated in the AI-paranoid halls of effective altruism. These are the people who were worried about the release of ChatGPT. They’ve perhaps been over-cautious and sometimes channel a little too much science fiction. But all evidence suggests that they’re on the level when they say they’re very concerned that foundation models could someday soon run amok if we don’t regulate them.

It’s endlessly amusing that Anthropic’s do-gooder, pro-regulation stance has actually been good business. While an OpenAI founder-funded super PAC is turning off the company’s employees, Anthropic is recruiting and retaining the best AI researchers by supporting regulation, welcoming criticism, and inviting scrutiny. It’s got to be infuriating for Sacks types that being so lib coded is apparently smart business in a world where winning over AI researchers is the biggest driver of their financial success. Praise be to capitalism.

On the substance of Anthropic’s safety position, it really feels like a matter of when not if.

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My personal view is informed by the self-driving car race where those researchers convinced themselves (and the world) that their technology would be ubiquitous any day now. Of course, it turned out that all the niggling final little details mattered quite a bit and it would take many years to figure out how to make it all work without human supervision. Today, with Waymo’s recent successes, a global society-altering self-driving car rollout seems more and more likely. So what if they got us all excited about a world historical idea a decade too soon?

Anthropic’s concerns here — about cyber security, bioweapons, government surveillance, autonomous weapons, and more — seem like things we should get ahead of. Worst case we’re prepared when these problems emerge a few years later than true-believer researchers thought they would. Anthropic is proposing limiting regulations to “models trained using more than 10²⁵ floating-point operations (FLOPs), developed by companies earning more than $500M in AI-related revenue or spending more than $1 billion on AI R&D.” So it’s not exactly mom-and-pop foundation model companies that would be caught in the dragnet of big regulation.

While much of the AI industry wants to figure out why Americans are hostile to AI, Amodei doesn’t believe Americans are getting it wrong (except maybe on data centers where their anger is “largely a symbol or outlet for broader economic anxieties about AI”).

He writes, “People are worried about AI because they correctly perceive that its risks are real.” He continues, “The key challenge is focusing this concern into constructive solutions and not allowing it to descend into formless anger and violence.”

Let’s not let cynicism about big business or smug hostility to regulations blind us to real leadership when it’s staring us in the face.

Newcomer Podcast

Ed Zitron Unfiltered on OpenAI, Anthropic & Why the Whole Thing Is a Con

IPO Watch

Investors Take a Leap of Faith Into Space

Of all the otherwise accepted business truths that Elon Musk challenges, one of the most fascinating is the Efficient Market Hypothesis.

The theory holds that stock prices reflect all available information — that the market, in aggregate, gets valuations roughly right. Skeptics argue markets are also moved by intangibles like momentum and vibes. With SpaceX beginning its trading today, the experiment is about to run again.

So far things have been going well. The company raised $75 billion, making it the largest IPO of all time. It’s a wide collection of investors in the round, which Bloomberg reported was four times oversubscribed. BlackRock ordered at least $5 billion worth of shares, per the Wall Street Journal — other buyers included sovereign wealth funds, family offices, and retail investors who reportedly requested more than $100 billion.

The longer term story will be trickier. Investors are, largely on faith, accepting a $1.8 trillion valuation for a company with revenue roughly the size of Cheerios-maker General Mills. The most outlandish case has been from Morgan Stanley, which told investors it projects the company will generate $3.4 trillion in revenue and $2.7 trillion in EBITDA by 2040, according to the Wall Street Journal. That’s an 80% margin — software economics, for a business whose plan involves launching its data centers into orbit on rockets.

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(We’ve written about how farfetched the orbital data center plan is, although the company believes it will have test units up in 2027, according to Reuters.)

It’s easy to laugh at these projections for being the pinnacle of Muskian absurdity — the Vibes Market Hypothesis. But there are much larger implications for how the market reacts to SpaceX.

If the expected growth in SpaceX’s future is coming from its AI business, then it will also serve as a preview of how OpenAI and Anthropic will fare with public investors. True, both of those have better AI models, less reputational overhang, and more revenue than xAI, but all of them are relying on an unprecedentedly huge market for AI overall to justify their valuations. The SpaceX bet isn’t just that xAI will catch up, but that what they’re all racing toward is as massive a shift in the economy as the tech industry has been predicting.

Fund manager and longtime Musk-bear Jim Chanos threw cold water on the whole idea, telling the New York Times that the SpaceX IPO feels like a “don’t look at the man behind the curtain” situation. It’s an ironic statement considering that the man behind the curtain is the reason people believe it’s possible at all.

Today’s public listing and the stock fluctuations to follow will make for an entertaining, if terrifying, watch — and a test not just of the efficient market hypothesis and the limits of Musk’s storytelling power, but of whether the public markets actually believe the AI future the entire industry is selling.

Eight Notable Deals

Poetic, Databricks, Ona, NEURA Robotics, Cyera, Standard Bots, ICEYE & Prometheus

• Enterprise AI automation startup Poetic raised $50 million in Series A funding led by Kleiner Perkins. Other investors include Founders Fund, First Harmonic, and OpenAI.

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If you have a healthier relationship with social media than we do, you may be opening up your X account after a relaxing weekend offline to see a deluge of mud-slinging threads between some of Silicon Valley’s most prominent founders and venture capitalists.

The biggest conflicts have come between Matthew Prince, the CEO of Cloudflare, and Vinod Khosla, and Brendan Foody, the CEO of Mercor, criticizing Sequoia’s investment practices. But the last few days’ VC hostile posting extravaganza took a long and sometimes winding path of quote tweets to get to these two conflicts.

Here’s a rundown of how the various beefs all got set off. Grab some popcorn if you like.

June 2: Greg Isenberg Kicks Off the VC Horror Stories Thread

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Google taps the equity markets for $85 billion in fresh funding to pay for its data center buildout, a week before the IPO of Elon Musk’s mega-corp. SpaceX will seek $75 billion at a $1.75 trillion valuation, though it won’t get special treatment from the S&P index after all. Gigascale founding partner Mike Schroepfer says his new $250 million hardware-focused fund is keen on climate startups. Median TVPI for venture funds is finally on the rise. Ramp leads a jam-packed fundraising week. President Trump’s new AI executive order is friendlier to the industry. Benchmark raises a $2 billion growth fund, its first. The data center buildout is facing some major delays. A16z hires a Biden administration veteran as its head of global affairs. Airbnb’s Brian Chesky launches an AI lab.

The Main Item

Google’s Big Equity Raise Is a Nod to Risk

You know it’s a strange time in the money world when a huge and highly profitable company that’s been buying back its own shares for years suddenly issues $80 billion in new equity — and it’s not even one of the bigger stories of the moment.

That company, of course, is Google parent Alphabet, which needs more cash for its data center build-out. If it was trying to steal a little thunder from Elon Musk with a number bigger than the $75 billion that SpaceX is aiming to raise in its IPO next week, well, that didn’t really work. Indeed, hardly anyone noticed when Google bumped its number to almost $85 billion later in the week.

But the fundraise does underscore the exceptional leverage Google enjoys as AI rivals OpenAI and Anthropic — as well as frenemy SpaceX — move towards the public markets.

Like Microsoft, Google has had to weigh AI data center investments against the needs of its existing cloud computing business, which after years of being out-competed by AWS and Microsoft is finally growing fast and taking share. Until now, it’s been happy to finance its ever-growing capital needs with debt.

But the company appears to have decided it needs to be more aggressive on AI data centers as it pushes its TPU chips and steadily expands its offerings. As a MoffettNathanson report notes, the company appears to be gearing up for “an aggressive land grab in the AI arms race.”

The fact that it’s raising equity is a nod to the risks. As James Mackintosh at the Journal points out, if AI turned out to be over-hyped, a debt-fueled expansion could leave the company vulnerable to a cash squeeze. That scenario becomes even more worrisome if Google’s recent AI overhaul of its core search service ends up hurting its cash-gushing ad business; Parmy Olson at Bloomberg says the changes are already causing a “freak-out” among marketers.

With equity, on the other hand, shareholders would absorb the pain with little direct impact on the company. And if you’re so big that you can sell $85 billion in stock without tanking your share price, why not?

Pundits are mixed on whether the public equity markets can absorb the ~ $300 billion in capital that SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google are expected to seek combined over the next six months or year. Barron’s is skeptical. Axios says it’s no big deal.

If anyone comes up short, though, it’s not likely to be Google.

New Fund Launch

Gigascale Capital Raises $250 Million & Will Go Hard at Climate Investing

Climate tech investing has fallen out of fashion, with many clean tech funds pivoting to national security or energy independence to fit the vibes of the moment.

But Mike Schroepfer isn’t shying away from positioning his first $250 million fund for Gigascale Capital, announced earlier this week, as one dedicated to funding hardware startups that are the most climate-friendly alternative to their incumbents.

“I look for the companies where the thesis is co-aligned,” said Schroepfer. That means teams who are building hardware that is “better, faster, cheaper, but also cleaner as a result.”

As the former CTO of Meta, Schroepfer oversaw several of the tech giant’s hardware pushes, including Meta Ray Bans and Oculus headsets post-acquisition, so he knows how “hard” hardware development can be.

Though this is Gigascale’s first fund, the portfolio already counts 25 investments made before first close using capital from Schroepfer’s family office — a major LP in the fund. Some of the buzzier companies are Radiant Nuclear, whose recent funding round Newcomer scooped last December, and the chip maker Fractile, which raised a $220 million Series B last month.

Another portfolio company Heron Power, which is developing solid state power transformers, recently landed a large deal with LG to connect its energy networks to LG’s industrial battery tech.

Neither of these companies fit the traditional climate tech definition, but both address energy consumption in ways that will have a significant impact on emissions. Fractile’s chips are particularly energy efficient, while Radiant’s modular micro-nuclear reactors generate clean power for industrial centers.

While there’s no hard and fast rule on check size, Gigascale plans to invest in early institutional rounds and bets will average $1 million to $10 million.

One Big Chart

Venture Returns Are Recovering Across Every Size Fund

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Given the state of legacy media these days — talk shows cancelled, a venerated investigative news series in turmoil — you’d think VC firms would want little to do with the industry of creating content. But the lure of making old-school TV is just too strong for Silicon Valley to resist.

The latest, and maybe most curious product, is from Founders Fund, which is launching a TV-style game show featuring A-list founders and investors playing a fierce game of Mafia. It’s the brainchild of Mike Solana, the Pirate Wires impresario and Founders Fund chief marketing officer. He wants to see if there’s an audience for partners and friends of the firm competing in a deception game.

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They filmed the show a few months back at Tosca Cafe, the fabled North Beach hangout that once served as the setting for the PayPal Mafia photoshoot in Fortune. The players include Sam Altman, Bryan Johnson, Dylan Field, Trae Stephens, Palmer Luckey, Ryan Petersen, Cyan Banister, and Moxie Marlinspike. The show will live on YouTube and X.

There’s points for creativity here, especially in a landscape of uninspired VC media efforts. A16z, always claiming to push the envelope with its media plays but ending up with fairly anodyne results, funded a knockoff of TBPN called Monitoring the Situation in April. TBPN itself was acquired by OpenAI, which doesn’t suggest fresh creativity is coming.

Boring VC Content

Beyond that is a bottomless supply of VC podcasts featuring partners and founders recounting their origin stories, lightly discussing industry trends and making some mild predictions.

Solana says he’s over it.

“I’m so fucking bored with VC content,” he told us in an interview. “There has to be a more interesting way to get to know someone, and I think that this is a way more interesting way to get to know someone.”

Where the VC content effort ends and the Solana passion project begins is debatable here. He’s a big fan of the game, which challenges a group of people — some mafia members, others townspeople — to suss out which is which. He said he began playing it in college and brought it with him to Silicon Valley.

Since then it’s become something of an underground scene in the tech world — a poker circuit for the ruthless, performative and yes, a little dorky. These days it’s rare to find any conference featuring a critical mass of the founder/VC class that doesn’t have a Mafia game going on one night.

(For those wondering, Solana said Peter Thiel has played but had a rough go of it. “Everyone tried to kill him immediately because they were terrified of him,” Solana said. “It is exactly confirmation of his fears of group dynamics. He was immediately witch-burned.”)

What’s Your Tell?

The game at Tosca featured a slew of founders in the firm’s broader network — Flexport, Anduril, Figma, and OpenAI are all portfolio companies. Stephens is a partner. Banister was formerly one. Others like Johnson, Marlinspike, podcaster and poker player Liv Boeree, and bio-hacker Josie Zayner are Solana’s friends.

As the game progressed, you could see elements of what makes some of these people successful start to emerge. Altman, who Paul Graham famously anointed the inevitable king of the cannibals, tried to slyly deconstruct other people’s deflections in order to suss out the mafia members. He was killed off early in the first game, but walking back to the loser’s lounge had correctly deduced who the mafia members were.

Marlinspike and Stephens were standouts, quickly taking control of the conversation and directing lines of inquiries away from themselves.

“Some people have really obvious “tells”, some people have crazy strategies that I’ve never seen before, and some people kind of “wilt” in ways I wouldn’t have expected them to,” Stephens later said in an email.

Mafia can be fun to play. But is it good content? The show was hard to follow at times, and absent truly memorable characters — or, let’s be honest, real celebrities — it’s hard to know how enjoyable it will be to watch if it isn’t your friends playing.

Entertainment vs. Marketing

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We’re less than a month away from our mid-year Cerebral Valley AI Summit in London, and our agenda is filling up with top AI speakers.

There’s still a bit of room left for top founders and investors to attend. If you’re interested in coming, you can apply on our site here.

Apply to Attend

Today, we’re announcing two new speakers and our first roster of discussion group leaders that will guide our attendees during the day’s breakout sessions.

We’re thrilled that Danny Rimer, partner at Index Ventures, and Eleanor Lightbody, CEO of Luminance, will be joining us on-stage.

Both are major leaders in AI who have met this moment head-on, and we’re excited to have them speak.

Additionally, we’re announcing our first set of discussion group leaders.

Our discussion leaders will include:

• Ian Hogarth, partner at Plural

• Michel Tricot, founder & CEO of Airbyte

• Stanislas Polu, founder & software engineer at Dust

• Zhenya Loginov, partner at Accel

• Joy Tuffield, head of growth at Generation Investment Management

We will be sharing more names of speakers and discussion leaders closer to the event, so stay tuned.

Big things happen at our Cerebral Valley AI Summits: Databricks bought MosaicML for $1.3 billion after Ali Ghodsi met Naveen Rao at our first Cerebral Valley AI Summit. Suno’s $250M Series C began at our Cerebral Valley AI Summit.

The Cerebral Valley AI Summit London will be held on June 24.

Tickets are selling out fast. If you’re a top AI startup founder or investor and you’d like to attend, be sure to apply now.

Big thanks to our sponsors Nebius and Index Ventures.

Our full speaker lineup is listed on our website. We can’t wait to see you in London.

Apply to Attend

Baseten and Fireworks are reportedly entering the decacorn club as inference demand gets red-hot. Newcomer editor-at-large Jonathan Weber catalogs the rise of the tech industry in San Francisco on the podcast. Anthropic’s latest $65 billion Series H pushes its valuation to $965 billion, ahead of its arch-rival’s. Cognition boasts a billion-dollar fundraise. Apple makes a big push for AI models that can work locally on its devices ahead of a new Siri. A Google employee gets arrested for insider trading on Polymarket. Big law firm Kirkland and Ellis allocates hundreds of millions to make its own AI legal tech tools. Robinhood debuts agentic stock trading. A new market map of VC fund-of-funds highlights those willing to back emerging managers.

The Main Item

Margin Concerns Fade for Baseten, Fireworks & Others as Revenues Skyrocket

Inference startups once drew a little side-eye from investors worried about whether they had a defensible position between the foundation models and the applications companies who buy their services.

Not anymore.

Inference computing, or the process of running a trained machine learning model on new data to generate predictions or outputs, is suddenly blowing up alongside the heightened demand for AI tools from enterprises.

• Inference provider Baseten is raising up to $1 billion in new funding just 4 months after closing its previous round, and is looking for an $11 billion valuation, according to The Information.

• Fireworks AI, a competitor to Baseten which also provides model customization tools and evaluation tools, in talks for fresh funding at a $15 billion valuation, Bloomberg reported.

• Modal, which straddles inference and AI agent infrastructure, just closed on $355 million in Series C funding co-led by Redpoint and General Catalyst.

• Together AI, which includes inference as part of its AI native cloud infrastructure, was reportedly in talks to raise around $1 billion at a $7.5 billion valuation.

• Fal, which offers API access to its library of over 1000 image, video, audio, 3D, and world models as well as an inference engine for businesses to utilize them, was also reported in March to be raising $300 to $350 million in new funding.

VCs say the fresh enthusiasm is all about the cash these companies are suddenly bringing in. “The revenue momentum for all of these companies is hard to deny,” said Deedy Das, partner at Menlo Ventures, citing that many were growing at multiples “on a $100 million-plus baseline” in the first half of 2026.

It’s not a given that they can sustain the momentum.

Some investors have long had concerns about the businesses’ margins, given that they have to run GPUs for long hours to be available to service requests. Those costs add up, especially since competitors like hyperscalers or big labs don’t have to pay to lease compute in the same way. It’s unclear if these companies can keep up this level of revenue without owning the compute layer to back it up.

“It seems like VCs are just doing a revenue multiple and are assuming the margin doesn’t matter,” said one skeptical investor.

Baseten, Fireworks AI, and Modal all just lease capacity, unlike neoclouds such as Lambda and Crusoe which provide inference while also owning the chip stack. Additionally, they’re also competing with the labs themselves for compute allocations, as OpenAI and Anthropic are gobbling up more chip capacity for their own training and development.

They also have fairly similar product offerings, bringing the risk of customers switching back and forth depending on who offers the best price of the moment. Fireworks works more with custom model APIs, while Baseten is more focused on custom model deployment. But as both expand into other parts of the stack besides inference, like fine-tuning, the risk of commoditization is high.

Still, the revenue growth for these inference-focused companies is remarkable, even for the new normals of the AI boom. Fireworks AI CEO Lin Qiao said on X Wednesday that the company surpassed $800 million in annualized revenue, up from $250 million in late October last year. Modal shared in its funding announcement that it had crossed $300 million in ARR, and Baseten’s ARR reportedly jumped to $600 million from $200 million at the start of the quarter after a strong month for growth.

Unlike training runs for models, which take place as labs are developing their new models, inference computing is the processing that happens when the models make predictions and generate content based on new data. Simply put, inference is the model running after it’s been trained, getting inputs from users and generating responses based on information that could be from outside its original training data set.

Coding assistants have been one area where enterprise adoption generated much more need for better inference, and Fireworks AI in particular has depended on Cursor as a major customer. But even just running LLM queries on internal company data requires inference capacity, so the market is theoretically set to grow much larger as more businesses adopt AI tools.

We compiled a chart of recent inference startup fundraising hauls by year for some of the top providers, according to data from Harmonic.

CVAI

Apply Now to Secure Your Spot at The Cerebral Valley AI Summit London

Newcomer is hosting our mid-year Cerebral Valley AI Summit in London on June 24.

We’re returning with another world-class lineup of AI leaders, founders, and investors for what’s shaping up to be one of our best summits.

Apply to Attend

Newcomer Podcast

Jonathan Weber on San Francisco & the Rise of the New Tech Right

This week on the Newcomer podcast, our very own editor at large, Jonathan Weber, spoke with Eric about Jonathan’s forthcoming coming book City on the Edge: Technology, Politics, and the Fight for the Soul of San Francisco.

A note from Jonathan ahead of the episode:

For the past couple of years I’ve enjoyed a rich, two-track professional life: working as editor at large for Newcomer, and writing a book about San Francisco in the internet era. It’s a great pleasure to have these two endeavors come together on the Newcomer podcast!

The book tells the story of the rise of the internet industry in San Francisco — as opposed to suburban Silicon Valley — and how it transformed politics and culture in one of the world’s most iconic cities. It features a rich cast of characters, including well-known political leaders like Gavin Newsom and Willie Brown, tech kingpins such as Chris Larsen and Mark Pincus, and numerous lesser-known figures who played major roles in shaping events over the course of 30 years.

The heroes of the story include the bold and idealistic pioneers of the early Web, who in the 1990s built the foundations of the commercial internet along with an inspiring and inclusive culture, exemplified by the annual reverie that is Burning Man. As to the villains, well, when it comes to San Francisco’s much-discussed dysfunctions, I found there was plenty of blame to go around.

I hope you enjoy my conversation with Eric and are inspired to read the book, which will be published June 9th by Simon & Schuster’s Atria Books. Pre-orders are always greatly appreciated! I have various events scheduled as well, details at cityontheedgebook.com. Thank you for listening, and for reading!

Six Notable Deals

Anthropic, Cognition, Stord, OpenRouter, Orbital Industries, Pace

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Tech companies have spent the first half of this year burning through budgets for AI coding agents at a stunning pace. Now they’re starting to ask what they are getting for it — a crucial question for investors and companies across the industry who are counting on the current surge in demand to be a new normal.

At Salesforce, which has been aggressively adopting agentic coding throughout its engineering corps, its initial token budget turned out to be an almost absurd underestimate.

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SpaceX’s outlandish S-1 is an all-in bet on Elon Musk. We share our condolences for the loss of Madrona managing director Soma Somasegar. Eric asks Wired Editor-in-Chief Katie Drummond why so many tech leaders want to buy her out of a job. Outsized funding rounds are eating up most venture dollars. Mercury, Exa, Decart, and several others join the 9-figure deal club. Google leans into agents at I/O. Lightspeed GP Baier-Lentz goes solo. Meta and Intuit slash thousands of jobs and blame AI. China’s purported love of AI may not be what it seems. Compute set to trade like a commodity. Trump corruption reaches new extremes with $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund.

The Main Item

SpaceX Numbers Show That Investors Will Be Betting Entirely on Musk’s Grandiose Promises

The public markets effectively laughed Adam Neumann out of the room when he tried to sell them on the idea that his co-working company was actually in business “to elevate the world’s consciousness.”

Elon Musk is trying to do Neumann several orders of magnitude better. Musk is bringing “the light of consciousness to the stars.”

You’ve got to read SpaceX’s full mission statement for yourself. This is what, with the advice of basically every banker known to man (including some of the same suits who tried to take WeWork public), SpaceX is telling the world:

Our mission is to build the systems and technologies necessary to make life multiplanetary, to understand the true nature of the universe, and to extend the light of consciousness to the stars. To do this, we have formed the most ambitious, vertically integrated innovation engine on (and off) Earth with unmatched capabilities to rapidly manufacture and launch space-based communications that connect the world, to harness the Sun to power a truth-seeking artificial intelligence that advances scientific discovery, and ultimately to build a base on the Moon and cities on other planets.

SpaceX’s desire to get men on Mars is the least outlandish thing about this company.

SpaceX is far and away the most unfocused, loss-generating, wanna-be trillion dollar-plus market cap company the world has ever known. The company amounts to:

• a rocket-launch company with $4.1 billion in revenue +

• a satellite telecommunications business growing roughly 50% year over year +

• a degraded version of Twitter that generates less revenue than when Musk bought the company +

• an AI lab that burns $2 for every dollar it brings in and has lost its entire non-Musk founding team +

• an endless string of promises about what it will become (space data centers & enterprise applications worth about 2/3 of current annual U.S. GDP).

Of course, unlike Neumann, Musk has delivered on some amazing things and had substantial business success. SpaceX rockets are reusable and dependable. Starlink is a profitable and fast-growing business. And by the way, Musk already has another company with a trillion-dollar market cap that had attracted plenty of doubters.

Musk has continually punished the haters, short-sellers, and the (yours truly) media naysayers with a mix of impressive results and seemingly undying loyalty from enough investors to fund his wildest dreams. But this IPO, in which SpaceX hopes to raise $75 billion at a $1.75 trillion valuation, could push even Musk die-hards to the limit. The prospectus reads, “By moving beyond the only home we have ever known, we ensure species-level redundancy and that the light of consciousness will not be tied to a single planet subject to the inevitable hazards of a harsh and vast universe. We do not want humans to have the same fate as dinosaurs.”

It’s a lot, as are the moonshot projections, which several high profile anonymous accounts on X were quickly calling out — a valuation approaching $2 trillion for what is effectively a $6.6 billion adjusted EBITDA business.

Here are a few key takeaways from the SpaceX S-1:

• The financials are worse than we expected. SpaceX’s revenue may have jumped 33% from last year, reaching $18.7 billion, but losses grew to $4.9 billion for 2025 after the merger with the money-bleeding xAI. The only profitable year listed in the S-1 was 2024, at just $791 million.

  

• It’s Elon’s company, public or not. Musk will own 85.1 percent of the SpaceX voting shares, giving him near-total control and limiting the ability of other shareholders to have any say in the company’s operations. This degree of concentration is large even for the tech industry and is listed as a risk in the filing.

  

• The business of X, formerly Twitter, is shaky. While X has 1.3 billion active accounts (defined as in use within the last 12 months), its ad revenues haven’t recovered from the staggering $595 million decline in 2024 that resulted from Musk’s dismantling of content moderation. Subscription revenue, which comes from 6.3 million active paying subscribers across consumer offerings like X Premium and SuperGrok, has not made up for the loss in ad dollars. Still, investors and lenders involved in the Twitter buyout have done well by Musk’s machinations.

• A few comparatively lesser-known names stand out as huge winners among SpaceX investors. Valor Equity Partners’ Antonio Gracias and Gigafund’s Luke Nosek are listed on the cap table as members of the board of directors. Gracias owns around 4% of SpaceX through various fund vehicles, per The Information, and is listed personally as owning 7.3% of Class A common stock, or around 503 million shares. Nosek owns around 32 million Class A shares.

• Other VC firms aren’t listed as 5% or larger stakeholders, but do own a sizable portion of the company. Founders Fund has a 3.5% stake, which could pay out into a $60 billion gain at the hoped-for $1.75 trillion valuation; it put in a little more than $600 million, per a source familiar with the numbers. Sequoia owns around 1.5%, which could generate around $20 billion in returns; the firm invested around $2 billion total across SpaceX, xAI, and X while they were separate companies, with $800 million of that direct into X, per a source familiar. Shaun Maguire took the lead on Sequoia’s deals, while Nosek led Founders Fund’s investment before leaving to start Gigafund.

• In a claim so bold that it would make Neumann blush, SpaceX defines its Total Addressable Market, or TAM, as a whopping $28.5 trillion across all its businesses (with these figures excluding China and Russia). AI unsurprisingly makes up $26.5 trillion of this, with the vast bulk of it in enterprise software and just $370 billion in “space enabled solutions.” Starlink connectivity could be worth up to $1.6 trillion.

• Hype aside, Musk’s amassing of compute is poised to bring in substantial revenues and could be a big growth driver. The S-1 details Anthropic’s deal for the Colossus compute cluster, with the xAI rival paying around $1.25 billion a month through May 2029 for data center capacity.

• SpaceX is playing some games around stock availability. It’s initially planning to have a small float but then will allow more shareholders to sell, especially if the stock is trading at a premium to the IPO price. The company seems to want to get onto the Nasdaq 100 quickly, creating more early buying pressure.

Unsurprisingly, space-focused founders and investors were thrilled to see the S-1 drop. Founders Fund partner and Varda co-founder Delian Asparouhov was pleased with the full-throated endorsement of orbital manufacturing as a future market. As Tom wrote yesterday, the pitch of a Muskworld company is not really about how it looks now, but what you believe it could be.

The SpaceX news was part of a remarkable week for the industry, coming on top of the verdict in the Musk versus Sam Altman legal showdown and leaks about an imminent OpenAI IPO filing. Nvidia, still the public markets’ main vehicle for AI wagers, reported another stellar quarter with revenue up 85% year over year. And Anthropic is projecting its first profitable quarter on extraordinary revenue gains, per the Wall Street Journal, and is expected to soon pursue an IPO of its own.

It’s fitting that Musk will dive in first. But little is predictable about what might come next.

Newcomer Podcast

WIRED’s Katie Drummond on Elon, Trump & Silicon Valley's War on the Press

Katie Drummond, global editorial director of WIRED and host of Uncanny Valley, came on the Newcomer Podcast this week to talk about the simmering war between tech and media.

From surviving the Gawker bankruptcy to now running one of the most scrutinized publications in tech, Drummond doesn't hold back on why certain tech figures want to buy or dismantle WIRED, why so much of Silicon Valley turned toward Trump, and what serious tech journalism looks like in 2026.

Listen to the Podcast

In Memoriam

Soma Somasegar, Managing Director at Madrona Ventures, Passes Away Unexpectedly

by Tom Dotan

The Seattle-based VC firm Madrona announced this week that much-loved managing director S. “Soma” Somasegar had died unexpectedly, eliciting an outpouring of remembrances in the venture and Seattle tech communities. He was 59.

Somasegar had been a longtime executive at Microsoft before joining Madrona in 2015. He was close with CEO Satya Nadella, with whom he co-owned a local cricket team.

While people should be remembered for much more than their professional output — he leaves behind a wife and two daughters — Somasegar was always a very kind, generous, and deeply knowledgeable VC who was happy to act as a resource to journalists and others who sought his help.

When I started covering Microsoft three years ago and first traveled to Seattle, he and his team set up a number of founders from their portfolio to meet with me in their offices overlooking the Puget Sound. He gamely sat through hours of my questions.

He wasn’t just pitching his book. Somasegar was willing and eager to pass along tips, discuss industry trends, and speak honestly (and on the record!) about Microsoft. If I ever texted, he’d always respond, often within seconds, while offering to set me up with others in his network.

He went far above and beyond the transactional interactions that are common among reporters and sources; he genuinely liked to help. For whatever it’s worth to his family, friends, and co-workers, know that it was deeply appreciated here. He will be missed.

Madrona has set up a page for people who knew him to share their memories and stories.

One Big Chart

Over 80% of VC Investment Now Going to Mega-Deals

It’s no surprise to Newcomer readers that a select few AI startups have accounted for a big chunk of venture funding over the last few years.

But the divide is more stark than ever for the first 5 months of 2026, with 80% of total deal volume and $232 billion in total capital going to these mega-rounds, per Crunchbase.

The chart provides a nice view of the secular shift in VC investing, with much larger rounds going to a smaller number of companies.

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Like all Elon Musk outfits, the SpaceX IPO only makes sense if you look not at what the company is — but what, in its wildest outcomes, it could be.

This is something that’s worked for Musk before, with Tesla. Now, with SpaceX, the story is that the rocket launcher/broadband provider with a bolted-on frontier AI lab is actually destined to be one of the largest data center operators in the universe.

The company makes clear in the IPO prospectus released Thursday where it thinks the puck is headed. While SpaceX pegs its overall addressable market at a gaudy $28.5 trillion, most of that — $26.5 trillion, or roughly 93% — is connected to its AI segment. AI infrastructure accounts for just $2.4 trillion of that; the real prize is $22.7 trillion in enterprise applications. The two are linked: SpaceX is betting that orbital data centers will give it the raw capacity to train frontier models that compete with OpenAI and Anthropic, while driving the cost per token low enough to unlock that larger enterprise market.

This may be one of the largest leaps of faith Musk has ever asked investors to take. Tesla’s narrative may be a stretch, but there are at least some proof points backing it up. For one, thousands of autonomous cars are currently on the road, and the popularity of Waymo proves that people are willing to pay (and pay up) for the service. On the humanoid robot side, yes they face major technical and economic challenges, but they do exist.

But SpaceX’s orbital data centers are, as of yet, a napkin-sketch concept. Its filing admits as much, saying the company won’t even begin deploying these satellites until “as early as 2028.” Anyone familiar with Musk’s timelines knows that expected releases have to be taken lightly — he’s been predicting Tesla’s humanoids are two years away for years now. So it’s anyone’s guess when they’ll actually get these up and orbiting at any scale.

Plenty of Power & Deep-Space Cooling

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The Cerebras IPO shows the power of the AI investing wave as Benchmark, Foundation, and Eclipse score. Sam Altman looks set to prevail in the Elon Musk lawsuit — but maybe not in the bigger battle for AI leadership. Anthropic tops OpenAI in enterprise usage for the first time, per Ramp. Anduril scores $5 billion. Isomorphic Labs brings in $2.1 billion. Recursive Superintelligence debuts, with $650 million. The Gallup poll shows Americans’ deep dislike of data centers. Anthropic is cracking down on the secondary trade and considering new financing that could triple its valuation. Newcomer made an error on the billionaire tax, and its backers pounced.

The Main Item

Cerebras IPO Is a Big Win for Benchmark, Foundation Capital, Eclipse — & OpenAI

Chip startups have been a tough sell for VCs in recent years, but Andrew Feldman (pictured) didn’t have a lot of trouble winning early backing for Cerebras, the AI chip startup that thrilled the markets in its public debut Thursday.

Together with Gary Lauterbach, Michael James, Sean Lie, and Jean-Philippe Fricker, Feldman had built the server company SeaMicro in 2007 and sold it to AMD after five years for $334 million. There were plenty of VCs eager to hear about their next thing.

Yet it was still a long and complicated road between the first discussions among Feldman, Lauterbach, and Steve Vassallo of Foundation Capital back in 2014 and Thursday’s sensational IPO. A few highlights from one of the first pure AI plays to go public:

• Cerebras raised $5.55 billion after opening at $185, the high end of its range, and reached $385 before closing at $311, for a market value of $95 billion.

• Feldman and CTO Lie are set to enter the billionaires club. Big VC winners include Eric Vishria and Benchmark (stake valued at $5.5 billion based on Thursday’s close), Vassallo and Foundation Capital ($4.8 billion), and Lior Susan and Eclipse ($4.2 billion). All three VCs remain on the board.

• Foundation Capital had a particularly impressive return on its investment: the firm put in only $36.8 million, which at Thursday closing price would be a 129x multiple.

• OpenAI could add its name to the winner list too. The foundation model lab struck a partnership with Cerebras in late 2025 in which the ChatGPT maker would eventually get 11% of Cerebras after buying billions of dollars in compute capacity over the next few years. Sam Altman and Greg Brockman also made off with a net worth boost, after the Musk-Altman trial revealed Altman owned around 89,000 shares and Brockman had about 78,000. Their positions were worth roughly $27.6 million and $24 million by Thursday’s close.

• Cerebras had tried to go public before only to pull back, and raised multiple billion-dollar funding rounds. Coatue and Altimeter were big growth investors but no longer make the 5% stakeholder cut off for the 2026 S-1. The growth-stage firm Alpha Wave Global has a 6.5% stake and Fidelity has the largest percentage stake outside of the top executives at around 11%.

• The debut came on a day when the Nasdaq and S&P indexes both registered fresh all-time highs, driven largely by unprecedented gains in a chip sector that’s been super-charged by AI. Notably, Nvidia is up 20% in the last 10 days, even though Cerebras is a direct competitor.

• Cerebras’s powerful debut speaks to the very frothy markets and the insatiable investor appetite for AI ahead of the anticipated debuts of SpaceX later this year and Anthropic and OpenAI in 2027.

Feldman is reaping the rewards of having seen the AI revolution coming more than a decade ago. He’d observed advances in machine learning, and anticipated the need for new types of chips that were optimized for running the so-called neural network algorithms that are at the heart of machine learning and generative AI.

Vassallo of Foundation Capital helped to incubate the idea in its early days. Meanwhile, at Benchmark, GP Peter Fenton had been business school classmates with Feldman at Stanford, and he forwarded his colleague Vishria the pitch for a new kind of chip architecture. Benchmark wasn’t known for hardware investments, but Vishria had also been following the impressive developments in machine learning and saw the potential in a purpose-built chip.

Over at the emerging venture firm Eclipse, Susan had followed the Cerebras team since his fellow GP Pierre Lamond, the legendary veteran of Fairchild Semiconductor, had backed them at SeaMicro. Benchmark and Foundation put in $10 million each into Cerebras’ first institutional round, with Eclipse throwing down around $6.5 million alongside various angels. Lamond initially held the Cerebras board seat until Susan took it up in 2023.

The company at first worked out of Foundation’s offices, with Feldman often hosting brisket barbecues for the team in their old backyard.

As the cliché goes, though, hardware is hard. There were many hardware and software redesigns and lots of continuous grinding. Not many people saw the use in these dinner-plate-sized wafer chips as machine learning remained a niche. After landing Argonne National Labs and GSK as customers, it wound up relying heavily on UAE-based G42 for contracts. That dependence helped scotch its first try at an IPO.

But as AI usage picked up post-ChatGPT and AI inference became the name of the game, Cerebras’ wafer chips proved more efficient than Nvidia’s GPUs for the task. As more labs needed these inference-specific chips to power existing user queries rather than just training runs, demand shot through the roof.

Susan at Eclipse helped Cerebras land G42, and later Amazon and OpenAI as big customers for Cerebras, which helped the firm slightly diversify its customer base after the cancelled 2024 IPO. Its customer concentration remains high, but if the pop on Thursday is any indication, investors will take any exposure to AI they can get at the moment, risks be damned.

Trial of the Century

Sam Altman Is Poised for a Legal Win. Bret Taylor Could Reap the Rewards.

Both sides gave their closing arguments in the Musk-Altman trial on Thursday, bringing us to the final moment in what has been a revealing, embittered, and often highly entertaining three week affair. When OpenAI’s lead attorney Bill Savitt wrapped up his case, Josh Achiam, the company’s court representative, smiled and shook Sam Altman’s hand.

The jury will begin their deliberations on Monday considering Elon Musk’s claims that Altman and Greg Brockman and OpenAI breached the company’s nonprofit mission by essentially converting to a for profit entity — and unjustly enriched themselves in doing so. The jury’s decision is advisory though, with the final verdict and potential remedies in the hands of U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers.

There’ll be plenty to pick over when the decision comes in, but as a courtside observer it’s hard not to see OpenAI as a heavy favorite. Going in, Musk’s side had a steep mountain to climb, and the defense has presented a lot of text evidence showing Musk was actively engaged in many of the discussions over creating the for-profit arm, which complicates the "breach" narrative. The betting markets agree, giving him only a one in three chance of winning.

But even if OpenAI prevails, there may be long-term damage to the company. Musk’s side effectively highlighted the persistent and widespread doubts about Altman’s credibility, and retreated his firing by the board in 2023. In closing arguments, Musk’s lead attorney noted that five different people who’d testified in the case said he wasn’t a trustworthy person (Helen Toner, Tasha McCauley, Ilya Sutskever, Mira Murati, and Musk).

Meanwhile Altman’s conflicts of interest have been enough to warrant a letter from the House Oversight Committee demanding more information.

Maybe he’ll be able to skate past all this and see OpenAI through an IPO and beyond. But an intriguing alternative quietly popped up during the trial when company chairman Bret Taylor testified.

He was calm, confident, and well informed. He parried Musk’s lawyers’ questions about Altman’s firing and why he chose to join the board (he wanted to help save the company) and its conversion into a public benefit corporation (all above board and approved by state officials).

Taylor’s name has been casually bandied about as a potential OpenAI CEO (the Wall Street Journal suggested this in a recent story), but this was the first time it seemed real.

It makes sense on paper. He’s an experienced enterprise sales chief, working as co-CEO of Salesforce before splitting with Marc Benioff. His AI software startup Sierra has built a promising business selling AI solutions for customer service uses. The guy knows chaos, having served as chairman of Twitter when Musk launched his takeover.

OpenAI is increasingly an enterprise oriented organization competing with Anthropic to sell its coding agents to companies. Also OpenAI has a history of bringing executives in from the board to be top executives: Fidji Simo was on its board before coming on as product chief.

This wouldn’t be seamless. Sierra just announced a new funding round valuing it at $15 billion and these investors would want to be made whole and then some if Taylor bounced. But those sorts of deals are standard fare these days.

There’s a lot that can change with the verdict and any number of other events in the coming months. Altman might be just fine. But if OpenAI ever feels the need to sub him out, Taylor passed the test.

Newcomer Podcast

Vinod Khosla on the End of Jobs and the Future of Capitalism & Aron D'Souza on Taking Down Gawker

It’s a two-for-one week on the Newcomer Podcast!

First up, legendary venture capitalist Vinod Khosla came on the podcast to share his thoughts on why AI could eliminate the need for traditional jobs, how capitalism may evolve in an AI-driven world, and why future generations may no longer need careers purely for survival.

Next up, Eric sat down with Aron Ping D’Souza, the Oxford law student who first pitched Peter Thiel on the idea that would eventually bankrupt Gawker. Today, D’Souza is building the Enhanced Games, a PED-legal sporting competition, and Objection AI, a Thiel-backed platform designed to investigate news articles line by line using former CIA and FBI agents.

Listen To The Podcast

One Big Chart

Enterprise Demand for Anthropic Tools Tops OpenAI for the First Time, Ramp Data Shows

Read more

A few weeks back, Lightspeed partner Faraz Fatemi attended a dinner of fellow GPs focused on consumer startups — the kind of gathering that once drew a packed table of fellow travelers. This one, hosted by Menlo Ventures, featured consumer investing stalwarts like Kirsten Green of Forerunner, along with Saar Gur at CRV, Ivan Zhou at Accel, and Mike Duboe at Greylock.

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We’re fresh off the inaugural Cerebral Valley Voice Summit.

Over 200 founders, investors, and operators gathered to hear from voice AI leaders like Bret Taylor, the co-founder of Sierra; Emergence Capital’s Jake Saper; a16z’s Olivia Moore; Lux Capital’s Grace Isford; OpenAI’s head of realtime AI Justin Uberti, Runway co-founder Anastasis Germanidis; and the founders of Abridge, Wispr Flow, Deepgram, Cartesia, and more.

We’re sharing all 13 talks from the summit in the newsletter as well as on our Newcomer Summits YouTube channel.

The Cerebral Valley Voice Summit is co-hosted by Eric Newcomer, Max Child, and James Wilsterman.

Many thanks to our sponsors Baseten, Felicis, Nebius, AssemblyAI, and Weekend.

Watch on YouTube

Bret Taylor (Sierra)

Sierra founder Bret Taylor spoke on-stage at the Cerebral Valley Voice Summit just two days after raising a fresh $950 million in funding, surpassing $165 million in revenue, and reaching 40% of the Fortune 50 using his company’s voice agents.

Despite all this progress, he still thinks its early innings for voice AI’s entrance into the global economy. “It feels like we’re in this stage of the internet before broadband,” he said.

Justin Uberti (OpenAI)

Panelists were divided on whether voice models should sound as close to “human” as possible, or if a more accurate but less conversational agent would be a better fit for certain use cases.

Justin Uberti, head of real-time at OpenAI, made a case for the former. “The agent has to be a great talker, a real conversationalist,” he noted. “There’s always a little bit of a tradeoff… how do you add intelligence without sacrificing the experience?”

The following day, OpenAI released its newest batch of realtime voice models, which can use reasoning while in the middle of a conversation to take better action from a prompt.

Anastasis Germanidis (Runway)

There was a hearty debate at the Summit on whether voice will be the primary way humans interact with computers going forward.

Anastasis Germanidis of Runway — primarily a video model maker — expressed excitement around promise of world models, which utilize voice in conjunction with motion and interactive video.

Linda Sheng (MiniMax)

Linda Sheng at MiniMax declared that voice model advancements were coming in combination with video and other multimodal channels.

Jake Saper (Emergence Capital), Olivia Moore (Andreessen Horowitz), and Grace Isford (Lux Capital)

Venture capitalists on-stage for the Cerebral Valley Voice Summit acknowledged it was still early days for the technology, but were excited about rapid improvements in the AI models.

Grace Isford of Lux Capital said we were still in “the Microsoft Co-Pilot era” of voice and much was still to be done in building end-to-end products.

While consumer voice applications haven’t broken out quite like enterprise ones, Olivia Moore of Andreessen Horowitz said it was on the horizon: “Consumer just takes longer to mature,” she said. Jake Saper of Emergence Capital pointed to the music app Suno, and predicted that “an increasing percent of music will be created or co-piloted with AI.”

Shiv Rao (Abridge)

Shiv Rao, founder of Abridge, noted that voice was a natural for a human-centric industry like healthcare.

The regulatory and privacy issues in healthcare, which have often scared away VCs, can be a competitive moat.

Tanay Kothari (Wispr Flow)

Tanay Kothari’s startup Wispr Flow was already widely used by the crowd at the Cerebral Valley Voice Summit, with people dictating everything from slack messages to coding workflows.

Unsurprisingly, Kothari was bullish on voice being the next paradigm shift for how we interact with computers. On-stage, he mentioned how strange people talking on the phone with AirPods looked a few years back, yet now we don’t question people’s public conversations in the street.

Eugenia Kuyda (Wabi)

Wabi and Replika founder Eugenia Kuyda predicted that we’ll see the rise of two kinds of voice agents: some for personal development, such as AI therapists or companions, and less personality-driven agents for work-related tasks.

Everyone in attendance at the Cerebral Valley Voice Summit may already be voice-pilled, but Wabi’s Kuyda offered a reality check on how far agent capabilities have actually reached mainstream users, noting a sharp divide between early adopters and everyone else.

Jeffrey Liu (Assort Health)

Jeffrey Liu of Assort Health, which builds AI voice agents for health systems to handle administrative calls like scheduling, billing, and medication refills, said his company had already seen 150 million patient interactions across 5,000 different providers, all handled with voice AI.

Dylan Fox (AssemblyAI)

Agents that sound human are important for some applications, but not for others — and there’s no consensus on whether people will embrace human-like agents as they proliferate.

Dylan Fox, founder of AssemblyAI, argued that people don’t necessarily want all agents to pretend to be alive.

Scott Stephenson (Deepgram)

Scott Stephenson of Deepgram said that as of today, voice AI models haven’t passed his personal “voice Turing Test,” where a person can have a five minute conversation with a voice agent and not realize it’s not human.

However, he predicted that this barrier will be broken by the end of the year with advancements in context memory.

Russ d’Sa (LiveKit)

Russ d’Sa, founder of LiveKit, which helps labs build, test, and deploy voice agents, pointed out that speeding up the communications layers of the process makes the agents smarter.

“Every single millisecond you can shave off between a round trip, or turn from a human to an AI gives you more time for inference,” said s’Sa.

Brandon Yang (Cartesia)

The startup Cartesia has built up a reputation for having some of the lowest latency text-to-speech models, but co-founder Brandon Yang noted that the evals for voice models are difficult to complete, given that what constitutes “natural speech” is quite subjective.

Many models are still constrained by language, with performance varying much more widely in non-English conversations.

Voice computing true believers gathered at our Cerebral Valley Voice Summit on Wednesday in San Francisco. We gave them hats that said, “VOICEPILLED.”

On stage, Sierra CEO Bret Taylor explained how his customer support-oriented company is taking Silicon Valley by storm raising $950 million this week at a $15.8 billion valuation led by Tiger Global and GV. He shared that Sierra’s agents are widespread enough that they’ve already talked to each other on the phone — “they weren’t conspiring, as far as I know,” he joked.

Wispr Flow, the rapidly growing voice dictation software, captured the audience’s attention. Tanay Kothari told the crowd how his company takes great care in turning your stream of consciousness into correctly punctuated prose. “What Wispr does as you’re using it the first five, six times, is it learns your comma patterns. That really small detail is what adds to the delight.” (Ramp recently found that Wispr Flow is the third-fastest growing software vendor.)

Meanwhile, OpenAI’s head of realtime AI Justin Uberti charted the history of voice technology without trying to give away the open secret that on Thursday OpenAI would reveal a suite of new voice models, giving them the power to reason and properly follow the context of a conversation even when interrupted.

A few takeaways:

• Cascade systems where companies cobble together a chain of text to speech and speech to text models are dominant right now, but everyone is eyeing improvements coming from voice-to-voice models.

• Granola and Wispr Flow are probably the two buzziest user-facing applications. Several speakers brought up the potential for better voice therapists or companions. Brandon Yang at Cartesia shouted out Tolan, an AI alien “best friend,” as an under-the-radar startup to watch.

• Even true believers are divided between people who see voice as a return to a more natural form of human communication and others who are optimistic but see it as something to be paired with graphical interfaces or reserved for moments like when people are driving.

• Olivia Moore, the summit’s resident consumer whisperer, said she had turned her focus to business applications. “On the consumer side, I’m still very optimistic, I think consumer just takes longer to mature,” she said. “It cannot be, in my opinion, predicted — only observed.”

Several of the speakers Wednesday envisioned a clear division between AI agents in the workplace, which will mostly be aimed at efficiency, and personal companion agents that might be assistants, therapists, and friends all at once.

“By 2030, we will have two general purpose AIs,” said Eugenia Kuyda, founder of Wabi and previously the founder of AI companion-maker Replika. One will be for knowledge work, she said, and the other will be a personal agent that will be getting to know you and “helping you flourish.”

The Cerebral Valley Voice Summit is co-hosted by Eric Newcomer, Max Child, and James Wilsterman.

Special thanks to our sponsors Baseten, Felicis, Nebius, AssemblyAI, and Weekend for making it possible.

Newcomer subscribers can scroll down to get the full breakdown of our onstage content from yesterday.

More Key Takeaways from the Summit:

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California’s Billionaire Tax is heading to the voters. Silicon Valley is fighting back, led by a newly political Sergey Brin and his MAGA-pilled girlfriend. Stargate sees shakeups as more Americans express their ire towards data centers. Extra-large seed rounds gobble up more than half of seed capital. We’re in the courtroom as Elon Musk takes the stand and denounces OpenAI’s for-profit transformation (though he liked the idea at the start). A top DeepMind researcher raises 10 figures for his AI neolab. Tech earnings go well for Google, less so for Meta. Chinese regulators order Meta to unwind its acquisition of Manus.

The Cerebral Valley Voice Summit is next week.

The Main Item

Sergey Brin Gets Political as Silicon Valley Preps for a High-Stakes Fall Election

Silicon Valley is freaking out about California’s Billionaire Tax Act. It’s easy to see why.

Even aside from the general rule that people hate paying more taxes, the California proposal would tax paper gains, and in some cases assign the value of private company shareholdings based on voting control. Such provisions could result in extraordinary tax bills for some founders.

On X, the indignation was flowing fast and furious this week after proponents of the measure announced they’d collected almost twice as many signatures as needed to qualify it for the November ballot. How could California be so stupid as to chase away the entrepreneurs that have made its economy so great?

Sergey Brin even got in Gavin Newsom’s face about it (the governor now opposes the tax). Brin, who’s moved to Nevada, has spent at least $57 million (and counting) on counter-measures, apparently in the hope of eventually moving back. (He’s pictured above with girlfriend Gerelyn Gilbert-Soto, a vocal Trump supporter).

There’s a similar dynamic afoot in the city of San Francisco. Unions have sponsored a reprise of the Overpaid Executive Tax, which was first passed in 2020 but then mostly eliminated in a 2024 voter-approved tax overhaul. The city can’t impose income taxes, but a levy on businesses with highly paid CEOs is a way to “tax the rich,” and the unions shamelessly walked away from the overhaul compromise to take a new tax to the voters. In the city, too, opponents in the tech industry, led by former Sequoia chair Michael Moritz and Ripple founder Chris Larsen, are sponsoring a countervailing measure.

The state proposal would impose a one-time wealth tax of five percent on anyone with more than a billion dollars in assets, with the proceeds to fill the gaps in the state’s healthcare budget. It’s drawn special ire for a clause on valuing private company shares which reads: “The percentage of the business entity owned by the taxpayer shall be presumed to be not less than the taxpayer’s percentage of the overall voting or other direct control rights.”

A provision allowing people to appeal if they can show that a valuation is overstated makes that outcome unlikely. Still, the state would appear to have a lot of discretion in making judgment calls on asset values — not exactly comforting for those in the crosshairs. (Interestingly, real estate is not counted in the calculations.)

The measure also has the demerit of prescribing specifically how the new tax revenues would be spent. Such provisions are common in ballot measures and mainly serve to further hamstring the state’s already Byzantine budgeting process.

Building a Better California, a new political group whose key backers include John Doerr as well as Brin, Michael Moritz, Chris Larsen, and Eric Schmidt, is leading the charge against the tax, sponsoring multiple initiatives that would cancel out the billionaire tax if they get more votes; one of them would bar any future wealth taxes.

Winning will be no slam dunk.

Silicon Valley investors and executives haven’t done a very good job of selling their agenda. Californians who feel squeezed by the cost of living don’t reflexively blame Democratic policies, nor do they do the math on business relocation incentives. They see a lot of young billionaires explaining why they deserve their money — and conclude that more taxes on said billionaires would be just fine.

Relatedly, there’s been a lot of moaning on X this week about how tech’s preferred candidate for California governor, San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan, isn’t getting any traction. But anyone schooled in California politics could tell them that *any* newbie candidate lacking statewide name recognition would struggle. Also: San Jose is run by a city manager, and for all Mahan’s appeal his track record is thin.

The sudden flurry of tech exec enthusiasm for Republican Steve Hilton, who’s married to a well-known Silicon Valley executive and has been endorsed by Trump, is bound to end in disappointment as well. Barring an unlikely scenario where Hilton and his GOP rival manage to win the top two spots in the non-partisan gubernatorial primary and face each other, the chances of a Republican winning the general election are close to nil.

From where we sit, the fall vote is shaping up as an excellent case study in the debilitating flaws of California’s system of “direct democracy,” with its well-used and abused processes. We can now look forward to an incessant barrage of misleading advertising across every medium — hardly what the “progressives” of the early 20th century had in mind when they invented a citizens’ counterweight to a state government that had been indelibly corrupted by the Southern Pacific railroad.

At the same time, the election could be a wake-up call for Silicon Valley executives who spend too much time talking to one another and too little considering how their politics play outside their bubble.

There’s still a chance that Governor Newsom could persuade the billionaire tax’s sponsor, a powerful healthcare union, to withdraw the measure in exchange for some other mechanism for boosting healthcare funding. Leaning into a deal like that would serve everyone well.

Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly characterized the voting-control provision that can be used to determine the value of assets. It applies only to privately-held companies and would not affect the Google founders.

Newcomer is hosting the Cerebral Valley Voice Summit on Wednesday, May 6. We’re running out of space but will continue reviewing applications. Apply if you’re a voice-pilled founder or investor.

Apply to Attend

Newcomer Podcast

Katie Jacobs Stanton Unfiltered on Tech’s Silence, Sam Altman & the AI Bubble

Silicon Valley has more power than ever, so why won’t it speak up?

Katie Jacobs Stanton, former Twitter executive, Obama White House alum, and founder of Moxxie Ventures, joins Eric to talk about what's really happening inside the Valley right now — why tech leaders stayed silent when ICE showed up in Minnesota, what Sam Altman’s Molotov comment really exposed, and why Stanton thinks the current AI cycle is building on quicksand the same way the dot-com era did.

Listen To The Podcast

Stargate Shakeup

Datacenter Buildout Hits Snags Even as Spending Soars

Despite ever-increasing capex from the hyperscalers, the data center buildout is getting harder to sell.

The grand vision of Stargate has been reduced to a more simple partnership agreement. The Financial Times reported Tuesday that the Stargate team has halted plans for data centers in Norway and the UK while pausing expansion plans in Abilene, Texas, with datacenter developer Crusoe. Meta has poached several Stargate leaders away from the company.

Instead of building out its own data centers, OpenAI has bet that it can continue its string of leasing agreements with third party providers, like Oracle, Broadcom, and CoreWeave. SoftBank, the original partner in the first formation of Stargate, is building its own data centers but hasn’t brought any online just yet.

Stateside, political backlash is leading to more delays around construction. Locals in Northern Virginia — THE data center capital of the country, mind you — have protested new construction efforts over noise pollution and rising electricity costs.

On Tuesday, the Brookfield-backed Compass Datacenters pulled out of its portion of a 2,100-acre project in Prince William County, Virginia, citing increased public opposition and no willingness from state lawmakers to sign any tax abatements for the site. In Utah, Box Elder County officials voted to delay final approval on a new hyperscaler data center after local residents pushed for a slowdown.

A fresh Marquette poll published Wednesday found all demographics surveyed — regardless of age, gender, political affiliation, or income level — said that the costs of data center buildout outweigh any public benefits. In our extensive polling survey two weeks ago, the polls we reviewed showed Americans evenly split on new data center construction, so this could signal an even more negative turn.

AI companies are still pushing ahead on their fundraising goals. Anthropic is already back to weighing incoming offers for a fresh funding round at a $900 billion valuation, which can only be justified if they have the compute infrastructure in place to grow at the scale they project.

But data center delays, for whatever the motivation, are going to turn into a major headache for tech if they can’t tackle it.

Musk v. Altman

Early OpenAI Talks Show Profits Were on Everyone’s Mind

At one level, the trial between Elon Musk and Sam Altman is a business dispute between cofounders. At another, it’s about whether safely developing AI is in conflict with a profit motive.

But as we watched in person as Musk and Altman squared off from the federal courthouse in Oakland, Calif. this week and their lawyers started bringing up old emails between them and associates, we also got a fascinating glimpse at the rise of OpenAI’s for-profit arm and the people who benefitted from it.

In 2018, as OpenAI began piecing together its investors, Shivon Zilis, a close Musk advisor and his occasional romantic partner, wrote to him about the quickly forming $500 million funding round — “would be corporates and high net worths” she wrote. A year later, Altman sent Musk an email with a TL;DR saying they’d raised a first round “led by Reid and Vinod.”

Then the following year, OpenAI raised a $1 billion round from Microsoft.

Of course, per the terms they wrote around the for-profit arm, these ended up being profit-sharing agreements and not equity. Had they been equity, they would have been among the most successful venture capital bets of all time.

It’s becoming increasingly clear that Musk was routinely discussing the structure of a for-profit arm with Altman, Greg Brockman, and Ilya Sutskever in the year or so before his split. The point that Musk kept coming back to — both under his lawyer’s questioning and cross-examination — is that a for-profit arm isn’t the problem, it’s the size of the for-profit arm relative to the nonprofit where he claims things went wrong.

“The for-profit can’t become the main thing,” he repeated over and over again growing increasingly frustrated on the stand. His other refrain was that Altman and Brockman “stole a charity.” At some point Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers got tired enough of that refrain that she told him he’s made that point plenty of times and to move on.

Then Musk pivoted to challenging the idea of profit caps as a way of keeping a company as a nonprofit. “If you say it’s a capped profit company, then it’s not a capped profit, then in that case it’s really a for-profit.” That, of course, was relevant to the news this week that OpenAI had amended its partnership with Microsoft to lift its profit cap.

Another mini-drama to this whole case is where xAI fits into this world of AGI and frontier labs. Musk had a habit during testimony of going back and forth between saying xAI was a much smaller company than OpenAI and hasn’t been keeping up but then saying xAI was actually very competitive with the best OpenAI models (for what it’s worth, he voluntarily ranked the frontier labs at the moment and put Anthropic at the top).

Saying xAI is a smaller company than OpenAI might be a good legal strategy if you’re trying to show this lawsuit isn’t about vengeance. But it’s not that great an argument when it’s a critical piece of the SpaceX IPO. Musk is probably hoping each message reaches a different audience.

Musk is likely finished with his testimony, though he still could be recalled, and his performance was a mixed bag. His side worked hard to present him as a hard-working but approachable nerd, which they’re hoping overcomes his political baggage among a liberal Bay Area jury. But his spats with Altman’s lawyer Bill Savitt showed a testier and less charming side. The early sense is that his side is down a couple of runs right now, largely because Musk’s argument that Altman stole a charity is hard to mesh with the sheer volume of emails that show Musk discussing a for-profit structure and not expressing any complaints.

But this case will likely come down to which side the jury trusts more. A lot hangs on how Altman does when he takes the stand.

Two Big Charts

More than Half of Seed Funding Now Flowing to ‘Megaseeds’

Elite startups that can command big dollars in their initial fundraise, which began to appear just a few years ago, are capturing more attention than ever from early stage investors.

Seed rounds of $10 million or more took in more than half of the seed-stage venture capital deployed last year, Crunchbase data shows, overtaking smaller seed rounds for the first time.

The number of seed deals overall, however, continued to decline from its 2022 peak.

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Venture investors poured over $7 billion into voice AI startups in the first quarter of this year, far more than in any previous period, as products based on vastly improved voice recognition technology proliferate in the workplace.

ElevenLabs, Synthesia, and Runway (which is known for its video models but handles large amounts of voice generation) have all raised sizable new rounds since the start of the year. The global market for voice recognition technology, expected to be worth $22 billion in 2026, is projected to nearly triple in size over the next five years.

We’re taking a look at how the tools are being deployed in a few key enterprise verticals. We have the stories of how Abridge launched across care centers in the Phoenix area, DeepL’s integration with Aramark, and more.

But first: talk about voice with us at our summit on Wednesday

Given the rush of interest in voice, we’re excited to be hosting the first-ever Cerebral Valley Voice Summit this Wednesday, May 6, in San Francisco.

We’ll take the themes of this story — like healthcare, customer service, and personal note-taking — and discuss them live and in-depth with the CEOs of Sierra, Abridge, Deepgram, Wispr Flow, and more.

Come contribute to the conversation. Applications to this invite-only summit are closing soon. You can apply here.

Now, back to the story.

Ambient AI in the Doctor’s Office

Dr. Craig Norquist remembers when ambient AI scribes first hit the market a decade ago. As Chief Medical Information Officer for HonorHealth — a Phoenix-area network of 200 care centers and 17,000 staff — he watched doctors try the technology, shrug, and walk away.

But the post-ChatGPT development of voice AI has changed everything. Generative AI supercharged the venerable but slow-developing voice recognition sector, and two years ago HonorHealth was in serious talks with Abridge, the AI note-taking platform built for physicians (CEO Shiv Rao pictured).

In February, Abridge launched at HonorHealth with 500 licenses for around 3,000 physicians and PAs, who are using Abridge in the background to record and take notes as they meet with patients.

After an appointment, Abridge uses its proprietary models to generate a full medical note that’s ready to drop into the patient’s electronic health records, along with queues on follow-ups, test orders, or prescriptions.

In less than two months, HonorHealth already has a waiting list of over 150 more doctors who want in on the tool, Norquist said. It not only cuts the after-hours work doctors have to do to keep charts up to date, he added, it also frees them up to be more present while interacting with patients as they don’t have to worry about remembering and recording the particulars.

Norquist acknowledged that a small but significant chunk of practitioners in his health system are concerned around data privacy when it comes to AI recording doctor-patient calls, and if it could be a liability to malpractice suits.

Patients are concerned about their own data from these meetings staying private, and about the accuracy of transcripts, according to a New York Times report this week. Abridge has worked to ease some of these concerns by letting medical practices host their own records and establish their own policies on access and retention.

Ordering With a Voice Agent

Customer service is clearly a big application category for voice AI agents. Decagon, a voice agent startup that raised $250 million at a $4.5 billion valuation in January, pointed us to Hunter Douglas, a multinational window treatment company that began using Decagon voice agents to handle customer service calls about 6 months ago.

Charmaine Vallance-Poole, the global customer experience director for the company, said the agents were immediately helpful for answering calls after hours, and she’s been impressed with how quickly they were able to learn and reference specs for all of the company’s product lines. The agents can even coach customers through product installation. “The bot is probably the most knowledgeable person on your business,” she said.

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Venture capitalists live by just a few rules. Go big or go home is one of them. Founders are king is another.

Chiratae Ventures has some different ideas — and they could hold important lessons for a fast-changing VC industry.

The Bengaluru-based firm’s founder and chairman, Sudhir Sethi, often tells colleagues that its main responsibility is towards its limited partners, who should get “customer first” treatment.

That’s led Chiratae to prioritize returning cash to investors in small chunks on a regular basis, rather than holding out for blockbuster exits.

It’s an unfashionable approach, to say the least. But the strategy has enabled Chiratae to return more cash to investors (DPI) than most of its peers even as it’s sacrificed on overall gains, according to financial documents obtained exclusively by Newcomer and interviews with former executives.

Slides Detailing Chiratae’s Performance Are Below

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SpaceX’s expected record-shattering June IPO will test the public markets’ faith in Elon Musk — and AI. Y Combinator and Ron Conway’s SV Angel show how volume can be a winning strategy in startup investing. Amazon backs Anthropic with another $5 billion and loads of compute. Chinese model-maker DeepSeek is raising outside capital. AngelList offers retail investors a chance to back private startups with debatable terms. Bob Iger returns to investing at Thrive Capital. Meta & Microsoft announce AI-efficiency layoffs and buyouts. Bill Gurley reminds everyone the AI boom is still heavily subsidized by VC cash.

The Main Item

SpaceX Financials Show How Faith in Elon Powers Musk Inc.

The SpaceX IPO, now expected in June, has become the black hole of technology and finance.

It’s sucking up the attention and the dreams — and soon the dollars — of everyone in its path. Elon Musk’s agreement to buy coding star Cursor for $60 billion sometime down the line, or pay $10 billion, marked only the latest unusual twist.

Data from SpaceX’s confidential S-1 filing has been dribbling out (itself an unusual phenomenon) and it’s all very… unprecedented!

The $75 billion SpaceX aims to raise is an order of magnitude more than what even today would be considered a massive IPO.

The company is a newly constituted combination of the old SpaceX, the old Twitter, and the new xAI, and its financials don’t remotely support the $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion valuation it’s expected to seek. Yet the Elon Musk reality distortion field has been a feature more than a bug for quite some years now (see Tesla). He believes his investors will follow him anywhere, and who’s to say he’s wrong?

Risk factors in an S-1 are doom-and-gloom by design, but SpaceX’s warnings are especially stark. “Yeah, we don’t really know if any of this will work,” would be a fair summary.

It’s widely assumed that Musk will be looking to combine a newly public SpaceX with Tesla. In the meantime, he’s trying to get SpaceX included in major stock market indexes right away. The prospect of the IPO being followed by a steep price decline as private investors cash in their winnings looms over the process.

No one has seen anything like this before.

It’s definitely a banker bonanza, with Morgan Stanley, Goldman ⁠Sachs, Bank of America, Citigroup, and JPMorgan Chase all serving as ​bookrunners and 16 other banks involved in smaller roles.

Here are some key factoids that have emerged from the S-1, mostly via Reuters and The Information:

• Musk holds a bit over 40% of the equity ahead of the IPO. Google could see its $900 million SpaceX investment from 2015 turn into more than $100 billion. Founders Fund (Luke Nosek, since departed), Valor Equity Partners (Antonio Gracias), and Fidelity all stand to win big, along with Sequoia Capital (Shaun Maguire), DFJ (Steve Jurvetson, since departed), a16z, Nvidia, and the Qatar Investment Authority.

• Merging SpaceX with xAI swung the company to a loss. The combined entity lost $4.94 billion last year on $18.67 billion in revenue, Reuters reported, after heavy investments in xAI infrastructure. In 2024, SpaceX had $791 million in profit on $14.02 billion in revenue. Capex exceeded $20 billion last year, with more than half going to AI development.

• Starlink is carrying SpaceX’s revenue. The Information reported that the satellite internet service brought in $11.4 billion in 2025, about 60% of the company’s total, with EBITDA margins of 60%. Rocket launches generated $4.1 billion in revenue, and AI accounted for $3.2 billion.

• Insiders are set to retain control. SpaceX will use a dual class structure that gives Class B shareholders — including Musk and a handful of other insiders — ten votes each, while the Class A shares will be worth one vote each. SpaceX will retain its “controlled company” status after going public, which means that it will not require a majority independent board.

• Retail investors may not have much board representation, but they will get a seat at the cap table. Musk is allocating 30% of IPO shares to retail, or around three times the norm, with banks assigned to specific pools or “lanes”: Morgan Stanley is handling smaller retail investors, Bank of America is serving family offices and high-net-worth individuals in the US, and UBS will take on these investors abroad, Reuters reported. Around 1,500 retail investors were invited on a roadshow tour of SpaceX’s Starbase facilities in Boca Chica, Texas, once it kicks off in earnest on June 8.

All of this is unfolding as Musk juggles the capital demands of his broader empire. Tesla’s Q1 earnings surprised analysts Wednesday with a projected $25 billion in capex — $5 billion more than predicted, and twice its previous peak.

The question hanging over all of it is whether the market can absorb Musk’s grand ambitions.

Bankers are thrilled that SpaceX could reignite the IPO market more broadly, but they’re pushing to get their own IPOs out ahead of SpaceX — or give it some breathing room and wait until after the summer.

Since buying SpaceX is really buying Musk Inc., there could be a rotation by Elon-stans out of Tesla and into SpaceX — not what Musk is looking for. The Nasdaq is eager to get SpaceX on board, but that could lead to concentration risk.

All of this will no doubt set precedents and influence the timing of the next turn of the wheel: the expected mega IPOs of OpenAI and Anthropic. It will certainly put the durability of the AI boom — or bubble — to the test.

Newcomer Podcast

Amanda Askell on AI Consciousness

Anthropic AI safety researcher Amanda Askell came on the Newcomer podcast to break down one of the most existential conversations in AI to date: can AI systems like Claude become conscious, and if they do, what do we owe them?

Listen to the Podcast

Cerebral Valley Show

Have the Vibes Turned Against Anthropic?

On the Cerebral Valley Show this week, Eric, Max, and James debate whether the “vibes” are actually turning against Anthropic or if this is just noise from power users, and later unpack a rough stretch for Sam Altman.

One Big Chart

Accelerators & SV Angel Top List of Seed Investors that Backed $100 Million Companies

Volume can be a very good strategy in the seed investing business.

Dealroom published a list of funds that have written the most seed-stage checks to startups that eventually reached $100 million in revenue, and it’s little surprise that the storied startup accelerator Y Combinator came out on top with 94 companies so far. The accelerator backs around 500 to 600 startups a year nowadays.

Ron Conway’s SV Angel has taken a similar small-check-wide-net approach, with around 50 to 100 new investments a year.

Sequoia Capital stands out as the most successful non-exclusive seed or accelerator fund.

Five Notable Deals

Anthropic, VAST Data, Blue Energy, Reliable Robotics, Omni

Amazon doubles down on its investment into Anthropic with more funding and compute capacity in a week otherwise filled with infrastructure and hardware deals.

• Amazon agreed to invest an additional $5 billion into Anthropic, with an option to put up $20 billion more as part of an agreement to build AI infrastructure.

• Data infrastructure startup VAST Data raised around $1 billion in Series F funding co-led by Drive Capital and Access Industries. Fidelity, NEA, and Nvidia also participated, among others.

• Nuclear power plant startup Blue Energy raised $380 million in combined equity and debt funding led by VXI Capital. Other investors include Engine Ventures, At One Ventures, and Tamarack Global.

• Reliable Robotics, which builds autonomous systems for aviation, raised $160 million in a new funding round led by Nimble Partners. Other investors include Eclipse, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Coatue, Pathbreaker Ventures, Island Green Capital, Socium Ventures, AE Ventures, RTX Ventures, Presidio Ventures, UP Partners, KAS Venture Partners, What If Ventures, Calm Ventures, Gaingels, and Mana Ventures.

• Omni, an AI analytics platform, raised $120 million in Series C funding led by Iconiq. Other investors include Theory Ventures, First Round Capital, Redpoint Ventures, and GV.

Stories We’re Reading

DeepSeek Seeks Funding, AngelList Pushes Private Investor Limits, Iger Returns to Thrive, Meta & Microsoft Slash Jobs, Anthropic Burns Figma, Gurley Reframes Compute Shortage

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Tuesday afternoon, Cursor CEO Michael Truell convened an all-hands meeting to make an announcement about its new partnership with SpaceX, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Shortly afterwards, SpaceX followed with a carefully worded post on X, which announced that Cursor had “given SpaceX the right to acquire Cursor later this year for $60 billion or pay $10 billion for our work together.”

The announcement caused a whiplash that rippled through the tech world — and was also slightly vague. But there are a few things to keep in mind, both on the specifics of this announcement and how we got here.

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Big news. We’re heading back across the pond.

Last year, we brought the Cerebral Valley AI Summit to Europe for the first time.

London was too good to do just once. We’re returning with another world-class lineup of AI leaders, founders, and investors for what’s shaping up to be one of our best summits.

Apply to Attend

Over the years, CVAI has earned a reputation as the summit where real things happen — new partnerships, fresh funding rounds, and deals you’ll read about later.

Databricks’ acquisition of MosaicML for $1.3 billion came after Ali Ghodsi met Naveen Rao at our first Cerebral Valley AI Summit. Suno’s $250M Series C began at our summit the following year.

We’ll be hosting the Cerebral Valley AI Summit in the heart of London on Wednesday, June 24.

We’re thrilled to announce our first batch of premier speakers, including:

• Alex Mashrabov, founder & CEO, Higgsfield

• Grant Lee, founder & CEO, Gamma

• R. Martin Chavez, board member, Alphabet

• Jesse Zhang, founder & CEO, Decagon

• Luciana Lixandru, partner, Sequoia Capital

• Aidan Gomez, founder & CEO, Cohere

• Oege de Moor, founder & CEO, XBOW

We’ll announce more speakers in the coming weeks. You won’t want to miss them.

The event is hosted by me, Eric Newcomer, along with Weekend co-founders Max Child and James Wilsterman.

Special thanks to our first set of sponsors — Felicis, Baseten, and Nebius — for helping us bring together this leading global AI summit.

Apply to Attend

• To see Newcomer’s full event calendar, click here.

• To reach out with questions or to sponsor the event, email riley@newcomer.co.

• To learn more about our past Cerebral Valley AI Summits, go to cerebralvalley.com. We will be back in San Francisco with our voice summit in May and our anchor event in November.

The Cerebral Valley AI Summit is an invite-only event. We welcome founders, investors, AI executives, and members of the media to apply to attend. The summit will bring together a couple hundred top AI leaders from around the globe for an intimate, one-day event.

Next up, the Cerebral Valley Voice Summit in San Francisco on Wednesday, May 6. Reach out if you’re interested in participating.