Good morning. Andrew here. Here we go: Both SpaceX and OpenAI may be going public within weeks, or months, of each other. We dive deep into the SpaceX prospectus — note not just the numbers, but the unusual governance structure — and what an OpenAI I.P.O. could look like. Also, we’ve got some highlights from my interview with Jeff Bezos. And we look at Barney Frank’s legacy. I always found him insightful and refreshingly candid. I remember him once telling me, for an article about the financial crisis: “You get no credit for disaster averted or damage minimized.” A friend made him a bumper sticker in 2010 with the slogan: “Things would have sucked worse without me.” (Was this newsletter forwarded to you? Sign up here.)
SpaceX vs. OpenAI vs. AnthropicElon Musk’s SpaceX just publicly took the wraps off the prospectus for its I.P.O., by far the biggest in history. But Wall Street today is wondering not only how investors will digest that megadeal, but also two other potential offerings — from OpenAI and Anthropic — hot on its tail. It sets up a race among three artificial intelligence giants to capture investors’ wallets, and raises questions about how they’ll fare in the public markets. What we’ve learned about SpaceX, via its S-1 filing:
But OpenAI stole some of SpaceX’s thunder, with reports emerging about its I.P.O. plans. The company behind ChatGPT is hoping to go public as soon as September, The Times reports — just three months after SpaceX. Making the I.P.O. possible was OpenAI winning a legal fight brought by Musk, seeking $150 billion in damages and to unravel its conversion into a for-profit company. The A.I. race is becoming a competition to go public. Investors are clamoring for a piece of the leading companies in the sector. But SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic (which is also targeting an I.P.O. in the fall) are all rushing to claim an outsize portion of that money before their rivals. Staging an I.P.O. would give these companies, which have already raised billions in the private markets, the ability to raise even more money from public market investors as they plan to spend heavily on data centers and other needs. Are these companies ready for the stock markets?
A JPMorgan Chase executive accused of sexually harassing a male colleague files a counterclaim. In her suit, Lorna Hajdini, who works on the bank’s leveraged finance team, said the lurid claims by Chirayu Rana were “entirely false, malicious, and fabricated” and “wreaked havoc” on her life. The allegations of sexual abuse have captivated Wall Street, and the case may now be heading to trial, a rarity for banking employment cases. Fed officials are more open to interest-rate increases. The release yesterday of minutes from the central bank’s last policy meeting revealed heightened concerns that higher wartime inflation would require the bank to increase borrowing costs, a pivot that would likely raise President Trump’s ire. That said, the futures market this morning sees one rate increase by December. The Trump administration will reportedly take stakes in quantum computing companies. The Commerce Department is set to soon announce that the White House is awarding $2 billion in grants to nine companies, including IBM, according to The Wall Street Journal. The deals involve the government taking equity stakes in those companies, part of a wider administration strategy. Nvidia knockoutNvidia did it again. The chip giant central to the artificial intelligence boom reported bumper profits, a torrid sales outlook, and generous stock buybacks and higher dividends yesterday. But that’s not enough for tech bulls. Shares in Nvidia are under pressure this morning as investors focus on SpaceX’s I.P.O. filing and weigh concerns about the chipmaker’s future. What Nvidia reported:
Its forecast was solid, too. Sales in the current quarter are expected to nearly double from last year, to $91 billion. “Demand has gone parabolic,” Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s C.E.O., told analysts, hailing the popularity of A.I. agents as a new growth driver alongside its data center business. How parabolic? The company said A.I. infrastructure spending would climb as high as $4 trillion in 2030, up from roughly $1 trillion today. But what about competition? Perhaps to allay investor concerns that its biggest customers are increasingly encroaching on its turf, Nvidia said it will break out its data center revenue line item to disclose how much comes from hyperscalers. Huang has dismissed concerns that Google’s massive investment in high-powered tensor processing units, or TPUs, is a threat to Nvidia’s dominance in A.I. chips. But investors are getting antsy about tech giants’ push into hardware. Other concerns include:
Bezos on taxes, Trump and his big projectsJeff Bezos and I sat down yesterday for a wide-ranging interview on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.” The tech mogul and I covered the billionaire class, artificial intelligence, the space race (and orbital data centers), and more. The interview also drew reactions from all corners of social media, including from Elon Musk and Mayor Zohran Mamdani of New York. Here are some key takeaways: Bezos proposed a major new tax policy: Eliminate taxes for the bottom 50 percent of earners. When I asked him about the backlash against billionaires, he said he’s been thinking a lot about what he sees as “a tale of two economies.” “The top 1 percent of taxpayers pay 40 percent of all the tax revenue. The bottom half pay only 3 percent,” Bezos told me. He added, “I think it should be zero.” Should billionaires then pay more to cover that 3 percent? “We don’t have a revenue problem in this country,” Bezos said. He added, “An Amazon C.F.O. could find 3 percent in the federal budget on a Tuesday afternoon.” He denied seeking President Trump’s favor. Bezos denied that he was behind Amazon’s decision to pay $40 million for a documentary about the first lady, Melania Trump, calling it “the falsehood that won’t die.” He added it appears to have been “a very wise business decision” for Amazon. Bezos also stood by what he said of Trump at the DealBook Summit in December. “I think he is a more mature, more disciplined version of himself than he was in his first term,” he said. Bezos added: “He’s been right about a lot of things. You have to give him credit where credit is due.” Bezos shed more light on his two big non-Amazon ventures:
Barney Frank’s legacyFew figures have had a more profound impact on Wall Street and Washington in recent memory than Barney Frank. The former Massachusetts Democratic congressman died on Tuesday at 86. Tributes are pouring in, from Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi to AIPAC. As chairman of the House Financial Services Committee during the 2008 financial crisis, Frank sponsored, with Senator Christopher Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. It is hard to overstate the legacy of the law, which passed in 2010 and touched nearly every corner of the banking industry. It included:
Elements of it have been rolled back over the years — one change was supported by Frank himself — but it remains a significant piece of banking regulation. “When we were at the brink during the 2008 financial crisis, Barney was crucial to securing passage of legislation that gave the government the tools it needed to avert financial meltdown,” Hank Paulson, the Treasury secretary from 2006 to 2009, said in a statement to DealBook. We hope you’ve enjoyed this newsletter, which is made possible through subscriber support. Subscribe to The New York Times.
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