All posts tagged: IPOs

Jersey Mike’s IPO illustrates how bad the AI hype has become

Jersey Mike’s IPO illustrates how bad the AI hype has become

Published by skeptic

I can’t tell the exact tipping point from realistic excitement over a new technology, to hype, to aww-come-on — but I’m pretty sure when a sandwich shop with Danny DeVito as its public face talks about AI in its IPO documents, we must be getting close. So it is with Jersey Mike’s. Because of investor thirst for all things AI these days, I understand why tech companies feel the need to sprinkle AI dust all over their pitches. This is as true for non-AI startups raising venture capital as it is for Bending Spoons’ public debut, a company in the business of buying aging, “not-AI” tech companies to rehabilitate. Just for kicks, I took a look at Jersey Mike’s IPO documents to see how far this compulsion may go. Surely a sandwich shop would have no need to mention AI in its S-1. But lo and behold! The term artificial intelligence and its acronym “AI” were mentioned 22 times. In this case, the company can’t claim to be selling AI software. It sells submarine sandwiches. …

Silicon Valley’s Elite Financial Advisers Say This Era of Wealth Is Different

Silicon Valley’s Elite Financial Advisers Say This Era of Wealth Is Different

Published by skeptic

If anyone in tech has already started their Hot IPO Summer, it’s Silicon Valley’s elite wealth advisers. Two private wealth managers who work with high-net-worth techies told me they’ve seen an uptick in activity from their client base, some of whom are expecting a big liquidity event this year. We’re talking, of course, about the employees and early investors at SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic who are coming into mind-boggling riches. (These wealth managers agreed to speak on the record but wouldn’t name specific companies, so any such references are my words, not theirs.) Visions of super-yachts, air-cooled Porsches, and vacation homes with closets full of Loro Piana probably come to mind. But elite advisers say most of their clients are pretty strategic about their newfound wealth before purchasing big-ticket items, snapping up real estate, or plunging their money into meme stocks. (Some go big anyway.) Ashley Velategui, the head of wealth strategies at Bernstein Private Wealth Management, who has been offering guidance to high-net-worth individuals in Seattle and the Bay Area for nearly 20 years, …

SpaceX Stock Soars in Debut and Makes Elon Musk the First Trillionaire

SpaceX Stock Soars in Debut and Makes Elon Musk the First Trillionaire

Published by Sam Flores

NEW YORK (AP) — Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire after shares of his rocket company SpaceX soared in Wall Street’s biggest initial public offering of stock. Shares in SpaceX jumped more than 19% after opening for trading Friday, a sign that investors are looking past the billions the company is losing and instead betting that its massive investments in satellites, orbital data centers and artificial intelligence will pay off in the future. SpaceX opened around midday at $150 a share, then rose to around $168, before finishing the day just below $161. That price gave the company a market value of $2.1 trillion, making it the sixth largest public U.S. company — larger even than its founder and CEO’s other big business, the electric vehicle maker Tesla. Between his holdings in SpaceX and Tesla, where he is also CEO, Musk is now worth an estimated $1.1 trillion, according to Forbes. Why SpaceX is going public now Musk says SpaceX, founded in 2002, is going public now because it needs money to fund its …

You Probably Won’t Get Rich Off the SpaceX IPO

You Probably Won’t Get Rich Off the SpaceX IPO

Published by skeptic

One thing that seems certain about the SpaceX IPO is that it’s going to make lots of people very, very rich. Another is that you probably won’t be one of them. At least not any time soon. There’s extraordinary interest in Elon Musk’s rocket-and-AI company’s public debut, and for good reason. SpaceX was already the leading private space company in the world, its rockets shuttling astronauts to the International Space Station and its Starlink satellites providing internet connectivity to millions of people around the world. Its recent acquisition of xAI means it is also the first of the big three AI startups in the US to go public, with Anthropic and OpenAI following close behind. The company raised $75 billion, valuing it at $1.75 trillion, which would make it the biggest IPO ever by a sizable margin. Like all IPOs, though, stratospheric wealth will likely be reserved for those who already hold shares of SpaceX, which means employees, big institutional asset managers, and Elon Musk. Even though so-called retail investors—individuals who don’t buy stock professionally—will …

SpaceX IPO Puts Elon Musk’s ‘Extreme’ Ownership to the Test

SpaceX IPO Puts Elon Musk’s ‘Extreme’ Ownership to the Test

Published by skeptic

Brian Manning encountered SpaceX’s culture of extreme ownership from day one as an engineer at the rocket maker. After a one-hour onboarding session a decade ago, he got his first assignment: Design a small part by the next day. “The way I looked at it is having very clear responsibility, autonomy, and accountability,” says Manning, who aced the task and spent about two years at the company. “Rather than hiring people and telling them how to do it, they give people full ownership to make things happen.” The principle has served SpaceX and its cofounder and CEO Elon Musk well. No company has delivered more to space. It’s also become the leading satellite internet provider while achieving once unthinkable aeronautical feats, including reusing key parts of its rockets. This week, SpaceX raised $75 billion by selling shares to investors in an initial public offering. That’s nearly three times more than any company has brought in from an IPO. The record IPO haul reflects investor excitement for SpaceX’s near-term goals such as building data centers in …

Why You Might Already Own SpaceX Shares, Siri’s AI Makeover, and Knicks Owner’s Surveillance Machine

Why You Might Already Own SpaceX Shares, Siri’s AI Makeover, and Knicks Owner’s Surveillance Machine

Published by skeptic

Brian Barrett: Noah, you are a celebrated, venerated national security journalist. You are. You have covered national security for a long time and you have covered, for lack of a better word, real spy stuff. You’ve been deep in it. How does that compare to this in terms of source handling in terms of the process here? Because it really rhymes, right? Noah Shachtman: Beyond. So look, for WIRED back in the day, I went to Iraq a couple of times. I went to Afghanistan. For WIRED, I reported on all the intelligence agencies. And I’ve never had a situation like this where people were so scared and took such elaborate steps to avoid being outed as a source. In spy movies, there’s this thing called a brush pass where someone pretends to bump into you or pretends to give you a hug or whatever and slip some information in your pocket. As far as I know, that shit has never happened in real life, or at least not to me. It finally happened in …

People Living Near xAI’s Dirty Data Centers Are Furious About the SpaceX IPO

People Living Near xAI’s Dirty Data Centers Are Furious About the SpaceX IPO

Published by skeptic

SpaceX, Elon Musk’s behemoth company that launches rockets and runs data centers, is set to go public Friday with a target valuation above $1.75 trillion. The move will make Musk, already the richest man in the world, vastly wealthier. A public offering will allow SpaceX to raise even more money to fund its AI ambitions, including building more data centers, faster. But even as Musk and other SpaceX investors see a huge windfall, the community hosting xAI data centers already in operation are demanding accountability from the company’s use of polluting gas turbines and a water treatment facility put on pause earlier this year. “We’re the extracted and exploited colony of what is going to be one of the most highly valued entities in the world,” says Justin Pearson, who represents portions of Memphis in the Tennessee House of Representatives. “People are going to die because of this pollution.” xAI is selling $15 billion per year in compute at its Memphis campuses to Anthropic, another company planning a blockbuster IPO in the coming months. “People …

OpenAI Confidentially Files for IPO on the Heels of SpaceX and Anthropic

OpenAI Confidentially Files for IPO on the Heels of SpaceX and Anthropic

Published by skeptic

OpenAI has filed confidential paperwork for an initial public offering, the company announced on Monday, kicking off what could be a monthslong process toward debuting on a US stock exchange. The move makes it the third company to file for what could be a trillion-dollar IPO this year. Tech companies pursuing the most powerful AI models, including publicly traded giants Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft, are hungry for tens of billions dollars each to build out more data centers and recruit scientists to grow their services. An IPO would be yet another fundraising opportunity for OpenAI after the company privately raised $122 billion in March. Going public, which brings many workers closer to a life-altering payday and increases transparency about a business’ financial health, could also boost employee morale and customer confidence as OpenAI tries to regain its position as the clear front-runner in frontier AI. OpenAI did not specify timing for the IPO nor how much it plans to raise. “We recently submitted a confidential S-1,” the company said in an unsigned, one-paragraph blog …

OpenAI and Anthropic May Be Rivals, but Investors Aren’t Picking Sides

OpenAI and Anthropic May Be Rivals, but Investors Aren’t Picking Sides

Published by skeptic

OpenAI and Anthropic have battled for workers, customers, and public attention. The rival AI labs have been on opposite sides of policy proposals, and their CEOs were the only ones not to link hands among a dozen industry leaders at a business summit earlier this year. But they do have one big area of overlap: their investors. About 90 venture capital firms and other money managers have invested in both OpenAI and Anthropic over the past few years, according to a WIRED analysis of data from PitchBook, a platform that tracks startup investments. OpenAI shares about 42 percent of its overall investors with Anthropic, according to the data. Roughly a third of Anthropic investors are also OpenAI backers, including major firms like Sequoia Capital, Greylock, Founders Fund, Redpoint Ventures, Emerson Collective, and Sound Ventures. Just last week, Anthropic made a fundraising announcement that named 31 investors—at least 13 of which have stakes in OpenAI, according to the PitchBook data and WIRED reporting. The number of common investors may be an undercount, because collecting information about …

The AI IPO Race Heats Up, DOGE Whistleblower Sues Elon Musk, and Instagram Gets Hacked

The AI IPO Race Heats Up, DOGE Whistleblower Sues Elon Musk, and Instagram Gets Hacked

Published by skeptic

Zoë Schiffer: Deviance and freaks, the new name of our podcast. And this is, I mean, just going back to red teaming, that’s work that a trust and safety team typically does. And those teams— Leah Feiger: We don’t have those anymore. Zoë Schiffer: They’re not as big as they used to be. There’s just not as much work. So yeah, I mean, it will be interesting to see how this plays out. Obviously within Meta, we’ve been talking to folks this week who kind of met the news with SI. The company has just laid off a large portion of the workforce. We’ve written about that. We’ve talked about that. And I checked in with people being like, “Well, how’s it going now?” The hack was kind of an excuse to talk to people, see how they’re doing. And they’re like, “I mean, as you’d expect, we’re asked to do two jobs now instead of on.” So you can imagine how that’s playing out. Brian Barrett: I also, we were talking about AI regulation …