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The Pulse by Augment

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SpaceX: a $1.77T ask, a $780B dissent

SpaceX set its IPO price at $135 a share — a fixed price, not a range — implying a $1.77 trillion valuation, and Morningstar answered with a published fair-value estimate of $780 billion. Washington, meanwhile, has reportedly held preliminary talks about the federal government taking equity stakes in AI companies, an idea Sam Altman has pitched directly to the President. And Quantinuum delivered the new IPO pipeline's first finished data point: priced above range, closed roughly where it priced.

Paul Smalera

Anthropic's S-1: Reconstructed From the Record*

Jun 4, 2026

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6 min read

Anthropic's S-1: Reconstructed From the Record*

Anthropic confirmed Monday it submitted a confidential draft S-1 to the SEC — no share count, price range, or timeline set. The filing is sealed, but the public record around it is unusually deep, so today we reconstruct it: $4.8 billion in reported Q1 revenue and a reportedly projected first operating profit in Q2; a reported $1.25 billion-per-month xAI compute contract that surfaced in SpaceX's filing rather than Anthropic's; a $100 billion-plus AWS commitment; a reported ~$36 billion off-balance-sheet chip lease in syndication; and a governance structure — five financially disinterested trustees who ultimately elect a board majority — with no precedent at this scale. We lay out what's on the record and mark what only the filing can answer.

Paul Smalera

Jun 2, 2026

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5 min read

SpaceX could hit your 401(k) in 5 days*

SpaceX is scheduled to open its IPO roadshow on June 4 — reportedly targeting as much as a $1.75 trillion valuation and a ~$75 billion raise, with pricing reported for June 11 — and index providers have cleared a fast lane that could pull it into 401(k)s and ETFs within days of listing. The repricing is spreading beyond AI and space — defense-tech maker Mach Industries raised at a reported $1.8 billion, nearly 4x its mark a year ago. Underneath the trophy names, PitchBook counts 220+ "fallen unicorns" — a reminder the same boom lifting the top is freezing the middle.

Paul Smalera

May 29, 2026

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7 min read

Anthropic's reported $965B tops OpenAI

Anthropic closed a reported $65 billion Series H this week at a $965 billion post-money valuation, nudging past the $852 billion mark OpenAI set in its March round and reordering the top of the AI-lab table. Apollo and Blackstone are reportedly shopping a roughly $36 billion private-credit deal to buy Google chips that Anthropic would lease. The quieter story is defense AI absorbing nearly half of all venture dollars in a single recent week.

Paul Smalera

OpenAI's $6.6B Tender: Comp, Not Cash Out

May 28, 2026

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7 min read

OpenAI's $6.6B Tender: Comp, Not Cash Out

OpenAI's $6.6 billion employee tender — the largest private-company tender on record — closed in October at a reported valuation around $500 billion. The per-employee mechanics surfaced this month: more than 600 current and former employees reportedly participated, with about 75 of them clearing a $30 million per-employee cap. Stripe ran another tender in February at a reported $159 billion. Anthropic completed one in April at $350 billion. Decagon, less than three years old, ran its first in March at $4.5 billion. Thursday Thesis: how the tender offer has become a compensation instrument — and what that may mean for how late-stage equity gets paid.

Paul Smalera

SpaceX filing unveiled; IPO pipeline comes into focus

May 22, 2026

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8 min read

SpaceX filing unveiled; IPO pipeline comes into focus

Three S-1 filings landed inside roughly 72 hours this week — SpaceX publicly, with Oura and Blockchain.com both filing confidentially the same day. A fourth, OpenAI, is reportedly preparing a confidential filing imminently. Separately, Anthropic told investors it expects its first operating profit this quarter on $10.9 billion in revenue — a number that resets the AI-lab comp set.

Paul Smalera

$725B in capex. The math behind the datacenter buildout.

May 21, 2026

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7 min read

$725B in capex. The math behind the datacenter buildout.

In the last two weeks, NextEra agreed to buy Dominion Energy for $67 billion to feed data center power demand. Anthropic signed a deal to pay xAI $1.25 billion per month for compute. CoreWeave doubled Q1 revenue but carries $25 billion in debt at 11% interest. And the hyperscalers collectively guided to $725 billion in 2026 capex. Everyone is building as fast as they can — but the demand forecasts justifying all of it rest on assumptions that Goldman Sachs says can swing by hundreds of billions with a single variable change. Today's thesis: the data center capex chain, who's exposed, and what breaks if the projections are wrong.

Paul Smalera

Musk lost in 2 hours. OpenAI litigation overhang eases; appeal and IPO timing still in focus

May 19, 2026

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4 min read

Musk lost in 2 hours. OpenAI litigation overhang eases; appeal and IPO timing still in focus

A federal jury rejected every claim in Elon Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI in under two hours yesterday, removing the most-cited overhang on the company's IPO timeline. Separately, Anthropic acquired Stainless for a reported $300M+ — the SDK-generation startup whose tooling runs inside OpenAI, Google, and Cloudflare. The frontier labs at scale are now M&A buyers.

Paul Smalera

May 15, 2026

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4 min read

Cerebras popped 108%

Cerebras printed the first true blockbuster tech IPO of 2026 — a 108% first-day pop on a $5.5B raise — and the calendar behind it tells the story of the week. Anthropic is in talks for $30B at a $900B valuation, doubling its February mark. Anduril doubled to $61B in five months. The private market is repricing its top names faster than the IPO window can absorb them.

Paul Smalera

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Archive

SpaceX: a $1.77T ask, a $780B dissent

Anthropic's S-1: Reconstructed From the Record*

SpaceX could hit your 401(k) in 5 days*

Anthropic's reported $965B tops OpenAI

OpenAI's $6.6B Tender: Comp, Not Cash Out

SpaceX filing unveiled; IPO pipeline comes into focus

$725B in capex. The math behind the datacenter buildout.

Musk lost in 2 hours. OpenAI litigation overhang eases; appeal and IPO timing still in focus

Cerebras popped 108%

The Pulse by Augment