Paul Smalera | The Pulse by Augment

Oliver Buchannon

Paul Smalera

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

Jun 5, 2026

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8 min read

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.

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.

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

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.

Anthropic's reported $965B tops OpenAI

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.

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.

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.

$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.

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.

Cerebras popped 108%

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.

Anduril at $61B and defense tech's 2026 reset

May 14, 2026

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5 min read

Anduril at $61B and defense tech's 2026 reset

Wednesday's $5B Anduril round doubled the company in eleven months and capped a record quarter for defense-tech venture funding. The revenue underneath the category looks nothing like what's funding the AI labs, and the difference is starting to matter.

Hackers shipped AI's first working zero-day

May 12, 2026

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6 min read

Hackers shipped AI's first working zero-day

Google's Threat Intelligence Group published evidence Monday of the first documented case of criminals using AI to discover and weaponize a zero-day exploit — a two-factor authentication bypass in a popular open-source admin tool. Google says it disrupted the campaign before it scaled. Cerebras raised its IPO range again ahead of pricing Wednesday night, with the offering now teed up at a basic-share market cap of $34.4B (fully diluted closer to $49B) and a book reportedly more than 20 times oversubscribed.

Ramp $40B. Hyperscalers' $49B tell.

May 8, 2026

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6 min read

Ramp $40B. Hyperscalers' $49B tell.

Ramp is reportedly raising at a $40B+ valuation — a 25% jump in six months. Goldman Sachs flagged this week that roughly 60% of Alphabet's and Amazon's Q1 "other income," about $49B combined, came from gains on private-company equity stakes. Anthropic's CEO put Q1 growth at 80x annualized. The private market isn't just adjacent to the public one anymore. It's showing up in the earnings reports.

Anthropic's tender priced at $350B. The market said $1T.

May 7, 2026

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8 min read

Anthropic's tender priced at $350B. The market said $1T.

A month after the tender closed, the Forge mark is at $1T. What that gap tells us about how private markets actually price.

Anthropic's $1.5B JV with Blackstone

May 5, 2026

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6 min read

Anthropic's $1.5B JV with Blackstone

Anthropic and OpenAI each launched a separately capitalized deployment vehicle in the same news cycle Monday — Anthropic's $1.5B JV with Blackstone, Goldman Sachs, and Hellman & Friedman to push Claude into mid-market enterprises, and OpenAI's $4B+ raise at a $10B pre-money for a new venture called The Deployment Company. Cerebras filed updated IPO terms with a $115–$125 range and a $26.6B fully-diluted mark, and Anthropic's separate $50B primary round at a $900B valuation could close within two weeks.

KKR raised $10B for AI infra

May 1, 2026

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7 min read

KKR raised $10B for AI infra

The hyperscalers reported the largest combined capex quarter on record this week, and the public markets split sharply on whether it's worth it: Alphabet closed its best month since 2004, Meta its worst day since October. OpenAI announced it has hit its 2029 compute target three years early. KKR quietly stood up a $10B+ AI-infrastructure operating company. The build-out is going faster than projected.

The Microsoft-OpenAI deal reset the proxy trade

Apr 30, 2026

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4 min read

The Microsoft-OpenAI deal reset the proxy trade

A widely-pitched trade in private AI investing — buy Microsoft for OpenAI, Amazon for Anthropic, Tesla for xAI — dilutes the underlying bet by a factor of ten or more, with the Tesla version diluting xAI exposure by roughly 750x. Sunday's Microsoft-OpenAI restructuring just broke the cleanest example.

OpenAI rewrote the Microsoft deal

Apr 28, 2026

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5 min read

OpenAI rewrote the Microsoft deal

Microsoft and OpenAI restructured their partnership Monday, ending Microsoft's revenue share to OpenAI, capping OpenAI's payments back to Microsoft, and stripping the exclusivity that had bound OpenAI's models to Azure — a structural shift that, per Wedbush and PitchBook, clears OpenAI's path to a public listing reportedly targeted for late 2026.

SpaceX S-1: $26.5T from AI

Apr 24, 2026

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7 min read

SpaceX S-1: $26.5T from AI

SpaceX's S-1 dropped this week with a number that reframes the filing entirely: $26.5 trillion in TAM from AI, out of $28.5 trillion total. Thoma Bravo is handing Medallia to its creditors — a $5.1 billion equity wipeout that lands as the largest PE-software unwind of this cycle. Cognition is in talks at $25 billion, 2.5x its September mark. And the OpenAI/Anthropic secondary-market split kept widening: Claude's implied valuation on Forge Global reportedly hit $1 trillion the same day OpenAI shipped GPT-5.5.

Power 20 Q1: OpenAI -22%, Anthropic +59%

Apr 23, 2026

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5 min read

Power 20 Q1: OpenAI -22%, Anthropic +59%

Augment just published its latest Power 20 rankings, updated for Q1'26. The headline number is staggering on its own — the 20 most active pre-IPO names on the platform now carry $4.25 trillion in aggregate estimated market cap, up roughly $940B in a single quarter, larger than Amazon's public market cap and 2.5x Meta's.The story underneath the headline is weirder. Q1'26 was the quarter OpenAI posted its first 22% drawdown in Augment history — in the same ninety days it closed the largest primary funding round in Silicon Valley history. Anthropic, meanwhile, gained 59% on the secondary market and is now fielding unsolicited offers at $800 billion, more than double its February primary mark. Two AI leaders. Opposite directions. Same quarter. That's the deep dive for today.

Tim Cook out. Ternus gets a $4T Apple

Apr 21, 2026

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4 min read

Tim Cook out. Ternus gets a $4T Apple

Tim Cook is stepping down as Apple CEO on September 1, with hardware chief John Ternus taking over a year earlier than most insiders had modeled — and inheriting the company's still-unsettled AI strategy. Meanwhile, Amazon added up to $25 billion to its Anthropic position and locked the lab into a $100 billion-plus AWS commitment.

Anthropic Says No to $800 Billion

Apr 17, 2026

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6 min read

Anthropic Says No to $800 Billion

Anthropic is turning away investors offering $800 billion-plus valuations — a signal that the company may believe its leverage only increases from here, especially with an IPO reportedly on the table for October. Meanwhile, a routine Alaska filing revealed Google's hidden 6% stake in SpaceX, worth an estimated $100 billion at IPO. And Amazon-backed nuclear startup X-Energy hit the road this week for an $800 million IPO on Nasdaq, bringing AI's power problem one step closer to an investable thesis.

Databricks 25x, Snowflake 12x: The NAV Trap

Apr 16, 2026

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9 min read

Databricks 25x, Snowflake 12x: The NAV Trap

Six private mega-caps trade at 2–3x public comps. The evergreen funds marking NAV off those prints are running a feedback loop, not price discovery. Four IPO catalysts in 120 days will break the loop or prove it right.

OpenAI says Anthropic's $30B is off by $8B

Apr 14, 2026

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8 min read

OpenAI says Anthropic's $30B is off by $8B

OpenAI's chief revenue officer sent an internal memo claiming Anthropic overstates its headline $30B run rate by roughly $8B — a direct challenge to the accounting narrative anchoring Anthropic's $600B secondary valuation. Separately, $600M in OpenAI shares sit unsold on secondary platforms while $2B in buy-side demand chases Anthropic stock with zero sellers. Underneath all of it, SpaceX's public S-1 is weeks away — and it reshapes the IPO window for every company standing behind it.

CoreWeave has now signed the four biggest AI labs

Apr 10, 2026

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15 min read

CoreWeave has now signed the four biggest AI labs

Meta, Anthropic, OpenAI, Google — all on one platform. The $66.8B backlog story, Anthropic employees won't sell at $350B, and xAI admits it's behind. (Our apologies for the late delivery — apparently our coffee machine was illiquid today. Here's hoping our bartender won't be.)

Anthropic's Mythos Just Broke Cybersecurity's Business Model

Apr 9, 2026

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12 min read

Anthropic's Mythos Just Broke Cybersecurity's Business Model

Anthropic did something on Monday that no AI company has done before: it announced a model too dangerous to release — and then handed it to Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, CrowdStrike, and seven other organizations to go find bugs in their own code. The model is called Claude Mythos Preview. The initiative is called Project Glasswing. And if the numbers Anthropic is publishing are real, the cybersecurity industry just woke up in a fundamentally different world. Here's our Deep Dive: