Tim Cook steps backAfter a lot of careful prepositioning and messaging, Tim Cook announced that he will become exec chairman and hand over the CEO role to John Ternus, an Apple (almost) lifer who runs hardware. See this week’s column. LINK Anthropic, Alphabet and Amazon On Monday Anthropic announced a ten-year, ‘$100bn’, 5GW infra deal with Amazon, including Amazon’s Trainium chips. Then on Friday, it announced another deal, this time with Google, which will invest $10bn now and up to $30bn more based on performance targets, expanding an investment & computer deal that Anthropic announced with Google and Broadcom earlier this month. Effectively, Anthropic is buying compute with equity, in the context that agentic models, and especially agentic coding, have increased demand for raw capacity by orders of magnitude and the company can’t keep up. GOOGLE, AMAZON The Elon AI shuffleBack in February, Elon Musk arranged for SpaceX to buy his AI lab xAI, which had launched a pretty good frontier model last year, but has since lost all of its founders, with Musk saying it needs to be rebuilt from scratch. Part of that turnaround was apparently exploring a merger with the French lab Mistral, and now there’s a deal to ‘partner’ with Cursor for $10bn, with an option to buy the company later in the year for $60bn. Cursor has also been struggling - it was the super-hot AI coding story this time last year, but Anthropic is now far ahead, and Cursor is ultimately dependent on OpenAI and Anthropic models (it announced its own model, which was really an open-source Chinese model), while agentic coding needs a huge amount of infrastructure that Cursor doesn’t have. The Information reported that Cursor had struggled to raise from VCs, not least because it had over 20% negative gross margins last quarter, though it turned positive more recently. Meanwhile, SpaceX itself (now including xAI) gets closer to IPO, apparently targeting a $75bn raise at a $1.75tr valuation, which is roughly the same as the latest private market prices for both Anthropic ($1tr) and OpenAI ($900bn) combined, where SpaceX itself valued xAI at $250bn in February, although all of these numbers are obviously very impressionistic. Publications that’ve seen the S1 say the Starlink internet business produced $4.4bn profits in 2025 and the company overall had $19bn of revenue (xAI is obviously pre-revenue and expensive). That’s a close-to 100x trailing revenue multiple, but what’s the future? Well… in the dotcom bubble, we had a term for companies that said ‘we’re this now, but eventually we’ll be something else and you should value us on that” - the term was ‘multi-stage rockets’, which is a good comparison for an actual rocket company, but that’s Elon Musk’s contribution to capital markets. “Don’t value Tesla on what it is, value it on things that don’t exist yet” - ten years of autonomy promises, plus solar roofs, batteries, insurance, and sports cars, none of which happened, and now robots. On most people’s SOTP valuations, the actual cars are at most 10% of Tesla’s market cap. The same here: SpaceX has a very cool rocket business with a very unclear TAM, but look! Orbital data centres! Mining on the moon! The problem, as I said a while ago, is that Elon Musk is a bullshitter who delivers… something: he says all this stuff, but there are the car company and the self-landing rockets! He raised money promising the moon, and delivers LEO, and that’s still pretty good. If only he didn’t spend half his time on Twitter promoting white supremacy. CURSOR, BACKGROUND, MISTRAL, SPACEX Intel spikesContinuing the hardware surge and capacity shortage story, Intel’s stock went up 24% on Friday after it beat estimates ($13.6bn revenue versus $12.4bn consensus) and raised guidance for next quarter as companies building datacentres snap up pretty much any chips they can get their hands on. That said, the foundry business remains unproven (for more… ask a semis analyst). LINK The week in AIAs rumoured a few weeks ago, Meta will cut 10% of staff - 8k people - in an efficiency drive to fund AI. As I wrote when this was first suggested, Meta ended 2019 with 45k employees, hired 27k across 2021 and 2022, did an 11k layoff in 2023 but still ended the year up by net 15k, cut another 20k in 2023, and added 12k back by the end of 2025 bringing it to 79k. Cutting 8k now would mean that since 2019 Meta has hired 54k people and laid off 39k, just going by the headline numbers. LINK Anthropic's security around its 'superhuman hacking' model Mythos turned out to have holes that let a bunch of people on Reddit play with it. LINK Meta will record employee mouse and keyboard use as AI training data. LINK Microsoft finally managed to ship a version of Copilot that can interact with your documents in Office. Claude launched this in January after a preview last October, and ChatGPT launched the same in March. Yes, that’s only a few months behind, but isn’t this Microsoft’s entire thing? LINK Anthropic has started requiring some users to provide a photo ID, which means a lot of Chinese tech people who’ve been quietly using Claude over a VPN are being cut off. LINK In other news(Note - every now and then someone complains that there’s too much about AI in this newsletter, which is like someone in 1998 complaining that a tech newsletter talks about the internet too much. Still, there is some other stuff…) If you can make an EV, then they’re a commodity (and Tesla has no differentiation). But EVs are integrated products that are very difficult for the disaggregated model of the legacy auto OEMs. Detroit went in hard but couldn’t make it work and pulled back - now Ford is discussing a partnership with Geely, one of the Chinese leaders, about a tech partnership. LINK The EU has a privacy law waiver that lets tech companies scan user content for CSAM, but that waiver expired this week amid legislative logjam. They will continue scanning anyway. LINK The French weather agency thinks someone tampered with a sensor to win a bet on Polymarket. LINK Tech mediaA few weeks ago OpenAI bought tech talkshow TBPN (me neither) for (apparently) $100m, and now A16Z has invested in MTS, another entrant in the radically under-served market for tech people talking to each other. I have some sympathy for the idea that the media is too often default-negative on tech, and clearly AI has a major comms challenge, with poll after poll showing very clearly that people are really sceptical about whether this is a good thing, which isn’t helped by the CEOs of OpenAI and Anthropic spending so much time saying that this is dangerous and scary. But if you want to persuade people otherwise, and want to achieve that by building new media voices, those voices can't just be talking to you. Both TBPN and now MTS are based on Twitter, when the only people still there are the people who already agree with you, and the first interview on MTS was a MAGA partner and culture warrior at Sequoia. Good luck with that. LINK |
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