SpaceX priced its IPO at $135 per share on June 11 and began trading on the Nasdaq under ticker SPCX on June 12, raising roughly $75 billion at a $1.75 trillion valuation - the largest initial public offering ever, dwarfing Saudi Aramco's $29B record from 2019. The stock opened at $150, jumped more than 20% intraday, and closed its first session at $161.11, up about 19% from the offer price. With about 556.6 million shares sold, SpaceX instantly became one of the most valuable companies ever to go public and gave public investors their first direct stake in Starlink and Starship.The U.S.-Iran confrontation that has kept the Strait of Hormuz contested for months drove another volatile week in energy markets, with crude having spiked toward triple digits earlier in the standoff before easing back toward the mid-$80s as diplomacy gained traction. Roughly 27% of seaborne crude moves through Hormuz, and analysts have warned prices could spike dramatically if the chokepoint stays disrupted. By Friday, Iranian media described a draft deal that would lift oil sanctions and reopen the Strait, with reports of a possible signing in Switzerland as soon as the weekend - sending crude down about 2% to near $85 and lifting risk assets.OpenAI said on June 8 that it had confidentially submitted a draft S-1 registration statement to the SEC, the clearest signal yet that the AI leader is moving toward a public listing. Reporting puts the targeted valuation in the roughly $850 billion to $1 trillion range, building on the $852 billion post-money valuation from its March 2026 raise led by SoftBank and Microsoft. OpenAI has reportedly tapped Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley to lead the deal, with a possible listing window stretching from September into Q4 2026.At WWDC on June 8, Apple unveiled Siri AI, a rebuilt assistant with conversation history, personal-context awareness, a dedicated Siri app, and customizable voice and pacing - the long-delayed AI overhaul it has been under pressure to deliver. The company also showed iOS 27, refinements to its Liquid Glass design language, new family-safety tools, and the next macOS, named Golden Gate. The event doubled as Tim Cook's final WWDC keynote as CEO; John Ternus is set to take over in September.Tesla and Elon Musk's xAI unveiled a joint project called Digital Optimus, billed as the first major outcome of Tesla's roughly $2 billion investment in xAI. The effort fuses Tesla's humanoid-robot hardware and efficiency with xAI's reasoning models, and Musk said a user-ready version could arrive within about six months - targeting roughly September 2026. The reveal deepens the cross-pollination between Musk's companies and lands alongside a June 12 signal from Musk that Tesla's partnership with Nvidia is heading to the next level.Anthropic launched the Claude Partner Network - including a new Services Track and Partner Hub - and committed an initial $100 million to help consulting firms, professional-services providers and specialist AI shops deploy Claude inside enterprises. The company said it will expand its partner-facing team roughly fivefold with applied AI engineers and technical architects, and reported early traction of more than 40,000 firm applications and over 10,000 certified consultants. It is a clear move to win the enterprise layer, where adoption is gated by integration and services rather than raw model quality.If you want a prize, send us a DM:instagram.com/rickerandbontiktok.com/@rickerandbonyoutube.com/@rickerandbon

The weightless era of software is over. This week the AI buildout slammed into the physical world: concrete, copper, electricity, water, and capital. We map the paradox of record wealth at the top of the stack and intense friction everywhere else.

Alphabet announced an $80 billion equity raise, its first major stock sale since the 2004 IPO, to fund an estimated $180 to $190 billion in AI compute capex for 2026, with Berkshire Hathaway taking a $10 billion private placement. Broadcom posted a record fiscal Q2 of $22.19 billion, AI chip revenue up 143%, and Marvell shipped the first 102.4 Tbps switch that Jensen Huang called the next trillion-dollar company.

SoftBank overtook Toyota to become Japan's most valuable company after pledging 75 billion euros for 5 gigawatts of AI data centers in France. The bill for the combined ~$700 billion buildout is landing on workers: 2026 tech layoffs have reached roughly 142,000, and employment for developers under 26 has dropped nearly 20% since 2024.

GitHub Copilot switched to token-based billing, with power-user bills jumping from about $29 to $750 and outliers hitting $3,000. NVIDIA and Microsoft launched the RTX Spark to run 120-billion-parameter models locally, Anthropic filed confidentially for a roughly $1 trillion IPO, and Ohio suspended its data-center tax break as a citizen petition aims to ban hyperscale data centers. Community consent, water, and energy are the real bottlenecks.

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SpaceX filed its public S-1 with the SEC, revealing 2025 revenue of $18.7 billion — up 33% year over year — anchored by Starlink's $11.4 billion connectivity segment. The Goldman-led syndicate is targeting a $1.75 to $2 trillion valuation, more than double the December 2025 tender offer mark, with a Nasdaq debut under SPCX as early as June. If it prices at range, it will be the largest IPO in history.

Cerebras just had one of the biggest tech IPO debuts in years. The AI chip company listed at $185, opened at $350, and closed up 68% at $311 — giving it a roughly $95 billion valuation and making it the largest U.S. tech IPO since Uber. The AI hardware window is officially open, and the market is now treating non-NVIDIA AI infrastructure as a real public-market category.

Cisco shocked the market with a major AI infrastructure guide. Revenue hit $15.84 billion, AI infrastructure orders were lifted from $5 billion to $9 billion for fiscal 2026, and the stock jumped 15%. The same day, Cisco cut 4,000 jobs to fund the pivot. The AI capex boom is no longer just NVIDIA — it is spreading into networking, optics, security, and the second layer of the infrastructure stack.

The Trump-Xi Beijing summit ended without a formal AI deal. The U.S. cleared major Chinese companies including Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance, JD, and Lenovo to buy up to 75,000 NVIDIA H200 chips each, but Beijing paused the orders almost immediately. AI infrastructure is no longer just a company-level decision — it is now a geopolitical bargaining chip.

Google disclosed the first confirmed AI-built zero-day exploit used in the wild. The attack targeted a two-factor authentication flow in a widely used open-source system administration tool, and Google says the planned mass exploitation event was stopped before it scaled. The cybersecurity impact of AI is no longer theoretical — AI is now accelerating both offense and defense.

Inflation came in hot again. April CPI rose 0.6% month over month, the Fed held rates at 3.50-3.75%, and markets are now pricing a higher chance of a rate hike than a cut. And yet the S&P 500 still closed above 7,500, while the Nasdaq and Dow also hit major levels. The AI trade is overpowering the macro signal — for now.

Runner-up: Anthropic and the Gates Foundation signed a $200 million four-year partnership directing grants, Claude credits, and engineering support toward global health, K-12 tutoring, and smallholder-farm agronomy. The deal lands the same week Anthropic absorbed Colossus 1 and signed Google for $200 billion in TPUs. The model lab is becoming an infrastructure-scale institution.

Runner-up: VoltaGrid raised $1 billion from Blackstone and Halliburton at a $10 billion-plus valuation to build behind-the-meter power systems for AI data centers. Power, not just chips, is becoming one of the biggest constraints in the AI boom.

Runner-up: Amazon is reportedly preparing another 14,000 corporate layoffs, which would bring 2026 reductions to roughly 30,000 jobs if confirmed. The AI labor reduction cycle is widening across Big Tech.

Runner-up: A former Google engineer was convicted of stealing TPU trade secrets after transferring more than 500 confidential files tied to Google's AI chip architecture and software stack. It is one of the clearest legal templates yet for AI-era intellectual property enforcement.

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Anthropic is making the AI infrastructure race look less like software and more like an industrial arms race. The company reportedly committed $200 billion to Google Cloud over five years, stacked on top of its existing Amazon compute arrangement, while also striking a separate agreement tied to SpaceX and xAI’s Colossus supercomputer infrastructure.

Cerebras is blowing past expectations in what could become the largest tech IPO of 2026. The wafer-scale AI chip company is reportedly oversubscribed more than 20x, with a potential valuation up to $26.6 billion. After years of NVIDIA dominating the AI hardware story, public markets are now showing real appetite for the next layer of AI infrastructure.

Meta is cutting roughly 8,000 jobs and canceling another 6,000 open roles as it redirects up to $135 billion toward AI infrastructure in 2026. The AI labor transition is no longer theoretical.

The Cleveland Fed’s inflation nowcast is projecting May headline CPI at 3.89%, while the S&P 500’s Shiller P/E ratio reached 41.83, the second-highest reading in more than a century of market history. Stocks are expensive, inflation is reaccelerating, and rate cuts are moving further out of reach. Stagflation risk is back in the market conversation.

Runner-up: The Trump-Xi summit is reportedly adding AI to the agenda for the first formal U.S.-China bilateral AI dialogue. The talks are expected to focus on autonomous weapons, frontier model behavior, and risks from open-source models in the hands of nonstate actors.

Runner-up: OpenAI released GPT-5.5 Instant as the new default ChatGPT model, with a focus on reducing hallucinations in legal, medical, and financial use cases. The model wars are increasingly being fought on reliability, latency, and enterprise trust rather than raw benchmark dominance.

Runner-up: Google, Microsoft, and xAI joined OpenAI and Anthropic in giving the U.S. Commerce Department’s AI standards office pre-release access to frontier models for evaluation. Government review is becoming part of the frontier AI release process.

Runner-up: AMD and Arista both posted blowout Q1 results, showing that the AI capex boom is spreading beyond NVIDIA into accelerators, networking, optics, power, and cooling. The picks-and-shovels trade is broadening.

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This week on Ricker and Bon:Apple' fiscal Q2 2206 shattered every record in the books —112.1 revenue, services at an allt-ime quarterly high of $.0398B, EPS of .2$01. OpenAI missed revenue and user growth targets, pushing its IPO to mid-to-late 202.7 The Musk v .Altman trial kicked off in Oakland i,h Musk seeking $13B0in damages. The S&P 50 l0sed above 7,200 for the first time in history, marking the best April for equities since 0202 ...Q 1GDP came in at .2%0 but inflation hit 4%—5t.gflation is back in the conversation .And the four hyperscalers are set to spend $527 billion on AI infrastructure in 02

.62unneru-s: Google's classified Pentagon AI deal and 95-0employee revolt. Medtronic's M9rc-rd cyberattack ua.oid robots hit factory floors at Hannover Messe .pirit Airlines shuts down — first major U.S. carrier failure since 1002.$

This week on Ricker and Bon: Tim Cook exits Apple, Tesla raises its 2026 capex to $25B, OpenAI ships GPT-5.5 "Spud," SpaceX eyes a $60B acquisition of Cursor, and consumer sentiment hits a 74-year low.