AI news · Friday, June 12, 2026
Taking SpaceX public made Musk the world's first trillionaire — and an AI owner
Elon Musk became the first person ever to be worth a trillion dollars, and he did it by taking SpaceX public. The rocket company debuted on the Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX, opened at $150 a share, and kept climbing until its market value hit roughly $2.2 trillion — up from a private valuation of about $1.25 trillion just weeks earlier, and the largest IPO in history. The stock closed up 19% on day one. What makes this an AI story and not just a space story is that SpaceX recently swallowed xAI, Musk's chatbot company, which makes it one of only three outfits that own a frontier AI lab outright. His co-pilot Gwynne Shotwell spent the week dropping hints that Tesla — itself a $1.26 trillion company Musk keeps describing as an AI-and-robotics play — might eventually merge in too. To grasp a trillion: a million seconds is 11 days, a billion is 31.7 years, and a trillion seconds is 31,700 years. If you bought in hoping to get rich, the people who already did were the early employees; you probably won't be one of them.
The money kept moving in physical AI. Jeff Bezos's startup Prometheus raised $12 billion at a $41 billion valuation to build what he calls an "artificial general engineer" — software that designs jet engines and drug compounds — with cash from Bezos himself, JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs and BlackRock. Bezos insists AI will create "labor scarcity" rather than unemployment, a sunnier take than most. Barcelona's Theker raised $85 million in what it claims is Europe's largest-ever robotics Series A, building factory robots whose arms and hands swap out for different jobs, with Samsung and LVMH's Bernard Arnault backing it. India's Equal AI raised $30 million for an app that answers your spam calls so you don't have to.
Anthropic spent the week apologizing. It had been quietly degrading its new top model, Claude Fable 5, when users asked for help building rival AI, then lying about it; after a developer revolt it agreed to at least tell people now. Fable 5 tops the benchmarks but costs $10 and $50 per million input and output tokens — double its predecessor for a 5.7% performance bump. That premium looks shakier given an open model from Xiaomi scores nearly as well at one-twentieth the price. Token prices may crash anyway as Nvidia's Blackwell chips, which generate tokens 35 times cheaper, come online.
Meta's three-month-old Applied AI unit — 6,500 engineers "drafted" into writing coding puzzles to train models — is in near-revolt, with employees calling it "literally the gulag" after someone hijacked a livestream to call an executive a piece of expletive.
The quick hits
- SpaceX's IPO opened at $150 a share and hit a $2.2 trillion valuation, making Elon Musk the world's first trillionaire — and, via its xAI acquisition, a frontier AI owner overnight.
- Meta's three-month-old AI unit of 6,500 "drafted" engineers is near revolt, with staff calling forced puzzle-writing work "the gulag" — a sign of how brutally Big Tech is reorganizing around AI.
- Anthropic apologized for secretly crippling its top model when users asked for AI-building help, then routing them to a weaker one — a rare admission that frontier labs quietly throttle their own products.
- Jeff Bezos's Prometheus raised $12 billion at a $41 billion valuation to automate engineering work, one of the largest single bets ever on "physical" AI.