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Matt Davis — Need2Know Chedditor

News You Need2Know

• Musk lifts the veil on SpaceX, pre-IPO

• Nvidia's stock falls despite strong earnings

• Zuckerberg defends 8,000 AI-related layoffs

• AI takes on the great outdoors with exoskeletons

• U.S. awards billions to quantum computing firms

• Poll of the day: It’s World-Famous-575™ Time

• Poll of the day: The HUNK mug, tho…

What’s the stock market up to, eh?

$SPX ( ▲ 0.17% ) $DJI ( ▲ 0.55% ) $NDX ( ▲ 1.59% )  

Companies mentioned in today’s newsletter

$SPCX ( ▼ 0.18% )  $NVDA ( ▼ 1.77% )  $META ( ▲ 0.38% )  $IBM ( ▲ 12.43% )  $GLOBAL.P ( 0.0% )  $QBTS ( ▲ 33.37% )  $RGTI ( ▲ 30.57% )  $INFQ ( ▲ 31.49% )

Musk lifts the veil on SpaceX, pre-IPO

SpaceX, Elon Musk’s famously secretive rocket and satellite enterprise, has finally revealed its financial inner workings ahead of a highly anticipated initial public offering. The company's massive 200,000-word prospectus unveils a staggering $1.25 trillion valuation, with the firm aiming to raise between $50 billion and $75 billion from investors.

Financially, SpaceX is a mix of explosive growth and massive spending. In 2025, revenue soared 33% to $18.7 billion. However, heavy capital investments in AI — totaling $20.7 billion — dragged the company to a $4.9 billion net loss last year. Fortunately, its satellite internet service, Starlink, remains a highly lucrative safety net, generating about $4.4 billion in operating income.

The IPO filings highlight Musk's shifting focus toward AI, a sector he views as a $26.5 trillion addressable market. His grand ambition is to "extend 'the light of consciousness to the stars' and harness the sun 'to power a truth-seeking artificial intelligence'.”

Governance remains strictly in Musk's hands, as he controls over 85% of shareholder votes through super-voting shares. This iron grip may stem from his past frustrations with public markets. As he noted in a 2023 interview, "There’s a lot of pressure, like immense pressure, on a public company to not have a bad quarter.”

SpaceX did not say how many shares it will sell in the IPO or at what price. It will trade on the Nasdaq under the symbol $SPCX ( ▼ 0.18% ) .

And I assume you’ll be buying some stock, yeah?

Quote of the Day

Nvidia's stock falls despite strong earnings

Poor Nvidia $NVDA ( ▼ 1.77% ). The company only managed to rake in $81.62 billion in revenue this quarter, crushing Wall Street's expectations. Naturally, the market responded by immediately dumping the stock, because nearly doubling your data center revenue to a staggering $75.2 billion just isn't enough to impress anyone anymore.

CEO Jensen Huang must be wiping his tears on one of those jackets of his. He tried to hype up the crowd on the earnings call, humbly declaring, "This was an extraordinary quarter. Demand has gone parabolic," and insisting that, "Agentic AI has arrived." He even went so far as to call the current tech boom "the largest infrastructure expansion in human history.”

Not to be outdone, CFO Colette Kress casually dropped that their new Vera CPU "opens a brand new $200 billion tab for Nvidia,” which is just pocket change, really.

But alas, despite Huang boasting, "We built it ahead of this moment so that when agentic AI arrived, Nvidia would be ready," investors are seemingly bored with all the winning.

Maybe they're sweating over Nvidia's massive tech hyperscaler customers building their own rival chips, or maybe they're just tired of Nvidia beating expectations in a pathetic 18 out of their last 20 quarters. Better luck next time, guys.

Zuckerberg defends 8,000 AI-related layoffs

Meta $META ( ▲ 0.38% ) CEO Mark Zuckerberg has masterminded another brilliant strategy: Firing 8,000 people to make room for the glorious future of the metaverse AI. In a company-wide memo detailing the elimination of roughly 10% of Meta's workforce, Zuckerberg valiantly defended the bloodbath by calling AI "the most consequential technology of our lifetimes.”

Of course, it’s always a bad look to toss thousands of your own employees onto the street. But Zuck is feeling great about it! Despite axing 8,000 workers and leaving another 6,000 roles vacant, he gleefully told his staff, "This is the most dynamic I have seen our industry." And he even claimed, "We're transforming our company to make sure it will always be the best place for talented people to have the greatest impact." 

So you’re not only fired, people. You’re talentless?

To wrap up his masterclass in tone-deaf leadership, Zuckerberg cheerfully noted that he is "optimistic about everything we're building to give billions of people the power to express themselves and connect with the people they care about." He also graciously mentioned he was "grateful to those leaving today." 

And I'm sure they’re just as grateful to you, Mark. Seriously though, when are you gonna change the company’s name again?

Song of the Day: Kacey Musgraves, ‘Horses and Divorces.’

Can you turn a cool rhyming couplet into an entire new-country song? Kacey Musgraves and Miranda Lambert certainly seem to think so, and who am I to argue?

AI takes on the great outdoors with exoskeletons

AI is officially stepping off the screen and onto the hiking trails. With devices like Hypershell’s X Ultra S personal exoskeleton, AI is entering the physical realm in a big way and the Wall Street Journal’s Nicole Nguyen took one out for a spin.

These bionic leg boosters consist of a waistband and thigh braces powered by twin hip motors that draw up to 1,000 watts. E-hiking with the device is driven by AI software called Hyperintuition, which "interprets your movements to deliver the right force." While wearing the rig initially feels like a "puppeteer controlling my legs," Nicole writes, it makes steep inclines and sandy terrain feel incredibly effortless once you find a rhythm. In fact, the exoskeleton's top speed is so powerful that it theoretically "could help you run an elite four-minute mile,” she writes.

However, the technology still has a few stumbling blocks. The AI struggles with descents, as it "isn’t smart enough to detect them," forcing hikers to manually activate a Downhill mode in a companion app. Furthermore, taking the bionic legs off after a long trek can leave your body feeling sluggish and heavy, much like an "astronaut returning to Earth, getting reacquainted with my own muscles."

While perhaps not quite ready for the mainstream, these AI-powered exoskeletons offer a fascinating, superhuman glimpse into the future of outdoor exploration. I wouldn’t mind giving them a try on the squash court, honestly.

U.S. awards billions to quantum computing firms

The Trump administration has announced a $2 billion investment across nine quantum-computing companies to accelerate the nascent industry, which President Trump considers a top economic and national security priority. In a unique approach, these deals involve the U.S. government taking minority equity stakes in the funded tech firms.

What’s quantum computing? Well. Think of a regular computer as a massive row of light switches. Each switch can only be off (0) or on (1). Everything your phone or laptop does is just a combination of billions of these 0s and 1s. A quantum computer replaces those switches with qubits (quantum bits). Instead of being just on or off, a qubit acts more like a spinning coin. While it's spinning, it is a blur of both heads and tails at the same time. Because of this and a few other mind-bending physics properties, quantum computers can process information differently, offering massive multitasking. They are being built to solve incredibly complex puzzles that would take a normal computer thousands of years—like designing brand-new life-saving medications, creating ultra-efficient batteries, or cracking advanced security encryption.

In short: Regular computers calculate linearly, one step at a time. Quantum computers use physics shortcuts to calculate almost instantly.

IBM $IBM ( ▲ 12.43% ) is the biggest winner, slated to receive $1 billion to establish the nation’s first specialized quantum chip manufacturing facility, in exchange for an undisclosed equity stake. Other major beneficiaries include chip maker GlobalFoundries $GLOBAL.P ( 0.0% ) , which will receive $375 million in exchange for a roughly 1% government stake, as well as publicly traded firms D-Wave Quantum $QBTS ( ▲ 33.37% ) , Rigetti Computing $RGTI ( ▲ 30.57% ) , and Infleqtion $INFQ ( ▲ 31.49% ) .

The firms’ stock all spiked:

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick championed the grants — which draw funding from the 2022 Chips and Science Act: “The Trump administration is leading the world into a new era of American innovation,” he said. While some analysts warn that the quantum sector is still too risky for government equity investments, Lutnick argued the deal structures ensure that taxpayers will ultimately benefit.

Industry leaders share the government's optimism. IBM Chief Executive Arvind “I just got a billion dollars of taxpayer money” Krishna noted that this wave of funding “is a great statement of confidence that this industry is right around the corner within a couple of years.”

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Poll of the day: It’s World-Famous-575™ Time

Poll of the day: The HUNK mug, tho…

We asked: “What do you think of Jeff Bezos saying low-income workers should avoid income tax?”

You answered:

⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ I think it's cool, leave him alone. The guy is just trying to enjoy his $230 million Miami compound and megayacht in peace. (18)
🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ It’s adorable that a guy with a $269 billion net worth thinks the real economic injustice in America is a household making $54,000 paying $913 in federal taxes. (94)
🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ I'm sure this populist gambit is completely unrelated to protecting his own billions from "tax-the-rich" politicians. (67)
🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ He literally threw a three-day Venice wedding with a foam party on his superyacht. But please, Jeff, tell us more about the "K-shaped" economy. (40)
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 Classic billionaire logic: He proudly declares lawmakers should slash taxes for the poor, offers absolutely no specific plans on how to actually achieve it, and then goes back to drinking coffee from his "HUNK" mug. (226)
⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ I'd believe Jeff Bezos about anything, to be fair, since he looked like he started juicing and got those guns out. (11)
456 Votes via @beehiiv polls

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