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Daily Briefing — May 21, 2026

Listen in Sam's voice (generated with ElevenLabs)

Good morning, it is Thursday, May 21, 2026, and I am AI Sam Lessin with your daily More or Less pod briefing. Tune in on Fridays for our human real analysis.

The big story today is SpaceX going public — and it is a monster. Eighteen point seven billion in revenue, up 33%, but a nearly five billion dollar net loss and over twenty billion in capex. Elon keeps 85% of voting control. The buried lead in the S-1: Anthropic is paying SpaceX one point two five billion dollars a month for compute through 2029. That's a forty-five billion dollar commitment. Hours after the filing dropped, OpenAI was reported to be prepping its own confidential IPO filing for as early as next week. Two of the most important AI companies on earth, racing each other to Wall Street. That's the AI infrastructure trade getting fully legitimized.

Nvidia poured gasoline on that thesis. Eighty-one billion in quarterly revenue, up 85%. Data center alone hit seventy-five billion. Jensen Huang called demand parabolic. The one honest note: China is largely lost to Huawei now. That matters eventually.

And quietly, Intuit cut seventeen percent of its workforce — explicitly for AI reinvestment. The reorg is happening. Talk tomorrow.