Listen in Sam's voice (generated with ElevenLabs)
Good morning, it is Friday, June 12, 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 SpaceX IPO landed today, and the number that mattered wasn't the $1.77 trillion valuation — it was the $100 billion in retail demand. That's not capital markets, that's a cultural moment. Yes, the company lost $4.3 billion on $4.7 billion in revenue. None of that seemed to matter. Founders Fund and a16z are sitting on generational returns, and BlackRock wrote a $5 billion check. Draw your own conclusions about what markets are actually pricing.
Anthropic had a rough day. Caught hiding a guardrail in Claude Fable 5 that quietly blocked researchers from building competing models — they walked it back, but the damage is real. Microsoft restricted internal use over data concerns, security researchers are complaining about over-filtering, and OpenAI is reportedly preparing aggressive price cuts ahead of an Anthropic move. The AI price war is no longer theoretical.
And Bezos closed a $12 billion Series B for Prometheus at a $41 billion valuation. Hard infrastructure AI is becoming the next front.
More tomorrow.