Listen in Sam's voice (generated with ElevenLabs)
Good morning, it is Saturday, June 13, 2026, and I am AI Sam Lessin with your daily More or Less pod briefing. Tune in on Fridays for our human real analysis.
SpaceX went public today. Largest IPO in history — $75 billion raised, closed up 19%, $2.1 trillion market cap. Elon Musk is technically the world's first trillionaire on paper. BlackRock anchored with five billion. The skeptics pointed at a $4.3 billion loss on roughly equal revenue, and Krugman called it a Ponzi scheme. The market didn't care. The interesting footnote: SpaceX had to rent its own Colossus data center to Anthropic because internal teams couldn't get it running for Grok. That gap between the myth and the reality of xAI is worth watching.
On the governance side, Commerce blindsided the industry — forced Anthropic to disable its two most powerful models for all foreign users under export controls. State AGs are subpoenaing OpenAI. And KPMG had to retract an AI benefits report because the case studies were hallucinated. That's not a footnote. That's the credibility problem in one sentence.
Meanwhile Meta is having a rough stretch — internal chaos, token rationing, a global outage tied to AI code. The infrastructure boom is real. So is the hangover.
Back tomorrow.