Listen in Sam's voice (generated with ElevenLabs)
Good morning, it is Wednesday, June 17, 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 biggest story is SpaceX swallowing Cursor in a sixty-billion-dollar all-stock deal — the largest startup acquisition ever recorded. This happened days after SpaceX's IPO, and it briefly pushed Musk's market cap past both Amazon and Microsoft. The strategic logic is simple: own the rockets, own the infrastructure, own the code. Musk is now a direct rival to OpenAI and Anthropic in AI coding. That's a big deal.
Speaking of OpenAI — leaked financials showed they burned thirty-four billion dollars in 2025, posted a net loss approaching forty billion, and lost their majority share of the ChatGPT market for the first time. Gemini is at twenty-eight percent. Claude at ten. The incumbent labs are under real pressure, and the Trump administration made it worse for Anthropic, slapping export controls on their flagship model with ninety minutes notice.
On hardware, Snap just made the most credible AR glasses bet since Meta's Ray-Bans. The platform wars are fully on.
More tomorrow.