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  • 🚀 Musk is a trillionaire. The AI IPO price is set.

🚀 Musk is a trillionaire. The AI IPO price is set.

SpaceX popped 19% on day one. Here’s why it’s secretly Anthropic’s stress test, not Elon’s victory lap.

June 13, 2026

In partnership with

My fellow AI explorers

Quite a jam-packed 48 hours.

Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire on Friday, but the people sweating hardest about it work at Anthropic and OpenAI. Because SpaceX’s blockbuster debut just fired the starting gun on the biggest IPO sequence in tech history, and the next two names in line are the labs building the models you and I use every day.

And while everyone stared at the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, Google quietly did something arguably more disruptive to your wallet: it turned AI into a price war. And Nvidia found a clever side door back into the China market it had basically been locked out of.

Three mega-stories, one weekend. Let’s get into it.

In today’s edition:

  • Six people doing the work. Your headcount is one.

    Your finance close runs in #finance. Stripe and QuickBooks reconciled, runway updated, posted Sunday night without you asking.

    Engineering review lands in #eng. Viktor pulled the open PRs, left comments on auth-refactor, flagged a dependency blocking api-pagination.

    Campaign brief lands in #growth: Meta CPA up 18%, recommendation to pause broad match, a draft landing page already deployed for the variant test.

    You hired him on day zero. He lives in Slack and Microsoft Teams alongside your contractors and investors, connects to 3,000+ tools, pushes back when you ship something dumb.

    "Viktor is now an integral team member, and after weeks of use we still feel we haven't uncovered the full potential." Patrick, Director, Yarra Web.

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🚀 The AI IPO Dominoes Just Started Falling

On Friday, SpaceX went public, and the numbers are almost hard to type with a straight face.

Shares were priced at $135 and then closed up nearly 19% at around $161, pushing the company’s valuation past $2 trillion and officially making Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire. It’s the largest IPO in recorded history.

But the part that matters for this newsletter isn’t the rocket company. It’s who’s standing in line right behind it.

Here’s the setup:

  • 🥇 SpaceX is move one in a sequential game. Anthropic confidentially filed its IPO paperwork earlier this month, and OpenAI followed days later. For the first time ever, two leading AI labs are in the IPO pipeline at the same time.

  • 💰 The valuations are staggering. Anthropic closed a funding round at a $965 billion valuation in May. OpenAI sits north of $850 billion. Combined with SpaceX, we’re talking about close to $4 trillion of new public AI-adjacent stock hitting the market in a single year.

  • 📉 The market is already nervous. The “Magnificent Seven” tech giants have collectively shed roughly $2 trillion in market value this month, partly on fears that this IPO wave pulls money out of existing tech holdings.

Why this is the smart-money story of the week: the AI IPO is a domino chain, not a simultaneous event. SpaceX going first means everyone gets to watch how public investors actually price a pre-profit, AI-heavy mega-company before Anthropic and OpenAI have to commit. As one former Nasdaq chief put it, he’d “definitely bet” both labs follow this year.

And there’s a deliciously weird wrinkle.

Anthropic reportedly trains Claude partly on compute it rents from Musk’s empire in Memphis, the same infrastructure originally built for Grok. So a chunk of the AI revenue investors just bid up in SpaceX is, in effect, Anthropic paying the maker of a rival model to train the model beating it.

Call it irony, call it capitalism.

🔮 Prediction: SpaceX’s pop buys Anthropic and OpenAI breathing room, but not a green light. The real test is whether SPCX holds its gains over the next few weeks. If it does, expect Anthropic to move fast and price into the enthusiasm. If it sags back toward its $135 offer price, the entire “pre-profit AI deserves a frontier valuation” thesis gets repriced, and OpenAI’s roadshow suddenly gets a lot harder. The next 30 days of one rocket stock may quietly decide the valuation of the entire AI industry.

Would you actually buy Anthropic or OpenAI stock at these valuations, or is this the top? Hit reply, I read every one.

💸 Google Just Turned AI Into a Price War

For three years the AI race has been about who has the smartest model. Google just changed the question to: who’s the cheapest?

This week Google dropped its entry-level Gemini plan, AI Plus, from $7.99 to $4.99 a month and doubled the included cloud storage from 200GB to 400GB. That’s double the storage for less than half the price, and it makes Google’s entry AI tier one of the most aggressively priced products in the entire consumer AI market.

What you’re actually getting at $4.99:

  • ☁️ 400GB of storage shared across Gmail, Drive, and Photos, with family sharing for up to six people, available in over 160 countries.

  • 🤖 Real AI features, not a stripped trial, including a new Daily Brief agent that summarizes your day and access to Gemini Omni, Google’s newest video-generation model.

  • 📊 A direct shot at the $20 club. ChatGPT Plus, Claude Pro, and Perplexity Pro all sit at roughly $20/month. Google just undercut the on-ramp to AI by 4x.

The strategy here is pure ecosystem judo.

Google isn’t claiming AI Plus has the best model on earth. It’s betting that for the hundreds of millions of people already living in Gmail, Drive, and Photos, “good enough AI plus double the storage for five bucks” is an impossible deal to refuse. The model is almost beside the point. The bundle is the weapon.

And the timing is no accident. The cut landed right after Apple’s WWDC AI blitz, and right as OpenAI and Anthropic march toward their IPOs, exactly when those companies need to show investors fat, growing subscription revenue.

Google just made that story harder to tell.

🔮 Prediction: This is the moment AI pricing decouples from AI capability. Within six months, expect the frontier labs to stop competing on price at the low end entirely and retreat upmarket, leaning into premium $100-to-$200 power-user tiers where margins survive, while ceding the $5 mass market to whoever can subsidize it with an existing ecosystem. Google, Apple, and Amazon can play that game. Pure-play labs that have to charge for the model itself cannot. The danger for OpenAI and Anthropic isn’t a better model. It’s a free one with 400GB of storage attached.

Be honest: would $4.99 Gemini pull you away from ChatGPT or Claude? Or is the model quality still worth the premium? Reply and settle it for me.

🎧 30-Second AI Play

Stress-Test Any AI Subscription Before You Pay For It

With Google now offering AI at $4.99 and everyone else at $20, the smart move isn’t picking a side; it’s running a 10-minute bake-off with your own real work before you commit a dollar. Here’s the workflow:

  1. Build a “torture test” of 5 prompts from your actual life. Not trivia. Pull a real email you need to write, a messy doc you need summarized, a spreadsheet question, a coding or formula task, and one creative ask. These are your benchmarks.

  2. Open the free tiers side by side. Gemini, ChatGPT, and Claude all have free or trial access. Put the same five prompts into each, in the same order.

  3. Score each on three things only: Did it nail the task, did it need follow-up hand-holding, and did the tone match what you’d actually send? Ignore the marketing benchmarks; yours are the only ones that matter.

  4. Weigh it for your ecosystem. If you live in Gmail and Photos, factor in that $4.99 storage bundle. If you live in code, weigh the coding result more heavily. The “best” model is the one that’s best at your mix.

  5. Pick the cheapest one that passed. If the $5 option cleared your torture test, the $20 premium is just brand loyalty.

💡 Pro tip: Re-run this every quarter. Model rankings flip almost monthly right now, and the price war means loyalty is actively costing you money.

Want to get your business in front of 150k+ startup founders, engineers, and AI early adopters?

⚡ Other Relevant AI News!

🇨🇳 Nvidia found a side door back into China: with GPU sales frozen by export controls, it’s now pitching Chinese clients its Arm-based “Vera” CPUs, with orders open now and chips landing as early as August.

🚀 OpenAI confidentially filed for its own IPO just days after Anthropic, setting up the first time two frontier AI labs race to Wall Street in the same year.

⚽ The 2026 World Cup has quietly become the largest AI surveillance test ever: facial recognition, anti-drone systems, and Hyundai robot dogs across 16 stadiums, with the EFF warning that the infrastructure outlasts the tournament.

📉 Salesforce ran another round of AI-era layoffs, and many of the 86 cuts were on Agentforce, its flagship AI team, a pointed reminder that even AI divisions aren’t immune to AI-driven “efficiency.”

🛒 Google is bringing Chrome auto-browse to Android late this month, letting Gemini agents fill forms, book appointments, and complete transactions, the first real step toward AI that acts instead of just answers.

🦋 Anthropic kept expanding its Mythos access program this week, broadening the trusted-partner circle for its most powerful model just days after launching the public Fable 5 version.

✨ Golden Nuggets

  • 🚀 SpaceX’s record IPO made Musk a trillionaire and turned into a live stress test for Anthropic and OpenAI’s own listings.

  • 💸 Google cut Gemini to $4.99 and doubled storage, splitting AI pricing away from AI capability and squeezing the pure-play labs.

  • 🇨🇳 Nvidia is routing around US export controls by selling CPUs, not GPUs, into a China market where its share had fallen to zero.

Until our next AI rendezvous,

Anthony | Founder of Uncover AI