SpaceX IPO, AI Compute, and Broken Benchmarks

SpaceX IPO closes up 19% and delivers the world’s first trillionaire Marina Temkin Sean O'Kane 1:20 PM PDT · June 12, 2026 SpaceX lifted off on its first day as a public company , immediately jumping to $150 a share after it began trading on the Nasdaq, around 11% higher than the $135 figure at which it officially p…

The stock price reached as high as $176 in midday trading, pushing the company’s market capitalization to nearly $2.3 trillion, before ultimately settling 19% higher at $160.95 as markets closed.

The demand for SpaceX is also a function of its small float, with only about 4% of shares available for public trading, while early investors and employees hold the rest. SpaceX also successfully lobbied a number of indexes (like the Nasdaq 100) to change their inclusion rules. The company will now join those indexe…

Robinhood said it has seen “record-breaking” traffic on its trading platform Friday in the hours after SpaceX’s historic public markets debut.

The debut is also one of the largest windfalls in the history of venture capital. The returns to Founders Fund, which invested $600 million in the company and owns a 3% stake, are estimated at more than $50 billion at the IPO price of $135, according to Bloomberg . Meanwhile, Andreessen Horowitz’s stake is worth mor…

Bloomberg, via Techmeme, reports SpaceX decided to rent its Colossus 1 data center to Anthropic.

The report says internal teams struggled to use it for Grok development due to latency issues.

Techmeme's summary repeats that Musk's firm struggled with latency issues with Colossus 1.

The scraped excerpt does not provide more technical detail about the rental terms.

Financial Times reports KPMG retracted a report on AI's benefits.

The report was found to exaggerate AI adoption with case studies that appeared to be based on AI hallucinations.

The bogus case studies named in the summary were on UBS and transit systems.

The Techmeme item frames the issue as exaggerated adoption of the technology.

Vanity Fair reports three ex-DOGE staffers are raising $130M from a16z, Sequoia, and others.

The startup aims to use AI to secure government systems.

Techmeme's summary says the engineers who wreaked havoc on Washington are ready for their second act.

The scraped excerpt does not name the startup or list product details.

The Peak XV-backed startup, which focuses on creating video tools for e-commerce , didn’t build Varya from scratch. It started with Wan 2.2, a publicly available video generation model released by Alibaba, and used a technique called distillation — essentially compressing the model’s capabilities into a leaner, fast…

To put that in concrete terms: Using an Nvidia H200 GPU, Varya can generate a five-second 720p clip in 45 seconds, compared to 1,230 seconds for Wan 2.2.

The most striking aspect of Varya may be its price. The company plans to charge ₹0.48 ($0.005) per second of video on its hosted service — far cheaper than models like Veo, Kling, Luma, and Runway, which typically charge $0.10 or more per second. That’s a roughly 20x price difference.

“India is a video-first market. We see this across every large consumer internet product in India: video wins over text. Current AI video models are too expensive for population-scale use in India. If video AI is going to reach students, teachers, MSMEs, creators, enterprises, and public services, costs have to come…

Image and video generation models often miss cultural nuances and produce stereotyped or generic outputs — a problem TechCrunch has reported on before . Avataar AI says it has used curated data to train Varya to recognize cultural nuances including food, clothing, architecture, and festivals.