We talk the foldable iPhone, Michael Jackson's death, and Trump passports. Some other notable news:Micron delivered one of the most stunning quarters in semiconductor history, reporting roughly $41.5 billion in fiscal-Q3 revenue, up about 346% year over year, and guiding next quarter to about $50 billion with an 81% gross margin. The read-through is that AI has turned high-bandwidth memory from a boom-bust commodity into a scarce, contracted input for the next generation of compute.SpaceX's record IPO unwound almost as violently as it launched, with the stock falling 31% in four sessions from its June 16 peak and erasing more than $600 billion of market value. A 4.2% public float, a $20 billion bond sale, newly listed options, August lockup risk, and a $4.9 billion 2025 net loss all collided in one of the clearest market-structure lessons of the AI trade.Oracle disclosed about 21,000 job cuts and directly tied the reductions to AI adoption in its own annual filing, even as it expands AI cloud capacity through major data-center deals linked to OpenAI and Meta. China also reclaimed the world's-fastest-supercomputer crown with LineShine, an all-domestic CPU-only system that hit 2.198 exaflops under U.S. export controls.A fatal Tesla crash in Katy, Texas, reopened the self-driving accountability fight after the driver said he had been using Tesla's partially automated driving system and both NHTSA and NTSB opened investigations. Robotics funding added the other side of the physical-AI story, with about $55.8 billion raised so far in 2026 and Figure banking a $1 billion Series C at a $39 billion valuation.The runner-ups: FedEx beat expectations and completed the FedEx Freight spin-off, onsemi agreed to buy Synaptics for about $7 billion to push deeper into edge and physical AI, and UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres pressed AI companies to disclose data-center emissions, water use, land use, and energy sources. The 30,000-ft view: Q1 GDP was revised up to 2.1%, PCE inflation ran at 4.6%, markets repriced toward possible Fed hikes, Nvidia's Vera CPUs entered full production, and the mega-IPO pipeline still has Anthropic and OpenAI queued. If you want a prize, send us a DM: instagram.com/rickerandbon tiktok.com/@rickerandbon youtube.com/@rickerandbon

SpaceX priced its IPO at $135 per share on June 11 and began trading on the Nasdaq under ticker SPCX on June 12, raising roughly $75 billion at a $1.75 trillion valuation - the largest initial public offering ever, dwarfing Saudi Aramco's $29B record from 2019. The stock opened at $150, jumped more than 20% intraday, and closed its first session at $161.11, up about 19% from the offer price. With about 556.6 million shares sold, SpaceX instantly became one of the most valuable companies ever to go public and gave public investors their first direct stake in Starlink and Starship.The U.S.-Iran confrontation that has kept the Strait of Hormuz contested for months drove another volatile week in energy markets, with crude having spiked toward triple digits earlier in the standoff before easing back toward the mid-$80s as diplomacy gained traction. Roughly 27% of seaborne crude moves through Hormuz, and analysts have warned prices could spike dramatically if the chokepoint stays disrupted. By Friday, Iranian media described a draft deal that would lift oil sanctions and reopen the Strait, with reports of a possible signing in Switzerland as soon as the weekend - sending crude down about 2% to near $85 and lifting risk assets.OpenAI said on June 8 that it had confidentially submitted a draft S-1 registration statement to the SEC, the clearest signal yet that the AI leader is moving toward a public listing. Reporting puts the targeted valuation in the roughly $850 billion to $1 trillion range, building on the $852 billion post-money valuation from its March 2026 raise led by SoftBank and Microsoft. OpenAI has reportedly tapped Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley to lead the deal, with a possible listing window stretching from September into Q4 2026.At WWDC on June 8, Apple unveiled Siri AI, a rebuilt assistant with conversation history, personal-context awareness, a dedicated Siri app, and customizable voice and pacing - the long-delayed AI overhaul it has been under pressure to deliver. The company also showed iOS 27, refinements to its Liquid Glass design language, new family-safety tools, and the next macOS, named Golden Gate. The event doubled as Tim Cook's final WWDC keynote as CEO; John Ternus is set to take over in September.Tesla and Elon Musk's xAI unveiled a joint project called Digital Optimus, billed as the first major outcome of Tesla's roughly $2 billion investment in xAI. The effort fuses Tesla's humanoid-robot hardware and efficiency with xAI's reasoning models, and Musk said a user-ready version could arrive within about six months - targeting roughly September 2026. The reveal deepens the cross-pollination between Musk's companies and lands alongside a June 12 signal from Musk that Tesla's partnership with Nvidia is heading to the next level.Anthropic launched the Claude Partner Network - including a new Services Track and Partner Hub - and committed an initial $100 million to help consulting firms, professional-services providers and specialist AI shops deploy Claude inside enterprises. The company said it will expand its partner-facing team roughly fivefold with applied AI engineers and technical architects, and reported early traction of more than 40,000 firm applications and over 10,000 certified consultants. It is a clear move to win the enterprise layer, where adoption is gated by integration and services rather than raw model quality.If you want a prize, send us a DM:instagram.com/rickerandbontiktok.com/@rickerandbonyoutube.com/@rickerandbon

The weightless era of software is over. This week the AI buildout slammed into the physical world: concrete, copper, electricity, water, and capital. We map the paradox of record wealth at the top of the stack and intense friction everywhere else.Alphabet announced an $80 billion equity raise, its first major stock sale since the 2004 IPO, to fund an estimated $180 to $190 billion in AI compute capex for 2026, with Berkshire Hathaway taking a $10 billion private placement. Broadcom posted a record fiscal Q2 of $22.19 billion, AI chip revenue up 143%, and Marvell shipped the first 102.4 Tbps switch that Jensen Huang called the next trillion-dollar company.SoftBank overtook Toyota to become Japan's most valuable company after pledging 75 billion euros for 5 gigawatts of AI data centers in France. The bill for the combined ~$700 billion buildout is landing on workers: 2026 tech layoffs have reached roughly 142,000, and employment for developers under 26 has dropped nearly 20% since 2024.GitHub Copilot switched to token-based billing, with power-user bills jumping from about $29 to $750 and outliers hitting $3,000. NVIDIA and Microsoft launched the RTX Spark to run 120-billion-parameter models locally, Anthropic filed confidentially for a roughly $1 trillion IPO, and Ohio suspended its data-center tax break as a citizen petition aims to ban hyperscale data centers. Community consent, water, and energy are the real bottlenecks.If you want a prize, send us a DM:instagram.com/rickerandbontiktok.com/@rickerandbonyoutube.com/@rickerandbon

SpaceX filed its public S-1 with the SEC, revealing 2025 revenue of $18.7 billion — up 33% year over year — anchored by Starlink's $11.4 billion connectivity segment. The Goldman-led syndicate is targeting a $1.75 to $2 trillion valuation, more than double the December 2025 tender offer mark, with a Nasdaq debut under SPCX as early as June. If it prices at range, it will be the largest IPO in history.Cerebras just had one of the biggest tech IPO debuts in years. The AI chip company listed at $185, opened at $350, and closed up 68% at $311 — giving it a roughly $95 billion valuation and making it the largest U.S. tech IPO since Uber. The AI hardware window is officially open, and the market is now treating non-NVIDIA AI infrastructure as a real public-market category.Cisco shocked the market with a major AI infrastructure guide. Revenue hit $15.84 billion, AI infrastructure orders were lifted from $5 billion to $9 billion for fiscal 2026, and the stock jumped 15%. The same day, Cisco cut 4,000 jobs to fund the pivot. The AI capex boom is no longer just NVIDIA — it is spreading into networking, optics, security, and the second layer of the infrastructure stack.The Trump-Xi Beijing summit ended without a formal AI deal. The U.S. cleared major Chinese companies including Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance, JD, and Lenovo to buy up to 75,000 NVIDIA H200 chips each, but Beijing paused the orders almost immediately. AI infrastructure is no longer just a company-level decision — it is now a geopolitical bargaining chip.Google disclosed the first confirmed AI-built zero-day exploit used in the wild. The attack targeted a two-factor authentication flow in a widely used open-source system administration tool, and Google says the planned mass exploitation event was stopped before it scaled. The cybersecurity impact of AI is no longer theoretical — AI is now accelerating both offense and defense.Inflation came in hot again. April CPI rose 0.6% month over month, the Fed held rates at 3.50-3.75%, and markets are now pricing a higher chance of a rate hike than a cut. And yet the S&P 500 still closed above 7,500, while the Nasdaq and Dow also hit major levels. The AI trade is overpowering the macro signal — for now.Runner-up: Anthropic and the Gates Foundation signed a $200 million four-year partnership directing grants, Claude credits, and engineering support toward global health, K-12 tutoring, and smallholder-farm agronomy. The deal lands the same week Anthropic absorbed Colossus 1 and signed Google for $200 billion in TPUs. The model lab is becoming an infrastructure-scale institution.Runner-up: VoltaGrid raised $1 billion from Blackstone and Halliburton at a $10 billion-plus valuation to build behind-the-meter power systems for AI data centers. Power, not just chips, is becoming one of the biggest constraints in the AI boom.Runner-up: Amazon is reportedly preparing another 14,000 corporate layoffs, which would bring 2026 reductions to roughly 30,000 jobs if confirmed. The AI labor reduction cycle is widening across Big Tech.Runner-up: A former Google engineer was convicted of stealing TPU trade secrets after transferring more than 500 confidential files tied to Google's AI chip architecture and software stack. It is one of the clearest legal templates yet for AI-era intellectual property enforcement.If you want a prize, send us a DM:instagram.com/rickerandbontiktok.com/@rickerandbonyoutube.com/@rickerandbon

Anthropic is making the AI infrastructure race look less like software and more like an industrial arms race. The company reportedly committed $200 billion to Google Cloud over five years, stacked on top of its existing Amazon compute arrangement, while also striking a separate agreement tied to SpaceX and xAI’s Colossus supercomputer infrastructure. Cerebras is blowing past expectations in what could become the largest tech IPO of 2026. The wafer-scale AI chip company is reportedly oversubscribed more than 20x, with a potential valuation up to $26.6 billion. After years of NVIDIA dominating the AI hardware story, public markets are now showing real appetite for the next layer of AI infrastructure.Meta is cutting roughly 8,000 jobs and canceling another 6,000 open roles as it redirects up to $135 billion toward AI infrastructure in 2026. The AI labor transition is no longer theoretical. The Cleveland Fed’s inflation nowcast is projecting May headline CPI at 3.89%, while the S&P 500’s Shiller P/E ratio reached 41.83, the second-highest reading in more than a century of market history. Stocks are expensive, inflation is reaccelerating, and rate cuts are moving further out of reach. Stagflation risk is back in the market conversation.Runner-up: The Trump-Xi summit is reportedly adding AI to the agenda for the first formal U.S.-China bilateral AI dialogue. The talks are expected to focus on autonomous weapons, frontier model behavior, and risks from open-source models in the hands of nonstate actors. Runner-up: OpenAI released GPT-5.5 Instant as the new default ChatGPT model, with a focus on reducing hallucinations in legal, medical, and financial use cases. The model wars are increasingly being fought on reliability, latency, and enterprise trust rather than raw benchmark dominance.Runner-up: Google, Microsoft, and xAI joined OpenAI and Anthropic in giving the U.S. Commerce Department’s AI standards office pre-release access to frontier models for evaluation. Government review is becoming part of the frontier AI release process.Runner-up: AMD and Arista both posted blowout Q1 results, showing that the AI capex boom is spreading beyond NVIDIA into accelerators, networking, optics, power, and cooling. The picks-and-shovels trade is broadening.If you want a prize, send us a DM on Instagram:http://instagram.com/rickerandbonttps://www.tiktok.com/@rickerandbon

This week on Ricker and Bon:Apple' fiscal Q2 2206 shattered every record in the books —112.1 revenue, services at an allt-ime quarterly high of $.0398B, EPS of .2$01. OpenAI missed revenue and user growth targets, pushing its IPO to mid-to-late 202.7 The Musk v .Altman trial kicked off in Oakland i,h Musk seeking $13B0in damages. The S&P 50 l0sed above 7,200 for the first time in history, marking the best April for equities since 0202 ...Q 1GDP came in at .2%0 but inflation hit 4%—5t.gflation is back in the conversation .And the four hyperscalers are set to spend $527 billion on AI infrastructure in 02.62unneru-s: Google's classified Pentagon AI deal and 95-0employee revolt. Medtronic's M9rc-rd cyberattack ua.oid robots hit factory floors at Hannover Messe .pirit Airlines shuts down — first major U.S. carrier failure since 1002.$

This week on Ricker and Bon: Tim Cook exits Apple, Tesla raises its 2026 capex to $25B, OpenAI ships GPT-5.5 "Spud," SpaceX eyes a $60B acquisition of Cursor, and consumer sentiment hits a 74-year low.

The 6 biggest stories in tech, business, and macro — week of April 12, 2026.Anthropic's Mythos Preview autonomously found high-severity zero-day vulnerabilities across every major operating system and browser. The offensive/defensive asymmetry in cybersecurity just shifted. Attackers with frontier AI can now run continuous, low-cost vulnerability scans that no human security team can match. Cyber insurance premiums, enterprise security budgets, and the entire defensive tooling stack are mispriced for this.The Strait of Hormuz has been closed for five weeks with 20% of global oil supply blocked, and equity markets are near highs. Trump issued an ultimatum to Iran with a Tuesday 8 PM deadline. Amazon is already rolling out a 3.5% fuel surcharge and airlines are hiking bag fees. The market is betting on a deal. History says those bets don't always pay.The Supreme Court invalidated Trump's IEEPA tariff authority, and a May US-China leaders' summit in Beijing is now the only real mechanism for trade stabilization. China enters that room with more leverage than it had in 2025. For multinationals, the summit outcome is a genuine binary.AWS AI services crossed a $15 billion annualized run rate, the first time Amazon has broken that figure out publicly. Amazon has committed $200B in 2026 capex directed at AI infrastructure, and Jassy says demand is outpacing supply. The custom chip business sits at a $20B run rate. This is AI moving from narrative to line item.Coachella 2026 Weekend 1 is being called one of the most stacked in recent memory. Sabrina Carpenter closed Friday after seven months of production. The Strokes played their first Coachella set in 15 years. Justin Bieber headlined his first major festival in years. Bini made history as the first Filipino group on that stage.Jeff Bezos's stealth AI lab Project Prometheus just hired the co-founder of xAI and former OpenAI infrastructure lead to build its compute architecture. Backed by $6.2B and recruiting from OpenAI, DeepMind, and Meta, Prometheus is targeting engineering, manufacturing, and aerospace, not chat. Physical-world AI with proprietary operational data is a structurally different bet than anything currently valued at frontier multiples.

A $122 billion funding round just valued OpenAI at $852 billion, with $2 billion in monthly revenue and nearly 1 billion weekly users, marking the moment AI stopped being a startup category and became global infrastructure.Five weeks into an Iran-linked oil disruption, the Strait of Hormuz remains constrained, crude markets are tightening, and companies like Amazon are already passing through a 3.5% fuel surcharge, while equities continue to hover near highs.Inside the enterprise, 2026 is shaping up as the year AI gets audited. Experimentation budgets are being replaced with ROI mandates, and vendors that cannot prove real productivity gains are already on the chopping block.At the same time, new research suggests quantum machines may be closer than expected to breaking modern encryption, forcing governments and corporations to accelerate post-quantum migration years ahead of schedule.And in a sign of what AI is enabling at the edge, a single founder in Los Angeles has built a company approaching a $1.8 billion run rate using AI across coding, marketing, and customer support, compressing what used to require entire teams into one operator.Meanwhile, NASA just sent humans around the Moon for the first time in over 50 years with Artemis II, restarting a space race now defined as much by private capital and infrastructure as national prestige.Ricker and Bon. Let’s get into it.⸻OpenAI raises $122B at $852B valuation; $2B monthly revenue; ~1B weekly users, AI shifts to infrastructure scaleStrait of Hormuz disruption drives oil pressure; Amazon adds 3.5% fuel surcharge; markets remain resilientEnterprise AI enters ROI phase; budgets shift from experimentation to measurable productivityQuantum computing timeline compresses; encryption risk moves from decades to yearsSolo founder builds ~$1.8B run rate company using AI for full stack operationsNASA Artemis II completes first crewed lunar flyby in 50 plus years, space economy reactivatesIf you want a prize, send us a DM on Instagram:http://instagram.com/rickerandbonhttps://www.tiktok.com/@rickerandbon

A federal judge used the word "Orwellian" this week to describe the U.S. government's attempt to blacklist one of its own AI companies for refusing to build autonomous weapons. Week four of the Iran war brought missiles into Saudi Arabia, oil past $100 a barrel, and a White House deadline that could take out Iran's power grid by April 6. Back home, TSA workers are six weeks into working without pay while ICE agents fill their posts at airports.In tech, SoftBank borrowed $40 billion — with no collateral, due back in 12 months to double down on OpenAI, now valued at $730 billion. The loan structure is Wall Street's clearest signal yet that an OpenAI IPO is coming before year's end. Meanwhile Meta took two jury verdicts on the same day — $375 million in New Mexico, $6 million in California — for what those juries said the platforms did to kids. Over 1,500 more cases are waiting in line.And Apple, the company that spent 20 years telling you its ecosystem was the best on earth, just licensed Google's AI to fix Siri.Ricker and Bon. Let's get into it.U.S. soldiers wounded in Iranian missile strike on Saudi air base; oil hits $103; April 6 Hormuz deadline setSoftBank borrows $40B unsecured to fund OpenAI at $730B valuation — IPO signalFederal judge blocks Pentagon from blacklisting Anthropic after it refused to build autonomous weaponsMeta hit with $375M and $6M jury verdicts in same week over harm to children; 1,500 cases pendingNetflix raises prices across all tiers same week it closed $600M AI acquisitionApple licenses Google's Gemini to fix Siri🤔 What are your thoughts?👨‍💻❗We wanna know, comment below!If you want a prize, send us a DM of your rating on Instagram http://instagram.com/rickerandbon