Andrew here. We’re following the ongoing wild ambitions in the A.I. race to go public. The latest: Sam Altman appears to be drawing a hard line, wanting a valuation of at least $1 trillion for OpenAI’s stock market debut.
Separately, Wall Street is dissecting a huge shake-up in JPMorgan Chase’s succession contest, with Marianne Lake, a longtime contender to succeed Jamie Dimon as C.E.O., retiring. Two other insiders, Doug Petno and Troy Rohrbaugh, were promoted to co-president, making it a two-man race. (Only a few years ago, it was a two-woman race: Lake and Jenn Piepszak.)
The critical detail everyone is whispering about: the age gap. Rohrbaugh, 56, is five years younger than Petno. When you’re planning for someone to replace a seminal leader like Dimon for the long term, that extra runway might just tell us how this final lap will play out.
A bearish pivot
Market volatility is jolting artificial intelligence bellwethers again on Friday as investors in the sector reckon with a tough new economic reality.
A.I. giants already faced high interest rates, rising input costs and corporate customers rethinking their A.I. spend. Now, The Times reports, OpenAI is weighing holding off its I.P.O. until next year.
Here’s the latest:
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Shares in SoftBank, a major OpenAI backer, fell nearly 13 percent on Friday.
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The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite index looks set to extend its losses to a fifth consecutive day.
Apple was especially hit hard. Its shares plummeted more than 6 percent on Thursday after the tech giant announced price hikes for its computers and tablets.
The sell-off spoiled hopes for a rebound in A.I. stocks after Micron, the memory chip maker, reported blockbuster results aided by robust demand from hyperscalers.
Micron is weighing on the sector. Demand for its DRAM and NAND flash memory chips has risen so sharply that it is threatening to make building data centers more expensive and to drive up costs for smartphones, factory equipment and more.
“We have never seen a component price increase this much, this quickly,” a spokesman for Apple said to explain why the company is raising prices. Hours later, Microsoft said it would raise the price of its Xbox game consoles.
Observers are now calling it “A.I.-flation,” a prospect that could complicate central bankers’ push to tame rising costs.
Then there’s OpenAI. A decision by the unprofitable A.I. lab to hold off on going public could send shock waves through the I.P.O. market. Would Anthropic, its chief rival, get cold feet, too?
A reminder: Sarah Friar, OpenAI’s C.F.O., had already raised questions about whether the company was ready to go public this year. And the start-up is busy trying to bolster both its enterprise customer base and its advertising business.
Big regulatory questions also loom. OpenAI now must restrict access to its latest model, GPT-5.6, to companies and organizations that have been selected by the Trump administration, according to The Information.
The move suggests that the administration’s light touch with A.I. will not apply to powerful frontier models like GPT-5.6 and Anthropic’s Mythos and Fable.
Washington’s A.I. shift isn’t going down well in Silicon Valley. The White House “de facto *is* regulating AI, but without transparency,” Gary Marcus, a tech chronicler and emeritus professor of psychology and neural science at N.Y.U., wrote on X. “That leaves businesses and investors in doubt.”
HERE’S WHAT’S HAPPENING
Bayer notches a big legal victory. The Supreme Court ruled that the German company couldn’t be held liable under state law for cancer suspected to have been caused by its Roundup weedkiller, because the E.P.A. had decided the product didn’t need to carry a warning. The decision clears a path for Bayer to complete a $7.25 billion proposed settlement of health litigation that arose from its 2018 takeover of Monsanto, Roundup’s original maker.
Oil prices ease despite an attack in the Strait of Hormuz. Iran’s armed forces hit a container ship passing through the vital waterway, U.S. and Iranian officials said, after Tehran warned ships against traveling near Oman’s side of the strait. Brent crude, the international oil benchmark, rose to about $75 before dropping more than 3 percent after U.S. officials played down the significance of attack, which only briefly halted traffic through the strait.
A tech critic will be nominated as the Justice Department’s antitrust chief. President Trump plans to name Adam Candeub, the general counsel at the F.C.C. and an author of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 initiative, to lead the department’s antitrust division, The Times reports. The division has faced criticism for settling lawsuits, including one against Live Nation, and not for challenging Paramount’s merger with Warner Bros. Discovery.
The bet behind Kalshi’s World Cup partnership
Until now, the World Cup’s official prediction market partner has been a little-known platform, ADI Predictstreet. That’s about to change, with Kalshi becoming an official partner of FIFA as well, Michael de la Merced is first to report.
The move reflects both the big boost that the World Cup, and sports more broadly, have given prediction markets and Kalshi’s quest for more growth.
What’s happening: Kalshi is forging a brand and product partnership with ADI Predictstreet in which the bigger prediction market, Kalshi, will funnel betting volume to its upstart counterpart. (ADI Predictstreet is available in only a few markets, leading to sometimes tiny betting volumes, while Kalshi operates in more than 100.)
In return, Kalshi will become an official FIFA partner, meaning that its branding will be splashed all over World Cup signage, TV coverage and online ads.
The World Cup has already been a boon for Kalshi:
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It saw nearly $10 billion in betting on the World Cup in the tournament’s first two weeks, a company spokeswoman said.
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It has also recorded more than $1.6 billion in daily volume during the competition, its biggest ever and well above its pretournament levels of nearly $1 billion.
Sports have been a big part of Kalshi’s success, moving the company beyond political betting. The explosion in trading volume because of sports wagers has helped Kalshi’s valuation jump more than fourfold since October, to $22 billion.
Rapid growth is important for Kalshi’s future. It’s behind the company’s efforts to encourage institutional trading by major Wall Street firms on its platform.
The jump in business is allowing the company to consider an I.P.O., though not this year. “A company of our financial profile with the rate of growth that we’re seeing, that sort of conversation has to happen,” Tarek Mansour, Kalshi’s C.E.O., told CNBC this week.
Deck of the day
SoftBank toots its own horn
Nobody does a shareholder presentation quite like Masa Son, the SoftBank founder and C.E.O. who has long been known for his offbeat slide decks.
Now, Son has returned to a favorite metaphor: SoftBank, which recently overtook Toyota as Japan’s most valuable company, as a goose that lays golden eggs. At the company’s shareholder meeting this week, he said SoftBank’s A.I.-related investments, including a huge bet on OpenAI, would continue to pay off. His slide deck featured several images of geese and golden eggs. “Eggs do not lay eggs; the goose lays the eggs,” he told his shareholders. “SoftBank Group is the factory that lays the eggs.”
The control issue
Business founders have been trying for years to exert greater control over their companies. At the same time, some investors feel as if they’re losing their say, especially as the Trump administration clamps down on advisory groups like ISS and Glass Lewis.
SpaceX’s recent I.P.O. has rekindled the debate. Elon Musk’s rocket and artificial intelligence company went public with a multiclass share structure that gives the tech mogul outsize voting control, The Times reports.
This month, SpaceX listed its shares on the Nasdaq with two tiers of stock: A-class shares, which are available to the public and carry one vote at the company’s annual general meeting; and B-class shares, which carry 10 times the voting power and are held by its founder and chief executive, Elon Musk, and a small group of insiders.
Musk owns about 40 percent of SpaceX shares but controls over 80 percent of the votes.
Tech companies have long led the way with such governance. Consider:
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Meta’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, owns about 13 percent of the company’s shares but controls roughly 60 percent of votes.
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Google’s founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, together own about 10 percent of Alphabet but control more than 50 percent of votes.
The Texas angle: SpaceX’s corporate home state has a decidedly pro-management approach to corporate law that has shifted power from shareholders to executives — for example, by setting an extremely high bar for shareholders to sue.
SpaceX’s governance has drawn criticism from Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts; Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers; and Mark Levine, the New York City comptroller, who oversees $300 billion in pension fund assets.
THE SPEED READ
Deals
Politics, policy and regulation
Best of the rest
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Honda bet its future on electric vehicles. Here’s how that went awry in what its C.E.O. said was “heartbreaking” fashion. (NYT)
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Om Malik, a veteran journalist turned investor who covered Silicon Valley for decades, died on Wednesday, his family announced. He was 59. (Om.co)
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“My New Life With the Palantir Chore Coat” (The Atlantic)
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