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Aug 05, 2026
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Happy Wednesday! SpaceX's first earnings report since its IPO reveals its heavy AI spending. OpenAI hits back at Apple's lawsuit. Polymarket seeks a valuation of more than $20 billion in a fundraising.
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SpaceX’s second-quarter earnings showed how the company is spending heavily to build up its AI business, even as the company reported $7.8 billion in revenue, up 92% from the previous year. SpaceX’s revenue was primarily driven by its Starlink satellite internet service and AI business. The company also reported more than $18.3 billion in capital expenditures during the second quarter, the majority of which was driven by the company’s continued AI data center build out. As a result, SpaceX reported it burned $25 billion in the first half of the year. SpaceX CFO Bret Johnsen said on an earnings call that capex in the third and fourth quarters would be in line with the second quarter. The company has said it plans to continue to expand its footprint of data centers and it has entered into more than $14 billion in agreements to provide compute capacity to customers. SpaceX announced agreements to supply Anthropic and Google with compute earlier this year. Johnsen said that the compute deals will help the company recoup losses from data center expansion. The earnings report also highlighted several updates to its space and satellite businesses, including doubling Starlink subscribers from the previous year and completing two successful Starship tests in the past 90 days. During the earnings call, SpaceX executives highlighted several ambitious goals. SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell said the company aims to have “boots on the moon” in 2028. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said SpaceX aims for Starlink to be responsible for most of the world’s internet service in the next 10 years.
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OpenAI gave a full-throated response to Apple’s lawsuit filed last month alleging theft of trade secrets. In a blog post on Tuesday, OpenAI called the lawsuit “careless, aggressive and oddly personal.” In the post, OpenAI detailed several issues it had with Apple’s lawsuit, including the iPhone maker’s accusation that one of its former employees, Chang Liu, deliberately took confidential Apple material with him when he joined OpenAI. Instead, OpenAI said that Liu and other Apple employees inadvertently ended up with access to such material because Apple fails to “properly manage system access when people leave.” The Information explored this type of security lapse more deeply in a story on Monday. The Information story described how new Apple employees are encouraged to tie their personal Apple IDs with their corporate digital identities, often resulting in employees with continued access to work documents shared through iCloud after they depart the company. In some cases, Apple has then used this continued access to pursue legal action against former employees.
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Polymarket is in early talks to raise about $1 billion at more than $20 billion valuation, Bloomberg reported, citing unnamed people familiar with the matter. The prediction market has also completed its earlier fundraising round of about $1 billion at a $15 billion valuation in April, with D.E. Shaw and G Squared as new investors. Intercontinental Exchange, the parent of the New York Stock Exchange, had invested $600 million in that round. Polymarket declined to comment on the fundraising news. Polymarket’s volume has fallen behind its main rival Kalshi, which was valued at $22 billion in a fundraising round in May. The two early leaders also face competition from Robinhood, which now makes more revenue from prediction markets than equities or crypto trading. Robinhood initially partnered primarily with Kalshi but now sends some of its orders to Rothera, a new prediction market exchange backed by Robinhood and Susquehanna International Group.
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Italian conglomerate Bending Spoons agreed to buy once high-flying productivity startup Airtable for $1.285 billion, a steep haircut to its last valuation of $11 billion in 2021. Founded in 2012, Airtable raised more than $1.3 billion from venture investors including Benchmark and Thrive Capital. Its valuation soared thanks to three funding rounds—led by Greenoaks, XN and Thrive—in 2020 to 2021 as investors flocked to back productivity apps during a surge of demand during the pandemic shutdowns. AirTable has $900 million in cash on its balance sheet. Including that, AirTable’s investors who hold preferred stock will get their money back Airtable was one of The Information’s 160 enterprise startups primed for a takeover, a group of enterprise software startups that raised money before the AI boom that haven’t announced new funding in at least two years. The deal is Bending Spoon’s first acquisition after it went public in July and adds to its portfolio of left-for-dead internet businesses such as Vimeo and AOL. Bending Spoons, whose stated mission is to buy and overhaul aging digital businesses, will likely try to run Airtable more efficiently. It said Tuesday that Airtable grew its revenue by 20% since last year to approximately $480 million as of June. (Updates details on funding rounds.)
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Advanced Micro Devices’ revenue in the second quarter rose 50% from a year ago to $11.5 billion and net profit grew even faster, the company said Tuesday. The figures beat analysts’ expectations, as did AMD’s projection of about $13 billion in revenue for the current quarter. That compared to consensus estimates of $12.5 billion, according S&P Capital IQ. Still, AMD’s stock—which has been on a tear this year thanks to demand for the server chips that power AI—slumped 9% after hours after rising during the trading day. AMD’s earnings report coincided with that of SpaceX, whose CEO, Elon Musk, said on an earnings call that his company—one of the world’s biggest buyers of AI computing equipment—would only buy from AMD rival Nvidia going forward. Some analysts also flagged concern over a surge in AMD’s capital e | | | |
