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Mar 26, 2026
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Supported by
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Happy Thursday! Space stocks rally after The Information reported SpaceX's IPO filing. Meta Platforms and YouTube are found liable in a landmark social media addiction case. A judge approves a testimony that Microsoft could owe Elon Musk $25 billion.
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Shares of US space companies rose Wednesday after The Information reported Tuesday night that SpaceX is aiming to file its initial public offering prospectus with regulators as soon as this week. The report said that advisers involved in the preparation predict the company could try to raise more than $75 billion in the IPO, higher than a previously reported estimate of $50 billion. Telecom company EchoStar, which owns SpaceX stock, rose more than 10% while satellite company GlobalStar, which doesn’t, jumped more than 20%. Shares of Sidus Space, Satellogic and Intuitive Machines rose nearly 20%, while Rocket Lab, AST SpaceMobile and Planet Labs each climbed more than 10%.
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Meta Platforms and Google’s YouTube harmed a user’s mental health through negligence, defective product design and a failure to warn of the dangers of their products, a jury found on Wednesday. The decision was a landmark that is likely to affect the outcome in thousands of other cases alleging that social media companies are creating addictive products. Meta and YouTube will have to pay $3 million in compensatory damages to the plaintiff, a 20-year-old from Chico, Calif. known as Kaley G.M. The jury also ordered Meta and YouTube to pay $3 million to the plaintiff in punitive damages, a small fraction of the $1 billion in punitive damages sought by plaintiff’s lawyers. Meta is required to pay 70% of that amount. The case, tried in federal court in Los Angeles, was the first “bellwether” case arguing a novel
legal theory that social media companies had harmed users through defective product design. The win came one day after Meta was ordered to pay $375 million for failing to protect young people in a separate New Mexico case. It could set a precedent for other cases filed against social media companies, and for cases against AI chatbot markers like OpenAI and Google that are using the same legal theory. Snap and TikTok settled the K.G.M. case ahead of trial but remain defendants in the other cases. Spokespeople for Google, which owns YouTube, and Meta said that the companies disagreed with the verdict and planned to appeal.
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The judge overseeing Elon Musk’s breach of charitable trust lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft ruled Wednesday that Musk’s damages expert, an economist at economic consulting firm Berkeley Research Group, is allowed to present his testimony at trial. The economist, C. Paul Wazzan, found that Microsoft could owe Musk up to $25 billion, assuming OpenAI is valued at $500 billion, if a jury finds that Microsoft aided and abetted OpenAI in violating its charitable purpose. Wazzan calculated the $25 billion figure by determining that Microsoft’s stake in OpenAI, minus
its investments, is worth $115 billion, that OpenAI’s charity was responsible for up to 29% of that stake, and that Musk deserves up to 75% of the credit for the charity, thanks to his early donations and support for OpenAI. Microsoft’s lawyers argued that this analysis did not account for how much of OpenAI’s gains were specifically due to Microsoft’s alleged wrongdoing, but the judge ruled that the analysis is proper in this case because aiding and abetting would make Microsoft liable for all the harm that OpenAI caused, and the jury can determine which if any of Microsoft’s investments count as aiding and abetting. The judge also ruled on the other experts that can present their opinions to the jury. OpenAI’s lawyers had sought to toss out testimony from Musk’s expert on AI safety, Stuart Russell, a computer science professor at the University of
California, Berkeley. The judge decided that Russell has sufficient expertise to testify on the risks from advanced AI, but he cannot present other people’s estimates of the likelihood that AI will cause catastrophic harm.
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SpaceX is likely to list the investment banks that are advising it on its mega initial public offering in alphabetical order on the prospectus, according to three people familiar with the process. That’s a departure from the norm, where the most senior bank is listed first on the filing in what is known as the “lead left” position. It’s another sign of how the size of the IPO—which could be as much as $75 billion—is running against the norm for most IPOs. Bankers from Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, JP Morgan and Citi have all been
preparing the IPO plans, even though they haven’t been officially hired. In another unusual move, SpaceX has also discussed dividing up roles, say to focus on selling shares to individual investors in the U.S. and overseas. It’s also enlisting several international investment banks to find buyers.
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Meta Platforms is launching Meta Small Business, a company-wide initiative to drive AI adoption and support entrepreneurship, Axios reported. In a memo sent to employees on Wednesday, CEO Mark Zuckerberg told staffers that “it should be easier than ever for people to build new businesses” in the AI era, and that small businesses have been a big part of its business model, according to the report. Meta president and vice chairman, Dina Powell McCormick and head of product Naomi Gleit, will lead Meta Small Business. On Tuesday the company announced that it tapped chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth to oversee its transition into an AI-native organization, with Bosworth leading its AI for Work initiative. It also formed a new organization focused on its AI efforts, called Applied AI Engineering, earlier this month.
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