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⚙️ Quantum computing's biggest-ever traditional IPO booted up yesterday but buffered by day's end. Honeywell's Quantinuum raised $1.68 billion at a $15.6 billion valuation in its Nasdaq debut, closing just above its $60 IPO price. Is the market ready for deep-tech listings? Read the article
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| At $1.78 trillion, why bother with price discovery? |
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| A SpaceX Starship launches out of Texas on May 22. (Ronaldo Schemidt/Getty Images) |
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By Rosie Bradbury and Michael Bodley, PitchBook News
Despite SpaceX's extraordinary valuation multiple on a fundamentals basis, plenty of investors appear to be buying into the company's vision.
On Wednesday, SpaceX set a single price of $135 per share for its upcoming IPO, an unusual move that would translate into $75 billion in gross proceeds from its listing.
Most sizable IPOs involve a roadshow led by underwriters to gauge demand and set a range accordingly. SpaceX is breaking from that norm, sending a signal to investors that "you're in or you're out," according to Richard Segal, partner at law firm Cooley. (In theory, they could still alter their price later in the roadshow.)
This pricing move underpins just how confident Elon Musk is that his roadshow will yield oversubscribed demand from institutional investors.
"Because the number is public a week early, any downward adjustment would read as a stumble rather than a routine calibration," said PitchBook senior research analyst Franco Granda.
A roadshow with conventional "price discovery could have pushed [the stock] well above $135," a banker at one of the 23 underwriters of SpaceX's IPO told PitchBook. Goldman Sachs, the lead left underwriter for the listing, predicted that SpaceX's AI revenue would surge 100x by 2030, the Financial Times reported yesterday.
For bulge-bracket banks, there's little incentive to advise SpaceX against setting a price up front. Their fees remain the same, and a small pricing range is unlikely to hugely impact the IPO's success.
"At such high valuations, the price ranges stop making a lot of sense," said Segal.
For underwriters, the priority remains a simple one for this year's mega-liquidity events: Get in on the deal, then make sure it pops. |
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• AI is impact investing's biggest test and its biggest opportunity, Leapfrog Investments chief says. Read the Q&A
• Blackstone Private Credit Fund, the firm's largest non-traded business development company, will fulfill requests for 5% of shares outstanding this quarter, after receiving repurchase requests for around 10%. Find out more
• Co-investment funds raised a record $47.3 billion last year, despite charging management fees and carried interest. Go deeper |
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| Big Tech is spending $600B on AI in 2026—and not on acquisitions |
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By Kaidi Gao, Senior Venture Capital Analyst
Four of the Big Five—Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft, minus Apple—are on track to spend nearly $600 billion on AI infrastructure in 2026, Morningstar forecasts show. But VC-backed acquisition count for all five together hit a decade low of seven deals in 2024, according to new PitchBook research.
The tech giants have redirected capital toward large minority investments and compute-linked deals, securing AI positioning through infrastructure commitments. Microsoft holds nearly 30% of OpenAI; Meta led a $14.3 billion Series G in Scale AI. These are strategic infrastructure guarantees, not conventional venture bets.
Beyond Big Tech, acquirer strategies diverge sharply. Nvidia has made 15 AI-related acquisitions since 2022, systematically extending its GPU infrastructure dominance across the full AI stack. Enterprise software incumbents are acquiring to close AI capability gaps before AI agents make their existing business models obsolete. |
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The urgency is reflected in market pricing. The iShares Expanded Tech-Software ETF fell 29.6% between December 2025 and February 2026.
While the sector has since partially recovered, the structural pressure on per-seat licensing models remains. Salesforce, Snowflake and Databricks are responding from positions of financial strength; Cisco and Intel, navigating structural headwinds, have stepped back from M&A broadly.
Regulatory risk is adding complexity to deal activity. The FTC and Justice Department have opened probes into talent-acquisition structures used by Microsoft and Google, signaling that talent-and-license deal structures face closer antitrust scrutiny.
China's order to unwind Meta's $2 billion Manus acquisition in April 2026 adds a geopolitical dimension: Corporate domicile alone can't insulate cross-border AI deals from regulatory intervention.
For AI companies evaluating exits, the buyer pool is narrow and strategically specific. The full picture of what that means for exit prospects, valuations and deal structures is in our analyst note. |
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• Goldman's CEO slid into Elon Musk's DMs to land a spot on the SpaceX IPO. Jefferies, left off the deal entirely, is now the bank hedge funds are calling to arrange bets against it. [Bloomberg]
• Marc Rowan argues the media's fixation on levered lending is "a failure of imagination." FT Alphaville accepted the challenge to out-imagine the Apollo CEO's $38 trillion vision for private credit. [Financial Times]
• A bankruptcy lawyer's AI agents spontaneously died, resurrected themselves and once tried to send a 3-million-word request to a language model. He's convinced the chaos is worth it. [The New York Times] |
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