News & Updates
The latest news and updates from companies in the WLTH portfolio.
Wall Street warms to SpaceX ahead of Nasdaq 100 inclusion
July 7 (Reuters) - SpaceX's (SPCX.O), opens new tab addition to the Nasdaq 100 on Tuesday is expected to unleash billions in passive buying, as brokerages kick off coverage of the $2 trillion-plus rocket and satellite company with broadly bullish views. The company joins the index just 15 days after its stock market debut on June 12 - among the fastest inclusions ever - thanks to the Nasdaq's revised rules for newly listed companies looking to enter widely tracked benchmarks. Its debut in the tech-heavy index is set to create another source of demand for its shares as index funds and exchange-traded funds (ETFs) tied to the Nasdaq 100 (.NDX), opens new tab will need to buy shares to match the benchmark's new composition. Active managers who track the index closely may also adjust their positions. Many retail investors prefer investing in funds to diversify their holdings. Over $587 billion is benchmarked in funds tracking the Nasdaq 100, including Invesco's QQQ (QQQ.O), opens new tab and QQQM (QQQM.O), opens new tab, which will now have to make room for SpaceX. J.P. Morgan estimated last month that SpaceX's addition to the index could draw $4.3 billion in passive inflows. QUIET PERIOD ENDS Investors are awaiting a wave of reports from Wall Street brokerages making their first attempt to value SpaceX as a publicly traded company, applying traditional valuation metrics to a business that's largely been assessed by investors' belief in Musk's long-term bets. The industry-mandated quiet period ends for analysts at banks that underwrote the blockbuster IPO - led by Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, BofA Securities, Citigroup and J.P. Morgan. Both Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs started coverage on the stock on Tuesday with their top ratings, with Morgan Stanley dubbing the company "AI's final frontier." "We see the company as well-positioned to scale its differentiated advantages across space, connectivity, and AI," Goldman analysts said, betting each market has the potential to become a multi-trillion-dollar opportunity over a five-year-plus horizon. Brokerages RBC, Bernstein, and Stifel also initiated coverage with their top ratings, betting on the success of Starship, SpaceX's next-generation rocket that is designed to be fully reusable. "The Starship is the flywheel that powers SpaceX's ambitions," RBC analysts said. Earlier this month, Oppenheimer became the first to initiate coverage with an "outperform" rating. INVESTORS BET ON AI CAPABILITIES Investors are betting SpaceX can evolve into a hyperscale AI infrastructure provider in the near term, using cash generated to fund the development of Grok as it takes on OpenAI's GPT models and Anthropic's Claude. They also see significant room for Starlink to expand its dominance in satellite communications, while much of the company's longer-term ambitions depend on the successful development of its next-generation Starship rocket. However, not everyone is bullish on SpaceX. Morningstar analysts pegged the company's valuation at about $780 billion, citing uncertainty around its AI business, including xAI and social media platform X. With a market capitalization of $2.1 trillion, SpaceX is the sixth-largest U.S. company, and CEO Elon Musk the world's first trillionaire. FTSE Russell added the stock to its U.S. indexes last month, with funds such as iShares Russell 1000 ETF (IWB.P), opens new tab already giving investors a piece of the biggest IPO in U.S. history. However, S&P Global (SPGI.N), opens new tab declined to create a similar fast-track process for the benchmark S&P 500 (.SPX), opens new tab in June, and it is expected to take at least a year before SpaceX joins the world's most widely tracked index. SpaceX shares have gained more than 6% since their debut in their short ride marked by post-IPO volatility. Reporting by Purvi Agarwal, Rashika Singh and Akash Sriram in Bengaluru; Editing by Anil D'Silva and Saumyadeb Chakrabarty Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab * Suggested Topics: * U.S. Markets Rashika Singh Thomson Reuters Rashika reports on brokerages and financial markets, alongside technology and corporate developments for Reuters, with a focus on U.S. and global companies. Her coverage spans analyst actions, earnings-driven stock moves, semiconductors, artificial intelligence, aerospace and defense, and high‑growth technology stocks, often through breaking news and market‑moving "hot stock" coverage. Her reporting primarily appears in the Technology, Business, and Markets sections of the Reuters website and wire service, examining how brokerage research, corporate strategy and earnings influence investor sentiment and global competition. She regularly contributes to Reuters' spot and breaking‑news coverage, rather than a named column or standalone newsletter.
AI Weekly: Anthropic controls lifted, Meta in the clouds
AI Weekly: Anthropic controls lifted, Meta in the clouds From Anthropic's new AI models finally getting clearance from U.S. officials to Meta's big cloud move, Francis Maguire rounds up the big stories from the AI revolution.
A new, inexpensive Chinese AI model is catching up with Anthropic, OpenAI on their home turf
BEIJING/BENGALURU, July 2 (Reuters) - Since DeepSeek shocked markets early last year with its cheap but powerful AI model, global consumers have been faced with a choice: Chinese offerings with lower prices and less capability or OpenAI or Anthropic, which have poured billions into development. A model called GLM-5.2, launched last month by Beijing-based startup Z.ai, may finally be closing that gap in terms of Western interest. GLM-5.2 has Silicon Valley buzzing with its coding and agent capabilities, or the ability to execute complex tasks with minimal prompting, that almost rival leading U.S. offerings at a fraction of the cost, in what some experts are calling a "mini DeepSeek moment." It has quickly climbed the usage charts on third-party AI developer platforms like OpenRouter, where it now ranks above Anthropic's models, while executives from cloud data platform Snowflake's CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy to venture capitalist Marc Andreessen have lauded its abilities. "We now have a Chinese open-weight model that is as good as the currently available models from OpenAI and Anthropic," said David Sacks, U.S. President Donald Trump's former AI czar, last week before Washington lifted curbs on Anthropic's Fable and Mythos models on Tuesday. Those capabilities have put Z.ai's GLM-5.2 model at the heart of a growing debate about whether China is finally catching up to the U.S. in the AI race, as technology executives warn that Washington's unpredictable regulation of the industry risks hampering its lead in the frontier technology. "It is just a tick below Opus 4.8 (from Anthropic) and right up there with GPT 5.5 (from OpenAI)," Sacks said of GLM-5.2 on the All-In podcast, adding that "we cannot afford to do things that slow our companies down." The Anthropic curbs and the delayed public rollout of OpenAI's latest GPT-5.6 model have fueled global demand for the Chinese model, some experts said. "The international developer community is increasingly aware that relying solely on proprietary, U.S.-based API models carries significant risk," said Brian Tse, founder and CEO of Concordia AI, a Beijing-based consultancy focused on AI safety. GLM-5.2's positive global reception also suggests increased interest in cheaper open-source development because businesses are getting stung by the rising and often unpredictable costs of using AI to complete tasks, as closed-source agentic AI tools consume more tokens, the units used to measure AI usage. Z.ai, also known as Zhipu AI, declined to comment. Anthropic and OpenAI did not immediately respond to requests for comment. GLM-5.2 currently holds fifth place on Artificial Analysis' large language model (LLM) intelligence leaderboard, which ranks performance across a range of benchmarks designed to measure overall capability, including reasoning and coding skills. And it is in the second spot on Code Arena's front-end coding rankings, measuring how well models generate websites and front-end applications, while operating at roughly a sixth of the cost of closed U.S. frontier models like Claude and the GPT series. Z.ai has not disclosed how much it spent to develop GLM-5.2. In a reply to Elon Musk on X last month, Z.ai founder Tang Jie said that the Chinese startup could produce a model on par with Anthropic's Fable before the first quarter of next year. "The shift GLM-5.2 brings is that the open-source model has become a plug-and-play, out-of-the-box product," said Tiezhen Wang, former APAC lead at Hugging Face, a startup that serves as a hub for developers tinkering with open-source models. "You just deploy the model and without doing any complex fine-tuning systems, it is in a highly usable, ready-to-use state. This drastically lowers the barrier to entry for open-source adoption." CONVINCING AMERICAN BUSINESSES One major hurdle to GLM-5.2's large-scale adoption remains data security concerns that have limited use of Chinese models by U.S. enterprises, particularly in regulated industries like banking and cybersecurity. The migration and upgrading of enterprise AI systems typically takes several months, Wang said. "I have seen some discussion among European companies about whether it could be used in enterprise settings," said Wei Sun, principal AI analyst at Counterpoint Research. "In the EU and U.S., some clients, partners and regulated industries may simply be unwilling to accept Chinese models in their AI stack, regardless of technical performance or price." A report earlier this year by non-profit RAND, opens new tab, based on website traffic data across 135 countries, found that Chinese LLMs' global market share jumped to 13% from 3% in the two months after DeepSeek launched its R1 model in January last year. The release sparked a global tech selloff because it contrasted DeepSeek's low cost with massive AI infrastructure spending elsewhere. China's LLM usage gains were most pronounced in developing countries and those with close political and economic ties to Beijing. Some experts said concerns about the safety of Chinese AI models were overblown, arguing that running them on U.S. cloud providers or on a company's own servers ensured data security. While major corporations are slow to migrate, tech startups and small- and medium-sized enterprises are moving much faster. "Developers tend to care less about where a model comes from than whether it works, how much it costs and whether they can deploy or access it reliably," said Poe Zhao, China tech analyst and founder of the Hello China Tech newsletter. "The likely pattern is partial routing, not overnight replacement of OpenAI or Anthropic. So yes, it is a mini DeepSeek moment but in a narrower, developer-centric sense." Reporting by Laurie Chen in Beijing and Aditya Soni in Bengaluru; Editing by Eduardo Baptista and Thomas Derpinghaus Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab * Suggested Topics: * Artificial Intelligence Laurie Chen Thomson Reuters Laurie Chen is a China Correspondent at Reuters in Beijing, whose coverage focuses on the nexus of frontier technology, strategic emerging industries and geopolitics. She has reported on China for almost a decade, having previously covered China's government, defence, security and foreign policy. She has broken multiple global scoops on U.S.-China relations and the trade war 2.0, elite Chinese politics and diplomacy. She is particularly interested in Chinese frontier AI, tech and industrial policy, semiconductor supply chains, robotics, aerospace and grand strategy.
SpaceX short interest estimated to be about 5-7% of float, S3 Partners says
NEW YORK, June 23 (Reuters) - Short sellers are finding it easier to borrow SpaceX(SPCX.O), opens new tab shares, even as some 5% to 7% of the company's float, about 40 million shares, has been sold short, according to S3 Partners. "Shares are getting easier to borrow," said Sam Pierson, director of research at S3 Partners, noting that short sellers were paying about 60 basis points to borrow the shares. While higher than the roughly 30 basis points for stocks with the lowest borrow costs, the rate reflects increased supply and a lack of concern regarding borrow availability for funds considering shorting, Pierson said. Short sellers aim to sell borrowed shares and buy them back at a lower price for a profit. When share supply is constrained, as can be the case for newly listed stocks with limited floats, it can push up borrow rates, making it more expensive for investors to sell shares short. The lofty valuation for Elon Musk's rockets-and-AI firm is likely to draw short sellers looking to bet on a drop in the share price. Factors that could deter SpaceX bears include strong retail and institutional interest in the stock and Musk's history of waging highly public battles against short sellers. On Tuesday, SpaceX shares were up about 6% at $164.04. During the session they slipped as low as 147.11. Reporting by Saqib Iqbal Ahmed; Editing by David Gregorio Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab
US judge dismisses Musk's xAI trade secret lawsuit against OpenAI
June 15 (Reuters) - A federal judge dismissed a lawsuit on Monday by Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company xAI that accused rival Sam Altman's OpenAI of stealing trade secrets for chatbots. U.S. District Judge Rita Lin in San Francisco said xAI failed to show that OpenAI induced former xAI senior engineer Xuechen Li to divulge confidential information related to its Grok chatbot, or that OpenAI engineers knew Li might have disclosed any. Lin dismissed the lawsuit with prejudice, saying it would be "futile" to continue. She dismissed an earlier version in February. The lawsuit originally filed in September focused on broader alleged misappropriation of confidential information, including source code, when xAI employees left for jobs at OpenAI. Monday's decision is Musk's second legal loss against OpenAI in four weeks. On May 18, a federal jury ruled against the world's richest person in his $150 billion lawsuit accusing OpenAI and Altman of "stealing a charity" by betraying the company's original mission as a nonprofit to enrich themselves. The xAI business is part of Musk's rocket, satellite and AI company SpaceX (SPCX.O), opens new tab. Neither xAI nor its lawyers immediately responded to requests for comment. OpenAI said on Monday: "This baseless lawsuit was never anything more than yet another front in Mr. Musk's ongoing campaign of harassment." It made the same statement after February's dismissal. TALKING ABOUT PAST WORK IS ROUTINE The amended complaint focused on a presentation that Li gave while OpenAI was recruiting him. Musk's company said OpenAI wanted secrets related to the July 2025 release of Grok 4, knowing its forthcoming update to ChatGPT "could not compete" on complex reasoning, and because OpenAI was "lagging" in reinforcement learning and post training techniques that Li understood. But the judge said asking job candidates to discuss their prior work was routine, and one could not infer that OpenAI pushed Li to leak anything confidential. "To hold otherwise would potentially expose employers to liability any time they inquire about a candidate's past work," Lin wrote. OpenAI has said Li never worked for the company and that it never acquired xAI secrets. In seeking dismissal, lawyers for OpenAI wrote: "OpenAI does not need or want anyone's trade secrets, especially not from xAI, which is failing in the marketplace and hemorrhaging talent." Li is being sued separately by xAI and has denied wrongdoing. Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; Editing by Mark Porter, Sanjeev Miglani and Cynthia Osterman Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab
US saw risk of Anthropic models being diverted to foreign military intelligence
WASHINGTON, June 15 (Reuters) - U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said he took action against Anthropic's latest Mythos and Fable AI models because officials feared they could be deployed by military intelligence users in China, Russia or other countries of concern. Lutnick noted the risk in a letter sent to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei on Friday, ordering the company to suspend export of the AI models to destinations worldwide and all foreign nationals, wherever located, according to a copy of the letter seen by Reuters on Monday. Senior Anthropic technical staff met with officials at the Department of Commerce in Washington on Monday to negotiate a solution, a Trump administration official said. The stakes are high, with the government seeking assurances the models cannot be used to harm the U.S., while Anthropic is pushing to restore access to its top-tier models after taking them offline for all users on Friday. Lutnick has been part of the process, holding regular calls with Anthropic officials as he works toward a deal, a source familiar with the situation said. Amodei and Lutnick are both set to attend the G7 meetings in Evian-les-Bains, France, where they may speak as negotiations continue. National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross joined Monday's working-level meeting with Anthropic at the Commerce Department, the source added. The company's technical staff have met with officials virtually every day since the Trump administration contacted the company on Friday, a person close to the company told Reuters. After the Lutnick letter, Anthropic said it would disable access to the models globally. The government told the company it believes there is a method of bypassing, or "jailbreaking," a safeguard that would prevent Fable 5 from being used in identifying software vulnerabilities, Anthropic said in a blog post on Friday. The bypass found only "minor" security flaws that other publicly available models can also find, the company added. Relations between the Trump administration and Anthropic ruptured earlier this year after Anthropic refused to allow the U.S. military to use its AI models for domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons systems, and the government retaliated by putting it on a national security blacklist. The San Francisco-based AI startup, which has confidentially filed for a U.S. initial public offering, had previously warned about the hacking capabilities of its Mythos model and held it back from wide release. On June 9, Anthropic rolled out a public version, called Fable 5, which included what it described as cybersecurity safeguards. Anthropic worked with the government to test Fable 5 before it was released, the person close to the company said, and received its approval to deploy it. POWERS USED FOR THE FIRST TIME TO STOP ANTHROPIC The letter to Anthropic said the Commerce Department was taking action through authorities granted it under the 2018 Export Control Reform Act to impose controls on emerging technologies essential to U.S. national security. It marks the first time the Commerce Department has used that power, according to an export control expert. The letter said that the Commerce Department would require a license for the export (or transfer to a foreign national in the U.S.), and threatened that failure to comply with the new restriction would result in "prompt criminal and civil penalties." However, export control experts said that AI models are generally not exported. They are deployed through remote access, which the export control regulations do not control, raising questions over whether Commerce has the legal authority to take such action. The Commerce Department did not respond to questions about the authorities in question. Neither the department nor Anthropic responded to requests for comment on the Monday meeting. More than 80 cybersecurity executives and experts on Sunday signed an open letter to Lutnick and National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross that supported Anthropic's position. In that letter, cybersecurity leaders at major firms, including Nvidia (NVDA.O), opens new tab and Adobe (ADBE.O), opens new tab, asked the Trump administration to lift the restrictions on Anthropic. Reporting by Karen Freifeld in New York; Additional reporting by AJ Vicens in Detroit; Editing by Chris Sanders, Matthew Lewis and Shri Navaratnam Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab
SpaceX IPO haul rises to $85.7 billion after underwriters exercise greenshoe
June 15 (Reuters) - SpaceX (SPCX.O), opens new tab said on Monday that its underwriters had exercised the "greenshoe" option to purchase additional shares, increasing the total proceeds from its initial public offering to $85.7 billion from $75 billion that it raised last week. Elon Musk's rocket, AI and internet conglomerate, which sold 555.56 million shares at $135 apiece to raise the record $75 billion, became the largest IPO in history even before the greenshoe option was exercised. The 'greenshoe' is a standard feature of most U.S. stock market listings that acts as a safety valve, helping underwriters support the stock and limit sharp price swings in the weeks after trading begins due to strong demand. SpaceX's shares surged 19% after the blockbuster Nasdaq debut on Friday. Reuters reported last week, citing sources, that the IPO had attracted more than $250 billion of investor orders, far exceeding the amount the company was seeking to raise. The IPO was oversubscribed by roughly three-and-a-half to four times, underscoring the extraordinary demand for the offering. The debut, which analysts described as a "Goldilocks" stock market entry, hit the sweet spot of rewarding investors with a strong first-day gain, while avoiding the perception that the company had left significant money on the table by pricing the offering too conservatively. Its shares rose another 7% in early trading on Monday, adding to the strong gains recorded in Friday's historic market debut, which lifted the company's market capitalization above $2 trillion and made Musk the world's first trillionaire. Underwriters typically exercise the greenshoe option when a stock trades above its IPO price. SpaceX said its underwriters purchased 83.3 million additional shares through the option. The greenshoe option is typically exercised in IPOs that have generated extraordinary demand from both Main Street and Wall Street investors. "Demand significantly outstripped the initial supply. Retail interest was high, but several major funds submitted massive orders, so underwriters wanted to tap the overallotment to satisfy these massive positions," said Brian Jacobsen, chief economic strategist at Annex Wealth Management. The deal has shattered IPO records and become an early test of investor appetite for a new wave of mega-listings, with AI heavyweights Anthropic and OpenAI reportedly expected to follow it into the public markets later this year. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley were the lead underwriters for the offering. Reporting by Manya Saini in Bengaluru; Editing by Shinjini Ganguli Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab * Suggested Topics: * Media & Telecom Manya Saini Thomson Reuters Manya covers the most influential U.S. financial institutions, from Wall Street's largest banks and card networks to leading asset managers and fintech companies. She also reports on late-stage venture capital fundraises, initial public offerings on U.S. exchanges and regulatory developments shaping the cryptocurrency industry. Her work appears across the finance, markets, business and future of money sections of the Reuters website. She holds a bachelor's degree in political science from the University of Delhi and a master's in journalism from the Symbiosis Institute of Media and Communication.
Cerebras shares drop on earnings debut, with margins below AI chip rivals
June 23 (Reuters) - Cerebras Systems (CBRS.O), opens new tab in its debut report as a public company forecast full-year profit margins would drop below the first-quarter figures and lag levels of chip companies including Nvidia (NVDA.O), opens new tab, sending shares down 10% in extended trading on Tuesday. The chip designer, which raised $5.55 billion in its IPO last month, is focused on inference, the process by which AI systems respond to user queries, and has tied much of its growth to OpenAI, including a $20 billion multi-year deal under which the ChatGPT creator will deploy 750 megawatts of Cerebras chips. Cerebras forecast adjusted gross margins of 38% to 41% for full-year 2026, down from the 47% it reported for the first quarter. While the projection is above analyst estimates of 29.58%, it is far below those of rivals such as Nvidia, whose gross margins are in the mid-70% area, and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD.O), opens new tab, whose gross margins are in the mid-50% range. It expects second quarter adjusted gross margin in the range of 36% to 38%, also below the 47% posted in the first quarter. Ben Bajarin, CEO of technology consulting firm Creative Strategies, said Cerebras' approach, which involves making some of the world's largest chips, is likely pressuring its gross margins because such large chips are difficult to manufacture. Cerebras also is temporarily renting back its own systems from an existing client to meet short-term demand while it builds out more data center capacity, Chief Financial Officer Bob Komin said on a post-earnings call. "The additional cost of renting third-party capacity will depress core cloud and other services margin temporarily from current levels," Komin said, adding Cerebras aims to achieve gross margins of 60% over the long term. Cerebras is in early discussions for data centers in Israel, the UAE, Australia, Singapore, India and Indonesia, CEO Andrew Feldman said. It reported revenue of $193.4 million for the first quarter, compared with $99.5 million in the same period a year ago. Cerebras said its adjusted net loss for the quarter was $2.5 million, narrower than analyst estimates of an adjusted loss of $36.75 million. For the second quarter, Cerebras forecast adjusted sales of $194 million, above estimates of $174.34 million, according to LSEG data. Reporting by Juby Babu in Mexico City and Stephen Nellis in San Francisco; Editing by Sahal Muhammed, Matthew Lewis and Chris Reese Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab
