IPO season is kicking into high gear. Recently, the artificial intelligence semiconductor company Cerebras went public and skyrocketed out of the gate. SpaceX just released its preliminary prospectus, with the company reportedly targeting a June 12 IPO. Now, OpenAI, the parent company of ChatGPT, could confidentially file for an IPO as soon as Friday, according to The Wall Street Journal, which ci...
IPO season is kicking into high gear. Recently, the artificial intelligence semiconductor company Cerebras went public and skyrocketed out of the gate. SpaceX just released its preliminary prospectus, with the company reportedly targeting a June 12 IPO. Now, OpenAI, the parent company of ChatGPT, could confidentially file for an IPO as soon as Friday, according to The Wall Street Journal, which cited "people familiar with the matter." The Journal didn't say that OpenAI would file on Friday; it just said it could. Sources the publication spoke with said that OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, want the company to be ready to go public as early as September of this year. The news comes after a federal jury ruled in Altman's favor in a hotly contested lawsuit filed by Elon Musk, who alleged that OpenAI improperly transitioned from a nonprofit to a for-profit entity after Musk donated $38 million to OpenAI between 2015 and 2017. Musk, who sued the company for $150 billion, sought to remove Altman from the board of directors and revert the company back to its original nonprofit status. Ultimately, the jury dismissed the lawsuit on the grounds that Musk waited too long to file the suit. Removing the overhang of the lawsuit makes OpenAI's path to an IPO easier, although many questions remain. Here's what investors need to know. Why OpenAI may want to do an IPO sooner rather than later The release of ChatGPT four years ago officially kicked off the AI craze that the world now finds itself in. ChatGPT also became the fastest-growing consumer app of all time, reaching 100 million weekly active users in just two months. Earlier this year, OpenAI disclosed that it had 700 million active weekly users. But the company is also in a much more complex situation than it was when it first launched. AI consumes an incredible amount of power, which is why all of the largest AI companies are spending hundreds of billions to build out infrastructure, such as data centers, to support the AI re...
SpaceX Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk can boost his overall compensation if the company succeeds in building colonies on Mars and data centers in space, according to a US Securities and Exchange Commission filing on Wednesday. In January, the board granted Musk 1 billion performance-based restricted Class B shares split into 15 equal tranches. To get the full award, the company will need to hav...
SpaceX Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk can boost his overall compensation if the company succeeds in building colonies on Mars and data centers in space, according to a US Securities and Exchange Commission filing on Wednesday. In January, the board granted Musk 1 billion performance-based restricted Class B shares split into 15 equal tranches. To get the full award, the company will need to have achieved a market capitalization of $7.5 trillion and established a permanent human colony on Mars with at least 1 million inhabitants. Musk owns 85.1% of the voting power ahead of a record initial public offering planned for next month. That reflects a highly concentrated governance structure and his ironclad control over SpaceX and its broader AI, satellite and launch strategy. Musk boosted his stake in SpaceX last year, buying $1.4 billion worth of stock from current and former employees. In November, he was also granted 302.1 million performance-based restricted Class B shares that vest over 12 equal tranches. Those will be awarded if the company’s market capitalization exceeds $6.565 trillion and SpaceX completes non-Earth-based data centers capable of delivering 100 terawatts of compute per year. Read More: SpaceX Files for IPO Showing $4.28 Billion Quarterly Loss
vicnt/iStock via Getty Images Higher for Longer The bull is in the china shop. The "bull" is the equity market, which has been charging to all-time highs despite a brief pullback over the last few days. The "china shop" would be delicate bonds, which are getting destroyed once again. The bond market is selling off at a blistering pace. Yields are surging , and the long end of the curve is flying o...
vicnt/iStock via Getty Images Higher for Longer The bull is in the china shop. The "bull" is the equity market, which has been charging to all-time highs despite a brief pullback over the last few days. The "china shop" would be delicate bonds, which are getting destroyed once again. The bond market is selling off at a blistering pace. Yields are surging , and the long end of the curve is flying off the charts. In a matter of weeks, the benchmark 30-year U.S. Treasury yield blasted past 5.10%, hitting its highest level since July 2007. Seeking Alpha, Bloomberg The culprit here isn’t a secret. The ongoing energy price shock stemming from the war in Iran has completely opened the doors to macro chaos, sending oil prices soaring and reigniting fears of a second inflation wave in four years. Any hopes we saw in late 2025 for a central bank policy pivot toward substantial rate cuts have been virtually extinguished. Put out by the return of the restrictive “higher-for-longer” policy that's now the definitive base case through the end of 2026. A Bear Steepener What we're witnessing right now is a textbook “bear steepening” of the yield curve. A bear steepening occurs when long-term interest rates rise faster than short-term interest rates. These rising yields result in a bond market sell-off on the longer-duration bonds. Seeking Alpha Understanding What a Bear Steepener Means for the Market The Fed’s operational lever on interest rates is generally confined to the short end of the curve, orchestrated by the Federal Open Market Committee’s setting of the Federal Funds Rate. The open market, however, holds greater influence over the long end of the curve. With inflation rapidly reigniting, fear of structural and sticky pricing pressures has permeated. In response, investors are demanding a higher premium on government bonds. Higher yields on 10-, 20-, and 30-year maturities can also act as a direct tax on consumers, significantly increasing the cost of consumer-driven debt. ...
It feels like short video clips from podcasts, songs, and movies are suddenly everywhere on social media right now, and that’s not an accident. Brands have realized that the format offers a highly cost-effective way to market products. Brands and marketing agencies often outsource the process of finding the most compelling 30 to 90 seconds of a video, known as ‘clipping’, to independent creators. ...
It feels like short video clips from podcasts, songs, and movies are suddenly everywhere on social media right now, and that’s not an accident. Brands have realized that the format offers a highly cost-effective way to market products. Brands and marketing agencies often outsource the process of finding the most compelling 30 to 90 seconds of a video, known as ‘clipping’, to independent creators. But managing these gig workers and determining exactly where to distribute those videos presents a massive operational challenge. Clouted, a startup that went through the a16z’s Speedrun accelerator in 2024, is building the infrastructure to automatically handle both the distribution strategy and the logistics of the clipping process. The platform taps into a network of over 100,000 gig creators to edit clips, then uses AI to determine the best social media platform and target audience for promoting them. Clouted co-founder and CEO Justin Banusing first applied the company’s technology to his personal passion: electronic music and festival production. As a longtime DJ, he used Clouted to promote and grow &Friends, a Manila-based electronic dance music and pop-culture festival that now draws over 20,000 people. Clouted’s approach has caught investor interest. The startup just announced a $7 million seed round led by Slow Ventures, with participation from Gold House Ventures, Weekend Fund, Peak XV’s Surge, and others. Unlike purely volume-driven marketing tools, Clouted doesn’t just chase high clip counts. Instead, its AI operates a continuous testing loop, experimenting with different formats and channel strategies to figure out what actually performs best. The practical effect is that each campaign makes the next one more targeted and efficient, as the system accumulates data on what works. Clouted works somewhat like penetration testing for social media algorithms — a concept borrowed from cybersecurity, where researchers probe a system’s defenses by attempting to break th...
Antonio Bordunovi/iStock Editorial via Getty Images Investment Thesis Nvidia Corporation ( NVDA ) reported fiscal Q1 '27 results for the period ended April 26, 2026, with exponential revenue growth of 85% (versus 79% consensus). Data Center revenue rose 92%, with growth diluted by smaller, non-AI segments. Non-GAAP EPS stood at $1.87/share, also beating consensus by 10 cents. GAAP net income was b...
Antonio Bordunovi/iStock Editorial via Getty Images Investment Thesis Nvidia Corporation ( NVDA ) reported fiscal Q1 '27 results for the period ended April 26, 2026, with exponential revenue growth of 85% (versus 79% consensus). Data Center revenue rose 92%, with growth diluted by smaller, non-AI segments. Non-GAAP EPS stood at $1.87/share, also beating consensus by 10 cents. GAAP net income was boosted by significant capital gains on NVDA's equity investments. The board authorized a dividend increase to 25 cents/quarter (from 1 cent) and expanded the share buyback authorization by $80 billion, on top of the $40 billion prior program. These shareholder return initiatives are supported by an 86% increase in free cash flow, or FCF, which stood at $49 billion in the quarter. Overall, the results put concerns over an imminent slowdown in AI infrastructure buildout at ease. It seems that the market is doing exactly the opposite of what NVDA bears expect, with data center sales growing exponentially, defying the law of large numbers, as opposed to slowing down. This confirms why I remain strongly bullish. For the first time in many years, faster chips are leading to better software logic quality, almost automatically, as opposed to just enhancing output speed as in traditional software. The more powerful NVDA chips are, the larger the parameter set used to train the large language models, or LLMs, and the more prevalent the use of Generative AI. Equally important, these chips are enabling deeper, longer, and faster answers by examining alternative paths and solutions and using more intermediate steps before answering. The current models are great, but they could be enhanced further, and I think that none of the major Generative AI labs will stop investing until they reach their goal of Artificial General Intelligence ("AGI") and investors won't stop investing, driven by optimism of the financial benefits from replacing the hundreds of millions of white-collar jobs with AI...
Image source: The Motley Fool. Wednesday, May 20, 2026 at 5 p.m. ET CALL PARTICIPANTS Chief Executive Officer — Scott Hart President and Co-Chief Operating Officer — Jason Ment Head of Strategy — Michael I. McCabe Chief Financial Officer — David Park TAKEAWAYS GAAP Net Loss -- $7.8 million, or $0.10 per share, primarily driven by fair value adjustments related to StepStone private wealth profits i...
Image source: The Motley Fool. Wednesday, May 20, 2026 at 5 p.m. ET CALL PARTICIPANTS Chief Executive Officer — Scott Hart President and Co-Chief Operating Officer — Jason Ment Head of Strategy — Michael I. McCabe Chief Financial Officer — David Park TAKEAWAYS GAAP Net Loss -- $7.8 million, or $0.10 per share, primarily driven by fair value adjustments related to StepStone private wealth profits interests recognized through the income statement. -- $7.8 million, or $0.10 per share, primarily driven by fair value adjustments related to StepStone private wealth profits interests recognized through the income statement. Fee Related Earnings (FRE) -- $105 million, up 12% with a reported FRE margin of 40%, bolstered by record quarterly fundraising and strong fee-earning AUM growth. -- $105 million, up 12% with a reported FRE margin of 40%, bolstered by record quarterly fundraising and strong fee-earning AUM growth. Core Fee Related Earnings -- $101 million, up 28% after excluding retroactive fees, while core FRE margin remains at 40%. -- $101 million, up 28% after excluding retroactive fees, while core FRE margin remains at 40%. Adjusted Net Income -- $69 million, or $0.57 per share, down from $81 million, or $0.68 per share, a year ago, due to lower performance-related earnings partially offset by higher fee-related earnings. -- $69 million, or $0.57 per share, down from $81 million, or $0.68 per share, a year ago, due to lower performance-related earnings partially offset by higher fee-related earnings. Quarterly Fee Revenues -- $260 million, representing a 21% increase, and 29% growth when excluding retroactive fees. -- $260 million, representing a 21% increase, and 29% growth when excluding retroactive fees. Blended Management Fee Rate -- 64 basis points over the past twelve months, a modest decrease from 65 basis points, attributed to a reduction in retroactive fees offset by higher private wealth mix. -- 64 basis points over the past twelve months, a modest decreas...
SoftBank Group Corp. -backed digital infrastructure firm SB Energy Corp. plans to file a confidential draft registration statement for a proposed initial public offering in the US, the company said in a Wednesday statement. SB Energy, based in Redwood City, California, is looking to capture investor demand for firms building out power infrastructure for artificial intelligence data centers. The co...
SoftBank Group Corp. -backed digital infrastructure firm SB Energy Corp. plans to file a confidential draft registration statement for a proposed initial public offering in the US, the company said in a Wednesday statement. SB Energy, based in Redwood City, California, is looking to capture investor demand for firms building out power infrastructure for artificial intelligence data centers. The company has raised more than $1.8 billion to fulfill its data center ambitions from SoftBank, OpenAI and Ares Management over the past year. In February, SB Energy unveiled plans for a 9.2 gigawatt natural gas power plant with an estimated cost of $33 billion. That plant would power SoftBank’s 10 gigawatt AI data center complex on a former uranium enrichment site in Piketon, Ohio, that the company said could funnel $500 billion into a single data center campus, making it one of the largest in the world. Read More: SoftBank’s Son Says Ohio Data Center to Be $500 Billion Project
Abstract Aerial Art/DigitalVision via Getty Images Two months after my previous coverage , W&T Offshore, Inc. ( WTI ) has already delivered 55% returns and justified my strong buy rating. This makes sense since it reflected the soaring oil prices since March. Now, one may think that it already had a good run after surging to its one-year high in a short period. Valuation adheres to it as the stock...
Abstract Aerial Art/DigitalVision via Getty Images Two months after my previous coverage , W&T Offshore, Inc. ( WTI ) has already delivered 55% returns and justified my strong buy rating. This makes sense since it reflected the soaring oil prices since March. Now, one may think that it already had a good run after surging to its one-year high in a short period. Valuation adheres to it as the stock appears fully priced in line with its fundamentals. Technicals also warrant extra caution, as the stock appears overbought. Q1 2026: A Stronger Beginning Amid Volatility The first three to five months of 2026 were a roller coaster ride for oil producers. Accelerating inflation and sharp oil price swings took place simultaneously, driven by the turmoil in the Middle East. While many industries grappled with market risks and cost pressures, many oil producers enjoyed and took advantage of the situation. Even offshore players like W&T Offshore, Inc., felt the positive spillovers. This was evident in its most recent performance. In Q1 2026, its operating revenue amounted to $150.0M , up by 15.5% YoY from $129.9M and by 24.2% QoQ from $121.7M. This was also higher than in my previous coverage, which shows its sustained rebound from its weakness in Q2 2025. In fact, this was its strongest performance in the past seven to eight quarters. This was impressive despite the volatile oil and gas prices. Its higher oil and gas sales volume during the quarter primarily drove its growth. This showed its strong demand despite the increasing prices of its products. In fact, the average natural gas price reached its one-year high of $5.41 per Mcf. Meanwhile, the sharp oil price hike in March amid the Iran War also strengthened its oil sales. With that, its acquisitions in the Gulf of Mexico in recent years worked to its favor as sharp oil and natural gas sales price swings worked to its advantage during the quarter. Operating Data (WTI Q1) Meanwhile, its operating expenses decreased despite ...
At Google I/O, the company unveiled Managed Agents in its Gemini API — a service that promises to collapse weeks of agent deployment work into a single API call. It's also a sign that Google believes its ecosystem, including the newly launched Antigravity CLI, is ready to own the execution layer end-to-end. Before a single agent is written, teams are already spending days on the unglamorous work: ...
At Google I/O, the company unveiled Managed Agents in its Gemini API — a service that promises to collapse weeks of agent deployment work into a single API call. It's also a sign that Google believes its ecosystem, including the newly launched Antigravity CLI, is ready to own the execution layer end-to-end. Before a single agent is written, teams are already spending days on the unglamorous work: standing up execution environments, managing sandboxes, wiring tool call infrastructure. Model providers like Anthropic have launched platforms to handle much of that work — but Google's approach is different. Google said in a blog post that Managed Agents in the Gemini API abstracts “away the complexity so that you can focus on your product experience and agent behavior.” The service is available in preview via new custom templates in Google AI Studio. The growth has introduced a real architectural question: should agent management live at the execution layer — embedded in the model or its harness — or at the infrastructure layer, as a separate runtime? Comparing Google’s approach Until recently, agent orchestration relied on frameworks that sat above the model, directing agents and letting teams control routing and execution separately. That layer is now being absorbed by the platforms themselves. Recent platforms like Claude Managed Agents embed orchestration at the model layer rather than on a separate runtime platform. The idea is that the model owns the reasoning and orchestration layers, and enterprises have control over execution. AWS, through new capabilities on Bedrock AgentCore, adds managed harnesses that stitch together the upfront tasks for deploying agents. Google's approach goes further, optimizing the model, harness, and sandbox together and running everything in secure Google-managed environments. René Sultan of Ramp, cited in Google's announcement, said the shift is concrete: "The real shift with Gemini Managed Agents is that the agent runtime moves into ...
Elon Musk’s xAI lost $6.4 billion from operations on just $3.2 billion in revenue in 2025, according to SpaceX’s IPO filings. And the losses are poised to grow. SpaceX’s filing reveals plans to scale Grok to “multiple trillions of parameters,” a dramatic boost that will likely require significant additional compute spend. Elon Musk merged his AI company xAI — which had previously acquired his soci...
Elon Musk’s xAI lost $6.4 billion from operations on just $3.2 billion in revenue in 2025, according to SpaceX’s IPO filings. And the losses are poised to grow. SpaceX’s filing reveals plans to scale Grok to “multiple trillions of parameters,” a dramatic boost that will likely require significant additional compute spend. Elon Musk merged his AI company xAI — which had previously acquired his social media platform X (formerly Twitter) — with his rocket and satellite company SpaceX in February before announcing that he’d take the combined company public this year. While AI competitors OpenAI and Anthropic are also eyeing public debuts in 2026, SpaceX’s is expected to be one of the largest in history with a potential $1.75 trillion valuation. The filing marks the first public glimpses into xAI, and therefore X’s, financials. In 2024, xAI recorded a loss of $1.56 billion on $2.62 billion in revenue. By 2025, losses had ballooned to $6.4 billion on $3.2 billion, meaning the gap between what xAI earns and spends is widening. Meanwhile, competitor (and customer) Anthropic reportedly expects a 130% revenue jump to $10.9 billion in the second quarter, leading to its first operating profit. The jump in revenue from 2024 to 2025 came in large part from “AI solutions and infrastructure revenue” totalling $465 million, which includes $365 million in X and Grok subscription revenue, and $88 million in data licensing. An additional $116 million came from advertising. AI segment capital expenditures climbed from $12.7 billion in 2025 to $7.7 billion in the first quarter of 2026 alone. That’s an annualized capex run rate of about $30.8 billion, more than doubling year-over-year. So far, that investment has resulted in growing, but still limited, user numbers. Per the filing, SpaceX recorded 117 million monthly active users for Grok AI features as of March 2026, out of 550 million total MAUs across Grok and X combined. That implies only one-fifth of the combined ecosystem is activel...
The S&P 500 Index ($SPX) (SPY) on Wednesday closed up +1.08%, the Dow Jones Industrial Average ($DOWI) (DIA) closed up +1.31%, and the Nasdaq 100 Index ($IUXX) (QQQ) closed up +1.66%. June E-mini S&P futures (ESM26) rose +0.96%, and June E-mini Nasdaq futures (NQM26) rose +1.57%. Stock indexes finished sharply higher on Wednesday, recovering most of this week’s losses, amid a plunge in crude oil p...
The S&P 500 Index ($SPX) (SPY) on Wednesday closed up +1.08%, the Dow Jones Industrial Average ($DOWI) (DIA) closed up +1.31%, and the Nasdaq 100 Index ($IUXX) (QQQ) closed up +1.66%. June E-mini S&P futures (ESM26) rose +0.96%, and June E-mini Nasdaq futures (NQM26) rose +1.57%. Stock indexes finished sharply higher on Wednesday, recovering most of this week’s losses, amid a plunge in crude oil prices and lower bond yields. Crude oil prices sank by more than 5% on hopes for a deal to end the Iran war, knocking inflation expectations and bond yields lower. The 10-year T-note yield fell -10 bp to 4.57%, falling back sharply from Tuesday’s 16-month high. Join 200K+ Subscribers: Semiconductor stocks also rallied on Wednesday, providing support to the broader market. Nvidia rose more than +1% ahead of its earnings results after Wednesday’s close. Nvidia’s earnings will provide an update on the state of the AI economy, with Q1 sales expected to be up 80%, but the markets will be focused on what the company has to say about ramping up production and fending off competitors. The minutes of the April 28-29 FOMC meeting were hawkish as "many" policymakers called for the Fed to drop its easing bias and signal its next move could be an interest rate increase. Also, most of the meeting's participants said that "some policy firming would likely become appropriate if inflation were to continue to run persistently above 2%." US MBA mortgage applications fell -2.3% in the week ended May 1, with the purchase mortgage sub-index down -4.1%, and the refinancing mortgage sub-index down -0.1%. The average 30-year fixed rate mortgage rose +10 bp to 6.56% from 6.46% in the prior week. WTI crude oil prices (CLM26) remain extremely volatile and are susceptible to headlines from the Iran war. Prices plummeted by more than -5% on Wednesday after President Trump said the US is in the "final stages" with Iran, bolstering speculation that crude supplies will soon start flowing out of the Strait o...
gorodenkoff/iStock via Getty Images Beating quarterly estimates and issuing strong guidance for the upcoming quarter were not enough to support Analog Devices ( ADI ) share price after today's earnings release. The stock is down by more than 5% in the early trading hours, and the daily performance is hardly a surprise. After delivering a total return of almost 90% over the past year, it is quite e...
gorodenkoff/iStock via Getty Images Beating quarterly estimates and issuing strong guidance for the upcoming quarter were not enough to support Analog Devices ( ADI ) share price after today's earnings release. The stock is down by more than 5% in the early trading hours, and the daily performance is hardly a surprise. After delivering a total return of almost 90% over the past year, it is quite easy for the market to get carried away and correct its near-term expectations. ADI's past 12-month performance is even comparable to that of the broader semiconductors sector ETF ( SOXX ), which has top holdings comprised of the high-flying Nvidia ( NVDA ), AMD ( AMD ), and Broadcom ( AVGO ). Data by YCharts The Q2 report and the reaction that followed were identical to what we saw exactly a year ago when I upgraded ADI to a Buy and showed why investors should not get dissuaded from their bullish views solely on the basis of one quarterly report. Since then, ADI's relative to that of the S&P 500 could be seen below. Seeking Alpha Fast forward to today, and we have a stock that has nearly doubled over the past year, and the market is reacting negatively to an excellent report as expectations adjust. This does not signal potential problems ahead, albeit investors should be mindful of the elevated valuation multiples (more on that later). Expected Performance Overall, this and previous quarterly results were largely anticipated. Not in terms of meeting or beating the exact estimates, but rather in terms of the general direction of the business. Reported earnings per share (EPS) increased to $2.4 during the second quarter of FY 2026, which is more than double the amount reported in the same period a year ago. The mid-range of the Q3 EPS guidance assumes 8% sequential growth, which, although it is not as impressive as this quarter's performance, is still a significant increase when annualized. Prepared by the author , using data from Seeking Alpha and Earnings Releases The main ...