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Jay Peters
Jay Peters
Google follows Anthropic in signing a compute deal with SpaceX.

Per a regulatory filing, Google will pay SpaceX $920 million per month from October 2026 through June 2029, as reported by TechCrunch.

In a statement to TechCrunch, Google says that it’s a “short-term” agreement to help meet “surging customer demand for our agent platform, Gemini Enterprise, which has been even higher than we expected.”

Anthropic’s deal with SpaceX was announced in May.

Elon Musk is steamrolling Wall Street to become a trillionaire
Play

Elon destroyed Twitter, but somehow still won as he prepares to take SpaceX public in what could be the biggest IPO ever.

Nilay Patel
Stevie Bonifield
Stevie Bonifield
SpaceX is reportedly aiming to raise $75 billion in its IPO.

CNBC reports details from a new filing ahead of SpaceX’s IPO on June 12th and notes a mention that xAI, which merged with SpaceX earlier this year, bought $269 million worth of Tesla megapack batteries in April.

At the $135 per share price tag, SpaceX would be valued at $1.77 trillion, which assumes the EchoStar spectrum and Cursor transactions close. The valuation would make SpaceX the seventh-biggest company in the U.S. by market cap, and put it above Tesla, which is valued at about $1.6 trillion.

The SpaceX IPO is great for Elon Musk and terrible for you

The biggest public offering ever is financial nihilism’s final form.

Elizabeth Lopatto
In SpaceX’s IPO, Elon Musk is the risk factor

The rocket company says it’s ‘highly dependent’ on Musk’s leadership. And that his other companies are possible competitors.

Andrew J. Hawkins
Musk v. Altman proved that AI is led by the wrong people

Public opinion of the AI industry is already sinking. A parade of untrustworthy executives makes it look worse.

Hayden Field
Jay Peters
Jay Peters
xAI launches an “early beta” of Grok Build.

As xAI aims to compete with rivals like Anthropic and OpenAI, which have focused heavily on AI-assisted coding, the company is launching a new agentic coding CLI tool for Grok. It’s available initially for subscribers to xAI’s SuperGrok Heavy plan.

Richard Lawler
Richard Lawler
Musk v. Altman week two recap.

What happened in the second week of Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman? The Verge senior AI reporter, Hayden Field, can help you catch up.

Dominic Preston
Dominic Preston
Xmaxxing.

Following its acquisition by Elon’s other company, xAI is now being referred to as SpaceXAI. Presumably this is only the start of the brand synergy to come.

tuff_ghost:

Excited for X to become SpaceX X by XAi

Get the day’s best comment and more in my free newsletter, The Verge Daily.

Jay Peters
Jay Peters
xAI is becoming SpaceXAI.

In Wednesday’s annoucement of its compute partnership with Anthropic, the company formerly known as xAI referred to itself as “SpaceXAI.” It was the first time I had seen that name, and while I don’t think it’s a good one, it made some sense following SpaceX’s acquisition of xAI.

According to Elon Musk, “xAI will be dissolved as a separate company, so it will just be SpaceXAI, the AI products from SpaceX.”

Richard Lawler
Richard Lawler
Brockman talks Dota 2.

Brockman said that focusing on the game was his idea, in a project worked on by several people, later explaining that DeepMind was working on something similar with a different game but “had nothing” yet, contributing to their decision not to open-source the technology.

The most notable part of the project, however, is how its development led to understanding that increasing the scale of their compute could rapidly advance the AI capabilities. “…the first Dota bot Jakub Pachocki trained was on 16 CPU cores … every week they had 2x the CPU cores, and the AI got 2x better. There was no limit. We kept increasing the scale, thinking this would peter out, but it never did,” said Brockman.

Google’s AI architect lived rent-free in Elon Musk’s head

DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis was a constant figure of fear among Musk and other OpenAI higher-ups.

Hayden Field
Elizabeth Lopatto
Elizabeth Lopatto
Jury is sent out for the day.

Just before they left, Jared Birchall’s testimony regarding the funding of the bid to buy OpenAI — the subject of last week’s drama — was struck.

Elizabeth Lopatto
Elizabeth Lopatto
We are hearing about the early days of OpenAI.

In Brockman’s telling, Altman was around a lot more often than Musk. The gee-whiz energy here is off the charts, including a pre-launch story about the group being stuck in traffic for an hour and a half and not noticing because they were having such a good time.

Elizabeth Lopatto
Elizabeth Lopatto
Early worries about Musk came from Ilya Sutskever.

From Sutskever’s texts to Brockman:

Elon might spend half a day a week with us

I imagined how it will be and I worry that our work environment can become very stressful

And since he’ll be bankrolling it, itll be hard to stop it

Elizabeth Lopatto
Elizabeth Lopatto
Brockman is describing his bromance with Altman.

When Brockman was leaving Stripe, he told Altman “I’m thinking about doing an AI thing” and Altman said, “I’m also thinking about doing an AI thing” and “then we kept in touch.” They went to a dinner in Menlo Park — Musk arrived an hour late — to talk about AGI, then Brockman caught a ride home with Altman.

Elizabeth Lopatto
Elizabeth Lopatto
“I do all the things.”

Asked what he does as president of OpenAI, that’s how Brockman responded. God I hate hearing millennial slang in the courtroom. Sooo I did a thing… for $30 billion.

Elizabeth Lopatto
Elizabeth Lopatto
Brockman says we are 80 percent of the way to AGI.

“We very much have these AI models that are smart and capable but they’re not fully connected to the world,” Brockman says. “We as society are still figuring out how do we integrate these.” This is lol and also lmao.

Elizabeth Lopatto
Elizabeth Lopatto
Open AI’s direct examination of Brockman is pretty sedate so far… aside from Tesla.

When Musk left OpenAI he told Brockman that he was going to start an AGI competitor within Tesla. “The most important thing was that there was going to be a counterweight to Google/Deepmind,” Brockman said. Musk said there was “no hope — zero percent chance” at OpenAI. Musk also told Brockman that the work on AGI at Tesla would be secret because “the shareholders wouldn’t like it.”

Elizabeth Lopatto
Elizabeth Lopatto
OpenAI’s lawyers are now getting their shot at Brockman.

Curious to see what they can recover from this testimony.

Elizabeth Lopatto
Elizabeth Lopatto
For real, I think nerds should not testify in court.

Look, correcting lawyers on whether they’ve dropped an article and saying things like “all those words are accurate so far” probably plays in a lot of places but this nitpicking doesn’t really cover you in glory in a courtroom. I get it! I am also obnoxious! But this kind of quibbling doesn’t help Brockman recover from the journal entries that make him look unreliable.

Elizabeth Lopatto
Elizabeth Lopatto
We are now looking at Brockman’s other financial dealings.

Cerebras, Stripe, CoreWeave, and Helion all appear on his financial disclosures. All four have deals with OpenAI. I see where this is going — probably a preview of what to expect with Altman.

Elizabeth Lopatto
Elizabeth Lopatto
We finished with the Microsoft investment pretty quickly.

It happened. Kind of a nothingburger, as Brockman said that the deal was “not really my focus area.” We are now back in his disclosures. OpenAI did a December 2025 deal with Cerebras, for $10 billion of chips — and Brockman had an investment. The deal increased Cerebras’ valuation to $23 billion. “Your equity in Cerebras became more valuable because of the transaction OpenAI did?” Brockman admits that’s possible.

Elizabeth Lopatto
Elizabeth Lopatto
Altman didn’t return after we took our break.

But Brockman is back on the stand, and boy, morning has not been good to him. We are now moving on to Microsoft.

Elizabeth Lopatto
Elizabeth Lopatto
We are presently having a fight about purple boxes.

You may recall from Musk’s testimony that OpenAI has used purple boxes to highlight things. We see another purple box in OpenAI LLC’s announcement it exists. Molo asks if this is something OpenAI generally uses in its paperwork to highlight important things. Brockman says no. We go back and forth on this for a while, because Brockman thinks Molo’s statement is overly broad.

Elizabeth Lopatto
Elizabeth Lopatto
We have been doing the same question for perhaps the last five minutes.

Brockman is worth $30 billion. Molo has been asking, over and over, why Brockman hasn’t donated the $29 billion to OpenAI’s charity since he’d be good at $1 billion. Brockman has been making weird non-answers. He sounds nervous and not especially convincing.

Elizabeth Lopatto
Elizabeth Lopatto
“Financially what will take me to $1B?”

The famous Brockman quote has finally hit. Molo is arguing that rather than figuring out funding for the nonprofit, Brockman was plotting to get rich. Brockman is trying to say that there’s more context. While Molo is getting worked up, Brockman is pretty level. “Do we accept Elon’s terms, or do we reject the terms, he quits to create his own [AI company], and then we create our own [AI company]?” Molo tried to strike the answer, but he is overruled.

Elizabeth Lopatto
Elizabeth Lopatto
“His story will correctly be that we weren’t honest with him in the end about still wanting to do the for profit just without him.”

Greg Brockman’s journal really is making Greg Brockman look unreliable. Six days after telling Musk that Brockman et al. wanted more results in the nonprofit and to fundraise there, he writes, “We’ve been thinking about that maybe we should just flip to a for-profit. making money for us sounds great and all.” Brockman says this was an expression of a frustration and not a plan. Molo asks if he rehearsed that. Brockman says “no.”

Elizabeth Lopatto
Elizabeth Lopatto
Greg Brockman’s journal: “it’d be wrong to steal the non-profit from him.”

He also writes, “To convert to a b-corp without him. That’d be pretty morally bankrupt.” That’s probably the most solid thing the Musk team has gotten out during the trial so far.

Elizabeth Lopatto
Elizabeth Lopatto
Brockman is not doing himself any favors.

Molo asks if the nonprofit should still be a philanthropic endeavor. Brockman says, forcefully, “no.” We then look at notes from his diary, where he records Musk as saying “gotta figure out how do we transition from non-profit or something which is essentially philanthropic endeavor and is b-corp or c-corp.” Does make Brockman look pretty shifty.

Elizabeth Lopatto
Elizabeth Lopatto
Brockman’s cross-examination isn’t as testy as Musk’s, but he’s also pushing back on a lot of questions.

We are hearing a lot of “I wouldn’t characterize it that way,” “I’m not sure I’d say it that way,” and “This sounds like something that I wrote, is it okay if we see it in context?” It’s not as contentious or tense as Musk’s exchanges with Savitt, but it’s definitely notable.

Elizabeth Lopatto
Elizabeth Lopatto
Is sending stuff to Sam Teller and Shivon Zilis the same as sending it to Musk?

The question is whether Brockman disclosed his ownership of Cerebras when OpenAI was discussing merging with it. Brockman told Teller and Zilis, who were in theory Musk’s chiefs of staff, but not Musk himself. Molo is driving this home, which… I am less convinced by. Lots of executives delegate.

Elizabeth Lopatto
Elizabeth Lopatto
Brockman and Altman’s alliance?

Musk’s team is finally landing some serious blows — namely that part of Brockman’s compensation was a grant from Altman’s family office. Musk’s adviser Jared Birchall wrote, “Greg is going to have a greater allegiance toward Sam as a result of this arrangement.” Brockman told Musk that “We ran out of YC stock fulfilling others’ offers” so Altman arranged the deal.

Molo is saying it’s a “side deal” that Musk wasn’t informed about. Except the email chain plainly says Altman informed Birchall directly, who then emailed Musk. I imagine that will come on direct. Still, the financial conflict of interest is the most undermining information I’ve seen from Musk’s team so far.

Elizabeth Lopatto
Elizabeth Lopatto
“Is Demis Hassabis evil?”

At a dinner about AI that Brockman and Altman attended, Musk was late. The first thing Brockman remembers Musk asking is, “Is Demis Hassabis evil?” Hassabis, of course, ran DeepMind.

Elizabeth Lopatto
Elizabeth Lopatto
Greg Brockman is talking about the earliest days of OpenAI.

It was initially supposed to be part of Y Combinator, as a research arm. Looking at a solicitation email from Brockman to then-CEO of Yahoo Marissa Mayer, Brockman writes that donors include Elon Musk, Jessica Livingston, Reid Hoffman, and Peter Thiel. “I’m personally donating $100,000,” he writes. But he didn’t end up donating that. Brockman is speaking very quickly and very softly, and YGR has just scolded him for it.