More market value was created this week than the entire 2024 IPO market combined. Three companies — SpaceX, Cerebras, and Anduril — collectively added $1.9 trillion in valuation through IPOs and raises in a single five-day stretch. Meanwhile, the man who built the most valuable AI company in history sat in a courtroom defending himself against the man who helped found it.
Inflation hit a three-year high. The Fed Chair changed hands. The US President landed in Beijing with the two most powerful tech CEOs on his plane. And copper — the metal nobody talks about — quietly hit an all-time record on the back of AI infrastructure demand.
This wasn’t a normal week. This was the week where every trendline in AI, geopolitics, and markets converged in the same five-day window. Here’s what happened and what it means for your portfolio.
$1.9T
Combined value created this week
SpaceX ($1.75T) + Cerebras ($95B) + Anduril ($61B)
More than the entire 2024 IPO market combined
Three companies. Three completely different industries. All hit milestone valuations in the same week.
THE IPO DESK
SpaceX Files S-1. The Biggest IPO in History Is Coming.
SpaceX filed its S-1 this week, targeting a $1.75 trillion valuation and a $75 billion raise for a June Nasdaq debut. The xAI merger bakes in an AI premium — investors aren’t just buying rockets and Starlink. They’re buying Grok.
REUTERS · MAY 14, 2026
THE CHIP DESK
Cerebras IPO: The Dinner Plate Chip Mints Two Billionaires Overnight
IPO’d at $185, opened at $350, closed up 68%. CEO Andrew Feldman and CTO Sean Lie woke up worth $3.2B and $1.7B respectively. Their wafer-scale chip has 4 trillion transistors. OpenAI signed a $20B deal. The “Nvidia killer” is public.
CNBC · MAY 14, 2026
THE DEFENSE DESK
Anduril Raises $5B at $61B. Palmer Luckey’s Weapons Empire.
The Oculus founder who got fired from Facebook at 24 just doubled his defense company’s valuation. Anduril — named after Aragorn’s sword — has a $20B Pentagon contract and a 5M sq ft autonomous weapons factory going live this summer.
BLOOMBERG · MAY 13, 2026
Why It Matters
The IPO window didn’t just reopen — it exploded. More combined value was created in IPO and raise activity this week than in the entire 2024 calendar year. The market is telling you it believes AI, space, and defense are the three pillars of the next decade. If you’re not positioned in at least one, you’re watching the train leave.
Nine jurors. $134 billion. The verdict drops Monday.
Closing arguments in Musk v. Altman wrapped this week in an Oakland federal courtroom. Three weeks of testimony from the most powerful people in tech — Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Satya Nadella, Ilya Sutskever — ended with two completely irreconcilable narratives.
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I didn’t steal a charity. Musk abandoned one.
SAM ALTMAN — TRIAL TESTIMONY, MAY 13
Musk wants OpenAI’s for-profit conversion unwound and $134 billion redistributed. Altman says Musk walked away from the nonprofit years ago and is now seeking revenge because he wasn’t given equity.
Nadella revealed Microsoft projected a $92B return on its $13B investment — and admitted he was terrified of Microsoft becoming “the next IBM.” Sutskever’s stake is worth $7 billion.
Six women, three men. They got chocolates from the judge. Monday they decide who owns AI.
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Watch Monday: If Musk wins, OpenAI’s $850B structure collapses and the for-profit conversion is reversed. If Altman wins, the model is permanently legitimized. Either outcome reshapes AI’s ownership model forever.
Trump landed in Beijing with Elon Musk and Jensen Huang on Air Force One.
On the table: Iran ceasefire negotiations, the Strait of Hormuz reopening, Nvidia chip export bans, Taiwan arms sales, tariffs, and rare earth leverage. Every issue that moves global markets — in one room.
200
Boeing jets ordered by China — market wanted 500. Stock dropped 4%.
First China order since 2017
+4%
Nvidia stock on reports H200 chips may be approved for China sale.
Jensen Huang flew for a reason
Trump needs Hormuz reopened — oil prices are driving CPI to 3.8%. Xi wants chip restrictions lifted and Taiwan arms sales blocked. Musk needs Tesla’s Shanghai factory protected. Jensen needs to sell GPUs to the world’s second-largest AI market. Everyone at that table wants something from the other side.
The Real Trade
This isn’t diplomacy. It’s a deal negotiation. If Trump gets Hormuz reopened, oil drops, CPI stabilizes, and the new Fed Chair gets room to hold rates. If Xi gets chip access, Nvidia unlocks billions in China revenue. If both happen, markets rally. If neither happens, inflation keeps climbing and the tech cold war deepens.
3.8%
CPI — highest since May 2023
Real wages went negative for the first time in 3 years
Trump blames the Fed. The Fed blames the war.
+28%
Gasoline YoY — Iran war driving 40% of CPI
Hormuz still closed
+15%
Beef prices YoY — biggest food-at-home jump since Aug 2022
Airline fares up 20.7%
Jerome Powell’s term ended Friday. He leaves with the building on fire — 4 dissenting votes at the last FOMC meeting, the highest since 1992. Kevin Warsh, confirmed 51-45, inherits a divided board, an inflation rate heading the wrong direction, and a president who demanded rate cuts but may now get the opposite.
Rate hike odds just crossed 30%. The question isn’t whether this hurts. It already does. The question is who takes the blame when Americans open their grocery bill this weekend.
Three stories that got buried under the headlines but matter just as much.
Copper — $6.46 · All-Time High
Copper hit a record closing price — up 13% YTD. Every data center, every GPU cluster, every power cable runs on copper. AI’s real infrastructure trade isn’t chips. It’s the metal connecting them to the grid.
Cisco — +17% · Best Day Since 2002
$5.3 billion in AI infrastructure orders. The boring networking company nobody talks about just had its best stock day in 24 years. While everyone fights over models, Cisco builds the pipes.
Anthropic — Claude for Legal · 90.9%
Anthropic launched Claude for Legal with 20+ connectors and 12 practice-area plugins. Claude scored 90.9% on the BigLaw Bench. RELX, Thomson Reuters, and Wolters Kluwer stocks rattled on the news.
Reading the Signs Before They Read You Out
Cloudflare -20% headcount · BILL -30% · Upwork -25% · All stocks went up
1
The Pattern
Three companies cut 20-30% of staff this week. All because of AI. Every stock went up on the announcement. Wall Street now rewards replacing humans with machines. The pattern is clear and accelerating.
2
The Audit
List the 5 tasks that take the most time in your role. Google each one + “AI tool.” If a tool exists that does it 80% as well as you, that task is at risk. Start learning the tool before your employer does.
3
One Action This Week
Pick the highest-risk task from your audit. Spend 2 hours this weekend learning the AI tool that replaces it. Become the person who manages the AI — not the person the AI replaces.
⚡
Try It Now
Ask Claude: “I work as a [title] in [industry]. Which 3 tasks in my role are most likely to be automated in the next 12 months, and what AI tools should I learn to supervise them?”
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$1.9 trillion in one week. A courtroom verdict that could unwind the most valuable AI company ever. A superpower summit with CEOs on the plane. This wasn’t a news cycle. This was a phase transition.
I keep coming back to Cerebras. Not because the IPO was the biggest — SpaceX dwarfs it — but because of what it represents. Two engineers spent a decade building a chip the size of a dinner plate that everyone said was impossible. They woke up billionaires on Wednesday.
Meanwhile, Palmer Luckey got fired from Facebook at 24 and built a $61 billion weapons company named after a Lord of the Rings sword. And Elon Musk sat on Air Force One flying to Beijing to negotiate chip deals with the Chinese president.
The speed at which power is concentrating is unlike anything we’ve seen. A handful of people — in courtrooms, in boardrooms, on planes — are making decisions this week that will determine how AI, defense, energy, and trade work for the next decade. The rest of us are watching the scoreboard.
CPI at 3.8% is the part that hits everyone personally. Gas is up 28%. Beef is up 15%. Real wages went negative. The trillion-dollar headlines are exciting, but the grocery bill is what people feel. And nobody in Beijing or Oakland is solving that.
This was the biggest week in tech history. And Monday might be even bigger.
Monday · May 18
Musk vs. Altman jury verdict expected. $134 billion and the future of AI’s ownership structure on the line.
Monday · May 19
Google I/O 2026 keynote. Gemini 2.5 Ultra, Android XR, Project Astra. Google justifies a 160% stock rally or the air starts leaking.
Monday · May 18
Kevin Warsh’s first day as Fed Chair. Inherits 3.8% CPI, a divided board, and zero room for error.
All Week
Trump-Xi summit outcomes. Chip deals, Iran ceasefire progress, Boeing follow-up, rare earth negotiations.
Friday · May 23
SpaceX S-1 details expected. Revenue numbers, xAI financials, and Starlink subscriber data hit the public for the first time.
