Greg Guenthner:

OpenAI Hits $500B Valuation, Surpassing SpaceX As World’s Largest Startup

Artificial intelligence company OpenAI has become the world’s largest startup after reaching a $500 billion valuation in a secondary share sale. 

Bloomberg reported on Thursday that current and former OpenAI employees sold $6.6 billion in stock to investors including Thrive Capital, SoftBank Group Corp., Dragoneer Investment Group, Abu Dhabi’s MGX and T.Rowe Price. 

The investment round boosted OpenAI's valuation to $500 billion, leapfrogging Elon Musk’s startup SpaceX, which has a market capitalization of about $400 billion. The company also dwarfed startups ByteDance and Anthropic, which are valued at $220 billion and $183 billion, respectively. 

The deal not only shows excitement around AI, but also a growing overlap between AI and blockchain, with capital flowing into the technologies increasingly viewed as the next pillars of digital infrastructure.

But at $500 billion, OpenAI towers over crypto’s biggest players. Coinbase, the largest publicly traded crypto exchange, has a market capitalization of about $89 billion.

However, with stablecoins gaining traction worldwide, issuer Tether might be the crypto company closest to rivaling OpenAI’s market cap. On June 7, Artemis CEO Jon Ma claimed that if Tether were to go public, it would have a valuation of $515 billion, making it the 19th-largest public company.

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Ari Goldschmidt:

Tesla Has Its Best Sales Quarter Ever As EV Tax Credit Expires

Tesla’s sales growth has vanished over the last year-and-a-half, but the company just registered its best quarter of deliveries ever, in large part because buyers rushed to take advantage of the $7,500 federal EV tax credit before it went away.

Tesla delivered 497,099 vehicles over the last three months, the company announced Thursday. That’s a massive 29% jump from the second quarter, about a 7% increase over the same period last year, and more than it has ever delivered in a single quarter.

Other automakers in the U.S. have seen similar jumps ahead of the credit expiring. The temptation to take advantage of the expiring credit was so strong that Cox Automotive has forecasted EVs will represent 10% of all vehicle sales in the U.S. for the quarter, which would be a record.

The boost in sales came at a critical time for Tesla. Before the third quarter bump, Tesla was on track to see its global deliveries fall for the second straight year. That decline has eaten into the company’s industry-leading profit margin.

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Enrique Abeyta:

Jim Cramer Explains Why He Thinks the AI Boom Is Different Than the Dotcom Bubble

CNBC’s Jim Cramer on Monday pushed back against the narrative that Wall Street’s fervor for AI is the same as the dotcom bubble of 2000, saying there are major differences in terms of the quality and funding of the current Big Tech stocks that are leading the market to new heights.

“Speaking as an internet pioneer, what I see now is the polar opposite of what we were seeing 25 years ago. When the dotcoms made bad investments, nearly all of them went under,” he said. “But, worst case scenario, if Google and Amazon and Meta make bad investments and take big losses, that’s just another day at the office.”

Cramer explained that some on Wall Street doubt the validity of hyperscalers’ huge investments in AI and data centers, and they fear the AI boom will bust and send the market into chaos like what happened at the end of the dotcom era.

But Cramer suggested that each of the major players in the space — namely Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta, Apple, Alphabet, Amazon and Tesla — are all “developing a reputation for something different” and are more substantive than many of the dotcom companies.

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