You're about to be able to buy shares in SpaceX. For the first time, retail investors get the same IPO price as the big institutions, and that price is $135 a share.

At a $1.77 trillion valuation, it's the largest IPO in history by a factor of three. Morningstar says the company is worth about half that. One of them is right.

Let's get into it.

The May jobs report came in hot this morning. The economy added 172,000 jobs, blowing past the 80-125K range economists expected. Unemployment held steady at 4.3%. Leisure and hospitality led with 70K, followed by local government at 55K and healthcare at 35K. On top of that, March and April were revised up by a combined 93,000 jobs. The labor market is not slowing down the way most forecasters thought it would.

Challenger's May layoff report hit yesterday: 97,006 announced job cuts, up 16% from April and the highest May total since 2020. AI was cited in 40% of all cuts, the highest monthly total ever recorded. Through the first five months of 2026, AI has been cited in 87,714 job cuts, already surpassing the 54,836 attributed to AI in all of 2025. The technology sector announced 38,242 cuts in May alone, the worst month for tech since August 2024.

Jobless claims jumped to 225,000 last week, up 13,000 from the prior week and the highest since early February. Continuing claims eased slightly to 1.777 million. One week doesn't make a trend, but it's the first time claims have broken above 220K since the winter.

CrowdStrike beat across the board with $1.39 billion in revenue, up 25.6% year-over-year, and record new annual recurring revenue of $256 million. The company also announced a 4-for-1 stock split. Cybersecurity remains one of the few sectors where AI is creating more demand, not less.

AlphaSense closed a $350 million round at a $7.5 billion valuation, with annual recurring revenue past $600 million. The AI-powered market intelligence platform is one of the clearest examples of enterprise AI that's actually generating revenue at scale.

Hiring

Funding

Contracts

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SpaceX priced its IPO at $135 per share this week, putting the company at a $1.77 trillion valuation. It will trade on Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX starting June 12. For context, the previous largest US IPO was Alibaba at $22 billion in 2014. SpaceX is raising $75 billion.

Here's what makes this different from a typical tech IPO. Retail investors on Schwab, Fidelity, Robinhood, SoFi, and E-Trade get the same $135 price as institutional buyers, at the same time. Up to 30% of shares may go to retail. That almost never happens at this scale.

The S-1 filing tells a more complicated story than rockets and satellites. Total 2025 revenue was $18.7 billion, but that includes xAI after the merger. Standalone SpaceX did closer to $15-16 billion. Starlink is the real business: 8.9 million subscribers (up from 4.4 million a year earlier), $11.4 billion in revenue, and a 39% operating margin. Launches are 22% of revenue. The AI segment, meaning xAI, is 17% of revenue and lost over $6 billion in 2025 alone, with another $2.5 billion burned in Q1 2026.

Then there's the Anthropic deal. SpaceX signed cloud services agreements worth $1.25 billion per month for access to its Colossus compute clusters through May 2029. That's roughly $15 billion a year in contracted AI infrastructure revenue.

Not everyone agrees the valuation is justified. Morningstar pegs SpaceX at $780 billion, roughly half the IPO price. And Musk retains 82%+ voting control after the offering, meaning shareholders get economic exposure but limited governance power.

Why it matters: This is the first time most people can invest in SpaceX at all, and the equal-access structure is a real departure from how IPOs usually work. But the $1.77 trillion price tag includes a money-losing AI division and a dual-class structure that keeps Musk in full control. The Starlink numbers are genuinely strong. Whether that's worth $1.77 trillion on day one is the question everyone will answer with their wallets next Thursday.

Broadcom posted $10.8 billion in AI semiconductor revenue last quarter, up 143% year over year. The company builds custom AI chips for six core customers, including Anthropic, Google, Meta, and OpenAI.

Then the stock dropped 15%, its worst day since January 2025. The Q3 AI chip forecast of $16 billion fell short of the $17.2 billion Wall Street wanted, and the company didn't raise its full-year AI chip target.

Broadcom's AI revenue nearly tripled in a year, but that wasn't enough. The companies spending on these chips are the same ones showing up in the Challenger layoff data, buying infrastructure that makes human coordination layers less necessary.

Follow the money. Companies are spending record amounts on AI chips and cutting record numbers of people in the same quarter. If you work in a role connected to the companies doing the buying (product management, AI operations, data infrastructure, security), there's demand. If you work in a role the AI is replacing (coordination, reporting, basic analysis), the Challenger numbers are the forecast.

Why it matters: The AI infrastructure buildout is the single largest corporate spending trend of the decade. Companies that supply it are growing fast and hiring. Companies that buy it are restructuring. Understanding which side of that trade your employer sits on is career-critical information right now.

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Copy this into Claude or ChatGPT:

This works for SpaceX, but it also works for any company on your watchlist. The S-1 is where companies have to tell the truth, and most people never read it.

Last issue's prediction: We asked about Broadcom's Q2 AI semiconductor revenue. The answer: $10.8 billion, landing squarely in the $10-12B range that most of you picked.

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