Tech Brew Ride Home - SpaceX Is Ready For IPO Liftoff

Episode Date: April 2, 2026

SpaceX is officially kicking off the year of the biggest IPOs ever. More job cuts and more signs AI is the cause, in one way or another. Microsoft makes its first public moves to divorce itself from OpenAI when it comes to AI models. And a billion-dollar company with only two employees? You guessed it: AI is why. SpaceX Has Filed Confidentially for IPO Ahead of AI Rivals (Bloomberg) Larry Ellison’s Oracle cuts thousands of jobs after AI push (The Times of London) US Job-Cut Announcements in Tech Keep Rising With AI Adoption (Bloomberg) Cloudflare launches EmDash — the 'spiritual successor' that wants to take on WordPress (Tech Radar) Alibaba Unveils Third Closed-Source AI Model in Focus on Profit (Bloomberg) Microsoft launches 3 new AI models in direct shot at OpenAI and Google (VentureBeat) Weekend Longreads Suggestions: How A.I. Helped One Man (and His Brother) Build a $1.8 Billion Company (NYTimes) AI Perfected Chess. Humans Made It Unpredictable Again (Bloomberg) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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with a custom color Xbox wireless controller. Learn more at Windows.com slash student offer. While supplies last, ends June 30th, turns at AKA.m.m.S. college PC. Welcome to the Tech Brew Ride Home for Thursday, April 2nd, 2026. I'm Brian McCullough today. SpaceX is officially kicking off the year of the biggest IPOs ever. More job cuts and more signs AI is the cause of them in one way or another.

Microsoft makes its first public moves to divorce itself from OpenAI when it comes to AI models. And a billion-dollar company with only two employees, you guessed it, AI is Y. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. SpaceX has reportedly filed confidentially, for an IPO, putting it on track for a June listing, and it could seek around a $1.75 trillion valuation and would reportedly raise if they did that around $75 billion, quoting Bloomberg. The filing puts it on track for a June listing, which would make SpaceX the first of what could be a trio of mega IPOs ahead of OpenAI and Anthropic. SpaceX could seek evaluation in the

IPO of more than $1.75 trillion. people familiar with the matter have said. The company acquired Elon Musk's artificial intelligence startup X-AI in a deal that valued the enlarged entity at $1.25 trillion. In a confidential filing, companies can receive feedback from the regulators and make changes before the information becomes public. Details of the offering, including the number of shares to be sold and the price range are expected to be disclosed in a later filing. A listing for SpaceX would raise as much as $75 billion, Bloomberg News has reported. At that size, it would dwarf the current record holder Saudi Aramco's $29 billion debut in 2019. SpaceX is telling prospective IPO investors to expect briefings from company executives this

month. People familiar with the matter have said. The so-called testing the waters investor meetings would potentially include more detail that would support its valuation target. The company has lined up Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan and Morgan Stans. for senior roles on the IPO, people familiar with the matter have said, and has added more banks to the lineup. SpaceX is also working with international banks who are looking after taking IPO orders in specific regions with Citigroup coordinating their roles. People familiar with the matter have said. Barclays is in charge of the UK and Deutsche Bank and UBS are working on European orders, they said. Royal Bank of Canada is managing share orders from Canada.

Mijou Financial Group is working on Asia orders and Macquarie Group. is focused on Australia, Bloomberg News has reported. The company is considering a dual-class structure in the listing that would potentially give insiders such as Elon Musk extra voting power to dominate decision-making. The IPO is expected to have a large retail component with SpaceX potentially allocating as much as 30% of the offering to small investors, a person familiar with the matter has said. The company's rocket launch program and Starlink satellites generate the majority of revenue, approaching $20 billion in 2026 with XAI, likely to generate less than $1 billion, according to Bloomberg Intelligence, end quote.

Sources say that Oracle has cut around 10,000 jobs in India or around 20% of its Indian workforce as part of a restructuring that reportedly affects 30,000 Oracle employees globally, quoting the Times of London. The first staff to be affected were told by email on Tuesday, according to Business Insider, reports suggested that as many as 30,000 roles could be axed. The company, which employed 162,000 people as of May 2025, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Posting on LinkedIn, Michael Shepard, a senior operations manager at Oracle said the company had conducted a significant reduction in force and clarified that the cuts were not performance-based. He said

that senior engineers, architects, operations leaders, program managers, and technical specialists had been let go. In December, Oracle said that its capital expenditure, which includes data-centered spending, would hit $50 billion in the year to May of 2026, a $15 billion increase on the company's estimates in September. Oracle's free cash flow turned sharply negative in the three months to May 2025, and the company burned $24.7 billion in the 12 months to the end of February. In January, analysts at TD Cohen estimated that cutting $20,000, to 30,000 employees could lead to $8 to $10 billion in an incremental free cash flow. The layoffs were widely expected then. Oracle recently announced that it was setting aside an

extra $500 million this fiscal year to cover restructuring costs, making a total of $2.1 billion, end quote. So with Oracle specifically here, these job cuts are AI-related in the sense that they need to free up that cash flow to do AI CAPEX spending. Though there is also the special. factor of AI taking the sort of outsourced IT jobs that India is known for, but I will also note this, quoting Bloomberg. Layoff announcements at technology companies continue to mount in March, leading other industries in overall AI-US job cut plans as investment in artificial intelligence catalyzes leaner staffing levels. Employers in the technology sector announced 18,720 job cuts up more than 24 percent from March 2025, according to outplacement,

and Challenger Gray in Christmas. That brought the industry total to more than 52,000 so far this year. The most first quarter cuts since 2023. Overall, U.S.-based employers announced 60,620 job cuts last month, up more than 25% from February. For all industries, AI accounted for a quarter of layoff announcements. Companies are shifting budgets toward AI investments at the expense of jobs. Andy Challenger, the company's chief revenue officer said in a statement, the actual replacing of roles can be seen in technology companies where AI can replace coding functions. Other industries are testing the limits of this new technology,

and while it can't replace jobs completely, it is costing jobs. Total layoff announcements were down 78% in March from the same month last year. The report Thursday, though, showed that hiring intentions almost tripled from the previous month. Still, hiring plans so far this year are down from the same period in 2025, consistent with soft labor demand. Data out Wednesday from ADP research showed payrolls at U.S. companies increased by 62,000 in March after a similar increase a month earlier. While AI topped the list of reasons for layoff announcements, employers also cited closings and restructurings, as well as market and economic conditions according to Challenger, end

quote. This is really interesting. Cloudflare has launched M-Dash, an MIT-licensed TypeScript-based CMS built on Astro designed as a serverless, what they call, spiritual successor to WordPress, available right now on GitHub, quoting TechRadar. The company explained an overwhelming majority around 96% of WordPress vulnerabilities come from plugins, which have full access to the database and file system and run in the same. environment as the core code without any isolation. To tackle this, Cloudflare is putting each M-Dash plugin in an isolated sandbox called Dynamic Workers, with plugins having to declare exactly which permissions it needs up front. In its announcement, Cloudflare criticized the fact that

existing WordPress plugins must be trusted and that their availability on centralized plugin marketplaces serves to give them a good reputation. WordPress.org currently manually reviews, and approves every plugin for the platform, and there's a queue of around 800 plugins right now that need to be verified. Instead of this trust, M-Dash plugins must be secure by design. And because developers can ship plugins with any license running independently of MDash that run in secure sandboxes, Cloudflare is able to do away with the marketplace lock-in it criticizes. Better still, MDASH is built to the scale-to-zero principle, meaning that it only builds for CPU time when it's actually operating.

It scales back down to zero if there are no requests, the company wrote. For the front end, MDASH is powered by Astra, which allows users to build themes of pages, layouts, components, styles, and more. Finally, Cloudflare describes MDASH as an AI-native CMS that includes agent skills, CLI, and built-in MCP servers. Users wishing to migrate from WordPress can either import their WXR file or do so by, funnily enough, installing a plugin called M-Dash exporter, end quote. Ready to soundtrack your summer?

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Monopoly is a trademark of Hasbro. Hasbro is not a sponsor of this promotion. No rest for the weary in terms of AI launches. Alibaba has released Quinn 3.6 plus its third proprietary closed-source AI model launched within a three-day period, saying it drastically enhanced agentic coding. Quoting Bloomberg. China's e-commerce leader unfurled the agentic AI-focused Quen 3.6 plus on Thursday days after it trotted out upgrades to an image generation platform and a multimodal model that can understand inputs like voice and images as well as text. All three are closed source, meaning developers cannot download and access its code or adapt the technology to their own purposes. That runs counter to the typical practice of many Chinese developers,

including minimax and deep-seek, which prefer to open up their models to promote usage and adoption. Alibaba's Quen platforms are among the world's most popular in part because of their open nature. But the internet pioneer is now driving a major restructuring aimed at generating income off its sprawling AI efforts. While Alibaba has emphasized it will continue to release open-source models going proprietary in select instances allows Alibaba to retain greater control and charge more users directly. Alibaba is keen to monetize its growing AI portfolio in part to counterweaknesses in its e-commerce business, which is grappling with fierce domestic competition. The company is moving to shore up its bottom line in other ways as well.

in March launched an agentic AI service known as Wukong for company clients and hiked prices for its cloud and storage services by as much as 34%. The latest model, Quen 3.6 plus, will be integrated with Wukon, the flagship Quen app, and other agenticistak, A.I. Basically, ditto. Quoting Venture Beat. Microsoft on Wednesday launched three new foundational AI models, it built entirely in-house, a state-of-the-art speech transcription system, a voice generation engine, and an upgraded image creator, marking the most concrete evidence yet that the $3 trillion software giant intends to compete directly with OpenAI, Google, and other frontier labs on model development, not just distribution. The trio of models. My Transcribe 1,

my voice 1, and My Image 2 are available immediately through Microsoft Foundry and a new My Playground. They span three of the most commercially valuable modalities in Enterprise AI, converting speech to text, generating realistic human voice, and creating images. Together, they represent the opening salvo from Microsoft's superintelligence team, which Mustafa Soleiman formed just six months ago to pursue what he calls AI self-sufficiency. The announcement lands at a precarious moment for Microsoft. The company's stock just closed its worst quarter since the 2008 financial crisis as investors increasingly demand proof that hundreds of billions of dollars in AI infrastructure spending will translate into revenue. These models priced aggressively and positioned

to reduce Microsoft's own costs of goods sold are Suleiman's first answer to that pressure. My Transcribe 1 is the headline release. The speech-to-text model achieves the lowest average word error rate on the Flurs benchmark, the industry standard multilingual test, across the top 25 languages by Microsoft product usage, averaging 3.8 were, WER. According to Microsoft's benchmarks, it beats OpenAI's whisper large V3 on 25 languages, Google's Gemini 3.1 Flash on 22 of 25 and 11 Labs, Scribe V2, and OpenAI's GPT transcribe on 15 of 25 each. Alongside it, My Voice 1 is Microsoft's text-to-speech model capable of generating 60-second of natural sounding audio in a single second. The model preserves speaker identity across long-form

content and now supports custom voice creation from just a few seconds of audio through Microsoft Foundry. Microsoft is pricing it at $22 per 1 million characters. My Image 2, meanwhile, debuted as a top-3 model family on the Arena AI leaderboard and now delivers at least 2x faster generation times on Foundry and Copilot compared to its predecessor. To understand why these models matter, you have to understand the contractual tectonic shift that made them possible until October 2025. Microsoft was contractually prohibited

from independently pursuing artificial general intelligence. The original deal with OpenAI signed in 2019 gave Microsoft a license to OpenAI's models in exchange for building the cloud infrastructure OpenAI needed. But when OpenAI sought to expand its compute footprint beyond, Microsoft striking deals with SoftBank and others, Microsoft renegotiated. As Soleiman explained in December 2025, the revised agreement met that up until a few weeks ago, Microsoft was not allowed by contract to pursue artificial general intelligence or superintelligence independently.

The new terms freed Microsoft to build its own frontier models while retaining license rights to everything OpenAI builds through 2032, end quote. Time for the week and long read suggestions for reasons I will explain in a second. But first up, there's been a lot of talk about how AI could enable a billion-dollar company to be created with only a handful of employees and maybe one day a solopreneur billion-dollar company. Well, quoting the times, Matthew Gallagher took just two months, $20,000 and more than a dozen artificial intelligence tools to get his startup off the ground. From his house in Los Angeles, Mr. Gallagher, 41, used AI to write the code for the software that powers his company,

produce the website copy, generate the images and videos for ads, and handle customer service. He created AI systems to analyze his business performance, and he outsourced the other stuff he couldn't do himself. His startup, MedV, a telehealth provider of GLP1 weight loss drugs got 300 customers in its first month. In its second month, it gained a thousand more. In 2025, Medve's first full year in business, the company generated $401 million in sales. Mr. Gallagher then hired his only other employee, his younger brother, Elliot. This year, they are on track to do $1.8 billion in sales. A $1.8 billion company with just two employees, in the age of AI, it's increasingly possible.

Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, predicted the rise of a new breed of super efficient companies in 2024, a one-person business worth $1 billion would have been unimaginable without AI, he said, on a podcast, and now it will happen. Mr. Gallagher, who formerly ran a startup that sold wrist watches, said he thought Mr. Altman's prophecy of a one-person, one-billion-dollar company would be a firm that built AI. He was excited when he realized he might have done it, taking an old idea being a middleman for weight loss drugs, and using AI to turbocharge it. It's not an AI company, but I did build it with AI, he said. In an email, Mr. Altman said that it appeared he had won a bet with his tech CEO friends over when such a company would appear,

and that he would like to meet the guy who had done it, end quote. And then a second one for you from Bloomberg, how chess grandmasters are finding new ways to win at chess by making less optimal moves after AI pushed classical chess toward perfect play, breathing new life into the game. It's titled, AI perfected chess, but humans made it unpredictable. Again, you know, chess was the first thing that AI tackled, right? So read the implications of this piece into that, however you want. So speaking of chess, it was deep mind that 15 years or so ago, a decade ago,

they were carrying the flag for AI advancements by beating humans, at chess, at Go, at Atari games, at Starcraft. The founder of Deep Mind is, of course, Demas His Abbas. And tomorrow's episode is going to be a deep dive discussion about the life of Demas Hasabas. Why? Well, because the kids and I and the wife are all heading out to spring break for vacation at the Grand Canyon. So, enjoy basically a biography of Demis Hasabas tomorrow that will double as a sort of history of modern AI. I will be back with you for a regular episode on Monday, but until then, be good, everybody.

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