This past Friday was a big day in our household, as my oldest child turned 11. It’s really hard to believe it’s been that long, but the old adage rings true: “time flies when you’re having fun.” And even better, she wanted a pool party with just her friends (she specifically said “No boys allowed,” which was just what I was thinking anyway). So when I was asking her what she wanted for her birthday, she couldn’t come up with anything she really wanted. At least that was until she said, “Dad, you know what I want for my birthday? I want you to write a weekly update with 11 interesting facts and figures from the last few weeks!”
Well, maybe she didn’t actually say that. Perhaps it was more like “I don’t know…” but you know how us parents hear what we want. So in honor of candle number eleven, here are eleven things from the world of (mostly) finance worth knowing about, no party hat required.
SpaceX Sticks the Landing
SpaceX went public on the Nasdaq under ticker SPCX last Friday (6/12), and “big” is an understatement. The company, priced at a fixed, take-it-or-leave-it $135 per share (a $1.77 trillion valuation), raised roughly $75 billion (more than 2.5x the previous record). It opened at $150 and closed near $160, with a first-day market cap above $2.1 trillion. The wrinkle worth noting is that SpaceX targeted about 30% of the offering for retail investors, versus the usual 5% to 10%, so many ordinary brokerage accounts got a real allocation in the largest IPO ever. And at the moment, that seems like it would have been a good birthday present.
OpenAI’s Dirty Laundry Gets Aired
Ahead of its own expected IPO, OpenAI’s audited financials leaked, and the numbers are a Rorschach test. Revenue tripled to $13.1 billion in 2025. The headline net loss was a staggering $38.5 billion, though most of that is a non-cash accounting charge tied to the company’s nonprofit-to-for-profit conversion. The actual cash burn was closer to $8 billion (much better). The number that may give a pre-IPO investor pause is the operating side, where R&D alone accounted for about $19 billion, more than the company’s total revenue. Tripling sales while spending more than you make explains the current AI spending spree in one income statement.
Twenty-Nine Points Down, and Still Champs
If you watched any television over the last two weeks, you heard this. The Knicks won their first NBA title since 1973, closing out the Spurs in five games. But the game everyone will remember for decades is Game 4. New York trailed by 29 points in the third quarter, then erased all of it, with OG Anunoby’s putback with 1.2 seconds left. It was the largest comeback in Finals history. The detail I love is that the Knicks were the first team ever to win a championship while trailing by double digits in all four of their wins. The lesson, if you want one, is that the scoreboard at halftime is not the final score. Keep your head up and keep working.
Turn it Off
Here is a corporate risk you don’t see in many textbooks. Anthropic, the maker of the Claude chatbot, disabled its two most powerful AI models just four days after launching one of them, following a Commerce Department export-control directive barring access by any foreign national. The scope was broad enough to include foreign nationals in the U.S., even Anthropic’s own non-citizen employees, which is why the company says it had to switch the models off for everyone. Coming right as the AI cohort lines up for the public markets, it is a reminder that regulatory risk is no longer a footnote in the prospectus.
Smartbird <> Smart Buy
You may remember Allbirds (which we wrote about a few weeks ago), the sustainable-sneaker brand beloved by tech workers. If you read that, you know it no longer makes shoes. This week, it completed its pivot to AI infrastructure, rebranding (yes, again) from NewBird AI to Smartbird while hiring a former Amazon executive as CEO. And as it turns out, that’s all you have to do to get your stock to jump 39% in a day. The fundamentals under the ticker (still BIRD) are less inspiring as first-quarter revenue fell 30% to $22 million with a $21 million loss. The incoming CEO told Business Insider she was “blissfully unaware of all things Allbirds” and predicted that “in a few months, people won’t even remember the shoes.” A near-perfect echo of the era when companies bolted “.com” onto their names and watched the price pop.
“Just Add AI” Is Officially a Genre
Smartbird was not a one-off. The very next day, a social-media platform called Myseum announced its own pivot to AI. And the pattern has real precedent: CoreWeave, which went public last year, started life as a crypto-mining operation before successfully reinventing itself as a cloud computing and AI company. None of this is new behavior on Wall Street, where the buzzword changes but the playbook does not. The buyer-beware footnote is always the same, though. A name change is free, creating a real business is not, and only one of those actually shows up in the financials.
Oil Round-Trips an Entire War
Here is the week’s tidiest example of how quickly markets move and how hard they can be to trade. The U.S. and Iran signed a memorandum of understanding to end the war (yes, a document that pretty much says we’ll take 60 days to keep talking about this stuff), with mediators saying it implies Iran will reopen the Strait of Hormuz and the U.S. will lift its port blockade. Crude’s response was immediate, with WTI falling to around $75, its lowest since early March, essentially erasing the spike that began when the conflict first hit energy markets in late February. But the crazy part is there were multiple periods with gains or losses of over 20% within the three-month period. Good luck figuring that out.
A New Sheriff in Town
Kevin Warsh chaired his first Fed meeting and, as expected, held the benchmark rate at 3.5% to 3.75%. The surprise was the tone. Updated projections flipped from a quarter-point cut to a quarter-point hike this year, a sharp turn from just three months ago. This was likely driven by consumer prices running a bit hot, up 4.2% in May, the highest in three years. Warsh also declined to submit his own dot to the Fed’s famous “dot plot” and trimmed the policy statement, calling it “a bit shorter, a bit simpler.” Whatever the White House hoped for when it nominated him, his debut leaned toward fighting inflation rather than cutting rates.
ChatGPT Slips Below Half
A quieter data point buried in the OpenAI coverage, and arguably a more important one than the loss figure, was a report that ChatGPT’s share of the chatbot market fell below 50% for the first time, to an all-time low of about 46%. And even as it remains the single most-used assistant, for a company about to ask public investors for a trillion-dollar valuation, eroding market share is the kind of thing that should worry you more than a big accounting loss.
Mars Changes M&M’s
Fitting for a week that ended with a kids’ pool party, Mars will roll out dye-free versions of four icons (M&M’s, Skittles, Starburst, and Extra gum) in 2026. They will be made without synthetic colors like Red 40 and Yellow 5. The finance-flavored irony is that Mars pledged exactly this back in 2016, then quietly walked it back after research found many shoppers didn’t actually consider artificial colors a problem. These new versions are additional options, not replacements, so the bright originals stay on the shelf. An expensive reformulation driven more by politics and optics than by demand, which is its own kind of corporate lesson.
The Fed Funds Is Not Your Mortgage Rate
A useful reminder for anyone watching their rate this summer. Mortgage rates don’t actually track the fed funds rate. The average 30-year fixed rate was about 6.51% this week, parked in the mid-6s where it has lived for almost two years. Mortgage rates follow the 10-year Treasury yield, which recently climbed to about 4.59%, its highest level since early 2025. These are the same factors (energy-driven inflation) that turned Warsh hawkish. As one economist put it, the headlines that move your rate now are more likely to come from the oil market than from the Fed. Which means the oil round-trip we discussed earlier matters more to your refinance than anything the Fed said at the podium.
That’s a Wrap
A trillion-dollar rocket, a shoe company that found its “footing” in AI, and a peace deal the market celebrated before the ink dried. If there’s a thread running through all eleven, it’s that the story and the substance don’t always arrive at the same time. Worth keeping in mind the next time a headline tells you to do something that doesn’t feel quite right. As for me, these birthday celebrations seem to last longer than when I was a kid, so it’s back to the action.
Markets / Economy
- It was another positive week as markets rode the “Memorandum of Understanding” wave. The S&P finished the week up 0.9%, the Nasdaq up 2.4%, and the small-cap Russell 2000 up 1.2%.
- U.S. housing starts fell 15% MoM in May, reaching a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1.177 million, the lowest since May 2020. The data indicate that high mortgage rates are curbing builder activity.
- Retail sales in the U.S. increased 0.9% MoM in May, higher than a downwardly revised 0.4% rise in April and above forecasts of 0.5%, signaling robust consumer spending.
Stocks
- U.S. equities were in positive territory. Technology and Industrials were the top performers, while Energy and Real Estate lagged. Growth stocks led value stocks, and large caps beat small caps.
- International equities closed higher for the week. Emerging markets fared better than developed markets.
Bonds
- The 10-year Treasury bond yield decreased two basis points to 4.46% during the week.
- U.S. bond markets were in positive territory this week, while International bond markets were negative.
- Government bonds led for the week, followed by high-yield bonds and corporate bonds.
