DeepSeek's $50B Round, OpenAI's Delayed IPO, and the GP Stakes Market with CAZ Investments

**Dave McClure** (0:00)
DeepSeek is raising a new round at a $50 billion valuation. That puts them in the top list of private companies.

**Aman Verjee** (0:07)
So I guess the pitch to potential users is, hey, we're not OpenAI, but we're 95% as good as OpenAI, but at under 10% the cost.

**Michael O'Keefe** (0:17)
Artificial intelligence is incredible, but a lot of those valuations are challenging to know whether you're buying the company that will change the world, or whether you're buying something that's really just hype.

**Dave McClure** (0:28)
Elon was a trillionaire for a couple of weeks. Unfortunately, he is now no longer a trillionaire.
Come on, welcome back to another episode of Trading Places, our horrible, very bad, no good DC secondary podcast. Let's go over our news stories this week. We're going to talk a little bit about SpaceX, as always. SpaceX is in the NASDAQ 100 index, or will be added soon. Unfortunately, Elon is out of the four commas club. Oh no, Russ Hannemeyer.

**Michael O'Keefe** (1:17)
I'm out of the three comma club.

**Dave McClure** (1:19)
Anthropic trading above a trillion dollars now. They are having some headwinds with the whole Mythos thing and the Fable thing, but Micron still puts some money in at a trillion dollar valuation. OpenAI is announcing a partnership with Broadcom to build new chips, but they've also announced they're pausing on their IPO until 2027, so no 2026 IPO for you, Sam Altman. We're going to cover some memory problems. Micron is selling out, but Apple is raising prices. Cerebras, although still doing well, but trading below its IPO price. I wonder if we're starting to see some cracks in the overall AI boom here, Aman. Then a lot of people talking about the costs of AI and how Chinese open weight models, open source models, are less expensive and good enough for most tasks.
Seems like that might be putting some pressure on the frontier model's ability to generate revenue. Related to that, DeepSeek, a Chinese LLM is raising money at a 50 billion dollar valuation. Then last, Bending Spoons is going to go public next month.
This is not an AI story at all, right? This is all about everything that's not AI.

**Aman Verjee** (2:32)
It is the anti-AI story.

**Dave McClure** (2:33)
Well, I think we're going to talk a lot about pricing and cost on this news segment. But let's start off with NASDAQ 100 news. SpaceX is going to be joining NASDAQ 100 I guess that will start happening after the 4th of July. After July 6th, I guess July 7th.

**Aman Verjee** (2:50)
Yes. Probably before the market opens July 7th, they'll be included in the NASDAQ 100 It's 15 trading days after the IPO, which started June 12th. So if you factor in the 4th of July holiday, which falls on July 3rd this year, because it's a Friday, that will put SpaceX in the NASDAQ 100 on the morning of July 7th.

**Dave McClure** (3:10)
So, Amand, do you think this is going to solve SpaceX's problem? I guess the stock has been slumping a little bit after the IPO. It kind of mooned up there initially, but it has now kind of traded down to maybe only 150 a share, sort of hovering around the $2 trillion valuation. Only $2 trillion.

**Aman Verjee** (3:27)
Oh, you're such a negative Nancy.

**Dave McClure** (3:29)
I know, right?

**Aman Verjee** (3:31)
Two years ago, this company was $210 billion valuation and everyone thought that was overvalued. Then it was $400 billion and that was overvalued. It was $800 billion and then we went to $1 trillion and now it's $2 trillion. And sure, the price went up to, the price remember at $135 at their IPO, very limited price discovery, by the way. Ticked at $150 bucks a share, I think briefly went above $200 for maybe one hour of one day and are holding it at $150. So the mini slump over the past couple of days is in context.
I wouldn't call this a problem. Now, there will be demand coming in from beginning on July 7 from a couple of funds that are tied to the NASDAQ 100 So the forced buyers, the inelastic buyers will be primarily these ETFs. The two biggest ones are QQQ, which run by Invesco and then a baby brother to QQQ. So that will probably bring in a fair amount of demand, and whether that's priced in or whether they'll have an effect on the stock price, I don't know. It's probably going to generate some demand over the course of that week, first week of July should be pretty good for the stock, I would think.

**Dave McClure** (4:36)