SpaceX Surges, Anthropic Stumbles, and Bezos Bets $12B

**Dave McClure** (0:00)
How did SpaceX first week in public markets go?

**Aman Verjee** (0:03)
I think it went really well. This is a little bit of the consequences of how Dario has been talking about AI so far. He's launched a technology that he himself says could be a cyber weapon that will overrun cyber security and traditional protocols on the internet.

**Dave McClure** (0:18)
I think we're gonna see pressure on both cost structure and sort of productivity. We're definitely gonna see limits on how much energy can be acquired or used to build out these data center platforms.
Come on, happy Father's Day.

**Aman Verjee** (0:50)
And happy Father's Day to you too, Dave. It reminds me, I gotta call my dad today. Shoot, no, let me take that note.

**Dave McClure** (0:56)
There we go.

**Aman Verjee** (0:56)
All right, happy Father's Day. You have any special plans?

**Dave McClure** (1:00)
My daughter is kidnapping me to go down to Santa Cruz. I'm not sure what's happening, but it's also the summer solstice, longest day of the year. So we'll enjoy the sunshine while you can. All right, here's what we're gonna cover on the show today. We're gonna talk a little bit about the global macro story, what's happening in Iran, what's happening with oil.
We'll cover SpaceX first week as a public company and how that went. Yeah.

**Aman Verjee** (1:23)
Yeah.

**Dave McClure** (1:24)
Some big news with Anthropic, actually several news stories, I guess government is laying on some export controls over concerns about cybersecurity issues and mythos and fable. And we'll talk about Jeff Bezos' new startup, Prometheus. This startup raised at a $40 billion valuation recently. That's kind of crazy. $12 billion Series B at a $41 billion valuation.
European startup, French company Mistral just recently raised at a $20 billion Euro or $23 billion US valuation. Salesforce is buying FINN, formerly Intercom. Actually, that's a 500 startups company for 3.6 billion.
Great day for Owen McCabe and his co-founders. And then I guess talking our own book a little bit, Saronic was in the news for picking up some American soldiers who had been downed by Iran in the Strait of Hormuz. So Saronic products actually working in the field. Well, let's start at the top here with the global macro picture and in particular the Iran war. There was a truce and deal that was announced, but then some fighting in Lebanon between Israel and Hezbollah.

**Aman Verjee** (2:36)
Oh no.

**Dave McClure** (2:36)
Kind of took that off track. I guess the latest news in the last 12 to 24 hours is that the Straits of Hormuz are closed again, Aman. They're open.

**Aman Verjee** (2:45)
No way.

**Dave McClure** (2:45)
Are you closed? No way. They're open. But at the moment, they appear to be closed and JD Vance is going to talk with some folks in Switzerland, I guess, and see if we can get that all straightened out.

**Aman Verjee** (2:58)
Okay.
That's promising. I guess the good news is the price of oil is had gone from between 100 and 110 over the last three to four weeks. It's down in the mid 70s and it's holding around 76 in the futures market. So I guess the market is anticipating, despite some starts and stops and fits and starts here, that the level of traffic in the Straits of Hormuz will be normalizing. So I guess that is probably good news, although I'm sure it will be. By the time this drops on Tuesday, I'm sure the noise will be.

**Dave McClure** (3:32)
Well, if we look at CalSHI for some indications on when traffic in the Straits of Hormuz will return to normal, the market is pricing in sometime in September or October, I guess. So probably still a few months to get traffic back to normal, even if things proceed in the right direction. Might take a little while to turn on all the oil infrastructure, clear up everything in the Straits and allow traffic to return to normal. I guess it's important whether that happens before or after November, right, Aman?

**Aman Verjee** (4:02)
Yeah, I think so. Well, in November, we have the midterms in the US, chances are, let's say 95 percent or so that the Democrats take the House, in which case now the ability for the government to strike deals becomes less. You need Congress to support anything around the War Powers Resolutions and War Powers Act. So I think if this gets done by November, that's obviously Trump's incentive and that's what they're shooting for. But Iran, I'm sure the Iranian IRGC knows our election calendar as well as you and I do. So I'm sure they have an incentive to drag it out until after November, and then they're dealing with the term they use here in the US as a lame duck. I don't know that Trump will ever be a lame duck the way that we think about it, but I think that's certainly the incentive that the IRGC has.