US vs. China AI: OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepSeek & Moonshot Go to War

**Aman Verjee** (0:00)
Up until last week, I think the narrative around Chinese labs, they weren't quite as good as the Frontier, but just a lot cheaper. And Moonshot's Kimi K3, this is the first time that an open model is ahead of all proprietary ones.

**Dave McClure** (0:12)
What's your take on kind of the overall SpaceX story, Amman? Are we coming back to Earth? Do you think there's more fall to happen, or are we kind of stabilizing?

**Marcelo Ballvé** (0:21)
ByteDance could be the next trillion-dollar company outside of OpenAI and Anthropic.

**Adam Crawley** (0:26)
This whole idea of making compute easier to build will see more companies rise in the rankings as a result.

**Dave McClure** (0:53)
Hola, amigos. Bienvenidos a nuestro terrible, horrible, muy malo podcasting, Mundario de Capital, Trading Places. We're in a...
Spanish mood today because of the World Cup, I guess positive for Spain, not so positive for Argentina.

**Marcelo Ballvé** (1:11)
Yeah, exactly.

**Dave McClure** (1:12)
So here's our new stories for this week. We're going to talk about SpaceX falling a little bit below its IPO price. Maybe some good news on some of the ideals, but certainly pricing in the market coming down to Earth. Anthropic seems to be getting ready for an IPO sometime in Q4, potentially as early as October. Chinese open-rate models, particularly Kimi K3 really surprising people and jumping ahead on some of the leaderboards. We have DeepSeek preparing for an IPO itself. I don't know if they're going to beat Anthropic to market, but maybe before the end of the year. Stripe and Advent are bidding $53 billion for PayPal, but maybe not enough PayPal thinks they want more.
EU Defense Tech Helsing company rising at an $18 billion valuation. Let's get started with SpaceX. Kind of been a tough month for SpaceX, huh, Mon?

**Aman Verjee** (2:00)
Yeah, a little bit. It's been down, down, down. Round about July 13, 14, I think they broke issue, meaning they traded below their IPO price for the first time. Well, that happens. A lot of people just sell. You know, there's some short interest accumulating in the stock. That doesn't help. You know what I think might have taken some of the wind out of their sales is Metta. We talked about Metta last week announcing that they were getting into the leasing business as well with their capacity. Some investors may fear like that's going to put some pressure on pricing as well. So some combination of all those things has taken them down to about a $1.6 trillion market cap today.

**Dave McClure** (2:34)
The IPO price at 1.8, they're now at 1.6. Looking at a news item from last week, short sellers had bought the company short. I guess they're about 28 percent of the available stock is short sellers. That's quite a big portion. Overall, the company has dropped a trillion dollars in value from its peak. I mean, I don't know if that's real money. That's really just more since the company started trading, but that is a notable drop in value.
I guess some good news, SpaceX is in talks to provide computing power to the Pentagon. Similar to the deals that SpaceX pulled together with Anthropic and Google for renting out compute and AI models, that I guess is potentially good news. I would imagine there's quite a bit of revenue they could block from providing that to the AI if they do put that together. But what's your take on kind of the overall SpaceX story, Amman?
Are we coming back to Earth? Do you think there's more fall to happen or are we kind of stabilizing?

**Aman Verjee** (3:33)
You know, what happened was, I think, they didn't do a lot of price discovery at the start, remember? So they priced at 135

**Dave McClure** (3:39)
Kindly at all.

**Aman Verjee** (3:40)
Yeah, and a very limited road show with no range. And then the first tick was on 50 And then the next trade is over 200 And then, you know, the market cap looked like 2.7, 2.8 trillion very briefly. But that was also just a lot of retail demand. And I think it's subtle. When you price that aggressively in an IPO and you pop, sometimes it just corrects. The fundamentals, though, I don't know where the next support is. There are 119, 120 bucks a share. I guess $100. I mean, the technical traders will probably tell me if I'm wrong. But I think at 100 bucks a share, there's going to be some support. 135 was the IPO price. That might be more of a ceiling. It may be in that range for a while. But the fundamentals you just described look good. They're doing Q2 earnings in first week of August. If they announce progress on revenues and sign a deal with the Pentagon, Department of War, and maybe other deals like with Reflection or others, that could provide some help to the stock. But I think overall, it's been of a tough market too. Tech is trading off a little bit. There's been noise around AI, Meta's jumping in the space. So I think it's just a little bit of a tough market. And it'll probably, my guess is it'll be very volatile and bounce around between 100 and 135 for a while. So the first locked up will come out in middle of August. That will be the first release of shares. So that may affect some of the supply as well.