Top News
SpaceX shares soar on Day 1: The stock closed out Friday just above $161 per share, a 19% jump over its IPO price. The company is now valued at over $2 trillion, and Elon Musk enters the record books as history’s first-ever trillionaire. (Notably, SpaceX also pushed past Tesla — and its $1.5 trillion market cap — to become Musk’s most valuable brand.) On today’s show, Jason advised viewers not to get pulled too deeply into IPO drama, noting that offerings are financial milestones, but relatively unimportant in the lifetime story of a company. Investing in SpaceX, he suggests, is a long-term decision, with multiple time horizons to consider and many opportunities to buy in as the stock experiences normal peaks and valleys. Ultimately, JCal argues, it comes down to whether you personally believe that Musk will one day realize grand ambitions like Moon bases, asteroid mining, and data centers in the cosmos.
Token-minning takes hold: The Information reports that, just weeks after famously encouraging employees to overspend on compute and realize their most expansive agentic ambitions, Meta is now planning to pull back and cut spending on AI tools. An internal memo reports that Meta has seen “an exponential increase in AI usage” and will devote billions of dollars internally to compute in 2026 alone. Their new approach involves managing tokens “in a more structured way,” with budgets and allocations, along with tools that give staffers greater visibility into how, specifically, they’re using AI and what it’s costing the company. WSJ also published a report on Thursday noting that many enterprises have started switching over to open-source Chinese AI models, putting pressure on closed-source US firms like OpenAI and Anthropic to rein in the cost of accessing frontier models.
Roku may put itself up for sale: Bloomberg reports that the hardware and streaming platform company — with a market cap of over $21 billion — has entered talks to potentially sell itself to… someone. Over the years, as more and more smart TVs arrive with streamers built in, the familiar Roku device has taken a backseat to their native ad-supported streaming channel. They’ve functionally switched from a device manufacturer that streams shows, to an ad platform that also happens to crank out set-top boxes. In 2025, Roku’s streaming platform generated $4.1 billion, or roughly 87.5% of their overall revenue.
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The most famous name in European AI remains France’s Mistral. While their models are not internationally famous like those of Anthropic, OpenAI, and DeepSeek, they’ve developed deep, valuable relationships across the Continent, particularly among governments, financial interests, and industrial firms. (Airbus and BMW are both notable clients.)
Today, Bloomberg reports that Mistral is negotiating a roughly $3.5 billion new fundraising round, which would take them up to roughly $23 billion in value.
Last month, while testifying before a French parliamentary commission on digital vulnerabilities, CEO Arthur Mensch assured lawmakers that Mistral’s models “are capable of finding all the vulnerabilities found by [Anthropic’s] Mythos.”
It’s an intriguing claim, as their most powerful model — Mistral Large 3 — doesn’t show up anywhere near the top of conventional AI leaderboards. It currently has an Intelligence Index Score of 49, compared to Fable 5’s 65, Opus 4.8’s 61, and GPT-5.5’s 60. Large 3 is not even in the Top 25 on Arena AI.
Rather than chasing the Most Powerful Model in the World trophy, the company is focusing specifically on security, privacy, and other pressing concerns for major enterprises.
In fact, we had Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch on the pod back in November, explaining why the company elides “bench-maxxing” (or chasing benchmarks) in favor of more meaningful performance metrics. [Watch that full episode here.]
Mistral plans to use the new funding to continue developing increasingly large and powerful models, but will distill them in house before selling smaller and more practical variations to clients. – Lon
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This Week in Startups
E2299: Two days before SpaceX launches the largest IPO in history at a flat $135/share, our VC roundtable drops a scorcher: The top 1% of seed deals might actually be underpriced. Plus: the "Sequoia scam" dual-tranche controversy, tokens-for-equity deals, and whether Claude Fable 5 is a true step function.
Tomasz Tunguz (Theory Ventures), Michael Downing (Castalia Capital), and Paige Doherty (Behind Genius Ventures) join Alex to go deep on Seed investing, startup economics, AI spend, and the impact of smarter AI on the founder journey.
E2298: Jason goes solo dolo this week, in a blockbuster episode capturing his reaction to the “Bad VC Stories” going around X, the Everything App. Jason recalls some of the high and low points of his career in venture fundraising, including an incredible story about legendary investor John Doerr going the extra mile to attend his Mahalo pitch. PLUS Jason chats with Sue Khim of Brilliant about the education company’s new AI tutor, Koji, and how actually empowering users can help the industry turn around its bad reputation.
E2297: Why does Anthropic want to slow down the development of AI? Aren’t they busy doing just the opposite? And what does Jason think about Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ proposal, that the American people should get 50% stakes in all the major AI companies? Is JCal really considering proposals around Universal Basic (or even High) Income policies? We dig into these questions in a news-heavy TWiST. Plus ComfyUI founder Yoland Yan demos the free, open-source platform, which simplifies and fine-tunes text-to-image and text-to-video workflows, and has been used on high-profile projects like the holiday Coca-Cola ads and “Wizard of Oz” at the Vegas Sphere.
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