“I actually think that, given everything happening with safety, right now would be an ill-advised moment to go public, and we don’t feel pressure on that,” Altman told business magazine Fortune on Saturday (September 11).

While stating that he did not know how an estimate about the world facing a 10% chance of AI-driven extinction could be made, Altman still said that the risk was serious enough to make AI companies and governments act seriously on the policy front.

“Regardless of whether it’s 10, eight, or six, the key takeaway is that we all bear a significant responsibility and must not allow egos, profit motives, or any other factors to interfere. We must act to avoid those risks, and I think we can,” the OpenAI boss said.

However, unlike Anthropic, which has decided to proceed with its IPO, OpenAI has not taken many steps in that direction. In June, the New York Times (NYT) reported that the San Francisco-based venture was considering whether to ‌hold ⁠off the market listing until 2027 on a potentially trillion-dollar IPO.

Altman told Fortune, “I would say we are not aiming for 2026. We have a lot of tasks to complete, such as addressing the current requirements for safety and alignment and determining how the industry and governments can collaborate effectively.”

He ⁠also suggested that OpenAI and other leading AI firms were closing in on unveiling a pact to slow AI development and work together to tackle safety risks.

Altman also found support from Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, with the latter urging AI companies to take a more deliberate approach to development.

“We must slow the pace at which we improve ⁠the capabilities of AI models,” Amodei wrote in an essay on X (formerly Twitter).

Agreeing with his rival CEO, Altman wrote on the popular micro-blogging platform, “I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier. This has been a primary topic of discussions we’ve had at OpenAI in recent weeks.”

Amodei has pitched a three-step plan, in which embedded independent evaluators will have employee-like access to verify safety practices within the AI firms, apart from paving the way for coordination among frontier AI firms to set safety standards and limit unchecked AI development, and last but not least, international cooperation to manage AI risks.

Both XAI boss Elon Musk and Altman agreed with Amodei.

“Committing to having independent evaluators with employee-like access is a great idea, and we will do the same,” Altman said, adding that more information on the roadmap would be shared soon.

Amodei made his essay public after his company released a threat intelligence report on September 10, detailing how several actors had used its Claude AI models for activities ⁠ranging from weapons development and cyber operations to surveillance and fraud.

Amodei also talked in detail about how AI’s growing ability to improve itself could become a threat for mankind, backing the long-held concerns about the technology surpassing the human ability to control the cutting-edge element.

He cited the recent incident involving OpenAI and Hugging Face as his main reason for halting model advancements.

Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigned last week, stating that the “people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”

On the other hand, various OpenAI executives have suggested that leading labs should be willing to coordinate a voluntary slowdown to build confidence in their safety measures.

Anthropic, in this backdrop, has positioned itself as the more safety-conscious frontier lab. Last week, it disclosed another instance of an AI model hacking external systems, after a July incident in which some of its Claude models had hacked into the systems of three companies during cybersecurity tests.

“Given the accelerating rate of AI capability development, it’s my worry that in 6-12 months such a swarm could be capable of taking over the entire internet, potentially causing hundreds of billions of dollars in damage,” Amodei wrote.

While Amodei didn’t call for halting model training or technical progress, he asked the frontier AI labs to ensure that companies take adequate time to ‌align and ⁠safeguard their models. Third-party evaluators should play an equally important role in confirming and validating these steps.

“A coordinated approach would enable leading US AI companies to carry out necessary safety research and ⁠safeguards without putting themselves at a competitive disadvantage. Such an approach likely would require targeted antitrust exemptions in the United States to permit collaboration in certain areas,” the Anthropic boss’ roadmap stated.

“Any slowdown by democratically governed countries should be limited to preserving the lead US AI firms hold over China,” Amodei observed, arguing that a Chinese advantage in the cutting-edge technology would pose US national security risks.

“Pacing within democracies will be limited by the lead that ⁠U.S. companies have over authoritarian regimes, chiefly the Chinese Communist Party,” Amodei wrote.

He also called for tighter controls on advanced AI chips, model distillation, and theft of model weights to prevent China from narrowing the gap.

“I believe all frontier labs should partner with the government to formalize the idea of permanent embedded evaluators to better prevent and document internal alignment incidents like those that have occurred in the last few months and to implement regulation focused on keeping capabilities in balance with safety,” Amodei concluded.

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OpenAI picked an awkward week to celebrate.

On August 31 the company announced that ChatGPT Ads had reached USD 1 billion in annualised revenue run rate, roughly 200 days after launch, and opened self-serve buying to advertisers across India, Europe, the Middle East and North Africa.

Ads now run in more than 40 countries, served to free-tier and Go subscribers who make up the bulk of ChatGPT’s roughly one billion weekly users.

It is the sort of number a company publishes when it wants prospective investors to see a business with more than one engine. OpenAI has filed confidentially for a US listing and carries a valuation reported at around USD 852 billion.

Analysts were quick to note the milestone also confirms a miss. OpenAI told investors in April it expected around USD 2.5 billion in advertising revenue this year. A billion-dollar run rate in late August does not get it there.

That, however, was not what dominated the coverage. Two other developments landed in the same 24 hours, and both point at problems that no amount of ad inventory will fix.

Apple’s forensic turn
In a filing in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, Apple alleged that Chang Liu, a former senior system electrical engineer at the iPhone maker and a named defendant in its trade secret case, accessed a power converter circuit schematic while working at OpenAI, and trained an artificial intelligence agent on proprietary Apple material in March 2026.

The sting is in the provenance. Apple said the evidence surfaced on a MacBook that OpenAI itself handed over on 21 August as part of the discovery process. Having examined the device, Apple has asked the court to expedite discovery, which is rarely the move of a plaintiff who thinks its case is thin.

Apple sued on July 10, naming OpenAI, its hardware subsidiary io Products, chief hardware officer Tang Yew Tan and Liu.

The complaint alleges Liu retained an Apple-issued laptop after leaving in January 2026 and exploited an authentication weakness to pull engineering documents and specifications for unreleased products while already on OpenAI’s payroll.

Apple further claims OpenAI coached departing staff on how to sidestep exit security procedures, and that it asked hardware partners to apply a metal finishing technique Apple developed while leaving those partners with the impression that permission had been granted.

OpenAI filed a 31-page motion to dismiss on August 5, calling the complaint baseless. A hearing on Apple’s request for a preliminary injunction is listed for October in San Jose. No court has ruled on the merits of anything.

The commercial relationship survives, uncomfortably.

ChatGPT remains an option inside Siri and Apple Intelligence, and Apple’s complaint expressly carves the integration agreement out of the dispute. Two companies are litigating over the hardware category that could eventually make that partnership irrelevant, while continuing to earn from it.

The backdrop is OpenAI’s roughly USD 6.5 billion purchase of io Products in 2025, which put Jony Ive and a cohort of former Apple engineers inside the company that Apple now accuses of systematic misappropriation.

The Cursor cutoff
The second development is smaller in dollar terms and considerably larger in what it signals.

On August 28, OpenAI notified SpaceX that it would wind down the contract supplying its models to Cursor, the AI coding editor, with a proposed shutoff date of November 12. It will supply no new models during the wind-down.

Cursor’s parent, Anysphere, was among OpenAI’s earliest customers, and the two worked together for close to four years. What changed was the ownership column.

SpaceX announced a USD 60 billion all-stock acquisition of Anysphere on June 16 and completed it on August 14, converting Anysphere stock into roughly 389 million SpaceX Class A shares.

Cursor, which had climbed from about USD 100 million in annualised revenue in January 2025 to roughly USD 4 billion by mid-2026, now sits inside SpaceX’s AI division.

OpenAI’s stated reason was trust rather than performance. It said it could not be confident SpaceX would use its technology within its terms of service, citing a history of contract breaches at Musk-owned businesses.

The company pointed to Twitter’s (now X) conduct after Musk’s takeover and, more pointedly, to Musk’s own admission under oath earlier this year that xAI had violated those terms.

It also invoked its forthcoming model, Astra, which OpenAI said in August may reach the critical cyber capability threshold under its own preparedness framework, as grounds for tighter control over who receives access.

Its custom agreement with Cursor, it noted, allowed only a narrow window to cancel following a change of control, and it used the full notice period available.

Cursor co-founder Michael Truell, now a SpaceX executive, was conciliatory, saying OpenAI models account for roughly 5% of Cursor traffic and that discussions were under way.

Musk was not. On X he said he could not care less, described Altman and OpenAI president Greg Brockman as untrustworthy, and repeated his charge that the pair took an open source nonprofit.

Anthropic moved within hours, with co-founder Tom Brown signalling additional compute for Claude models inside Cursor.

A decade of grievance
To understand why a routine contract termination read as an act of war, you have to go back to 2015.

Musk and Altman founded OpenAI together that year as a nonprofit, explicitly to stop advanced AI ending up under the control of any single company. Musk contributed tens of millions of dollars. By 2017 the founders had concluded they could neither raise the capital nor recruit the researchers needed to compete without a commercial arm.

Musk accepted the diagnosis but wanted the cure on his own terms, proposing either a majority stake in the for-profit entity or folding the whole thing into Tesla.

Altman, Brockman and Ilya Sutskever refused. Musk left the board in 2018, took talent with him and stopped the donations he had promised.

The grievance stayed largely private for five years. It went public in July 2023 with the launch of xAI, and became litigious in February 2024, when Musk sued in California state court.

He withdrew that case in June and refiled in federal court in August, alleging that Altman and Brockman had manipulated him into bankrolling a charity they then converted for personal enrichment.

January 2025 added the personal insult. Altman appeared alongside Donald Trump to announce Stargate, a USD 500 billion AI infrastructure programme, without warning Musk, who was by then running the Department of Government Efficiency.

Weeks later a Musk-led consortium bid USD 97.4 billion for OpenAI’s assets. The board rejected it within hours. Altman replied on X with an offer to buy Twitter for USD 9.74 billion, a number chosen for the joke.

OpenAI countersued in April 2025, calling the bid a feint and describing a sustained campaign of harassment waged through press attacks, a pretextual records demand and posts to more than 200 million followers on a platform Musk owns.

A judge let those counterclaims proceed in August 2025, and they remain live.

Then the fronts multiplied. In August 2025, xAI and X sued Apple and OpenAI in Texas, arguing that the Siri partnership made it impossible for any rival assistant to reach the top of the App Store.

A month later xAI sued OpenAI over engineer poaching and trade secrets. That case was dismissed in February 2026 with leave to amend, dismissed again in June without it, and is now before the Ninth Circuit. The antitrust case survived dismissal in November 2025 and is still running.

The trial that settled nothing
The main event opened in Oakland on 28 April 2026, with Musk seeking as much as USD 134.5 billion from OpenAI and Microsoft.

Three weeks of testimony put Altman, Brockman, Satya Nadella and Musk himself on the stand, and produced one genuinely uncomfortable moment on  April 30, when Musk conceded under cross-examination that xAI had partly used OpenAI’s outputs to train its own models. Distillation, he argued, was standard industry practice.

On 18 May a nine-person advisory jury took under two hours to find that Musk had waited too long to sue.

Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers adopted the verdict and dismissed the claims from the bench.

Nobody ruled on whether Altman and Brockman had actually broken a promise. Musk called it a calendar technicality and confirmed an appeal.

That outcome explains almost everything since. The verdict removed the last serious threat to OpenAI’s corporate structure ahead of a listing, but it left the accusation entirely intact and Musk free to keep repeating it.

By July the two were trading insults on X, Musk reviving his scammer nickname, Altman needling him over orbital data centres, Musk suggesting Altman might one day need a parole officer.

When Apple sued in July, Musk amplified it within days.

Leverage, not lawsuits
Musk’s position has changed materially in the interim. SpaceX absorbed xAI in February 2026 in a deal valuing the combined group at USD 1.25 trillion, listed on June 12 in the largest IPO on record, and moved on Cursor four days later.

The man suing OpenAI over its commercialisation now runs a public conglomerate spanning rockets, satellites, a social network, a frontier lab and the leading AI coding tool.

That is why the Cursor decision matters beyond its size. Model access has quietly become leverage. Anthropic cut OpenAI off from Claude in August 2025 and later restricted xAI.

OpenAI has now done the same to a Musk-owned business. Each move was defensible on its own terms. Together they establish that a frontier lab will treat supply as a strategic instrument, and that a change of control can rewrite a critical dependency without warning.

Cursor will probably absorb it. OpenAI serves a twentieth of its traffic, Anthropic is stepping in, and SpaceXAI has its own Grok models to fall back on.

The lasting effect will be felt in procurement offices, where single-vendor exposure in the AI stack is about to get a much harder look.

OpenAI, for its part, is holding three things together at once. It wants a clean narrative for public markets. It is defending a trade secret case whose discovery could force disclosure of its hardware roadmap.

And it is managing a rival who lost in court, is appealing, owns the venue where the argument plays out, and now controls a tool its own customers open every morning.

The advertising billion was meant to be the story. It lasted about a day.

The post OpenAI’s advertising billion arrives as Apple and SpaceX tighten the screws appeared first on International Finance.

Average pay for chief executives at S&P 500 companies, excluding Tesla’s Elon Musk, jumped 21% to USD 22.8 million in 2025, the highest figure since records began in the 1990s, according to the AFL-CIO’s annual Paywatch study released on Thursday (August 13).

Fred Redmond, the labour federation’s secretary-treasurer, said Musk’s Tesla package, potentially worth up to USD 1 trillion, was reshaping pay negotiations across corporate America.

“It changes the dynamic when other CEO compensation plans come up. Boards use it as a reference,” he said.

Including Musk’s award, valued by Tesla at USD 158.3 billion, the average S&P 500 chief executive took home USD 340.1 million in 2025.

The gap between executive and worker pay widened accordingly. Excluding Musk, the ratio of CEO-to-worker pay rose to 312:1 from 285:1 in 2024; including him, it reached 5,387:1. The report calculated that Musk earned the median Tesla employee’s annual salary roughly every four seconds.

Redmond said, “Our members are angry about their situation and feel they should speak out about inequality.”

Special one-off awards proved contentious elsewhere. Goldman Sachs paid chief executive David Solomon USD 118.9 million, including a retention bonus, winning support from 71% of shareholders in an advisory vote, below the market average.

The post Elon Musk’s trillion-dollar pay deal drags corporate America’s CEO salaries to record highs appeared first on International Finance.

“The facility is intended at narrowing the gap between global chip supply and the more than 1 terawatt of computing power that SpaceX and Tesla expect to need in the coming years,” the companies said.

“Future expansion phases could push total investment much higher,” SpaceX remarked, while adding that the facility would employ at ⁠least 3,000 people in the coming days.

“The Terafab is bringing cutting-edge manufacturing to America, creating thousands of high-paying jobs in the Lone Star State, and enabling us to produce AI chips at scale for use on Earth and in space,” Musk said, while reacting to the news.

The tech titan has been closely integrating AI efforts across his companies, with SpaceX acquiring his startup xAI earlier in 2026 in a deal focused on building space-based data centers, before going public in June in the world’s largest-ever IPO.

“The vertically integrated, 100-million-square-foot Terafab plant will make, package and test advanced logic and memory chips under one roof, ‌producing ⁠processors needed to power Tesla’s Optimus robots and Cybercabs, as well as high-power chips to run SpaceX’s space-based data centers,” the companies said.

As per a May 2026 filing, SpaceX had proposed an initial investment of USD 55 billion to build the Terafab, with the total amount rising to USD 119 billion if extra phases are completed.

As part of the project, SpaceX ⁠earlier this year partnered with Intel, which has been trying to expand its chip manufacturing business as part of a turnaround effort.

In April, Tesla broke ground on a research facility at the North Campus of ⁠its Giga Texas plant, calling it the precursor to Terafab. The Grimes County site sits near the Gibbons Creek Reservoir, whose water Tesla and SpaceX are planning to use for industrial operations rather than local groundwater.

The Terafab development comes amid speculation about the possible merger between Tesla and SpaceX, with Musk citing growing overlap between the companies.

“As you can tell from the many collaborations on so many fronts with SpaceX, there’s more and more overlap. We can’t talk about, you know, combining companies and that kind of thing on an earnings call. It’s got to be done with the appropriate process,” he said during Tesla’s Q2 earning call on July 23.

Tesla already supplies batteries and manufacturing technologies for SpaceX projects, apart from collaborating on the Terafab project.

As a section of analysts believes that combining the companies could simplify Musk’s corporate empire and create a more integrated company spanning artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, manufacturing, energy, and space infrastructure.

“Operational integration between the two entities is already deep,” said JPMorgan analysts, while citing shared engineering talent, AI infrastructure, Terafab and Musk’s leadership as factors that “would facilitate an eventual combination.”

SpaceX President and Chief Operating Officer Gwynne Shotwell has also acknowledged potential benefits of the tie-up between the companies. During a June 2026 interview with CNBC, she said that folding the companies together “might ⁠make Elon’s life a little easier by streamlining management across his businesses.”

However, JPMorgan, in the same analysis note, also pointed to the “practical bottleneck” of getting regulatory approvals for both companies. Also, Musk controls a much larger voting stake in SpaceX than in Tesla, complicating governance considerations for Tesla’s public shareholders.

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Revenue for the quarter ended June 30 came in at USD 7.81 billion, up 92% from USD 4.1 billion a year earlier and roughly USD 900 million ahead of the USD 6.93 billion consensus.

President Gwynne Shotwell noted 78 Falcon launches in the first half and 1,041 tonnes delivered to orbit, most of it the company’s own hardware.

Beyond that sits mobile. Starlink has struck direct-to-cell partnerships with SoftBank, NTT DoCoMo and Spark New Zealand, and the FCC has cleared the transfer of EchoStar spectrum, which Shotwell called a foundational advantage.

Satellites capable of a standalone service are targeted for 2027, with first customers by the end of that year and an explicit ambition to become a fourth US carrier.

American telecom shares fell on Wednesday morning. Shotwell also put a crewed lunar landing in 2028, and Musk repeated a USD 100 billion annualised revenue run rate by December and USD 1 trillion of annual revenue by 2030, a year earlier than previously signalled.

Every item on that list is capital before it is cash flow, which is precisely the tension the quarter exposed.

What the analysts are saying
Deepwater Management’s Gene Munster was the loudest bull, posting on X during the session that the market was “missing the point”.

The rest of the Street scattered. Morgan Stanley’s Adam Jonas has stayed Overweight with a USD 300 target on the view that the AI business is undervalued. Piper Sandler trimmed to USD 140 from USD 156 and Wells Fargo to USD 215 from USD 230, while Bank of America turned more constructive and UBS reiterated a buy.

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Noting that the three biggest operators, AT&T, Verizon Communications and T-Mobile US, generate hundreds of billions of revenue per year, SpaceX President and COO Gwynne Shotwell, while presenting the earnings data, said, “I anticipate us being able to acquire quite a few of their customers, because I think our service will be better. I’m quite excited about Starlink Mobile going forward.”

After Shotwell’s comments, shares of AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile each fell more than 4% in post-market trading.

SpaceX’s satellite internet business already beams data directly to mobile phones, shoring up service in so-called “dead zones” for existing ground-based networks. While adding land-based components, such as cell towers, would better position Starlink to compete with the big names of the American telecom sector, doing so will be costly. As per the analysts, constructing and operating nationwide networks will require billions of dollars in physical infrastructure, along with scarce government-regulated airwaves.

“We definitely intend to build out the terrestrial component. So you will have not only the capacity from the satellites themselves, but you will have a build-out of the hardware and systems necessary to make a true mobile service,” Shotwell remarked, while making the SpaceX’s telecom roadmap public.

ALSO READ | SpaceX: From history’s biggest IPO to Wall Street’s most crowded short

SpaceX’s plans to lure customers away from longstanding operators will require a network of upgraded Starlink satellites. Along with this, it needs to acquire rights to more spectrum, the radio waves needed to beam coverage, and last but not the least; securing access to thousands of cell towers and small cell nodes. All of these could take years.

SpaceX most likely won’t have access to network rental partnerships, an indutsry practice under which companies including Charter Communications and Comcast Corp have become what’s known as mobile virtual network operators. The mobile carriers have already declared that they won’t give SpaceX access to their networks in an MVNO (Mobile Virtual Network Operator) capacity.

“Unless Starlink can secure an MVNO agreement from one of the carriers, which would provide a baseline of coverage, it’s extraordinarily challenging to imagine a direct-to-consumer service from Starlink that could be competitive with carrier services in the next five years,” said Craig Moffett of MoffettNathanson, while interacting with the Reuters.

An MVNO provides wireless service without owning a nationwide cellular network. Instead, it leases network capacity from an existing carrier and sells service under own brand.

The companies, as part of the defensive move against the Musk-led venture, have already announced a rare three-way joint venture that aims to make satellite capabilities more readily available to mobile phone customers.

To deal with this, SpaceX has adopted a creative path. As per the reports, in July, it held talks with Charter about running some of its phone traffic through the largest home-internet provider’s ground-based infrastructure.

Also not to forget SpaceX’s strategic acquisition of 65 megahertz of wireless spectrum licenses from EchoStar for a total of USD 19.6 billion through two deals announced in 2025, that gave Starlink airwaves to expand into mobile services.

ALSO READ | Starlink: The Pacific Islands’ digital lifeline

“The spectrum that we purchased from EchoStar does have terrestrial components, so we definitely intend to build out terrestrial,” Shotwell said.

Shotwell said the company will build the infrastructure needed to make Starlink “a true mobile service” and expects to ⁠win “quite a few” customers from the “Big Three” wireless carriers.

SpaceX, as per the reports, intends to disrupt the American telecom industry by pairing its satellite network with ground-based infrastructure to offer a broader wireless service, moving beyond the current direct-to-device service for areas without cellular coverage.

Starlink and SpaceX’s broader connectivity operations remain the company’s primary financial engine, underpinning Musk’s expensive push into AI, data centers and next-generation rockets.

“It makes no sense for SpaceX to try to replicate what terrestrial players have built ⁠over 30 years with 1000 MHz between them, with 65 MHz,” said David Barden from New Street Research.

A section of the investors still sees market underestimating the potential disruption.

ALSO READ | Verizon to sell 274 retail locations, reduce 500 jobs in fresh cost-cutting push

“I definitely think what Elon said on the call about investors undervaluing that side of the business is ⁠absolutely correct in my mind,” said David Wagner, portfolio manager at Aptus Capital Advisors.

For Wagner, SpaceX’s willingness to innovate, along with Musk’s high-risk appetite, may end up disrupting the market beyond the imagination of the so-called “Big Three.”

Under its partnership with T-Mobile, SpaceX uses Starlink satellites to provide direct-to-cell connectivity for compatible smartphones outside traditional cellular coverage, complementing rather than competing with the carrier’s network.

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That works out to exactly 5.00% of the 390,256,808 shares outstanding, and it was worth somewhere between USD 127 million and USD 154 million depending on which day’s closing price you use, because the market moved so sharply once the news broke.

Lucid’s shares closed roughly 22% higher on the day of the disclosure, their strongest level since April 2026. A representative for the Prince confirmed the obvious, which is that the shares were bought during a slump in the price.

The filing was made on a passive basis, with the prince holding sole voting and sole dispositive power over the entire holding and no intention of steering the company’s management.

For anyone who has followed his career for four decades, the pattern is instantly familiar. Prince Alwaleed does not buy stories at their peak. He buys assets when the narrative around them has soured, then waits.

The template that made a reputation
The template was set in 1991, when a young Saudi investor few people in New York had heard of put close to USD 800 million into Citicorp while the American banking system was in the middle of a property loan crisis. That single position went on to define his standing in global finance and earned him a nickname he has never entirely shaken off, the Arabian Warren Buffett.

The same instinct runs through the portfolio he assembled afterwards. Kingdom Holding Company, which he founded in 1980 and listed on Tadawul in 2007, has taken positions across banking, hospitality, media, technology, aviation and real estate.

Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts, Fairmont Raffles Swissotel and full ownership of the Hotel George V in Paris gave him one of the most valuable luxury hospitality footprints in private hands.

Rotana Group and the Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation gave him reach across Arabic-language media. Positions in Apple, News Corporation, JD.com, Uber, Snap and Twitter, the last of which converted into a holding in X, put him early into the digital economy at a time when very few regional investors were looking that way.

More recently the focus has swung towards artificial intelligence (AI), with Kingdom Holding committing significant capital to Elon Musk’s xAI.

Prince Alwaleed retains 78.1% of Kingdom Holding, with the Public Investment Fund holding the 16.9% stake it acquired in 2022, an arrangement that ties his personal balance sheet directly to the state’s own investment programme without merging the two.

Why Lucid, and why now
The Lucid purchase should be read on two levels.

Commercially, it is a classic Alwaleed entry. The company has had a difficult year, and the prince stepped in while sentiment was at its weakest, which is precisely the point in the cycle at which he has historically been most active.

He has done this before with Citicorp, with Fairmont and with hotel assets bought in the aftermath of downturns, and the discipline has rarely varied.

Strategically, the position carries a weight that goes well beyond its dollar value. The Public Investment Fund, through Ayar Third Investment Company, already holds a majority of Lucid, and Saudi Arabia is preparing to move to full-scale vehicle manufacturing in the kingdom.

Lucid is not simply a portfolio line for Riyadh. It is the centrepiece of an attempt to build an advanced automotive industry inside Saudi Arabia, complete with local assembly, engineering jobs and a supply chain that did not exist a decade ago.

When a senior member of the royal family puts his own name, rather than a sovereign vehicle, on a 5% holding, the message to global markets is unambiguous. The Kingdom’s commitment to this project is not a line item that can be quietly withdrawn.

Building upwards in Jeddah
The Lucid filing was triggered by an acquisition dated 23 July. On exactly the same day, Prince Alwaleed was standing on a construction site on the north side of Jeddah, announcing that Jeddah Tower had reached 430 metres.

That coincidence is worth pausing on. The tower, developed by Jeddah Economic Company with Kingdom Holding as its principal backer, is designed to pass one kilometre and become the tallest building in the world.

Construction restarted in 2025 under a contract worth around SAR 7.2 billion, and the project has since moved past the ninetieth floor with facade cladding and mechanical works under way.

Kingdom Holding has pointed to a workforce of roughly 5,200, an average five-day floor cycle and more than eight million hours worked without a lost-time incident. Completion is currently guided towards 2028.

Jeddah Tower anchors Jeddah Economic City, a development of some 57 million square feet intended to position the Kingdom as a destination for international business and premium tourism.

It will house residences, offices, a Four Seasons hotel and one of the highest observation decks anywhere. For Gulf executives watching capital allocation across the region, the tower is the clearest statement of intent that Kingdom Holding has made in years.

The domestic portfolio and the giving
Closer to home, Kingdom Holding holds a stake of about 27.4% in flynas, the low-cost carrier that completed its Tadawul listing in 2025, and 16.2% of Banque Saudi Fransi. The Kingdom Centre tower in Riyadh remains one of the capital’s landmarks and one of his best-known assets.

Then there is the giving, which the prince has repeatedly described as the part of his work he values most. Alwaleed Philanthropies reports more than USD 5 billion deployed over 45 years, reaching upwards of 1.5 billion beneficiaries across 190 countries.

In January this year, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, the organisation announced a fresh USD 15 million commitment to the Global Polio Eradication Initiative alongside the Gates Foundation, funding vaccination campaigns, surveillance and outbreak response over three years.

Bill Gates, Chair of the Gates Foundation, said: “Polio eradication is within sight, but the last mile is the hardest. Alwaleed Philanthropies’ latest commitment is exactly the kind of leadership the world needs to build a future where no family has to live in fear of polio paralyzing their child.”

HRH Princess Lamia Bint Majed Al Saud, Secretary General, Alwaleed Philanthropies, added: “This commitment builds on Alwaleed Philanthropies’ long-standing support for global health and its partnership with the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, reinforcing the critical role of philanthropy in addressing some of the world’s most complex public health challenges.”

In July, its Crafting Change project with UNESCO in Tanzania marked its own milestone in cultural skills training.

The lesson for the region
At 71, Prince Alwaleed remains one of the few Gulf investors whose personal conviction still moves a listed share price on two continents in a single session. The Lucid stake will be judged in time by returns.

What it demonstrates today is the discipline that has defined him since 1980, which is a willingness to commit capital at the point of maximum doubt and to stay committed for far longer than the market’s attention span allows.

For the region’s boardrooms, that is the more useful takeaway. Gulf capital has spent the past decade proving it can write very large cheques. The harder skill, and the one on display this week, is knowing when to write them.

The post Prince Alwaleed bin Talal’s Lucid stake buildup: The art of buying when others are selling appeared first on International Finance.

By the close on July 22, investors betting against SpaceX were sitting on USD 15.5 billion of paper profit. The company had been publicly traded for six weeks.

Nothing about the listing pointed that way. SpaceX priced 555.6 million shares at USD 135 on June 11 and raised USD 75 billion, rising to USD 85.7 billion once underwriters took up their overallotment. It was the largest flotation ever completed anywhere, more than double the USD 29.4 billion Saudi Aramco raised in 2019.

The stock opened at USD 150 the next morning and closed its first session 19% above the offer price. Four days later it touched USD 225.64 intraday, valuing the rockets-to-AI conglomerate at roughly USD 2.1 trillion and making Musk the world’s first trillionaire.

The turn
The reversal since has been close to total. SpaceX closed at USD 113.50 on Monday (July 27), a record low, before recovering to USD 116.41 the following session. That leaves it around 48% below the June peak and some 14% under the price at which shares were sold to the public.

Retail investors who took allocations at USD 135 are under water, and anyone who bought at the top has lost close to half their money. SpaceX and Tesla together have shed USD 1.2 trillion of market value in July alone.

The timing of that record low is the part the bulls should find uncomfortable. It came days after Starship Flight 13, a near-flawless test and the clearest operational win the company has had since listing. The stock fell anyway.

Short sellers, meanwhile, have been adding rather than banking. Bloomberg put their paper gains at USD 3.88 billion on July 15. Ortex Technologies had it at USD 8.7 billion the following day, when the stock first traded through its offer price, and at USD 15.5 billion by July 22. Almost USD 12 billion arrived inside five sessions.

Reading the position data
The build-up has been fast. Short interest sat at roughly 40 million shares at listing, between 5% and 7% of tradable stock and unremarkable for a hot debut. By end-June it was near 83 million. S3 Partners now counts more than 206 million shares short, about 32% of the float and roughly USD 25 billion of notional exposure.

Ortex reads it slightly lower at close to 196 million, and adds that around 49% of the free float is out on loan. Peter Hillerberg, who co-founded Ortex, called the speed of it unusual for a stock less than a month old.

Anyone quoting those numbers should know where they come from. FINRA’s settlement data, the official record, showed roughly 110 million shares short at the end of June, close to half the vendor estimates. The gap reflects method rather than error.

The official figures appear twice monthly and with a lag, while Ortex and S3 model stock-lending flows nearer to real time. It also means SpaceX does not show up on the standard most-shorted screens, which rank on FINRA data. Groupon leads that table at 59.1% of float, ahead of ImmunityBio and RH.

Measured in dollars rather than percentages the comparison is not close. At roughly USD 25 billion of notional exposure, the SpaceX short book is worth more than most of that list combined, and has been widely called the most heavily shorted newly listed stock Wall Street has tracked.

Why the float made it possible
Most of what has happened traces back to one decision about supply.

SpaceX released fewer than 5% of its shares into public hands at listing. A company carrying a USD 2 trillion valuation was trading on a base of a few hundred million shares, and into that thin base came buyers with no discretion.

FTSE Russell added the stock to its US indices in late June, and Nasdaq moved it into the Nasdaq-100 on July 7 under revised rules for new listings. Every tracker fund and ETF benchmarked to those indices had to buy, whatever the price.

That is a good environment to sell into. It is a much worse one to own, because the price it produces is not really a price. It is a queue.

What followed was the more considered part of the trade. Rather than a single cliff-edge expiry, SpaceX adopted a staggered unlock in tranches of roughly 7% at days 70, 90, 105, 120 and 135 after listing.

The first meaningful wave lands two trading days after the maiden earnings report, releasing up to 911.5 million shares unconditionally on 6 August.

A further 455.8 million, worth about USD 62 billion, unlock only if the stock closes at or above USD 175.50 on five of the ten sessions before results. Near USD 116 that is effectively dead, which points to the smaller tranche being the one in play.

For a short seller this is close to ideal. The supply event is dated, the size is disclosed and the arithmetic is public.

The balance sheet the prospectus only hinted at
Two disclosures in the fortnight after listing did the rest of the damage, both concerning commitments the company had already made.

On June 22, ten days after the debut, SpaceX launched its first bond sale, pricing USD 25 billion across five tranches maturing between 2031 and 2056. The paper is investment grade at Moody’s, Fitch and S&P, and the proceeds repay in full the bridge loan used to buy xAI in February.

That bridge had a hard maturity of September 2027, so the refinancing was always coming. The shares fell 16% regardless. What unsettled the market was not fresh borrowing so much as confirmation that SpaceX had entered public life carrying debt the equity story had glossed over.

Four trading days after listing the company had also exercised its option to acquire Cursor for USD 60 billion, entirely in stock, diluting holders by around 3.4% and signalling that newly minted equity would be spent as acquisition currency straight away. The deal should close in the third quarter.

Against that, a Starship launch abort in mid-July that took roughly USD 100 billion off the market value looks almost incidental. Borrowing the stock has cost about 1.95% throughout, cheap enough that none of these views had to be right quickly.

The other side
None of which makes the position comfortable.

A stock with 32% of its float short on vendor numbers, and half that float lent out, is crowded, and crowding is its own risk. Ortex calculates that every one-dollar move shifts the value of outstanding short positions by more than USD 300 million.

Should sentiment turn, the bears must buy back stock they do not own, out of a float that is small for the same reason it was easy to attack. Hillerberg has described the position as a considerable amount of fuel if it tips into a squeeze.

The bull case has not gone quiet. Morgan Stanley’s Adam Jonas has reiterated a buy with a USD 300 target. Consensus across 31 analysts surveyed by TipRanks sits at USD 235.18, far above the market but drifting lower all month, so read it as a direction rather than a destination.

Cathie Wood’s ARK funds have put close to USD 115 million into the stock in July alone. Musk posted on microblogging platform X (formerly Twitter) that the survival probability of firms holding significant short positions in SpaceX is very low, a remark that costs nothing to make and has occasionally proved expensive to ignore.

August
SpaceX reports quarterly results as a public company for the first time after the US close on August 4. Two days later, up to 911.5 million shares come free.

Those results will be the first look at how the three businesses inside the company perform against one another. SpaceX reports across Space, Connectivity and AI, the last arriving with xAI and covering Grok, X and the compute behind them.

Analysts have modelled Starlink economics and frontier-model spending from the outside, with no segment history to work from. Both the valuation argument and the debt argument rest on figures nobody has seen.

Six weeks in, the bears have been right about the valuation and right about the timing, which is a rarer combination than it sounds. What they have not yet had is a day when the news went the other way and the market cared.

The post SpaceX: From history’s biggest IPO to Wall Street’s most crowded short appeared first on International Finance.

What the numbers said
The top line was the best Tesla has ever printed. Revenue reached USD 28.24 billion, up 26% on the same quarter a year earlier and ahead of the USD 25.71 billion analysts polled by LSEG had expected, while the core automotive segment brought in USD 20.52 billion, a rise of 23%.

Deliveries hit a record 480,126 vehicles, up 25% year on year, and energy storage deployments reached 13.5 GWh.

Everything below that line moved the other way. Operating income fell 57% to USD 398 million and operating margin sank to 1.4%, down from 4.1% a year earlier, as operating expenses jumped 47% to USD 4.35 billion.

Gross margin slipped to 16.8%, hurt by lower vehicle pricing and a sharp fall in regulatory credit income, a line that once delivered profit without effort.

Adjusted earnings came in at USD 0.33 per share. The size of the miss depends on whose consensus you use. LSEG had USD 0.51. FactSet had USD 0.55. Either way it was a substantial shortfall against a record revenue quarter.

Shares fell around 3% in after-hours trading on Wednesday. The heavier move came in Thursday’s session, when the stock dropped more than 12% and shed over USD 140 billion in market value, with the slide deepening during the earnings call itself.

Why the cash turned negative
The figure that unsettled investors most was free cash flow. Operating cash flow actually rose 85% to USD 4.70 billion, a healthy result. But capital expenditure surged 142% to USD 5.79 billion, producing negative free cash flow of USD 1.09 billion. That compares with positive free cash flow of USD 1.44 billion in the first quarter of 2026 and USD 146 million a year earlier.

It is worth correcting a figure circulating in some coverage. Several outlets have described a USD 3.3 billion cash burn. That number is the sequential increase in capital expenditure, not the cash deficit. The free cash flow shortfall was just over USD 1 billion.

So this is not a demand problem or a manufacturing problem. Tesla is generating more cash from operations than at any comparable point. It is spending faster than it earns, deliberately.

The company has raised its 2026 capital expenditure guidance to more than USD 25 billion, close to three times what it spent in 2025, with the money going towards AI infrastructure, robotics and the Optimus humanoid programme.

Chief financial officer Vaibhav Taneja confirmed the figure on the call, and Musk described 2026 as “a massive capex year,” arguing the investments would deliver strong returns. Musk also indicated capital spending would keep rising over the next two to three years.

A profit worth examining
Tesla reported GAAP net income of USD 1.11 billion, down 5% year on year. Here a caveat is needed. One outlet has reported that roughly USD 750 million of that figure came from a mark-to-market gain on Tesla’s stake in SpaceX, which would mean most of the quarter’s reported profit was a paper gain on a private company Musk controls rather than money earned selling cars or energy.

That claim comes from a single source and has not yet been corroborated against Tesla’s quarterly filing. If it holds, it materially changes how the quarter reads, because operating income was USD 398 million. Anyone relying on the point should check the 10-Q before treating it as settled.

Can the car business carry it?
There are real reasons for optimism on the automotive side. Analysts point to the fully ramped new Model Y, aggressive global pricing, the end of Musk’s DOGE role removing a reputational drag, and what one investor called the end of the EV slump that began in March 2024.

Full Self-Driving subscriptions are also becoming a visible recurring revenue line, though the specific figures cited on the call have so far appeared only in secondary summaries rather than in Tesla’s own materials.

Against that, the margin structure has changed. Tesla operated above 17% margins at the peak of its pricing power in 2022. It is now at 1.4%. The regulatory credit windfall that once flattered results has largely gone.

A business selling more cars than ever at thinner margins, while its subsidy income evaporates, is a weaker platform for funding multi-year moonshots than the same business two years ago.

The robotaxi question
This is where the gap between narrative and delivery matters most. Musk said last year that Tesla would scale its self-driving taxi service rapidly and launch in several US cities by the end of 2025, a target conditioned on regulatory approvals. Progress has been slower than that framing implied, and on Wednesday’s call the executive team took a noticeably more guarded tone.

Tesla now says Robotaxi is live in seven major metros, with several ramping unsupervised and San Francisco running supervised Full Self-Driving under a California permit. Cybercab production and public-road engineering tests began during the quarter, though the company describes these as steps before fleet deployment rather than deployment itself.

The mileage data supports two readings. Cumulative paid Robotaxi miles passed 2.4 million, up roughly 41% on the first quarter, and Tesla added Miami, Orlando and Tampa to its ramping-unsupervised markets, doubling active markets in a quarter.

Broken into quarterly increments, however, the service added roughly 900,000 paid miles in the second quarter, the same as in the first, meaning the quarterly rate held flat rather than accelerating. Both descriptions are accurate. Which one matters depends on whether you are measuring footprint or throughput.

Tesla says it recorded no notable incidents across more than 380,000 unsupervised miles. That is the company’s own figure and has not been independently audited.

On scale, the comparison remains stark. Independent trackers compiling operator disclosures and state filings put Waymo at roughly 3,000 vehicles across 11 US metros, around 500,000 paid rides a week and about four million autonomous miles weekly, while Tesla’s active Austin fleet is reported at around 20 vehicles despite unsupervised service covering the whole metro since June. Tesla’s robotaxi operation remains at an early stage and has yet to generate meaningful revenue.

Optimus, chips and the widening bet
The spending extends well beyond robotaxis. Tesla is pursuing Terafab, a chip manufacturing project shared with SpaceX and xAI, which Musk described as a dependency for Optimus.

The first Optimus production line is under construction, with mass production expected during 2026, though Musk conceded it is the hardest product Tesla has ever attempted to manufacture at scale, with almost every component requiring fresh development and a long capacity ramp ahead.

Tesla also more than doubled its onsite compute in Texas during the first half of 2026, with its Cortex clusters running above 90 MW and 115 MW.

None of these programmes is close to self-funding, and each carries an uncertain payoff date.

The cushion, and its limits
Tesla is not in financial distress, and it is important to say so plainly. It ended the quarter with USD 43.52 billion in cash, cash equivalents and short-term investments, up 18% year on year, with the sequential decline of USD 1.2 billion driven by the capex surge.

The quarter’s cash burn was also far smaller than analysts had feared, coming in at USD 1.09 billion against estimates closer to USD 3.64 billion.

A company with more than USD 43 billion in liquid assets and positive operating cash flow can sustain a USD 25 billion spending year without existential risk. The question is not solvency. It is duration and discipline.

The verdict
Tesla can afford this year. Whether it can afford three or four consecutive years like it, while margins sit near 1% and robotaxi throughput holds flat, is genuinely open.

The bear case is straightforward. The automotive engine is running at its thinnest margins in years, the subsidy income has shrunk, and spending is rising rather than plateauing.

The bull case is equally coherent. Record deliveries, growing subscription revenue, a strong balance sheet and a technological bet that, if it lands, reprices the entire company.

Musk spent much of the call describing Tesla as increasingly intertwined with SpaceX and xAI, citing Grok in the vehicles and Starlink in the Cybercab. Asked directly about a merger, he said there is “more and more overlap” between the companies but declined to discuss combinations on an earnings call.

That may be the most revealing signal of all. If the automotive business cannot indefinitely fund Musk’s AI ambitions alone, a restructuring that pools the capital of his empire starts to look less like speculation and more like a plan.

The post Can Tesla afford its robot dreams? What the Q2 numbers really show appeared first on International Finance.