Rocket Lab Targets SpaceX's Starlink Dominance in New Deal

24:14So Bob Iger has previously been a venture partner at Thrive in between both of his stints as CEO of Walt Disney Company. He stepped down from that CEO role earlier this year and rejoined Thrive as an advisor. Now we're seeing both Bob and Josh team up together as they discuss whether they want to make a bid for the NBA expansion team in Las Vegas through Thrive Eternal, Another new effort, which Bob is advising on, and the whole idea between Thrive Eternal is that they want to invest in iconic franchises, cultural assets, everything from collectibles to sports teams in this case.

24:52Ed Ludlow:Okay, look, I am a fair weather Warriors fan at best. The Bleetec team in New York is still pretty high on the Knicks' success. Yes. What I do know is that the NBA has looked at the idea of a potential franchise expansion in Las Vegas. Where is that process at? Yeah, I mean, this is something that they have approved, you know, the actual expiration of doing this. And so this would mean that they would be expanding the NBA to include teams in both Las Vegas and Seattle. In this case, the bid is for a majority investment. It's yet to be submitted, according to my sources, but this is an attempt at taking a controlling stake in that potential team.

25:37What's also interesting here is it's not Thrive's first investment in sports. Earlier this year, we reported that Thrive was making a smaller investment in the San Francisco Giants a little bit closer to home for both of us. And so this is a bigger deal, literally, but really kind of is interesting given that they have made a few bets in sports.

25:58Ed Ludlow:just to point out that for the story, representatives for Thrive Capital and Bob Iger declined to comment, but I would check out Natasha's story, one of the most read things today on Bloomberg. Bloomberg's Natasha Mascarenas. Thank you very much. Coming up, SpaceX helps power a record year for Wall Street fundraising. We look at how AI is driving the deal boom. We're about halfway through the program and right now we're in a place where markets feel pretty good. Now it's that 100 upper percentage point. semiconductors up almost a percentage point just a quick check on bitcoin$59 ,129 per token a little softer but there's nothing in the news cycle really driving that as I said it's half time we'll be right back from San Francisco this is Bloomberg Tech

26:51Ed Ludlow:welcome back to Bloomberg Tech I want to get back to that Comcast deal so Comcast is going to spin off NBCUniversal and Sky, basically separating into two separate public companies. This is something that's about a year out and existing investors will have exposure to both. But it's really interesting to see how the streets kind of reacting to this. In fact, Bloomberg Intelligence and our own analysts kind of see this as something that opens up and sets the stage for more M &A in the cable media space, right? So you have a separate entity that is focused on the media business, NBCUniversal, while Comcast doubles down on more of that kind of legacy infrastructure business.

27:30Ed Ludlow:And as Geetha Ranganathan writes, the transaction also enhances strategic flexibility and can pave the way for M &A. Interesting. It's kind of like what happens next. Let's take a look at today's big number as well. $570 billion. That's the amount of market value Microsoft is set to shed in the month of June, with the stock at one point down as much as 20 % during the month. So right now, it's on track for its worst monthly drop since December of 2000 or its worst month of performance in almost 26 years, one we're tracking. A wave of fundraising tied to the AI build-out has pushed US IPOs and share sales to a record$251 billion this year so far.

28:16Ed Ludlow:Blockbuster offerings from SpaceX and Alphabet have led the way and bankers say there's plenty more in the pipeline for more. Bloomberg's Baylor Lipschultz is here on the IPO and equity beat. Like the big picture story is one we've talked about, right? Lots of equity is going to flood the market. But the line of what I just read that is interesting is that, you know, the bankers hope and the bankers see that there's more to come. What do we know? Bankers get paid to be optimistic. So we got to take everything they say with a grain of salt. But when you look at the record year so far, the record half, we've already seen, again, North of$251 billion raised.

28:53That doesn't even fully encapsulate that Google raise because it's an ATM, which means an at-the-market offering, which it technically hasn't been fully penciled in. So that number should be even larger. Again, we are looking at numbers we have never seen before beating 2021. The expectation for the weeks and months ahead, SK Hynix expected in the coming weeks, that's going to be potentially$30 billion fundraise here in the U.S. So that'll take the baton and get us off to a quick start in July. Expectations do broaden out quite a bit as we look for the likes of private equity, maybe in the retail consumer space.

29:25Jersey Mike's is a name that continues to come to mind, but certainly continuing to keep an eye on anything and everything around artificial intelligence. I also want to call out that we're expecting C-Square, which is a data center company, to kickstart its process on the other side of the Fourth of July holiday.

29:39Ed Ludlow:I was going to say thank you for bringing it back to tech, bringing Jersey Mike's to this show. Unbelievable. Part of it is like we're showing this amazing chart. Let's go back to the number so far in 2026. You know, this is a big number. This is something that we have not seen for quite a few number of years now. No, we've never seen it. And I think when you look at the breadth, so we're talking about obviously the big fundraise from SpaceX. Again, record-setting number kind of bolsters this. SK Hynek would potentially be the second largest IPO ever. So these would be two deals in consecutive months, something we've never seen before.

30:18Again, going back to the broader equity issuance, whether that's regular way equity or convertible debt, that big fundraising from Alphabet potentially puts the pressure on other hyperscalers to sell equity. So diverting away from debt, which has kind of been the bread and butter for the build out of this AI boom, this data center boom, and the expectations that there will be more lying on the other side of the midway point, again, on the other side of the 4th of July holiday. Again, just want to call out things have been working across the AI ecosystem. Cerebros, again, not really trading as well as many had expected, or it certainly was day one.

30:50But that's a north of$6 billion IPO. And then you just go down the list. There's about a dozen raising a billion dollars or more. Bankers expect that number to continue and be matched in the second half. And even some of these conversations with these big bankers at the likes of a Morgan Stanley or Goldman Sachs, they expect the third quarter to be critical as we kind of get towards potentially anthropic coming in the fall towards year end.

31:13Ed Ludlow:Bloomberg's Bailey Lipschelz, thank you very much. Now coming up, Anthropic wins U.S. approval to restore some access to its powerful Mythos 5 AI model. We'll discuss what that means for model development and AI regulation with Hugging Face CEO Clem DeLong. That's next. This is Bloomberg Tech.

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34:14Ed Ludlow:Late on Friday, Anthropic won U.S. approval to restore some access to its powerful Mythos 5 AI. Now, you may remember two weeks ago, the U.S. government abruptly barred Anthropic from letting foreign nationals have access to its most powerful models over cybersecurity concerns. In response, Anthropic disabled all access to those models. And right now, after furious negotiations, Mythos 5 is back. Sort of. In a letter to the company seen by Bloomberg News, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick wrote the model could be released to, quote, certain trusted partners. The Fable 5 model or variant wasn't mentioned.

34:56Ed Ludlow:Let's get into it. Starting with the business impact, Teresa Payton. She is the CEO of Cybersecurity Advisor Fortalea Solutions and a former White House CEO during the George W. Bush administration. I rely on both your expertise in industry and experience of being on the government side of the table. the June 12th export control, the parameters of it are very interesting. And maybe you can unpack them a little. But what they said was there's been significant progress in risk mitigation and finding it hard to understand what that progress looks like. I mean, where do we begin? I mean, the greatest AI breakthrough is one that people can actually use.

35:37And what we're saying in this instance is it's the greatest breakthrough. It scares us, but we're not going to let people use it. But my understanding of what's been reported is that there will now be roughly more than 100, but not much more than that, federal departments and agencies, private sector companies that have already been vetted, which will have access to this model. And they will not have sort of the constraints around foreign employees to be able to use this model. And then I guess more to come. It's sort of a stay tuned and let's see.

36:09Ed Ludlow:The thing, the tension here is that because of the capabilities of the model, industry wants access to it, right? They want to use it for its benefits. From the government side of the table, how do they hear that? How do they get that part right? I think this is a tough one. And, you know, this should be a wake up call for everybody, not just the AI companies who are producing, you know, agentic AI, generative AI and frontier AI models, as well as businesses implementing them that, you know, we saw open AI actually just got told recently that they needed to limit model access for new capability.

36:52So what we need to do here is, you know, we know that the The rest of the world, including China, is investing aggressively. Increasingly, there's capable open source, in some cases free models that are narrowing the gap. So leadership in this moment really depends on responsibly getting these breakthroughs as fast as possible into the users. So what's going to have to happen here is a much faster vetting process for allowing these incredible capabilities to be in the hands of people in business who need to have this to protect and defend. their enterprises.

37:26Ed Ludlow:Teresa, you teed us up really nicely for our next conversation with Hugging Face CEO Clem DeLong in a moment, a particular focus on open source. You said what needs to happen. I guess there's a distinction with what is likely to happen. And so, you know, again, reflecting on your experience, do we need to expect tighter US restrictions, particularly on the frontier labs, each generation of powerful model they put out? I think we run a huge risk if we don't create a framework that provides certainty in the process and fairness in the process. And, you know, so if you if you don't create a framework and we don't know who's next, you know, the markets don't like uncertainty.

38:06And certainly our global partners don't like uncertainty. You're already starting to see global partners say, well, maybe we need to develop our own models. Maybe we need to do things our own way. Maybe we need to install open source models right here within our country. So we really need to see leadership come out from Washington, D.C. to say, this is the framework, this is the certainty, here's the process, it may change, but at least publish a process so we all know what the test looks like and we can all perform according to the test.

38:37Ed Ludlow:Let's recap where we stand from Friday. There are 100 U.S. companies and federal agencies that have been approved for access. They don't require an export license for themselves or for their non-U.S. employees. But how much scrutiny will that group of 100 be under? How they use the model, what they were able to get from it, rather than just Anthropic itself sort of being under the microscope of this administration? Yeah, you bring up a great point at sort of be careful what you wish for. So now that you're in this group, if you're in a heavily regulated private sector industry, your regulators are going to ask you, when did you run it?

39:13What did you find? And did you fix what you found. So there is going to be another layer of undue scrutiny on kind of these businesses, but they also have an advantage. They get to have access to this tool first. I think the other reminder for people is that running this tool isn't free. It does require tokens. So it does cost money. It costs computer resources. It costs staffing resources to look at the results. And oh, by the way, if you find something, you definitely need to get it fixed right away. And so having the capability to actually mitigate and remediate anything that's found and doing it at machine speed is not something that all businesses have.

39:50Ed Ludlow:Theresa Payton, CEO of Fortily Solutions and former White House CIO. Thank you very much. This isn't just about one company or one AI model anymore. It's about what happens when government scrutiny becomes a market signal. Our next guest has argued that being labeled too dangerous may actually be good marketing for frontier AI firms. Joining us now is Clem DeLong, CEO of Hugging Face. And if you're unfamiliar, Hugging Face is where more than 7 million developers discover, test, deploy AI models from leading labs to open source, giving Clem a pretty unique perspective on how AI is actually being adopted across industry.

40:28Ed Ludlow:And Clem, I want to start with that post you put on X, the idea that that designation is good marketing. Could you explain a little bit more why you think that? Well, first, I want to point out that a lot of people are saying that it's not completely unfair for them to start being regulated, given that they've been doing what we call doom marketing for quite many years now. If you remember GPT-2 that was released, I think, five, six years ago, was already deemed too dangerous to release. So I feel like it's fair for the US government to at least try to get more transparency about what these models can and can't do.

41:10And, you know, I think it's important to remember that these are gigantic companies, you know, fastest growing in the world on their way to maybe be the most valuable companies by the end of this year. So I feel like they can take these kinds of regulation and interaction with the US government. I think one thing that we need to be careful of is to kind of like spread these constraints and these regulations to the rest of the ecosystem, like startups, little tech, you know, university, academia, who certainly don't have the same kind of like legal and policy

41:47Ed Ludlow:capabilities than these companies have. I want to get to that distinction of regulating sort of the Frontier Labs and APIs and open source in just a minute. But to end the conversation on that post, do you think that the US government have handled this correctly with Anthropic and Mythos and Fable? Well, I think it's important to get more transparency for everyone, right? The government needs to have more transparency about what these models are capable or not capable of doing, which is hard to do through APIs, right? Because there are guardrails, there are limitations that makes it hard to actually know what they're capable and not capable of doing.

42:28So I think it's quite fair for the US government to try to get more transparency on this very complex black box system. Obviously, it's hard to do that perfectly, given how fast the field is moving and how uncertain some of these risks are.

42:48Ed Ludlow:But I think it's not unfair overall. You argue that there should be a distinction how governments regulate frontier AI and open source. Why should open source be treated differently? What is it that the ecosystem needs differently on the open source side? Well, first in terms of capabilities, I think it's broadly accepted that the most dangerous capabilities are concentrated in these kind of like frontier AI labs, where the majority of kind of like open source models are more like specialized, smaller, more kind of like broadly beneficial models that aren't really creating more risks. So there's a difference in terms of capabilities.

43:37There's a difference in terms of transparency. You know, like open source models, it's really easy to evaluate and to look at what they can and can't do from the get-go because, you know, you get the models so you can test it really easily. Versus an API, it's really, really hard to do that. So you need kind of like some more kind of like access, I would say, to really assess them. And also, of course, like the provenance is different, right? like open source is like an ecosystem of smaller companies, smaller organizations, you know, versus, you know, the Frontier Labs is a couple of companies

44:16Ed Ludlow:that are concentrating a lot of power behind closed doors. There's been a lot of press coverage of late and other data points like your own revenue run rate, right? Open source is your lifeblood. But open source models seem to be competitive in a market against closed models. What else would you point to to evidence that? Well, it's not just us, right? Like the whole ecosystem right now is booming. We see tons of companies doing super well, like the inference providers, NeoCloud are posting kind of like fantastic, fantastic growth. A million new models and data sets have been shared on Hugging Face just the past quarter.

45:01And you see that in usage too, right? The usage of open source by American companies, American startups, American small companies is also booming. So this is really exciting because it basically enables and empowers more people to really own AI themselves rather than renting it with APIs.

45:26Ed Ludlow:So this is quite exciting. clem another area of real focus of the show of late has been robotics we had deepu tala from nvidia on last week talking about um halos hugging face is also looking a lot of robotics what i would be really grateful for is to understand the role that open source is playing in robotics and physical ai but also like the benefit of leaning on open source in that field i feel like it's even more important than in general ai just because you know if you think of having a robot at home that is interacting with your environment with your kids I just got two daughters a few months ago so when I think about a robot interacting with with my daughters like I don't want to have to trust a black box control just by one mega corp being able to do anything I want to have some transparency about what's going on on this robot how is it built how does it decide to interact one way or another.

46:29And for that, open source is the only way, right? Like it gives you transparency, it gives you control, it creates an ecosystem of different companies that are going to be able to build robots. So that's why we're excited about it. We created this little robot called Richie Mini, and we've been really surprised by how into it people have been. We shipped over 10 ,000 of them all over the world in the past few months. And that's a testament to how excited people are by, you know, more open, more transparent, more open source approaches to robotics.

47:05Ed Ludlow:Clem DeLong, Hugging Face CEO, back on Bloomberg Tech. Thank you very much. Indeed. Now, coming up, AI bots are taking over remote meetings, creating new challenges for the corporate sphere. We have a really interesting one next. This is Bloomberg Tech.

47:33Ed Ludlow:AI note takers are infiltrating the corporate world meant to increase productivity. AI bots are instead posing privacy concerns and security risks. As AI is increasingly incorporated into the workplace, So the debate is growing on what conversations constitute robots and which ones are strictly human. Bloomberg Businessweek contributor Isi Lepowski has more brilliant Businessweek story, the new etiquette for navigating AI note takers. Start with the overview of the story. Right. So I think we've all seen this happen in our sort of virtual remote work world. We're joining the Zoom calls and Google Meets.

48:10And when you get on the call, it's you and whoever you're supposed to have the call with. and their note taker. Sometimes that says, you know, Otter AI or read AI, or sometimes it doesn't even announce itself at all. And what these note takers do is kind of take a live transcript of what you've talked about, and afterwards they hand you back a really handy summary. And a lot of people feel like it's great. This is saving me time on doing the whole recap, and I can go back and look at my notes afterward. The question is, are people really doing the work up front to make sure the other person on the other side of the screen is comfortable with that as well?

48:44Ed Ludlow:You know, that is also a question of human responsibility. You make the piece in the point in the Business Week piece that, you know, the AI note takers are quite commonplace now. Some of these tools have already got millions of users apiece, but it's up to the humans to say, how is this working? Absolutely. I mean, that's what the story is about. I think we all know that there are legal implications here of having every single word recorded and shared and saved. But there are also interpersonal consequences, right? When you are the person who has your note taker, you know, plugged into your calendar and it goes to every meeting and sometimes you don't even show up because you forgot about the meeting, but your note taker didn't.

49:24That's a really bad look. So this story is really about the norms and common courtesy that we have to develop around these AI note takers because we are not all at the same place of comfort with regard to AI. We are in some cases quite polarized. And these meetings, these AI note takers are sort of the one place where my drive for, you know, AI enabled efficiency is running up against your discomfort with having AI in your life. And so we need to navigate those things on a human to human level. And often that deals with issues of consent and all of that and just personal responsibility.

50:02Ed Ludlow:That was Bloomberg Business Week contributor Issy Lepowski. Thank you very much indeed. Indeed. Let's go back one last time to Comcast. Shares markedly high. There is a plan to spin out NBC Universal and Sky in Europe into a standalone public company. So there will be two. And in a year's time, if it all goes to plan, shareholders will have exposure to both. The stock up 7 % on track for its best day since mid-April. That does it for this edition of Bloomberg Tech. So much in the program. Check out the podcast to recap all of it. You know exactly where to find it. This is Bloomberg. When you're running a business, the best days are the ones where priorities stay on track.

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