Why SpaceX-Telsa Merger Makes Sense, Airtable’s $1.3B Sale, Claude Code Alternatives

0:13Welcome everyone to the Informations TI TV. My name is Stephanie Palazzolo and it's Tuesday, August 4th. First up, we'll discuss the big news of the morning, the acquisition of once high-flying productivity startup Airtable for a fraction of its last valuation. Then the information published a great analysis this morning ahead of SpaceX earnings, making an argument in favor of a merger with Elon Musk's other company, Tesla. Our financial analysis columnist crunched the numbers and she'll walk us through her story. We'll then discuss how Coinbase and other tech firms are building their own AI coding agents as an alternative to pricier options from giants like Anthropik and OpenAI.

0:53And we'll wrap the show with a discussion with the CEO of AI interpretability startup Goodfire about their new product launch. I'm really looking forward to all these discussions. Italian conglomerate Bending Spoons has agreed to acquire productivity startup Airtable for around$1.3 billion. That's a steep drop from its$11 billion valuation it had just five years ago. as enterprise software companies face mounting pressure to prove their value in the AI era. Here to comment is Arif Halali, partner at Bain Capital Ventures, and Chase Packard, founding partner at Marathon Management Partners. Welcome, Arif and Chase.

1:34Great to have you both on the show. Thank you. It's great to be here. Thanks for having us. So, Arif, five years ago, Airtable was one of the hottest software startups out there. Today, it's getting bought for a fraction of its last price. What happened and what do you make of the acquisition? Well, I think that there are a lot of companies that are worth 10 % of their 2021 valuations. And so Airtable is not uncommon. And what happened is AI and, you know, the SaaS-pocalypse, if you like. But legacy SaaS companies are just worth much less in a world where they're likely over time going to be displaced by new AI-native solutions.

2:14I think the phrase, what happened is AI, can apply to a lot of things that have occurred in the last five years. I mean, Chase, do you think people are misunderstanding anything about the deal? Yeah. One thing I haven't heard people talk about much is the week before the deal, Airtable split into the core business and then their new AI business called HyperAgent. It's unclear what exactly vending students required, if it's the entire company or just just the core business. But if it's splitting off the core business and the AI business, it changes the deal completely. It's cleaning house and adjusting to the new reality of an AI-first world.

2:53So this seems like new information. As you mentioned, it sounds like they split off between hyper-agent and the core business. I mean, do you know anything about what this means for investors? Are they going to get equity in the spinoff entity, hyper-agent? It's unclear right now from what I've seen. They have equity in both. The split happened before the merger was announced. So I wouldn't be surprised if we see an announcement in the coming weeks of the core Airtable team focusing on the HyperAgent project versus Airtable within that it's first. And your read on this is HyperAgent is the kind of maybe AI native or AI first product.

3:33Correct. Yeah. Correct. Yeah. how he announced it, I believe, about four months ago, and to where a lot of the engineering team has been focused recently, and I believe what he views as the future of the product. I think it's worth breaking down this deal from the perspective of the different stakeholders, Stephanie, because I think this will be a common phenomenon for SaaS companies as things go forward. So if we look separately at Bending Spoon, let's first look for Bending Spoon. Bending Spoon's got a great deal. It's 1.285 billion net of cash for a company with 500 ,000 customers and 80 % of the Fortune 500 using their product, 480 million in ARR growing 20%.

4:13So, you know, that's a 4.7 revenue multiple or 2.7 equity net of cash. I think they objectively got a great deal. For investors and for the founders, well, you know, the founders probably took liquidity along the way and will still get, you know, a chunk of the proceeds and the investors get their money back and get to move on. So I think they're fine. This is all kind of like part of the thing of starting a company and investing in startups. I think that the people you have to feel for are the employees. Some of them will feel really hard done by. And it'll be jarring and a shock to them because in the secondary market, Airtable was trading at$4 billion pretty recently.

4:54And they will be, I think today, very worried about will they get anything for their shares. I think it's hard to tell off the bat, but it looks like if you do the math, there should be about 850 million left over for common shareholders on this deal. The founders probably own about 20 % of the company, so they'll take that. The ESOP, if it has 15%, that would mean 127 million spread across 900 people. So common shareholders should get something from this, just nowhere near what they were hoping for. It does sound like maybe employees were left kind of holding the short end of the stick. I mean, obviously, hindsight is 20-20, but Arif, I'm curious, looking back, do you think there's anything that they should have done differently or a pivot that should have happened?

5:36Or is it just kind of out of their control and they were betting on no code and now AI has kind of just totally subsumed that? I think it's just, it's really hard to second guess management teams when they're dealing with so many different things at the same time. Of course, if you go back in time, I'm sure the Airtable team would do things differently over the last five years. They might have leaned into AI more heavily, but it's easy to armchair quarterback that when they're the ones building a company. And let's not forget, built a really successful product here that has thousands and thousands of customers and millions of happy users.

6:11And I think they all have a lot to be proud of. Again, yeah, I think it's tough to look back now with all the information that we do have. And in that moment, I think it's super hard to know what to do next. I mean, taking a step back, I think it's interesting to think about what this is going to mean for the kind of broader class of older enterprise software companies. I mean, Chase, do you think this is an isolated case? Are we going to see more of these types of deals? And if so, you know, what types of enterprise software companies do you think are on the table here for this to happen to as well?

6:43Yeah, I think your table isn't the exception. It's the opening act. And there's two kinds of at-risk. Pricing that was wrong that gets bought. and built wrong that gets to lead. I think this bucket one, they raised the head of their skis in 2021. They get consolidated by PE, strategics, operators like Benning Spoons. Toma Bravo did over 42 billion of transaction volume in 2025. This is where your table lives. They find homes, the fight is over. And that's where the only debate after that is where the preference stack is. I think bucket two is the companies that are built wrong. These have AI risks.

7:18These are where the product itself is commoditized by AI. The February 2026 SaaS apocalypse wiped out almost$300 billion of market cap in a week because AI worked. Customers are cutting seats as AI does more and agents take more in this work. Yeah, I agree. I mean, I feel there are two strategies for a startup software company, I'll say. One is what venture capital is set up for. You're going to have triple-digit ARR growing in triple digits. You're going to be part of the zeitgeist. You're going to take over the world. And then the alternative strategy is kind of far from that. It is we're going to embrace 20 % growth.

7:57We're not going to try and take over the world. We're going to cut costs. We're going to stop speculative R &D and make incremental improvements. And most importantly, we're going to raise price and monetize our existing base, sort of the IBM mainframe strategy. And that anyone stuck between those two, I think, has a hard time. And so Airtable is moving from strategy one to strategy two with this acquisition. Do you have an opinion on which strategy is better or does it just kind of depend on the specific? Well, I mean, you don't get to pick. If you can do the takeover the world strategy and grow 100%, then who would not do that?

8:32Of course, everyone would love that. But if you can't do that, if that is not possible, then you have to look again at plan B. I mean, I think a question for both of you, I think there definitely are parallels here to a question that I think many investors are facing now, looking at their own, you know, portfolio companies where we, you know, as much as AI maybe ate up SaaS, or this is like a narrative that's going around, I think people are worried now that the AI labs might eat up AI applications or at least take a big chunk out of their, you know, kind of pie. How does this kind of influence how you're thinking about the AI apps that you've invested in and maybe the threat from model developers who are also building competing apps?

9:15Maybe, Ar, if we can start with you. Yeah, sure. I mean, I work with a number of these companies like Cognition, Decagon, and Simile. And what I see is there is no one model that will take over them all. And most of our companies are not just using foundation model products from the labs. They're also using open weight models. And they're finding them really effective at a bunch of things. And so I think the chances that the labs take over the application layer completely is zero. And that the application companies can deliver a ton of value by selecting the right model for the right job and by helping with the human diffusion problem of actually getting people comfortable with AI and using AI, which itself is a big challenge.

10:03Yeah, I agree. The foundational models are under the most pressure they've been in quite some time, which is great to see. Open source is getting more and more popular. I think the safest at the application later is always going to be things with data modes, regulatory modes, specific vertical where there's sensitivities around users or customer data or things like that. Those are always going to have modes, whether it's on the foundational model side or on the vertical app side. Well, we'll have to have both of you back on for the next big enterprise software deal, which I'm sure will happen very soon.

10:38Again, thank you both for coming on. And that's Arif Hilali, partner at Bank Capital Ventures, and Chase Packard, founding partner at Marathon Management Partners. Thank you for having us, Stephanie. Thank you for having us. SpaceX is reporting its first-ever quarterly results today. Ahead of that report, the information published a story analyzing a SpaceX-Tesla merger and how it could benefit shareholders. Our financial analysis columnist, Anita Ramaswamy, joins me now with her verdict. Welcome, Anita. Hi, Steph. Happy to be here. So, a SpaceX-Tesla merger? Yay or nay for shareholders of both companies?

11:16So, it sounds on the surface like it might not be the greatest idea, considering some of Elon Musk's track record and past deals. But what I ultimately concluded after talking to investors and really analyzing the financials of both companies is that it's a yes. That's awesome. So, let's get into your reasoning a little bit here. You know, one of the reasons you talk about is eliminating conflicts of interest between Elon Musk's companies. You know, as we all know, he runs SpaceX, he runs Tesla, he ran XAI, which is now part of SpaceX. Is this just kind of the next natural step for him? In some ways, yes, it is, Steph.

11:49So the thing is that a lot of Elon Musk shareholders who I talked to who are shareholders in either Tesla or SpaceX or both, they're really believers in Elon Musk's long-term vision. and they're taking a lot of these sort of frontier edge bets where they might believe in Optimus and humanoid robotics or they might believe in the future of rocketry or they might believe in his ability to turn XAI slash SpaceX into a long-term AI business, whether that's through renting out compute or whether that is through building their own AI models. And all of these possibilities have not materialized and probably will take several years to actually get there.

12:23But in the meantime, a lot of the investors who I spoke to were saying that, look, if I'm an investor in Tesla, I want Elon Musk's incentives to be aligned to create value for me. And so if he's spending all his time on SpaceX, then I'm not necessarily going to capture the value of Musk running those combined companies. And I do want to draw a historical parallel because I think the deal that a lot of people were talking to me about was the deal for the acquisition of SolarCity that Tesla did back in the 2010s. That was a very different transaction where it was perceived as Elon Musk sort of rescuing this company that was run by his cousins, SolarBusiness, and folding that into Tesla.

12:58And the point that I wanted to make with this column is that this time around is actually different. It's not a bailout of a failing company. It is combining these two businesses that are making some really risky bets that may or may not play out. But ultimately, if you're a believer in the long-term vision of Elon Musk, you're going to want to see him sort of align and consolidate his business interests, eliminate any potential conflicts of interest, and focus on running the combined company. And I think something that you also mentioned, too, in your column is this idea that these two companies are already sharing resources, it sounds like.

13:31And so combining would just make it easier to do so. Talk a bit about that. Yeah, so they are sharing resources in a lot of ways. I mean, one example is that Elon Musk shares, he tends to move executives and employees around between his various companies pretty freely. And, you know, if you think about the actual products and how they're being operationalized, right now, Grok models, you know, through XAI are being used in Tesla cars to help guide some of the self-driving capabilities and technologies. And so right now, if, you know, let's say Tesla is actually buying its compute from XAI, they're doing so probably at retail prices.

14:07And if these companies were actually to consolidate, they can find some cost savings through that. Maybe they don't have to pay full price for compute. Maybe their incentives are more aligned. Maybe they can find some ways to save on infrastructure and the broader AI buildout. A lot of these synergies are not the most distinct. Right now, it's investors sort of saying, oh, he could do this or he could do that. And ultimately, we will have to see what Elon Musk himself decides to pitch if he decides to go forward with this deal. And, you know, you talk a bit about the math of this potential deal as well.

14:37You know, I think an interesting point here is that the recent performance of SpaceX's stock, while maybe not something that makes SpaceX investors super happy, it could actually make this sort of combination easier. What did you kind of find there with that math? So SpaceX went public pretty recently. And when it went public, it was valued a lot more highly than it is today. it reached a high share price of$211 per share. And so that was like a$2.8 trillion equity valuation for the market cap. And now the market cap of SpaceX is closer to$1.5 trillion. So when you look and compare SpaceX and Tesla as two standalone companies, they are actually now trading at a forward price to earnings ratio that is very similar.

15:20And I think that makes a deal look a lot more palatable to shareholders. And as a SpaceX investor, maybe you were happy, yes, of course, that your stock was worth$211 per share. At the same time, that valuation was just not rooted in reality fundamentally. And so I think the market correction makes sense that the SpaceX valuation of the stock has come down. And even though it might make it a little bit harder, at first glance, you might think, okay, it's going to make it harder because SpaceX doesn't have as much stock that they can, or their stock isn't worth as much to be able to do the acquisition.

15:51I think that it's healthy that the valuation has come down to a level where it is realistic. And these two companies trading at a similar valuation makes it an easier sell to see how they can benefit one another. So it's not just a deal that's lopsided like, oh, you know, SpaceX is bailing out Tesla or Tesla's bailing out SpaceX. It's like, no, they actually trade at really similar levels. And so combining the two makes a lot more sense. And obviously today is their first earnings. Very exciting. I think a lot of people are looking forward to it. What are the kind of big questions that you're looking to perhaps get answered today that might make this question of a merger clearer?

16:25Well, this whole idea of a merger really came up in the Tesla earnings call. I mean, it had come up many times before and people had speculated, okay, maybe this is Elon Musk's grand plan and this is what he wants to do. During the Tesla earnings call a couple of weeks ago, he sort of coyly answered that he was not going to answer questions about the deal. And he said, if any such thing happened, it would have to go through an appropriate process. So I highly suspect that he's going to get some questions from analysts on the call today about whether or not he would proceed with such a thing. and it's going to be interesting to see how he chooses to respond.

16:57He will probably officially decline to comment, but with Elon, we always tend to get some signal and some sort of other body language or indicators of what his next move is. And I think this is just something that investors are seeing as very, very much on the table. So keep a lookout for maybe the way Elon Musk will answer that question today. To kind of take the other side of this argument, both companies are burning a lot of cash because they're investing in kind of, you know, in some cases, unproven technology. It doesn't seem like a merger would help with that. In fact, it might just make everything look worse because you're consolidating all these, you know, hugely unprofitable businesses together.

17:37What does that mean for the merger? And is that something that people are worried about? Yeah, absolutely. And you're totally right to point it out. Pretty much all of the big ambitious bets that SpaceX and Tesla are making are unproven, to your point. And, And I'll say two things to this. Firstly, SpaceX and Tesla are burning cash. That is true. But Tesla at least has a track record of generating healthy free cash flow through their electric vehicle sales. We'll have to see where they go with Optimus. And they are choosing to invest in this cycle to sort of lay down the foundation for the long-term humanoid robotics play and for their AI infrastructure.

18:12But it, at least to me, was sort of encouraging to see that there is a path to generating cash flow and at least at a unit level when they sell cars, those are profitable and generating cash. So I think that gives a little bit of comfort, but your point is still totally correct that these are two cash burning businesses. This is a very, very much like a long-term play for investors who believe in the vision and that they will eventually get to profitability. The other point that I think is important to consider here is that the merger would make it easier for SpaceX to actually fund some of these ambitions, SpaceX and Tesla, to actually fund some of these ambitions.

18:45So in the long term, if they're going to go to the capital markets, they're going to need to raise a lot of equity or a lot of debt one way or the other to be able to actually fund their AI build out and to fund robo taxis and to fund the build out of humanoid robotics. And I talked to one credit executive who was kind of telling me that the idea that they need all this capital, that'll actually become easier for them to go to the debt markets and raise when the two companies are combined. They're both pretty highly rated from a credit perspective, there's a lot of demand for investment-grade credit right now.

19:14And by bringing them together, by increasing the scale of the company, it might make it easier for them to finance some of their long-term ambitions. I mean, it is interesting because I think we are obviously talking about all these different kind of strategic rationales. But as you mentioned in the piece, a lot of this boils down to investors just betting and just following Elon Musk and this idea that, I think as you mentioned earlier, they don't want him to be dividing his attention and they're such big believers in him that they feel like, you know, if he could focus all of his attention on the combined businesses, that would be better for shareholders.

19:47But very exciting and sounds like we'll have a lot to look out for in the earnings call today. Again, thank you so much, Anita, for coming on. And that was Anita Ramaswamy, our financial analysis columnist here at The Information. As AI costs rise, companies are looking for ways to save. And for some, that means developing their own agents. Laura Bratton, author of our Applied AI newsletter, wrote about where this is happening. Laura joins me now to share what she learned. Welcome, Laura. Hey, Steph. How's it going? Great. So, you know, you wrote in today's column that Coinbase built its own AI coding agent in April called Forge.

20:26And this is an agent that's also able to integrate into Slack. So this timing means that it came even before Anthropics clawed tag agent, which also integrates into Slack. What did you learn through the process of writing this column? I learned that Coinbase and other companies who have invested in developing their own internal coding agents are now starting to see that investment pay off. That's because just now companies are starting to think about, oh, man, maybe we shouldn't be locked into one frontier AI lab as the government might introduce new policies that restrict how we use these models.

21:04you know, as we've seen from our own reporting and with Fable 5. And, you know, as companies might change their cost structures with coding tools, it just makes sense to have your own internal tool or to diversify the set of tools that you have. And so Coinbase is an example of a company that early on invested in creating its own internal coding agent. And, you know, Interestingly, it came out before Anthropics Cloud Tag. Both Coinbase and Shopify have coding agents that are available through Slack to all their employees, and you can sort of tag it in channels and work with the coding agent through Slack.

21:45I mean, you do mention in your column that in the case of Coinbase, they still do say that Cloud Code is their most used AI coding agent, despite also having this in-house option as well. So how much is Forge really making a difference there? I think that it's just an example of companies diversifying their set of tools. So even though CloudCode remains the most popular tool at many companies, they're beginning to explore other options, whether that's their own internal coding agent or others. So Coinbase in particular told me that they see usage of Forge rising as fast, if not faster than CloudCode.

22:26And so I think that that is significant. And they think that it will result in significant cost savings over time because it lets you sort of connect to any AI model that you want to use through this gateway or router that they have. Whereas with CloudCode, you're primarily using Anthropics models. And while technically you could set up CloudCode to use with different AI models, and some companies are finding interesting ways to do that, that's certainly not encouraged by Anthropic and not the way they're promoting its usage. You also mentioned Shopify, which is another company that has its own agent as well that's accessible through Slack.

23:05How does that adoption look like compared to what you're seeing with Coinbase? Is it similar growth with both? Yeah, I would definitely say similar growth with both. In a May presentation, Shopify said that about 75 % of the company is using River, which is their coding agent. And they said that, you know, we're all in on River. River's what we use to build Shopify. If anything, I feel like they were even more all in on their internal coding agent than, you know, Coinbase when I talked to Coinbase. Although, interestingly, Shopify still also uses CloudCode and Codex, whereas I didn't hear Coinbase using Codex.

23:48I mean, obviously, kind of the running through line here, which you did touch on, is this idea that companies are coming up with creative ways to save money on AI tools rather than just, you know, defaulting automatically to the big providers. I mean, why is this becoming such a big concern and focus for businesses? And do you think this sort of approach is working? Yeah, I think that the approach, it's too early to really know how this will play out. In some cases, I could see a future in which companies have developed their own internal coding agents and then it becomes a form of tech debt where they're stuck with this tool that it takes time and energy for engineers to keep up with.

24:34But in other cases, I think that it makes a ton of sense if you have a tech savvy company and really forward thinking engineers who are willing to spend the time and energy on these things. In Coinbase's case, it took about seven months for two engineers to build this tool. Um, so yeah, I think, I think that the strategy we're seeing among more and more companies and, you know, it, it makes sense as they look to avoid vendor lock-in and as the pricing, uh, shifts more and more to usage among the frontier labs. I mean, seven months is not nothing. That's a pretty significant amount of time for engineers to be spending their time building on, building such a tool.