SpaceX completed its IPO offering. According to Bloomberg (see here), SpaceX has raised a staggering $75 billion from investors by selling 555.6 million shares at $135 each. At that price, the company will have a market cap of roughly $1.77 trillion. For context, the second-largest amount ever raised during an IPO was $29.4 billion; that was Saudi Aramco’s IPO in 2019. SpaceX will begin trading on the stock market later today. I’m curious to see how receptive public-market investors will be to the company in the coming weeks and months. Regardless, this is a record-setting IPO.

Last week, I shared that Google raised $85 billion by selling stock (see here). That’s a lot of money, and it’s also the first time since 2006 that they’ve raised capital by selling shares. Today, a friend shared a Bloomberg article with me (see here). The article reports that Anthropic obtained a $35 billion loan associated with leases at five data centers. It goes on to say that Google agreed to backstop the lease payments at these data centers should Anthropic be unable to pay, but only after the data centers are fully operational.

The devil is in the details, and this deal is likely very complex. I don’t know anything about this space or have any unique insights. But this seems like a material commitment. Google has been flexing its financial muscles lately. I’m really curious to watch how they deploy capital and what the return (and risks) are on deals like this one.

Yesterday, I wrote about Google’s CEO presenting on the company’s plans to proceed with selling $80 billion in new shares. I’m a huge user of YouTube and its premium subscription, and it’s one of the apps I get the most value from every month. I get a great return on my $15.99. I dug into the detailed presentation, and one stat really stuck with me.

The CEO said that YouTube did $60 billion in revenue last year (page 11). I knew that YouTube is a big business, but that’s an enormous business. That number stopped me in my tracks. It got me thinking. YouTube is big enough to be a large, likely $100 billion plus, market-cap company on its own.

YouTube is a giant inside another giant. Interesting data point.

Earlier this week, I shared that Google’s parent company is raising $80 billion by selling stock (see here). And I wondered what it will do with all that money (it already had almost $128 billion in the bank before this raise). Well, the CEO has answered that question. Today, he shared the presentation he and the CFO gave to investors interested in participating in the raise. It seems they’re going to deploy it across the business to maintain or obtain a leadership position. So, not one single thing, but doing more of what they’ve already been doing.

If you’re interested in the press release about the presentation, it’s here. And for the full slide deck presentation, look here.

Today I read the press release from Google’s parent company about raising $80 billion (see here). As of the writing of this post, no company has ever raised that much capital in a single deal. For context, before this announcement, Google hadn’t sold equity to raise cash since 2006, when it raised $2.1 billion in an equity offering. And per its latest quarterly financials, it had almost $128 billion in cash on its balance sheet. So an equity raise, especially one this large, is unusual for the company.

Here’s how the $80 billion is structured:

• $10 billion – Berkshire Hathaway is anchoring the deal by buying via a private placement at a reported 6.5% discount to the previous day’s closing price.
• $15 billion – Issuance of mandatory convertible preferred stock, which, as I understand it, is a hybrid instrument. It’s a stock that pays a fixed dividend yield but converts to common stock on May 15, 2029. This stock will be priced this week.
• $15 billion – Marketed sale of common stock. Bankers will pitch this to institutions in the hope that they’ll commit to buying the newly created common shares.
• $40 billion – At-the-market offering, which means that shares of common stock will be periodically sold, likely on the open market. The company doesn’t have to pre-announce these stock sales; it can offer them as it sees fit. It’s reported that at-the-market sales won’t start until the third quarter.

This is a lot of cash and a big deal. I’m curious to see how all the pieces of the deal come together. And I’m even more curious to see how the company plans to deploy such a sum.

This week, I listened to investor Alix Pasquet III share his simple process for learning new investing skills:

1. Imitate – Find the smartest people who’ve figured out what you’re trying to do. Watch how they do it and imitate them. You’re trying to understand and replicate the what.
2. Assimilate – Analyze what they’re doing to understand why it works so well. The why is what you want to understand.
3. Innovate – Improve upon what you’ve learned. Make it better by adding your own insights or twist.

That’s a pretty straightforward process. I like it because you’re not trying to reinvent the wheel. You’re building upon what others have already figured out, which saves a ton of time.

Imitate, assimilate, innovate. That’s the way to learn and build new skills.

Another thing I learned at the weekly AI sessions hosted by Georgia Tech was the capabilities of an AI tool I’d heard of but overlooked: Manus. It has agentic capabilities like Claude and ChatGPT, and it’s so good that Mark Zuckerberg bought the company for $2 billion last December (see here). The deal closed, and Manus became part of Meta. But the story has more twists and turns. On April 27, 2026, the Chinese government ordered Meta to unwind the acquisition (see here). It’s basically forcing Meta to accept a refund for the purchase price of Manus. We’ll see how that plays out.

Last night, I got to see how an AI engineer who knows Manus well uses it. He showed us what he’d created with Manus and how he uses it daily. I was impressed. Comparing it to Claude, I noticed a big difference. Claude has various products that can do different things, like Claude Design. Manus can do the same things, as far as I can tell, but the capabilities are all within the single Manus product.

I walked away with a better understanding of why Zuckerberg bought the company so quickly, and I’m looking forward to playing with Manus myself.

I was listening to a podcast today. An entrepreneur shared a quote that got me thinking:

Pessimists sound smart, but optimists get rich.

I’m not sure who said this originally, but I think it’s a great quote for entrepreneurs and investors to keep in mind. A disposition that considers the worst things that could happen or the potentially negative outcomes is valuable because it keeps the What could go wrong? and What risk am I taking on? questions top of mind. Managing downside risk is critical to surviving long enough to get lucky as an entrepreneur or investor, and you can’t survive if you’ve taken on more risk than you realize.

But being mostly pessimistic severely limits you, because you constantly think that things won’t turn out well. Surprise, surprise, when you think like that, things don’t turn out well. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The most successful entrepreneurs and investors I know are neither wholly optimistic nor wholly pessimistic: they’re about 80/20. They’re optimists 80% of the time, but 20% of the time they’re thinking about the downside to make sure they’re not going to do something that takes them out of the game permanently.

One thing I do periodically is read the SEC filings of publicly traded companies that are about to go public. The SEC requires them to file an S-1, a comprehensive document that details everything about the company: financials, ownership percentages, risk factors, etc. With it, anyone considering buying shares when the company begins trading on a public stock market can make an informed decision.

SpaceX is planning to IPO next month, and this week, they filed their S-1. The rumor is that the company is aiming for a market cap (i.e., valuation) of between 1 and 2 trillion dollars, which would make it one of the largest publicly traded companies in the world. That’s a big number, and I’m curious to understand the company to figure out whether this valuation makes sense. So, my goal is to carve out some time to read the S-1.

If you’re interested in reading the S-1 yourself, you can find it on the SEC’s website here.

An eye-opening thing I’ve been thinking about recently is hit rate. In the context of investing, your hit rate is how often an investing idea or decision is correct. The concept isn’t new to me, but a book I read recently, Stock Market Maestros, contains a surprising stat. Using years of historical buy-and-sell data and a top-notch analytics platform, the authors established that the best stock market investors, who have gigantic returns, are right only about 50% of the time.

This got me thinking about my entrepreneurial decision-making hit rate. When I was running my company, I never measured my hit rate. But if someone had asked, I confidently would have proclaimed it was probably 70% to 80%. Reading this book humbled me, and I know that statement would be false. I’m pretty sure it was more like 40% to 49%. Maybe 50% at best. What I now realize is that as an entrepreneur, I was wrong a lot, and that’s normal, even for the most successful people.

I now think about decisions I make as having a higher probability of being wrong than I realize. That change has made me more open to alternative decisions and their higher probability of being right than I might naturally think. I also spend time thinking about the payoff ratio, also known as magnitude. What’s the magnitude of the consequences of a decision, right or wrong?

I think that hearing about this 50% hit rate is making me more flexible mentally, which I hope improves my decision-making.