It’s news everyone saw coming from 239,000 miles away (that’s the distance to the moon, where SpaceX plans to begin sending commercial cargo flights as soon as 2028).

The Elon Musk-led aerospace firm filed a prospectus with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday to list on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol SPCX. The stage is now set for the biggest initial public offering in history, with a listing as early as June 12. On Wall Street, the IPO set up a heated contest to be the underwriter nonpareil.

The Underwrite One

There are a whopping 23 banks named on the cover of the SpaceX prospectus, including groups headquartered in the Netherlands (ING), Japan (Mizuho), Spain (Santander), the UK (Barclays), Canada (RBC Capital Markets) and France (Société Générale).

The top line, though, is as American as free refills. In order, there’s Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Citigroup and JPMorgan. Goldman Sachs holds the coveted lead-left slot, indicating it’s the premier underwriter. It marks a reunion of sorts, as Goldman was the lead on the 2010 Nasdaq debut of Tesla, the other trillion-dollar company Musk leads. It’s an important win for the bank because the fees for this listing, with SpaceX planning a record-breaking raise up to $80 billion at a valuation of roughly $2 trillion, are going to reach the exosphere. And Goldman is looking to shore up a position as high tech’s underwriting bank of choice as more megacap debuts loom, creating the most competitive jostling for IPOs among banks in recent years — OpenAI, for example, is planning to file for an IPO as early as Friday. Goldman, however, wasn’t the only Wall Street major to be tasked with a prestigious job:

• SpaceX named Morgan Stanley as the IPO’s stabilization agent, putting the bank in charge of transactions to steady or preserve the stock price. Basically, it says Musk’s firm trusts the bank to help steer its all-important early weeks of public trading.
• Last year, Morgan Stanley led all Wall Street banks in equity capital markets revenue, a measure of how much a firm earns from equity-based transactions like IPOs and follow-on offerings, garnering just shy of $2 billion. But Goldman Sachs leapfrogged its rival in the fourth quarter and maintained pole position in the first quarter of this year with a $535 million haul, a 45% year-over-year increase, compared with Morgan Stanley’s $396 million.

Fee Glee Club: The underwriting fees for the SpaceX IPO could total $1 billion, according to some estimates. For comparison, when Goldman and Morgan Stanley led Medline’s $7.2 billion listing in December, they took home more than a third of the $156.5 million in fees. In other words, someone’s getting a nice bonus this year.

Whoever said business is best done face-to-face should have to compensate Jensen Huang for his recent travel expenses.

The Nvidia CEO tagged along with the Trump delegation to Beijing hoping to finally close some sales for the company’s less-powerful designed-for-China H200 chips, yet arrived back in the US this week perhaps more boxed out from the Middle Kingdom than ever. As the chipmaking giant unveiled yet another blockbuster quarterly earnings report on Wednesday, it was quietly forced to reckon with the small problem of losing access to a very, very big market.

Game Over?

Tapping the Chinese market requires getting all parties involved on the same page. Not easy. Case in point: While US officials are now on board with H200 chips going to China, Beijing has refused to approve sales in a bid to boost chips from domestic alternatives like Huawei. Worse, China last week also moved to block Nvidia’s RTX 5090D V2 gaming chip, which was also specifically designed to clear Chinese customs and service Chinese gaming and animation developers.

The question of access to China moving forward loomed so large that it undermined the company’s stellar earnings report, which featured an 85% increase in revenue to $81 billion, topping estimates:

• In a call with analysts, CFO Colette Kress confirmed that the company generated zero revenue from H200 sales to China. Its forecast of $91 billion in revenue for the second quarter also assumed no sales to data centers in the country.
• Sales to China once accounted for as much as 20% of Nvidia’s data center revenue. Shares of the company fell as much as 2% following the after-the-bell earnings call, before paring some of those losses.

A Big Hole: Huang has estimated that the Chinese AI chip market could be worth as much as $50 billion. Nvidia dominated the market before export controls and a broader trade war. Now? “Our experts are less and less confident Nvidia will be able to regain any significant foothold in the China market unless Beijing lifts restrictions,” Third Bridge sector analyst William McGonigle told The Daily Upside.

New grads are about to enter a workforce where companies are replacing human intelligence with artificial intelligence.

Meta employees stuffed their bags full of kombuchas and chargers this week before mass layoffs went down Wednesday. The social media giant let go 10% of its employees and is moving another 7,000 folks into AI-focused roles. Cisco said last week it plans to slash 4,000 jobs as it focuses spending on AI, while Microsoft reportedly made ~7% of its employees eligible for voluntary buyouts last month. Block laid off 40% of its employees in February, and CEO Jack Dorsey said Tuesday he wants the company to cut more layers from its organizational structure.

Oracle, Amazon and Coinbase have also made major layoffs this year as tech-sector job cuts surge past 111,000, according to Layoffs.fyi.

AI’s Funny Selfie Phase Is Over

AI entered the zeitgeist as a fun way to create inedible recipes and anime-ified selfies. But with companies spending hundreds of billions on building the tech, it was bound to get serious. And as companies keep shedding roles both to fund AI and because of AI-driven efficiencies, the outlook for jobs could shift dramatically:

• The college-degree-to-office-job pipeline is over, according to recruiting firm Randstad, which found jobs in specialized trades are experiencing wage growth competitive with office work (up 30% in the US over the past four years). In another sign of an AI-driven shift away from the office, Standard Chartered’s CEO said his bank’s mass layoffs would replace “lower-value human capital” with AI (before he walked back the comment). Anthropic’s CEO said this year that AI could see GDP climbing (by his guess) 5% to 10% while unemployment reaches 10%.
• Other executives say AI costs more than human labor as spending on AI-powering tokens outstrips workers’ rates. At the same time, Randstad’s data found that graduates who can master AI can command higher salaries, and demand has risen for job applicants who bring emotional intelligence and creativity. One major employer survey found junior-level hiring is set to increase.

Building Backlash: As layoffs mount, sentiment toward AI is shifting faster than ChatGPT can say, “You’re absolutely right!” Several commencement speakers mentioned AI and were quickly booed by jaded graduates. Reese Witherspoon encountered backlash for her post last month saying women should learn more about AI. Community organizations, meanwhile, delayed or blocked at least $156 billion worth of data-center projects last year, Data Center Watch found, as AI demands more power.