SpaceX posts biggest IPO in history

PLUS: Amazon’s data centers are awfully thirsty

Good morning, tech enthusiasts. SpaceX just pulled off the biggest IPO in history, raising $75B in a single night. It also makes Elon Musk something no human has ever been: a trillionaire, at least on paper.

The nearly $1.8T price tag is riding on rockets and Starlink today — and orbital data centers and a Martian city tomorrow. With 85% of the vote, Musk alone holds the controls.

In today’s tech rundown:

  • SpaceX IPO raises record-breaking $75B

  • Amazon’s awfully thirsty data centers

  • David Sinclair tests age-reversal pill on people

  • Researchers find superbug killer in old dirt

  • Quick hits on other tech news

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

SPACEX

Image source: Images 2.0 / The Rundown

The Rundown: SpaceX priced the largest IPO in history Thursday night — 555.6 million shares at $135 apiece, a $75B raise that values the company at $1.77T — and makes Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire on paper.

The details:

  • SpaceX is now the seventh most valuable U.S. company, ahead of Tesla, and the raise more than doubles Saudi Aramco’s 2019 record of $29.4B.

  • Musk’s stake is worth $866.5B at the offer price, plus $320B in Tesla — past the trillion-dollar mark, on paper.

  • The company lost $4.9B on $18.7B in 2025 revenue, yet its filing projects more than $28.5T across its markets.

  • Retail got around 30% of the allocation, triple the norm or more, and new exchange rules could put SPCX in the Nasdaq 100 within 15 trading days.

Why it matters: Investors just handed a money-losing company a $1.8T valuation built on future orbital data centers and Mars bases. It makes Musk the first trillionaire in the process, with a fortune Oxfam says grew by more than $1M a minute over the past year — all amid months of renewed protests and political blowback around Musk.

AMAZON

Image source: Amazon

The Rundown: Amazon disclosed for the first time that its data centers used 2.5B gallons of water worldwide last year — 5% of what metro Seattle uses annually — a number it’s framing as proof it cools server farms better than the competition.

The details:

  • Water use fell 2% from 2024 despite a bigger footprint, hitting 0.12 liters per kilowatt-hour — sevenfold better than the industry average, Amazon claims.

  • However, it excludes colocation sites — a fifth of Amazon’s 2024 computing power — and the water burned generating its electricity.

  • Amazon says it will be “water positive” by 2030 and claims it’s 75% of the way there; 26 data centers already run on reclaimed water, with projects underway.

  • Amazon is the last of the big four to disclose water levels — Google, Meta, and Microsoft have reported the numbers since at least 2020.

Why it matters: The numbers land in the middle of a politically charged fight over data center resource use, with Amazon’s hometown of Seattle now weighing moratoriums on new construction. Researchers say, too, that only granular, site-level data will reveal what these facilities actually cost the communities around them.

LONGEVITY

Image source: Images 2.0 / The Rundown

The Rundown: Harvard longevity scientist David Sinclair says his confidential oral drug, SL-100, could reverse aging across the entire body, not a single organ, and he plans to give the test to volunteers in a bid to win XPrize’s $101M age-reversal contest.

The details:

  • SL-100 uses chemical reprogramming to mimic the embryonic gene, and, unlike gene therapy, it can travel via the bloodstream to reach the whole body.

  • The Saudi-funded XPrize awards its grand prize for a 10-year improvement in immune, cognitive, and muscle function after one year.

  • Critics are skeptical: Harvard’s Vadim Gladyshev found chemical rejuvenation toxic in mice, and Sinclair hasn’t published any animal data.

  • Sinclair carries a credibility problem, having resigned from a longevity-research post in 2024 over a dog age-reversal claim one scientist called a “lie.”

Why it matters: Whole-body rejuvenation has been the holy grail of longevity science, but no one has proven it works in humans, or even agreed on how to measure it. Skepticism of Sinclair’s mystery drug runs high, even as billions of dollars continue flowing into longevity companies chasing the promise of eternal youth.

SCIENCE

Image source: Images 2.0 (E. coli) / The Rundown

The Rundown: Scientists sifting through a 75-year-old soil bacterium’s chemical leftovers just discovered manikomycin, an antibiotic that kills superbugs by blocking a ribosome site no drugs have ever hit, with new research published in Nature.

The details:

  • Manikomycin comes from the same soil microbe behind 1950s oxytetracycline, but a sharper fractionation method surfaced molecules overlooked for decades.

  • It works by latching onto a spot on the bacterial ribosome called the E-site, blocking the cell’s used tRNA, and shutting down protein production.

  • It wiped out drug-resistant Klebsiella pneumoniae, E. coli, and Salmonella in the lab — only about one Klebsiella in a hundred million survived to pass it on.

  • Manikomycin doesn’t persist long enough in the bloodstream to work in people and misses Gram-positives like staph, so it’s only a lead compound.

Why it matters: By 2050, drug-resistant infections could directly kill 1.91M people a year, and the Gram-negative bugs manikomycin targets are among the hardest to treat. After years of writing off old soil strains as tapped out, drugmakers are finding novel-mechanism candidates — like Roche’s zosurabalpin — hiding in plain sight.

QUICK HITS

Oracle plans ~$70B in net capital spending in fiscal 2027 — nearly double the $55.7B it just spent — to build AI data centers for customers like OpenAI and Meta.

Reddit just rolled out video comments to all users, letting people record or upload one clip per reply in public, safe-for-work communities.

Xiaomi filed with China’s industry ministry to add an extended-range EV to its lineup, its first move beyond pure battery-electric cars like the SU7 and YU7.

DoorDash launched Ask DoorDash, an in-app AI chatbot that lets users order food and groceries via voice, text, or visual inputs through an “Ask” button in the search bar.

Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government introduced legislation that would ban social media for Canadians under 16 unless companies meet a set of safety standards.

BYD chairman Wang Chuanfu told shareholders at the company’s annual meeting this week that BYD will become the world’s largest automaker by scale within five years.

Microsoft’s Xbox division is reportedly planning major job cuts next month, as new CEO Asha Sharma overhauls the gaming unit to stem declining revenue.

Pokémon Go players’ 30 billion location scans reportedly helped train a navigation AI now bound for U.S. military drones.

Deezer launched a free AI music detector that lets users of 20 rival streaming platforms scan their playlists for fully AI-generated tracks.

Bluesky rolled out group chats for up to 50 people, the first concrete move in a strategy that focuses on smaller, user-controlled communities.

The90, a startup founded by Fitbit veteran Stacy Salvi, launched The Gem, a $300 smart pendant necklace that tracks real-time UVA and UVB exposure.

COMMUNITY

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Rowan, Joey, Zach, Shubham, and Jennifer — The Rundown’s editorial team

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