🏎 Operating margins in autos: Ferrari plays a different game

Ferrari does not just build beautiful cars. It runs one of the strongest operating margin profiles in the auto industry.

While most manufacturers compete on volume and face tight margins, Ferrari keeps production limited and pricing firm.

In autos, that is the difference between selling cars and running a business.

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🎫 Former HSBC executive faces court for 740 fare dodges in 11 months

Joseph Molloy, a millionaire and former senior executive at HSBC, appeared in a London court after repeatedly evading train fares.

Over 11 months, he used a scheme 740 times by buying tickets only for the first and last stations of his journey. The estimated loss to Southeastern Railway was about €6,700. He purchased tickets under false names and addresses between October 2023 and September 2024 and admitted guilt.

According to his lawyer, Molloy could not explain his actions. He previously led HSBC Global Asset Management and retired early last year.

The court sentenced him to a 10-month suspended term, 80 hours of community service, and a one-year ban from Southeastern Railway.

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📉 US tech IPOs fall to ~15 per year as exits get older and rarer

Data from 2,770 US tech IPOs between 1990 and 2025 shows a sharp decline in listings.

🖱 In the 1990s there were 1,598 tech IPOs.

🖱 In the 2000s, 573.

🖱 In the 2010s, 372.

🖱 In the 2020s so far, 227.

Recent years average around 15 deals annually. Companies now go public at roughly 11 years old, compared with about 7.6 years in the 1990s.

At the same time, the share of profitable companies at IPO has dropped from around 60% in the 1990s to roughly mid-20% levels in recent years.

The US public market is worth $62.2T.
IPO volume suggests access to it is narrowing, not expanding.

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💰 OpenAI secures first commitments in $100B round at $830B valuation

🖱 OpenAI finalized the first commitments in a new funding round expected to total $100B. The deal values the company at about $830B and would be the largest private financing round on record.

🖱 Key investors include SoftBank, Nvidia, Amazon, and Microsoft. OpenAI still generates $0 in annual profit and remains deeply unprofitable, with revenues projected to exceed expenses only by 2029, if at all.

🖱 Much of the capital is expected to flow back to the same companies through infrastructure and compute spending. Money moves in a loop.

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💰 OpenAI valuation could top $850B in new funding round

🖱 According to Bloomberg, OpenAI may exceed an $850B valuation in its next funding round.

🖱 That would place it above Exxon Mobil, Visa, and JPMorgan Chase by market capitalization.

An AI lab approaching the scale of legacy financial and energy giants signals how capital is being repriced around compute and models.

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🤝 Sam Altman and Dario Amodei skip Unity Raise handshake in Delhi

🖱 At an AI summit in Delhi, India’s prime minister led a Unity Raise ceremony where participants hold hands and lift them to signal solidarity.

🖱 Everyone joined in except Sam Altman and Dario Amodei, who happened to stand next to each other.

🖱 Amodei previously served as VP of Research at OpenAI. He left in 2020 after disagreements with leadership and later founded Anthropic. Since then, he and Altman have become direct competitors.

Stage optics sometimes say more than prepared speeches.

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🌍 World Labs lands $1B to build AI-generated 3D worlds

World Labs secured $1B in funding. The startup builds AI models that generate interactive 3D worlds. Its first product, the Marble model, launched in November.

Autodesk is one of the largest investors, committing $200M. The company plans to integrate World Labs’ models into its products in the future.

The latest reported valuation stands at $5B.

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🧠 Ex-DeepMind lead David Silver lands $1B to build superintelligence without LLMs

David Silver’s London startup Ineffable Intelligence secured $1B in a seed round at a reported $4B valuation. Silver previously led work on AlphaGo and contributed to Gemini before leaving Google last year to start the company.

The goal is to build an “infinitely learning superintelligence” that discovers knowledge on its own. Instead of training on massive datasets, the system will rely on reinforcement learning and learn through trial and error.

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🚀 Claude Code hits $2.5B ARR just 9 months after launch

Anthropic opened Claude Code to all users in May 2025.

Nine months later, the product is generating $2.5B in annual revenue, faster than any SaaS product before it.

Growth is accelerating.

Since early January, revenue has doubled, and business subscriptions are up 4x.

Half of the total growth came in the last six weeks.

🖱 Claude Code now accounts for more than half of Anthropic’s enterprise revenue.

🖱 Anthropic itself scaled from $1B to $14B ARR in 14 months.

🖱 500 customers pay over $1M per year, and 8 of the Fortune 10 use its products.

One developer tool is turning into a core revenue engine.

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Yahoo was once worth more than Google, Amazon, Apple, Nvidia & Netflix combined.

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There is always a compelling reason to sell stocks.

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🤖 Anthropic accuses Chinese companies of "siphoning" data from Claude

Accusations include:

🖱 Anthropic says DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax set up fraudulent accounts on Claude

🖱 These companies prompted Claude more than 16 million times to train and improve their own models

🖱 Anthropic says more than 24,000 fraudulent accounts were used

🖱 OpenAI sent a memo to the US House accusing DeepSeek of the same tactics

The AI arms race is heating up.

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❕ Stargate struggles to secure $100B as partner tensions surface

The Stargate AI project, launched last year with plans for $100B upfront and up to $500B long term, still has no finalized funding deals.

Negotiations continue, but no official agreements have been signed.

The Information and Wired report disagreements between key partners, including Oracle and SoftBank.

At the same time, OpenAI appears to be reconsidering plans to build its own data centers and is leaning more toward cloud partnerships instead.

A year after the big launch, the capital and structure behind Stargate remain unsettled.

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When Amazon's stock price went from $113 to $6 in 2001

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🏬 Amazon commits $12B to AI data centers in Louisiana

Amazon will invest $12B to build new AI data center campuses in Caddo and Bossier Parishes in northwestern Louisiana. The sites are expected to create 540 full time jobs and support about 1,700 additional roles.

The move is part of Amazon’s broader $200B capital expenditure plan for the year, with most of the spending directed toward AI infrastructure, including data centers, chips and networking equipment.

As hyperscalers push AI capacity higher, Louisiana is emerging as a key hub, with Amazon joining other tech giants expanding their footprint in the state.

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🖥 Microsoft partners with SpaceX to link Azure with Starlink

Microsoft and SpaceX announced a partnership to connect the Azure cloud to SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet network. More than 800 Starlink satellites had been launched at the time, with service already in limited regions.

The integration allows Starlink connectivity to link directly with Microsoft data centers, including the Azure Modular Datacenter, a mobile cloud unit roughly the size of a semi trailer designed for remote and hybrid environments.

The move expands Microsoft’s push into space through its new Azure Space unit and Azure Orbital service, positioning it more directly against Amazon’s AWS satellite efforts and Project Kuiper.

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