Billions, Benchmarks & Bets

📈 Portfolio Pulse

🎲 Kalshi Enters the Perpetual Futures Game

Kalshi is launching "perpetual futures" markets, joining Polymarket in bringing the crypto world's favorite leverage instrument onshore for the first time. Perps are like prediction markets that never expire, with traders settling up multiple times per day based on price movements. Global offshore volume on crypto perps topped $80 trillion last year. Kalshi's regulated entry widens its moat and pulls another massive liquidity pool into the US regulated market. Marketplace

🧠 Anthropic's Big Week: $100B, Design, Mythos

Anthropic locked in a 10-year agreement with Amazon for up to 5 gigawatts of new compute, committing over $100B to AWS Trainium chips. Amazon is putting another $5B in now, with up to $20B more to come. Run-rate revenue just crossed $30B, up from roughly $9B at the end of 2025. Same week, Anthropic launched Claude Design, a tool that turns plain-text prompts into prototypes, slides, and one-pagers. Less positive: Bloomberg reported that an unauthorized group accessed Mythos, Anthropic's enterprise cybersecurity product, through a third-party vendor. Anthropic is investigating and says there's no evidence its own systems were impacted. Anthropic | Techcrunch

🤖 OpenAI Drops GPT-5.5, Agents, and Images

OpenAI had a big week. GPT-5.5 is their smartest model yet, built for real work like coding, research, and handling multi-step tasks on its own. It's faster and cheaper to run than the previous version. OpenAI also shipped Workspace Agents (build an AI helper once, share it across your team) and a full upgrade to ChatGPT's image generation. Three launches, all aimed at making AI genuinely useful at work. OpenAI

⚓ Anduril Scales Navy Autonomous Vessels

Anduril announced a push to scale autonomous surface vessels by partnering with the world's leading shipbuilders for the US Navy. The move layers Anduril's autonomy stack onto partners' existing manufacturing capacity, which is how defense tech actually scales. Someone else builds the hulls, Anduril builds the brains. Fits cleanly alongside Saronic on the broader water thesis. Bullish. Anduril

🚀 SpaceX Strikes $60B Option to Acquire Cursor

SpaceX announced a deal giving it the right to acquire AI coding startup Cursor for $60B later this year, or pay $10B for the partnership work alone. The two companies will pair Cursor's distribution into expert software engineers with SpaceX's million H100-equivalent Colossus supercomputer to train next-generation coding and knowledge-work models. All ahead of the SpaceX IPO targeted for June at a $1.75 to $1.8 trillion valuation, which would be the largest in history. Yahoo Finance

👀 Watch List

📊 Polymarket Raises $400M at $15B Valuation

Polymarket is in talks to raise $400M at a $15B valuation, nearly tripling its worth in a few months. Prediction markets are hitting mainstream momentum, with Polymarket and Kalshi both pushing into perpetual futures (see Kalshi above) and vying for market share as the CFTC opens the regulated door. The capital sets up a two-horse arms race at scale. Techstartups

💾 Cerebras Files S-1 at $35B

Cerebras filed its IPO registration statement with the SEC on April 17, targeting a mid-May listing at a reported $35B valuation, up from $23B in February. The company reported $510M in 2025 revenue (76% YoY growth) and confirmed a multi-year OpenAI deal worth over $20B covering 750 megawatts of Cerebras systems, plus a multi-year AWS inference deal. If the IPO prices well, Cerebras becomes the first public bet on non-NVIDIA AI compute at scale. Techcrunch

💬 Prompt

What can I help you with?

Take the next five years of [industry or technology] and compress them into 12 months. What happens first, what gets disrupted, who wins, who disappears, and what is the thing nobody sees coming?

📚 Content

🏗️ El Segundo's Hard-Tech Renaissance

The Gundo bros are building. Deseret News covered Discipulus Ventures' latest demo day in El Segundo, where 22-year-old Jakob Diepenbrock raised $60M in under a year and runs a 1% acceptance program, with Palmer Luckey giving the keynote. Hard tech is coming back, and El Segundo is the center of gravity.

💡 Thiel Fellows 2026 Class

The 2026 Thiel Fellows were announced this week. $250K per fellow over two years, twelve young founders working on BCI, robotics, fintech, and AI infrastructure. Prior classes produced Anthropic, Ethereum, Figma, and Cognition, so these names usually matter in hindsight and we are following closely.

💭 Anand Kannappan On The SpaceX/Cursor Deal

An interesting take on the SpaceX/Cursor deal from Anand Kannappan. His argument: this isn't M&A, it's a $10B experiment to figure out whether developer traces are the real bottleneck in coding models. If Cursor's data transfers cleanly to Grok training, SpaceX exercises the $60B option; if not, they walk with the answer.

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