Dec 12, 2025 4 min read Daily Rundown

⛵ Disney Crowns OpenAI

Plus: SpaceX Prices the Impossible, Adobe Sells Access

Good Morning, Early Adopters!

In the AI era, control is shifting less around invention — and more around who owns distribution, narrative, and leverage at scale.

Disney Crowns OpenAI, Quietly

👀 What’s happening: Reuters reports Disney is investing $1 billion into OpenAI under a three year deal that licenses more than 200 characters to Sora. Disney becomes Sora’s first major content partner, a major OpenAI customer, and plans to roll out ChatGPT internally, with some user generated Sora videos headed to Disney+.

🔥 How this hits reality: This is a strategic endorsement, not a growth fix. Disney gives Sora legitimacy and IP gravity at a moment when AI video retention is weak, while drawing a hard line against rivals like Google using lawsuits instead of licenses.

⛵ Our take: In generative media, capital matters, but permission matters more, and Disney just decided who gets it.

TOGETHER WITH SECOND ME

Second Me brings real connection back to the AI era. Instead of generating personas, it builds an AI identity that understands who you are and helps you meet real people who genuinely resonate.

Key Features

Identity as a living model: Your Second Me is powered by a dynamic model of your interests, personality, memories, and voice. It gets to know you even better than you know yourself, and evolves with you.
AI-to-AI presence replaces passive feeds: Instead of swiping or gaming the algorithm, your AI identity actively explores conversations for you, surfacing people who share your energy, even outside your usual circles.
Anti-hashtag matchmaking: Second Me connects people through the subtle traits, vibes, and patterns traditional algorithms can’t see. Sometimes it feels like serendipity.
Conversations that skip the awkward part: AI-to-AI icebreakers help you enter meaningful exchanges without small talk or social pressure.
Not a companion, but real connections: Second Me isn’t giving you a roster of AI friends. It uses AI to help real humans find each other quickly, effortlessly and authentically.

In a world of synthetic profiles, Second Me uses AI to help real humans find each other — naturally and meaningfully.

Create your Second Me

IPO

SpaceX Prices the Impossible

👀 What’s happening: Reuters reports SpaceX has locked in an IPO plan targeting a $1.5 trillion valuation and roughly $25 billion in new capital, potentially as early as June. Demand is expected to be intense, driven by its dominant launch business and the cash flowing from Starlink. Elon Musk has framed the moment as less about an exit and more about funding the long game, repeatedly saying SpaceX exists to make humanity a multi-planet species and that Mars remains the end goal, not quarterly optics.

🔥 How this hits reality: At $1.5 trillion, this is not a growth story, it is a power reallocation. Public investors are being asked to bankroll Mars ambitions while underwriting a capital-intensive monopoly on launches and low-orbit connectivity. Private funds and crossover investors quietly win liquidity. Public markets inherit Musk volatility at unprecedented scale. The bar for execution tightens, because once SpaceX is public, missed timelines stop being mythology and start being line items.

⛵ Our take: This IPO is not about upside, it is about access. SpaceX is daring public markets to finance a civilization project and accept that discipline comes second.

Adobe Sells Access Not Intelligence

👀 What’s happening: Adobe posted record 2025 Q4 revenue of $23.77B and says AI now drives over a third of its ARR. Firefly exists, but the real move is elsewhere as Adobe embeds itself into OpenAI, Copilot, Gemini, AWS, and Azure. The stock is down more than 20% this year, but the business fundamentals say something else.

🔥 How this hits reality: Adobe has pivoted from model competition to distribution control. It owns the creative workflows, the file formats, and the enterprise contracts, then lets everyone else’s models flow through its tools. The risk is obvious because without breakout AI-native products, Adobe is monetizing momentum rather than setting it.

⛵ Our take: Distribution buys time, not immunity. If Adobe's product advantage does not show up soon, the channel strength eventually runs out of excuses.

BAY AREA MEMOS

Eclipse Energy uses microbes to convert leftover oil in abandoned wells into hydrogen and will scale the low-carbon process globally with Weatherford.
Google is testing AI article overviews on select publishers and expanding personalized news while compensating them for lost traffic.
Android now supports encrypted live video sharing during 911 calls to help responders better assess emergencies.
Reddit is testing gray checkmarks to verify identities of selected public figures and partners.
RSL 1.0 is now official, giving publishers a way to demand paid, use-case-level control over how AI companies access and use their content.

TOGETHER WITH US

AI Secret Media Group is the world’s #1 AI & Tech Newsletter Group, reaching over 2 million leaders across the global innovation ecosystem, from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Microsoft to top AI labs, VCs, and fast-growing startups.

We operate the industry’s most influential portfolio of newsletters, each shaping a different frontier of the AI & Tech revolution:

Be Smarter in 5 Minutes