⛵ Tesla Pays for A Future

Good Morning, Early Adopters!

What used to be framed as innovation is now being priced as liability—and Tesla is among the first to pay upfront for what comes next.

VALUATION

Tesla Pays for an Exit From the Car Business

👀 What’s happening: Tesla committed $2 billion into xAI, formally tying its balance sheet to Musk’s AI stack, while repeating that Cybercab production will start this year. The move comes as Tesla signals a shift away from near term vehicle growth toward autonomy, software, and AI driven optionality.

🌍 How this hits reality: Input costs are moving the wrong way. Copper and aluminum prices are spiking, memory and logic chips keep climbing, and estimates now point to $600 to $1,000 higher cost per vehicle this year. That directly compresses auto margins and drags down forecast revenue. In parallel, xAI sits on a valuation curve that benefits from AI capital scarcity, not commodity inflation.

⛵ Key takeaway: Selling cars now hurts the multiple. Owning AI helps escape it. By investing in xAI while pushing FSD and robotaxi timelines, Tesla is trying to trade shrinking auto economics for AI driven valuation upside before cost pressure hits the stock harder.

TOGETHER WITH QODER

Our Agent Rebuilt Itself in 26 Hours. AMA 👀

Qoder is hosting a live AMA on r/ChatGPTCoding, open now through Friday. The team let their own autonomous agent, Quest, refactor itself for 26 hours across core logic, state management, and interaction layers. Some parts worked, some broke, and some were genuinely surprising. Instead of polishing this into a launch, they’re opening the process to real user questions.

If you build with AI or care where autonomous coding actually breaks, join the AMA and ask anything—or follow the discussion as it unfolds.

CHIPS

Geopolitics Redefines How Technology Responsibility Is Assigned

👀 What’s happening: U.S. lawmakers accused Nvidia of providing routine technical support to DeepSeek in 2024, support that later became controversial when DeepSeek’s models were linked to China’s military. What was treated as normal commercial assistance is now being reinterpreted through a national security lens.

🌍 How this hits reality: The issue is no longer what companies intended, but who they are connected to. Export controls are shifting from measurable inputs like chips to inferred outcomes like capability gains. A model trained on roughly 2.8 million GPU hours has become evidence not of efficiency, but of strategic risk, stressing global collaboration norms.

⛵ Key takeaway: Geopolitics is pushing tech away from result based accountability toward identity based judgment. Who you work with now matters more than what you actually did, raising long term risk for innovation, partnerships, and global scale.

LEAK

OpenAI’s Leaked Plans Revive Biometric Social Media

👀 What’s happening: A leak suggests OpenAI is exploring a humans only social platform built around biometric identity, positioned as a cleaner alternative to X. The rumor tied the idea back to World ID infrastructure and briefly sent Worldcoin sharply higher, despite no product launch or formal confirmation.

🌍 How this hits reality: At global scale, there is only one proven case of real name social media: Wechat. And it did not happen through product design. It worked because real identity was mandated through telecom, payments, and government systems. Outside China, platforms avoid this because identity friction collapses growth and invites legal exposure.

⛵ Key takeaway: This leak highlights the gap between ambition and precedent. Identity gated social networks do not scale on market forces alone. Without state backing, biometric verification becomes a liability before it becomes a moat.

BAY AREA MEMOS

• Decagon AI raised $250 million at a $4.5 billion valuation to expand its enterprise AI concierge platform.
• Meta’s Reality Labs lost about $19 billion in 2025, and despite long-term optimism, losses are expected to continue into 2026.
• China plans to deploy gigawatt-scale space-based AI data centers within five years, moving energy-intensive computing into orbit to challenge SpaceX.
• Amazon is continuing layoffs affecting about 16,000 employees as it shifts resources toward AWS AI and data center growth areas.
• PitchBook expects a modest rebound in venture-backed IPOs in 2026, though the recovery remains constrained.

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