Tech News — 2026-05-20#

Story of the Day#

The secretive financials of Elon Musk’s empire have finally been exposed through an S-1 prospectus ahead of SpaceX’s massive Nasdaq IPO (ticker: SPCX). The filing not only reveals SpaceX’s $18.67 billion revenue for 2025, but exposes a labyrinthine AI compute economy—including xAI burning $6.4 billion last year and a staggering $45 billion compute deal struck between Anthropic and SpaceX.

Top Stories#

Nvidia Posts Historic Profit, Wall Street Shrugs · The New York Times Nvidia reported a jaw-dropping $58.3 billion profit for its most recent quarter—a 211% year-over-year jump driven by extreme AI demand—and disclosed $43 billion in startup holdings. Despite projecting $91 billion in revenue for the upcoming quarter, the market reacted with a lukewarm shrug as investors fret over mounting AI chip competition and the sustainability of the hardware rally.

OpenAI Eyes Fall IPO Following Musk Legal Victory · TechCrunch Just days after a jury rejected Elon Musk’s claims that OpenAI abandoned its nonprofit mission, the ChatGPT maker is moving full speed ahead to file for an initial public offering. The highly anticipated public debut is targeted for as soon as September, setting the stage for one of the most significant public market listings in Silicon Valley history.

Meta Axes 8,000 Jobs in “AI Efficiency” Push · Bloomberg Meta has initiated 8,000 global job cuts as part of a restructuring effort to reduce costs and offset the massive capital requirements of its artificial intelligence ambitions. During the layoffs, one employee protested the dark day by using the company’s AI tools to generate an internal radio station featuring layoff-themed songs.

Google Publishes Unpatched Chromium Exploit · Ars Technica In a baffling security blunder, Google accidentally published proof-of-concept exploit code for a 29-month-old, unpatched vulnerability in the Chromium browser codebase. The flaw in the Browser Fetch API can turn virtually any device running Chrome or Edge into a persistent proxy node for a botnet, threatening millions of users.

Minnesota Bans Prediction Markets, CFTC Sues · Slashdot Minnesota Governor Tim Walz signed the nation’s first law making it a felony to host or advertise prediction markets like Polymarket and Kalshi. The US Commodity Futures Trading Commission immediately hit the state with a lawsuit to block the ban, arguing it undermines federal regulatory authority and harms farmers who rely on event contracts as risk hedges.

Samsung Strike Averted at the Eleventh Hour · Bloomberg More than 47,000 Samsung Electronics workers had planned an 18-day strike over bonus payouts and AI profit-sharing, a move that threatened to cripple the global supply of memory chips. The union suspended the work stoppage at the last minute to vote on a tentative wage agreement with the tech giant.

Also Worth Knowing#

• Anthropic’s Milestones (Bloomberg): The AI startup is on pace for its first profitable quarter due to surging demand for Claude, and has hired former Tesla AI director Andrej Karpathy.
• Colossal Hatches Artificial Eggs (MIT Technology Review): As part of its avian de-extinction efforts, the biotech startup successfully grew chickens inside transparent, 3D-printed artificial eggshells.
• GitHub Repos Breached (TechCrunch): Hackers stole data from roughly 3,800 of GitHub’s internal repositories after compromising an employee’s workstation via a poisoned VS Code extension.
• Trump Mobile Leaks Data (The Verge): The T1 Phone’s preorder database was exposed by a vulnerability, allowing individuals to scrape customers’ emails, phone numbers, and home addresses.
• Mercedes Unveils 1,153-HP EV (The Verge): The all-electric AMG GT 4-door coupe utilizes F1-derived batteries and three axial flux motors to challenge modern hypercars.