Tech News — 2026-06-12#

Story of the Day#

SpaceX executed the largest initial public offering in history today, raising $75 billion and valuing the combined rocket, satellite, and AI company at roughly $1.77 trillion. The record-smashing market debut officially propelled CEO Elon Musk’s net worth past the 13-figure threshold, making him the world’s first trillionaire.

Top Stories#

SpaceX Makes History With Biggest-Ever IPO · Bloomberg Shares of SpaceX began trading on the Nasdaq today under the ticker SPCX at an opening price of $150, an 11% pop from the initial $135 offering price. The debut triggered overwhelming retail demand that briefly broke the Robinhood trading platform for some users. While making thousands of employees overnight millionaires, the IPO also paves the way for an anticipated wave of mega-offerings from AI giants like OpenAI and Anthropic.

Jeff Bezos’s Prometheus raises $12B to build an ‘artificial general engineer’ for the physical world · TechCrunch Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has secured $12 billion in new funding for his AI startup Prometheus, driving its valuation to an astonishing $41 billion. Co-led with Vik Bajaj, the 150-employee company is developing “physical AI” tools to automate the engineering and design of complex physical products like rocket engines, robotics, and drugs. The massive capital injection highlights the ballooning costs of the compute required to train models capable of translating deep learning principles to physical world manufacturing.

Google sues alleged Chinese cybercrime operation that used AI to send scam texts · TechCrunch Google filed a lawsuit to dismantle “Outsider Enterprise,” an alleged Chinese cybercrime ring that used Google’s own Gemini AI to generate massive volumes of SMS phishing scams. The group created nearly 300 scam templates to impersonate brands and government agencies, distributing 2.5 million fraudulent text messages to Android users over just two weeks. Google says it is actively collaborating with US telecom carriers and the FBI to block the operation.

Justice Department Approves Paramount’s $111 Billion Acquisition of Warner Bros. · Slashdot The US Justice Department has cleared Paramount Skydance’s $111 billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery without requiring any divestitures or concessions. The mega-merger consolidates a staggering amount of media control under the Ellison family and combines the Paramount+ and HBO Max streaming platforms into a single service boasting 200 million subscribers. While the DOJ concluded the deal won’t harm competition, Hollywood workers and critics argue it will trigger mass layoffs and further monopolize the entertainment industry.

Pokémon Go players unwittingly contributed to tech with military drone uses · Ars Technica Years of real-world 3D location scans uploaded by casual Pokémon Go players were used to train Niantic Spatial’s visual positioning system. That technology is now being paired with software from defense contractor Vantor to navigate military drones and intelligence systems when GPS is unavailable or jammed. The pipeline from mobile gaming rewards to battlefield defense systems is raising serious ethical questions about user consent and the opaque destinations of corporate training data.

Controversial FISA spying law expires tonight. The spying will continue. · Ars Technica Congress allowed Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to lapse at midnight, marking the first time lawmakers have failed to extend the controversial warrantless spying authority. However, despite the political theater surrounding the expiration, the FBI and NSA’s surveillance operations will not actually go dark. The government’s spying powers remain fully active until March 2027 thanks to a yearlong certification issued by the FISA Court earlier this year.

‘Tell Him He’s a Piece of Shit’: Meta’s New AI Unit Is a Total Mess · WIRED Meta’s 6,500-person AI division is reportedly on the verge of open revolt as employees struggle with chaotic internal strategies and executive mismanagement. Tensions boiled over in company-wide forums where staff expressed deep resentment toward CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s mandated AI hackathon, reflecting a broader cultural breakdown within the company’s aggressive pivot to artificial intelligence.

Also Worth Knowing#

• ShinyHunters Hacked 100+ Organizations By Exploiting an Oracle PeopleSoft 0-Day: The ShinyHunters ransomware group stole gigabytes of data from over 100 global organizations, heavily targeting higher education, by exploiting a critical zero-day server-side request forgery vulnerability in Oracle PeopleSoft.
• $130 billion in data center projects blocked by protests so far this year: Community opposition groups successfully halted or delayed 75 data center construction projects in the first quarter of 2026, marking a structural shift in public resistance to massive AI infrastructure rollouts.
• Ukraine’s one-time test used fully autonomous drones to kill Russian soldiers: A Ukrainian drone manufacturer confirmed the deployment of quadcopters equipped with a preprogrammed, AI-powered “Terminator mode” that successfully sought out and eliminated targets without human piloting.
• Infineon to Open German Chip Fab as Part of EU Sovereignty Push: Driven by the staggering power demands of AI data centers, Infineon is opening a $5.8 billion power semiconductor factory in Dresden with the backing of EU Chips Act subsidies.
• Nothing CEO says phone prices are going to keep going up: Noting that memory costs have already doubled since the Phone 4A was designed, Nothing CEO Carl Pei warned consumers that smartphone prices will continue to surge into next year due to an AI-fueled shortage of RAM chips.