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In today’s post:
🚀 You Just Bought More SpaceX
👀 $3.1 Trillion, Off The Books
🐌 Slowing Down Is Now Illegal?
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🚀 You Just Bought More SpaceX
SpaceX's slice of the Nasdaq 100 is about to more than double.
Bloomberg reported Saturday that Elon Musk's rocket, satellite and AI company will make up 2.82% of the index once Monday's quarterly rebalance lands, up from roughly 1.28% today.
Same company. Same rockets. Twice the footprint in one of the most-tracked indexes on earth.
🚀 Why The Jump?
SpaceX joined the Nasdaq 100 back in July. But despite a market cap north of $2T, it got handed a tiny weighting, because most of its shares were locked up and couldn't actually trade.
Index weightings don't care how big you are. They care how many shares are loose in the wild.
Think of it like a party where only 12 of your 200 guests are allowed on the dance floor. The venue's huge. The floor is not.
Now those lockups are expiring, the free float is growing, and the weighting is climbing with it.
📈 The Part That Actually Moves Money
Index funds and ETFs that track the Nasdaq 100 have to buy more SpaceX shares to match the new weighting.
Not because a fund manager likes the company. Because the rules say so.
Passive money is the least emotional buyer in markets. It shows up when the spreadsheet tells it to, buys at whatever price is on the screen, and goes back to sleep.
And there is a lot of money tracking the NDX. Every incremental percentage point of weighting is mechanical demand.
The numbers, quickly:
Current weighting: ~1.28%
Post-rebalance weighting: 2.82%
Effective date: Monday
Source of the figure: Bloomberg, confirming provisional data the index provider published last week
Calculated off the last closing price, so the final number can drift
🧠 What It Means For Your Money
If you own a Nasdaq 100 tracker, congratulations: you now own roughly twice as much SpaceX as you did last week, and nobody asked your opinion.
That's how passive investing works. You inherit whatever the index committee decides, and a company you may never have researched quietly becomes one of your larger holdings.
It also concentrates you further into a small group of enormous names. The Nasdaq 100 was already top-heavy. A $2T satellite-and-rockets business stepping up the leaderboard doesn't exactly spread the risk around.
Worth knowing what's under the bonnet, especially since the free float is expected to keep growing as more lockups roll off. This probably isn't the last weighting bump.
Is 2.82% the ceiling? Based on the float math, almost certainly not.
The dance floor is getting bigger.
You now own twice as much SpaceX. Nobody asked. How do you feel?
NVIDIA's Founder Says Farmers Should Absolutely Use AI
“If I were a farmer, I would absolutely use AI.”
That’s Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA.
He’s pointing to one of AI’s biggest untapped opportunities: farming.
DIT AgTech is already putting AI to work with 500+ units deployed and 370,000 head on-platform.
𝘐𝘯 𝘮𝘢𝘬𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘢𝘯 𝘪𝘯𝘷𝘦𝘴𝘵𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘥𝘦𝘤𝘪𝘴𝘪𝘰𝘯, 𝘪𝘯𝘷𝘦𝘴𝘵𝘰𝘳𝘴 𝘮𝘶𝘴𝘵 𝘳𝘦𝘭𝘺 𝘰𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘪𝘳 𝘰𝘸𝘯 𝘦𝘹𝘢𝘮𝘪𝘯𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘪𝘴𝘴𝘶𝘦𝘳 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘮𝘴 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘰𝘧𝘧𝘦𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘨, 𝘪𝘯𝘤𝘭𝘶𝘥𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘮𝘦𝘳𝘪𝘵𝘴 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘳𝘪𝘴𝘬𝘴 𝘪𝘯𝘷𝘰𝘭𝘷𝘦𝘥. 𝘋𝘐𝘛 𝘈𝘨𝘛𝘦𝘤𝘩 𝘩𝘢𝘴 𝘧𝘪𝘭𝘦𝘥 𝘢 𝘍𝘰𝘳𝘮 𝘊 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘚𝘦𝘤𝘶𝘳𝘪𝘵𝘪𝘦𝘴 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘌𝘹𝘤𝘩𝘢𝘯𝘨𝘦 𝘊𝘰𝘮𝘮𝘪𝘴𝘴𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘪𝘯 𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘯𝘦𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩 𝘪𝘵𝘴 𝘰𝘧𝘧𝘦𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘨, 𝘢 𝘤𝘰𝘱𝘺 𝘰𝘧 𝘸𝘩𝘪𝘤𝘩 𝘮𝘢𝘺 𝘣𝘦 𝘰𝘣𝘵𝘢𝘪𝘯𝘦𝘥 𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦: https://bit.ly/4bzuWCi
The stock round-tripped from $10 to $17 and back to $10. The order book never round-tripped.
In the same stretch, AI & Cloud sales grew 105% to €446 million. Orders in a single quarter hit €2.8 billion, up from €1.0 billion the quarter before.
Over €5 billion booked across four quarters, against a segment running at roughly €1.8 billion annualised.
Here's why the orders keep landing. Hyperscalers are locking in supply while capacity is tight, and management says only about half of the quarter's volume converts to revenue inside 12 months. The rest is equipment reserved for 2028.
Meanwhile gross margin sits at 46% and operating margin at just 9%, with full-year operating profit guided to €2.1bn to €2.6bn.
Today's Premium+ deep dive covers:
Why consensus growth estimates still model four quarters of bookings out of existence
The disclosed metric that tells you whether the order surge has a floor
The exact level in the backlog that would change our mind
What we're doing with it, and the size we're comfortable holding
👀 $3.1 Trillion, Off The Books
Seven of the biggest names in tech are sitting on $3.1 trillion of commitments that barely show up on their balance sheets.
That's Morgan Stanley's estimate. Roughly the entire economy of France, filed under "don't worry about it."
🏗️ The Trick
Tech companies have handed out as much as $300 billion in guarantees over the past year to get AI data centers and chips financed.
The tool of choice is the residual value guarantee.
A company promises that a pile of servers or a data center will be worth at least X in the future. Someone else owns the asset. Someone else borrows the money.
If it later sells or leases for less than X, the tech company covers part of the gap.
Meta wrote the playbook last year. Everyone else photocopied it.
💸 Who Promised What
Meta: a $28 billion guarantee on its Hyperion project with Blue Owl in Louisiana. That helped the venture raise $27 billion at borrowing costs only slightly above Meta's own, with most of the obligation sitting outside its reported balance sheet.
Nvidia: $105 billion in guarantees for an SB Energy campus in Ohio built for OpenAI. The site is expected to run Nvidia hardware exclusively for 20 years. It has also offered to backstop up to 25% of certain financing packages.
Broadcom: around $29 billion behind a vehicle that buys chips and leases them to Anthropic, with more possibly coming for Anthropic and OpenAI.
Broadcom's pitch to investors: losses are unlikely because the top AI labs should be profitable and the equipment should hold its value.
Both of those are forecasts wearing the costume of facts.
🧠 The Bigger Picture
Credit ratings stay pristine. Cash stays in the bank. Capacity still gets built. Lovely, as long as the machines keep earning.
The whole structure only bites if one of three things happens: demand comes in soft, hardware goes obsolete faster than the spreadsheets assume, or the industry builds more compute than customers actually want.
Rating agencies aren't ignoring it. They work out how far the promised value sits above what an asset would fetch in a stressed market, then add that difference to their leverage calculations.
So far, analysts reckon there's enough collateral to keep expected losses small.
💡 What It Means For You
When you look at a hyperscaler's debt pile, you're seeing a partial picture. A chunk of the exposure lives in the footnotes.
The number worth watching is what a three-year-old AI chip actually fetches on the secondhand market. That single figure decides whether these promises stay quiet or get very loud.
Same for occupancy. Empty racks in Louisiana and Ohio are what turn a guarantee from paperwork into a bill.
Nobody's ringing an alarm yet. Worth knowing where the wiring is, though.
🐌 Slowing Down Is Now Illegal?
Four people are suing the world's biggest AI companies for moving too slowly.
Yes. Too slowly.
The suit landed Friday in federal court in Northern California. Defendants: SpaceX, Google, Anthropic and OpenAI.
The argument: the labs agreed to coordinate a slowdown, that's an antitrust violation, and paying subscribers get less for their money.
On Sept. 12, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay calling for the industry to cooperate on slowing model improvements in favour of safety.
Same day, OpenAI's Sam Altman, SpaceX's Elon Musk and Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis all publicly agreed.
Four rival CEOs, one afternoon, total consensus. From an industry that can't agree on what "AGI" even means.
The plaintiffs say an agreement to progress "slower than competition would otherwise produce" is anticompetitive by definition.
🧾 Who's Actually Suing
Four named plaintiffs. Their qualification: they pay for ChatGPT, Claude, Grok or Gemini.
They want to represent a nationwide class of every other paid subscriber to those four services.
Lead attorney Nick Rowley is not playing it cool. He says AI could "kill us all" if safety protocol gets decided by private deals between for-profit tech giants.
That's a bold pitch to run while suing those same companies for excessive caution.
🧠 The Part That Makes Lawyers Sweat
Amodei saw this coming. In the essay itself, he flagged the antitrust problem and asked the US government to mediate the cross-lab talks, or at minimum issue a narrow waiver covering safety conversations.
Altman's response was warm on the goal and cold on the paperwork. OpenAI would welcome a federal safety framework, but said it won't wait for an antitrust exemption before getting started.
None of the four companies commented on Saturday.
💰 What It Means For Your Money
Of the four defendants, only Google trades on a normal exchange. The rest are private, so the direct stock exposure here is thin.
The bigger question is whether antitrust law becomes the thing that governs how fast AI ships.
If labs conclude they can't legally talk to each other about safety, coordination dies and the release cadence speeds back up. That flows straight into capex, chip demand and the entire AI trade.
If the suit lands, it sets a precedent that "we slowed down on purpose" is something a company can be sued for. Every AI safety team just became a legal department problem.
Either way, the pace of AI is now a courtroom question, and courts move at a speed that would make a glacier blush.
Join Aaron Levie for a fireside on AI transformation at Pioneer
Aaron Levie is joining the speaker lineup at Pioneer, the summit where CX leaders redefine what's possible.
Aaron is an entrepreneur, investor, Co-founder and CEO of Box, and one of the most influential voices on AI transformation.
He’ll join Eoghan McCabe, Fin's Co-founder and CEO, for a fireside chat on leading their companies through the biggest technology shift in history. They’ll get into the key decision points in their journeys, the challenges they faced and how they navigated through them.
Join Aaron and CX leaders from Anthropic, Clay, Kalshi, Gamma, and more for a day of industry-shaping discussion on the future of customer experience.