Welcome to the TechBrewRide Home for Thursday, April 23rd, 2026. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, Microsoft considered buying Cursor but didn't pull the trigger before SpaceX's deal. Microsoft launches its first-ever voluntary retirement program, Anthropics' secondary market valuation hits $1 trillion on Forge Global, and SpaceX's S1 reveals plans to manufacture its own GPUs. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Today's episode is brought to you by Doppel. Disguises are getting pretty good these days, and I'm not just talking about when you throw on a pair of glasses and a hoodie and hope you won't be recognized. We're talking about the kind of disguises that end up in your inbox, on your phone, or on the web, blending in as your everyday internal email, casual text message, or normal website. Doppel strengthens team resilience by giving employees the tools and defenses they need to protect themselves from increasingly sophisticated social engineering threats. Their digital risk protection takes it one step further by keeping an eye on every channel to connect patterns and shut them down fast. From deepfakes to bad links to impersonation attempts, Doppel helps you stay ahead of these threats with their AI-native social engineering defense platform. Learn more at d-o-p-p-e-l.com. That's d-o-p-p-e-l.com. A few follow-ups to that whole SpaceX kinda sorta acquiring Cursor story. First, sources say SpaceX isn't acquiring Cursor immediately because the deal could delay its forthcoming IPO. Quoting Bloomberg, a major transaction would require SpaceX to update its filings and financial details, potentially delaying the IPO, which is targeting a $2 trillion valuation. The $10 billion is a breakup fee if the deal doesn't go through, according to people with knowledge of the deal. SpaceX and XAI didn't immediately respond to a request for comment. Cursor had been in talks with investors to raise about $2 billion in a funding round with a valuation of more than $50 billion, not including the investment, Bloomberg reported last week. The company is no longer proceeding with that round because the capital was set to fund Cursor's computing needs, which are now being handled by XAI, according to a person familiar with the matter. end quote. CNBC says that Microsoft considered buying Cursor in recent weeks but didn't make an offer. Microsoft has been working to boost GitHub Copilot's popularity, quote. While Microsoft has gained traction among developers with GitHub Copilot, the AI coding market is currently being dominated by Cursor along with Anthropic and OpenAI. Microsoft's primary role in the space has been as an investor and cloud provider pumping billions of dollars into Anthropic and OpenAI, which have committed to hefty spending on Microsoft Azure. Microsoft, meanwhile, has seen its stock price drop 10% this year, underperforming the broader market and its hyperscaler peers. CEO Sachin Nadella told analysts in January that GitHub Copilot had 4.7 million paying subscribers, up 75% from a year earlier. OpenAI is pushing its own Codex programming app. CEO Sam Altman said on X on Tuesday that Codex has reached 4 million active users less than two weeks after crossing the 3 million mark. Anthropics Claude Code Service has gained popularity this year, helping Anthropic to reach $30 billion in annualized revenue this month, end quote. And Business Insider says that XAI held talks in recent weeks with Mistral and Cursor about a potential three-way partnership. Mistral co-founder Devendra Chaplot joined XAI in March. But I want to flag something about all of this so that you can keep this context in your mind. This whole thing sort of was a domino effect kind of scenario. Anthropics revenue exploded because of Claude Code. Cursor exploded to a $60 billion valuation because of coding. OpenAI is catching up rapidly with Codex. So one of the motivations for Elon is to have one of these things that is making the most money in AI in his own tool belt. But this is where open source, Open weights might throw a curveball into the mix. The dream for a lot of developers right now is to be running open weights models locally so you don have to pay the heavy token tax to the big LLMs and coding companies I mean that also partially what the whole open claw mania and buying Mac minis mania has been about as well So what if the open weight models get so good at coding and so small in size that you could run them locally and be confident that you're doing good work? Like people are still paying the big boys because they're the best. They feel confident the quality is the best. But what if there are diminishing returns there. What if open weights get good enough? And for example, Alibaba just launched a QN 3.627B model, an open weight dense model with a mere 27 billion parameters, saying it surpasses QN 3.5397B, a 397 billion parameter model on major coding benchmarks. So this new model, like, I could run that easily on my Mac Studio. I'm asking, could we get another deep seek moment where somebody suddenly releases an open-weight coding model that obviates the need to pay thousands a month to Anthropic or whomever because you can run it on your laptop. What would that do to the revenue picture of all these players if that were to happen tomorrow? Microsoft has announced the first voluntary retirement program in its 50-year history for U.S. staffers whose combined years of service added to their age totals 70+. Quoting The Verge, Many of these employees have spent years and in some cases decades shaping Microsoft into what it is today, said Microsoft's HR chief Amy Coleman in a memo seen by The Verge. For those who may be considering their next chapter, we're offering a one-time voluntary retirement program. Microsoft says it applies to only a, quote, small percentage of our U.S. employees. U.S. employees whose combined years of service added to their age totaled 70 or more will be eligible for voluntary retirement, said Coleman, saying this will include generous company support. It's not clear if this is a precursor to more layoffs at Microsoft, but it certainly looks like a method to avoid a bigger round of layoffs ahead of Microsoft's new financial year in July. Microsoft is also changing how it rewards employees with performance-related bonuses and stock. A more simplified rewards program reduces pay points from nine to five levels, and there's no curve involved, so Microsoft isn't returning to the unpopular stack ranking system. We're also changing how stock is awarded, moving away from it being directly tied to bonus, so managers have more flexibility to meaningfully recognize high performance, says Coleman. That could help retain some of the talent that Microsoft has been losing through executive departures recently, allowing managers to offer an additional stock package without it having to be tied to the bonus schedule, end quote. Calci has suspended and fined congressional candidates Mark Morin of Virginia, Matt Klein of Minnesota, and Ezekiel Enriquez of Texas for what they are calling political insider trading, quoting CNBC. Calci said in a statement that all three candidates who each were suspended for five years, quote, were flagged because of our newly released safeguards to block political candidates from trading on their own elections. The sanctioned candidates were Mark Morin, who had been a candidate in Virginia's Democratic primary for the Senate before deciding to seek the seat as an independent, Minnesota State Senator Matt Klein, who is running in the Democratic primary for that state's second congressional district, and Ezekiel Enriquez of Texas, who ran in the Republican primary for the state's 21st congressional district. Kalshi identified the candidates by name in separate notices of disciplinary action. Kalshi said Morin traded in two markets related to his campaign. The first was a market on individuals who had run for public office in 2026, Kalshi said. This person placed a trade on himself in this market. Then, once the trader announced himself as a candidate for the Democratic primary election for Virginia U.S. Senate, he again traded on his own candidacy, the company said. Morin, when contacted by Kalshi, initially acknowledged being a candidate and violating the rules, but later stopped communicating with the company's team, according to Kalshi. Morin repeatedly refused to resolve this matter via settlement, the company said. Kalshi fined Morin in addition to suspending him the company said Morin in a statement on X said I traded on myself knowing this would happen also knowing that I wouldn be vying for the Democratic nomination and the attention it would create to highlight how this company is destroying young men. As Senator, I will go after Koushi and impose significant penalties on them, 25%, a vice tax to pay down our national debt. Also ironic timing, given that on DC subways, Calci has to run ads that they are a fair and legal betting market because they know heat is on them and the administration already chose their winner with Polymarket. They know they're effed and trying to do the same thing the tobacco companies did, Morin wrote. Klein and Enriquez both cooperated with Calci's probes, according to the company. Klein, who had, quote, traded a small amount on the outcome of his own election, also acknowledged that the trading activity violated CalShay Exchange rules, agreed to pay a fine of $539.85 and to his suspension, the company said. Klein, in a statement on X, said that last October he heard from friends that there was a prediction market enabling wagers on his primary race. I had never wagered on a predictions market previously, Klein said. I was curious about how it worked. I set up an account and bet $50 of my own funds that I would win the primary. I was informed in March of 2026 that this was a violation of platform rules. In compliance with their request, I paid a penalty and agreed to be suspended. That was the only wager I have ever made on a predictions market. This was a mistake, and I apologize, Klein wrote. He added, My experience, like many other Minnesotans, points to the need for clearer rules and regulations for these types of markets, end quote. Anthropics valuation has hit $1 trillion on Forge Global, a leading private marketplace exchange, surpassing OpenAI's valuation on that platform of $880 billion. Quoting Business Insider, Desperate buyers are in a race to secure a dwindling supply of secondary shares in Anthropic, driving the AI company's valuation on some sites to $1 trillion, a price that would have unthinkable even a few weeks ago. Meanwhile, traders Business Insider spoke with are seeing slumping demand for OpenAI, which is now trading at a discount to Anthropic despite OpenAI being valued at $852 billion, more than twice Anthropik's valuation in their most recent funding rounds. Anthropik's valuation now hovers at around $1 trillion on Forge Global, a leading private marketplace exchange, its CEO Kelly Rodriguez told Business Insider. OpenAI's valuation on the platform is $880 billion, a slight uptick from its March funding round. Since Anthropik and OpenAI are not yet public companies, the vast majority of investors are forced to buy via secondary markets with existing stock in the companies sold by current or former employees or early investors. Neither company responded to a request for comment. One Anthropik shareholder recently offered to unload shares at a $1.15 trillion valuation, according to Ken Sawyer, a co-founder and managing partner at Saints Capital, a venture secondary firm. A very well-known growth fund offered to buy Anthropik shares at a $1.05 trillion valuation, Jesse Lemming-Gruber, founder of OpenHome, posted on X this week, end quote. A poll of 4,000 workers in the US and the UK finds that the highest earning and most experienced workers are adopting AI in their jobs far faster than others. Quoting the FT, an FT poll of 4,000 workers in the US and UK shows adoption is heavily skewed towards the best paid workers. More than 60% use AI daily, compared with just 16% of the lower earners. The data, the first released from a new AI workforce tracker produced by the FTE and research company Focal Data, also points to a persistent gender divide with men significantly more likely than women to use AI tools across sectors ranging from technology to education and retail. The monthly survey covers how workers are using AI, changes in productivity, barriers to adoption, and impacts on the labor market. It offers a snapshot of how the technology is rippling across the US and UK and who stands to benefit most. The rhetoric out there is that the tools are going to be democratizing, but the reality is that you require a certain degree of education, abstract and quantitative skills familiarity with computers and coding in order to be using the models said Darren Esselamgu the Nobel Laureate in Economics and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology AI is going to increase inequality between labor and capital that is almost for sure. I would say it is setting us up for a S-show, end quote. The poll showed that top knowledge workers were the heaviest users of AI across white-collar jobs, but that the main differences in usage was between particular occupations rather than within them. Lawyers, accountants, and software developers are using these tools at similar rates, whether junior or senior, but are using them much more than people in lower paid occupations in the same industries. The strong relationship between pay, education, and AI use suggests the technology may increase earnings inequality and boosting the productivity of workers at the top, but not at the bottom." Some details trickling out from SpaceX's S1 filing. For example, quoting Reuters, SpaceX may be tackling one of the biggest challenges in the chip business, manufacturing the keys to powering artificial intelligence called graphics processing units or GPUs. Ahead of SpaceX's $1.75 trillion IPO expected this summer, the company has warned prospective investors of its big spending plans to develop AI and other technologies. It lists manufacturing our own GPUs among the substantial capital expenditures it is undertaking, according to excerpts of its S1 registration reviewed by Reuters. Companies filed this document to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to disclose their risks and finances before going public. The ambition follows work by SpaceX, its ex-AI unit, and Tesla to jointly develop the TeraFab, an advanced AI chip manufacturing complex that CEO Elon Musk is planning in Austin, Texas. Though Musk has said the project would target chips for cars, humanoid robots, and space-based data centers, many details, including the types of AI chips such as GPUs it would produce, have been unknown. There are a range of approaches for chips that power AI. For example, NVIDIA largely makes GPUs, which are general purpose and good at performing a wide array of data-crunching tasks. Alphabet's Google takes another approach with its tensor processing units, or TPUs, which are tuned to perform specific functions key to building AI models and running chatbots such as Anthropics Claude. It was unclear when SpaceX plans to manufacture its own chip and which companies, the TerraFab developers or their partner Intel, would handle the fabrication technologies inside the plant, end quote. And one more nugget from the S1 before we leave this, SpaceX says its total addressable market could be as much as $28.5 trillion, with $26.5 trillion of that from the AI sector, most of it from AI for businesses. So yeah, Elon really does think of everything he's doing now as AI. Cars and rockets are just along for the ride. finally today spotify is celebrating its 20th anniversary with a first ever list of its 20 most streamed artists albums songs podcasts and audiobooks quoting billboard some of the artists at the top of the music categories won't surprise anyone you would expect taylor swift bad bunny drake the weekend and ed sheeran to feature prominently given their domination during the streaming era. There are, of course, plenty of veteran acts in the mix on the most streamed of all time as well. Rihanna, Eminem, Coldplay, Kanye West. But the real interesting mix is on the top 20 most streamed albums tally. That's where Benito's smash 2022 album Un Verano Senti, with a record 22 billion total streams to date, is number one, followed by The Weeknd's 2016 album Starboy, Ed Sheeran's Deluxe, Olivia Rodrigo's Sour, and another one by The Weeknd After Hours. Abel is tops on the most streamed songs tally, as well as Blinding Lights coming in at number one, followed by Sharon's Shape of You, The Neighborhood's Sweater Weather, The Weeknd and Daft Punk's Starboy, and Harry Styles' As It Was, end quote. Click through if you want to read the full lists. nothing more for you today talk to you tomorrow
