Start with the number. Yesterday, June twelfth, SpaceX went public on the Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX. It priced at a hundred and thirty-five dollars a share, raised about seventy-five billion — the largest IPO in history. Then it opened, jumped, and closed at a hundred and sixty-one dollars, up nineteen percent on day one.
This is YegerPod. I'm Yeger. It's Saturday, June thirteenth. Today in AI: a record on Wall Street, and a first for Washington. The biggest IPO in history, and a government pulling an AI model off the market.
Start with the number. Yesterday, June twelfth, SpaceX went public on the Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX. It priced at a hundred and thirty-five dollars a share, raised about seventy-five billion — the largest IPO in history. Then it opened, jumped, and closed at a hundred and sixty-one dollars, up nineteen percent on day one.
That close put SpaceX past a two-trillion-dollar valuation — Reuters and the Guardian both have it around two-point-one to two-point-three trillion by end of day, sixth-most-valuable US company. And it crossed a personal line for Elon Musk: per the New York Times, he became the world's first trillionaire, on paper, as the stock closed.
A couple of details that tell the story. Trading volume — Fortune clocked over three hundred and sixty million shares in the first hour, about ten times what 2026's second-biggest IPO, Cerebras, did in its entire first day. And the texture of it, from a Times reporter on the floor: Wall Street was, quote, "surprised, and in some cases relieved, at how unexpectedly boring it is." The largest IPO ever, in a volatile sector, run by a mercurial founder — and it traded calm.
Hold that thought — a frontier company hitting two trillion — against the second story, because together they're the actual headline of the week.
On June twelfth, the same day SpaceX was ringing the bell, the US government issued an export-control directive to Anthropic. It ordered the company to suspend all access to its two top models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, for any foreign national — inside or outside the United States, including Anthropic's own foreign-national employees. To comply, Anthropic said it had to disable both models entirely, for everyone. This is reported by Reuters, Fortune, NBC, and Anthropic's own statement.
Think about what that is. Not an export ban on chips to a rival country. A directive that reaches a US company's already-released software and switches it off — globally — because of who might use it. The Commerce Department issued it. NBC and Business Insider confirm the agency and the mechanism.
The stated reason, per Anthropic: the government believes someone found a way to jailbreak Fable 5. Anthropic says it reviewed the demonstration, and disputes the severity — it called the technique narrow, not a universal jailbreak, surfacing a few already-known minor vulnerabilities that other public models can find too. Anthropic's warning, in its statement: pulling a model over a narrow vulnerability could set a precedent that halts AI deployment across the industry.
Now the reactions, because this split the tech world fast, and the voices are worth hearing directly.
Dean Ball, of the Foundation for American Innovation: "If this is true, it is just baffling. An administration whose posture is that we should export advanced AI chips to China — which also wants to ban Britain, and every other non-American on Earth, from using our best models? I have no words." His word for it: "cartoonish."
Chris McGuire, at the Council on Foreign Relations, takes the other half: "I actually think targeted export controls on model access are prudent." But — his words — "across the board controls on all countries on a single model, without any warning, is highly questionable," and the deemed-export piece restricting foreign nationals is "just absurd." Two people who both work in this space, landing in different places. That's the real shape of the debate.
And then the most striking frame, from Peter Girnus, a threat researcher at the Zero Day Initiative. Two things, he says, are true at once. One: Anthropic spent months marketing Mythos as too dangerous to release — and, in his telling, "the Commerce Department has now formally agreed it is a bomb. If you describe your product as a munition in every press release, eventually a government takes you at your word."
Two — and this is the history worth knowing: we have run this experiment before. In the 1990s, the US government classified strong encryption as a munition under the arms-export rules. A t-shirt printed with a few lines of RSA code was, legally, a weapon. Activists beat it by printing the source code as a book — because books are protected speech. The controls collapsed, in Girnus's phrase, because "math does not stop at customs."
The new wrinkle he points to is the "deemed export" rule: showing controlled technology to a foreign national inside the US counts, legally, as exporting it abroad. Which is why — his line — "Anthropic's own foreign-national employees are now locked out of the model they built. The munition is in the building, and the people who made it are not allowed to look at it."
One market reading, then I'll close. On Polymarket, best AI model at the end of June — Anthropic is at eighty-eight percent, on nearly fourteen million dollars of volume, Google eight, OpenAI four. The model the market still ranks number one is, as of this weekend, one most of the planet can no longer legally use.
So the picture on June thirteenth. The most valuable IPO ever closed up nineteen percent and minted the first trillionaire. And on the same day, the US government reached into a private company and switched off its best AI for every non-American on Earth — over a jailbreak the company says is minor. One of these is a market story. The other is a question about who controls access to this technology, and the people debating it don't agree.