The SpaceX IPO made history. Is the excitement still there? SpaceX investors have swung from celebration to apparent concern in its first month as a publicly traded company. When shares in the firm, co-founded and led by Elon Musk, first became available for individuals to buy on the public stock market on 12 June, there was an investor frenzy . Although the company had decided to price its shares at $135 each, the price immediately shot up to $150 that first day, climbing to $176, before closing at $160.95.

Many Australian superannuation portfolio's are invested in Elon Musk's company. Many Australian superannuation portfolio's are invested in Elon Musk's company. Artificial intelligence and technology stocks have become a driving force on Wall Street and, unbeknownst to most Australians, a growing part of their retirement savings . The so-called "magnificent seven" - chip maker Nvidia, Google owner Alphabet, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook owner Meta and Tesla - are, for better or worse, increasingly part of the portfolios offered by superannuation funds. The average Australian super portfolio now has an estimated 12% of its investments in AI-related companies due to the massive growth of tech stocks in recent years, experts say.

'AI cannot and will never render us obsolete' Cory Doctorow at home in Los Angeles. 'AI cannot and will never render us obsolete' Cory Doctorow at home in Los Angeles. The writer who coined the word'enshittification' tells us why AI will never deliver what it promises - and why it still appeals so much to those in power A "centaur", in automation theory, is a person assisted by a machine, and a "reverse centaur", hero of Cory Doctorow's new book, The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI, is a "human who is conscripted into acting as an assistant a machine". Every warehouse worker who ever had to urinate in a water bottle because they couldn't otherwise meet the fulfilment targets set by an algorithm is a reverse centaur. Reaching into the future, everyone who has to sit in a self-driving truck to make sure it doesn't crash, presumably on minimum rather than truck-driver wages, is a reverse centaur; as is every lawyer no longer on lawyer's money checking Gemini's command of precedent, every indie band scraping a living doing covers of AI-generated hits, and so on. That, anyway, is the promise: AI is coming for your job, and it is coming for your kids' jobs, and there is no point fighting it because the future's already here.

Plus: Amazon workers who backed data center limits face potential termination. A startup claims it broke through a bottleneck that's holding back LLMs AI startup Subquadratic came out of stealth last month with a huge claim: it had solved a mathematical bottleneck that had held back large language models for almost a decade. The purported breakthrough comes from slashing the number of computations transformers need to carry out to generate answers. The result is a faster and cheaper LLM that uses far less energy than any other model on the market. Many experts remained skeptical--but Subquadratic has started to share the receipts. They suggest that their approach might be worth paying attention to.

Weekly quiz: How many SpaceX employees just became millionaires? This week, the White House hosted a UFC fight on its South Lawn, Royal Marines boarded a Russian shadow fleet oil tanker, and a schoolgirl said she would be left staring at a wall if social media was banned for under-16s. But how much attention did you pay to what else happened in the world over the past seven days? Try last week's quiz, or have a go at something from the archives . Musk's SpaceX overtakes Amazon to become world's fifth most valuable firm For the first time, individual investors can take a stake in Elon Musk's rockets-to-AI company.

Plus: The Pentagon says it used Grok in strikes on Iran. For decades, physicists have hunted for weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs), a leading candidate for dark matter. But their search has run into a new problem: neutrinos. These tiny particles from the sun and other stars can create a "neutrino fog" that drowns out any signal of dark matter. Hitting the neutrino fog does not, however, mean an end to the search. Researchers just have to shift the focus of their hunt.

This week only, every donation is doubled! Halfway through our Summer Membership Drive, we're still well behind where we need to be. But there's good news: This week, every donation will be doubled up, to $50,000 We need you right now. We need you right now. Trump's Justice Department Backs Elon Musk in Data Center Lawsuit DOJ urges judge to throw NAACP's legal action over xAI's gas turbines in Mississippi.

This week only, every donation is doubled! Halfway through our Summer Membership Drive, we're still well behind where we need to be. But there's good news: This week, every donation will be doubled up, to $50,000 We need you right now. We need you right now. The wave of booing aimed at AI-pilled commencement speakers signals a sea change in public opinion.

AI will lead to more need for workers rather than make people redundant, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos predicted during an appearance at a tech conference in Paris. Bezos pushed back against growing concerns that AI will replace large numbers of workers. Instead he argued that the tech will unlock new opportunities and increase demand for human labour. This is in contradiction to some other tech and political figures - including former UK prime minister Rishi Sunak, now an adviser to Microsoft and AI firm Anthropic, who recently said AI was having an impact on young people's job prospects . I know there's a lot of concern that many people have, including many smart people, that AI is going to make humans redundant and so on, Bezos said.

SpaceX staff and guests celebrate the company's IPO in New York on Friday. SpaceX staff and guests celebrate the company's IPO in New York on Friday. SpaceX overtakes Amazon to become world's fifth most valuable company Elon Musk's firm briefly reached $2.97tn valuation days after its IPO following purchase of AI coding startup Cursor SpaceX has overtaken Amazon to become the world's fifth most valuable company days after its stock market debut . The milestone came as Elon Musk's company agreed to buy the startup behind the AI-powered coding app Cursor for $60bn (£44bn), in an attempt to capitalise on the technology's success as a coding tool. SpaceX is the parent of Musk's AI business, xAI, which will be able to boost its capabilities in an area - AI systems writing code - that has proven to be a strong commercial success for Anthropic, the rival company behind the Claude chatbot.