MARKET RECAP
📈 Iran Ceasefire Talks, New Fed Chair, and Chip Stocks Reaching Highs

🚀 The rally continues, with the S&P notching its 8th green week in a row (its longest green streak since December 2023).

📊 Across the indexes:

• The S&P 500 rose +0.88%

• The Nasdaq 100 rose 1.22%

• The TSX rose 1.89%

🛰️ Our biggest story this week is SpaceX’s IPO, but before we dive into the details (and whether it’s a rocketship or a trap), here’s a breakdown of the 3 core macro themes of the week:

💣 1. The Iran War Isn’t Over

🇮🇷 The markets have brushed off the US-Iran war as if it never happened, with the S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 up +8.64% and +18.12% compared to before the war, but the war is still not over.

🕊️ Throughout the week, the U.S. and Iran signaled more progress toward a permanent ceasefire, but the US remains stuck over Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile, and its attempt to establish a permanent toll system on the Strait of Hormuz.

🚫 Trump flatly rejected a toll, saying the US has “total control” of the waterway and wants it free and open. And later said he was “hours away” from striking Iran again despite the existing conflict pause, before he was convinced to postpone for a few days.

🗣️ Secretary of State Marco Rubio also called the potential toll system “unfeasible,” but said on Saturday during a trip to India:

🛢️ As of today, negotiations are still ongoing (mediated by Pakistan), but Iran’s highly enriched uranium and the Strait remain the two core sticking points. And until those issues are resolved, oil prices are expected to stay volatile and may rise even higher as global oil reserves deplete (although, as we’ve seen in the markets, investors seem to have moved on from worrying about the war and its potential impact).

🏦 2. The New Fed Chair Is Here

⚖️ On Friday, Kevin Warsh was sworn in as the new chair of the Federal Reserve to replace Jerome Powell, and in less than a month, he will be making his first decision as Chair on whether to cut or raise rates.

🎙️ During the swearing-in ceremony, Trump said he wants Warsh to be “totally independent” and do his “own thing”, but many feel this will be tough for Trump, who put a ton of pressure on Jerome Powell to lower rates, saying Powell was “either incompetent or crooked” and that “he’s done a bad job. We should have lower rates.”

Despite this pressure, many were happy with Trump’s choice of the new Fed Chair, seeing Warsh as a ‘credible steward of monetary policy.’ But this may put Warsh in a very tough spot, with potential pressure from Trump on one side, and a harsh economic reality on the other that makes rate cuts tricky.

🔺 Fed governor Christopher Waller (also appointed by Trump) said on Friday that he “can no longer rule out rate hikes further down the road if inflation does not abate soon,” and that the Fed’s next statement should make it clear that a rate cut is “no more likely than a rate increase,” to account for the volatile economic environment.

📋 According to a CNBC survey back in April, 58% of respondents said Warsh will be ‘dovish’ (in favour of cutting rates), but the current FedWatch now puts the probability of no cut at 96% and a rate increase at 4%, so I wouldn’t get your hopes up for a rate cut anytime soon

🖥️ 3. Chip Stocks Hit Record Highs (Without Nvidia)

📡 And last but not least, semiconductors.

🚀 Also on Friday, the Xtrackers Semiconductor ETF ($CHPS) pushed to a record high, now up a massive +82% year-to-date. But interestingly, these gains weren’t driven by Nvidia ($NVDA).

📉 Nvidia has fallen slightly since its Wednesday earnings report (which we covered in detail here), despite topping estimates and offering a positive outlook.

🏆 The biggest gains in this sector came from the other chip giants, with Advanced Micro ($AMD) rising +9%, Arm Holdings ($ARM) surging 46%, and other stocks like ASML ($ASML) gaining +10%.

🔄 This is a sign that AI buildout isn’t slowing down, but money is rotating across the semiconductor industry rather than concentrating in a single name (which may be a healthier sign for the sector overall).

🪐 All right, with those 3 macro stories covered, let’s break down everything you need to know about SpaceX’s upcoming IPO. But before we switch gears, a quick word from today’s sponsor Xtrackers!

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TOP STORY
🛰️ Everything You Need to Know About the SpaceX IPO

🪐 Apart from Nvidia’s earnings, the biggest story this week was on Wednesday, with SpaceX formally filing with the SEC to list on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol “SPCX.”

🗓️ The listing is expected on June 12 (in less than 3 weeks), with a valuation range of $1.75-2 trillion and a raise of $40-80 billion. This would make it the largest IPO in history.

😬 But while exciting, many are questioning the numbers… SpaceX lost $4.3 billion in the first quarter of this year alone, on $4.7 billion in revenue. And if we take a look at some of the commentary around this IPO, it isn’t pretty.

👀 Just take a look at the top YouTube titles to see what I mean:

• SpaceX IPO: Nice Try Though

• The SpaceX IPO… It’s Worse Than You Think

• SpaceX Just Filed to IPO - The Numbers Are Ugly

• The SpaceX IPO doesn’t add up

🔍 So let’s dive into the details ourselves and try to make sense of whether the IPO is a great investment or a trap…

🛸 What SpaceX Actually Does

🤔 If you opened SpaceX's filing this week thinking you were reading a rocket company's IPO prospectus, you'd be in for a surprise. The word "AI" appears over 200 times in the document, and the word "consciousness" appears 10 times.

🧠 The filing opens with 14 pages of rocket photographs and declares that the company's primary objective is to "extend the light of consciousness to the stars", a phrase repeated 10 separate times.

💡 But once you get past the buzzwords, SpaceX is really 3 businesses stacked on top of each other, and right now, only one of them makes money:

1. 🛰️ Connectivity (Starlink) — $11.4B in 2025 revenue (61% of total), $1.1B operating profit in Q1 2026, and EBITDA margins of 63%, up from 41% just two years ago. More satellites in orbit than NASA and every military on Earth combined.

2. 🚀 Space (Launch Services) — ~$4B in 2025 revenue, a monopoly on U.S. commercial and government launches via Starship (the world's most powerful rocket ever built). Also lost $662M in Q1 2026.

3. 🤖 AI (xAI) — Acquired from Musk in an all-stock deal valued at $250B in February 2026. Lost $2.47B in Q1 alone on just $818M in revenue, burning over $1B a month.

🛰️ Starlink: The Crown Jewel

🚀 Let's start with the good part: Starlink, SpaceX’s subscription satellite internet business. With 10 million active subscribers across 164 countries, 63% EBITDA margins (for context, traditional satellite businesses run at about 20%), and a defense contract with the National Reconnaissance Office and the Pentagon, Starlink is right now the strongest part of the SpaceX business.

💬 Scott Galloway, entrepreneur and host of the Prof G Markets podcast, even called it the ‘best product in the last few years’.

✨ Then there’s Launch Services, where SpaceX holds basically a monopoly in US commercial and government orbit launches via Starship (the world’s most powerful launch vehicle ever developed), which is expected to expand into payload delivery in the not-so-distant future.

🤖 The Rough Spot: xAI

😥 But underneath the rockets is xAI, with many worried that the successful space businesses will just essentially become cash fuel for a pretty tough AI bet.

🤝 In February 2026, SpaceX acquired xAI, the AI lab Musk founded in 2023, in an all-stock deal that pegged xAI's value at $250 billion.

💡 For context:

• OpenAI generates ~$24B in annual revenue and is currently valued at around $850B (35x).

• Anthropic generates over $30B and is valued around $400B (13x).

• xAI generated roughly $1B in revenue before the deal and SpaceX paid $250B for it (250x).

👋 Grok, xAI's flagship model, holds only 3.4% of the AI market, and all 11 of xAI's co-founders, researchers and engineers poached from DeepMind, OpenAI, Google, and the University of Toronto, have left the company.

💰 And as mentioned, xAI is a cash-burning machine, spending over $1B a month.

📊 The Valuation Question

🤔 So where does that leave us for valuation? Well, at $1.75 trillion, SpaceX is priced at ~100x its 2025 revenue of $18.7 billion, about five times Nvidia's current price-to-sales multiple.

😬 Patrick Boyle puts the comparison bluntly:

🎯 Aswath Damodaran, widely known as the "Dean of Valuation" and professor of finance at NYU's Stern School of Business, was a bit more bullish, but even his valuation came short of the $1.75-2T:

🐂 The bull case is the market size. SpaceX claims a total addressable market of $28.5 trillion (larger than the entire U.S. GDP), but 93% of this is attributed to AI.

🤑 That said, many see the potential as massive… referencing AI data centers, point-to-point terrestrial rocket travel, in-orbit manufacturing, and asteroid mining, but this leaves a lot riding on businesses that don’t exist yet.

🚗 That said, Tesla isn’t so different, with most analysts (and even Elon himself) arguing that 80-90% of Tesla’s business is driven by its future autonomy and robotics potential (also businesses that don’t yet exist).

Max Levine sums this up:

👀 You May Be Forced to Buy SpaceX Anyway…

🙅‍♀️ Now maybe after reading all this you’re thinking, ‘I was never going to buy SpaceX anyway so why should I care’. If that’s you… think again.

📝 On May 1st, Nasdaq introduced three new rules, conveniently timed for a June listing.

• The waiting period for Nasdaq 100 inclusion was cut from 3 months to just 15 trading days.

• The 10% minimum free float requirement was scrapped (SpaceX is targeting 4-5%).

• And a hidden multiplier now treats any float under 20% as three times larger for index weighting, meaning SpaceX's 4% float counts as 12%.

😳 What this means is, within 15 trading days of listing, every passive fund tracking the Nasdaq 100 (over $600 billion in assets) becomes a forced buyer of SpaceX (including any ETF like QQQ, QQQM, etc.).

💬 Portfolio manager George Noble put it another way: "Your 401k is the exit liquidity."

🤔 So what can you do about this if you don’t want to own SpaceX?

💸 Well, one way to counteract the exposure is to short an equivalent dollar amount of SPCX once it lists, but with only 4-5% of shares in public float, borrow costs on a short position could be punishingly high in the early weeks (and not to mention complicated for beginners).

💡 For most people, the best move is simply knowing the exposure is coming and deciding in advance how comfortable you are with it.

🍀 And for those of you who are investing, I wish you good luck! To join the discussion, make sure to join Anthony (the rocket man)’s post on Blossom:

😎 All right, now that we’ve covered SpaceX, let’s switch gears to the other big story this week - Google’s big announcements at its developer conference - but first, a quick word about our upcoming events!

BLOSSOMCON 2026
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✈️ This year we’re hitting 3 cities, and even booked out the Rogers Centre (where the World Series was hosted last year) for our Toronto event!

🤑 We’ve extended Early Bird tickets for one more week, so make sure you grab your ticket now to get the discount!

• July 25 — Toronto (Rogers Centre)

• Aug 22 — Vancouver (JW Marriot Parq)

• Oct 3 — New York (Metropolitan Pavilion)

*P.S. The events are break-even, so all the money we make goes into creating a better experience 😊

BIG TECH
🛰️ Google Unveils A Complete Search Overhaul, AI Glasses, and More

🔍 The narrative around Google ($GOOGL) was rough over the past few years with concerns about AI eating into its search dominance, questions about whether Gemini can compete with ChatGPT, and a stock that was beaten under pressure.

🤖 But as most of us know, this AI narrative shifted in the second half of 2025 (which we covered in detail here), and this week, it was shown again just how innovative Google can be in an AI world, at its annual I/O developers conference.

📣 On Google’s own blog, you can find the full list of 100 announcements they made, including:

• 🤖 Gemini Spark, a 24/7 personal AI agent that works across your apps in the background

• 🛒 Universal Cart, an AI-powered shopping cart that works across Search, Gemini, YouTube, and Gmail

• 🎬 Gemini Omni, an AI that can generate and edit video from images, audio, and text

• 📝 Docs Live, where you can dictate a brain dump and Gemini builds a full formatted document in real time

• 📺 Ask YouTube, that finds the exact moment in a video that answers your question

• 🤖 Gemini 3.5 Flash, a new frontier model that runs 4x faster than competing models

• 🏗️ Antigravity 2.0, Google’s agentic developer platform, now capable of running hundreds of agents simultaneously

• 💰 Google AI Ultra price drop, top-tier plan cut from $250/month to $200, with a new $100/month tier

✨ But out of this list (and more), here were a couple of announcements that stood out!

🔍 A Rebuilt Google Search

🎤 Google CEO Sundar Pichai opened the keynote at I/O 2026 announcing that AI Overviews in Search now had over 2.5 billion monthly active users, and that “AI Mode” (released a little under a year ago) had already surpassed 1 billion users in under a year.

🏆 The company called this one of the largest shifts in search history, but perhaps the biggest announcement regarding Search around its full redesign, as seen in this video here.

🔄 The redesigned search box is a full pivot into the “AI chatbot” era, and now allows users to create and manage multiple AI “information agents” directly from the search bar, that keep working in the background, monitoring biotech stocks, apartment listings, sneaker drops, and sending alerts when something changes.

🤝 In other words, now instead of returning a list of links, Search is becoming an AI helper that works on your behalf.

💰 For investors, this was the most important announcement of the conference. Search generates roughly 60% of Google’s revenue after all, and the question hanging over the stock has been “Will AI cannibalize Search, or will Google successfully evolve it?”

🔮 And while we can’t predict the future, we do know that this week was Google’s way of answering that themselves into a full AI pivot. And after AI Overviews and AI Mode’s bright success, it suggests that pivot is already working.

👓 AI Glasses Are Back (But For Real This Time)

👓 Now, last year Google announced it was developing its own smart glasses to compete with Meta ($META), even showing a demo on last year’s stage at I/O 2025.

🚀 But this year, Google used the back half of the 2026 keynote to reveal a full slate of smart glasses built on Android XR with Gemini, in partnership with Samsung, Warby Parker, and Gentle Monster, launching this fall. The glasses can see what you see, hear what you hear, provide real-time language translations, and answer questions about whatever’s in front of you.

🍕 The demo showed Gemini navigating the wearer to a café, opening DoorDash, finding her usual order, and queuing it for pickup, all without touching her phone.

💡 What Analysts Are Saying

🌊 The message from I/O 2026 was that Google is diving headfirst into the upcoming AI world, showing investors that it can use integration across its product ecosystem (Search, Gmail, YouTube, Maps, Android, Chrome, Workspace) to become a true player in the AI space.

🧑‍💼 And analysts generally agree with that premise:

📈 And while Google dropped 3% this week, it’s still up 11% over the past month and 118% over the past year, so safe to say investors are happy with the big moves Google has been making.

FROM THE BLOSSOM COMMUNITY
⭐️ Top Discussions of the Week

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