gm.
midweek catch-up. five things that moved since monday.
the 5
1. xbox is cutting 3,200 jobs and selling off game studios.
microsoft is cutting about 4,800 employees total, with xbox taking the biggest hit at ~3,200 jobs by 2027 (roughly one in five xbox employees). the new xbox CEO published a blog post admitting the business isn't healthy: margins are three to ten times lower than sony and nintendo, and xbox has invested over $20 billion in games and hardware over the past five years while annual revenue actually declined by $500 million.
xbox is also spinning off four game studios (ninja theory, undead labs, compulsion games, and double fine, about 350 people combined). microsoft stock is down about 19% year to date, the worst performer of any US mega-cap.
2. robinhood's new blockchain is being taken over by meme coins.
robinhood launched its own blockchain last week, pitched as infrastructure for tokenized stocks and serious financial products. the first thing to actually take off on it: a cat-themed meme coin called cashcat, based on robinhood's old mascot. it surged 700% to 950% in 24 hours.
one trader turned $838 into over $1 million (a 1,253x return) in a day. robinhood's CEO acknowledged the shift on X, saying the chain "works great for memes too." real-world assets, meanwhile, remain more of a promise than a product.
3. china is thinking about locking down its best AI models.
reuters reported tuesday that chinese officials have been meeting with with the country’s top AI companies (alibaba, bytedance, and zhipu) about restricting international access to their most advanced models. talks are early. no timeline. companies declined to comment.
context: chinese "open-weight" models (where the underlying code is free to download) have become world-class and much less expensive, undercutting US AI companies globally. if china restricts exports, that price advantage disappears and demand shifts back to expensive US frontier models (openai, anthropic). the US did something similar last month with anthropic's fable 5.
4. xAI is now SpaceXAI.
on monday, spacex completed the rebrand of xAI (musk's AI company) to SpaceXAI. the @xai account on X changed its handle, dropped a new logo, and posted a transition video.
context: spacex acquired xAI in an all-stock deal in february. musk said in may that xAI would be folded into spacex entirely. now it's official. spacex now has rockets, satellite internet (starlink), the X social platform, an AI lab (grok), and a rumored phone all under one roof.
5. SK Hynix files a $28 billion US IPO.
SK Hynix is a korean company that makes the specialized fast memory chips (called HBM, or high-bandwidth memory) inside nvidia's AI processors. it's the world's #2 memory maker overall. tomorrow (friday), it starts trading on the nasdaq under ticker SKHY.
the deal size is $28 billion, making it the second-largest US IPO ever (only spacex's june IPO was bigger, at $85.7 billion). notable backer: leopold aschenbrenner's hedge fund situational awareness. aschenbrenner is the ex-openai researcher whose famous essay predicted this exact AI infrastructure boom. his fund plus baillie gifford and coatue are together taking up to $7 billion of the deal.
see you monday.
not financial advice. aggregated community trends and commentary.