Daily Briefing — May 29, 2026

SpaceX filed its S-1 last week with a $1.75 trillion valuation, hoping to raise between $75 and $80 billion. The headline grabber is that 47% of the prospectus talks about AI — more than it spends on Starlink or rockets. A company that currently makes almost none of its money from artificial intelligence has built its entire investor story around the idea that AI is coming and SpaceX will be there when it does.

The business underneath the pitch tells a different story. Starlink is pulling in $11.4 billion in revenue, 61% of the company's total $18.7 billion, at solid margins (39% GAAP, 63% EBITDA). That part is a real business with real numbers. The rocket-launching side is bleeding: the Space division posted a $657 million operating loss in 2025 on $4 billion in revenue, with another $3 billion going into R&D.

So you've got a profitable satellite internet company strapped to an expensive rocket program, both wrapped in an AI narrative that hasn't shown up in the financials yet. The valuation is priced on a bet about where the company will be, not what it earns today. That isn't automatically wrong, but it's worth seeing clearly before you take the pitch at face value.

The old tells are gone. Broken English, pixelated logos, sketchy phone numbers — those used to be your early warning system for online scams. Generative AI has dismantled all of it. Criminals now have access to the same tools your marketing team uses, and they're deploying them at scale to build fake storefronts, clone voices, and write copy that reads cleaner than most legitimate brand communications.

The New York Times tech columnist Brian X. Chen nearly got caught by a fake Hoka sneakers site that looked completely real. Eighty percent off, polished layout, the whole thing. His instinct kicked in just before checkout, and a quick Reddit search confirmed what his gut suspected. Most people don't get that pause moment. They just click, enter card details, and find out two weeks later when the shoes never arrive.

This is happening to smart, tech-literate people because the quality bar for scams has jumped dramatically. AI tools are cheap, accessible, and require almost no skill to operate. The scam economy is getting a productivity upgrade, and consumers are absorbing the downside.

A Chinese startup called LinkerBot is making robotic hands that can thread needles, play piano, and assemble electronics, and they're selling them for $600 a unit. The company shipped 10,000 of these hands last year, which they claim is 80 percent of total worldwide demand. That's a remarkable number for a company that didn't exist before 2023.

The funding story is almost as wild as the product. Six rounds of investment in 13 months, with backers including Ant Group, HongShan Capital, and the Chinese government. The $6 billion valuation isn't for a full robot — it's for the hands. That tells you where the bottleneck in humanoid robotics actually sits.

Elon Musk said it plainly last fall: hands are the majority of the engineering difficulty in the entire robot. LinkerBot's founder agrees, and he's betting that in three to five years these hands will drop to $200 each. His long-term vision is that everyone will own ten robots on average. That's either visionary or deeply unhinged, and the line between those two things in deep tech is thinner than you'd think.

If hands are the unsolved problem, whoever controls the supply of good robotic hands controls a chokepoint in the entire humanoid robot industry. That's the kind of infrastructure play that reshapes whole labour markets, not just factory floors.