The Briefing: SpaceX, Nvidia, Google

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The Briefing

May 17, 2026

The Briefing

By Martin Peers

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Greetings!

This should be an action-packed week in tech news, what with Nvidia’s first-quarter earnings, Google’s annual I/O developer conference and Meta Platforms’ scheduled layoffs of 8,000 employees. But it is Elon Musk who has the biggest week coming up.

For one thing, the first test launch of SpaceX’s Starship in seven months is scheduled for Tuesday. A successful launch will boost investor interest in SpaceX’s upcoming IPO, not that it needs much of a lift. Meanwhile, chatter late last week was that SpaceX’s IPO filing could become public sometime in the next few days.

The disclosures in that document—which could include first-quarter earnings—will help investors finalize their analysis of SpaceX, assuming some of them are taking the numbers into account and not just acting on warm feelings about Musk’s aggressive space ambitions.

To be sure, mMany of the most important details of the filing, particularly around SpaceX’s finances, have already surfaced in news reports in the past few weeks in The Information and elsewhere. (See here, here, here, here and here.)

The other big Musk news this week is that we’ll likely get a result in his lawsuit against OpenAI—the one in which he has claimed OpenAI co-founders Sam Altman and Greg Brockman engaged in fraud and breach of contract by starting a for-profit arm out of the nonprofit he helped finance. The case goes to the jury on Monday.

Of these three news events, the Starship launch may be the most important for Musk. That’s because SpaceX must get Starship—the largest rocket ever built—into service for most of its other business plans to work. As we explained in this piece, SpaceX needs Starship so it can launch a new generation of Starlink satellites to carry data centers as well as the nascent Starlink Mobile service.

As things stand now, Starship is five years behind its original date for entering commercial service. What’s been holding it up lately is determining whether the rocket’s upper stage is reusable. Even the latest test flight is behind schedule: It was supposed to happen in March.

In contrast, the outcome of the OpenAI trial doesn’t matter much to Musk. After all, he is just acting out a grudge in pursuing the ChatGPT firm. It could be expensive for OpenAI if it loses, to be sure, although this report from our correspondent in the courtroom, Rocket Drew, implied the odds are in favor of the ChatGPT firm.

Nvidia’s Quarter

Whatever happens with Starship, we’ve still got the rocket ship that is Nvidia to watch. We’ll get a reminder of that on Wednesday when the AI chip designer reports the first quarter of its 2027 fiscal year, which runs through next January. (The quarter ended in April.)

What’s notable about this year is that Nvidia’s growth is expected to accelerate after a slowdown last year. Of course, everything is relative. Nvidia’s revenue growth exploded to more than 100% in fiscal 2024 and 2025, as the AI boom sparked a rush of demand for its chips. In fiscal 2026, which ended in January, growth fell to a still-spectacular rate of 66%. This year, analysts expect growth to accelerate to 73%, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence.

The first quarter’s growth is likely to be even faster. In February, Nvidia projected revenue of $78 billion, which would be 77% higher than a year earlier, but analysts are estimating revenue will grow 80% to $79.16 billion, S&P data show.

The acceleration reflects a compute crunch that has made Nvidia’s graphics processing units very hard to find. As an executive at cloud firm Nebius said last week, it was seeing “four or more customers competing for every GPU we bring online.” Nvidia stock, meanwhile, has soared 36% in the past six weeks, to Friday’s close of $225. It had been stuck around the $180 level for months before that.

Ackman in, Gates out

Bill Ackman’s Pershing Square has built a $2 billion stake in Microsoft, the hedge fund disclosed Friday. Ackman said in a post on X that the company’s nearly 15% share slide so far this year has been driven by investors who “underestimate the resilience” of its Office 365 software and the growth of its newer Copilot AI software.

Meanwhile, also on Friday, the Gates Foundation Trust disclosed it had sold the last of its stake in Microsoft. As of Dec. 31, the trust held 7.69 million shares, worth around $3 billion. As of March 31, it had no shares.

In Other News

• OpenAI is combining teams working on ChatGPT, its Codex coding product and its application programming interface into one organization, pressing ahead on streamlining its strategy despite the prolonged medical leave of top executive Fidji Simo (more here).

• President Donald Trump has traded millions of dollars’ worth of technology stocks since the start of 2026, new disclosures released on Thursday show. In a report filed with the U.S. Office of Government Ethics, Trump revealed that he bought and sold shares of companies including Nvidia, Palantir and Oracle.

• OpenAI bought Weights.GG, a small startup that made Replay, an AI voice-cloning tool, in January, according to a person familiar with the acquisition. A half-dozen employees joined OpenAI, which purchased the startup’s intellectual property but does not plan to integrate its product.

Friday on The Information’s TITV

Check out Friday’s episode of TITV in which we speak with an early iPhone engineer who worked with Steve Jobs about the current state of Apple’s AI.

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