For once, SpaceX is ahead of schedule: Elon Musk's space and AI conglomerate officially confirmed that it has raised $75 billion from the sale of its shares to its underwriters, who are set to begin marketing the company on the Nasdaq stock exchange Friday. SpaceX priced its 555.6 million shares at $135 each, the company said in an update on its website. That makes SpaceX officially the largest IPO in history, easily eclipsing the $24.9 billion in funds raised by Saudi Aramco during its 2019 public markets debut. At this price, the deal also looks set to make Musk the world's first trillionaire. While IPO pricing typically works itself out as markets open, SpaceX took an unusual approach in setting the price well in advance. The company was testing its $135 share target with investors before its official roadshow started, the Financial Times reported. And that offering, which eschewed traditional IPO pricing practices, attracted four times the available shares, per Bloomberg. As active trading gets underway tomorrow, SpaceX's share price may sink or rise. But anecdotal reports suggest that big institutional investors and individual buyers are lining up to purchase shares in the 24-year-old technology company....

According to Shopify, the best e-commerce platform is Shopify. On its blog, the company has published at least 60 different ranked listicles, including '10 Best Ecommerce Platforms for Small Business in 2026,' '11 Best Ecommerce Platforms for Your Business in 2026,' 'The 11 Best Cheap Ecommerce Platforms for Small Business (2026),' and 'Best Ecommerce Software 2026: Compare 11 Top Platforms.' The competitors that come in second and beyond vary, but the No. 1 pick is always Shopify. If rankings produced by the very company at the top of the list seem unlikely to fool anyone, that's because humans probably aren't the target audience. Chatbots are. When I recently asked ChatGPT for the 'best way to set up an online storefront,' the AI tool identified Shopify as the first option. It wasn't immediately clear how ChatGPT arrived at that recommendation, but a list of citations that accompanied the answer yielded a clue: Shopify's own rankings. For the quarter century that Google has been the de facto front door to the web, businesses have tried to find ways to get their pages at the top of search results. You've surely felt the influence of search-engine optimization, even if you don't know the term. When you search for a recipe and have to scroll past the author's rambling reminiscences about their great-aunt's kitchen, that's a form of SEO at work. Years ago, it became conventional wisdom among recipe bloggers that Google's search rankings favored longer, more distinctive articles. (Some of them also just liked to spin a yarn.)...

Silicon Valley's leaders are rushing to embrace the power of media for the purposes of marketing and political capital. Now, in a sign of the times, Founders Fund, the venture capital firm co-founded by Peter Thiel, has launched its own game show. The spectacle is moderated by Pirate Wires editor Mike Solana (who is also the chief marketing officer at Founders Fund). The debut episode includes a who's who of players ' Sam Altman; Palmer Luckey; Bryan Johnson, the famed biohacker who will (according to him) live forever; and Moxie Marlinspike, the founder of encrypted chat app Signal. 'I'm so f*cking bored with VC content,' Solana told Newcomer, which originally reported the show's existence. 'There has to be a more interesting way to get to know someone, and I think that this is a way more interesting way to get to know someone.' In many ways, having a reality-TV-esque platform is just good business these days. The internet has turned the world into a population of chronic media consumers, and the average American spends around 2.5 hours on social media per day. Much of that time is spent scrolling through an endless flood of advertising-laced memes and videos....

Nvidia opened Taipei's enormous Computex trade show on Sunday with a spark, literally. The chipmaker unveiled a new PC CPU called the RTX Spark, which it dubbed a 'superchip,' and named a who's who list of PC makers that will soon deliver AI PCs powered by it. The super-fast, 1-petaflop chip is designed to run AI agents like OpenClaw or Hermes Agent securely, according to Nvidia. Such RTX Spark Windows PCs will be available this fall from ASUS, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Microsoft Surface, and MSI, with models from Acer and Gigabyte to follow. In addition to being equipped with secure sandboxes (jointly developed with Microsoft) to run agents securely, the PCs will also have enough CPU, GPU, RAM, and underlying Nvidia CUDA software to run local versions of large language models. The chipmaker is marketing this as an alternative for creators making AI content, as well as providing a significant upgrade to its traditional market of gamers. Nvidia said more than 100 Windows software makers have signed on to support the new chip, including Adobe, Blender, ComfyUI, Riot Games, and Xbox....