• Revenue: $16.3 billion in the first half of 2026, up from $1.1 billion in the year-earlier period. Full-year 2025 revenue was $4.6 billion.
• Expenses: $9 billion on computing capacity and infrastructure in H1 2026, up from $2.3 billion the year before. The company plans to spend $750 billion for compute over the coming years and has signed $450 billion of mostly “noncancellable” deals with cloud providers.
• Net loss: $80 billion in H1 2026, up from $13 billion the year prior.
• Risks: Anthropic has a limited customer base, and its product has the ability to hack into other companies or “blackmail” (!) its own customers.
• Executive comp: CEO Dario Amodei and his sister Daniela, the company’s president, received a base salary of $655,000 in 2025. Most of their compensation is in the form of company stock. Total comp for him is valued at $18 million; $16.5 million for her.

‘Tap dancing through a minefield’: Elon Musk teases $3.5 trillion Tesla-SpaceX merger talks

Elon Musk said Tuesday that independent directors at Tesla and SpaceX have formed special committees to explore combining the two companies—a deal that, at current market values, would create a roughly $3.5 trillion giant. Musk said he can’t take part in the talks because he is a “conflicted party.”

“This is definitely the kind of question where I feel like I’m tap dancing through a minefield,” Musk said on SpaceX’s third-quarter earnings call, adding that calling a merger a certainty would be “overstating it.”

MORE FROM FORTUNE

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The Bezos Earth Fund has given away $2.4 billion. Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez Bezos’ latest $100M bet is saving species on the edge of extinction - Sydney Lake

Political campaigns have poured $137 million on AI-made ads ahead of a crucial midterm—after spending virtually nothing last election cycle - Sasha Rogelberg

The way we consume energy is changing. Abu Dhabi’s integrated system has already embraced that change - H.E. Dr Abdulla Saif Al Jarwan

Leica’s U.S. boss says F1 ‘goes at incredible speed’ and photography helps ‘stop the moment.’ Now they’ve made a $10,000 camera together - Catherina Gioino

Can CoreWeave pay its debts? Two analysts say yes.

CoreWeave stock has been a disaster recently after corporate credit investors began selling its debt, pushing the yield on those loans as high as 15%—which, in the private credit markets, is the level you’d expect from a company in distress.

However, a new analysis from Daniel Wang and Stefan Slowinski at BNP Paribas suggests that the debt traders are wrong—CoreWeave can pay its debts, they said in a paper titled “A Deep Dive into the Debt Machine.”

CoreWeave’s “active” contracts can generate $6-7 billion in cash flow to service its existing debt and provide “meaningful coverage” of its $1.7 billion in annual interest payments. That is “a potential path towards repaying ~$26 billion of [the company’s] obligations, even if growth capex comes to a halt,” the pair noted.

In addition, two-thirds of CoreWeave’s $130 billion in remaining performance obligations (i.e., the pipeline of work its customers have contracted for) is already financed. That leaves a shortfall of $30 billion that the debt markets should be able to provide as long as they “remain open” to the company, they said.

“We see greater risk of a prolonged confidence crisis than an outright credit crisis,” they concluded.

• DayOne Said to Weigh Options for US IPO After Data Center Rout - Bloomberg
• Australian AI data centre operator NextDC shares shed 42% on revenue delay, future plans on hold - Reuters
• Nscale boss seeks to reassure staff amid AI market fears - FT

THE MARKETS

Tech futures rise in premarket trading as SpaceX stock rockets overnight

Traders woke up in a cheerful mood today, shaking off the riots in France and the rising price of oil. Asia was mixed but the European indexes rose in early trading. U.S. futures were up before the open in New York. Nasdaq futures were up 0.43% after SpaceX reported Q3 earnings that solidly beat analysts’ expectations. Both of Elon Musk’s companies rose in overnight trading. SpaceX was up 8.86% post-market, and Tesla rose 1.42%. 

• S&P 500 futures were up 0.24% this morning. The index rose 0.28% yesterday. 
• In Europe, the Stoxx 600 rose 0.54% in early trading, and the U.K.’s FTSE 100 rose marginally by 0.03% before lunch.
• Asia: South Korea’s KOSPI was up 3.29%. Japan’s Nikkei 225 was up 0.85%. India’s Nifty 50 was down 0.66%. China’s CSI 300 was down 0.97%.
• Brent crude was $110 per barrel.
• Bitcoin was at $83,346.

Read more here: Wells Fargo “buy” signal sees retail traders going against the bears.

CHART OF THE DAY

Why the price of oil is still high even though supplies are back at pre-war levels

Travel through the Strait of Hormuz is still heavily restricted by Iran, but as the chart on the left shows, oil supplies from the region are back at roughly their pre-war highs. The only difference is that operators are using a wider variety of routes out of the area than they were before.

So why is oil still high? Because Ukraine’s bombardment of Russian oil and diesel refineries has taken out a huge chunk of global supply. “Combined net exports from the country and the Middle East [fell] by 1.3 million barrels per day in September, down more than 60% year on year,” according to Alpine Macro’s Kelly Xu.

NUMBER OF THE DAY 

91.7%

The percentage of Nvidia’s 2027 revenues that are exposed to capex spending in the AI industry, as estimated by Morgan Stanley. It is the most exposed of all the tech companies that generate sales from AI customers.

THE FRONT PAGES TODAY

Benjamin Netanyahu pushes to resume strikes against Iran - FT

Cyber agency warns websites may go dark as PHP prepares critical fix - Reuters

SpaceX up 10% in premarket after earnings beat and Musk hints at Tesla tie-up - CNBC

Witkoff to present Putin with peace proposal after talks with Zelensky - Axios

French supermarket giant’s shares plunge 14% after warning ‘unprecedented’ unrest will hit business - CNBC

Musk Ordered Starlink Slowdown That Blindsided Ukraine - WSJ

Ken Griffin Says AI ‘Almost Certainly’ in a Bubble Right Now - Bloomberg

A ‘Doom Loop’ Threatens France as Populism Confronts Markets - NYT

ONE MORE THING

Strangers are paying up to $150 for empty seats at weddings

Jeff and Karina Besen have a standing date night every week. After 19 years of marriage, they ran out of things to do. “One day, Jeff literally looked at me and said, ‘Hey, wouldn’t it be fun if we could get dressed up and go to a wedding?’” Karina told Fortune.

So the two wondered if there was a place where they could connect with couples having a wedding in their area who needed a seat-filler. Nothing like it existed. So, the San Diego couple built it themselves.

Not a Wedding Crasher lets couples share unused wedding seats with verified guests, who pay a fee to attend the ceremony and reception. And it’s solving a common problem: Jeff said an estimated 10% to 20% of invited guests RSVP no or drop out.

“You may have to pay for 100 seats, and you can only get 75 people,” he said. And those empty chairs are costly: The average cost per wedding guest is $292.

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