AI | April was the densest model release month in AI history. Anthropic fired the opening shot on April 7 with the announcement of Claude Mythos Preview. Mythos Preview is Anthropic's most advanced AI model, with significant improvements in reasoning, coding, and cybersecurity, but unlike previous releases, it will not be publicly available. Access is limited to a consortium of tech companies through Project Glasswing. The jump in model performance is massive. Where Opus 4.6 turned vulnerabilities it found in Mozilla's Firefox 147 JavaScript engine into working exploits only twice out of several hundred attempts, Mythos Preview succeeded 181 times. Anthropic committed $100M in usage credits and brought in AWS, Apple, Cisco, CrowdStrike, Google, JPMorgan Chase, the Linux Foundation, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and Palo Alto Networks as founding partners. Anthropic publicly conceded that its new Opus 4.7 model does not match the performance of Mythos, the highly advanced system the company hasn't released publicly due to safety concerns. OpenAI, however, didn't wait long to fire back with its own release. GPT-5.5 dropped on April 23, less than six weeks after GPT-5.4, described as the company's smartest and most intuitive model yet. OpenAI announced that they have 4 million active Codex users, 9 million paying business users, and over 900 million weekly active users. OpenAI is undercutting the narrative that it has lost traction among consumers and fallen behind Anthropic in the race for enterprise customers. On benchmarks, GPT-5.5 Pro scored 39.6% on FrontierMath Tier 4, postdoctoral-level math problems that can take a human expert days to solve, nearly double Claude Opus 4.7's 22.9%. With the model arms race is heating up, will OpenAI exercise a similar level of restraint as Anthropic?

IPO WATCH | SpaceX submitted its confidential draft registration statement to the SEC on April 1, targeting a June Nasdaq listing at a $1.75 trillion valuation and a $75 billion raise. If it lands, it would be the largest IPO in history by a wide margin, dwarfing Saudi Aramco's $29.4 billion raise in 2019. The valuation case rests on Starlink's 10 million global subscribers and $10 billion in 2025 revenue, the February xAI merger that added an AI infrastructure thesis on top of launch and satellite, and a reported 30% retail allocation with demand running 10 to 20x oversubscribed. Additionally, Cerebras filed its public S-1 on April 17th, with a May IPO expected that may surpass a $35 billion market cap, making it the first major AI hardware company to test the public markets. And OpenAI is preparing for a near-$1 trillion listing in Q4 2026. Three historic offerings potentially in a twelve-month window. A $75 billion mega-listing will absorb most of the institutional allocation capacity earmarked for the rest of 2026, and what happens to the 20 mid-cap deals lined up behind SpaceX depends entirely on its debut. A successful landing opens a 60 to 90 day window for the rest, but a flat or botched debut could shut down the IPO pipeline until Q4.

ECONOMY | The Supreme Court's February ruling striking down the IEEPA tariffs continued to reverberate, with the Trump Administration beginning to refund $166 billion in tariffs, money collected without legal authority and now owed back with interest. Estimates suggest total liability could reach $200 billion by 2029, meaning the administration's signature economic policy will ultimately cost more than it raised. Businesses have already begun filing for refunds. The IMF's April World Economic Outlook, titled "Global Economy in the Shadow of War," projects global growth slowing to 3.1 percent in 2026, citing the Middle East conflict, rising commodity prices, and tighter financial conditions as the primary headwinds. The Fed remains boxed in, with core PCE running at 3.1% and no room to cut without risking a re-acceleration. Payroll growth slowed further in March as firms reported greater reluctance to hire amid heightened geopolitical uncertainty. The bull case rests on AI-driven productivity gains materializing fast enough to offset the energy and trade shocks, a bet that is increasingly central to how Wall Street is pricing everything. The bear case is that the traditional stabilizers, Fed rate cuts and fiscal stimulus, have almost no room to operate with inflation still sticky and the national debt sitting at $39 trillion.

THE END OF AN ERA | Apple announced that Tim Cook will become executive chairman of Apple's board of directors, and John Ternus, senior vice president of Hardware Engineering, will become Apple's next CEO effective September 1, 2026. It's the first CEO transition for Apple since Cook succeeded Steve Jobs in 2011, shortly before Jobs' death. Ternus will become Apple's eighth CEO. Cook will stay on through the summer to work closely with Ternus before moving to the role of executive chairman, where he will continue to engage with policymakers globally. Cook's run as CEO has been one of the most consequential in history. He 15x'd Apple's market cap, scaled revenue to over $100 billion a year, and navigated Apple through a global supply chain crisis, a pandemic, and the transition to Apple Silicon. Ternus is a hardware-first operator who joined Apple in 2001 and has spent his entire career there, rising to lead the teams responsible for the iPhone, the M-series chips, and the Vision Pro. The question is whether a hardware-first CEO can navigate the current AI environment when the company has deliberately invested less than its peers in AI-related capital expenditures. Apple's AI strategy, anchored in a Gemini-powered Siri that has yet to land convincingly with consumers, remains the least defined among major tech companies. Can Ternus lead Apple through the AI chaos?

MUSK v. ALTMAN | Elon Musk took the stand in Oakland federal court on April 28 in the trial over his lawsuit against OpenAI, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and Microsoft, a case that could upend the company that kicked off the AI arms race. Musk's argument is that he funded OpenAI as a nonprofit, funding at least $44 million in its early years, with the explicit understanding that it would never become a for-profit company. OpenAI's argument is that Musk knew about and supported the for-profit plans until he lost an internal power struggle in 2018, walked away, started xAI, and is now suing because his feelings are hurt. On the stand, Musk called himself a fool for funding the company and conceded under cross-examination that he had likely called OpenAI employees a "jackass" on more than one occasion. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers had to threaten a gag order on day one after Musk posted to X, calling Altman "Scam Altman" and Brockman "Greg Stockman," who had "stolen a charity. Full stop." The trial is expected to run roughly four weeks, with Altman still to take the stand. If Musk wins, he could oust Altman from OpenAI's board and derail the company's planned IPO. Things may be trending that way after Brockman’s private diary was revealed to the court.

WE’RE GOING BACK | On April 1, 2026, Artemis II launched on a nearly 10-day voyage around the Moon, marking the first crewed flight of NASA's Orion spacecraft and the first crewed mission beyond low Earth orbit since Apollo 17 in December 1972. Fifty-four years. The four-person crew, NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch, along with Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen, splashed down on April 10 in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Diego after traveling 694,481 miles. At their farthest point, the crew reached 252,756 miles from Earth, setting a new record for the greatest distance humans have ever traveled in space, 4,111 miles farther than Apollo 13 in 1970. During the April 6 lunar flyby, the crew passed through a solar eclipse as Orion, the Moon, and the Sun aligned, and watched an Earthrise as the spacecraft emerged from behind the Moon. NASA is now preparing for the Artemis III mission in 2027, which will target a crewed lunar surface landing.

CODING WARS | The AI coding tool landscape reshuffled completely this month. SpaceX struck a deal with Cursor, giving SpaceX the option to purchase the startup later this year for $60 billion, or pay $10 billion for their work together, pairing Cursor's product and distribution with SpaceX's million H100-equivalent Colossus training supercomputer. Cursor had been on track to close a $2 billion funding round this week with Andreessen Horowitz set to co-lead, but chose to halt discussions after SpaceX swooped in. That's a 30x premium over what Cursor was about to raise at. SpaceX wants to position itself as an AI company ahead of its June listing, and acquiring the category leader in developer tooling is the fastest way to attach an AI multiple to what is otherwise a space and satellite business. However, neither Cursor nor xAI has proprietary models that can match Anthropic or OpenAI. Cursor still routes traffic through Claude and GPT, an increasingly uncomfortable arrangement as Claude Code and Codex roll out their own competing products.

No Defaults 🎯

A costume called conviction 🦸‍♂️

Wizard’s First Rule: Unlocking Latent Belief 🧙‍♂️

Call the Plumber; We’ve Got a Leaky Abstraction 🪠

Possible: Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings [1 hr]

Workday’s Last Workday? [0.5 hr]

The Collison Brothers LIVE on TBPN [1.5 hr]

We hosted 600+ people across 15 states at Missouri Startup Weekend and deployed $130k in investments

Fireside chats at the residency

Joining the Gr8er Plains Summit in Omaha

Troy-based Slate Auto closed a $650M Series C

Grapple wrapped a $1M Seed, based in Omaha

SCATR, an Ohio-based company, closed a $13M Series A

Las Vegas-based Neato raised a $25M Series A

Fargo-based Lilac Agriculture raised a $1.7M Seed

Chicago-based startups closed a few rounds this month

Across Texas

Minnesota-based Onsetto wrapped a $9M Seed