Bending Spoons Buys Airtable, OpenAI Hits Back at Apple Over Lawsuit, Spider-Man Ads in BMWs | Diet TBPN
5 Aug 2026 · 31 min
In this episode of Diet TBPN, host Jordi Hays and guests dissect several breaking tech stories. They begin with Bending Spoons’ $2.7 × ARR acquisition of Airtable, unpacking the deal’s financial mechanics, the broader SaaS‑bust environment, and the strategic spin‑out of Airtable’s HyperAgent AI unit. The conversation shifts to the evolving SaaS valuation landscape, comparing today’s “SaaSpocalypse” to the earlier D2C e‑commerce hype, and emphasizing gross retention as a key value driver. The panel then reviews Snap’s Q2 results, highlighting 19 % revenue growth, rising operating leverage, and the emergence of a high‑margin subscription line, while debating the commercial viability of Snap’s $2,200 “Specs” AR glasses. The discussion moves to Apple’s lawsuit against OpenAI, summarizing the accusations, procedural mishaps, and broader implications for AI governance. A separate controversy is examined: BMW’s optional Spider‑Man startup banner, sparking debate over luxury branding and in‑car advertising. Finally, the episode covers SpaceX’s latest earnings, noting record revenue driven by Starlink, AI services, and a growing launch segment, as well as a new partnership with NVIDIA for space‑based AI compute. Throughout, the hosts intersperse humor, personal anecdotes, and speculation about future business models, including ad‑funded autonomous vehicles and prediction markets for tech outcomes.
Chapters
Big deal. The big one that's tearing up the timeline right now is that Airtable, founded in 2012 and once valued at $11.7 billion, is getting acquired by Bending Spoons, founded in 2013, at 2.7 times ARR. Uh, once hot startup, now an unfortunate victim of the SaaS bust, says D.D. Doss. Uh, it raised $1.4 billion, only to be sold for $1.285 billion enterprise value, because they had almost $1 billion in cash on the balance sheet. And so the total equity value was $2.25 billion equity value, just clearing the preference stack. So early employees, founders probably got something. Later investors probably got 1x their money back, but probably probably had it tied up for a few years. So not a good outcome, but there's some interesting silver linings here. Obviously, it's good for— could be good for Bending Spoons if they got a good deal and they turn it into a mammoth cash machine. Also, there's some nuance to where different pieces of the business are going, because they're sort of dividing it up.
Really sort of exemplifies the current moment where a company can sell for over $1 billion and everyone's like, wow, that's unfortunate. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And a wake-up call to the many maybe younger companies that are at lower revenue run rates that are raising at much higher valuations and basically signaling to them, like, you've got some many, many years of compounding to do.
Yeah, it's interesting. There's a SaaSpocalypse narrative, which is like, these companies are going away, software won't exist, you'll just prompt it. And I think there's a lot more nuance to it than that. But one thing that it does feel like the underwriting, the financial trajectory of these single point solution SaaS products, single player, somewhat sticky, maybe not that sticky, maybe replaceable,— it's not that they're going to zero. Bending Spoons wouldn't be buying it if everyone was churning and it was going to be a zero. But at the same time, you can't underwrite it.
It's growing 20%.
Yeah, yeah. But you can't underwrite it at 40x revenue, 100x revenue anymore. And it feels a little bit like what happened with D2C e-commerce, honestly. There was a moment where e-commerce brands were venture-backable, and you could underwrite them— or they were being underwritten similarly to venture startups that had true moats, true compounding advantages. They would get the same multiple as a SpaceX or an AI company or a social media company. And that never really made sense. It was sort of just a weird quirk in the system for a couple of years. And then go forward a few years when there were some pullbacks, some of the IPOs went out, they didn't do that well. They traded down and all of a sudden it was like, okay, well, if we're doing, if we're doing, you know, in my case, like food on the internet and we're gonna VC back a food company, like has Nestlé been disrupted? Like, no. And that would, or Unilever, is Unilever trading down like crazy because they're facing so much pressure? And that's usually what happens when there truly is disruptive innovation. Like you see this with, I saw some crazy post about how people were bearish on Starlink. For a while and the company that they were competing with just went bankrupt. And you see this with social media came out and yes, like the newspaper and the internet, actually the newspaper stocks did actually trade down. That never happened in e-commerce, D2C e-commerce, any of that. And we're now in this new regime. So I think that there's actually a pretty safe path if you just build the business. If you're saying, look, I am in this SaaS, industry, it is going to be more competitive going forward, but I'm setting myself up to have a reasonable multiple so that at every point, if I'm trading at 3 times ARR, I'm happy because the cap table is set up for that, right?
Yeah, one thing I will say is I started using Airtable— it was 2015, right? So I probably started using it a few years in, but the product, the way that I used the product back then for my first business,, I would 100% just VibeCode a solution today.
Sure.
Because I was using like very basic dashboard functionality.
Yep.
I wanted dashboards that we could use internally. Yep. Share externally. Mm-hmm. Now it'd be very quite easy to just do all of that, uh, in Codex or your favorite agent.
Sure.
So I do think that business is very much under threat over the long run, but still has sort of compounding, uh, that it can do just given how deep it is into the Fortune 500 and some— Yep. And the long tail of small businesses.
I'd be very interested to know what is new user, new logo growth like versus just expansion within an organization. Because if you have some company that's already sort of running on Airtable, they're growing, so they're adding seats, they're adding functionality because they're sort of bought in and they're not going to rip it out. What does that growth rate look like versus new companies actually going and signing up and saying, like, Yes, this is the best tool for the job because you do get a lot built for free up and like it's not like they don't have access to AI agents that can improve their systems. Like you might be doing a lot of maintenance on your vibe-coded solution, but at the same time, a lot of people, especially in smaller organizations, were using this as like just one small dashboarding tool, one small database that is sort of replicable. So interesting to see where it goes. And yeah, just like an interesting data point in the SaaS-pocalypse, late-stage growth, —like, is it a zombie corn? What term are you using for it? Jared Sleeper has some more thoughts. $480 million ARR growing 20%. It's a unicorn exit. Many very satisfied customers, including Jared Sleeper, for years. Fantastic run. Never underestimate how much VCs love products that make, quote, "everyone a builder." The wrinkle is that one-player products are high churn. Was Airtable—I feel like the whole pitch for Airtable was that it was multiplayer, but Maybe that wasn't the way that people were actually using it that often. A lot of people would just be like, oh, yeah, that guy on the team is using Airtable for that thing. But I mean, certainly from very early on, the pitch was—
I think by one player, he means that you can— it's more like product-led, like one person at a company. Because I've only used it in a team capacity, right? But one player can sign up, start using it, invite other people to the team. Yeah. But it's—
It's an advantage because you're bottom-up, you can just ramp into a different company so quickly. But at the same time, if you're not like going through the CFO and being like, there is a mandate that we're using the ERP system. Selling 200 seats at once. Exactly. Yeah, it is a little different. 3, his third point, gross retention remains the single greatest predictive variable of terminal value for any business that doesn't have a scale effect or network effect. It dictates somewhat mathematically what folks like Bending Spoons will pay. Great to see employees get liquid, but perhaps Sad that some are learning about liquidation preferences, SaaS multiples to their disappointment. So of course, if you had mentally marked your stock at $11 billion, but then this deal happens, the investors that put in that money at $11 billion, they're going to get their money back first, and then you're going to have to fight for whatever's left over, the scraps. Silicon Valley can do a better job talking to employees about what stock is worth in various scenarios, but no one is incentivized to do it. Well, I mean, you can also just look it up. There's a whole bunch of blog posts about it. You can ask ChatGPT and get a whole deep dive on, run this whole scenario and play out every possible option. But yes, I agree. No one likes to, you know, oh, we're closing a big candidate. Let's tell them about what's going to happen if Bending Spoons comes in and destroys—
let's tell them what happens if we get our spoon bent.
Bending Spoons is emerging as the constellation software of the prosumer, high churn, higher churn SaaS— is a fascinating turn of events and a good thing for pref stacks everywhere just because there's more liquidity for systems?
Well, it's a buyer of last resort. Yeah, whereas— Like no founder setting out, hey, I want to be, you know, go on this generational run and then get my spoon bent. But it's still great because it allows, again, it is real liquidity. Yeah. This is a win. I think bending spoons, bending spoons will obviously end up, I would say, like right-sizing the company. They're not gonna continue to run it the same way that it's been run. But at least it allows everyone to get out and go on to do new things. Yeah.
In an interesting twist, speaking of getting out, Shiel Monat shares this about the Airtable acquisition. They spun out their AI business, HyperAgent, prior to the acquisition. So the company lives on and likely some cash with it, probably can be recapitalized. Seems like a fantastic outcome. Shed the old business and focus on AI. So I would be very interested to see who is going to be working at Hyperagent. Is this something where the founders didn't want to exit the business entirely and then just start from scratch? They wanted to take a whole bunch of the team with them and they wanted a bunch of the resources and learnings. And so they were able to package everything up and this will be something that's very founder-led. Or was this just Okay, that is a more expensive piece of the business. Bending Spoons, it's earlier in its ramp. Maybe it's working, maybe it's not, but that's not the business that's Bending Spoons in. And so this is more like a Bending Spoons-driven—
Well, Bending Spoons, look, we've had both founders on the show. Bending Spoons is like, hey, let's take a great product and just basically right-size the team, run it efficiently, and we're not trying to get growth back to 200%, 300% a year. Howie's been on the show. He talked a bit about HyperAgent. That's a product that, if they execute well, can grow 10x year over year, right? And so I could imagine, again, leaving some of the team to just continue running Airtable indefinitely, and then, again, like you said, taking some of the talent out and saying, like, let's take another big swing.
Liquidity is laughing about the fact that Bending Spoons has a very soft, friendly brand. Bending Spoons branding, very— very simple, and it just sounds like such a simple name. It's not like Cerberus Capital. And yet when they negotiate, they're presumably difficult to negotiate with. I don't know. I mean, in a certain situation you can be very friendly and amicable and just sort of say like, yeah, we're a buyer at 2.7 ARR. You know, we're not going to like screw you over here. We're just going to give you— this is a fair price. Take it or leave it. And you can take it. You don't necessarily need to be this like crazy werewolf of like a shark, you know?
Yeah, there's just not that many buyers for a company like Airtable. Yeah, and it's a— just sort of in this economy, a slow-growing enterprise software business, right? There are not that many buyers. If Airtable had wanted to sell in 2020, I'm sure they would have gotten meaningfully more. They probably did have offers at different points. You could imagine Airtable ending up at a Salesforce, as an example. But now Luca is— saying the buyer of last resort is like maybe unfair.
Yeah, just like a value-based buyer. Yeah. I don't know. Yeah. Snap earnings happened, and Evan Spiegel was on CNBC talking to Sorkin. And it's a very interesting storyline because people are obsessed with the SPACs. I mean, job completed in terms of like getting more attention for the company.— but it's been sort of a weight around the company because the question is like, okay, is, is everyone going to be buying $2,200 smart glasses from you anytime soon? When that's not really the story. The story is actually like the revenue growth, the profit, the operating leverage that's coming back into the business. So, I mean, overall it was a good quarter for Snap, clear beat. Revenue was up 19% year over year with profitability and cash generation rising even faster. So that's that operating leverage. They're growing revenue faster than their growing costs. And so they're increasing their margins. Advertising revenue grew 9% to $1.3 billion in the quarter. But the really interesting number that was surprising to me was they're making $316 million a quarter in subscriptions and paid services, up 85%. So just subscribing and being a paid— power user. It's only 3% of the user base, something like that. That's, that's now a billion-dollar line of business, obviously very high margin, uh, working really plays to the strengths of what Snap offers. Um, and usage is up globally, but they're losing a step in Western markets. So, uh, the North America, I think, fell 7% and Europe fell 2%. And so that's not great for long-term ad monetization because 'cause you wanna be in the richer countries generally, but still revenue is accelerating. They are monetizing better. And that's probably an AI story. It's just like a boring AI story because it's like the ad recommendation system got a little bit better. Nobody really cares. People wanna focus on specs, but they're $2,200 and they're bulkier than competing smart glasses.
Well, it felt like in that interview, Spiegel was talking about specs, but he wasn't wearing them.
Yeah, does he need to wear them?
I think he kind of needs to wear them all the time. Gotta wear 'em.
I mean, you're going to hold Apple to that? Tim Cook's got to wear Vision Pro everywhere he goes? That'd be hilarious.
No, but the Vision Pro is not meant to be—
Augmented reality. It's augmented reality. It's meant to be worn 24/7 if you're a serious person. Let's actually pull up here.
You should do a full show if you love Apple Vision Pro so much.
I could. Not be a problem.
Do the full show. OK. Do the full show this Friday.
Book it. We'll test run it with Tyler. So here's an interesting tidbit. Specs, it feels like, oh my God, they're spending so much money. It's like so crazy. I think the rough estimate is like $300 million a year, which is a lot, but it's only 5% of their cost. It's like 20% of their overall R&D budget, maybe something like that. These are very rough numbers, but it's not like if they just spun out specs or cut specs and they were just like, we're not doing anything there. All of a sudden the business is like wildly profitable. It's not that big of a stone around the neck. It's more just like a distraction, a question. And it's also not great that on the earnings call they asked, how many pre-orders have you sold? And he sort of danced around it and didn't really give a straight answer on that. Because if it was good, you'd probably be like, yeah, we sold a lot of these things. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, let's play a little bit of Evan Spiegel on CNBC.
I want to hear him snap reporting Q2 results after the bell on Monday. They scored an earnings beat with $1.6 billion in revenue. It's 19% higher than just one year ago. And joining us right now for more, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel. He did not bring his glasses on the set, but we're going to talk about those glasses in just a minute because I think that's been a big part of the story. But you beat across the board, not just, by the way, on the revenue piece, but on the margin piece, which is what I think the market was actually looking for.
Yeah, well, first of all, thanks so much for having me on, Andrew. It's such a beautiful morning here in Aspen. It was a great quarter for Snap. And I think what folks are seeing is that the free cash flow in the business is really starting to inflect, which is allowing us to offset dilution, to strengthen our balance sheet, and of course, to continue investing in the future, which is so important to us. Okay.
Let's look forward to the future. 2:30 pieces of that story.
I mentioned glasses. We'll get there in a second. I think glasses— I want to hear him talk about glasses. About $2,200 right now. $2,100 is what they're going to come in at. $1,995. Okay. So The question I keep thinking about is under how quickly those can come to market in a way, at a, in a way and at a price point that people buy them, you know, en masse. And how do you think about the competition coming from whatever you think Apple is ultimately going to create, whatever you think Google is working on, and whatever you think Meta is going to do next?
Well, we've been working for more than 12 years to reinvent the computer and make it feel overnight. I think people are spending more than 7 hours on average staring at screens. Specs represent the opportunity to bring computing into the world, to make it a shared experience, and ultimately to help, you know, bring all the productivity gains we saw in desktop computing and laptop computing to the real world and to real-world jobs, which is the vast majority of jobs, about 60% of jobs. So I think this computing transformation is incredibly exciting. We're certainly the leader in the space. I think specs represent a totally new category, right? If you look at the landscape today, You have very bulky but capable headsets and then you have very limited but lightweight glasses and specs represent, you know, the capability of some of these VR headsets. And in terms of the immersiveness and the ability to really have a full workstation experience, but with the wearability of some of these lighter weight glasses.
But do you say to yourself, Apple's going to come and do the same thing and Meta is going to go? I mean, so how do you think about that given the cost of putting this all out there and the amount of money that some of these big companies can actually throw at this?
Yeah, well, I think, you know, as we look at the history of innovation, I actually think one of the things that helps power innovation are constraints. Right. And one of the things that makes Snap so unique is that we've been so laser focused on specs for such a long period of time. So I think this focus, our history of innovation, you know, and our first mover advantage in this space—
like it should be a different company. If you want to be laser focused, it feels like the benefit would be like Do the Elon thing, start a separate company that is laser-focused on it. The investors in that company are laser-focused on that.
The employees— Yeah, have a distribution deal with Snap.
Yeah, you know, like, like, just, just have this, like, you know, get— we're good in this video— just get Snap to a really polished, oiled machine. You own all the equity, you, you have the founder control, it's your your financial backstop, your credibility to actually go and truly laser focus because it's weird to be laser focused on a thing that's not your core business. And then everyone's just constantly asking you like, we'd love for you to laser focus on the main business that's making billions of dollars every year.
Seems pretty solid.
Yeah, it's like making $6 billion. Well, what do you think, Tyler?
Yeah, I mean, earlier this year they did spend spin off the AI video company. That seems much more related to the main Snapchat app than the glasses, right?
What is the AI video company? I think it's called Dotmo.
It was like their internal generative video team. Interesting. He was talking about enterprise use cases for the glasses. I mean— Like workplace use cases. It's so hard to imagine. As an independent company, you make a really great device. I can imagine that company having its own go-to-market motion saying, hey, Amazon, yeah, we want you to use, you know, our devices across your workforce and maybe they do a pilot. Yeah, but trying to sell in like Snapchat glasses into the enterprise. Yeah.
Feels like just going to be a tough sell. OpenAI is firing back at Apple a little, little glazy though. They say Apple is one of the greatest companies of all time. What a funny way to kick off a blog post. Firing back in a lawsuit. Apple just cooked OpenAI.
Just— well, they say— and built a reputation for obsessing over the smallest details. True. And then they go on to say, yeah, maybe there were some details that were missed.
Yes. So what were the key things that they said? They accused— Apple accused OpenAI of ignoring them. Turns out the lawyers emailed the wrong Asian guy because two Asian last names look similar. They claimed you discussed the allegations with OpenAI's general counsel that they admitted that that conversation never happened, accused an ex-employee of improperly accessing files. They forgot to mention Apple employees were allegedly asking him to access those same files after he left. So there seemed to be some scenario where like the guy had left, but he had so much internal knowledge that someone at Apple was just like, hey, like, can you remind me where this thing is or something?
Yeah. When Reading through the initial complaint, Apple made it seem like the employee or the former employee was just running wild through his old laptop. Yep. He had sent a message to someone at Apple saying something to the effect, I'm paraphrasing, but I still have access to my computer, LOL. But the reason that in the text messages that they shared, you can imagine the reason that he was there and sending that message Why would he send the message if he was doing something that was wrong or that he would feel guilty of, right? He was helping his former teammates. Weird. And they say, there's 10 other people I could ask you, but you're the smartest or something like that. Yeah. And so when you have all this context, the story looks quite a lot different.
Yeah. They're sharing a lot of text messages. You can go read the blog post, but there's like full back and forth iMessages between Chang Liu and Apple employees were Chang, whose last day at Apple was January 22nd, 2026, is being asked by his former colleagues to help them locate files and information to assist them with their Apple work. Note other individual names and Apple confidential information has been redacted. So certainly another, another wild—
Yeah, I'm still, I'm still just very surprised that, that Apple during the middle of a, you know, a year-long talent raid would know that someone significant had quit and that would not go through the process of actually taking back their laptop and making sure that, you know, the separation was really finalized. People have been saying stories how historically, you know, maybe call it 15 years ago, if you quit Apple, someone would show up to your house immediately and take back any prototypes that you may have had or anything, anything of the sort.
Yeah. I'm excited for prediction markets to get on this. Honestly, it was very helpful during the, the Elon Musk OpenAI case. Currently, Kalshi has a few here. Will the OpenAI Johnny Ive device have a screen? No is at 82%. When will OpenAI release Astra? And there's some dates here. What else are they? Will OpenAI increase the cost of ChatGPT? No, at 87%. No market on the Apple lawsuit because it's still very early. There's not even like a court date yet, but we'll keep tracking it because it's an interesting story. Is BMW forcing owners to watch a Spider-Man: Brand New Day promo when they start their cars up? That's the question. A lot of people We're upset about this. Jordi Hays this morning is like, this is awful. There's some nuance here. So BMW owners are debating the company's latest in-car promotion after videos spread across X showing a Spider-Man: Brand New Day animation appearing on their vehicle's infotainment screen at startup.
And the reason why this fake news triggered me was back in the day in college, I was getting a Kindle. And on the checkout page, it was like, do you want to save $10 and get the ad-supported Kindle? And as a college student, I was like, hmm, saving $10 sounds pretty nice. And then I had to live with a Kindle that would sit on my bedside table just blaring ads in my face constantly. And it wasn't like I would have actually appreciated ads. Can you just flip it upside down? True. Wow. One simple trick. Jordi Hays's one simple trick. But it wouldn't be ads for like Spider-Man. It would be ads for random books, right? Yeah, books that, uh, and the targeting wasn't good. So again, people don't like ads that target was good. Um, anyways, what happened here, John? Okay.
So venture capitalist Shil Monat wrote, when you start a BMW, it shows you an ad for Spider-Man. Really cheapens the BMW in my opinion. A16Z partner Josh Elman added, of all the brands I thought I might I thought might bombard you with in-car ads on screen right when you start the engine. I had BMW pretty dang low on that list. This seems the opposite of luxury and performance. Is BMW a luxury brand?
They were premium. I— yeah, I think it's a premium brand.
Premium brand. Even Paul Graham weighed in though, reposting Monat's video and saying, I'm never buying a BMW. He's never buying a BMW. What about an old BMW? They can't show you ads in an E39 M3.
Wait, but what, what actually happened? You have to opt into this?
Community notes added important context. According to OneNote, the Spider-Man promotion is an optional startup banner available on compatible BMWs from July 27th through August 10th, 2026. The banner does not automatically play a full-screen ad. Instead, owners must tap in to launch a themed animation featuring music and synchronized vehicle lighting. BMW has offered similar limited-time startup experiences in the past, including holiday-themed animations.
Jordi, very, very, very different. Uh, you can just see the pop-up there. Surprise, Spider-Man just dropped into your BMW.
And that's enough. You press the button, you have to actually turn it on. It's not—
yes, yes, but I'm saying there's a banner ad.
Oh, there is a banner.
It's just a banner. Look at the video, start it over.
Uh, let's see, let's, let's be judge of this.
Look at this banner. It's a banner. Oh, okay. And then you click the banner, then it plays an ad. So it's a pop-up that you click. Okay. And it's like, wait, what is this pop-up? Why does my car have a pop-up?
And then it plays an ad into a setting somewhere. There should be an icon that's like promotions or themes. That didn't look tucked in anywhere.
They're literally saying surprise, a Spider-Man ad. And they're not even like, they should just say Hey, we have an ad for Spider-Man here if you'd like one. Okay, this is right on the line, but this, this is, this is, this crosses my line. This crosses your line because you're like, what does Spider-Man have to do? What does, what does Spider-Man have to do with my car? And then you click it and you get an ad for Spider-Man.
Spider-Man's doing well though, so the ads are working. So, you know, maybe the BMW owner showed up in droves because the new Spider-Man movie scores Hollywood's second biggest debut ever. Ever. That's actually huge. So the Sony film grossed $932 million through Sunday, topped only by 2019's Avengers: Endgame. That is massive. Did you realize that this movie was making that much money?
I mean, if you had asked me an hour ago, is there a new Spider-Man movie coming out? I would say, haven't heard of anything.
Yeah. I haven't seen that much energy about it. I've been aware of it, but I have not— I've not seen like a massive takeover. But also, but I'm not driving an ad supported BMW, so maybe that's the problem. Spider-Man spun a massive weekend for movie theaters, flouting superhero fatigue and giving a major boost to Hollywood's summer block box office. Sony Pictures' Spider-Man: A Brand New Day opened to an estimated— we got some good ideas here in the chat. Yeah. What do we got?
So ad-supported cars that get you free self-driving, where the ads take over the whole entertainment system in the car. So you're sitting there relaxing, you know, the car is driving itself, but then it's just blaring high volume every—
I'll take it a step further.
Every 5 minutes, one 30-second ad.
What if there was a whole company dedicated to building self-driving cars that was funded by an advertising company, like a company that just prints billions, hundreds of billions of dollars in advertising, like their DNA is advertising, and then they go into the self-driving car market. Why has no one done this before? They would have a huge advantage in terms of targeting.
Yeah, why has no one done this before? Yeah.
They could even have a video platform where they're making a lot of money running video ads, and they could take that video platform.
Oh, almost like a YouTube type of thing.
Like a YouTube, yeah, exactly. So you could have like,, you know, a huge ad network, YouTube ads, and then you can have a self-driving car company, put them all together. That's synergy, right?
And maybe you could spin the company out at some point and raise some venture capital to spin the company out.
They secretly still advertising. No, I don't think Waymo will do crazy ads.
I think, I don't know, maybe a major streaming executive just texted a major streaming executive, just texted me. Me and says, okay, going to get to be to build a car right now.
You got to build a car. You got to do it.
SpaceX announces a new partnership with NVIDIA to design its StarMind AI-1 payload, bringing data center class compute into orbit. That makes a lot of sense.
Let's find some actual numbers. So revenue was $7.81 billion versus $6.93 billion expected. Loss per share was $0.09. Average analyst estimated a loss of $0.26. Revenue jumped 92% from $4.1 billion a year earlier. So huge. You know, you're even at this scale still doubling the revenue. And it's the first time Elon Musk's reusable rocket maker will face Wall Street in this capacity, and investors are jittery. SpaceX stock has dropped, uh, 16% since opening at $150 a share on June 12th. And, uh, SpaceX lost $4.9 billion last year, largely due to heavy investments in artificial intelligence, which we've discussed. Uh, the company merged with Musk's XAI in February. CNBC reports saying that, uh, at the time, the vision was to build data centers in space, but the launch business, which accounts, uh, on large contracts from NASA is losing money. Most of SpaceX revenue for the year and its only source of profit came from its connectivity segment, which consists of its Starlink internet service. Starlink is sold directly to consumers. So here's how SpaceX performed in the three key segments. For space, they brought in $962 million versus $835 million, which was expected. So they beat in space. On connectivity, they brought in $4.29 billion. So the Starlink business is 4— more than 4 times the size of the actual launch business. They brought in $4.29 billion versus $3.83 billion that was expected. So they beat there. And on AI, they brought in $2.56 billion versus $2.18 billion expected. So beats across the board. And very interesting to see that the thing that they started doing, space, of course, launching rockets, is now their third largest line of business. Connectivity is of course bigger and also AI is bigger. Everything is computer, John. Everything is computer. That is a good summation of it.
And that's a good place to end our show.
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