💼 AI Is Now The Number One Reason Companies Give For Layoffs. That Doesn't Mean AI Is Doing The Jobs

TLDR; The tech industry has cut more than 123,000 jobs this year, with AI now overtaking economic uncertainty as the most cited reason for layoffs. But while AI is getting the blame, the bigger risk may be what happens to the next generation of talent. 👀

New data shows AI was linked to nearly 88,000 job cuts in 2026, accounting for around 40% of all announced layoffs in May alone.

At the same time, tech firms are spending hundreds of billions on AI models, chips and data centres as they race to convince investors they're ready for the AI era. 🤖

The narrative is becoming familiar:

➡️ Cut jobs

➡️ Invest in AI

➡️ Tell investors the two are connected

So Is AI Actually Taking Jobs?

Maybe. But not at the scale the headlines suggest.

What's clearer is that companies are under pressure to prove their AI investments are delivering efficiency gains. Telling investors you've cut headcount because of AI is a much easier story than proving AI can genuinely replace entire teams.

The bigger shift appears to be fewer graduate, junior and entry-level roles as companies use AI to absorb tasks that once served as training grounds for future talent.

Ironically, AI may not be replacing experienced workers first.

It may be replacing the opportunities that helped people become experienced workers in the first place. 🎓

So What? 🇬🇧

The real risk isn't AI replacing everyone.

It's that companies stop hiring and developing the next generation before new opportunities emerge.

For an industry already struggling with diversity, access and representation, the first jobs to disappear may be the very ones that helped underrepresented talent get through the door.

Every generation of technology promises to create new jobs.

The challenge isn't whether AI will create them.

It's whether companies are willing to keep hiring people before those jobs arrive. 🤔

📚 Read More

🤖 Forbes: Tech industry loses 123,000 jobs this year, with AI now the most cited reason for layoffs

https://www.forbes.com/sites/maryroeloffs/2026/06/04/tech-industry-loses-123000-jobs-this-year-ai-is-the-most-cited-reason-for-layoffs/

📊 BBC: What AI is actually doing to jobs and why economists aren't convinced we're seeing mass replacement yet

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cnvpn253re4o

💰 Black Founders Are Having Their Best Funding Year Since 2022. Don't Celebrate Just Yet.

TLDR: Black founders have raised $643m so far this year — nearly 70% of everything they raised in 2025. Sounds like progress. The catch? More than half of that came from a single company. 👀

According to new Crunchbase data, Black founders in the US have raised $643m in venture funding so far in 2026 — the highest quarterly total since 2022.

That's already close to the $942m raised during the entirety of last year. 📈

On paper, that looks like a comeback story.

The reality is more complicated.

More than half of the funding came from just 34 deals, led by AI infrastructure company SambaNova's $350m raise. A handful of other large rounds, including sports prediction startup Noviq and AI insurance platform Harper, account for much of the remaining growth.

In other words:

The numbers are up. The distribution isn't.

One of venture capital's favourite tricks is making concentration look like progress.

If one founder raises $350m, the statistics look fantastic.

If hundreds of founders can't get a first cheque, the statistics still look fantastic.

That's the problem with celebrating aggregate numbers.

The question isn't whether Black founders can raise venture capital.

We already know they can.💁🏽‍♀️

The question is whether Black founders can consistently access the networks, introductions and relationships that unlock venture funding at scale.

And according to Crunchbase, those barriers remain stubbornly intact.

There's another trend hiding underneath the data.

The venture market is becoming increasingly obsessed with AI.

That's great if you're building AI infrastructure.

Less great if you're building almost anything else.

As capital becomes concentrated around a small number of AI companies, investors are becoming more conservative elsewhere. The result is a classic "winner takes most" market where a handful of companies attract enormous rounds while everyone else fights over what's left. ⚡

Historically, founders from underrepresented backgrounds have struggled most in exactly these kinds of environments because access to capital often depends on warm introductions, existing networks and pattern matching.

Three things the venture industry has never been particularly famous for diversifying.

🇬🇧 So What?

The good news is that Black founders are raising larger rounds again.

The bad news is that we're still talking about $643m out of a market that has seen more than $250bn invested overall.

That's progress.

But it's not transformation.

The risk is that investors point to a handful of breakout successes and declare victory while the underlying structural barriers remain exactly where they've always been.

Because representation isn't measured by whether one founder raises $350m.

It's measured by whether the next 350 founders get a shot too. 🚀

📚 Read More

💰 TechCrunch: Black founders raise highest amount of quarterly funding since 2022 — but there's a catch

https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/31/black-founders-raise-highest-amount-of-quarterly-funding-since-2022-but-theres-a-catch/

🚀 The Trillion Dollar Moonshot

TLDR:

SpaceX has completed the largest IPO in history, raising $75bn and briefly pushing Elon Musk past the $1 trillion personal wealth mark. Days later, it spent another $60bn acquiring AI coding startup Cursor.

But beneath the celebrations sits a much bigger question:

Are investors buying a rocket company, an AI company, a telecoms company, or simply a story about the future? 🤔

Because right now, some of the world's most valuable companies are being valued not on what they do today, but on what they might one day become.

SpaceX debuted on the Nasdaq in the largest IPO ever seen.

📈 Raised $75bn

📈 Debuted at a valuation above $2tn

📈 Shares surged almost 20% on day one

📈 Made Elon Musk the world's first trillionaire

Then, before investors had even finished celebrating, SpaceX announced a $60bn acquisition of Cursor, one of the fastest-growing AI coding startups in the world.

The rationale?

Combine Cursor's AI coding tools with SpaceX's vast computing infrastructure and AI ambitions to build what Musk describes as some of the world's most powerful AI systems.

In less than a week, SpaceX went from being "the rocket company" to becoming one of the biggest players in the AI race. 🚀🤖

At over $2tn, SpaceX is now worth more than the GDP of most countries on Earth. For context, that's larger than the entire annual economic output of countries such as Canada, South Korea and Australia, and not far behind economies like Italy and Brazil.

The company is worth more than many of the firms that actually manufacture the chips, servers and hardware underpinning the AI boom.

Yet here's the awkward bit.

SpaceX isn't currently profitable.

The company has reportedly lost billions over the last two years as it pours money into rockets, satellites, data centres, AI infrastructure and long-term projects.

Much of its valuation rests on businesses that either:

🌕 Don't yet exist

🪐 Haven't proven commercial viability

🤖 Are still being built

🚀 Depend on technologies that remain years away

To put the valuation into perspective:

📊 At more than $2tn, SpaceX is valued at roughly 25–30 times its estimated annual revenue.

📊 That's higher than many of the world's largest technology companies despite those firms generating tens of billions in annual profits.

📊 The company is worth more than the combined market value of several major aerospace and defence firms that collectively generate hundreds of billions in revenue each year.

📊 Investors are effectively assigning hundreds of billions of dollars of value to businesses that currently produce little or no revenue at all.

Its IPO prospectus reportedly referenced everything from Mars colonies and asteroid mining to orbital AI data centres and lunar infrastructure.

None of those markets currently exist at meaningful commercial scale.

In other words:

Wall Street just assigned a multi-trillion-dollar valuation to a company whose future ambitions are worth vastly more than its current business operations—and whose most valuable assets may still be science fiction.

🤖 The AI Bubble Question Nobody Wants To AskThis isn't really a SpaceX story.

It's an AI story. Because SpaceX isn't alone. Anthropic is approaching a trillion-dollar valuation. OpenAI is heading towards public markets.

Nvidia became one of the most valuable companies in history largely because investors believe AI demand will continue growing indefinitely.

The common thread?

Future expectations are becoming more valuable than current performance.

Historically investors paid for profits. Today they're increasingly paying for potential.

That can work. Amazon looked absurdly expensive for years before becoming one of the most important businesses on the planet.

But history also contains plenty of examples where investors confused possibility with inevitability.

• 📞 Telecoms in 2000

• 🌐 Dot-com companies in 2000

• 🏠 Housing in 2008

• ₿ Crypto in 2021

Every boom sounds rational while it's happening.

🏦 Here's The Bit That Should Worry Everyone

The AI boom is no longer just affecting venture capitalists.

It's increasingly becoming everyone's problem.

Or everyone's opportunity depending on your perspective.

Nasdaq has accelerated rules allowing companies like SpaceX into major indices more quickly. Analysts estimate that tens of billions of dollars could flow into SpaceX through passive funds and pension investments alone.

That means millions of ordinary savers may soon own SpaceX shares whether they've consciously chosen to or not. Ultimately those Early VC's that will sell some of their shares for a return will do sell them to ordinary folks and profit from them

The same thing will likely happen when OpenAI and Anthropic eventually float.

The result?

Retirement funds, pension schemes and index trackers become increasingly tied to the success of AI.

If AI wins, everyone benefits.

If expectations collapse, everyone feels it.

Musk becoming a trillionaire is obviously the headline.

But it's arguably not the story.

The story is that the global economy is now producing wealth at a scale that would have sounded ridiculous even a decade ago.

Ten years ago the idea of a trillionaire felt like science fiction.

Now we're asking who comes next.

📱 Mark Zuckerberg? 💻 Jensen Huang? 🔍 Larry Page? 🤖 Sam Altman?

The real question isn't whether there will be another trillionaire.

It's how many. And what that concentration of capital means for competition, politics and society. Because while technology continues creating extraordinary value, it's also concentrating extraordinary power.

🍿 So What?

The bullish view says this is exactly what innovation should look like. Big bets. Big risks. Big rewards.

The sceptical view is that we've reached a point where investors are valuing stories more aggressively than businesses. Both might be true. SpaceX may genuinely become one of the most important companies in human history. It may build the infrastructure for AI, space exploration and global communications.

Or investors may have simply become so desperate to own the future that they've stopped asking what it's actually worth.

The biggest question isn't whether SpaceX deserves a $2tn valuation.

It's whether we're entering a world where every ambitious AI company eventually becomes worth a trillion dollars on the promise of what comes next.

Because if that's the case, we're not just living through an AI boom.

We're living through the largest speculative bet on the future that markets have ever seen. 🚀

📚 Read More

🚀 The Guardian: Elon Musk becomes the world's first trillionaire as SpaceX completes the largest IPO in history
https://www.theguardian.com/business/live/2026/jun/12/spacex-float-us-stock-market-share-elon-musk-trillionaire-largest-ipo-ever-live-news-updates

🚀 BBC: SpaceX IPO live coverage and analysis as shares surge on debut
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/czj8dd0kyl7t

💰 BBC: Elon Musk becomes the world's first trillionaire after SpaceX IPO
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvgd5g7d7gyo

🏦 Financial Times: How Wall Street pulled off the biggest IPO in history for SpaceX
https://www.ft.com/content/a7f4246d-9ae2-4f7b-90af-e5a53c52203b

📈 Yahoo Finance: SpaceX's IPO: What happens next?
https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/spacex-ipo-next-123247116.html

🤖 BBC: SpaceX acquires AI coding startup Cursor for $60bn days after IPO
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business

🇺🇸🔒 The AI Iron Curtain Arrives💸

TLDR: Anthropic says the US government has ordered it to suspend access to its most advanced AI models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, for all foreign nationals — including Anthropic's own employees. If true, this isn't just an export control story. It's a sign that frontier AI is increasingly being treated like strategic infrastructure rather than software. 👀

Anthropic announced that a US government export control directive has forced it to disable access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all foreign nationals, regardless of whether they are inside or outside the United States.

Remarkably, that restriction reportedly extends to Anthropic's own foreign-national employees.

The company says the order was issued on national security grounds and has forced it to abruptly suspend access while it works to resolve what it describes as a misunderstanding.

Access to other Claude models remains unaffected. 🤖

🌍 The End Of Global AI?

For most of the internet era, software spread globally. A developer in London could access the same tools as a developer in San Francisco. A startup in Lagos could build on the same infrastructure as a startup in New York.

That assumption is beginning to break down.

Over the last few years we've seen restrictions on:

🖥️ Advanced semiconductors

⚡ AI chips

☁️ Cloud computing

🔬 Research collaboration

🤖 Foundation models

The difference this time is that the restrictions appear to be hitting the models themselves.

The future may not be one global AI ecosystem. It may be several competing AI blocs with different levels of access depending on your nationality, location or geopolitical alignment.

🇬🇧 Why The UK Should Care

Britain has spent the last few years positioning itself as an AI superpower.

The challenge?

The UK doesn't control the frontier models, the frontier chips, or much of the underlying infrastructure.

That's fine when access is open.

It's a much bigger problem when access becomes conditional.

If advanced models can suddenly be restricted by national security directives, it raises an uncomfortable question:

How sovereign is your AI strategy if another government can switch it off? ⚠️

🏛️ The Bigger Picture

The AI boom was built on the assumption that intelligence would become increasingly abundant and widely available.

This points in the opposite direction.

What if frontier AI becomes scarce rather than abundant?

What if access becomes geopolitical rather than commercial?

What if the most powerful models become available only to certain countries, companies or citizens?

That's not a software question anymore.

That's a national security question. 🛡️

And once governments start treating AI like strategically important infrastructure, restrictions rarely stop at one model or one company.

🍿 So What?

For years, AI leaders talked about democratising access to intelligence.

This feels like the opposite.

The world may be entering a phase where advanced AI systems are treated less like products and more like strategic assets.

The immediate question is whether Anthropic can reverse this decision.

The bigger question is whether this becomes normal.

Because if governments can decide who gets access to frontier AI based on nationality, then we're no longer talking about software distribution.

We're talking about borders around intelligence itself.

And history suggests that once those borders appear, they rarely stay small. 🚧

📚 Read More

🤖 Anthropic Statement:
https://x.com/AnthropicAI

🇺🇸 US Export Controls:
https://www.bis.gov

📵🇬🇧 Britain's Social Media Ban Is Coming. But The Loophole Is Already Obvious

TLDR; The UK government will ban under-16s from major social media platforms from next year, with companies facing sanctions or even exclusion from the UK market if they fail to comply.

But while TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat may be in the firing line, messaging apps like WhatsApp and Signal appear set to remain exempt.

Which raises an awkward question:

If the problem is addictive algorithms, harmful content and online safety, what happens when all that activity simply moves somewhere else? 🤔

Sir Keir Starmer has confirmed plans for a nationwide social media ban for under-16s, arguing it will make children "safer" and "happier". Platforms covered by the ban will be required to verify users' ages, with Apple, Google and social media firms expected to play a role in enforcement. Companies that fail to comply could face significant penalties and potentially be barred from operating in the UK. (What happens if folks access on a computer is less clear)
The proposals would block access to major platforms including TikTok, Snapchat and Instagram while also restricting features such as live-streaming, contact with unknown adults and certain AI companions. WhatsApp, Signal and other messaging services are expected to remain outside the scope of the ban.

📱 The WhatsApp Question

This is where things get interesting.

The debate has largely been framed as social media versus childhood. But many of the behaviours parents worry about don't fit neatly into that definition anymore. Group chats spread misinformation. Channels distribute endless content. Forwards go viral. Private communities can amplify bullying, extremism, self-harm content or conspiracy theories.

In some cases, the content is arguably harder to monitor because it exists in private rather than public feeds.

The government's argument is that platforms such as WhatsApp are primarily messaging services rather than social networks. That distinction made sense ten years ago.

Today? Less so.

WhatsApp has Channels. Telegram looks increasingly like a social platform. Discord sits somewhere between messaging app, forum and social network. Signal may be private, but privacy doesn't automatically remove harmful content.

The reality is that the line between "social media" and "messaging app" is becoming increasingly blurry.

The challenge with platform-specific bans is that users tend to migrate.

When Facebook became uncool, people moved to Instagram.

When parents joined Instagram, teenagers moved to Snapchat.

When public feeds became crowded, people moved to private group chats. The risk is that the ban whilst reducing online activity it perhaps just redirect some of the more harmful more pernicious stuff into darker corners of our digital society.

If millions of teenagers suddenly lose access to TikTok and Instagram, some of that attention will almost certainly flow into WhatsApp groups, Discord servers, Telegram channels and whatever the next platform happens to be.

Which raises another question:

Will WhatsApp remain exempt for long if it starts behaving more like the platforms the government is trying to restrict?

This policy signals something bigger than child safety.

For years governments tried to regulate specific harms online.

Now they're increasingly regulating access itself.

Australia started it.

France, Norway and Spain are exploring similar approaches.

Now Britain has joined the club.

The shift is subtle but important.

The question is no longer "How do we make platforms safer?"

It's becoming:

"Which platforms should children be allowed to use at all?"

🍿 So What?

The politics here are easy. The implementation won't be.

The government may succeed in reducing time spent on TikTok and Instagram. But technology has a habit of routing around restrictions. The real test won't be whether teenagers can still access banned platforms. It'll be whether the behaviours policymakers are worried about change or just reappear somewhere else.

Because if WhatsApp channels, Discord communities and encrypted group chats become the next destination for teenage attention, today's messaging apps may end up looking a lot like yesterday's social networks.

And if that happens, don't be surprised when the next debate isn't about banning social media.

It's about redefining what social media actually is. 📲

📈 The tools behind the tech📉

📦Product📦

• 1,000 Data Breaches Later, the Disclosure Lag is Worse Than Ever

📏Design📏 

• Designing with Claude over figma
• Words of type
  

👩🏿‍💻Code👩🏿‍💻

• Software Is Made Between Commits
  

🏢The business behind the tech🏢

• A personal collection of good public-domain reads.
  

😃BTF is back😃

Yep we're going to call this the "best tech festival" is back

• October 29th 

• New venue, Tobacco Docks

• Early bird price tickets (the same as last year)

Check it out. Joinbtf.com

😃What we are consuming😃

🎧Ben Evans big macro view on what's going on in tech

💰AMD invests in the UK

💻Google will pay SpaceX $920M per month for compute

😱12,060 piece, $799.99, Sagrada Família is the largest Lego building set to date