TheChek News Flow

Defense tech unicorn Anduril Industries led the fundraising lineup in a week heavy with rounds for companies focused on applications in the physical world. Anduril’s $5 billion financing was by far the biggest. Other large rounds went to companies focused on supplying data power, robotics, space tech, biotech, and even strawberries.

1. Anduril Industries, $5B, defense tech: Defense tech unicorn Anduril Industries raised another $5 billion in funding at a $61 billion valuation — double the valuation of $30.5 billion it received less than a year ago. The Series H round, led by Andreessen Horowitz and Thrive Capital, brings the Costa Mesa, California-based company’s total raised to date to $11.4 billion, per Crunchbase.

2. VoltaGrid, $775M, energy: Houston-based VoltaGrid, a provider of mobile natural gas generators for data centers, microgrids, and industrial applications, secured $1 billion in strategic investment from Halliburton and Blackstone. The investment includes $775 million in capital funding and a $225 million secondary purchase from existing investors.

3. Mind Robotics, $400M, robotics: Palo Alto, California-based Mind Robotics, developer of an AI-enabled industrial robotics platform, picked up $400 million in new financing led by Kleiner Perkins. The round brings total funding to date to more than $1 billion for the startup, which launched in 2025 as a spinout of Rivian.

4. Cowboy Space, $275M, space tech: Cowboy Space, a developer of rockets and satellite infrastructure to power and run AI compute in space, closed on $275 million in Series B funding at a $2 billion valuation. Index Ventures led the financing for the San Carlos, California-based startup, which was founded by Robinhood co-founder Baiju Bhatt.

5. Oishii, $150M, indoor farming: Oishii, operator of highly automated indoor farms for growing strawberries, raised $150 million in Series C funding led by SPARX Asset Management. Founded in 2016, the Jersey City, New Jersey-headquartered startup has raised $370 million in total funding to date.

6. Exaforce, $125M, cybersecurity: San Jose-based Exaforce, developer of an AI-native security operations platform, secured $125 million in Series B funding from backers including HarbourVest, Peak XV, Mayfield, Khosla Ventures, and Seligman Ventures.

7. Create Medicines, $122M, biotech: Create Medicines, a startup focused on in vivo immunotherapies for autoimmune diseases and cancer, closed on $122 million in Series B funding. Newpath Partners, ARCH Venture Partners, and Hatteras Venture Partners led the financing.

8. HavocAI, $100M, autonomy: Providence, Rhode Island-based HavocAI, a provider of tools for developing military and commercial-grade autonomous systems across sea, air and land, secured $100 million in Series A funding. The round brings total funding to date for the 2-year-old company to $200 million.

9. Star Catcher, $65M, space tech: Star Catcher, a startup that says it is building the first power grid in space by beaming concentrated solar energy on demand to satellites, picked up $65 million in Series A funding. B Capital, Shield Capital and Cerberus Ventures led the financing for the Jacksonville-based company, which was founded less than two years ago.

10. GridCare, $64M, data center power: GridCare, developer of technology to more efficiently provide power to AI data centers, raised $64 million in Series A funding. Sutter Hill Ventures led the financing for the Redwood City, California-based startup.

Two companies aiming to make better babies by tweaking the DNA of embryos were invited to talk about the future of the technology at SynBioBeta, a major gathering of the biotech world scheduled for earlier this month in San Jose, Calif. As the discussion’s moderator, I felt eager to hear more from them about their science and how they might commercialize it. The only problem: By the time the conference rolled around, both companies weren’t in business anymore.

One of the now defunct embryo editing companies was Bootstrap Bio. CEO Chase Denecke said it failed because it simply ran out of money. Persuading more investors to get on board was a challenge when people are barred from using edited embryos to create pregnancies, raising questions about how many customers such a startup could ever attract. “It will obviously be a lot easier to raise money if we have less regulatory barriers,” Denecke said.

The other startup, Manhattan Genomics, fell apart amid a disagreement between its co-founders, Eriona Hysolli and Cathy Tie. The company folded during discussions on moving from the Cayman Islands to the U.S.

Hysolli previously worked at Colossal Biosciences, an Austin-based startup that has raised money from billionaire Thomas Tull, the CIA’s venture arm and many others to edit animal embryos and attempt to resurrect a slew of extinct animals, most notably woolly mammoths. She still thinks human embryo editing could be a good business. But first, she said, scientists have to show the technology is safe and can cure diseases. “It’s up to us to win over hearts and minds,” she told me.

Looking over what happened to Bootstrap Bio and Manhattan Genomics made something evident to me: It’s still a tough road for anyone interested in starting an embryo editing company, a concept that has attracted the attention of Silicon Valley’s elite.

Companies trying to develop treatments for diseases using gene editing have been around for more than a decade, but they have focused on children and adults. The idea of editing embryos was considered too risky to even try. Scientists worry that cutting, editing or inserting DNA in cells might cause unintended problems, and that the edits in embryos would also pass to future generations.

The prospect of embryo editing got an even greater setback in 2018 when Chinese scientist He Jiankui announced at an international gene editing summit that he had created the world’s first gene-edited babies. The conference organizers called his actions irresponsible and said it was too early to use the technology in clinics. Some scientists called for a global ban.

Chinese authorities seemed to agree, jailing him for three years for the illegal practice of medicine. Scientists have questioned whether the parents of the babies understood the risks of the experiment and whether the edits even worked. He claimed he had edited the embryos to be immune to HIV.

His jailing chilled enthusiasm among researchers interested in the possible commercial expansion of embryo editing. Formidable barriers for prospective embryo editing companies remain today. Three prominent cell and gene therapy industry groups last year called for a 10-year moratorium on gene editing embryos, saying not enough safety data existed to justify its use.

Still, the icy climate for the technology hasn’t stopped startups from attempting to test it nor discouraged the tech elite from writing them checks. Last year, for instance, San Francisco–based Preventive announced it had raised $30 million from backers including OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Coinbase’s Brian Armstrong. (“I think the time is right for the defining company in the US to be built in this area,” Armstrong wrote on X.)

Preventive reportedly has considered conducting embryo editing experiments in countries with looser regulations than the U.S. Other startups could follow its lead to increase their odds of survival. CEO Lucas Harrington has said Preventive is studying embryo editing to prevent serious genetic diseases. He has promised it won’t participate in experiments to impregnate women with edited embryos before it has shown the technology is safe.

And despite the closure of Manhattan Genomics, Tie, one of its two co-founders, told me she has already started another embryo editing company, Origin Genomics, which has a lab in New York City. She wouldn’t name the funders.

Tie, a former Thiel fellow, only intends Origin to work in the U.S. with approval from ethics boards. (In an unusual twist in the saga of this industry, Tie was previously romantically involved with He, the Chinese scientist who shocked the world and went to prison.)

She compared the controversy over embryo editing to the introduction of in vitro fertilization in the 1970s. At first people were uncomfortable with the safety and ethics of creating embryos in a petri dish and using them to make babies. Now IVF represents 2% percent of annual births in the U.S.—somewhere around 100,000 babies a year. Tie thinks embryo editing can follow a similar trajectory. “If we can show it is safe, there will be a market,” she said.

Last month, Tie argued in favor of embryo editing at a public debate in New York sponsored by the Hastings Center for Bioethics, a prominent research institute. Vardit Ravitsky, the center’s president and the debate moderator, later told me that when it comes to embryo editing, “The question has become not whether but rather how.”

In San Jose at SynBioBeta, I asked Jamie Justice, executive vice president for health at the XPrize Foundation, which holds competitions to encourage scientific innovation, if there was a way for companies to pursue embryo editing.

Justice thinks the regulatory barriers are so high that any company will have to meet a rigorous standard to move forward: Parents hoping to use a gene editing service would have to show that a lethal genetic disease that couldn’t be treated after birth, such as Huntington’s disease, affected all their embryos, Justice said. In her view, all these conditions mean the commercial market for embryo editing is limited.

“We have this tiny, almost infinitesimally small percentage that might actually create the use case,” she said.

One way to expand the future market is for companies to eventually move beyond embryo editing for diseases and use the technology to enhance traits like intelligence, athletic prowess and musical ability. However, the repugnance many people share about the idea of parents ordering up superbabies is hard to avoid in any conversation about embryo editing.

Even though the current crop of embryo editing companies say they are only focusing on editing disease genes, there may come a time when parents argue there is no reason to stop there, said Jonathan Anomaly, a co-founder of Herasight, a genetic screening company that predicts the probability of embryos having serious diseases as well as traits like intelligence.

Anomaly was at SynBioBeta, too, where he put forward the most controversial view of all. He argued that drawing a line between using embryo editing to treat diseases and using it to enhance abilities is not morally justifiable. Both are based on parents wanting to improve the future lives of their children, Anomaly said. SynBioBeta prides itself on highlighting boundary-pushing views, but outside Silicon Valley, his argument is likely to rile people up.

Anomaly doesn’t expect to see many thriving embryo editing companies of any kind any time soon. Getting rid of complex conditions like heart disease, he said, might require editing hundreds of genes in every cell, a formidable task.

There may be a commercial market for these services someday, but he thinks that possibility is decades away. “The science isn’t there now,” he said.

Kissei Pharmaceutical, which sells the rare immune-disease drug in Japan, warned doctors to stop prescribing it to new patients

Twenty people in Japan who took Amgen’s rare-disease drug Tavneos have died, and at least 22 developed a potentially fatal liver injury, according to Kissei Pharmaceutical 4547 -1.94%decrease; red down pointing triangle, which sells the medicine in the country.

Kissei told doctors Friday to stop prescribing the drug to new patients.

The Japanese drugmaker said the 20 deaths occurred in people who had suffered a serious liver “impairment” and attributed 13 of the deaths to a condition, called vanishing bile duct syndrome, marked by the destruction of the ducts that carry bile out of the liver.

Kissei said causal links to Tavneos hadn’t been confirmed in all 20 deaths. Amgen AMGN -2.22%decrease; red down pointing triangle shares were down more than 2% late Friday.

An Amgen spokeswoman said the 20 deaths occurred among more than 8,500 patients treated in Japan, and that some cases involved deaths where a causal link to Tavneos hadn’t been established. She added that no deaths linked to serious liver injury have been reported among the more than 8,000 U.S. patients who have taken the drug.

CSL CSL 0.72%increase; green up pointing triangle, which holds the rights to sell the drug outside the U.S. and licensed it to Kissei for sale in Japan, said it “takes all matters of patient safety seriously” and is committed to working with regulators.

“Kissei has begun providing information to healthcare professionals, urging them to refrain from using this drug for new patients and to carefully assess the continuation of treatment for existing patients, explaining the risks of liver dysfunction and alternative treatments to ensure patient safety,” the company said.

Tavneos treats a group of rare autoimmune diseases that cause inflammation in small blood vessels. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved it in 2021.

The medicine went on sale in Japan in 2022, according to Kissei. Also that year, Amgen bought the drug’s developer, ChemoCentryx, for $3.7 billion.

In January, the FDA asked Amgen to voluntarily pull the drug from the U.S. market, but Thousand Oaks, Calif.-based Amgen refused.

Then in March, the FDA said it had identified 76 global cases of serious liver injury linked to Tavneos, including eight deaths. Most were reported in Japan. Of the 76 global cases the FDA identified, seven involved the syndrome, and three of those patients died.

In late April, the FDA moved to formally begin withdrawal proceedings.

The FDA has also said that ChemoCentryx had included material misstatements in its original approval application.

Amgen said in an April letter to doctors that it “is not aware of issues with underlying patient data and remains confident” that Tavneos is an effective treatment. The company added that researchers had observed serious liver injuries during testing of Tavneos, and liver damage is a known risk of the drug. Tavneos’s label warns about the risk of liver damage.

Tavneos generated $119 million in sales in the first quarter for Amgen, up 32% from a year earlier, and accounting for less than 2% of the company’s overall drug sales.

Amgen said in its quarterly earnings release in late April that the drug “demonstrates effectiveness and a favorable benefit-risk profile,” and said that vanishing bile duct syndrome hadn’t affected patients in the U.S.

The legal showdown between Elon Musk and Sam Altman revealed the personal and financial fault lines beneath Silicon Valley’s defining boom.

OAKLAND, Calif.—U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers opened the last day of testimony in the titanic trial between Elon Musk and Sam Altman’s OpenAI with a simple question: Should a trophy of a golden donkey’s backside be entered into evidence?

The judge held the statue in her hands with a bemused look. Dario Amodei, then a team lead for AI safety, had helped award it to a company intern years earlier, after Musk called the person a “jackass” for challenging him over AI safety at a company meeting.

“We think it’s pretty obvious this trophy has no relevance,” a lawyer for Musk said in court. Gonzalez Rogers opted to allow a photo of the statue given to Joshua Achiam, now OpenAI’s chief futurist, to be admitted.

The actual statue was put away before the jury of six women and three men could see it, although they were shown a photo. So went the landmark legal showdown between some of the most powerful players in AI. The three-week trial, now in the jury’s hands, was technically about allegations by Musk, the world’s richest man, that he was snookered into fronting OpenAI millions of dollars as a struggling nonprofit, only to see it morph into the world’s most powerful AI company. OpenAI argued it had to go commercial to fund its massive research needs, and that Musk supported such a move.

The proceedings revealed the mythmaking of AI’s seismic economic transformation, with heady talk of benefiting humanity and existential risk. It also exposed the AI boom’s underbelly: the grubby sidedeals, financial anxieties, short tempers and personal vendettas that have shaped modern technology every bit as much as the march toward machine consciousness.

Two days before the trial, Musk emailed OpenAI President Greg Brockman about a potential settlement offer. When Brockman suggested both sides drop their claims, Musk responded, “By the end of this week, you and Sam will be the most hated men in America. If you insist, so be it,” according to legal filings.

Musk has asked that Altman be removed as CEO, among other requests, and is seeking up to $180 billion to be paid out from OpenAI’s for-profit arm to its nonprofit parent. He also wants OpenAI’s conversion to be unwound as part of the remedies in the case. If Musk is successful, it would greatly complicate OpenAI’s potential IPO—expected as soon as later this year.

The courtroom served as a kind of leveler in an increasingly oligarchic age. Several of those who came to testify were billionaires—including Musk and Altman—accustomed to private jets and private chefs. Yet they all had to remove their electronics and pass through the same metal detectors as everyone else.

In Silicon Valley, where dressing down is the ultimate symbol of tech’s disruptive power, nearly every executive who took the stand donned suits and ties. Brockman and Altman attended the proceedings nearly every day, sitting next to each other on benches behind the OpenAI defense table, at times taking notes. Halfway through the trial, Brockman started bringing a white pillow to sit on.

Musk entered with a team of security personnel. The judge scolded the billionaire at least twice—once for his social media usage and second for saying if he loses this case, it’ll mean trouble for all charities in America.

The courthouse has strict rules for everyone, such as a ban on taking any photos inside and leaving items unattended. An elderly spectator was booted from the nearby overflow room one day for snapping a souvenir photo, protesting as he was led away by marshals that he had arrived hours early to get his spot.

Lines to the courthouse in the early days of the trial snaked through the jasmine-scented courtyard in the Bay Area’s always-gloomy early mornings. It wasn’t just tech reporters, lawyers, staffers and protesters (one held a sign that read “Everyone sucks here except protesters and media”), but also curious onlookers, eager to use the democratic structure of a public court to get a front-row seat to history.

“If you come here early, you can see people like Musk and Altman testify, and they’re the future of the world,” said Kalid Meky, 55, who commuted from his home near San Jose for nearly a week to watch from a backbench.

Spectators sat transfixed in Courtroom One of the Ronald V. Dellums federal courthouse as witnesses painted a world of robots that can solve Rubik’s Cubes, eye-popping fortunes and worries over possibly unleashing a doomsday beast. The trial took onlookers back in time to the earliest days of the boom as OpenAI and Musk’s SpaceX now race to go public.

Inside the courtroom, Gonzalez Rogers showed a mix of humor and toughness as she wrangled battalions of dark-suited attorneys lined up against each other in the wood-paneled room. “Everybody understand how the game is going to be played?” she said one morning on some evidence-handling instructions.

Yet she showed a soft spot for the nine-member jury, whose role was to advise her in the final verdict. “All the lawyers want to do nothing more than to make you happy as they can,” the judge said at one point Wednesday, turning to the panel.

Clash of the titans

The legal arguments of the case have changed many times since Musk first sued OpenAI and its CEO more than two years ago. But they have always circled around the idea that OpenAI betrayed its nonprofit mission when it created a for-profit subsidiary and took a major investment from Microsoft.

In the days before the trial, the more than 20 claims that Musk had leveled at Altman and his associates were whittled down to just two: breach of charitable trust and unjust enrichment. Musk boiled down his legal team’s main argument succinctly on the stand: “It’s not OK to steal a charity.”

His legal team’s broader point was about his place in AI history. OpenAI existed, he said, because of his own emotional connection to the human race.

He told the oft-repeated story of a conversation he had with his friend, Google co-founder Larry Page, about the future of AI. When Musk told Page that he would prefer that the AIs not wipe out all humans, Page accused him of being a “speciesist,” Musk testified.

“The reason that OpenAI exists is because Larry Page called me a speciesist,” Musk said. “That’s fundamentally it.”

Musk then teamed up with Altman, and later Brockman and famed AI researcher Ilya Sutskever, to create a nonprofit AI lab in 2015 that would be a counterweight to Google, which at the time employed most of the best AI researchers, he said.

Throughout the trial, Musk’s lawyers argued that only he had the reputation and capital to bring OpenAI into existence, even if he had multiple other day jobs at the time and left the OpenAI board a little more than two years after the company’s founding.

Altman acknowledged on the stand that Musk’s early support was critical for OpenAI’s success. Musk provided the bulk of funding in its early days—though the roughly $40 million he provided fell far short of the $1 billion he had publicly pledged.

The trial also showed Musk’s volcanic temper and mercurial side.

When OpenAI’s co-founders were negotiating a possible new for-profit structure in 2017, Brockman testified that Musk sent him and other co-founders Teslas ahead of a meeting about converting the nonprofit lab to a for-profit company that he would control. “It felt a little bit like he was buttering us up,” Brockman testified.

Musk arrived at the meeting with a painting of a Tesla as a gift, Brockman said, but after the group rejected his proposal to have a controlling share of the company, he grabbed the artwork and left.

Text messages between Altman and Shivon Zilis, Musk’s close associate and onetime OpenAI board member, who is the mother of four of his children, show the two strategizing on how to best manage Musk’s moods. After one particularly good late-night meeting, Musk ended the evening with what Altman described as “a long, long conversation about him showing us memes on his phone.” Altman also testified that Musk often had to be reminded of things, especially when he was upset.

The trial is just one front of Musk’s yearslong, multipronged attack on his onetime co-founders. His war against them ramped up after he founded his own rival AI company, xAI, in March of 2023, less than six months after OpenAI’s ChatGPT took the world by storm and kicked off the AI race.

Musk has used his megaphone on X, the social-media platform that he owns that continues to serve as the town square of the AI industry, to routinely bash Altman as “Scam Altman” and to attack OpenAI.

The trial offered a fresh look at major moments in OpenAI’s history, including the “blip” when Altman was briefly ousted as CEO. In one text chain admitted as evidence, Altman, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and other Microsoft executives batted about potential members of the new board as part of negotiations for Altman’s return. Microsoft CTO Kevn Scott at one point vetoed former Google Cloud CEO Diane Green with “strong, strong no”—a bit of candor that went viral on social media.

It also laid bare new details of its operations, as well as elements of Altman and Brockman’s entanglements. An email from the lab’s early days revealed that part of Brockman’s compensation was made up of equity paid from Altman’s family office, after the nonprofit ran out of shares of stock in the startup accelerator Y Combinator, which Altman ran at the time he co-founded OpenAI, according court documents.

In testimony, Altman confirmed that he owns substantial stakes in startups that have signed deals with OpenAI, including a third of Helion, a nuclear-energy startup. Altman said he recused himself from board discussions about Helion and OpenAI, which signed an agreement under which OpenAI would purchase electricity from Helion to power its infrastructure. He acknowledged, when pressed by Musk’s attorney, that he had participated in meetings about OpenAI’s computing needs while also serving as chairman of Helion.

Among the trove of evidence, from candid emails and private text messages to meeting notes, was Brockman’s private diary, which became something of a star witness.

Musk’s legal team never called Altman as a witness. But during cross-examination of Altman on Tuesday, Musk’s lawyer, Steven Molo, opened with a brutal barrage of questions about his character: “Are you completely trustworthy?” he asked. “I believe so,” Altman replied.

“But you don’t know whether you’re completely trustworthy?” Molo continued.

“I’ll just amend my answer to yes,” Altman replied.

A few beats later, Molo asked: “Do you always tell the truth?”

“I believe I am a truthful person,” Altman replied.

“That wasn’t my question, sir. Do you always tell the truth?” Molo asked again.

“I’m sure there’s some time in my life when I have not,” Altman replied.

Altman remained calm under the barrage, even as Molo pressed him on the testimony of other witnesses who had described him as a liar. Outside the courtroom, Musk was advancing on other fronts.

While the trial was under way, SpaceX announced a deal to lease computing power to OpenAI’s fiercest rival, Anthropic, which had found itself constrained after its Claude Code product took off.

While Altman was on the stand, Musk was also preparing to travel to China with President Trump. Musk, the onetime “First Buddy,” appeared to have re-entered the president’s inner circle, less than a year after their relationship appeared to have frayed.

The same day Musk boarded Air Force One, a group of Republican attorneys general and a congressional committee led by Republicans announced they were investigating Altman’s potential conflicts of interest that had been revealed by Wall Street Journal reporting.

So compelling was the clash of the titans that almost every day for two weeks, Lance Jackson got up at 4:40 a.m. at his home in Orinda, Calif., rode the BART to downtown Oakland and stood in line to watch the trial.

“This is really a seminal, critical trial that’s going to affect society,” the 73-year-old Jackson, a retired sketch artist. “You can see it already starting to happen with AI, we are really starting to snowball really quickly now.”

Adding a sliver of the hottest private companies to your portfolio can be far more tricky than buying stocks

It sounds like the investment opportunity of a lifetime: a chance to get in on one of the hottest names on Wall Street, before the company’s stock even starts trading.

Financial advisers say buyer beware.

It is technically possible for ordinary investors to get ahead of the coming oversize and high-profile public offerings expected in 2026—including SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic. Investors can get access through direct secondary marketplaces, exchange-traded funds that advertise private-company exposure and even crypto tokens that seek to mirror the performance of the company’s shares.

But all those methods vary greatly in risk level and degree of actual ownership on offer, highlighted by Anthropic’s market-rattling warning this past week that it won’t recognize investments not approved by its board. Advisers said that many private-market investments come with layers of complexity and fees that, for most people, might just not be worth the hassle.

Here’s what to know.

Once upon a time, companies like Amazon and Apple made their stock-market debut with market capitalizations under $2 billion. Now, firms wait much longer to go public—SpaceX was recently valued at $1.25 trillion—while institutions and wealthier private-market investors benefit from the growth.

While that leaves many investors curious about snagging a piece of big-name privately held firms, advisers said they rarely recommend it to clients. Those best suited to private-market investing are usually long-term, sophisticated investors who don’t mind taking on quite a bit of risk, they noted. Some platforms for buying private shares are available only to accredited investors, meaning you’ll need at least $1 million in net assets, excluding your primary residence, or at least $200,000 in individual or $300,000 in joint income.

But even then, said Patrick Huey, principal adviser at Victory Independent Planning in Naples, Fla., private-market investments probably shouldn’t make up more than a sliver of your portfolio.

“I understand wanting to be one of the first people in,” he said. ‘But even a good company can be a bad investment because of the wrong price or the wrong size.”

One common way of getting access to pre-IPO companies is through something called a special purpose vehicle, or SPV, a private fund created to hold a specific asset. Some SPVs can be layered, meaning the fund owns another fund that owns the private company’s stock.

Those funds can also result in fees: management fees, upfront commissions, a chunk of any gains. Those charges eat into the return on your investment and are often not clearly disclosed, said Neena Mishra, director of ETF Research at Zacks Investment Research.

“There’s a lack of transparency,” Mishra said. “I think it’s best for investors to just wait until these companies go public.”

One place to find exposure is marketplaces run by companies such as Forge Global and Nasdaq Private Market, where investors can buy, sell or request stock in private firms. For investors interested in direct, singular exposure to a private company, these platforms are probably your best bet, said Matt Chancey, a financial planner and founder of Tax Alpha Companies in Tampa, Fla.

“Many times when investors want to go in on a private firm, they want a concentrated position,” Chancey said. On secondary platforms, he said, “you should be able to obtain a more direct ownership structure.” In the case of Forge and Nasdaq Private Market, stock transactions are completed with the approval of the issuing company, though investors might still be purchasing their stake through an SPV.

But shares of a particular firm might be unavailable, and you still won’t get the perks that come with owning a public stock—like a transparent look at the company’s financials, or the ability to sell whenever you choose.

Exchange-traded funds

A number of exchange-traded funds advertise exposure to private firms. The Tema Space Innovators ETF, for example, includes SpaceX in its holdings alongside publicly traded space companies. The ERShares Private-Public Crossover ETF holds a “sleeve of select private companies” alongside shares of Nvidia, Meta Platforms and other public stocks.

Mishra said there are two things to consider: First, shares of the private company are likely a small portion of an ETF’s overall holdings and are mixed in with other names. Federal regulations generally restrict illiquid securities to 15% of a mutual fund or ETF’s assets.

Fermi raced to go public. After an 80% drop in the stock price, its founders are battling over what comes next.

Seven months ago, former Energy Secretary Rick Perry described as genius an idea from Texas energy billionaire Toby Neugebauer to build the world’s largest data center on a dusty grazing lease near Amarillo.

“There will be an M.B.A. case study written about what you guys pulled off—I’m telling you,” Perry said to Neugebauer onstage at an October nuclear power conference.

Today, the men are on opposite sides of a bitter showdown over the company they co-founded.

Fermi FRMI -11.67%decrease; red down pointing triangle raced to go public last year—it was founded in January and held its initial public offering in October to capitalize on two booming trends: AI data centers and renewed interest in nuclear power. The startup courted investors with ambitious plans for a sprawling data-center and energy campus named for President Trump on land owned by the Texas Tech University System.

It has promised to generate enough electricity to match what many states produce, largely with natural gas-fired equipment and four large nuclear reactors. Electricity would flow directly to sprawling on-site data centers filled with rows of servers running AI workloads for tech companies.

Things haven’t gone according to plan.

Fermi, which hasn’t generated any revenue, has yet to land the kind of marquee tech tenant needed to finance the project. Insiders, including Perry’s son, have unloaded shares, which have plunged about 80% from their public debut.

The company ousted Neugebauer as CEO last month for what it called unauthorized actions, policy breaches and a pattern of abusive behavior, according to a termination letter included in court filings. Neugebauer’s legal team argues his firing was retaliatory because he and others raised governance concerns to the board.

Neugebauer—who says he, his family and current or former executives close to him hold about 40% of Fermi shares—is pushing for change. He wants to see the company sold or matched with a strategic partner that could bring a lower cost of capital, a record in construction “and a customer at the table.”

Neugebauer called a shareholder meeting in April to vote on new directors he is nominating to the board, but Fermi’s new leadership canceled it. The board on Wednesday amended the bylaws to require a 70% shareholder vote to change the number or tenure of directors, from a majority.

“Mr. Neugebauer’s proposals, taken together, would result in Mr. Neugebauer taking control of the company and advance his stated goal of selling Fermi quickly,” the board said in a statement this past week. His plan would lock in losses for shareholders given the sagging stock price, the directors added.

Neugebauer said he wants to “ensure the board considers every option,” including a sale, and called the bylaw change an “unprecedented act of entrenchment—they’re simply running scared because they don’t want shareholders to have a real voice.”

Perry, who sits on the board, said he supports the company’s new leadership.

“The team leading this next chapter has my full confidence and support,” he said in a statement. “We have the right leadership, land, permits, equipment, and partners to scale to commercial operations.”

Neugebauer and Perry’s son, Griffin Perry, discussed the idea for Fermi while on one of their frequent walks in their Dallas neighborhood. Neugebauer later brought the idea to Rick Perry, who elevated Fermi’s profile with his political connections as a longtime Texas governor and former Trump administration official. Griffin Perry’s firm said it remains the second-largest shareholder behind Neugebauer and has “strong conviction” in Fermi’s prospects.

Fermi was valued at roughly $19 billion upon its public debut in October, but its market value has since shrunk to less than $5 billion. Tensions at the company had been rising for months.

Fermi had a prospective data-center client in Amazon, but that deal didn’t materialize, according to people familiar with the matter.

Without a customer in place, the pace of construction slowed. Satellite images suggest the company started moving dirt on the site in October, but there wasn’t significant construction activity between February and late March, according to research firm Cleanview.

Dissension among the board grew, and Neugebauer’s charismatic, but at-times abrasive, style rubbed some the wrong way, some of the people said.

Fermi said in court documents that Neugebauer wreaked havoc on relationships with key counterparties and stakeholders. One told Fermi “it would not do a deal unless Fermi agreed Mr. Neugebauer would not communicate directly with its employees.”

Neugebauer, who co-founded the private-equity firm Quantum Energy Partners, is no stranger to controversy. He is the former chief executive of the failed anti-woke bank startup GloriFi, which raised tens of millions of dollars from high-profile investors, including Ken Griffin and Peter Thiel, before going bust in a matter of months. The registration paperwork for Fermi’s IPO listed the bankruptcy and related lawsuits as a potential distraction.

Neugebauer has said he remains committed to Fermi: He hasn’t sold shares but thinks the project needs a different owner, such as a hyperscaler, data-center owner or oil-and-gas developer to move forward.

“Toby Neugebauer is a fierce, successful businessman with deep energy sector experience who was able to take Fermi from an idea to a multibillion-dollar publicly traded company in less than a year,” a spokeswoman said. “He is being dragged through the mud by a small number of Fermi board members desperately clinging to power for their own gain.”

For their part, Fermi executives and board members have framed the upheaval as a pivot from a startup to an institutional “Fermi 2.0” that can offer the ingredients needed for AI projects racing to build.

The company reported on Thursday a $189 million net loss for the first quarter, along with $243 million in total cash. It said it has secured about $940 million in financing and has “a clear path to commercial power delivery later this year.” Co-President Anna Bofa said multiple prospective tenants and partners have visited Fermi’s site in the past two weeks.

“The most important message is that the market has not walked away from this asset,” she said.

Rare virus has high fatality rate and can spread through the air, research shows, though it is easier to contain than Covid-19

I knew hantavirus had reached a tipping point when my own 12-year-old called out to us after bedtime to ask: “What is hantavirus, and do we have to worry about it?”

The virus that started with an outbreak on a cruise ship has infiltrated the public consciousness, and it feels like déjà vu: resurrecting painful memories of the Covid-19 pandemic that shut down the world.

There are lots of questions, misinformation and, understandably, fears. But what do we actually know about the hantavirus that has infected at least 11 people, killed three of them and led to the quarantining of dozens more across the globe? How infectious—or not—is it, and how does it spread?

U.S. health officials say Andes hantavirus usually spreads through prolonged contact with infected people, but scientists say one key study has shown that it can be spread through the air and by so-called superspreaders. Some researchers say current guidelines underplay the risks of transmission, though most still expect the outbreak to be contained.

What is hantavirus?

First, hantavirus is a family of viruses that typically spreads to humans from rodent droppings or urine such as when someone inhales particles near infected rodents. The Andes species of hantavirus—responsible for the cruise-ship outbreak—is the only type that spreads between people.

The main danger with hantavirus is that it often develops into a severe lung infection that kills about 38% of infected people. This is a very high fatality rate—much higher than deaths caused by the virus behind Covid-19—but the virus is less contagious. Only about 100 to 200 cases of Andes hantavirus crop up in humans a year, largely in Argentina and Chile.

Gustavo Palacios, a professor of microbiology at the Icahn School of Medicine Mount Sinai in New York City, says most human-to-human transmission involves close contact among family members or healthcare providers treating infected patients.

One major exception is a transmission chain that he and co-researchers documented in a 2020 study in the New England Journal of Medicine, detailing an outbreak in Argentina between 2018 and 2019. It is the largest documented outbreak of Andes hantavirus.

In that outbreak, one person infected with the virus from a rodent spread it to 33 other people, resulting in 11 deaths. The majority of spread centered on three symptomatic individuals who infected others through seemingly casual contact at a crowded indoor birthday party and at a wake. At least one infection occurred from a brief, passing interaction at the party.

The Argentine researchers found that the so-called “superspreaders” had higher viral loads, were sicker and had signs of liver damage.

Transmission through the air

They calculated that the virus’s infectiousness—an estimate of how many people one contagious person will infect on average—is 2.1. That is lower than for measles and some strains of Covid-19 but higher than for influenza. It’s not insignificant.

Palacios noted that when isolation and social-distancing measures were implemented, the number went down quickly. “In conditions when people are not aware, this virus might be transmissible, especially at the beginning of an outbreak,” he says.

Dr. Josh Schiffer, an infectious-disease modeler and physician at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, says the study makes clear that Andes hantavirus can be transmitted through the air. It remains unknown whether the transmission is through droplets—typically emitted when someone sneezes or coughs—or aerosols, which are smaller and can be emitted and inhaled from talking or even breathing and linger in the air for hours. Aerosols contributed to the quick spread of Covid-19.

But Schiffer says several characteristics of the Andes hantavirus make it easier to contain than the virus that causes Covid-19. Most transmission seems to occur after a person develops symptoms; the long incubation period allows for plenty of time to do contact tracing; and superspreader events seem to contribute to most infections.

“That’s what makes it very different from SARS-CoV-2 and really most respiratory viruses,” says Schiffer.

Questions about CDC guidance

Guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has shifted over the past week. It now states that Andes hantavirus spread is usually limited to people in prolonged direct physical contact, in close or enclosed spaces, or exposed to body fluids or respiratory secretions.

Some scientists say the guidance understates the possibility of airborne spread in indoor settings.

“The best outbreak investigation we have contradicts the message we have of close, prolonged contact,” says Joseph Allen, a professor and director of the Healthy Buildings program at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “It’s not just intimate contact, it’s not just close contact. There is evidence that it spread without those things happening but it was absent from the official messaging for at least a week.”

Allen is concerned that the improper guidance could lead to people who are now home under self-quarantine taking their quarantine less seriously than they should—particularly with the incubation period being up to 42 days.

In his view, “the long incubation period creates challenges” because Allen says he isn’t convinced that there’s no pre-symptomatic transmission. Even though a wide outbreak isn’t anticipated, new cases could surface every few weeks, he notes.

The good news is the virus has shown no signs of mutating to make it better at infecting people.

Palacios is involved in a genomic sequencing of the virus, and so far it looks similar to previous versions. “I feel confident no more secondary cases are going to be observed,” he says, “but we should acknowledge that we don’t know everything.”

So at the moment, no you don’t have to wear a mask. But our understanding of the virus is limited and evolving. We haven’t seen a hantavirus outbreak that looks like this before, spreading to multiple corners of the world.

It appears possible for the virus to spread through the air, not just through bodily fluids and intimate contact. This is something the general public should know so that the proper precautions are taken, and we can limit transmission and go about our business.

A collaboration between Swatch and Audemars Piguet generated surprising hype—and fierce debate

Earlier this week, when the Swiss watch brands Swatch and Audemars Piguet announced a collaboration, many fans were hoping that they would get an affordable version of a legendary style. Some speculated that a riff on the iconic Royal Oak was on the way.

What they got instead was a rainbow-colored pocket watch.

The Royal Pop pocket watch, revealed on Tuesday, has a multicolor body complete with a lanyard. It went on sale at Swatch stores on Saturday, at a starting price of $400. (A version with a seconds subdial runs for $420.)

News of the release generated significant hype, alongside fierce debate over the design. Still, people lined up days in advance to get their hands on the pocket watches. Representatives for Swatch and Audemars Piguet declined interview requests.

In recent years, Swatch has captured attention with limited-edition products made in partnership with luxury makers Omega and Blancpain—versions of those brands’ iconic pieces rendered in Swatch’s colorful Bioceramic material. Priced in the low-to-mid hundreds, the watches appealed to both longtime collectors and total newbies. They also held significant value on the resale market, with some listed online for nearly $1,000.

But even with those collaborations, some fans still saw a partnership between Swatch and Audemars Piguet—whose pieces can command six figures—as pie-in-the-sky. “One of the dream ones was always, like, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if they did something with the Royal Oak?’” said Tony Traina, the writer of the watch newsletter Unpolished, referring to Audemars Piguet’s flagship model. “And it was always, like, ‘Yeah, but that would never happen.’”

When Swatch began teasing its partnership with Audemars Piguet, eagle-eyed fans went down watch-history rabbit holes. Keen observers knew that in the 1980s Swatch released a line of “Pop” watches that could be removed from their frames and affixed to bags or jackets. “Something like what they came out with was kind of always the reasoned or informed opinion of what would be coming,” Traina said.

That didn’t stop frenzied corners of the internet from using AI to conjure images of a hoped-for model: an affordable ceramic version of the Royal Oak wristwatch. Some, on seeing the images, complained that their Royal Oaks—often starting at $30,000 on the secondary market—would be devalued.

Zoë Abelson, who sources and sells watches through her company Graal, noticed that Swatch-AP content took over her Instagram feed, which was normal enough, given her profession. Less normal? “The amount of messages that I received from friends who are not into watches, just wanting to speculate and talk about it and ask me what I think it is, was pretty incredible,” she said.

It was one thing, said Joshua Ganjei, CEO of the Boston watch retailer European Watch Company, when Swatch collaborated with Omega and Blancpain—luxury brands, to be sure, but corporate siblings under the Swatch Group umbrella. “Now you’re talking about the Swatchification of a Holy Trinity watch, and that changes things,” he said, using the watch-obsessive term for pieces from Audemars Piguet, Patek Philippe and Vacheron Constantin.

Early birds began lining up outside the Swatch store in Times Square nearly a week before the new pocket watches were released.

“We’ve been here since Sunday. After Mother’s Day, we came here,” Arvey Valderrama, 35, said on Thursday from a folding chair set up snugly against the Swatch shop’s exterior, where a hundred or so others were waiting in line.

On Tuesday, after Swatch and Audemars Piguet released official photos of the pocket watches, a number of folks decided they were no longer interested, according to people who stayed in the line.

Rodney Smalls, 28, kept his place in line. “It’s AP—so anyway it goes, it’s a smart investment,” said Smalls on Thursday, using an abbreviation for Audemars Piguet.

Buyers of the new pocket watch are limited to purchasing one per store per day. Potential resellers said they hoped to get anywhere from $1,500 to $4,000.

Smalls said that if he got a watch, he would hold onto it for a while, betting that it would appreciate. If he were to never sell it, or if he is able to snag a second, he is hoping that Swatch will eventually release a wristband that he’d be able to pop the pocket watch into.

But that wasn’t a dealbreaker for Smalls. Since he often wears a suit for his security work, he said, “I would actually wear it as a pocket watch.”