The trillion dollar club: Tesla joined an exclusive group this week

10/26/21 8:00PM

This week Tesla joined a very exclusive club: companies with a market capitalization of at least one trillion dollars.

Tesla joins other tech heavyweights like Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Google as well as Saudi Aramco (Saudi oil company, not charted) in the club. Facebook is now an ex-member, as its market capitalization has just dipped below the threshold in the last few weeks.

‍Show me where it Hertz

‍The tipping point for Tesla came from a deal struck with rental car company Hertz — which ordered 100,000 Tesla cars for its fleet. That's the largest order of electric vehicles ever, and is quite remarkable considering that Hertz filed for bankruptcy in May 2020.At $40k a pop, the 100,000 cars ordered are likely to be worth about $4bn or so in revenue to Tesla, but the news added closer to 25x that amount in market cap, pushing Tesla's equity value over the 13-digit mark. That's more than the next nine public automakers **combined.**‍

‍The old guard

‍Tesla investors are waiting, and hoping, that the company's early lead in electric vehicles will one day turn into earnings like its mega-tech peers Microsoft and Google — both of which reported results yesterday. For those companies, the future may be bright, but the present is pretty sunny as well.

‍Microsoft announced $45bn in revenue and $20bn in operating profit. Alphabet (Google parent co.) went one better and served up $65bn in revenue with $21bn of operating profit. Those numbers are just for the last quarter (3 months worth).Combined the two grew their revenue 33% relative to last year. For companies of their size, that kind of growth is really only fitting of one adjective. Unprecedented.

Chris Stokel-Walker

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While gaming industry groups may not like it, there’s been a huge change in the methods people are using to put money on the big games, with everyone from fortunate NYC bar owners, to a far less fortunate Spanish supporter, turning to prediction markets to try and turn their sports know-how into cold, hard cash.

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

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Anthropic pulls Fable and Mythos access worldwide after Trump administration bars their use by foreign nationals

Only days after releasing two versions of its next-gen AI model, Anthropic has disabled them for users worldwide.

Anthropic says it received a Friday night order from the Trump administration to suspend access to the models for any foreign national (anywhere in the world) — a group that included some Anthropic employees. In response, the company turned off access to everyone.

Last week, the company released to the public its much-anticipated Claude Fable 5 model (and its restricted version Claude Mythos 5, which is still being tested with trusted partners). Anthropic said in a blog post announcing the action that officials cited national security concerns with the new models, while offering few specific details.

The post said that the government gave the company “verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak” of the public Fable 5 model. A jailbreak is a means by which users can evade restrictions built into the code to unlock prohibited functionality. Anthropic downplayed the significance of the attack, and said other major models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, could also be affected by the technique described.

Fears of these first Mythos-class models being misused are running high, after Anthropic warned the cybersecurity world in May that the advanced cyber capabilities of Mythos have rapidly discovered thousands of vulnerabilities in ubiquitous software, leading to the decision to restrict the full version of the model to a close group of trusted partners for testing.

This morning, Axios reported that Anthropic technical staff have flown to Washington to meet with White House officials to resolve the issue.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Trump administration’s decision to take action against Anthropic was prompted by discussions that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had with officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. According to the report, Amazon researchers said they had been able to evade some of Fable 5’s security restrictions using specific prompts. Amazon is a major investor in Anthropic.

Anthropic is currently suing the US government to fight the Pentagon’s blacklisting of the company on national security grounds.

Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5