Blue Origin is Raising Outside Capital!

Plus: Apple winds down cheaper Apple Vision Pro display, GPT 5.6 Sol coming tomorrow, Getty abandons Shutterstock merger after UK ruling

Brandon Gorrell

Jul 08, 2026

Happy Wednesday.

We’re live on YouTube and 𝕏.

The current thing in tech and business is anticipation of OpenAI’s upcoming release of GPT 5.6’s flagship model Sol.

Today’s Lineup

Prime Intellect Co-Founder & CEO Vincent Weisser at 11:40 AM
Stratechery Author & Founder Ben Thompson at 12:00 PM
SambaNova Co-Founder & CEO Rodrigo Liang at 12:30 PM
Paradigm Managing Partner Alana Palmedo at 12:40 PM
Overland Co-Founder & CEO Byron Boots at 12:50 PM
Cult Holdings Founder Will Mayer at 1:00 PM
CAA Evolution Partner Tucker Brown at 1:15 PM

Run of Show

Blue Origin is Raising Outside Capital!

Andrew Ross Sorkin has a scoop in the NYT today about Blue Origin. The company is raising $10B in its first outside capital raise.

Funny to think about this 25-year-old company as bootstrapped, but it really has been a solo Bezos megaproject for a quarter century now. He’s doubling down though and putting ~$2B into this round. Coatue is getting twice as much allocation with a nice $4B slice.

Another interesting Coatue tidbit from the NYT piece: “Bezos’ family office is a major investor in Coatue’s Innovative Strategies Fund, which is focused on emerging-technology start-ups.”

The valuation is expected to land at $130B. So a very soft launch into the private markets. Blue Origin is estimated to burn $5B this year and has burned ~$27B to date. Given how small the revenue base at Blue Origin is, some Elon fans are saying this makes SpaceX look cheap. Still, solid progress at Blue Origin even though they had that unfortunate landing pad setback. — John

Apple Winds Down Development of Cheaper Display for Apple Vision Pro

Apple has reportedly stopped development of a cheaper display for a lower-cost Vision Pro, according to MacRumors, with supplier Samsung Display expected to formally end the project by September.

The cheaper display would have cut the headset’s pixel density roughly in half, from 3,386 pixels per inch to around 1,600–1,700 PPI.

The move likely reflects Apple’s broader shift toward smart glasses: Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman previously reported that Apple paused work on a lighter, cheaper “Vision Air” in October 2025 to fast-track its Ray-Ban-style glasses effort.

This does not mean the Vision Pro itself has been canceled. Apple refreshed the headset in October 2025 with an M5 chip, and this report only suggests the cheaper display project is no longer moving forward. — Brandon

In other news:

Getty Images abandoned its $3.7B Shutterstock acquisition after the UK Competition and Markets authority cleared the merger but only on the condition that Getty sell Shutterstock’s editorial business, which supplies footage and images of real-world, newsworthy events. Selling the editorial business would have left Getty with only Shutterstock’s stock photo/videos and other similar assets.
Ridley Scott’s Scott Free Productions is making a documentary on the Vesuvius Challenge, a machine learning/computer vision competition that awards prize money for successfully reading the carbonized Herculaneum Scrolls that are otherwise unreadable. The Challenge was started in 2023 by Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross.
Apple has expanded its agreement with Broadcom to manufacture more than 15 billion chips in the US and upgrade Broadcom’s Colorado facilities. The deal is now expected to top $30B. “All signs point to this being related to Apple’s first chips developed specifically for AI servers,” says Mark Gurman.

Clip Spotlight: Alex Hormozi is not impressed by your 3-hour morning cold plunge, light bath, and sauna routine

“That’s the first three hours of the day when you’re probably the freshest and have the most energy, you would have to have an incredible argument for why that’s going to improve your output.”

His advice:

“You wake up, you caffeinate, you shut off your distractions, and then you begin the work.”

“The ideal is how much you can compress the time from waking to beginning work. You are the freshest whenever you are post-sleep.”