Google Taps Berkshire

White House issues AI EO, Berkshire invests $10B in Alphabet, Impulse Space raises $500B

Brandon Gorrell

Jun 02, 2026

Happy Tuesday.

We’re live on YouTube and 𝕏.

The current thing in tech and business is Alphabet announcing an $80B equity raise to scale its AI efforts.

Today’s lineup

F1 Driver & Meuze Founder & CEO Jack Doohan at 11:45 AM
Special Co-Founder Nate Cavanaugh at 12:00 PM
Impulse Space Founder, CEO, & CTO Tom Mueller at 12:15 PM
Gusto Co-Founder & CTO Eddie Kim at 12:45 PM
Partiful Co-Founder & CEO Shreya Murthy at 1:00 PM
Board Founder & CEO Brynn Putnam at 1:15 PM

Run of Show

Alphabet raises $10B from Berkshire as part of $80B equity capital raise

Yesterday Alphabet announced a massive $80B equity capital raise to secure compute and finance data center expansion.

The raise will be broken up into a few initiatives over the course of this year. Berkshire Hathaway will buy $10B worth of shares at a roughly 6% discount from Monday’s closing stock price. Another $30B will consist of underwritten public offerings, and the last $40B will be staggered common stock offerings beginning in Q3 2026. All the shares Alphabet will sell are brand new, meaning the plan is slightly dilutive for existing shareholders.

A lot of opinions on the timeline about this deal this morning. I’ve seen a number of people theorizing that Alphabet is sucking up liquidity/ AI demand from investors before they’d be able to buy an Anthropic or OpenAI IPO. Rihard Jarc gave a few less-conspiratorial explanations — one being that Alphabet is seeing demand for Gemini go up, and so it’s going to invest more in compute and scale. And Ben Thompson had, per usual, a solid piece on the raise this morning. He wrote:

The first question is why did Google issue equity instead of debt? Debt is, all things being equal, the preferred instrument for investment: the proceeds of the latter pay off the former, and existing equity holders reap all of the benefits. Equity, on the other hand, removes the risk of debt, but at the cost of giving up a share of future profits[...]
That leads to what may be the Occam’s Razor explanation: Google is also going to start issuing a lot more debt as well, which is to say that everyone continues to underestimate the amount of demand there is for compute. Of course that’s not far off from a more bearish interpretation: Google is uncertain about the return on investment of all that capex, and would prefer to share the risk (along with the upside). If there isn’t a substantial debt issuance down the road then this might be the right answer.

You can read Alphabet’s press release for the raise here.

— Brandon

Why do companies file for IPO confidentially?

We got a question from the chat about the confidential IPO filing that Anthropic announced yesterday that led to a few more questions and a bit of a mini rabbit hole. Here’s a bit of the history and rationale behind the current IPO process.

First, the basics: “Confidential IPO filing” does not mean “IPO in secret.” It means the company submits a draft S‑1 to the SEC for private staff review before releasing the prospectus on EDGAR. This lets companies run the SEC review process while keeping the sensitive financial details private. Any regulatory stumbling blocks can be dealt with in advance, so the final filing is clean and ready to go. SpaceX did the same thing, filing a confidential draft submission before the public S-1.

After the 2008 financial crisis and regulation that resulted from the fallout, the financial markets slowly built back and started opening up as the economy rebuilt. Before 2012, the S-1 became public early in the process, which was good for journalists reporting on IPOs, but raised the stakes for companies, because if anything was off, it could result in a botched IPO which would be damaging for morale and potentially the company’s future financial plans. No one wants to be running a company that has publicly failed to IPO.

So in 2012, the JOBS Act passed, which created a new class of company with some relaxed filing requirements. “Emerging Growth Companies,” or EGCs, were defined as any company with less than $1B in revenue, but it’s inflation-adjusted, so that threshold became $1.235B pretty quickly. That doesn’t really matter though, because in 2017, staff at the SEC explained the confidential filing flow to include all issuers, not just EGCs. The JOBS Act was driven by Republicans, but broadly supported. The 2017 change happened during Trump 1, but didn’t face strong opposition. Private markets investors like IPOs for the liquidity and public market investors like access to more names. And 2017 was a big year for larger startups trying to go public smoothly. You had Uber, Airbnb, DoorDash and Palantir all well past the billion-dollar revenue threshold, but still there was plenty of uncertainty about how the market would price the stock in the public markets. By filing confidentially, it set these companies up to “test the waters” by asking big institutional investors roughly whether or not they would buy the IPO, at what valuation, and what concerns they had about the business.

The confidential filing rules were expanded again in 2025 under the Trump 2 SEC staff to include other financial offerings from already public companies. So a new issuance of stock or another class of securities can be reviewed confidentially before going out to the market. This allows companies to test the waters on follow-on financings, spin-offs, and other capital market transactions.

There’s no question that companies are staying private longer. Private markets are incredibly deep, driven both by megafundraises from the largest venture capital firms, crossover investing from hedge funds, and plenty of activity from hyperscalers and other strategic investors. The end result is that the public markets have been losing companies to private markets for years, and if we want ordinary investors to own the next generation of tech companies, we need to make going public less painful. Confidential filings don’t fully obscure investor protections, because all the traditional data still needs to be released before money changes hands, but it speeds up time to market and increases coordination between private companies and their future shareholders in the public markets.

— John

Clip Spotlight

The Rotten Tomatoes prediction market trader who turned down an offer from one of the world’s biggest hedge funds

Hedge funds are trying and failing to hire prediction market sharps.

“We are just getting crushed by these sharps,” said Susquehanna’s Jeff Yass.

Yesterday on TBPN, Journalist Adam Iscoe told the story of a guy who’s made 7 figures trading Rotten Tomatoes betting markets, and rejected an offer from SIG:

“He said, ‘Not only am I just making a killing, but I can do things that a big institutional fund can’t do.’”

“He’s a Rotten Tomatoes trader. He trades how a film’s going to do on Rotten Tomatoes. He’s made 7 figures, easily. He’s building models, scraping websites, and he’s doing things that SIG, through their corporate policies, maybe wouldn’t allow.”

“And he asked in the interview, ‘Could I do this technique?’ And they said, ‘Yeah, probably not.’”

“And this guy, he self-describes as a ‘dips**t from the Midwest.’ He’s like, ‘I didn’t go to an Ivy League school, and I’m able to outcompete Wall Street with a $600 Lenovo laptop.’”