AI Boom Reality Check, Jobs Boom, Cybertruck Scrapped | Praveer Melwani, Keller Cliffton, Rahul Sonwalkar, Max Siegelman, D.A. Wallach

Wall Street sheds $2.5tn as the AI trade cracks

Funding and deals

• Anthropic. The AI lab's rumoured IPO valuation slid from $2tn to $1.2-1.5tn, with Polymarket at 49% odds of a listing by 24 November and Claude pegging fair value at $500-800bn.
• Zipline. The drone delivery company raised $1.5bn at a $21.5bn valuation.
• Thinking Machines. A leak cited on the show suggests the AI lab is closing about $5bn at a $40bn valuation.

Guest interviews

• Keller Cliffton, CEO of Zipline. Cliffton said Zipline's national Walmart expansion starts with 300 supercenters, which he called the largest autonomous vehicle contract in human history. Its 35 US sites run 6am to 11pm every day, and the company aims for a million deliveries per metro per year. An Uber Eats partnership targets a million deliveries a day, with LA next year, and Cliffton said Zipline must build 50,000 aircraft a year.
• Praveer Melwani, CFO of Figma. Figma posted $391m of quarterly revenue, up 43%, with 131% net dollar retention, and raised full-year operating profit guidance by $30m. The Figma agent went GA on 6 October and lifted credit consumption 2.5 times by month end, with an MCP server above a million weekly active users and 20-plus MCP partners. Melwani said some engineers once spent tens of thousands of dollars on tasks that now cost a fraction.
• D.A. Wallach, cofounder and general partner of Time BioVentures. Wallach said medicine is becoming preventive and the bottleneck in drug development is translation, not ideas, with AI cutting development time from twelve years to eleven and then ten. The average blockbuster sells about $3bn a year, so every day saved is worth millions. He said China's cheap, ubiquitous AI strategy matters more than the hype, and called peptides and promises to cure all disease in ten years mostly snake oil.
• Max Siegelman, founder of Siegelman Stable. Siegelman Stable started in 2020 with $300 of hats and now runs a five-week Soho pop-up. The brand licenses with the Knicks and Mitchell & Ness, releases two things a month, and has worked the Super Bowl with Don Julio 1942 for three or four years.
• Rahul Sonwalkar, founder and CEO of Julius AI. Julius AI built its Deep Finance benchmark with Evercore, JPMorgan, UBS and Harvard Business School experts. Sonwalkar said he does not yet know how it will make money, and that Thinking Machines' Inkling 2 Small leads American open source models behind only Kimi.

News

• Wall Street loses $2.5tn in AI rout. Tech stocks fell 5% on Thursday in the worst rout since June 2026, before the NASDAQ bounced 1.38%. The selloff followed midterm wins for AI skeptics, and Korea's index is down to about 5,000 from a 9,114 peak.