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What Microsoft’s 10-Q Says About OpenAI
Buried on page nine of Microsoft’s 10-Q for the quarter ended March 31, 2026 is a paragraph worthy of attention. Why? What does it reveal? A lot.
For starters, Microsoft now holds approximately 27 percent of OpenAI on an as-converted basis, accounted for under the equity method. The total funding commitment is $13 billion, of which $11.8 billion has been funded as of March 31, 2026. The October 2025 OpenAI recapitalization produced a dilution gain. Microsoft recorded $5.9 billion of net gains from OpenAI investments over the nine months, primarily from that dilution gain. The prior nine-month period reflected $2.7 billion of net losses on the same investment.
In plain English, even though Microsoft owns less of OpenAI, that smaller stake is worth more, and it produced a gain. Why? Because the implied valuation of OpenAI rose faster than Microsoft’s ownership percentage fell. Microsoft booked the markup. Money for nothing,
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Memory Is the Machine
It is late April 2026. If you want to get a Mac you want, you cannot go into any Apple Store and pick the Mac you want.
A Mac mini with 64GB of RAM, ordered today, ships in sixteen to eighteen weeks. A Mac Studio with 256GB of RAM ships in four to five months. The 128GB and 256GB Mac Studio configurations are listed as “currently unavailable” on Apple’s online store. Apple removed the 512GB Mac Studio option entirely earlier this year. As of last week, even the base $599 Mac mini is sold out.
Have you wondered why?
The easy answers include a global memory shortage thanks to the AI boom. And that Apple has devices that are good for AI work.
Both are true. And yet, that is not the whole story.
For instance, if you want a maxed-out M5 Max MacBook Pro with 128GB of RAM and
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Software Eats Its Own
Another day another deal which makes you question the meaning of money itself. SpaceX said this morning it has an option to buy Cursor for $60 billion later this year, or pay the coding startup $10 billion for the work they are already doing together, Elon Musk said on his bully pulpit. Chasing the “code” opportunity has been top priority inside xAI, so this adds up.
SpaceX isn’t alone.
Over at Google, Sergey Brin has come out of semi-retirement to personally drive a DeepMind “strike team” whose job is to catch Anthropic in coding. (He wants Gemini to start writing Gemini. Recursive, that.) OpenAI just rolled out a Codex revamp last week with desktop control, memory, and multi-agent workflows aimed at the same target.
And they are all coming to the same conclusion because they are looking at Anthropic with lustful jealousy.
Anthropic says Claude Code is now growing revenues
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What to Read This Weekend
I am sending this out a day early as I have a new mystery book I want to finish this weekend, uninterrupted. Priorities, people!
Also, I have decided that this weekend’s reading list has to be decidedly less technology. I mean, we get enough of it already. There is a lot of great non-tech writing these days, and it is worth highlighting. Plus you can get your heart’s fill of “AI” writing from me.
What to Read This Weekend
Corruption, Crime & Cricket Canada | CBC / The Fifth Estate
A months-long Fifth Estate investigation has found that a violent criminal group have been threatening cricket players in British Columbia to influence team selection all the way up to the national squad. This is scary and sobering. Great investigation, regardless whether you love, understand or care about cricket.
3D-Printed Homes, an Abandoned $590,000 Deposit, the FBI | ProPublica
Two men
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Eat Your Words
The New Yorker articulated something that has been on my mind for a long time. AI’s self-inflicted messaging crisis. This is as clear an example of my long standing argument that words have consequences.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wants to “de-escalate” the rhetoric around artificial intelligence, days after a Molotov cocktail hit the gate of his San Francisco mansion and bullets were fired at his home. He is certainly the most high-profile of targets, but there have been others who have earned the ire of those who are threatened by AI and the rhetoric around it.
The New Yorker’s Kyle Chayka says that Altman is at fault himself. After all he did say that AI would “most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime there’ll be great companies created.” You cannot spend years telling people your product is an existential threat and then ask them
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Newbird.AI! Or Loony.AI
Every speculative era has its favorite suffix. In the 1960s it was “tronics.” In the 1990s it was “dot-com.” Today, of course, it is “AI.” Nothing typifies a crazy, gambling, speculative degenerate economy like our present moment than what happened to Allbirds today.
The San Francisco maker of wool sneakers, once valued at more than $4 billion, sold its brand and intellectual property last month to brand management company American Exchange Group for $39 million. The stock had fallen more than 99 percent since its 2021 Nasdaq IPO. And then it decided to pivot to AI compute infrastructure, with a new name: NewBird AI.
An unknown investor did a $50 million convertible. Every filing and press release describes the counterparty only as “an institutional investor.” Maybe we will find it in the proxy statement, due before the May 18 shareholder vote. The press release itself reads like the white papers
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Human Error is OK! Machine Madness is a No-No! Why?
We forgive human error as if it were weather. We treat machine error as if it were heresy. That thought has kept nagging at me as I read about three recent technology screw-ups. Anthropic exposed unreleased files. Anthropic then shipped 512,000 lines of internal code, roadmap and all, to the public npm registry. Axios got hit through a compromised maintainer account. Different incidents, same explanation. Human error.
And that left me with a question. Why are we able to absorb big technology failures when they are blamed on people, but respond so differently when the failures come from machines?
I mean, we fret a lot about AI error. There is a whole cottage industry around AI errors. Debates rage about the risks of machines making decisions, writing code, and running autonomously. No one can deny the gravity of the issues and their wide-ranging consequences. Certainly not me. That said, the
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What To Read This Weekend,
It was a week of mostly quiet work, that involved focusing on some personal matters, whether it was paperwork (tax day is approaching) or some annual medical check ups, like keeping tabs on my vision. Life was mundane. And that was reflected in my writing this week as well. Just a solitary essay and two short notes. Even my reading was sporadic and intermittent.
Here are a few articles that I did read, and thought were worth sharing. Hope you get to enjoy them this weekend.
The Biggest Scandal in Chess — Vanity Fair
I am looking forward to Ben Mezrich’s new book, Checkmate. Vanity Fair’s excerpt about the time 19-year-old Hans Niemann beats Magnus Carlsen in 2022 has me waiting in anticipation. Chess is brutal. (There is a documentary on Magnus on TubiTV and PlutoTV, if you want to watch something.)
Leave Big Tech Behind — The Guardian
It
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