📰On The Record – 17th June 2026 Edition

Good morning. Wednesday has arrived with the energy of a market that can't quite make up its mind — big bets are being placed on what comes next (AR glasses! AI security! rocket ships worth trillions!), while the old economic forces that never really went away are making themselves heard again. Somewhere between Elon Musk's latest world-domination milestone and a price index nobody wanted to see, today's business world feels like it's simultaneously sprinting toward the future and tripping over the present. The visionaries are betting everything on the next computing platform. The policymakers are quietly panicking about who controls the intelligence that powers it. And the Fed is staring at an inflation number that just got awkward. Buckle in — here's what happened.

SpaceX overtook Amazon to become the world's fifth most valuable company, with its valuation briefly touching the $3 trillion mark. That's not a typo. A private rocket company — one that, not long ago, was blowing up prototypes on a Texas launchpad — now sits in the same conversation as Apple, Microsoft, and Nvidia. The move was fuelled by surging investor confidence in SpaceX's AI ambitions alongside its aerospace dominance. What this really signals is a reordering of what "the most powerful companies in the world" actually look like. We're not in a FAANG era anymore. Read full story →

The must read articles that are moving the business landscape today.

US and European officials held discussions about how to guarantee reliable access to advanced AI models, prompted by a dispute involving Anthropic — the AI company behind Claude. The talks reflect a deepening anxiety among policymakers: the world's most critical AI infrastructure is concentrated in the hands of a very small number of American companies, and what happens if that access gets cut off — through legal battles, geopolitics, or commercial decisions — is a question nobody has a clean answer to. AI sovereignty is quietly becoming one of the defining policy challenges of the decade. Read full story →

Snap unveiled its first consumer-facing augmented reality glasses, called Specs, priced at $2,195 — which, yes, is a lot to ask for hardware from the company that makes the dog-ears filter. CEO Evan Spiegel positioned the launch as a long bet on AR becoming the next major computing platform, replacing the smartphone the way the smartphone replaced everything before it. The glasses run on dual Snapdragon processors, offer navigation and AI assistance, and give you around four hours of battery life before you need to plug back into the present. Investors are sceptical. Spiegel is not. Read full story →

SoftBank launched an AI-powered cybersecurity service in Japan called "Patching as a Service," built through its joint venture with OpenAI. The service is designed to help organisations find and fix vulnerabilities before bad actors — increasingly armed with their own AI tools — can exploit them. The focus is on protecting Japan's critical infrastructure, and CEO Masayoshi Son framed it as a defensive weapon in what he called a growing cybersecurity arms race. The launch deepens one of the most consequential tech partnerships of the moment and signals that AI's next big commercial frontier might not be productivity software — it might be security. Read full story →

US import prices rose 1.9% in May from the previous month, and 6.7% year-on-year — the steepest annual jump since August 2022. The surge was driven primarily by fuel costs and capital goods, with Middle East tensions pushing oil prices higher and feeding broader inflationary pressure. The number landed harder than economists expected and has reignited the debate about whether the Federal Reserve will need to hold interest rates higher for longer. Economists are still cautious about predicting new rate hikes, but nobody's racing to bet on cuts either. Read full story →

A daily score of business conditions (scored out of 100), with a breakdown of what’s driving it.

The Daily Business Index slipped to 49.1 on Wednesday — just below the neutral line of 50 — as markets paused after Monday's Iran peace rally to focus on something bigger: the Federal Reserve's first interest rate decision under new chairman Kevin Warsh. Oil kept falling, with Brent crude dropping below $80 a barrel for the first time since the conflict began, but that relief was offset by US inflation still running at 4.2% — a three-year high — and a new survey showing American small businesses at their most pessimistic since late 2024. The day captured the mood of a global economy on the edge of a turning point, but not yet through it.

The one piece of business jargon demystified this week, so you can nod along with confidence.

What it means: AI sovereignty refers to a country's ability to access, control, and operate advanced AI systems independently — without relying on foreign companies or governments to keep the lights on. Think of it like energy independence, but for algorithms. Today's story about US-European talks following the Anthropic dispute is a textbook example of why it matters: when the world's critical AI infrastructure lives inside a handful of Silicon Valley companies, every government that depends on it is, to some degree, at their mercy.

Wednesday is reminding us that the future and the present have a complicated relationship. Trillion-dollar rockets, $2,000 glasses, AI systems governments can't quite get their hands around — and underneath all of it, an inflation print that suggests the boring macroeconomic reality hasn't finished with us yet. The big bets are real. So are the constraints. The most interesting businesses right now are the ones trying to win on both fronts at once. Good luck out there.