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R.J. Scaringe, Rivian’s 35-year-old CEO, introduces his company’s R1T all-electric pickup and all-electric R1S SUV at Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, November 27, 2018.
Mike Blake | Reuters

Rivian Automotive, the electric vehicle maker backed by Amazon and Ford, priced its IPO on Tuesday at $78 a share, according to a person familiar with the matter who asked not to be named because the sale hasn’t been announced yet. The deal values Rivian at $66.5 billion.

Should underwriters exercise their full purchase option, the company will have a market cap of over $68 billion. The stock will trade on the Nasdaq under ticker symbol RIVN.

Reuters and the Wall Street Journal reported on the IPO price earlier. A Rivian spokesperson declined to comment.

Last week, Rivian increased the expected price range to between $72 and $74 from a previous range of $57 to $62. At its $78 offer price, Rivian is already worth almost as much as Ford ($79 billion) and General Motors ($85 billion). That’s all before the company has even started generating real revenue.

Rivian said in its prospectus that it will lose up to $1.28 billion in the third quarter, while revenue will range from zero to $1 million. It’s the latest EV company to attract hefty investor capital at a stratospheric price without yet proving that it has a sustainable business model.

Lucid Motors is worth $72.5 billion even though the company just began production of its first cars. Nikola’s market cap was higher than Ford’s at one point last year, despite the company having no revenue. It’s now worth less than $6 billion, after a short-selling firm accused the company of making “an Ocean of Lies.”

Investors are continuously trying to hop on the next Tesla. Elon Musk’s company topped $1 trillion in market value last month and is now the fifth most-valuable U.S. company.

While Rivian is still effectively pre-revenue, the company said in its prospectus that it has a backlog of 55,400 pre-orders for its R1T and R1S electric vehicles. The R1T is a truck that starts at $67,500, and the R1S is an SUV starting at $70,000, according to Rivian’s website.

The company said it expects to fill those orders by the end of 2023. Additionally, Amazon has ordered 100,000 vehicles to be delivered by Rivian by 2030, and the companies plan to have 10,000 new Rivian-Amazon delivery vehicles on the road as early as next year. Amazon is pushing its fleet to renewable energy sources, and said in 2019 that it was purchasing thousands of vehicles from Rivian.

Amazon, which invested more than $1.3 billion into Rivian, owned 22.4% of the company’s Class A shares prior to the IPO. That stake is worth about $12.5 billion at the offer price. Ford owned 14.4% of Class A stock before the offering, a stake now valued at $8 billion.

Rivian says its factory in Illinois has the capacity to produce up to 150,000 vehicles per year. The company had over 6,000 employees as of the end of June.

— CNBC’s Lora Kolodny and Annie Palmer contributed to this report

WATCH: Should you believe the Rivian hype?

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Palantir sues former employees, says Percepta AI CEO set out to ‘pillage’ top developers

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Palantir sues former employees, says Percepta AI CEO set out to 'pillage' top developers

Palantir Technologies CEO Alex Karp attends the Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit on the campus of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, July 15, 2025.

Andrew Caballero-reynolds | Afp | Getty Images

Palantir expanded its lawsuit against two former employees on Thursday to include the CEO of their new artificial intelligence startup, Percepta AI.

In the suit, Palantir alleged that Percepta CEO and co-founder Hirsh Jain, co-founder Radha Jain, and a third employee, Joanna Cohen, violated their non-solicitation agreements, hiring top talent to create a competitive business.

Palantir and Percepta didn’t immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.

The three defendants are accused of attempting to “poach” executives and developers from their former company and “plunder Palantir’s valuable intellectual property.”

Cohen and Radha Jain, who were named in the original lawsuit filed in October, were previously senior engineers at Palantir. Hirsh Jain, an executive responsible for the company’s healthcare portfolio, was added as another defendant in the latest complaint.

Palantir said the defendants were “entrusted” with the company’s “crown jewels,” including source code, customer workflows and proprietary customer engagement strategies.

The former employees “brazenly disregarded their contractual and legal commitments to Palantir and instead chose a path of deception and unjust competition,” the plaintiffs said in the document, which was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

Cohen and Radha Jain denied the initial allegations in a November filing, and agreed to stop working for Percepta during the proceedings.

The suit accused Hirsh Jain, who resigned from Palantir in August 2024, of an “aggressive campaign” to recruit other employees to join Percepta, and said the startup has already hired at least 10 former Palantir employees.

An alleged message written by Hirsh Jain in November 2024 read, “I’m down to pillage the best devs at palantir when they’re at their maximum richness.”

The complaint says Rhada Jain wrote another message saying, “God thinking about poaching is so fun.”

Palantir, which was co-founded by Peter Thiel, CEO Alex Karp and others, builds analytics software for companies and government agencies, including the U.S. military. The company’s stock price has soared more than tenfold since the end of 2023, lifting its market cap close to $450 billion.

Palantir also accused Cohen of sending herself highly confidential documents shortly after announcing her resignation from the company in March. Cohen allegedly took photos of sensitive information, the suit said, and downloaded the files onto her personal phone.

“At Percepta, they seek to succeed not through old-fashioned ingenuity and competition, but through outright theft and deceit,” Palantir said in the filing.

Among other things, Palantir is asking for the defendants to be forced to return any confidential information in their possession, and to avoid working at Percepta or venture backer General Catalyst for 12 months from the time of an order.

WATCH: AI stocks still a ‘table pounder opportunity’

'This is an arms race playing out,' says Wedbush’s Dan Ives on Nvidia

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Trump ‘sells out’ U.S. national security with Nvidia chip sales to China, Sen. Warren says

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Trump 'sells out' U.S. national security with Nvidia chip sales to China, Sen. Warren says

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., speaks during a Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee confirmation hearing on President Donald Trump’s nominees to lead the National Economic Council, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and Federal Housing Finance Agency, on Capitol Hill in Washington, Feb. 27, 2025.

Annabelle Gordon | Reuters

President Donald Trump‘s decision to let Nvidia sell its advanced H200 artificial intelligence chips to China “sells out American national security,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., said Thursday.

Warren also reiterated her call for Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang to testify before Congress about the agreement, along with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.

The senator’s fiery remarks on the Senate floor came three days after Trump announced on social media that the U.S. semiconductor giant Nvidia could sell the chips to “approved customers” in China, so long as the U.S. gets a 25% cut of the revenues.

The announcement drew concerns both from Democrats and some of Trump’s Republican allies, who have been vocal about protecting America’s hardware advantage over China in the race to AI superiority.

Warren, in Thursday’s remarks, urged Congress to pass bipartisan legislation that “reins in this administration” by imposing new chip export restrictions. Critics of the bill say it could undermine U.S. chipmakers’ competitiveness.

The Trump administration knows that China gaining access to the chips, which have previously been subject to export restrictions, “poses a serious threat to our technological leadership and national security,” Warren said on the Senate floor.

She noted that shortly before Trump announced his decision on the H200 chips on Monday, the Department of Justice touted a crackdown touted a crackdown on a “major China-linked AI tech smuggling network.”

Sen. Elizabeth Warren: Economy and Fed still have a lot of 'red flashing lights'

“So why did the President make this bad deal that sells out the American economy and sells out American national security?” she asked. “It’s simple: In the Trump administration, money talks.”

“Mr. Huang understands that in this administration, being able to cozy up to Donald Trump might be the most important corporate CEO skill of all,” Warren said.

She pointed to Huang attending a $1 million-per-plate dinner at Trump’s Florida home Mar-a-Lago, and Nvidia’s later donations to the president’s under-construction White House ballroom.

“Those are just the most obvious possible reasons to cut this deal,” Warren said, “and who knows what else Mr. Huang might have done behind closed doors to persuade President Trump and Secretary Lutnick into making this dangerous concession.”

CNBC has reached out to Nvidia for comment on the senator’s remarks.

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Musk says SpaceX report of 2026 IPO is ‘accurate’

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Musk says SpaceX report of 2026 IPO is 'accurate'

The Axiom-4 mission, with a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft and Falcon 9 rocket, lifts off from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, June 25, 2025.

Giorgio Viera | AFP | Getty Images

Elon Musk responded to the latest report that SpaceX is going public in 2026, calling it “accurate.”

The article from Ars Technica’s Eric Berger examined why this is the right time for Musk’s space venture to IPO, and said the rise of artificial intelligence and opportunities for data centers in space play an important role in the move.

“As usual, Eric is accurate,” Musk wrote on his social media platform X in response to Berger’s article.

Musk’s comment comes after multiple news outlets said that SpaceX was looking to go public in 2026, with The Information and Wall Street Journal both reporting last week on the likeliness of an IPO, as well as a new share sale valuing the company at about $800 billion.

Bloomberg said this week that the company was pursuing an IPO in 2026 and is looking to raise more than $30 billion.

Over the weekend, Musk said on X that reports of the $800 billion valuation were “not accurate” and addressed the amount his company gets from NASA.

“While I have great fondness for @NASA, they will constitute less than 5% of our revenue next year,” Musk wrote. “Commercial Starlink is by far our largest contributor to revenue. Some people have claimed that SpaceX gets ‘subsidized’ by NASA. This is absolutely false.”

SpaceX didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Heading into 2026, SpaceX and Tesla CEO Musk look set to gain a powerful ally in the government’s space program.

Read more CNBC tech news

Jared Isaacman, who paid millions to lead two private spaceflights with SpaceX in 2021 and 2024, is likely to become the next NASA administrator and was voted through committee on Monday.

He now heads to a full Senate vote for confirmation.

SpaceX is a key contractor for NASA, but acting administrator Sean Duffy has criticized Musk’s space operation for being behind on the Artemis moon trip, which has seen several delays.

Musk lashed out at Duffy, accusing him on X of “trying to kill NASA!”

Duffy, who is the secretary of transportation, was handed the reins of the space program this summer by President Donald Trump, after he pulled Isaacman’s nomination following a clash with Musk.

Trump said at the time that Isaacman’s relationship with Musk represented a conflict of interest.

The renomination of Isaacman at the beginning of November signaled that the relationship between Trump and Musk was on the mend, and the Tesla CEO’s attendance at a White House dinner later that month solidified the return to camaraderie.

— CNBC’s Lora Kolodny contributed to this report.

WATCH: How SpaceX is fueling Elon Musk’s wealth surge

How SpaceX is fueling Elon Musk’s wealth surge

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