The 'people’s airline,' SpaceXAI, and the Enterprise AI Race

Equity

TechCrunch

Entrepreneurship, Business News, News, Business, Technology

4.2 • 372 Ratings

🗓️ 8 May 2026

⏱️ 32 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Everyone wants a piece of the enterprise AI pie, and this week, we saw a string of companies making their moves. From Anthropic and OpenAI announcing new joint ventures targeting enterprise AI deployment to SAP dropping $1B on German AI startup Prior Labs, it's becoming clear that if you're a startup building enterprise tools, you're likely an acquisition target. On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, hosts Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O'Kane dig into the week's enterprise AI deals, the xAI-Anthropic compute arrangement, and what it all means ahead of what could be a big IPO season. Listen to the full episode to hear about: Why a TikToker is trying to crowdfund the purchase of Spirit Airlines, and whether anyone really loves Spirit enough to make it work Why Katie Haun's venture fund and Andreessen Horowitz are both raising billions to back a crypto comeback Aurora Innovation's milestone commercial trucking contract with a Berkshire Hathaway subsidiary, announced shortly after we caught up with Aurora’s CEO, Chris Urmson, at HumanX The Pentagon's latest AI spending spree, inking deals with Nvidia, Microsoft, and AWS Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod. Chapters: 00:00 Intro 00:31 Spirit Airlines & the crowdfunded "people's airline" 03:25 xAI x Anthropic deal: is xAI becoming a NEO cloud? 13:47 Haun Ventures & a16z's crypto comeback 17:48 Aurora Innovation lands a commercial trucking contract 19:27 A big week for enterprise AI: who's actually making money? 26:45 The Pentagon's AI spending spree 31:04 Outro Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Right, home from work, walk the dog, kids are back.
0:05.0	Mom!
0:06.0	Up the stairs for something.
0:08.0	Ugh, back down, no idea what I went up for.
0:12.0	Mom, what's for dinner?
0:14.0	Chop, sizzle, done.
0:17.0	Hello Fresh can't slow life down, but it makes bringing everyone together around the table a whole lot easier.
0:23.4	So its phones down, forks up.
0:25.6	Hello, Fresh. Bring back dinner time.
0:29.8	Hello.
0:30.7	Hello and welcome back to Equity TechCrunch's podcast about the business of startups.
0:35.6	Today is Friday, May 8th. And I'm Kirsten Koresak, transportation editor here at TechCrunch, and I'm joined, as always, by our senior reporter, Sean O'Kane, and weekend editor, Anthony Ha. Spirit Airlines went bankrupt. It's folded. It's done. But I wanted to mention it because there is an effort to bring it back. And Anthony,
0:56.6	I'm wondering if you made a pledge on top. I have not made a pledge yet, or at least I'm not
1:04.7	admitting to it on this podcast. But yeah, as you said, there was this announcement that Spirit
1:09.6	Airlines is going bankrupt.
1:11.1	And, I mean, it seemed like a very, very sudden process.
1:13.3	People were stranded, had to, like, frantically book new flights, all of that.
1:17.8	And then this TikToker, Hunter Peterson, said, hey, what if we all got together and crowdfunded
1:23.7	and bought Spirit Airlines and turned it into the people's Airline, which, I mean, I find
1:29.5	for interesting on multiple levels, but one of them is I don't necessarily think of Spirit as a
1:34.2	particularly beloved airline. It's not like, if I was trying to save an airline, Spirit is not
1:39.5	necessarily the first on the top of my list. What would you say? Which one is savable? Which one is
	...

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