Good morning. It's Tuesday, May twelfth, 2026.
SpaceX has completed the full wet dress rehearsal for the first Block 3 Starship stack — Booster 19 with Ship 39 — at Starbase's new Pad 2. That's the complete fueling and countdown simulation, no engines lit, but it's the last major milestone before flight. Navigational warnings have been updated to No Earlier Than May 15th, with some sources pointing to Friday at 6:30 PM Eastern. This is the first flight of Block 3: Raptor 3 engines, integrated interstage, and the inaugural launch from Starbase's second pad. The flight plan: roughly 90-minute around-the-world suborbital trajectory with a splashdown near Hawaii. After the deluge system explosion during testing earlier this month that pushed the timeline back, this WDR completion is a genuine green light.
A new IBM report dropped Monday with a striking number: 76 percent of more than 2,000 organizations surveyed have established a Chief AI Officer role. That's up from just 26 percent last year — nearly triple in twelve months. The message: AI is no longer an IT initiative, it's a boardroom-level transformation. Major institutions including HSBC and Lloyds Banking Group have all appointed CAIOs this year. The report also found 59 percent of companies expect their CHRO's influence to grow — because AI is rewriting org charts from the top down. Gartner analysts are split on whether this becomes universal, but the trend is unmistakable. Companies without a CAIO are already behind.
Wall Street is watching SoftBank this Wednesday. Analysts expect roughly 236 billion yen in profit for the January-to-March quarter, driven largely by the OpenAI stake. But the debt math is getting uncomfortable. SoftBank had planned a 10 billion dollar margin loan backed by its OpenAI shares, but Bloomberg reports creditors are hesitating and the deal has been downsized. When the lenders who financed a 40 billion dollar bridge loan last year start getting cold feet, that's a signal worth noting. Full FY2025 results drop tomorrow morning Tokyo time.
The world's largest autonomous systems expo kicks off at Huntington Place, running through Thursday. Over 8,500 professionals from 60 countries. On the floor: AeroNet EdgeNode debuting — a universal air traffic management platform for unmanned aircraft. And on the defense side, HDT Robotics just delivered Hunter WOLF unmanned ground vehicles to the US Army 10th Mountain Division at Fort Polk. Theme for the year: autonomy isn't a prototype anymore. It's in active deployment, and the supply chain is maturing fast.
That's all for today. Stay curious.