Good morning, and happy Fourth. The desks are dark, the grills are lit, and the only thing trading today is hot dogs, so consider this your week-ahead briefing wrapped in a sparkler.

While America queued for fireworks, Texas queued up a subpoena. Attorney General Ken Paxton opened an investigation into StubHub after a wave of fans said their FIFA World Cup tickets were canceled days, and in some cases hours, before kickoff. The complaints point to "ghost ticketing," where a seller lists seats it doesn't actually hold, pockets the money, and bails when it can't deliver; StubHub blames "transfer problems" on FIFA's own platform. Either way, thousands of people paid full price for a seat that turned out to be Schrödinger's.

The World Cup was supposed to be the resale market's Super Bowl. Turns out the hardest part of selling a ticket is having one.

Markets

Elon Musk spent 20 years defying gravity. On Tuesday, the market's version pulls him in anyway.

SpaceX (SPCX) will join the Nasdaq-100 before the opening bell on Tuesday, July 7, a fast-track entry that comes just 15 trading days after last month's record initial public offering. Under the index's revamped rules, the roughly $2 trillion company skips the usual seasoning wait and lands straight in the benchmark that sits underneath the wildly popular Invesco QQQ ETF. Every fund pegged to the index now has to own it, whether the manager likes the valuation or not.

That is the quiet superpower of index inclusion: it manufactures a buyer that cannot say no. Analysts estimate passive funds will have to scoop up around $4.3 billion of stock as they rebalance around the change, a mechanical bid that lands regardless of what anyone thinks the rocket company is worth.

Here is the twist in the flight plan: the very same Tuesday, the underwriters' quiet period expires, freeing the 23 banks that ran the deal to publish opinions for the first time. So the automatic buying and the first real analyst scorecards arrive on the same morning.

The deal itself was a monster. SpaceX raised about $85.7 billion in June, the largest listing on record, and the stock has behaved exactly like its hardware ever since.

Not every gatekeeper is waving SpaceX through. Nasdaq fast-tracked the entry, but S&P Dow Jones signaled it will hold the company to its existing eligibility requirements, meaning a berth in the S&P 500, and the far larger pool of money that tracks it, is not automatic. Underwriters including Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan are expected to initiate coverage once the quiet period lifts.

Forced Landing: The mechanical bid is real, but it is also a one-time event, not a verdict. Once the rebalance clears, SpaceX trades on the same fundamentals every other name does, and Tuesday is also the day the sell-side finally gets to argue about whether a $2 trillion valuation on roughly $19 billion of 2025 revenue makes sense. The index gives Musk a captive audience for a day. Keeping it is the harder orbit.

Semiconductors

If artificial intelligence is a gold rush, Micron just started pouring concrete for a bigger mine.

Micron (MU) broke ground Saturday on a major expansion of its Hiroshima campus in western Japan, a project it pegs at roughly ¥1.5 trillion, or about $9.3 billion. CEO Sanjay Mehrotra turned the ceremonial dirt on a second fabrication plant built to churn out the high-bandwidth memory, or HBM, that Nvidia's AI accelerators inhale by the stack.

The timing is pointed. Micron is committing another building's worth of capacity even as the chip trade got dragged out back this week, with the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index down roughly 12% to start the quarter on fresh questions about whether AI spending has run ahead of itself. Micron's answer, in concrete and rebar, is that the demand is real enough to build against.

Memory is the part of the AI supply chain that quietly went from commodity to kingmaker. HBM sells out years in advance now, and the companies that make it are racing to add clean-room floor space before the next node arrives.

By the numbers:

Foundation Work: The gap between Wall Street's mood and Micron's capex plan is the whole story. Traders can reprice the AI trade in an afternoon; a fab takes years to pour, wire and qualify, so a groundbreaking today is a bet on demand three summers out. If the AI buildout keeps eating memory at the current clip, capacity like this becomes a moat. If the skeptics dumping chip stocks this week are right, it becomes a very expensive monument. Either way, the shovels are in the ground.

Artificial Intelligence

Trust is the one thing you can't ship in a software update, and Alibaba just decided it had run out.

Alibaba is barring employees from using Anthropic's Claude Code starting July 10, and has told staff to delete Anthropic's models, including Sonnet, Opus and Fable, from their work machines. In an internal notice, the Chinese tech giant said Claude Code had been found to carry "back-door risks" and added it to a list of high-risk software with security vulnerabilities.

The trigger, per reporting from The Information and others, was code that could detect whether a user was based in China or tied to a Chinese AI lab. A recent version of Claude Code reportedly checked for Chinese time zones or proxies linked to firms such as Alibaba, Baidu and ByteDance, and adjusted its behavior accordingly.

This is less a bug report than a divorce filing, and it caps months of open hostility between the two camps.

Border Control: The two-way suspicion is the point. What looks like a corporate IT memo is really the software layer of the US–China tech split hardening into policy, one deleted app at a time. For the enterprises picking AI vendors, the lesson is that a coding assistant is now infrastructure with a passport, and its nationality can get it banned. Expect more walls, more homegrown substitutes, and fewer tools that travel freely across the line.

Landlord Era: Meta (META) is building a cloud business, "Meta Compute," to rent out spare AI capacity, and SemiAnalysis reports it is in final talks to give Anthropic private Claude instances, a Bedrock-style offering that would sit alongside capacity deals reportedly worth $1.25 billion a month from Anthropic and $920 million from Google.

Opening Bell: Earnings season cracks open Thursday when PepsiCo reports with its shares roughly flat on the year and GLP-1 drugs nibbling at snack demand, followed Friday by Delta Air Lines, where options are pricing a move of about 5.8% on its read of summer travel.

There is nothing on the tape today but barbecue smoke, so we'll leave you with the shape of the week ahead. Markets reopen Monday to a services-sector reading and Wednesday's Fed minutes, SpaceX gets adopted by the index funds on Tuesday, and the banks that sold it finally get to grade their own homework the same afternoon. Micron is building for a boom the tape spent all week doubting, and Alibaba is deleting the software the rest of us are learning to lean on. It's a market arguing with itself about whether the AI trade is a foundation or a fireworks show. Fitting, on a day built for both. Enjoy the sparklers, America.

That's the tape. We'll see you at the open. — AllThingsWallSt