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It’s all in a stock that may very well be near its zenith when this closes (or maybe not. This is so far past fundamentals it’s impossible to tell).

They’re spending Monopoly money.

It also seems like SpaceX is poised to Hoover up all of Elons companies so it’s might not be “just a space company” for long.

The company that just IPOed is already overwhelmingly "X AI" financially, regardless of the fact that it says "Space X" in the marketing. Whether SpaceX also buys Tesla is hardly even going to move the needle.
Elon's award is tied to growing Tesla's market cap - it's pretty transparent that he's just trying to ball-of-mud together everything he can to hit that target and grab the bag.
Yep, bundle it all together, rename the whole company X (for added confusion), get a few final pay outs in the hundred of billions if not trillions and then Elon flees to Argentina as the whole house of cards crumbles.
Everything will be folded in "X" eventually, anyway.
Yup - given that it’s $60bn of stock, now is an excellent time to do it, as the current valuation isn’t even irrational. And I say that as someone who believes they have great long term prospects.
> They’re spending Monopoly money.

They also seem to be desperate to buy their way into a monopoly, even though the company itself has a long track record of failing to deliver anything noteworthy.

> Stock that may very well be near its zenith when this closes (or maybe not. This is so far past fundamentals it’s impossible to tell).

Nah, not in a bubble or anything at all.

> It’s all in a stock that may very well be near its zenith when this closes

No, it is not. This is not legal or financial advice, but I believe the stock could easily rise 2.5x - not because of its current or future financial condition, but because it is run by what may be the most skilled fraudster our planet has ever breed. Charles Ponzi himself couldn't have pulled this off. While most CEOs are careful about what they publicly say or "predict," Musk's companies are fueled by increasingly fantastical projections. The consequences have amounted to some $1.5 million in SEC fines that, relative to the value created, were negligible - and that was under the previous administration. The current one won't be any more aggressive. The closest comparison I can think of is Trevor Milton and his famous "electric" truck that was filmed rolling downhill under its own momentum. He went to prison for that, although he was later pardoned by Trump. Many people have lost fortunes betting against Tesla based on fundamentals. SpaceX's shareholder list includes so many influential and powerful names, including people closely connected to the current administration, that I find it hard to imagine the stock being allowed to fail in any meaningful percentage. Obviously I'm exaggerating when I say the government would send agents door-to-door to collect valuables from American households to plug any hole in the balance sheet before allowing the stock to fall significantly. But that's honestly closer to how protected I think the company is than what traditional financial analysis would suggest. I'm nobody special, just someone with about $1.8 million in a stock portfolio. Yet this thing called SpaceX stock gives ordinary investors like me a chance to ride alongside the biggest players on their way to even larger fortunes. They are guaranteed not to lose money, and to me its not personal.

The total addressable market (TAM) for SpaceX is finite. There are only so many nation-states and large corporations that want to launch payloads into orbit.

And even if their internet service provider is uniquely capable for now, it only fills a strategic need for certain customers.

So instead, Musk and Co. need to find bubbling market trends that look like they will have huge gigantic TAMs to justify the potential growth of this company.

If only the shareholders had any kind of voice - if only it was illegal to issue a fake IPO where you sell an overwhelming number of shares stripped of their voting power - if only the market responded rationally to this boondoggle.

If we're going to right the ship in turn of common sense a bunch of people need to lose a bunch of money, I just hope it doesn't mostly hit passive investors and instead lands mostly on Elon-stans.

With its IPO, SpaceX secured its role as the vehicle for consolidating Musk's vanity businesses into one closely held public organization that can more easily convert publicity into investment and internally reallocate funds and debts based on his personal whims.

So yes, SpaceX is pivoting, but it's to no one's surprise.

Cursor's edit data is invaluable to anyone who wants to train a coding model. Probably the best data available outside Anthropic and OpenAI. Coding models are seen by the leaders in AI as both the biggest current revenue opportunity and the best way to accelerate the progress of AI and bring about recursive self-improvement that will create superintelligence. So yeah, it's easy to see how SpaceX could see it as in their interest to purchase Cursor with 2% of their equity.

Mars was never going to happen without revenue. Starlink is providing revenue but probably not enough to build a whole city on Mars within our lifetimes. SpaceX needs more and AI is the only near-term way.

This Cold Fusion vid covers the "pivot" nicely.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPIGu0anfAE

The video explains that it is spelled out in the prospectus that SpaceX is counting 70%-80% of their total addressable market to be AI related and only about 7%-8% to be space-related.

Calling it an IDE is under-representing cursor

They have in-house models, and the data to train even more powerful ones. The cursor team is a proper AI lab.

>One of the things that makes @SpaceX so valuable is how valuable it is. The Cursor acquisition costs materially less in dilution because of SpaceX’s high valuation.

https://x.com/BillAckman/status/2066866144154161555?s=20

They are buying it with overvalued stocks, so it isn't real money. Probably the Cursor team will be able to sell it when the SpaceX stocks will be already crashed.
Why are you comparing it to building expensive modern hospitals? Why don't you compare every other tech acquisition to that? because that's not a relevant comparison, and building expensive modern hospitals has nothing to do with the goal of for-profit corporations.

SpaceX has 3 major businesses: Space, Starlink, and AI.

This acquisition helps with the 3rd one.

Evidently, at some point money just stops being real. Also, it's not even $60b. It's a 100% stock deal.

The markets have quite literally given Elon a carte blanche. Can it last forever? I doubt it.

> all-stock deal

It's not like they could easily cash out all of those $60B. I always find it troublesome that we generally conflate cash with stonks, market caps, and such.

I wish we’d stopped calling him Elon like he’s a family uncle or something. I chuckled at Heilon Musk, but I’d settle for just Musk.
Back-of-the-napkin math tells me Google’s top 20 acquisitions combined are cheaper than Cursor.
Elon is consolidating all of his property into one single megacorporation because he is confident that nobody will ever challenge this, given the current political direction of the United States.
is spacex a space company? I thought they were an internet provider that wants to use their strategic advantages to get into AI including AI infra like data centers.
> 150 of world’s most expensive modern hospitals

https://sfyimby.com/2024/06/construction-underway-for-4-3-bi...

Probably not the most expensive , just first I thought of … so maybe it’s more like 10-15 typical urban hospitals.

SpaceX isn't a space company anymore, it's an AI company. In their IPO filing, of their projected $28T total addressable market, only $370B (~1-2%) of that is from space [1]. The rest is primarily AI, with a sprinkling of Telecom revenue from Starlink.

Given xAI's Grok is way behind ChatGPT & Claude on coding capabilities, whereas Cursor was able to get in spitting distance of them w/ Composer 2.5 by simply running post-training on Kimi K2.5, I'm not sure Elon could dream up a more perfect strategic fit.

Cursor likely has the largest, highest quality dataset of any private firm for training new coding models, which would compete SpaceX's trifecta of becoming a viable competitor in the AI race:

1. Access to compute (they have so much that they're renting capacity to Anthropic & Google)

2. Liquidity for R&D+M&A (largest IPO in history)

3. High quality training data (this Cursor acquisition)

> Isn't it kinda bizarre that Elon is pivoting SpaceX to something else?

In a vacuum, absolutely yes. But in the bizarre context of the AI economics, chaotically scrambling to bring everything you need to compete in-house makes perfect sense.

Arguably, when compared with either OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google, SpaceX/xAI now own the most compute, are the most financially liquid, and (assuming the Cursor acquisition goes through) have the largest corpus of high quality training data.

We may very well be a couple of months away from a Grok release that goes toe-to-toe w/ other American frontier models, IMHO.

So when you look at this as a $60B play to capture an additional 10-20% of an estimated $26T total addressable market, it makes a lot more sense. Now, whether that projected TAM is even remotely close to reality (or even just enough to make Cursor worth $60B) is another question entirely.

[1]: https://www.satellitetoday.com/finance/2026/05/20/spacexs-ip...

* edited to add source for IPO numbers & tweak grammar/formatting

Because cursor gets some of the highest quality training data from the world's programmers and responses from the full ecosystem of model vendors and access to active code bases. XAI wants the data.
Since Cursor is kind of a Select-Your-Model front end for various AI coding systems, how much of it could be to just make sure Grok gets to the top or default choice of that Select-Your-Model list?
How is buying a company sending messages on the Internet for $45b in the owner's interest when Westinghouse, who built nuclear reactors sold for under $10b? The market is irrational.
when you see the list of major investors in Cursor that will never break even if it stays independent, and compare it to the investors in SpaceX, it all makes sense.
Please don't let Musk know that his money can be used for the real world, mundane stuff.

Because he will buy 150 hospitals and drive them to ruin, private equity style.

We are way better off when he pays abstract amounts of it for abstract stuff to some random nerds and grifters.

His money is not a resource that could be put to any good use. It's a liability for all of us.

Prediction -- SpaceX rebrands within a decade like Meta or Alphabet. And they turn out to be a AI company not a space company.
Gotta pump that stock price with constant news buzz
Why do you think it's a space company? SpaceX didn't even define ITSELF as a space company in its IPO filing.
It’s not real money, there’s no check being written for that amount and then deposited into someone’s bank account.
I mean, the answer is obvious if you do not deliberately try to put a message in the worst light possible:

- "Space company" has a major LLM+datacenter business called X.ai.

- LLM for coding is a big business, as you can see from trillion dollar valuations of Anthropic.

- Cursor is popular and gives you a headstart on the business.

- Instagram was bought for the price of many many hospitals. Uber is more valuable than companies owning the cars. Different business models, entirely different valuation models. Not sure what that comparison entails. You know it. I know it.

Whether it is a good purchase or not, we may not know, but we know your characterization is just outright dismissal without much rationale behind it.

Smart move as they will pay in stock, and if stock is overvalued by 2x this means you get 50% discount
xAI is a subsidiary of SpaceX and runs several of the worlds largest compute datacenters.
yeah but someone -- no one has explained who -- still thinks this is a good idea
Giving retail traders a reason to turn their life savings into exit liquidity
I would agree but in this case they are buying the talent and the data.
Might be a play for talent. Recruiting in this space is hard... and expensive
XAi is part of SpaceX.
Space exploration requires significant software development.

Take a look at the Apollo 11 movie: There was quite significant computing power for the 1960s putting a person on the moon.

Composer-2.5 is a good model, grok-4 is not.

Its that simple.

Tesla isn't a car company anymore either.
SpaceX is planning to do data centers in orbit. Engineering issues aside, that might dovetail with Cursor nicely if timings work out.
It is crazy that a company like SpaceX was allowed to exist.

The whole big tech industry needs Microsoft/MSN style breakups again.