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SpaceX Pounces On Cursor
00:21:16
SpaceX is acquiring Cursor for $60B days after its blockbuster IPO, as its stock soared 20% on day one. Anthropic's standoff with the Trump administration churned on without resolution, OpenAI's 2025 spending hit $34B, and OpenRouter's Fusion claims to beat frontier models.
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Welcome to the tech we write home for Tuesday, June 16, 2026. I'm Brian McCullough. Today SpaceX is acquiring cursor as its stock soared 20% on day one of full trading. Anthropic standoff with the Trump administration churned on without resolution. OpenAI's 2025 spending hit 34 billion and open routers. Fusion claims to beat Frontier models by using all the models. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Think you have to build your own search engine scraping infrastructure? Think again, folks. SERP API can take care of all your search engine scraping needs. It lets AI products access real time web search data programmatically. No scraping infrastructure required. Their APIs offer structured JSON data from all the top search engines, including Google, Amazon and YouTube. Top tech companies already use SERP API to power their AI agents, their market intelligence tools, and their automated research workflows. See how it can help you and your team. Serp API provides 250 free searches per month. Go check it out@serpapi.com that's serpserpapi.com
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well,
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hot on the heels of the IPO, SpaceX is moving fast. Quoting TechCrunch, SpaceX has agreed to acquire AI coding startup Cursor in a $60 billion stock deal just a few days after the space company's historic IPO and less than two months after announcing a tie up between the two. The deal is meant to help SpaceX's AI division, built around Elon Musk's AI company Xai, which SpaceX merged with earlier this year, catch up to the major AI labs. Despite being a centerpiece of its IPO promises, SpaceX's AI division has been in the midst of a restructuring after running into repeated controversies like allowing users to generate non consens deepfakes of women and children. SpaceX told investors during the IPO process that it sees an addressable market for AI products worth $26 trillion, roughly equivalent to the US GDP. SpaceX said Tuesday that the acquisition is likely to close in the third quarter of this year. Before SpaceX came knocking, Cursor was on track to close a $2 billion funding round from the likes of Andreessen Horowitz, Thrive and Nvidia that would have valued the AI coding startup at $50 billion, TechCrunch has reported. Musk's company announced a curious deal in April ahead of its IPO. It Buy cursor for $60 billion in stock or pay a $10 billion breakup fee if the deal fell through, end quote. You know what? Let's check in on how the SpaceX IPO has gone, quoting CNBC. SpaceX shares climbed 20% on Monday, the first full day of trading, following a record breaking debut last week on the NASDAQ. Roughly 244 million shares changed hands. Trading volume on Friday topped 500 million shares, approaching Facebook's debut when close to 580 million shares were traded. SpaceX on Friday saw its stock closing at around $161 after being priced at $135 per share. That put the company's market capitalization above $2 trillion after the biggest initial public offering in history. The Stock added about $31 on Monday to close at $192.50. Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX, posted on Sunday that the company might be able to reach approximately $1 trillion in revenue in 2030 and I would be surprised if re than $1 trillion in 2031, Musk added in a follow up post. CFRA on Friday initiated coverage of the stock with a sell rating and a 12 month price target of just $115, which is a nearly 29% drop from Friday's closing price. CFRA said its view was due to the company's extremely ambitious growth strategy, elevated valuation expectations and significant capital intensity. SpaceX's capital expenditures in the three months ended March totaled $10.1 billion versus $4.1 billion in the same period last year. The majority of that went toward artificial intelligence. Morningstar analyst Nicholas Owens released a note on June 8 in which he said the firm values SpaceX at $63 per share and described the stock as overvalued. Paulina Rosikowska, lecturer in finance at Bayes business school, told CNBC's Europe Early Edition that SpaceX has made a lot of promises but at some point that turn into cash flow. Aside from those phrases about data centers in the orbit which are high promises, if you are asking for 70, $80 billion contribution, I think that you owe investors a little bit more than poetry, rosikowska said. The IPO prospectus lacks details on governance or execution risks, she said. So I'm wondering what are these promises based on, rosikowska said. However, other analysts are more bullish on the stock. New Street Research initiated coverage of SpaceX with a $165 price target. Can you look business, let's say, over a longer time frame than you would over most equities to justify to get to the current valuation? We think you can, james Ratzer, partner and senior analyst at New Street Research, told CNBC Squawkbox Europe on Monday. But we think you have to be looking out over kind of 20 to 25 years in terms of a timeframe. I think a lot of the building blocks are in place to succeed, but it is definitely a much longer dated equity story than most, Ratzer said. SpaceX has at least a 10 year lead over competitors when it comes to its rocket launch capabilities. When you look at SpaceX and driving what's needed to succeed on Starlink on direct to cell orbital data centers, everything has to hinge back to success on launch. And you look at what they're building with Starship, the advantage they will have with that, the mass they can put into orbit is a huge advantage, Ratzer told CNBC. End quote and quoting from a different CNBC piece, SpaceX underwriters have officially exercised their overallotment of shares in the Histor initial public offering, bringing the total raise to $85.7 billion by the company, according to an investor relations update out on Monday. The additional money raised in the SpaceX overallotment is bigger than almost all tech IPOs on record. Underwriters typically exercise the overallotment when the stock rises. SpaceX staff wore green shoes on the trading floor Friday and a nod to the green shoe option and Musk reshared a photo of that on X. Musk told employees gathered at SpaceX's Starbase headquarters in Texas on Friday that he wanted to take the company public now to raise capital for a quote, significant growth phase, end quote. Back to AI because of course there's still the money question running around in the background for Everybody. Quoting the FT OpenAI spent $34 billion last year as the ChatGPT maker poured money into a race to dominate the fast growing AI market ahead of a planned stock market listing. Audited financial figures confirmed by people familiar with the matter show the company spent about $19 billion on research and development in 2025 and nearly $6 billion on sales and marketing, as well as other costs. The spending figures, up sharply from the previous year, offer a rare glimpse into the economics underpinning the AI boom, particularly OpenAI's lavish outlay to build models, fund data centers and recruit top researchers. The numbers, which were first shared with the FT by independent journalist Ed Zittron, suggest OpenAI's revenues are outstripped by rising costs. OpenAI only booked about $13 billion in revenue last year. By the end of 2025, it was generating $2 billion in monthly revenue, up from $1 billion a quarter by the end of 2024, making it one of the fastest growing businesses in history. But heavy spending contributed to a nearly Eightfold increase in the net loss attributable to OpenAI, which soared from $5 billion in 2024 to around $39 billion in 2025. A person familiar with the matter said the large majority of that jump reflected a non cash accounting charge and linked to the company's previous structure rather than its underlying operations. End quote. And then there is the running undercurrent of price wars and competition and commoditization openrouter has debuted Fusion, one of the new type of tools that prompts multiple AI models in parallel, depending on the task you're doing. These are growing in popularity, but with Fusion, OpenRouters claims it can reach and surpass fable level performance on deep research tasks. Quoting Digit Fusion leverages a concept called panel of models. It means that when making a request, the system sends your query in parallel to several models, giving each of them the ability to perform web search and fetch operations. After receiving all the answers, the judge model compares all of them, creating a structured list of agreement areas, contradictions, gaps in information and valuable ideas each model has contributed. Then the final model creates the answer based on this structured comparison. It is all hosted on the server side and can be accessed via one API request with the model slug. OpenRouter Fusion OpenRouter used the Draco framework for benchmarking, which is a deep research evaluation suite created by perplexity. It involves conducting 100 research assignments in 10 different areas such as law, medicine, finance and comparisons of products. Each assignment is evaluated based on a practice 39 weighted factors. Importantly, negative marks will be awarded for wrong answers. Therefore, no model can achieve a high score simply by bluffing or providing a long winded response. The results are impressive. The fusion of Fable 5 and GPT 5.5 into one panel using Claude Opus 4.8 yielded 69% in Draco, outperforming any individual model that was tested. Fable 5 achieved 65.3% on its own merits. More importantly, even the Budget panel did very well in this test the fusion of three cheaper models, namely Gemini 3, Flash, Kimik 2.2.6 and Deepseek V4 Pro gave 64.7%. In Draco, this performance was better than that of both GPT 5.5, which achieved 60%, and Claude Opus 4.8, which gave 58.8%. In separate assessments, OpenRouter also ran an experiment where a single model, Claude Opus 4.8, was fused with itself as a two model panel. That combination scored 65.5% compared to 58.8% for Opus running alone. The 6.7 point jump from running the same model twice suggests the synthesis step itself is doing meaningful work, not just the diversity of different model architectures. End quote. 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That's why with Twilio, you can transform fragmented campaigns into orchestrated customer journeys and helping ensure every promotion reaches the right person on their preferred channel, whether that's SMS, RCS, WhatsApp or others. Twilio helps brands reach customers on the channels they love, right when it matters most, and all from a single platform. Twilio's API first approach also gives developers and marketers the flexibility to build custom promotional workflows, triggered campaigns, and dynamic messaging logic tailored to their business needs. Real time behavioral signals like browsing cart activity and in store activations activate timely, relevant offers to customers so your brand is always on and always personal. Get started@Twilio.com tb1 that's Twilio.com tb1 the latest anthropic brouhaha with the government churns on with no resolution, at least at the time of this recording. Anthropic says its senior leaders met Trump administration officials on June 15 and both sides are working to resolve things quickly, quoting Politico. It will likely take longer than a few days to reach a resolution that eases the federal government's Friday action, which had barred Anthropic from allowing non US Users to access its newest model because of potential security vulnerabilities, a senior White House official said. But the official left the door open to the possibility that it can be done quickly. That's up to Anthropic, the official said. The company raised to send senior leaders with research and safeguard expertise to D.C. after multiple hours long calls among Anthropic co founder Tom Brown, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and National Cyber Director Shawn Cairncross over the weekend said the officials, who like others quoted in the story, were granted anonymity to describe the discussions. Anthropic Head of Public Policy Sarah Heck was also present on those calls. Monday's in person meetings held by Commerce and Cairn Cross's office were more technical and were led by staff including Chris Fall, who heads Commerce's center for AI Standards and Innovation, the person familiar with the discussion said. Anthropic gave a presentation to administration officials explaining Anthropic cybersecurity safeguards in hopes of moving past the restrictions, the administration officials said. Representatives from Anthropic included Logan Graham, who evaluates and stress tests models as part of the company's Frontier Red team Dave Orr, the company's head of safeguards and Nicholas Carlini, its lead security researcher, a person close to Anthropic said end quote. Now there is a growing narrative that Anthropic maybe fundamentally does not get what the government wants or culturally jibes with the government. Or maybe the fault is specific to certain people inside of Anthropic, quoting Ben Horn on Twitter. This developing story about Dario's failed communications with the White House confirms everything I've ever believed about the enormous power of the sales Chad. You can be the smartest, most hard working, well meaning guy around, but if you can't get people to like you, it's all for nothing. When the time comes to send one of your own to meet inside the halls of power, you don't send the geek squad, you must send send the affable, beer drinking, golf loving sales chad. It literally doesn't matter if he understands the product half as well as everyone else you send him. It's what he was put on earth to do. End quote. And then there's a picture of Roger Sterling from Mad Men and a quote from Roger Sterling saying you're not good at relationships because you don't value them anyway. Paraphrasing Axios, According to a U.S. administration official, some White House staff had previously supported closer, more constructive cooperation with Anthropic, but recent developments have shifted that position. Everybody's said Anthropic was a bad actor. Some of us said it was time to give them a chance. Now those people are questioning that they screwed us, an anonymous source told Axios. According to the news outlet, dissatisfaction with Anthropic within the administration had been building for several reasons. One was reports that the security mechanisms in the Mythos and Fable models could be bypassed, which the government had raised with Amazon. Another was White House concerns over possible access to Mythos by an organization linked to China. Washington believed the company had not treated both risks with sufficient urgenc. Representatives of Anthropic reject this account of events. The company says it received direct government authorization to launch Fable and did not refuse to address the issues when they were raised. Axios also reports that the Trump administration was dissatisfied with how Anthropic interacts with the government in general. A source told the news outlet that the situation could be described as it's like they just speak in different languages. End quote. Now, apropos of nothing, I'm going to add this bit from the end of Ben Thompson's latest piece in Stratecheri. Quote the entire Anthropic origin story is rooted in the founders belief that OpenAI wasn't taking safety seriously enough. The company believes that only they can control AI and that because they uniquely care about safety, they are justified in trying to control everyone else up to and including the US Government. Here's the thing about these safety justifications. I think they work because to Anthropic they aren't justifications. The company really believes that they are the only ones who believe in superintelligence and thus are the only ones who are sufficiently concerned about the dangers. That excuses decision after decision, policy after policy, and confrontation after confrontation that to people on the outside look like a bizarre combination of cynicism and naivete. The contrast to OpenAI is massive. I think that one way to understand how and why OpenAI lost its lead is that in the years following the release of ChatGPT, OpenAI has been at war within itself internally as to what used to be a research lab suddenly being seized with the burden of being the accidental consumer tech company that it became. To the extent OpenAI solved that conflict, it was by bleeding huge amounts of talent to Anthropic. In particular, Anthropic on the other hand, has perfect alignment between talent and mission and business. The company gets to sell to researchers the creation of a machine God with the mantle of being the sort of person who cares about the dangers and is smart enough to navigate them on behalf of humanity that every policy change that falls out of that happens to be great for is the most beautiful coincidence in the world. I respect this alignment and I fear it. I respect it because it is so clearly effective. The closest analogy is probably Apple, which has always framed every self serving action in the guise of doing right by users and often they were. So it is with Anthropic. What I fear, however, is that it is one thing to have people convinced they know best building a smartphone that I can take or leave. It's considerably more concerning to have them building superintelligence that has the potential to rival or exceed the power of nation states or merely massive core corporations. The history of brilliant people convinced they know what humanity needs is a sordid one precisely because they have convinced themselves that their intentions are good, justifying actions that very much are not. End quote. Final link in the show notes today is to my launch on Product Hunt Hunt of resumewriting. Com. So you know I'd love your support there if you had a chance. Talk to you tomorrow.