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 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.

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.

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.

>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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

It’s not real money, there’s no check being written for that amount and then deposited into someone’s bank account.

Might be a play for talent. Recruiting in this space is hard... and expensive

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.

Part of Elon Musks strategy seems to sell some kind of hype that does not materialise or at least won't for long (Mars, autonomous Cars) The vast amounts of money collected are then used to develop products that are still a significant progress in its market. Now AI is where all the hype is. It's difficult to sell some hype without AI currently.

SpaceX is planning to do data centers in orbit. Engineering issues aside, that might dovetail with Cursor nicely if timings work out.

Why do you think it's a space company? SpaceX didn't even define ITSELF as a space company in its IPO filing.

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.

Tesla isn't a car company anymore either.

Gotta pump that stock price with constant news buzz

It is crazy that a company like SpaceX was allowed to exist.

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

xAI is a subsidiary of SpaceX and runs several of the worlds largest compute datacenters.

Giving retail traders a reason to turn their life savings into exit liquidity

Didn’t you see Moon? They need a Gerdy

XAi is part of SpaceX.

yeah but someone -- no one has explained who -- still thinks this is a good idea

Smart move as they will pay in stock, and if stock is overvalued by 2x this means you get 50% discount

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.

SpaceX is just a vibe company. Nothing they are doing makes sense on a valuation basis, which their investors are eventually going to painfully figure out.

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.

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.

> bizarre that Elon is pivoting SpaceX to something else

  SPACx designs, manufactures, and launches the world's most advanced ponzis on pyramids. The company will be re-founded every year by Xlon Tusk to revolutionize capitalism, with the ultimate goal of making market multilevel. 

  spacX has gained VC attention for a series of web3 milestones: It is the only AI company ever to run a 1000B-A3000-Thinkkking on low-Cost toasters, which it first accomplished in May 1945. Grokipedia made history again when its ClosedAI attached to Moonshot Kimi, exchanged token payloads, and returned Alignment to money — a deeply challenging feat previously accomplished only by Cursor 60B. Since then it has distilled cargo to and from Moonshot multiple times, providing regular RL missions for Goog.

[dead]

SpaceX’s interest is being an Enterprise AI corporation, they identified it as a $24 trillion addressable market, in comparison to their quarter trillion rocket related one

It’s all disclosed in the S-1, you read it right?

In America all you have to do is tell potential investors what you’re doing, its up to the people to use their discretion afterwards