TBPN

SpaceX Completes Cursor Acquisition

June 16, 2026

Happy Tuesday.

We’re live on YouTube and 𝕏.

The current thing in tech and business is SpaceX’s stock rocketing the company to a nearly $3T market cap.

Today’s Lineup

Tasklet Founder & CEO Andrew Lee at 11:15 AM
Eden Robotics Co-Founder & CEO Stamatis Floratos at 11:23 AM
Tenet Industries Co-Founder Hugo Frisk at 11:32 AM
Dispatch Co-Founder & CEO Payton Case at 11:40 AM
9 Mothers Co-Founder & CEO Russell Smith at 11:49 AM
Adialante Co-Founder & CEO Efraín Torres at 11:57 AM
Madrone Founder & CEO Akshay Trikha at 12:06 PM
Y Combinator Managing Partner Diana Hu at 12:15 PM
Y Combinator Managing Partner Harj Taggar at 12:30 PM
Y Combinator President & CEO Garry Tan at 12:45 PM

Run of ShowAlamy

SpaceX Completes Cursor Acquisition

$60B to buy Cursor sounds like a lot of money, until you see that SpaceX added more than 4 times that in market cap today alone. There are lots of questions now about who exactly has dibs on SpaceX’s huge compute infrastructure. Anthropic has a deal, Google has a deal, Cursor clearly wants to use these GPUs. Who gets first priority? A lot of these will shift around pretty fluidly, and it seems fine to have Cursor in a position where they can grab any unused capacity so it never sits idle. Also, after talking to Gavin Baker yesterday, it sounds like there might be many more gigawatts coming online terrestrially in short order. Full details in the WSJ here. — John

The Fox + Roku Bull Case

The market didn’t like Fox buying Roku yesterday. Fox traded down 20%, but Ben Thompson likes the deal more than most and points out some interesting details you might have missed. First, the reason for the selloff in his view is about the shape of the business. The deal requires additional debt (always risky) but it also prices Roku at a very high EBITDA multiple (north of 50x). The psychology of Fox shareholders this week sums up like this:

Fox’s investors thought they owned a focused and eminently understandable company with knowable risk and strong cash flows; now, thanks to dilution from new stock issuance, they own much less of a much more complicated business with real execution risk and a big debt load.

The interesting piece is the definition of focus in this particular media business. Fox sold off its studio business, 21st Century Fox, in 2017 to Disney and over the past 6 years, Fox outperformed Disney in terms of share price appreciation. Fox up 50%+ while Disney is down ~9%. So the strategy for Fox has been to move away from studio content that would be licensed downstream, stay away from paid streaming competition, and instead focus on news, sports, and ads. Core to the ads strategy are Free Ad-Supported Streaming Television, or FAST, services. Roku fits in here perfectly, but so does Tubi, which Fox acquired in March 2020 for $440 million (in 2025 revenue hit $1.1 billion).

Advertising is consistently an unsexy and underrated business. It benefits from scale, but doesn’t draw as much attention as blockbuster movie productions that sell lots of tickets. That doesn’t matter for Fox though, instead of competing with Disney, Netflix, and the Paramount WBD HBO Elison complex, Fox is continuing to invest in ad-supported content that can go much broader, precisely because it’s free. — John

Clip Spotlight: Gavin Baker breaks down the orbital vs. terrestrial compute math

From yesterday’s show: Atreides’ Gavin Baker says that once Starship is reusable, the economics of orbital compute crush the economics of terrestrial compute.

He lays out the math:

“Once SpaceX can reuse Starship, the math for orbital compute becomes pretty compelling.”

“It’s $60B to bring on a GW terrestrially. $25B is power and cooling — you don’t need that in space. And so the right comp for that $35B in IT equipment — GPU, CPU, switches, memory, storage — is that $25B [in power and cooling] vs. the cost of launch.”

“And once Starship is reusable, I think the cost to launch is $5B. So that means you can put a GW into space for [$40B]. The GW on earth is $60B.”

Headlines

CNBC: SpaceX leapfrogs Amazon in market cap, briefly jumps Microsoft among top U.S. companies

Reuters: SpaceX locks in $60 billion Cursor deal to close gap with rivals in AI coding race

BI: Inside Cursor’s wild rise

Wired: Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth Admits the Company’s AI Reorg Was ‘Atrocious’

FT: OpenAI spending hit $34bn last year ahead of planned IPO

WSJ: The Party Game Where Silicon Valley’s Elite Pretend to Kill Each Other

WSJ: Qualcomm Is a Rare AI Chip Value Play

Snap Launches $2,195 Specs, Declaring Glasses the Next Computer

Robinhood plans 10% RIF

The Information: Qualcomm in Talks to Buy Tenstorrent to Expand AI Chip Capabilities

The New Yorker: Ken Griffin’s Billions and Billions