SpaceX is having a week for the history books. It’s only Tuesday

By David Goldman, CNN

(CNN) — SpaceX is now bigger than Microsoft. Its shares are more popular than every other stock on the market, combined. And it just bought an AI company for $60 billion.

Today is just SpaceX’s second full day of public trading.

The latest splash in its history-making debut is SpaceX’s long-sought acquisition of Cursor, an AI agent that can write code and competes with Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex. SpaceX said in April that Cursor had given SpaceX the right to buy it.

Snatching up Cursor, one of the fastest-growing AI coding tools, could go a long way in helping SpaceX catch up to market leaders OpenAI, Anthropic and Google. Cursor is used by 64% of Fortune 500 firms, according to the company’s website.

The all-stock deal will add to SpaceX’s considerable AI capital expenditures. The company combined with CEO Elon Musk’s xAI earlier this year with the ambition to eventually launch data centers into space.

The promise: cheap cooling from space and free electricity from the sun, combined with SpaceX’s Starlink satellite network for beaming communications back and forth. The problem: the wild expense.

Another concern: xAI is trailing its rivals, which have made significant leaps in capabilities – particularly in the ultra-competitive and potentially lucrative enterprise space. Anthropic’s Mythos tool has grown so capable in recent months that the Trump administration blocked access for foreign nationals.

To compete, SpaceX spent $12.7 billion on AI last year and $7.7 billion on the technology in the first three months of 2026 alone. Now it owes Cursor $60 billion in stock.

Those huge expenses have contributed to multi-billon-dollar losses: $4.9 billion last year, and $4.3 billion in the first quarter of 2026.

Nevertheless, SpaceX believes the expense is well worth it: The company predicted in a regulatory filing that enterprise AI applications will become a $22.7 trillion market in the near future.

As with Tesla, investors are buying on the promise for the future and less on today’s perhaps less-than-savory fundamentals.

SpaceX has been an enormously popular investment. The stock has risen more than 19% in each of its first two days on the stock market, and it’s up another 10% Tuesday.

The stock traded above $210 a share, valuing the company at nearly $2.8 trillion. That’s enough to put it just above Microsoft for fourth place on the list of most valuable companies on the stock market, behind only Apple, Google and Nvidia. SpaceX blew past Amazon earlier in the trading session.

That sky-high valuation has been propelled by some truly surreal buying behavior from everyday investors. Despite the sky-high valuation and massive expenses, retail traders have bought SpaceX shares nearly as much as they have purchased all other stocks, combined, according to market data analytics company Vanda Research.

On Monday, SpaceX accounted for nearly three-quarters of all single stock purchases among retail investors, Vanda Research reported.

The company that’s accustomed to defying gravity is now defying market physics.

The-CNN-Wire
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