{"id":504501,"date":"2026-06-17T15:04:15","date_gmt":"2026-06-17T15:04:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/504501\/"},"modified":"2026-06-17T15:04:15","modified_gmt":"2026-06-17T15:04:15","slug":"spacex-overtakes-amazon-to-become-worlds-fifth-most-valuable-company-spacex","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/504501\/","title":{"rendered":"SpaceX overtakes Amazon to become world\u2019s fifth most valuable company | SpaceX"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"dcr-130mj7b\">SpaceX has overtaken Amazon to become the world\u2019s fifth most valuable company days after its <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/science\/2026\/jun\/12\/spacex-stock-price-ipo-spcx\" data-link-name=\"in body link\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">stock market debut<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p class=\"dcr-130mj7b\">The milestone came as Elon Musk\u2019s company agreed to buy the startup behind the AI-powered coding app Cursor for $60bn (\u00a344bn), in an attempt to capitalise on the technology\u2019s success as a coding tool.<\/p>\n<p class=\"dcr-130mj7b\">SpaceX is the parent of Musk\u2019s AI business, xAI, which will be able to boost its capabilities in an area \u2013 AI systems writing code \u2013 that has proven to be a strong commercial success for Anthropic, the rival company behind the Claude chatbot.<\/p>\n<p class=\"dcr-130mj7b\">The group also includes the SpaceX rocket company, social media platform X and the satellite maker and internet service provider Starlink, which is the only profitable part of the business.<\/p>\n<p class=\"dcr-130mj7b\">The news of the Cursor acquisition was announced as SpaceX passed <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/technology\/amazon\" data-link-name=\"in body link\" data-component=\"auto-linked-tag\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Amazon<\/a> in market capitalisation, an important measure of value for a publicly listed company. SpaceX shares rose by 13% on opening on the Nasdaq index on Tuesday.<\/p>\n<p class=\"dcr-130mj7b\">At one point, its valuation rose as high as $2.97tn, leaping over Amazon\u2019s $2.65tn to become the world\u2019s fifth most valuable company by market value. Its shares later eased back to about 5% up at the close and a valuation just ahead of the e-commerce company of $2.66tn.<\/p>\n<p class=\"dcr-130mj7b\">SpaceX lost $4.9bn in 2025 on revenues of $18.7bn, while Amazon posted revenues of $717bn and net income \u2013 a US measure of profit \u2013 of $78bn.<\/p>\n<p class=\"dcr-130mj7b\">SpaceX floated at $135 a share on Friday and its shares have risen by approximately 50% since. The float made Musk, SpaceX\u2019s founder and chief executive, the world\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/technology\/2026\/jun\/12\/elon-musk-spacex-net-worth\" data-link-name=\"in body link\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">first trillionaire<\/a> with a fortune of $1.1tn, according to Forbes. It reckons the 54-year-old is now worth $1.3tn.<\/p>\n<p class=\"dcr-130mj7b\">The company had been circling Cursor, owned by the San Francisco-based Anysphere, for months. It said in April it had <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/technology\/2026\/apr\/21\/spacex-cursor-ai-startup\" data-link-name=\"in body link\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">secured an option<\/a> to \u200ceither buy Cursor for $60bn later this year or pay $10bn for a partnership.<\/p>\n<p>Hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman said the strong value of SpaceX\u2019s stock was another boon for the company because it would require fewer company shares to pull off large acquisitions such as Anysphere. Photograph: Kristoffer Tripplaar\/Alamy<\/p>\n<p class=\"dcr-130mj7b\">Harrison Rolfes, an analyst at the financial research firm PitchBook, said the deal would not \u201cclose the gap\u201d between xAI\u2019s models and those developed by Anthropic and OpenAI. However, he said it made sense to gain access to Cursor\u2019s more than 1 million users.<\/p>\n<p class=\"dcr-130mj7b\">\u201cOwning the tool that professional developers already trust daily is a faster path to enterprise AI revenue than winning the model race,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<p class=\"dcr-130mj7b\">Anysphere is one of several Silicon Valley startups that have drawn waves of developers by using AI to automate coding, making it an important rival to market leaders \u2060Anthropic and OpenAI. But a lack of access to computing power \u2013 something SpaceX can offer as a datacentre owner \u2013 has hampered Cursor\u2019s growth.<\/p>\n<p class=\"dcr-130mj7b\">\u201cCursor does not have the scale of OpenAI or Anthropic, but it has built \u200bsome very impressive coding models relative to cost. That makes this a positive \u200cmove for SpaceX,\u201d said Matt Britzman, a senior equity \u200canalyst at Hargreaves Lansdown.<\/p>\n<p class=\"dcr-130mj7b\">In its filing for an initial public offering, SpaceX had said Cursor\u2019s access to developers\u2019 data, including coding requests and design decisions, could help improve xAI\u2019s Grok model.<\/p>\n<p class=\"dcr-130mj7b\">Gil Luria, head of technology research at the US investment firm DA Davidson, said Cursor would \u201cimprove SpaceX\u2019s position in the frontier model race with Anthropic and OpenAI\u201d. He added that Grok \u201chas to have a coding component that enterprise customers can utilise side by side with [AI coding models] Anthropic Claude Code and OpenAI Codex.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"dcr-130mj7b\">Anysphere will be paid in stock under the deal, a regulatory filing showed, and the deal will not use proceeds from SpaceX\u2019s IPO. The transaction is expected to close in the third quarter of 2026.<\/p>\n<p class=\"dcr-130mj7b\">The hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman said the strong value of SpaceX\u2019s stock was another boon for the company because it would require fewer of the company\u2019s shares to pull off large acquisitions.<\/p>\n<p class=\"dcr-130mj7b\">\u201cOne of the things that makes SpaceX so valuable is how valuable it is. The Cursor acquisition costs materially less in dilution because of SpaceX\u2019s high valuation,\u201d Ackman posted on X.<\/p>\n<p class=\"dcr-130mj7b\">Anysphere is backed by prominent Silicon Valley venture capitalists \u2060such as Andreessen Horowitz and Thrive, as well as Nvidia and Google.<\/p>\n<p class=\"dcr-130mj7b\">Reuters contributed to the report<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"SpaceX has overtaken Amazon to become the world\u2019s fifth most valuable company days after its stock market debut.&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":504502,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[220,218,219,61,60,80],"class_list":["post-504501","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/504501","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=504501"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/504501\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/504502"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=504501"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=504501"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=504501"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}