Tech Brew Ride Home - SpaceX Pounces On Cursor

Starting point is 00:00:03 Welcome to the TechBrewrite home for Tuesday, June 16th, 2026. I'm Brian McCullough today. SpaceX's acquiring cursor as its stock soared 20% on day one of full trading. Anthropics standoff with the Trump administration churned on without resolution. Open AI's 2025 spending hit $34 billion. And OpenRouter's Fusion claims to beat frontier models by using all the models. Here's what you miss 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.

Starting point is 00:00:49 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 at SERPAPI.com. That's SERP-S-ERP-A-P-I-com. Well, 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.

Starting point is 00:01:37 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-consensual 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 U.S. 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 Andreson Horowitz, Thrive, and NVIDIA that would have valued the AI coding startup at $50 billion, tech crunch has reported. Musk's company announced a curious deal in April ahead of its IPO. It would either buy Cursor for $60 billion in stock or pay a $10 billion breakup fee if the deal fell through, end quote.

Starting point is 00:02:35 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 in 2012 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. 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 X on Sunday that the company might be able to reach approximately $1 trillion in revenue in 2030. And I would be surprised if revenue is not greater 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 $15, which is a nearly 29% drop from

Starting point is 00:03:48 Friday's closing price. CFRA said its view was, quote, due to the company's extremely ambitious growth strategy, elevated valuation expectations, and significant capital intensity, end quote. 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 8th in which he said the firm value SpaceX at $63 per share and described the stock as overvalued. Paulina Rosakoska, lecturer in finance at Bay's Business School, told CNBC's Europe early edition that SpaceX has made a lot of promises, but at some point that will need to

Starting point is 00:04:31 turn into cash flow. Quote, 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.

Starting point is 00:05:02 Can you look at this 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 Squawk Box Europe on Monday. But we think you have to be looking out over kind of 20 to 25 years in terms of a time frame. 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, end quote. Ratser 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,

Starting point is 00:05:40 on direct-to-sell 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, rats are told CNBC, end quote. And quoting from a different CNBC piece, SpaceX underwriters have officially exercised their over-allotment of shares in the historic 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 over-allotment is bigger than almost all tech IPOs on record. Underwriters typically exercised the over-allotment when the stock rises.

Starting point is 00:06:21 SpaceX staff were green shoes on the trading floor Friday and a nod to the green shoe option, and Musk re-shared 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 chat GPT 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

Starting point is 00:07:06 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 Open AI'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, suggests Open AI's revenues are outstripped by rising costs. Open AI 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

Starting point is 00:07:41 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 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,

Starting point is 00:08:27 depending on the task you're doing. These are growing in popularity. But with Fusion, open routers 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, and 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

Starting point is 00:09:13 with the Model Slug OpenRouter slash 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 approximately 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 GPD 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

Starting point is 00:10:01 budget panel did very well in this test. The fusion of three cheaper models, namely Gemini 3 Flash, Kimi K2.2.6, and Deepseek V4 Pro gave 64.7% in Draco. This performance was better than that of both GPT5.5, 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. You know how after a meeting you end up spending too much time trying to piece everything together,

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Starting point is 00:12:32 relevant offers to customers so your brand is always on and always personal. Get started at Twilio.com slash TB1. That's Twilio.com slash TB1. The latest Anthropic Bruhaha 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 15th, 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

Starting point is 00:13:21 senior leaders with research and safeguard expertise to D.C. after multiple hours long calls among Anthropic co-founder Tom Brown, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnik, and National Cyber Director Sean Karen Cross over the weekend, said the officials, who, like others quoted in the story, 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 Karen 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

Starting point is 00:14:00 in hopes of moving past the restrictions, the administration officials said. Representatives from Anthropic included Logan Graham, who evaluates and stress test 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 Anthropics 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 hardworking, well-meaning guy around, but if you can't get people to like you, it's all for nothing.

Starting point is 00:14:51 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 the affable, beer-drinking, golf-loving sales chants. 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,

Starting point is 00:15:26 but recent developments have shifted that position. Everybody 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 urgency. Representatives of Anthropic reject this account of events. The company says it received direct

Starting point is 00:16:06 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 Stratory. Quote, The entire Anthropic origin story is rooted in the founder's belief that Open AI 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,

Starting point is 00:16:50 up to and including the U.S. 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 open AI 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 ChatGAPT, OpenAI has been at war with a

Starting point is 00:17:28 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 business is the most beautiful coincidence in the world.

Starting point is 00:18:06 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

Starting point is 00:18:30 building superintelligence that has the potential to rival or exceed the power of nation states or merely massive 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 of resumewriting.com. So, you know, I'd love your support there if you had a chance. Talk to you tomorrow.

Tech Brew Ride Home - SpaceX Pounces On Cursor

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