SpaceX leapfrogs Amazon and briefly tops Microsoft in market value in Cursor acquisition news
Shares of SpaceX rose on Tuesday morning, pushing the Elon Musk-led company above Amazon and into a neck-and-neck race with Microsoft for the title of the world’s fourth-most valuable public company, less than a week after its blockbuster $75 billion IPO.
A rocket maker, satellite internet provider, defense contractor, and AI company now account for more than the entire Italian economy.
The jump comes after SpaceX announced its $60 billion acquisition of AI Coding Startup, a San Francisco-based company that last November generated more than $1 billion in annual revenue.
“We look forward to working closely with the Cursor team to advance our AI capabilities at the frontier,” SpaceX wrote in a message to X on Tuesday morning.
That helped propel SpaceX to stratospheric heights.
Its market capitalization stood at about $2.94 trillion at one point Tuesday morning, ahead of Amazon’s $2.66 trillion. SpaceX also added value to 51-year-old Microsoft during Tuesday’s session, going back and forth with the Redmond tech giant. Microsoft is worth an estimated $2.93 trillion.
Nvidia remains the most valuable company, with a market value of just over 5 trillion, followed by Alphabet at $4.51 trillion and Apple at $4.37 trillion.
SpaceX’s success underscores how quickly investor attention has shifted to companies working at the intersection of artificial intelligence, space infrastructure, defense networks and communications. But also speaking to Musk’s allure, Vanda research shows that SpaceX accounted for nearly three-quarters of all single-stock purchases by retail investors on Monday.
“A company that used to defy gravity is now defying market science,” noted CNN.
The acquisition of Cursor reflects Musk’s desire to build a vertically integrated AI powerhouse that includes chips, data centers, software, communication networks and space infrastructure.
The stock’s surge also adds a new dimension to a story GeekWire explored last week, examining what the SpaceX IPO means for Seattle and the broader Pacific Northwest space industry. SpaceX maintains a significant engineering presence in Redmond, where workers develop Starlink satellite technology and related communications systems, making the region a key hub that has become one of the world’s most important companies.
For Amazon and Microsoft, the comparison is largely symbolic. Seattle-area tech giants generate hundreds of billions of dollars in annual revenue and run prominent businesses in cloud computing.
But Wall Street’s willingness to value SpaceX above Amazon and Microsoft highlights how investors are viewing AI and space as the next big technological frontier. SpaceX also competes directly with Amazon’s Leo satellite broadband network business.
Whether SpaceX can sustain scaling at these levels remains an open question. Some analysts and tech watchers described the stock’s post-IPO performance as highly speculative, noting that the company posted losses following its merger with Musk’s xAI.
Still, the message from the market is clear: at least for now, investors see it as one of the defining technology companies of this decade.
