SpaceX leapfrogs Amazon and briefly tops Microsoft in market value on Cursor acquisition news

Shares of SpaceX surged 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.

The rocket maker, satellite internet provider, defense contractor, and AI company is now valued at more than the entire economy of Italy.

The jump came after SpaceX announced its $60 billion acquisition of AI coding startup Cursor, a San Francisco-based company that last November said it was generating more than $1 billion in annualized revenue.

“We look forward to working closely with the Cursor team to advance our frontier AI capabilities,” SpaceX wrote in a message on X on Tuesday morning.

That helped propel SpaceX to stratospheric heights.

Its market capitalization stood at roughly $2.94 trillion at one point on Tuesday morning, well ahead of Amazon’s $2.66 trillion valuation. SpaceX also topped 51-year-old Microsoft in value for periods on Tuesday, going back and forth with the Redmond tech giant. Microsoft is valued at roughly $2.93 trillion.

Nvidia remains the most valuable company, with a stock market value just over $5 trillion, followed by Alphabet at $4.51 trillion and Apple at $4.37 trillion.

SpaceX’s achievement underscores how rapidly investor attention has shifted toward companies operating at the intersection of artificial intelligence, space infrastructure, defense and communications networks. But it also speaks to the allure of Musk, with Vanda Research indicating that SpaceX accounted for about three-quarters of all single stock purchases by retail investors on Monday.

“The company that’s accustomed to defying gravity is now defying market physics,” CNN noted.

The Cursor acquisition signals Musk’s ambition to build a vertically integrated AI powerhouse spanning chips, data centers, software, communications networks and space infrastructure.

The stock surge also adds a new dimension to the 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 employees develop Starlink satellite technology and related communications systems, making the region an important outpost what has become in a matter of days one of the world’s most valuable companies.

For Amazon and Microsoft, the comparison is largely symbolic. The Seattle area tech giants generate hundreds of billions of dollars in annual revenue and operate dominant businesses in cloud computing.

But Wall Street’s willingness to value SpaceX above Amazon and Microsoft highlights how investors increasingly view AI and space as the next major technology frontier. SpaceX also competes directly with Amazon’s Leo satellite broadband network business.

Whether SpaceX can sustain a valuation at these levels remains an open question. Some analysts and tech watchers have described the stock’s post-IPO run as highly speculative, noting that the company posted a loss 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 the decade.