SpaceX went public four days ago. It's already worth more than Amazon. And yesterday it announced the largest startup acquisition ever: $60 billion in stock for Anysphere, the company behind AI coding tool Cursor. The deal tells you exactly what the IPO was for. Musk now has a publicly traded currency, and he's spending it fast. I'll break down why he paid $60 billion for a product whose market share is actually shrinking, what it means for the AI coding tools market, and why the financial math behind this deal should matter to anyone watching where the tech industry is headed.

Also in this issue: the Fed decides at 2 PM today and the dot plot could surprise, both OpenAI and Anthropic filed for IPO in the same month, and workers with AI skills are earning 56% more than their peers.

Let's get into it.

The Fed decides at 2 PM today, and the dot plot could shift the story. The rate itself is essentially locked: 97%+ odds of holding at 3.50-3.75%, the fourth consecutive meeting with no change. But Bank of America economist Aditya Bhave warned that the dot plot could show at least three FOMC members projecting rate hikes this year, not cuts. If that materializes, it would be the first time since 2023 any meaningful bloc of the Fed is pointing rates upward. Chair Warsh's first-ever press conference follows at 2:30.

OpenAI and Anthropic both filed to go public within weeks of each other. OpenAI filed its confidential S-1 with the SEC, targeting a Q4 2026 listing at a valuation between $852 billion and $1 trillion. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are leading the offering. Anthropic filed its own confidential S-1 on June 1, also targeting near $1 trillion after a $65 billion Series H-1 round in May valued it at $965 billion. Two competing AI companies, both aiming for trillion-dollar public debuts in the same year. The combined $3.6 trillion AI IPO pipeline is larger than every company that went public in 2021.

NinjaOne raised $400 million at a $12.3 billion valuation. The Austin-based IT operations platform announced its Series C extension on June 9, with investors including Wellington Management, Sequoia Capital, and CapitalG. The company hit profitability in its most recent quarter and grew revenue nearly 70% year over year. They plan to use the capital to integrate AI across their platform and expand their roughly 2,000-person workforce. SiliconANGLE

Workers with advanced AI skills are earning 56% more than peers in the same roles. New data from PwC's 2026 Global AI Jobs Barometer and workforce analytics firm Gloat shows the AI skills premium is widening fast. But there's a perception gap: 65% of workers believe their current skills will remain relevant for the next five years, while employers estimate 40% of existing tasks will be automated or significantly augmented within two. Stanford data confirms a 13% decline in entry-level hiring for AI-exposed roles since generative AI took off.

The U.S. Army awarded Anduril a new enterprise contract to streamline defense tech procurement. The deal consolidates purchasing of Anduril's commercially available technologies under a single contract vehicle, reducing administrative overhead and accelerating fielding of capabilities. Separately, Leidos landed a $454.9 million contract to modernize the Air Force's Cloud One platform in partnership with AWS, supporting centralized cloud computing and cybersecurity across the service branch.

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SpaceX signed a definitive agreement on Tuesday to acquire Anysphere, the company behind AI coding tool Cursor, in an all-stock deal valued at $60 billion. It is the largest acquisition of a venture-backed startup ever recorded. The deal came four days after SpaceX's $75 billion IPO, which was itself the largest in American history. And on the same day, SpaceX's stock surged past Amazon in market cap to become the fifth most valuable company in the world at $2.65 trillion, briefly touching Microsoft at $2.94 trillion before pulling back.

Here's what makes this deal unusual. Cursor's market share among AI coding tools has dropped from 41% to about 26% over the past year, according to spending data from Ramp. Meanwhile, Anthropic's Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex have been gaining ground fast. SpaceX's xAI division, which built Grok, lost $6.35 billion in 2025 and has struggled to compete in the coding tools category. So Musk is buying what he couldn't build.

The strategic logic is clear: Cursor gives xAI an immediate product with over a million paying users and $2.6 billion in annualized B2B revenue. But Cursor's competitive edge was always its model agnosticism, letting developers route tasks to Claude, GPT, or Cursor's own models depending on preference. Many enterprise teams chose Cursor specifically because they could keep sensitive code on Claude. Under SpaceX, every API call routed to Anthropic becomes revenue leaving the ecosystem. The question is whether developers stick around once that flexibility disappears.

The financial picture is striking. SpaceX did $18.7 billion in revenue and lost $4.9 billion last year. Amazon did $717 billion and earned $77.7 billion. SpaceX is now valued higher. The $60 billion it spent on Cursor represented just 3.4% dilution at its IPO valuation, with a $10 billion termination fee if the deal falls apart and a separate $4 billion fee if regulators block it. This is what a hot IPO stock enables: using inflated equity as acquisition currency before the window closes.

Why it matters: This deal reshuffles the AI developer tools market. If SpaceX pushes Cursor toward Grok and away from Claude/GPT, a chunk of developers will have to decide whether to stay or switch. That creates hiring demand on both sides: SpaceX/xAI will need people to integrate the product, and Anthropic and OpenAI will invest harder in their own coding tools to capture the migration. For people in the AI/developer tools space, this is a moment where the talent market gets hotter, not quieter.

What to do about it: If you work in developer tools, AI infrastructure, or product engineering, watch the next 90 days closely. SpaceX needs to integrate a team, xAI needs to retain developers, and competitors will be hiring to exploit the transition. Companies that just raised massive rounds (LangChain $125M, Modal Labs $87M, NinjaOne $400M) will be looking for people who understand this ecosystem. The acquisition is the signal, but the hiring wave that follows is the opportunity..

The data on what AI skills are actually worth is getting harder to ignore. PwC's latest Global AI Jobs Barometer, drawing from over a billion job ads across 27 countries, found that workers with advanced AI skills earn 56% more than peers in the same roles without them. That's not across different jobs. That's the same title, same function, different skill set.

But here's the part that should get your attention: according to Gloat's Q2 2026 workforce analysis, roughly four out of five workers will need to acquire new AI-related skills within the next 12 to 18 months to stay competitive. Meanwhile, 65% of workers believe their current skills will stay relevant for five or more years. Employers disagree. They estimate 40% of existing tasks will be automated or significantly augmented by AI within two years.

This isn't about learning to build AI models. The World Economic Forum identifies creative thinking, resilience, flexibility, and leadership as the skills rising fastest in importance alongside technical AI fluency. The professionals standing out in 2026 are the ones who can work with AI tools and bring the contextual judgment that machines still can't replicate.

Why it matters: The gap between "I know AI exists" and "I use AI to produce better work faster" is now a 56% salary difference. That gap will only widen. The people who close it in the next 12 months will have options. The ones who don't will increasingly compete for a shrinking pool of roles where AI skills aren't expected.

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Open a blank doc and list every task you do in a typical work week. For each one, mark it as: (A) AI could do this better than I currently do it, (B) AI could assist me but I'd still add value, or (C) AI can't meaningfully help here. If more than half your tasks land in column A, that's your reskilling priority list. If most land in B, your next move is learning the specific tools that augment those tasks. Column C tasks are your differentiators, the skills worth doubling down on because they're hard to automate.

Then pick one Column A or B task and spend 30 minutes this week trying to do it with an AI tool (Claude, ChatGPT, Copilot, whatever you have access to). The goal isn't to replace yourself. It's to find out where you're leaving the 56% premium on the table.

Cursor's biggest selling point has always been model agnosticism: pick the best AI for the task, regardless of who built it. But under SpaceX, every API call to Anthropic or OpenAI is revenue leaving the ecosystem, and xAI lost $6.35 billion last year partly because Grok couldn't compete in coding tools. The business incentive to lock developers into Grok is obvious. The risk is that forcing the switch drives developers to competitors. What do you think happens? Reply with your prediction..