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Cursor CEO and cofounder Michael Truell<\/span><\/p>\n Getty Images for HumanX Conference<\/small><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n O<\/abbr>n the heels of its blockbuster IPO<\/strong>, SpaceX announced that it plans to acquire AI coding startup Cursor in an all-stock deal worth $60 billion<\/u> by the third quarter of 2026. The deal would double the net worths of Cursor\u2019s four young billionaire cofounders, Michael Truell, 25, Aman Sanger, 25, Sualeh Asif, 25, and Arvid Lunnemark, 26. Forbes<\/em> estimates they will be worth $2.7 billion each. <\/p>\n They aren\u2019t the only ones poised for a windfall from the deal. Early investors including Andreessen Horowitz (which reportedly owns a roughly 10% stake, worth $6 billion) and Thrive (which owns about 7%, worth $4.2 billion, per a source familiar) stand to win big from the deal too. <\/p>\n Cursor has come a long way in a short span of time. Founded in 2022 by four MIT friends and 30 Under 30 alumni, the startup started out as a coding tool for developers. After AI behemoth Anthropic launched Claude Code, Cursor found itself on the defensive, shifting to \u201cwar time<\/u>\u201d mode, as Forbes<\/em> reported in March. <\/p>\n It appears to have worked. In early June, Cursor crossed $4 billion in annualized revenue, fending off stiff competition from both Anthropic and OpenAI, Forbes<\/u><\/em> reported. Its revenue grew from $2 billion in February to $3 billion in late April. The uptick in revenue is in part due its new product Cloud Agents, which works on complex programming tasks for hours in the background. <\/p>\n Cursor first teamed up with SpaceX in April, when the rocket maker obtained the right to acquire it for $60 billion, or pay $1.5 billion in breakup fees and $8.5 billion in computing resources if the deal didn\u2019t go through. SpaceX, which also acquired xAI in February, had been struggling to improve the capabilities of its models as AI researchers left en masse. But it has a ton of compute, thanks to its gigantic Colossus supercomputer. For the past few months, the two companies have been jointly training a new AI model that will be released in Cursor and xAI\u2019s Grok, SpaceX said in a post<\/u><\/a>. <\/p>\n Now let\u2019s get into the headlines. <\/p>\n BIG PLAYS <\/strong><\/p>\n On Friday, Anthropic abruptly disabled<\/u> its new AI model, Fable 5, after the U.S. government issued an order to ban foreign nationals from accessing it, citing national security concerns. The directive came after government officials learned of a way to jailbreak the powerful model\u2019s safeguards. Fable 5, a more secure version of Anthropic\u2019s Mythos family of models, had been in restricted access for months and was launched just days earlier to millions of people. A group of tech leaders including Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had flagged concerns over the model\u2019s security risks to senior Trump officials last week, Reuters<\/u><\/a> reported. <\/p>\n \u201cYou have to make a judgment call on these things,\u201d Anthropic\u2019s Chief Commercial Officer Paul Smith told Forbes<\/u><\/em> just hours before the order was issued. \u201cThe safest you can be is to not let people use something. And then it\u2019s totally safe. But then how is that helping the mission?\u201d <\/p>\n Also notable: OpenAI\u2019s spending reached $34 billion last year amid a neck-in-neck race with rival Anthropic to dominate the AI market, the Financial Times<\/u><\/a> reported. The giant\u2019s costs far outweigh the $13 billion in revenue it booked in 2025. <\/p>\n SHOW ME THE MONEY<\/strong><\/p>\n SpaceX\u2019s historic IPO made scores of stakeholders<\/u> ultra-wealthy. The rocket maker and AI company started trading just before noon on Friday at $150 per share, implying an eye-popping $2 trillion valuation. CEO Elon Musk became the world\u2019s first trillionaire<\/u>. Early investors<\/u> like Peter Thiel\u2019s Founders Fund and Antonio Gracias\u2019 Valor Equity Partners\u2019 stakes in the company are worth $67 billion and $71 billion, respectively. As of Tuesday afternoon, SpaceX\u2019s market cap had skyrocketed to $2.8 trillion, surpassing Amazon<\/u> as the world\u2019s fifth largest company by market value. <\/p>\n AI DEAL OF THE WEEK<\/strong><\/p>\n Jeff Bezos\u2019 AI venture Project Prometheus raised $12 billion in funding at a $41 billion valuation. Bezos runs the company as co-CEO with Vik Bajaj, a cofounder of Alphabet\u2019s life sciences research lab Verily and a Stanford University professor. The nascent startup is building AI tools to help engineers design and manufacture physical products faster. It plans to use the funding to buy up compute, according to CNBC<\/u><\/a>. <\/p>\n DEEP DIVE<\/strong><\/p>\n If you\u2019re interested in renting an apartment in one of Equity Residential\u2019s 300 properties, chances are you\u2019ll soon be chatting with Ella to set up an apartment tour or answer questions about a lease.<\/p>\n But Ella isn\u2019t human. It\u2019s an AI assistant that answers the phones and responds to hundreds of emails around the clock. It\u2019s still sending quick replies after all the humans have gone home, when most inquiries typically come in.<\/p>\n Ella is so helpful that some people don\u2019t realize they\u2019re talking to a bot.<\/p>\n \u201cCustomers were calling in asking for Ella and saying, \u2018We just love her work ethic.\u2019 They wanted to make sure she was going to get her commission,\u201d says Kristin Hupfer, a senior vice president of customer experience at Equity Residential. The firm discloses that Ella is an AI chatbot the first time it communicates with a person through email, phone or text, Hupfer says.<\/p>\n Ella has been a gamechanger for the Chicago-based property manager, which owns buildings in New York, San Francisco and Seattle. Back in 2018, the firm\u2019s staff struggled to keep up with the influx of hundreds of requests from prospective tenants each week. That in turn meant losing customers to rivals and keeping units idle. Then in 2019, it started working with New York-based EliseAI, the developer of Ella. Now the bot handles 1.5 million texts, emails and phone calls every year, allowing Equity Residential to save $20 million in payroll costs, Hupfer says (no layoffs, she clarifies, just not replacing staff who left). The real estate firm owns two buildings in Jersey City that don\u2019t need a human staff member at all because they can be managed from a nearby community and Ella handles all the administrative tasks.<\/p>\n Today one in six apartments in the U.S. and 90 percent of the country\u2019s largest property managers use EliseAI\u2019s tools to respond to questions about a unit, renew leases and triage maintenance requests. It can even use smart locks to let renters into an apartment for a tour, or determine that a request to fix a broken A\/C unit in the summer should be prioritized.<\/p>\n Read the full story on Forbes<\/u><\/em>. <\/p>\n MODEL BEHAVIOR<\/strong><\/p>\n Anthropic\u2019s AI models are incredibly powerful. That is, unless you\u2019re an AI researcher developing frontier large language models that could eventually compete against them. Anthropic disclosed last week that its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models deliberately become less helpful<\/u><\/a> if they detect another AI research lab using them. Rather than outright refusing to produce an answer, the models secretly modify user prompts to change its own responses.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n