What could be more audacious than a company making a $60bn acquisition mere days after a hyped-to-the-eyeballs $1.8tn initial public offering? This sort of brazenness looks like classic Elon Musk. Except it isn’t. Silicon Valley has seen this playbook before, or something like it — and Musk should hope it goes as well for him as it did for his predecessors.
SpaceX said on Tuesday that it would buy coding aid Cursor, paying with $60bn worth of its hot-off-the-press shares. The combination was floated by Musk a few weeks earlier, when the company was still getting ready for last Friday’s public offering. Cursor’s backers will get twice the valuation it achieved in a fundraising in November, according to PitchBook data.
What other chief executive could so boldly walk and chew gum at the same time? Mark Zuckerberg, for one. The Facebook boss circumvented his board to strike a $1bn deal with photo-sharing app Instagram in 2012, weeks before his company’s market debut. The price was roughly 1 per cent of Facebook’s valuation. While the dollar cost of Cursor is far bigger, Musk is spending just over 2 per cent of SpaceX’s current market capitalisation.