The Archive

Elon Musk officially began his testimony in the trial he has brought against OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and company president Greg Brockman. The three were on the initial founding team of OpenAI, with Musk investing up to $38 million early on before the co-founders' relationship soured over disagreements over company structure and mission, including whether or not OpenAI should be folded into Musk-owned Tesla. Musk walked away and, years later, founded xAI - his own direct competitor to OpenAI, which is now owned by Musk's SpaceX. In recent years, Musk has filed no less than four different lawsuit...

Stratechery weekly digest covering Tim Cook's Apple departure, Cursor IDE, SpaceX developments, and geopolitical competition.

Cursor was on track to close a $2 billion funding round this week but chose to halt discussions after SpaceX offered a $10 billion "collaboration fee" and a path to a $60 billion acquisition.

Commentary on Apple's John Ternus appointment and its implications for hardware-AI strategy, with tangential reference to SpaceX-Cursor partnership.

Only Elon would do this before an IPO.

With an IPO looming for Elon Musk's SpaceX / xAI / X combo platter of companies, SpaceX has announced an odd arrangement to either acquire the automated programming platform Cursor for $60 billion or pay a fee of $10 billion. Buying this startup that's focused on AI coding could help xAI's tools compete with market leader Anthropic, as well as the other competitors. A report by The Information this week said Sergey Brin has directed Google's "strike team" to help its agentic AI tools catch up, while Sam Altman reportedly declared a "code red" at OpenAI last year before shutting down Sora to f...

SpaceX acquires xAI, consolidating AI development with rocket/hardware infrastructure.