Dear Reader,
This is Dylan Jovine with Behind the Markets.
Happy Wednesday. Today is Wednesday, June 17th.
SpaceX just came out with a bang.
Yesterday they announced a deal to buy Cursor for $60 billion in stock. No cash changes hands. And when you pull the camera back, you can see exactly what Musk is trying to do. He's turning SpaceX into a holding company for everything AI — and he's doing it by becoming vertically integrated from top to bottom.
Let me explain what that means, because I think you'll find this interesting.
The Five-Layer Cake
Think of AI as a five-layer cake.
At the very bottom is energy. Without it, none of this happens.
Right above that is chips — the best NVIDIA, Google, or ARM chips in the world.
Above that is infrastructure: AI factories, data centers, the physical machinery of it all.
Above that are the models — Claude, ChatGPT, Grok.
And at the very top is the application layer. This is where economic value is actually extracted.
Drug discovery platforms, legal copilots, industrial robots, autonomous vehicles.
These are the applications that teach the models how to interact with the real world. That's where the money is.
The Cursor acquisition fills that top layer.
Where Musk Stands Right Now
He has the application layer now with Cursor. He has the model layer with Grok. He has the infrastructure layer with Colossus. On energy, he's running 50 gas turbines on flatbed trailers, bought an entire power plant from overseas because he couldn't get one built domestically in time, and is pointing Tesla's solar operation at the problem.
The one missing layer is chips.
Right now, Nvidia has a stranglehold on his cost structure. By his own math, roughly 25 to 30 cents of every dollar in expenses goes straight to Nvidia. If he builds his own chip, that drops to a nickel. His profitability goes right up. That's not ideology. That's arithmetic.
He has publicly said that starts this year. And on Thursday, we're going to show you exactly why — and what it means for us.
Join Us Thursday
This Thursday, June 18th at 1:00 PM, Charles and I are going live to take you behind the scenes of that chips layer.
We'll show you the full blueprint, walk you through where the $75 billion is going, and explain why it's all happening right now.
I think you're going to find it very interesting. I hope to see you there.
I'll see you tomorrow.
“The Buck Stops Here,”
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Written by Dylan Jovine