SpaceX-Cursor Deal, ChatGPT Images 2.0, Fake Bear Scam | Diet TBPN

0:00John Coogan:A bunch of major stories today. SpaceX and Cursor are partnering up. More news out of Images 2.0. A bunch of news out of OpenAI and Mythos. A group of unauthorized users have been using Claude Mythos since the day it was released. There's a big scoop in Bloomberg. We'll go through. There's a whole bunch of timeline. We can also pull up the lineup and take you through who's coming on. We got Adobe, Build Forever, AngelList, Zankar, Vast Data, Gradient. We're going through all the news of the day. Well, let's start with SpaceX and Cursor, who are teaming up in a very interesting deal. Is this a gong already?

0:39John Coogan:This is gong-worthy. This is gong-worthy because it's an option to buy the company, but a$10 billion breakup fee. Incredibly, incredibly. Yeah. I think it's a win-win. Yeah. It's a win-win. I think it makes sense for both parties. Well, let's go through the facts first. So SpaceX partners. Who needs facts? Who needs facts? Just immediate takes. We assume you already know all the industry. Post-fact. Do you know all the information? Do we need to give you any information? We'll see. But let's run through it. So SpaceX partners with Cursor to, quote, create the world's best coding and knowledge work AI.

1:17John Coogan:The deal gets Cursor, whose agentic coding model, Composer 2, basically operates at frontier level performance. access to compute from SpaceX's million H100 equivalent Colossus supercomputer. And that is the correct term for Colossus. It is a supercomputer. There were some other terms that Elon was throwing out. Fantastic terminology from the XAI team over there. What was the other one? It was like AI... Compute Gigafactory. Compute Gigafactory. They're all hilarious and very good. I like all of these. Computa? Computer Gigafactory. Were they saying computa? The XAI timeline, I was like, I was thinking about it.

1:56John Coogan:I was like, when did this actually start? Like, I, cause it just kind of came out of nowhere and just absolutely blew up. I wanted to actually review and reset on like the timeline of events here because it's gotten so crazy to the point where it's like, the thing that started as like Elon sort of being like, I want to buy Twitter is now like a Neolab with a massive supercomputer data center and a coding agent and code review for the age of AI. because don't forget, they own Graphite now, or potentially will, and a social media app. Graphite, the space code review company? Exactly. I'm genuinely so thrilled for the Graphite team.

2:38I'm thrilled for the Cursor team. I'm thrilled for Scott Wu. Yeah, Scott Wu is licking his chops. He's like, what are you going to leave out in the records?

2:50John Coogan:He really is going to have fun with it. I also think we need to take one moment and just send some thoughts and prayers to SBF. Oh, yeah. Imagine, I don't know how this works in whatever prison he's in, but I imagine, you know, hopefully every few days he can go and, like, talk to the outside world. Yeah. And you can imagine him going, you know, making the call. Yeah. And he says, you know, sir. What would the mark be? How's Anthropic doing? How's my baby doing? and he's like, sir, it's traded up north of 800 in secondary markets, and it's quite possibly going north of a trillion. And then he's like, thank you.

3:33Comes back the next day. I haven't checked in with Cursor in a little bit. How are they doing? Sir, you may not want to hear this, but.

3:41John Coogan:There's a$50 billion acquisition on the table. They've agreed to sell for$60 billion. $60 billion. And if they don't sell, they're going to get$10 billion of non-dilutive capital. Absolutely wild. Anyways. What a wild, wild turn of events. Anyway, let's go through the timeline because it's interesting to revisit the flurry of news that has come out of Elon Inc. over the past just four years when this all started. April 14th, 2022. It's April 22nd now. So we're talking four years to go from just proposing buying Twitter. He made an unsolicited offer to acquire the company. He closed that acquisition after a bunch of back and forth saying, hey, maybe I don't want it.

4:24John Coogan:It was very clear that the stock would have traded down significantly from that$44 billion because this was when the interest rate hike happened. And the end of Zerp and basically all software companies sold off significantly. And so we saw declines in Snap and Pinterest and basically anything that was even Meta sold off like 40, 50 percent post. although that was like an anomaly and they built back up, but the question about like, okay, well, Reality Labs is a, what, 10 billion, tens of billions dollar bet on revenues that might come in like 10 years. Like it was so far away. And the revenue ramp on VR and metaverse projects was so slow that the market just had to discount those future revenues, even if they were still bullish on the idea of meta winning the VR race, winning the metaverse at some point.

5:17John Coogan:It just wasn't going happen anytime soon so you got a discount that back at six percent instead of three percent or whatever your risk-free rate is uh in your dcf and so everything sold off and elon had locked in that pre end of zir price and there was a big question about could he get out of it were they going to twist his arm they there was a little bit of arm twisted the arm was a little bit twisted uh but more than that it was on board and a bunch of other it was almost broken but the people who get who were whose arms were twisted morgan stanley and all the vc backers who came in they wound up with SpaceX stock.

5:48John Coogan:And so they wound up doing very well because they wound up with XAI stock and then SpaceX stock. And so it's all looking like, you know, as crazy, it was never bet against Elon. Like that was the thing was like, surely this is the time to bet against Elon. He's buying Twitter for$44 billion. It's a crazy idea based on the market, where things are, but everything sort of penciled out. So he closed the Twitter acquisition on October 27th, 2022. And he took control of the platform at the end of that month. That was sync day. Of course, He comes in with a sink. What was the joke about the kitchen sink?

6:16Let that sink in.

6:17John Coogan:Oh, let that sink in. Okay. It wasn't like I'm doing the whole kitchen sink another phrase as well? Yeah, like throw the whole kitchen sink at it. Okay. Yeah. He did that too because he threw everything together. Yes. Good job. Yeah. So XAI came later. He publicly announced XAI on July 12, 2023. And that's only nine months after ChatGPT, maybe eight months after ChatGPT. Google quick followed with Gemini. And it was a very fast following, I think, to get to XAI off the ground. And that was like, just for context, that was right around the time you first publicly talked about the potential for a tech live stream, right?

6:58Oh, yes, yes. 2023.

7:00John Coogan:I think that was actually very close to the date. Yeah, I was making YouTube videos. I made a whole YouTube video about the Elon Twitter acquisition. and I was sort of trying to justify it as a desire for free speech than anything else. Like you shouldn't look at it in financial terms. I think that still probably holds. But there wound up being a whole bunch of other knock-on effects for Elon's strategy. He was coming out on July 12, 2023, saying, I'm back in the AI horse race. I'm competing directly with the big labs. I'm going to go up against DeepMind still. Remember, that's why he founded OpenAI.

7:31John Coogan:He wanted to push back against DeepMind. I'm going to go up against Anthropic, going to go up against OpenAI. And so the first major product milestone came just a couple months later, November 3rd. That's when they introduced Grok, November 3rd, 2023. So it's been almost three years. The first real integration with Twitter happened on December 7th, 2023, when Grok started rolling out inside of X for premium plus subscribers, which was a new tier. It's actually crazy. Everyone got verified. Yeah. I mean, that year on Twitter was insane. Like, just product feature, product feature. And they were shipping stuff that had been clearly developed beforehand.

8:08John Coogan:Like, I think the community notes idea had been workshopped and even, like, engineered in the pre-Elon era. But he just got there and was like, ship that tomorrow. And, like, there were a lot of things like that that happened. And there were other things that got pulled back and review. And, like, there were other pieces of the puzzle that were, like, not doing so well. And he was just a cut, cut, cut. And so he sort of like put it back in startup mode and it felt a lot more agile. And it still does. That was the moment Grok finally became a part of the X product experience. In early 2024, XAI started shipping updates quickly.

8:38John Coogan:March 17, 2024, it open source Grok 1. March 26, 2024, Grok Access expanded to X premium subscribers. Two days later, they announced 1.5. Then on April 12, 2024, they announced 1.5V, which added multimodal capabilities. Then Grok 2, Grok 2 Mini. By the end of 2024, Grok was available to all X users. And so 2025, XAI moved from being connected to X to absorbing it at the product level. On February 19, 2025, XAI announced Grok 3 Beta. Then March 28, 2025. So over a year ago, for some reason this feels more recent than that, XAI acquired X in an all-stock deal. So March 28, 2025. effectively merging the AI company with a social platform.

9:27John Coogan:After that, X kept releasing faster model updates. They did Grok 4 fast, Grok 4.1. Then came the SpaceX deal. That was February 2, 2026. So the clean sequence is that Musk first proposed the Twitter acquisition, then founded XAI, then brought Grok into X, then merged XAI with X, and then SpaceX bought XAI. And so now Cursor is joining the team. It makes so much sense, right? Cursor needs compute. They need the resources. They need the capital to train a frontier coding model. They've also never done a pre-trap, I believe, whereas the XAI team has, right? Correct. And the big, big thing is that the Grok brand has been through so much.

10:06There was an idea being thrown around last year that it had been banned in more workplaces than it had been adopted. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So more people had said, like, you cannot use this product in the workplace than we're actually using it in the workplace. Cursor's a great brand, right? It's a brand that I think can probably expand outside of coding, right? Say in the announcement. To create the world's best coding and knowledge work AI. So we're at a point right now where everyone is building the exact same thing. We got everyone on Earth building a box that you can tell to do things.

10:44John Coogan:Oh, so you just want one company to do it all? Communist? No, no, I don't. I think the competition is great. You want the government to have one. It's bringing out the best. It's bringing out the best. It is. But I think Cursor is like. It's a knockout, dragout fight. Cursor's always had a great brand. I saw someone else. SBF replied to SpaceX's tweet saying, that's me. Pull up the first post here and then scroll down. The SpaceX and Cursor are now working closely. Is that it? Yeah, there you go. Look, SBF is somehow on Twitter. How can you be on Twitter from jail? all these people in jail on on x i don't understand no it says it in his bio yeah is it in his bio it's man says uh we can use bop approved phone calls emails to tell others what to post on our socials right i think it would be a free speech violation to say like if you are in jail you cannot distribute information in the outside world in any capacity but it feels like this was maybe some legislation that was created pre-internet because it seems like having like a ghostwriter on your account is a really good way to like start you know kind of like influencing public perception right i think this is elizabeth holmes has had enough kind of moments where it was like she you know her proxy posted something that was mildly kind of entertaining and over time that just wears on people and eventually people are like maybe maybe she isn't so bad after all right Well, Richard Wu broke down the structure of the deal.

12:12John Coogan:He says the structure of the deal is pretty interesting here. I think what's happening is, one, XAI is having trouble training a state-of-the-art coding model, hence co-founder departures. They might have a bunch of idle GPUs. Cursor doesn't have capital to blow on a$5 billion training run to compete with Codex and Claude. XAI 3, XAI says to Cursor, use all the GPUs you want at cost and get to a state-of-the-art coding model as long as we have the option to buy you. 4, Cursor also gets a free option. Train a model better than Opus and get bought out for$60 billion or get$10 billion that pays for all the GPUs you rented.

12:53John Coogan:Win-win. And I was reflecting on Michael Truel's, I mean, fantastic entrepreneur, remarkably young. But his aesthetic is very much in like the Stripe world, I imagine, because I feel like the one really cinematic podcast he's done is that one with, was it Patrick Collison? Is that the one I'm thinking of? And it's like them at the coffee shop. And it's so welcoming and warming. It's like that is welcome in every corporate entity in America, right? And to your point about, oh, if your corporation is like, oh, what's going on with Elon and politics, blah, blah, blah. Do we really want Grok running around with Mecca and Annie and all this crazy stuff?

13:32John Coogan:But if it's just like Michael Truel from Cursor, he's so reassuring. If I'm like Coke or GE or Ford, I'm like, yeah, of course. We love Cursor. That's great. Aesthetics do matter. Vibes do matter. And I think it makes a lot of sense. Matt Slotnick says he loves math. Okay. What is the math here? But he's talking about Julian. So Julian says, at a 30x revenue multiple, at first glance, it appears that SpaceX is overpaying for Cursor. However, the deal is wildly accretive for SpaceX, given it is expected to go public at more than 100x revenue. A 70-term multiple expansion on$2 billion of revenue adds up.

14:10Wow. Yeah.

14:11John Coogan:This is a notorious thing in corporate M &A, and occasionally it's gone poorly. but there is like an old adage that if you can acquire earnings at a lower earnings multiple and maintain your current multiple, that is accretive to the stock. And so there's a whole philosophy around that. But the smart investors should price each earning stream differently. And having like a monopoly on launch capacity should be a higher multiple than a super competitive oligopolistic coding market, if that's what this winds up being. It's a tricky, tricky situation. Will Brown. Wow. Cursor just hit a$10 billion run rate.

14:48John Coogan:They did. It's guaranteed, right? There's no way that they won't make$10 billion this year. That's not even a run rate. That's just like it's locked in. It's more than contracted. I don't know. Yeah. And it's very meaningful because it is effectively an exit and that it's by itself. They'll be in a position to actually reinvest that. That's like a nice little Neolab kind of Series A, basically. Ken says no. You've got to multiply that$10 billion by 12. Because in that month, when they get the$10 billion check from SpaceX, it will be$120 billion. They will be the largest AI company in the world that month.

15:27John Coogan:And then they just have to figure out. They don't collect until end of year if they're still independent. Otherwise, it's more than$25 billion. Patrick is quoting Scott Wu. Oh, yeah. Last of the Mohicans. Scott Wu. I love it because despite this does not look good. Without images, too, we just this this kind of asset. I actually think this might have been done the old fashioned way. No, this is Nano Banana. This is Nano Banana. There we go. It's good at cutting out faces. Thank you, Watermark. He says, here we go again. Last of the Mohicans. Yeah, Scott, who's the last one standing in this particular category?

16:00John Coogan:And yeah, he's licking his chops thinking about who might want to hop over to Cognition Cursor. with a cognition windsurf devon cursor zombie corp as the uh as the ghost ships continue to line up on the shores of scott woo's uh territory uh some news from space news inc this is very interesting china backs orbital data center startup with 8.4 billion in credit lines they're pilled they're pilled elon is interested 8.4 billion in credit lines that is a lot of money a beijing-based space startup has secured early stage funding early stage funding to the tune of 8.4 billion? What are we doing here?

16:39John Coogan:And extensive credit backing is part of a broader Chinese push towards space-based computing infrastructure. Beijing Orbital Twilight Technology Company Limited. We don't know how to name companies like that in this country. Seriously. This is a new meta. Yeah. What is Cursor's real name? AnySphere? That's a pretty good name. I like AnySphere and I like Cursor, but it doesn't hold a candle. It's a Beijing Orbital Twilight Technology Company Limited. Also known as Orbital Chenguang, announced the completion of a pre-A1 funding round April 20th. The round saw participation from venture and industrial investors, including Hysan Capital, CITIC, Construction Investment Capital, Cathay Capital.

17:20John Coogan:They got everybody. It's a murderer's row over there. At the same time, Orbital State said that it has obtained strategic credit lines totaling$8.4 billion from 12 major financial institutions, including the Bank of China. Are they going to build rockets with this? I mean, I don't understand why this would be so capital intensive if they're not going to fab the chips and they're not going to launch the rockets. Well, they're going to put a lot of GPUs in space. I guess they're just going to buy a lot of Huawei chips or something. Are they going to go to Huawei and get some special stuff? Yeah, I mean, this is pretty interesting because I feel like, you know, generally the main bull case for space data centers is that the like regulatory environment in the U.S.

17:56is going to be so hard to build data centers. Yeah, like supercomputers, but yeah, normal land. Oh, yeah. Yeah, supercomputers. So you've got to send supercomputers to space. Yeah, because there's less. No, we can do data centers in space.

18:06John Coogan:We just we if it's on the ground, it's a supercomputer. OK, yeah, that makes sense. Because because we don't want any more data centers on Earth. It's Earth Day, by the way. Congratulations, Earth. You've done fantastically. Yeah, but the whole thing like in China is like they you know you can just like build things there Yeah, there's like very little regulatory overhead So it's like I feel like the space data centers. Yeah a lot more sense for the US. Yeah If the if the bull case is regulatory which seems to be that's like generally consensus Yeah, I was laughing about how you know how there's all this fear about like data centers using water in America But over in China they have the three gorges dam which generates electricity from water and it technically uses a lot of water.

18:43John Coogan:The water's not destroyed or anything. It just passes through the dam, generates electricity. But they're using an entire ocean of water. Exactly, the Hoover Dam. That's a nightmare. If you just, like, there's one frame where you don't want the water to be destroyed or made unpotable so you can't drink it anymore. But there's another one where you think, like, water has individual rights and should not be used at all. Like, it should not be used. It should not flow through a water wheel. It should not flow through a dam and generate electricity at all. it should be left to its own devices still and just chill.

19:13Maybe.

19:14John Coogan:Anyway, Orbital is incubated by the Beijing Astro Future Institute of Space Technology, which itself is backed by Beijing's Municipal Science and Technology Commission and the Science Park Administration. The institute leads a consortium of 24 organizations. The rationale for the constellation in November briefing. So large-scale data centers have expanded rapidly worldwide, but further growth faces major obstacles, including heavy land use. Weird. Soaring energy consumption. Weird. Limits on atmospheric cooling. These things usually don't apply in China, but maybe they are skating where the puck is going, and maybe they're thinking that they will need to change their direction.

19:52John Coogan:They're planning a dawn-dusk orbit about 700-800 kilometers above the Earth, aiming to achieve a large-scale space data center to support space-based computing by 2035. Wow, thinking in decades over there. An initial phase spanning 2025 and 2027. Wait, why are they talking about last year? We'll focus on core technology changes in the first computing. They're manipulating time, John. The experimental satellite was slated for launch in late 2025 or early 26, but it does not appear to have launched. They have, they have like decent launch capacity with the Long March rocket. I think that they just are not amazing at landing it, but you got more money.

20:30John Coogan:You can just YOLO more rockets up there, I guess. Problem solved. Although I would be surprised if there's as much pressure to not build supercomputers next to the Three Gorges Dam. Moving on. More images out of ChatGPT. Images 2, Image Gen 2. Pull these up. Images V2. These are crazy. Has anyone done that rune test of the guy driving the car into the whole thing where he was like, it's AGI if it can understand this meme? I guess you can't because like that particular meme has been saturated on the internet. And so it no longer is a challenge. I'm going to have it make an image. This is a crazy image.

21:08I am a tiny man.

21:11John Coogan:What is this? MySpace. When my son was born, they handed me to him. Never forget where you came from. Blink-182. It really packed so much stuff in here. It's almost too much. I have been noticing Gabriel over there is pushing the model into chaos and seeing what happens. Cows are flying. Horses are flying. Trampolines are flying. The next one by Ethan Mollick has like every image benchmark in one. You were asking about this. You said, and explain the history of this. So originally like when like Dolly first came out, the like image that everyone was like, oh, this is crazy. It was an astronaut riding a horse on the moon.