The x.ai/SpaceX AI model business, supercharged by the Cursor acquisition, is the most underappreciated source of upside in the SpaceX story, more so than the well-understood cloud compute deals.
Brad Gerstner argues that the market is underrating how much the Cursor acquisition has advanced SpaceX's frontier AI model capability, calling it the biggest overlooked source of potential upside. ✦ AI generated
Brad Gerstner · BG2 Pod · 2026-06-11 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 31:22
I think the thing that's getting lost is I think they've dramatically advanced their capability when it comes to building a frontier model. People outside Silicon Valley may not know, you know, Michael and the team at Cursor as well. This is an extraordinary team that he just downloaded, right, into SpaceX.
verbatim transcript · starts at 31:22
31:22get excited about the deals with Anthropic because you can put your hands around that. You know how much revenue it is. I see debate about, you know, the 90-day termination and how long they last and what multiple do you put on those revenues. But I think the thing that's getting lost is I think they've dramatically advanced their capability when it comes to building a frontier model. People outside Silicon Valley may
31:42not know, you know, Michael and the team at Cursor as well. This is an extraordinary team that he just downloaded, right, into SpaceX. SpaceX was already building good models. And what they have is they have this way to monetize compute that gives you this call option that you can pull all that compute in-house, right, to train a model and then to run the model. I suspect if there's an
32:04upside surprise, if we went around the table, I'd say this is the place that's getting the least amount of attention and could have the biggest upside surprise. Any any thoughts, Clark, on what you think is being overlooked or areas that you think are misunderstood about the business today? >> I I would say I would say what the last few weeks have proven is that Elon, um, their team can stand up all this
32:29compute. Actually, if you just, you know, went back 1 and 1/2 years, you know, they were behind in the race to stand up compute. They were you know they they didn't have that many H100s. They brought in Colossus. Then they brought in Colossus 2 at a scale much larger than anyone else. And now you know as we gear for Vera Rubin you know from you know a lot of my conversations
32:52it looks like they've you know secured maybe up to 20% of Vera Rubin capacity especially in the early days of you know when you know these these chips are very scarce that that they're going to have a a a lead on all of this because you know people think that they can stand up this compute better. So I think they'll all you know what what the last few weeks
33:14have actually shown is that Elon you know Elon will take you know take a shot at hitting the frontier but if it you know if for whatever reason um they they have over procured some capacity this is a very scarce asset that they've shown that they can monetize at actually you know best in class margins and payback periods. >> The irony is like you know you and I've been doing this long enough