SpaceX went public in June 2026 at a valuation near $1.8 trillion, the largest IPO on record. Days later, it agreed to buy Cursor, the AI coding startup, for $60 billion in stock, the biggest acquisition of a venture-backed company ever. Together those things say as much about what capital is chasing as they say about Elon Musk.
Start with what SpaceX actually is. It builds rockets, satellites, and factories, and through its merger with xAI it now runs data centers and the power to feed them.
That is a company built on physical things. Real concrete assets. When it went looking for a software company, it didn’t pay cash. It paid with stock the market values for the physical buildout behind it. Even a $60 billion bet on software was, underneath, financed by the worth of real assets and the appetite to own them.
Cursor’s side of the trade points in the same direction. What a coding tool wanted from a rocket company was access to its compute, the data centers and energy that frontier AI actually runs on. The software is abundant. The physical capacity to run it at scale is not. Scarcity has quietly moved back to the real layer, the physical layer, the parts of the economy you can stand next to.
This is a different world than the 2010s. Capital was close to free. For a long time, rates sat near zero, central banks were buying bonds in size, and markets paid high prices for growth that wouldn’t arrive for years, because waiting cost almost nothing. That has changed, and the long end of the bond market is where I’m watching closely.
A long-term interest rate is often treated in the markets as a guess about the Fed’s next move. It is really a price for time, for inflation risk, and for the volume of debt the market is being asked to hold. Right now a lot of borrowers want that money. And they all want it at once. The federal government is running large deficits. The Fed is no longer the steady bond buyer it was after 2008 and through the pandemic. Private capital is lining up to fund data centers, power, factories, and housing. When this many borrowers compete for long-dated money, its price stops being a background detail. It shows up in mortgage rates, in property values, and in the return on anything real.
The lesson of June is not that capital has dried up. It clearly has not. Capital has turned selective, and it is rotating toward things that are real. Data centers, at bottom, are real estate and power. The collateral behind a mortgage is a house. The oldest, most physical assets are being repriced as if time and scarcity matter again. Because they do.
Money has a clearer time value again. For more than a decade, much of the financial system behaved as if it didn’t. That correction is slow and easy to miss, and it will outlast any single deal, however historic.
– Jeromee Johnson, President
