Issue 25

20 June 2026

Hi there,

SpaceX priced its IPO on 12 June at $1.77 trillion – the largest in history. Four days later it announced it was buying Cursor for $60 billion in stock. By the end of the week, SpaceX had shed roughly $600 billion in market cap. The sequence is worth sitting with: a company uses the goodwill of an historic float to do the largest startup acquisition ever, and the market responds by repricing the acquirer down by more than ten Cursors. Whether that’s rational is a separate question from the fact that it happened, and happened fast.

Meanwhile Hetzner – the affordable European cloud that a lot of us run on – quietly repriced its AMD and dedicated lines by 113 to 175 percent. Components are scarce and prices for RAM and SSDs have climbed; Hetzner said so plainly. That’s less dramatic than a $60 billion deal, and touches more of the people reading this.

Industry

1. SpaceX goes public at $1.77 trillion – the largest IPO ever

SpaceX priced its IPO on 12 June at $135 per share, opening at $150 and reaching $225 before settling back to around $160 by early July. The $1.77 trillion opening valuation is the largest in market history, eclipsing Saudi Aramco’s 2019 listing. The float gives SpaceX a public currency – and, as it turned out, an acquisition war chest it moved on almost immediately.

2. SpaceX acquires Cursor for $60 billion

Four days after the IPO, SpaceX announced it was buying Anysphere – the company behind Cursor – in an all-stock deal valued at $60 billion, the largest acquisition of a venture-backed startup ever. Cursor’s annualised revenue had reached $4 billion in early June, up from $2 billion in February, though its market share had slipped from 41% to 26% over the same period as Claude Code and Gemini CLI took ground. SpaceX and Anysphere said they’ve been working together on a new AI model to ship via both Cursor and xAI’s Grok platform. The market’s verdict: SpaceX shed roughly $600 billion in market cap over the four days following the announcement. The deal is expected to close in Q3, subject to regulatory review.

Artificial Intelligence

3. The AI IPO queue is now three deep

With Anthropic’s confidential S-1 already filed and OpenAI’s draft submitted, all three of the main frontier-AI players are now in the IPO pipeline – SpaceX already trading, Anthropic targeting October, OpenAI targeting Q4. The combined implied valuation is somewhere around $3.8 trillion. The S&P 500 has already said it won’t fast-track any of them until they post sustained GAAP profits, which keeps the passive money out for now. The public markets will have to price AI infrastructure bets without index-inclusion support doing any of the lifting, which is a different proposition from what the private rounds implied.

Infrastructure

4. Hetzner triples some cloud prices overnight

Hetzner repriced its AMD and dedicated vCPU lines by 113 to 175 percent on 15 June, effective immediately for new orders and rescales. A CPX51 (16 AMD cores, 32GB RAM, 640GB storage) went from $92.49 to $279.49 per month. Dedicated virtual cores now start at $50.99, up from $19.99. ARM and Intel shared lines rose a more modest 30 percent. Hetzner cited severely limited component availability and sharply higher RAM, SSD and GPU costs. US servers are up 158 percent on average; Germany about 99 percent; Singapore 78 percent. The Hacker News thread was not kind. Hetzner has been the go-to affordable European cloud for a lot of independent and small-team infrastructure – this is the price point where some of that changes.

Microsoft

5. Microsoft’s record Patch Tuesday: 206 CVEs, three zero-days

June’s Patch Tuesday set a new record at 206 CVEs, with 38 critical, including three publicly disclosed zero-days. The standouts: CVE-2026-45657 (CVSS 9.8), a wormable Windows Kernel RCE exploitable without authentication or user interaction; and CVE-2026-47291 (CVSS 9.8), an HTTP.sys RCE with the same unauthenticated, no-interaction profile. Microsoft has attributed the acceleration of AI-assisted vulnerability discovery as a factor in the rising patch count. The volume is the real story – 206 fixes in one month is genuinely hard to process in a normal enterprise patch cycle, and it comes the week after CISA cut the federal remediation deadline to three days for the most critical flaws.

Development

6. Elixir 1.20 ships annotation-free gradual typing

Elixir 1.20.0 is now at release-candidate stage with the final stable release imminent. The headline feature is whole-program type inference with no annotations required – the compiler infers and checks types across your entire codebase, narrows across case branches and conditionals, and only flags verified bugs (violations guaranteed to fail at runtime). Struct and map fields are tracked; unions and intersections derive from guards. A dynamic() type handles the cases where inference can’t be certain. If you’ve treated Elixir as "dynamic = no safety net", this is the release that changes that argument.

Information Security

7. The US unplugged from Fable 5 – and Mythos stayed locked

In the same fortnight that Anthropic released Fable 5 publicly, the White House issued an executive order mandating NSA-run classified benchmarking of frontier models, with OpenAI confirming it would comply. The order creates a formal government pre-release assessment process for models above a capability threshold – the first time the US has put a regulatory gate, however opaque, in front of frontier-model deployment. Anthropic’s Mythos line remains under controlled access; Fable 5 cleared the bar for public release. The two decisions – what goes public and what the government reviews first – are now formally linked.

Coming up

Jul: npm v12 lands, blocking install scripts, Git and remote-URL dependencies by default. Anyone running JavaScript CI pipelines should have tested on npm 11.16.0+ warnings before this hits.

Oct: Anthropic IPO window opens, per the S-1 timeline.

Q4: OpenAI IPO expected.

Reply if anything here changes how you’re thinking about your stack.

Cheers, Julian