SpaceX
SpaceX fully installs Super Heavy booster’s ‘aerocovers’
For the first time, SpaceX has more or less installed a full set of ‘aerocovers’ on a Super Heavy booster prototype.
Designed to protect the booster from both itself and Earth’s atmosphere during ground testing, liftoff, ascent, and reentry, Super Heavy’s the structures amount to thin, steel shells mounted on metal box frames. The most obvious aerocovers slot over the top of six racks of equipment installed on the outside of Super Heavy’s aft end, giving the booster a sort of utility belt of hydraulic systems, pressure vessels, avionics, and heat exchangers. Unsurprisingly, those racks are festooned with electronics, composites, and thousands of feet of wiring and thin plumbing – none of which are particularly suited to sit a few dozen feet from the fury of 29-33 Raptor engines or near the leading edge of a hypersonic reentry vehicle.
Aside from the steel they’re mounted on, it’s likely that every system located on Super Heavy’s ‘utility built’ would begin malfunctioning or be destroyed outright if directly exposed to just a few seconds of the hypersonic buffeting and heating Starship boosters will experience during reentry. Unlike Falcon boosters, which almost always use reentry burns to slow down and create a sort of heat shield with their own exhaust, SpaceX is theoretically designing Super Heavy to survive the full force of reentry without an extra burn to cushion the blow.
To survive reentry and still land in good enough condition to enable anything close to same-day reusability, which is SpaceX’s goal, every ounce of at-risk equipment installed on Super Heavy’s exterior will likely need to be carefully shielded. In theory, that’s the purpose of the aerocovers SpaceX has only just begun to fully install – let alone test – on Super Heavy B4.
Before Booster 4’s most recent installation on the orbital launch mount, SpaceX did install covers over a pair of hydraulic and heat exchanger racks but left all four composite overwrapped pressure vessel (COPV) racks and an umbilical port uncovered. After B4 was removed from the launch mount for the third time on December 30th, both covers were uninstalled. On January 14th, 2022, though, SpaceX rapidly installed all six covers for the first time and began sealing each cover’s exposed corners. On January 17th, SpaceX even installed aerodynamic surfaces around Booster 4’s protruding umbilical port, smoothing out any hypothetical airflow around the device.
Prior to main aerocover installation, SpaceX also added at least half a dozen small boxes seemingly designed to protect a number of thin metal probes that pierce through Super Heavy’s tanks and skin and are connected to avionics boxes. Additionally, while less visible, teams also worked to finish Super Heavy B4’s Raptor heat shielding with a large number of similar sheet steel covers and panels. Without official photos from SpaceX or another lift onto the launch mount, it’s impossible to know if Booster 4’s Raptor heat shield is fully closed out, but the shielding that runs around its circumference appears to be finished.
As it stands, Super Heavy B4 is likely just a few parts shy of true completion and is about as ready as it’ll ever be for static fire testing. More likely than not, those aerocovers and Raptor heat shields are essential for Super Heavy B4 to be able to perform more than one test at a time without immediately requiring major repairs. Unlike Starship, which has mostly tested three engines at once and only performed a few six-engine static fires, Super Heavy B4 may eventually test all 29 Raptor engines simultaneously.
When almost 30 engines are involved, even nominal preburner testing will likely produce a massive fireball that could engulf Super Heavy’s aft (if not the entire booster) with flames. For static fire testing, Raptors typically produce a smaller and briefer (but still substantial) fireball during shutdown, creating another potential source of damage to any sensitive hardware located anywhere on or in Booster 4’s thrust section. As such, Super Heavy aerocovers may be just as important for surviving static fires as they’ll be for surviving launches and landings.
It’s unclear if or when Super Heavy B4 will return to the orbital launch mount for wet dress rehearsal and static fire testing. SpaceX has ambiguous test windows scheduled from 10am to 10pm on January 18th, 19th, and 20th.
Elon Musk
Why SpaceX just made a $60 billion bet on AI coding ahead of historic IPO
SpaceX has secured an option to acquire Cursor AI for $60 billion ahead of its historic IPO.
SpaceX announced today it has struck a deal with AI coding startup Cursor, securing the option to acquire the company outright for $60 billion later this year, while committing $10 billion for joint development work in the interim. The announcement described the partnership as building “the world’s best coding and knowledge work AI,” and comes just days after Cursor was separately reported to be raising $2 billion at a valuation above $50 billion.
The move makes strategic sense given where each company currently stands. Cursor currently pays retail prices to Anthropic and OpenAI to the same companies competing directly against it with Claude Code and Codex. That means every dollar of revenue Cursor earns partially funds its own competition. With SpaceX bringing computational infrastructure to the Cursor platform, that could reduce Cursor’s dependence on OpenAI and Anthropic’s Claude AI as its providers. Access to SpaceX’s Colossus supercomputer, with compute equivalent to one million Nvidia H100 chips, gives Cursor the infrastructure to run and train its own models at a scale it could never afford independently. That one change restructures the entire unit economics of the business.
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Cursor’s $2 billion in annualized revenue and enterprise reach across more than half of Fortune 500 companies gives SpaceX something its xAI subsidiary currently lacks, which is a proven, fast-growing software business with real enterprise distribution.
For Cursor, SpaceX’s $10 billion in joint development funding is transformational. Cursor raised $3.3 billion across all of 2025 to reach that $2 billion in revenue. A single $10 billion commitment from SpaceX, even as a development payment rather than an acquisition, dwarfs everything Cursor has raised in its entire existence. That capital accelerates product development, enterprise sales infrastructure, and proprietary model training simultaneously.
The timing is deliberate. SpaceX filed confidentially with the SEC on April 1, 2026, targeting a June listing at a $1.75 trillion valuation, in what would be the largest public offering in history. The company is expected to begin its roadshow the week of June 8, with Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and Morgan Stanley serving as underwriters. Adding Cursor to the portfolio before that roadshow gives IPO investors a concrete enterprise software revenue story to price in, alongside rockets and satellite internet.
The deal also addresses a weakness that became visible after February’s xAI merger. Several xAI co-founders departed following that acquisition, and SpaceX had already hired two Cursor engineers, signaling where its AI talent strategy was heading. Cursor, for its part, faces a pricing disadvantage competing against Anthropic’s Claude Code.
Whether SpaceX exercises the full acquisition option before its IPO or after remains the open question. Either way, this deal reshapes what investors will be buying into when SpaceX goes public.
Elon Musk
How much of SpaceX will Elon Musk own after IPO will surprise you
SpaceX’s IPO filing confirms Musk will maintain his voting power to make key decisions for the company.
Elon Musk will retain dominant voting control of SpaceX after it goes public, according to the company’s IPO prospectus that was filed with the SEC. The filing reveals a dual-class equity structure giving Class B shareholders 10 votes each, concentrating power with Musk and a handful of other insiders, while Class A shares sold to public investors carry one vote.
Musk holds approximately 42% of SpaceX’s equity and controls roughly 79% of its votes through super-voting shares. He will simultaneously serve as CEO, CTO, and chairman of the nine-member board after the listing. Beyond that, the filing includes provisions that may limit shareholders’ influence over board elections and legal actions, forcing disputes into arbitration and restricting where they can be brought.
The case for Musk holding this level of control is grounded in SpaceX’s actual history. The company’s most important bets, from reusable rockets to a global satellite internet constellation, were decisions that ran against conventional aerospace thinking and would likely have faced resistance from a board accountable to investor gains. Fully reusable rockets were considered economically irrational by established industry players for years. Starlink, which now generates over $4 billion in annual operating profit, was widely dismissed as financially unviable when it was proposed. The argument for concentrated founder control seems straightforward, and the decisions that built SpaceX into what it is today required someone willing to ignore consensus and absorb years of losses.
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For context, Musk’s position is significantly more dominant than Zuckerberg’s at Meta. The comparison with Tesla is also worth noting. When Tesla did its IPO in 2010, it did not issue dual-class shares. Musk has only recently pushed for enhanced voting protection, proposing at least 25% control at Tesla in 2024 after selling shares to fund his Twitter acquisition left him with around 13%.
SpaceX has clearly learned from that experience and structured the IPO differently by planning to allocate up to 30% of shares to retail investors, roughly three times the typical norm for a large offering. The roadshow is expected to begin the week of June 8, with a Nasdaq listing rumored to be a $1.75 trillion valuation and a $75 billion raise.
Elon Musk
ARK’s SpaceX IPO Guide makes a compelling case on why $1.75T may not be the ceiling
ARK Invest breaks down six reasons SpaceX’s $1.75 trillion IPO valuation may be justified.
ARK Invest, which holds SpaceX as its largest Venture Fund position at 17% of net assets, has published a detailed investor guide to why a SpaceX IPO may be grounded in a $1.75 trillion target valuation.
The financial case starts with Starlink, SpaceX’s satellite internet constellation, which has surpassed 10 million active subscribers globally as of early 2026, with 2026 revenue projected to exceed $20 billion. ARK’s research puts the total satellite connectivity market opportunity at roughly $160 billion annually at scale, and Starlink is adding customers faster than any telecom network in history. That growth alone would justify a substantial valuation.
Additionally, ARK notes that SpaceX has reduced the cost per kilogram to orbit from roughly $15,600 in 2008 to under $1,000 today through reusable Falcon 9 hardware. A fully operational Starship targeting sub-$100 per kilogram would represent a significant cost decline and open markets that do not currently exist. SpaceX executed a staggering 165 missions in 2025 and now accounts for approximately 85% of all global orbital launches. That infrastructure position took decades to build and would be nearly impossible to replicate at comparable cost.
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The February 2026 merger with xAI added a layer to the valuation that straightforward financial models struggle to capture. ARK argues that at sub-$100 launch costs, orbital data centers could deliver compute roughly 25% cheaper than ground-based alternatives, without power grid delays, permitting friction, or land constraints. Musk has stated a goal of deploying 100 gigawatts of AI computing capacity per year from orbit.
The $1.75 trillion figure itself is not a conventional earnings multiple. At roughly 95x trailing revenue, it prices in Starlink’s adoption curve, Starship’s cost trajectory, and the orbital compute thesis together. The public S-1 prospectus, due at least 15 days before the June roadshow, will give investors their first complete look at the financials to test those assumptions. ARK’s position is that the track record earns the benefit of the doubt. Fully reusable rockets were considered unrealistic for years. Starlink was considered financially unviable. Both happened on timelines that surprised skeptics.
Why SpaceX just made a $60 billion bet on AI coding ahead of historic IPO
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