SpaceX Takes Off, Cursor's Wild Rise, Snap Bets on AR Glasses | Diet TBPN

Diet TBPN delivers the best of today’s TBPN episode in 30 minutes. TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with each episode posted to podcast platforms right after. Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” the show has recently featured Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. TBPN is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Public - https://public.com Cisco - https://www.cisco.com Console - https://www.console.com CrowdStrike - https://www.crowdstrike.com Figma - https://www.figma.com MongoDB - https://www.mongodb.com NYSE - https://www.nyse.com Railway - https://railway.com Shopify - https://www.shopify.com/ Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Jordi Hays?

  The big news is that SpaceX ran like absolute crazy after hours last night. I kept getting push notifications and thinking that can't be right. And then I would double click in, check a little bit and I would say.

• 0:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, the headlines are crazy.

• 0:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so the big one is.

• 0:20John Coogan?

  There's so many of it, just like it's passing this company, passing this company, passing that company. Whoa, this is a crazy, crazy time.

• 0:27Jordi Hays?

  So SpaceX.

• 0:29John Coogan?

  Bigger than Amazon.

• 0:30Jordi Hays?

  Sitting comfortably in the top five.

• 0:32John Coogan?

  Five.

• 0:33Jordi Hays?

  Company.

• 0:34John Coogan?

  You got Nvidia at five trillion, Alphabet and Apple right around four, four and a half, then Microsoft and SpaceX neck and neck, just shy of three trillion dollars. And it basically makes their cursor acquisition free. They paid 60 billion in new stock for the company and their market cap, SpaceX's market cap, more than quadrupled and added more than 4Xed the price of a cursor acquisition.

• 0:58Jordi Hays?

  I believe they had until Q4 to actually pull trigger on the cursor deal, like they built in a window.

• 1:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, now.

• 1:06Jordi Hays?

  I bet you there was some terms that weren't public that cursor would have wanted to make sure that they got in as quickly as possible.

• 1:13John Coogan?

  Sure, sure. If the stock's running.

• 1:15Jordi Hays?

  Because IPO's done really well. Who knows where SpaceX will net out? I mean, I thought, I thought we'd be at 2.4 trillion by the middle, by basically the last hour of trading on Friday. I was incorrect at the time, but it's obviously continued to run. And there was another scenario where SpaceX could have effectively acquired Cursor at an even, at an even higher valuation, but I think it's a great, fantastic outcome for the Cursor team, obviously, you know, OpenAI, big Cursor investor, Thrive, A16Z, Co2, and others that I'm unfortunately forgetting, but.

• 1:54John Coogan?

  Who was Brimstone saying about this? He said it's the biggest, in the past five days, we've seen the biggest VC-backed IPO ever and the biggest VC-backed strategic sale ever. We've never had an M&A of a VC-backed company, young startup, north of 50 billion. Like 60 billion is so, so big. We sort of lose sight of it because we're talking about a trillion dollars for this company, three trillion for that company, but 60 billion is beyond a home run. And it happened in an M&A, which is crazy.

• 2:28Jordi Hays?

  And there's, I would assume, a large number of the retail investors investing in SpaceX.

• 2:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:35Jordi Hays?

  Were not necessarily even that familiar with Cursor up until today.

• 2:39John Coogan?

  I did see the headline today.

• 2:40Jordi Hays?

  If you're waking up today, you're like, wait, SpaceX just acquired one of the hottest AI

• 2:45John Coogan?

  Coding labs.

• 2:46Jordi Hays?

  companies in the world with billions of dollars in revenue. Like, this is so bullish. Obviously, a lot of the more institutional investors or people that had been following the company privately were well aware that they had the option to do this.

• 3:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:02Jordi Hays?

  That they would almost certainly take it.

• 3:04John Coogan?

  Yeah. The takes are all over the timeline. Quinn Thompson says, "This is brilliant corporate finance. User newly printed low float retail inflated currency to acquire real businesses ahead of the lockup expiring, probably the most creative accretive way to sell as much equity as possible into IPO pump. I wonder what acquisition is next." That's very interesting. Nick Carter fires back and says, "You'd think that people buying the equity would also be aware of this," and that's a good point. But the question is, like, are there more acquisitions in the pipeline? Because Tesla has not done a lot of acquisitions. Elon's always been a build, not buy operator or founder.

• 3:43Jordi Hays?

  But Tesla itself.

• 3:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's a very different scenario. What I'm talking about is, like, there are companies, Meta is very acquisitive, Google, Apple. Apple's like on the smaller side, but they still do deals more frequently. It would be very interesting if we're seeing, you know, one deal a month and he's sort of putting together the pieces of buying up Neo Labs and compute capacity and Neo Clouds and rolling everything up. That would just be a completely different operating philosophy. But given where the stock is, given how smooth this deal went and where the market cap of SpaceX is, it's not the craziest thing. It would be a big pivot in his. In his strategy, though, Business Insider has a deep dive on Cursor's wild ride.

• 4:27John Coogan?

  Michael Truall didn't pay himself for years. Interestingly, Cursor once made up 40 to 50% of Anthropic's revenue. That is a crazy gyration in the market. It just shows you how quickly things are changing. Went from, you know, it's all Cursor, that that business is just funneling to Cursor. Cursor is the front door to this business. Then it's like, oh, it's all these hyperscalers that are spending a billion dollars, half a billion dollars a month. And so the, the whole, the whole landscape is changing. Nothing, nothing tells that more than Anthropic telling Cursor that Claude Code was just a research effort. This goes back to the Dylan Field, like, were they consistently candid? Or maybe they really just did think, hey, yeah, this is just a research effort, like, you do you, and then realized later, like, whoa, whoa, whoa, we, well, we need to be a player in this.

• 5:10John Coogan?

  We cannot be in the middle of this situation, so we gotta do our own thing.

• 5:15Jordi Hays?

  Owning the end customer relationship.

• 5:16John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so, wild, wild ride.

• 5:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, similar, similar to, I, I think, the messaging to Figma and Canva around Anthropic's design tool.

• 5:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's tricky. Every AI company is, is a general use technology. They're using it for everything. There's, there's, you know, questions about like, will you maintain value if you're in the token path? Do you need to be, like, do not build a company that depends on the models getting better? But if the models are really, really good, like, what can't they do? And so constantly, we see every company competing with every other company as, you know, every hyperscaler has an LLM at this point, and every SaaS product has other products because they can launch features faster. And so the, the competition is heating up across all these different companies.

• 6:02Jordi Hays?

  Next time we have Michael on the show. We got to ask how he paid the bills for all those years.

• 6:08John Coogan?

  Crashing on couches or something?

• 6:10Jordi Hays?

  Got to ask. Taking out massive loans against the company, maybe. Ryan Peterson says, with yesterday's 20% SpaceX pop, Elon made more money than Warren Buffett made in his entire career.

• 6:23John Coogan?

  These headlines are going to get crazy because I, I mean, I, I see some of them getting community noted, but it's like, a single day will move more than like all of Bill Gates. Is current net worth, that type of thing. Those headlines are going to pop off consistently. The crazy one is like, there's going to be down days. Like, there's going to be just randomly.

• 6:41Jordi Hays?

  Elon lost more money today than any person in history combined.

• 6:45John Coogan?

  He lost more money than Brazil makes in a trillion years, you know, and because like whenever the big numbers get contextualized, it's always very entertaining. It was up another 14% after hours, though. But the numbers are staggering when you're in the one trillion dollar club.

• 7:02Jordi Hays?

  JB says, is this everyone's first IPO? It's silly now as it approaches Amazon valuation. Well, we passed that, but the float is low until the lockup of nearly every retail investor on earth wants to be involved. You're going to get stupid moves, then the float opens up and all the retail people are stuck for years.

• 7:17John Coogan?

  What does that mean?

• 7:18Jordi Hays?

  Just say, just say you haven't seen the Mass Driver demo, buddy.

• 7:22John Coogan?

  Or, or the next data center. I mean, that's the really interesting thing with cursor. There's all this debate over like, they have a deal with Anthropic, they have a deal with Google. Cursor obviously wants to compute, but talking to Gavin Baker, it sounds like there might be a lot more terrestrial compute coming online in the very short term. And that is valuable. They're monetizing this very effectively. And so you could see a short-term revenue ramp just driven from sort of the boring neo-cloud stuff that monetizes really well. And then that provides, you know, it's like the Model 3. It's, it's, it's going to be the economic engine that provides the capital for data centers in space, Mass Driver on the moon. All that stuff needs fuel for the fire. Anyway.

• 8:03Jordi Hays?

  Ad Ludlow has some data. SpaceX, the current approximate price to sales is 150x. Amazon is 3.6, Microsoft 9.2.

• 8:15John Coogan?

  See, people read this as a bare SpaceX take, but imagine if Amazon started trading at SpaceX's price to sales.

• 8:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 8:22John Coogan?

  Be probably like a hundred trillion dollar company. This is from Evan Spiegel. Yes, and the Geminator reporting.

• 8:28Jordi Hays?

  Says the snap specs are official. $2,195 all-in-one AR glasses that Evan Spiegel has dubbed the next computer.

• 8:38John Coogan?

  $2,200. That's almost Apple Vision Pro numbers. That's expensive. It's.

• 8:48John Coogan?

  Going to be a lift. I feel like it's a lot. It seems like a lot of money. It's got to be

• 8:54Jordi Hays?

  Apple Vision Pro starts at $3,499. So a bit of a jump, but this is a product that seemingly is trying to compete in the realm of like it's a mobile device. It's naturally a mobile device. Unlike the Apple Vision Pro, which obviously there's some viral images on launch of people walking around with it.

• 9:13John Coogan?

  I'm just thinking about like, there are a lot of Apple fanboys who buy every

• 9:16Jordi Hays?

  Get this.

• 9:17John Coogan?

  What?

• 9:17Jordi Hays?

  Get this guy on right now.

• 9:18John Coogan?

  What?

• 9:19Jordi Hays?

  Pull him up.

• 9:20John Coogan?

  Hey, what do you think? Are you buying the Snap specs? $2,200? Are you spending your paycheck on that?

• 9:27Speaker 02

  I mean, I think they actually do look really cool. I don't know. Like, I was looking at some of the product demos earlier. Some like the game features look really cool. There's like ping pong.

• 9:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:36Speaker 02

  2.2K is like a little pricey personally.

• 9:39John Coogan?

  But if you can watch Lawrence Arabia from start to finish.

• 9:42Jordi Hays?

  If we bought it, if we traded you your phone for a pair of these for a week, would you demo them for a week? No phone?

• 9:51John Coogan?

  No phone.

• 9:53Speaker 02

  Can you do like texting on it? Can you call?

• 9:55Jordi Hays?

  You can go without texting for a

• 9:58John Coogan?

  You have Lawrence Arabia. You don't need a phone.

• 10:00Speaker 02

  That's true. I can watch Lawrence Arabia like, you know.

• 10:02John Coogan?

  What's the battery life?

• 10:03Jordi Hays?

  During the show.

• 10:04John Coogan?

  Snap specs, battery life, specs, battery life. I gotta, I gotta know.

• 10:09Jordi Hays?

  So what happened? Wasn't there some conversation that specs might spin out?

• 10:13John Coogan?

  Up to four hours. That's Lawrence Arabia right there with a little intermission.

• 10:17Jordi Hays?

  If I remember correctly, there was some like rumors that that specs would be spun out. I remember at least one article. That has not happened.

• 10:27John Coogan?

  I don't think so.

• 10:28Jordi Hays?

  And so the stock is down 7% today.

• 10:34John Coogan?

  I don't know. The trick is that you have Apple fanboys who of, you know, they have a lot of Apple fans, but some of them are wealthy. Some of them buy every product. They buy a new iPhone, a new iPhone every year. They buy the top of the line MacBook. They have the Mac Studio and the Mac Mini just for fun. And like, that's a whole class of consumer for Apple. And so when they come in with something that's a little crazy. Like a $10,000 gold Apple Watch like they'll sell a couple of them when they come in with a $3,000 VR headset like a couple of people will just be like, yeah, I'll give it a try. When you're talking about a new company entering hardware, Meta, I think did a better job coming in with like, yeah, it's just a pair of sunglasses. You need a pair of sunglasses anywhere, anyway.

• 11:18Jordi Hays?

  Camera in it.

• 11:19John Coogan?

  We put a camera in it. It's $100 for the version that you know and love, the Ray-Ban Wayfarers that don't have a camera in them. Ours are add a couple hundred extra bucks. It's still something you could give as a gift.

• 11:29Jordi Hays?

  Afford to lose money on every single device effectively forever.

• 11:33John Coogan?

  Totally. Yeah. And so, and so it's a lot easier to get into that like meta ecosystem just saying like, yeah, throw a camera on my, on my Ray-Bans. I'll give it a try. Maybe I'll churn, but if it's collecting dust in the, in the cabinet or in the, in the sock drawer, you're a lot less like, ah, I really got burned. And like the Apple fanboys that, you know, a lot of them took them back, but they're like, yeah, that was still like a cool experiments mix. Except me.

• 12:00Jordi Hays?

  Well, Tyler, once you're back in town.

• 12:02John Coogan?

  What was that?

• 12:04Speaker 02

  Lord of the Rings Extended Cut. I think that's, that's even longer than that.

• 12:07John Coogan?

  Four hours? You can't watch the whole thing.

• 12:09Jordi Hays?

  Well, let's do this. Once you're back in town, let's pick up a pair. Tyler can live with them. We won't say a week, we'll say 48 hours.

• 12:17John Coogan?

  Exclusively.

• 12:17Jordi Hays?

  Exclusive.

• 12:18John Coogan?

  Do everything.

• 12:19Jordi Hays?

  We take your phone.

• 12:20John Coogan?

  I think you need the phone to, to, to do anything. I think a lot of the compute happens.

• 12:23Speaker 02

  48 hours, I, I think is actually like not very hard.

• 12:26John Coogan?

  That's just a digital detox.

• 12:27Speaker 02

  It's like one weekend.

• 12:28Jordi Hays?

  You're down?

• 12:29Speaker 02

  I could do a week. I could do a week.

• 12:30John Coogan?

  That's like 10 showings of Lawrence.

• 12:32Jordi Hays?

  I'm not asking you to do a week. If you want to do a week, we can do it. Okay. He's doing a week.

• 12:36John Coogan?

  I'm here in, I'm here in four weeks. I'm here in a full month now.

• 12:40Jordi Hays?

  All right. It was great to see you, Tyler. We miss you.

• 12:42John Coogan?

  Great to see you. Ultra Nerd's not the same without you.

• 12:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it really is. John and I were kind of messing around.

• 12:48John Coogan?

  Kind of quiet in here today.

• 12:49Jordi Hays?

  And we realized when Tyler's not here, there's, there's nobody super close by to laugh at our, our, our bad jokes.

• 12:55John Coogan?

  Yeah. Spiegel called the specs both very, very wearable and highly capable, which he said, gives Snap an opportunity in a market that's focused on either very large and clunky headsets that are super capable. Or very lightweight glasses that really don't do much. So it is interesting. I was reading the coverage in, there's some videos here in Upload VR and it shows sort of the, the process of this. The hollow lens one from Microsoft 2016 was 580 grams. Snapbacks are 132 grams. So they are light. Now, the red, the Meta Ray-Ban display is 70 grams. So about half as heavy. So these are heavier, but they're nowhere as heavy as a hollow lens

• 13:38John Coogan?

  or a real VR headset. And it checks a lot of the boxes on field of view and we'll see, we'll see what the developer ecosystem is like. I hope someone comes up with some interesting thing. I hope that there's a YC company that builds on top of this exclusively and, and has some sort of breakthrough user interface experience, some, some killer use case that comes from the community.

• 13:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Gotta wait to see how many of these sell.

• 14:01John Coogan?

  Yes, that will be, that will be.

• 14:03Jordi Hays?

  You're gonna need, I mean, even with a million, a million sold, it's not a very big user base.

• 14:07John Coogan?

  It's a lot of money. Let me tell you about Codex. Codex is a powerful workspace for getting work done with AI agents, whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content, or automating business workflows. Codex helps you move projects forward from start to finish.

• 14:19Jordi Hays?

  Over on X, Daniel's advocating for banning social media for over 65s.

• 14:25John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. The inverse of the UK's project or the UK's initiative to ban social media for under 16. Over 65, I think that would ruffle some feathers. That would probably be pushed back on more by the social media companies because the purchasing power from 65 onward is so high. There's so much wealth with the boomer generation. That would actually be very devastating to Facebook and YouTube and TikTok even. The young folks, I think all the social media companies have an incentive to get those users as early as possible, keep them on the platform. But I think more than anything, they want a level playing

• 15:07John Coogan?

  field. So Connor Hayes can duke it out with every other social media site as soon as someone turns 16. Try and acquire them. Try and get them on board, but. We'll see as that rolls out and where the guardrails are set.

• 15:22Jordi Hays?

  Sean Frank, everyone is doubting Meta. Spenders are mad at bugs and model changes. Investors think they're missing AI like the AR saga all over again. But as a large-ish customer who will spend something like $100 million with them this year, Meta is working and no ad space comes close to their level of scale. Don't doubt the zuck.

• 15:42Jordi Hays?

  The fact that you can buy, that you could have one SpaceX or two Metas for the same price is pretty unbelievable and certainly not something that most people would have guessed even a year ago.

• 15:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, it is a crazy, crazy situation. At the same time, rockets, they're inspiring. And social media is so.

• 16:05Jordi Hays?

  Totally. I mean, I can see, I can see what we got here, but it's still surprising.

• 16:09John Coogan?

  But yeah, obviously fantastic business and yeah, people are probably need to, you know, reality check with Sean Frank because he's in the trenches. He understands the business better than most. So thank you for tuning into TBPN today.

• 16:24Jordi Hays?

  It's been an honor and a privilege.

• 16:26John Coogan?

  Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter at tbpn.com. We'll see you.

• 16:31Jordi Hays?

  We love you.

• 16:31John Coogan?

  Tomorrow. Goodbye.

• 16:33Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.