Silicon Valley Hotspots on X — 2026-06-23

BREAKING: SpaceX has agreed to acquire Cursor, the world's fastest growing software startup, for $60 billion in an all stock deal. Cursor has over 1 million paying customers, more than $2 billion in annualized revenue, and is projected to hit $6 billion by end of 2026. At $60 billion, this is the largest software acquisition in history, paying 20 to 30 times Cursor's current revenue. The deal is subject to regulatory approval and expected to close in Q3 2026. SpaceX now owns the rockets, the satellites, the AI models, the chips, and is about to own the tool every developer on earth uses to write code.

I think it’s time to revisit the accredited investor laws in the US. Companies are staying private longer, where only accredited investors (aka rich people!) can invest. Retail investors can only come in after IPO, when much of the upside has already been captured. These rules were created with the best of intentions, to protect regular people from scams - a noble idea. Unfortunately, in practice they've often made it illegal to get richer, unless you're already rich. A regressive tax! We have to judge policies based on their outcomes, not on their intentions. These are two possible routes I see: 1) Replace the rule with something merit-based, like a financial literacy test. Pass it and you're accredited. Having a qualification based on competency rather than your bank balance or income seems far more fair. 2) Remove the rule entirely. Let consenting adults assess their own risk. Disclosure requirements stay and fraud enforcement stays to punish bad actors.

Last year, I was doing airport runs to clear debt. $800 behind on my car payment. One more missed payment and they repossess it. Picked up a guy from the airport. Dropped him at a hotel. Next passenger opens the door: "There's a laptop back here." MacBook Pro. Stickers from MIT. Locked. No ID. I could've sold it, paid the car, fixed my teeth, eaten for 2 months. Nobody would've known. Instead I drove back to the hotel. Waited 2 hours, finally a guy runs out, panicked. "My whole startup is on that."

People at major AI labs (using internal models) 3-4 months ahead of startup silicon valley engineers SV founders/eng 3-6 months ahead of NY NY founders/eng 6-12 months ahead of rest of world Most people have no idea how fast AI shifting as 1-2 years behind SOTA "The future is here, just not equally distributed" - Robert Heinlein

This is the only other IPO I'm really excited about.

How Deep Does The Web Of Corruption & Deception Go? The CIA created and funded a venture capital company called ‘In-Q-Tel’ In-Q-Tel provided funding for: - Apple - Facebook - Google - Amazon Through In-Q-Tel , the CIA provides early-stage equity funding to companies building technology that might prove useful to intelligence agencies. KPMG “it's evident that the intelligence community's research funding helped not only Google but Silicon Valley as a whole” In-Q-Tel: In 1999, at the peak of the dot-com boom, the CIA launched In-Q-Tel, a Silicon Valley venture capital fund with a mission to invest in startups that aligned with the intelligence agency’s needs. The Google History Crash Course: In 1994, two Ph.D. students Sergey Brin and Larry Page began working on their automated web crawling and page ranking application as part of their research project they had bet on making the exploding Internet easy to access and it paid off enormously. Sergey Brin's part of the Stanford Research was funded by the NSA and CIA. At some point, Sergey Brin (one of the co-founders of Google) reported the progress to the representatives of the US Intelligence Agencies. GOOGLE EARTH had CIA Investment: In 2003 the CIA through In-Q-Tel would invest in Keyhole. Keyhole was a startup that built 3-D global mapping software one of its first uses was to support US troops during Operation Iraqi Freedom the campaign to overthrow Saddam Hussein. In the following year, Google bought keyhole whose team now included CIA personnel Google would soon turn keyhole into the basis for Google Earth. Only a year after the purchase the director responsible for initially investing in keyhole at the CIA investing firm In-Q-Tel, moved to take a position at Google. During this period Google would win contracts for different search applications for the NSA and CIA. GOOGLE and NSA: Google federal was launched in 2006 and its purpose is to serve federal contracts at a certain point this branch of Google had so many former NSA staff that they became known as the NSA West. When there was hackers threat from China and other countries, journalists quote, ‘Google agreed to provide information about traffic on its networks in exchange for the intelligence from the NSA about what it knew your foreign hackers.’ While both Google and the intelligence community deny that the CIA directly funded the start of Google it's evident that the intelligence community's research funding helped not only Google but Silicon Valley as a whole.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and his husband are funding a startup to edit babies' genes. By merging AI with CRISPR, they aim to “fix” humans while offshoring early embryo testing to evade oversight. When scientists and billionaires play God, the result is usually tragedy. The GMO humans will undoubtedly face severe health consequences throughout their lifetimes. We have seen this story before in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Dr. Frankenstein believed he was advancing humanity, but instead he unleashed a creature he could neither guide nor contain. What began as an experiment in human perfection ended in horror and isolation. In the twenty-first century, the monster is not stitched together from corpses but assembled from code, chromosomes, and venture capital. Silicon Valley’s new “creators” are convinced they can improve upon nature itself. Yet, like Frankenstein, they fail to grasp the full moral weight of what they are summoning into existence.

Peter Thiel: Europe will never have massive tech companies because they fear success. "In Silicon Valley, there's this pornography of failure. You talk about all your failures, and this somehow means you're going to succeed." "In the social democratic European societies, it's acceptable to be moderately successful, it's not acceptable to be wildly successful. If you have a successful company that's starting to grow, it will get short-circuited, and you'll sell the company. You'll never get to an enormous company if you sell it along the way." "The single most important decision in the history of Facebook— summer of 2006. It was two years into the company. We got an acquisition offer for $1B from Yahoo to buy the company. There were three of us on the board— Mark Zuckerberg, myself, and another VC. We had a meeting to decide if we should take the $1B." "The two of us thought it was a lot of money, we should maybe take it. Mark started the board meeting— 'this is a pro forma thing, we're just going to talk about this for 10 minutes. Obviously we're not taking it.'" "Any super big tech company is one where you've been offered multiple times for people to buy it, and you've chosen never to sell it. You're not that afraid of success." "In Europe, the answer is to check out sooner rather than later and go back to the decade-long vacation that people are on in Europe."

Some moments stay with you. A look back at the extraordinary team behind a milestone achievement. Morgan Stanley was honored to support @SpaceX team through its IPO, serving as joint lead bookrunner and hosting the opening of trading in our offices last week as sole stabilization agent.