Post by Al Maulini, CFP®, CPM®, CEPA®

The AM Brief, Thursday June 18, 2026 Part 2 Good morning, It’s 11am in Miami and here is a recap of events that caught my eye. Part 2 Following its record initial public offering (IPO), SpaceX signed a $60 billion all stock deal on June 16 to acquire Anysphere, the maker of the popular AI coding platform Cursor. Exercising an option secured in April, SpaceX will fold Cursor into its xAI ecosystem to give its Grok assistant a vital foothold in developer tools and attract enterprise clients. The transaction, expected to close in Q3 2026, represents the largest AI-coding acquisition on record. Fueled by a post IPO stock surge that pushed Elon Musk’s wealth past $1 trillion, the deal pairs Cursor's workflow platform with SpaceX's massive compute infrastructure to accelerate frontier model development. The two companies have already been jointly training a new AI model slated for release in Cursor and Grok Build. Founded in 2023 by four MIT graduates, Cursor ignited the "vibe coding" era and currently competes directly with Anthropic’s Claude Code. Industry analysts view the acquisition as a strategic mastermove leveraging rocketry success to anchor an advanced, vertically integrated AI development stack. Gina Rinehart’s Hancock Prospecting has made its largest non iron ore investment, acquiring a stake of over $1 billion in SpaceX following its historic $75 billion IPO. The offering is currently valuing SpaceX at $2.1 trillion. Rinehart views the investment as a long term strategic play, aiming to align her critical minerals portfolio, including stakes in companies like Lynas and MP Materialsnwith SpaceX’s future material needs. This investment marks a significant diversification for Hancock Prospecting beyond its core mining operations into space technology and advanced infrastructure. Advanced metallurgy startup Foundation Alloy has secured a $22 million Series A funding round to scale its proprietary "MetalsFIRST" manufacturing platform. The company's solid state process bypasses the traditional, energy intensive melting phase entirely, fusing metal powders together through high energy repeated smashing on an atomic level instead. Foundation Alloy claims this method utilizes approximately ten times less energy while engineering uniform materials that are significantly stronger and more heat resistant than conventional alternatives. The financing will be used to transition from pilot scale production to a newly opened 36,000 square foot facility in Massachusetts, aiming to increase capacity to multiple tons per week by 2027. The technology is currently being deployed for molybdenum alloys and specialty steels, with active testing underway by early clients across the defense, aerospace, automotive, semiconductor, and luxury consumer goods industries. Sources : CNBC, Bloomberg, Opening Bell, Epoch, Yardeni, Forbes, Rundown AI, Mario Nawfal, X Thank you for reading Live your best life, AL Maulini

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