Elon Musk's SpaceX has overtaken Amazon to become the world's fifth-most-valuable company after a surge in its share price.

Days after joining New York's tech-focused Nasdaq stock exchange in the biggest public listing ever, its share price has risen by more than 50%.

It leaves Musk's rocket company worth about $2.78tn (£2.1tn), while Jeff Bezos's sprawling online retail and media empire is currently worth about $2.66tn.

The boom in SpaceX's value came as it announced it was buying AI coding start-up Cursor for $60bn.

SpaceX said it would take over Anysphere, Cursor's parent company, which makes the artificial intelligence coding agent.

Soaring shares

SpaceX has garnered huge enthusiasm among investors for its vision of sending AI data centres to space and even helping humans to colonise Mars.

Its listing raised $85.7bn and minted Musk as the world's first trillionaire. Since first selling shares to the public at $135 each on Friday, they have risen to $209.

But analysts have questioned the sustainability of its high share price given the significant uncertainty surrounding its future earnings.

While Amazon is a household name, its brand is difficult to avoid encountering almost daily; SpaceX is less embedded in the lives of the general public.

Despite SpaceX's stock market value overtaking Amazon's, the companies' revenues and profits are vastly different.

Amazon made $30.3bn of profit in the first quarter of 2026, while Musk's future-focused SpaceX lost $4.3bn.

In 2025, Jeff Bezos's firm generated some $716.9bn in sales, while SpaceX recorded $18.67bn in sales.

But investors appear to be betting on what they think SpaceX can achieve. While its primary focus is manufacturing and launching rockets with reusable parts, the company also manufactures and launches Starlink internet satellites and is ramping up its presence in the AI race.

SpaceX and Cursor have been partners since April, when Musk's firm announced it had the right to either buy it for $60bn, or pay $10bn for the work they have done together.

Like OpenAI and Anthropic, Cursor's technology uses AI to automate the process of writing code, one of the most prominent current uses for artificial intelligence.

The tie-up comes as SpaceX tries to catch up with rivals by growing its AI business, xAI, which is behind the controversial Grok chatbot.

Announcing the partnership in April, SpaceX said: "The combination of Cursor's leading product and distribution to expert software engineers with SpaceX's million H100 equivalent Colossus training supercomputer will allow us to build the world's most useful models."

Cursor is used by major companies including Stripe, Adobe and Nvidia, whose boss Jensen Huang has described it as his "favourite enterprise AI service".

SpaceX said the deal would be completed by the end of September, with Cursor's shareholders paid with $60bn worth of SpaceX shares.