The FAB10 era begins with massive corporate buyouts and rising policy risks

A new group of tech companies is challenging Wall Street’s traditional favorites.

This shift is happening at a time when the tech world has seen a huge IPO, a $60 billion buyout, and a government order that shut off access to one of America’s most powerful AI systems. 

Investors have long rallied around the Magnificent Seven: Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla.

But market watchers say a new grouping, the FAB 10, is quickly taking their place at the top of the conversation.

SpaceX leads the FAB10 into record territory

SpaceX is leading that charge. The FAB10 group is increasingly viewed as the next generation of market-leading technology companies.

Shares of Elon Musk’s rocket and satellite company climbed sharply in early Tuesday trading, opening above $200 for the first time.

That price put SpaceX’s market value at more than $2.8 trillion, pushing it past Amazon’s $2.66 trillion to become the fifth most valuable company in the world.

The listing also made Musk the world’s first trillionaire.

Right after going public, SpaceX quickly put its financial strength to use.

On Tuesday, the company announced it would buy Anysphere, the creator of the AI coding tool Cursor, in a $60 billion stock-only deal.

Once the deal is completed, expected in the third quarter of 2026, Cursor will become a fully owned part of SpaceX.

The company said it will not use any money raised from its IPO to pay for the acquisition.

Cursor CEO Michael Truell said in a statement: “We are excited to share that SpaceX has exercised their option to acquire Cursor in an all-stock transaction with the goal of building the world’s most useful AI models.”

SpaceX had been eyeing Cursor for months. Back in April, it secured an option to either acquire the company outright for $60 billion or pay $10 billion for a partnership arrangement.

At the time, Cursor said working with SpaceX’s xAI unit would allow it to use xAI’s AI data center in Memphis, Tennessee, to build future products.

Analyst Adam Crisafulli of Vital Knowledge wrote in a note to investors Tuesday that “SpaceX hopes the Cursor team/product will give a jolt to its Grok AI business, especially in coding, which has so far failed to make a dent in the frontier market, which is led by Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and Meta in the US, in that order.”

The deal puts SpaceX in more direct competition with Anthropic and OpenAI, both of which already offer AI coding products.

Those two companies also have their own major milestones on the horizon.

Anthropic filed confidentially with the SEC on June 1, 2026, and OpenAI followed a week later on June 8.

Anthropic is currently valued at $965 billion, while OpenAI trails at $852 billion. Both companies are targeting a public listing this fall.

Federal crackdown hits Anthropic at a critical moment

But even as these valuations reach record territory, Anthropic ran into serious trouble last week.

On Friday, the company revealed that the U.S. Department of Commerce had ordered it to stop allowing anyone outside the United States from accessing its frontier AI models. Anthropic responded by cutting off access for all users worldwide.

The company had been running a limited early access program called Project Glasswing, through which institutions in around 15 countries, including U.S. allies Japan and South Korea, were granted access to test Mythos for security research purposes.

Paul Triolo, a partner at DGA-Albright Stonebridge Group, called the move unprecedented: “It is the first time that a government has ordered a model developer to restrict access to a particular model based on nationality.”

Triolo warned that governments and companies will now start rethinking which AI systems they rely on.

He said that until clearer criteria emerge from Washington, many will explore alternatives, including models from European firms like Mistral and Cohere, as well as capable open-source Chinese models.

That shift, he added, could end up benefiting AI developers like DeepSeek and Moonshot AI.