CNBC’s Jim Cramer said Tuesday that investors flocking to SpaceX are betting on Elon Musk’s ability to create transformative businesses — not the company’s current earnings power.

“The stock is called SpaceX, but it might as well be called Elon Musk,” the “Mad Money” host said.

SpaceX has quickly become one of the world’s most valuable companies following its blockbuster IPO on Friday. Shares surged almost 5% Tuesday, pushing the rocket company’s valuation above several technology heavyweights, including Amazon, and briefly surpassing Microsoft. The rally has intensified questions about whether SpaceX’s roughly $2.5 trillion market value is justified.

Cramer argued, however, that conventional valuation methods miss what many investors are buying.

“There is no way this company, which could see losses for many years, deserves such a high valuation on its own. It only gets there because it’s run by Musk,” he said.

While Musk recently projected that SpaceX could generate $1 trillion in annual revenue by 2030, Cramer argued that the stock’s appeal extends far beyond any single forecast. Instead, he thinks investors are assigning value to Musk’s track record of building category-defining businesses and his ability to turn ambitious ideas into commercial opportunities.

“When you buy SpaceX here, you’re really buying Elon Musk’s brain,” Cramer said. “I think the cult of Musk is for real.”

To support that view, Cramer pointed to the breadth of SpaceX’s businesses and growth initiatives, including its Starlink satellite internet network, reusable rocket operations, and long-term data center ambitions. Adding to that opportunity set, SpaceX announced Tuesday that it will acquire AI coding startup Cursor for $60 billion in stock, deepening its push into artificial intelligence and software development tools. While the company currently operates at a loss and many of these opportunities have yet to fully materialize, Cramer said they could ultimately become significant drivers of future growth.

Cramer suggested that some investors view SpaceX similarly to how previous generations viewed Berkshire Hathaway under Warren Buffett — a way to gain exposure to a business leader they believe can continue creating value for decades.

While skeptics continue to question the stock’s valuation, Cramer noted that betting against the rally has been costly so far.

“While you’re sitting here trying to justify SpaceX’s valuation, the buyers are relentlessly pushing it up, and I bet they keep going,” he said.

PARK CITY, Utah — Rivian Automotive CEO RJ Scaringe envisions a day in the not-so-distant future when the electric vehicle maker’s manufacturing employees will have a new type of colleague: humanoid robots.

“There’s going to be thousands of people that are collaborating alongside these robots. They’re going to be taking pictures, ‘Hey, check this out! My co-worker’s name is Phil, and he’s a robot,'” Scaringe said during a media event for the launch of the Rivian R2 EV.

The 43-year-old automotive enthusiast and tech entrepreneur started a robotics company last year called Mind Robotics. The company has raised more than $1 billion, according to Scaringe.

Humanoid robots are designed to be shaped and move like people. Artificial intelligence algorithms power their abilities along with complex hardware like semiconductors. Proponents say they could be used in various settings, from factories to hospitality and even in the home, while others have raised concerns about the devices replacing human jobs.

Scaringe said the company expects to reveal its first product in less than a year, with Rivian as a large minority shareholder and launch customer. Mind currently has roughly 20 open positions ranging from software and hardware engineers to data architects, according to its website.

Scaringe, who is executive chair and acting CEO of Mind, told CNBC that the plan is to keep the robotics company separate from Rivian, as opposed to the automaker partially shifting to make humanoid robots, like Tesla CEO Elon Musk is doing with his company.

“We have a deep relationship, and that was actually how we structured it,” Scaringe said during an interview. “A big part of structuring the business was to allow me to be able to spend time on both.”

The robotics strategy adds to a narrative of Scaringe doing things differently than Musk, despite obvious similarities in their companies. There have been enough comparisons that Rivian has even been called the “anti-Tesla” and Scaringe has been referred to as the “anti-Elon.”

“I’d say there’s a lot of alignment there, and I think that’s because, obviously, I’m biased, but I think they’re right … that autonomy is a super important technology,” Scaringe said about Tesla and Rivian. “But in terms of the products, they, in many ways, couldn’t be more different.”

So far Rivian and Mind are assisting each other, though, much like Musk’s companies have also done during developmental phases. That includes Musk’s xAI company merging with SpaceX before the company’s record-setting initial public offering on Friday as well as SpaceX purchasing vehicles from Tesla.

Scaringe said Rivian will be a “huge beneficiary” of Mind, which is using data from Rivian for training its AI models. Along with Rivian’s equity stake, the automaker will be Mind’s first customer for the robots.

“We realized it was such a big opportunity that deserved to be its own company,” said Scaringe. He said he believes there is a multitrillion-dollar total addressable market for industrial labor.

Scaringe was visibly excited when speaking with media about the potential for AI and humanoid robotics, calling it “one of the most exciting times, perhaps in human history.”

“One hundred years from now, they’re going to be inheriting the work that we do over our lifetimes, and so I just think we’re so lucky that we get to be alive at the birth of AI,” Scaringe said.

Despite the optimism for humanoid robots, Scaringe said he expects the devices to work alongside humans rather than replace them completely for the foreseeable future, saying it takes a “long time” for vehicle assembly plants to become so-called “dark factories” which can be almost entirely run by robots.

“What I see happening is the simplest tasks will be taken on by robots. The more complex tasks that require higher levels of reasoning or more complex, more tactile levels of dexterity [will be done by humans],” he said.

Scaringe said manufacturers are dealing with an “extreme lack of labor,” from other automakers. Rivian currently has more than 30 open manufacturing and engineering jobs, according to the company’s website.

The need for such workers, as well as the rapid development of AI, Scaringe believes, will mean human employees will be working alongside a robot named “Phil” far sooner than they may expect.

“The rate at which this is moving is far faster than I’d say — like an order of magnitude faster — than the average person in society understands,” he said. “That’s going to be a particularly big challenge in the short-term to just have the average person … realize how fast the models are learning and how capable they are at doing almost everything.”

— CNBC’s Arjun Kharpal contributed to this report.

Elon Musk just became the world’s first trillionaire.

With SpaceX opening on the Nasdaq at $150 a share Friday, the CEO of SpaceX and Tesla now has a stake in SpaceX that’s worth more than $766 billion. Combined with his Tesla stake, which is worth $280 billion, Musk’s net worth from both companies as of Friday was roughly $1.05 trillion.

The SpaceX IPO added more than $180 billion to Musk’s fortune. He is now worth more than the next five richest billionaires in the world combined. His personal net worth is larger than the national GDP of Taiwan, Ireland or Sweden.

Musk’s coronation as the first person in history to be worth $1 trillion is likely to add fuel to the debate over wealth inequality and the rise in power of America’s richest tech founders. Along with creating the world’s first trillionaire, the SpaceX IPO also minted thousands of new millionaires and several new billionaires among the employees and executives who own stock.

Shares of SpaceX gained roughly 20% Friday to close just above $160 apiece. That values the company at more than $2 trillion.

Shares of Tesla rose almost 2% to roughly $406 apiece.

Musk was first declared a billionaire by Bloomberg and Forbes in 2012, with the latter estimating his net worth at $2.4 billion at the time.

His fortune reached $20 billion in 2019 and skyrocketed the following year after a Tesla stock split, making Musk the world’s fifth centibillionaire — worth more than $100 billion — by Forbes’ estimate. In the six years since, Musk’s net worth has grown roughly tenfold.

His fortune has surged by a rate unmatched even by the decade’s previous “world’s richest person” titleholders: Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, and Bernard Arnault, head of the luxury empire LVMH.

Google co-founder Larry Page, currently worth an estimated $295 billion, according to Forbes, takes a distant second place among the ranks of the world’s richest people.

Page is followed by a second Google co-founder, Sergey Brin; Bezos, and Oracle founder Larry Ellison, each worth more than $200 billion as of Friday, according to Forbes.

That said, Gates’ fortune would be a whopping $464 billion had he not given so much away to philanthropy, per Forbes‘ estimate.

SpaceX filed for an IPO a week ago, and Elon Musk is already creating confusion.

Days before the reusable rocket maker is slated to start pitching its story to investors, Musk took to social network X (which is owned by SpaceX) late Wednesday to explain details of the company’s recent partnership with competing AI startup Anthropic. His comment included a potentially material aspect about their deal that wasn’t included in SpaceX’s 300-plus page IPO filing.

Earlier this month, SpaceX said it was leasing unused compute capacity at its Colossus 1 data center in Memphis, Tennessee to Anthropic. Last week’s prospectus said that Anthropic agreed to pay SpaceX “$1.25 billion per month through May 2029, with capacity ramping in May and June 2026 at a reduced fee.” The filing also noted, “The agreement may be terminated by either party upon 90 days’ notice.”

In his X post Wednesday night, Musk wrote, “SpaceX has not committed to leasing Colossus for years,” and called the pact a “180 day lease with 90 day notice mutual cancellation thereafter.” The prospectus, however, said nothing about the deal potentially ending in a matter of months.

Whether Anthropic is slated to pay SpaceX $15 billion a year for the next three years or will be spending substantially less over a much shorter period represents a major consideration for prospective investors. SpaceX’s total revenue in 2025 was just $18.7 billion, and selling compute capacity out of its data center adds an entirely new revenue stream, while putting SpaceX in competition with so-called neocloud providers like Nebius and CoreWeave.

Some investors are already leery of buying into the largest IPO on record, and backing a company that’s valued at over $1 trillion while burning billions of dollars a quarter. Musk’s post raises further questions about the company’s financial disclosures.

“The odd thing is that either Musk is correct and the S-1 is materially misleading, or the S-1 is correct and Elon is up to his old hijinx,” said Eric Talley, a professor at Columbia Law School and expert on corporate governance, in an email. “But more than that it’s confusing to investors who are trying (best they can) to put a valuation on SpaceX.”

Anthropic declined to comment for this story, and representatives from SpaceX didn’t respond to a request for comment.

The Anthropic disclosure isn’t the only one in SpaceX’s filing that analysts have highlighted as less than thorough.

Franco Granda, an analyst at PitchBook, catalogued an array of omissions in a report following the publishing of the prospectus.

“Critical disclosures are missing,” Granda wrote. He pointed to “subscriber churn” as well as “unit economics” for the Falcon 9, SpaceX’s partially reusable rocket, and “AI segment granularity,” writing that the company didn’t break out subscriptions to Grok or X or provide details on the “utilization rate on 1.0 GW of deployed compute.”

As the leaders of the world’s two most powerful economies rekindled personal ties in Beijing on Thursday and Friday, with a cavalcade of American business leaders accompanying U.S. President Donald Trump, the Chinese capital turned into something of a spectacle.

The visit — the first by a sitting U.S. president to China in nearly a decade — was full of friendly overtures, closely orchestrated pageantry, business dealmaking, and headline-grabbing sideshows that captivated audiences on both sides of the Pacific.

Beijing deployed its diplomatic arsenal to the full.

It laid on brass bands and flower-waving schoolchildren at the airport, a state banquet at the Great Hall of the People, a private tour of the Temple of Heaven, and a closing garden stroll at Zhongnanhai – the walled compound where China’s top leaders have worked and lived since 1949 – during which Chinese President Xi Jinping offered Trump rose seeds as a parting gift. 

“There were unusually long handshakes, back-patting, smiling, and synchronized walking during public appearances,” said Lyle Morris, senior fellow for foreign policy and national security at the Asia Society Policy Institute. “The interaction was warmer and more relaxed than some previous Trump-Xi encounters,” Morris said. 

Crowds gathered along streets near the Four Seasons hotel and the Great Hall for a glimpse of Trump’s motorcade. “It was quite a spectacle,” said Alicia Liao, a university student in Beijing. “We had an exam the next day, but almost everyone followed the broadcast or social media clips.”  

A week into the Musk v. Altman trial, which features two towering figures in the tech industry facing off in a case that could have major implications for OpenAI, the plaintiff has made his central message clear to the jury. 

“You can’t just steal a charity,” Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, said repeatedly during his time on the stand at a federal courthouse in Oakland, California. 

Musk’s testimony was the centerpiece of the trial’s first week. It comes two years after the Tesla and SpaceX CEO first sued OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, the company’s president, alleging they went back on their promises to keep the artificial intelligence startup a nonprofit and to follow its charitable mission.

Musk, who helped start OpenAI in 2015 as a nonprofit, claims that the roughly $38 million he donated to the project was used for unauthorized commercial purposes. OpenAI, now valued at over $850 billion by private investors, has called Musk’s allegations “baseless.” Musk left OpenAI’s board in 2018, and five years later started xAI as a competitor, before merging that business with SpaceX in February. 

The trial began Monday with the seating of a nine-person jury. Attorneys for both parties presented opening arguments on Tuesday. The main event was Musk’s testimony, which stretched over the course of three days, wrapping up on Thursday. 

The courtroom was dark on Friday, and proceedings will resume next week, with Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, an appointee of former President Barack Obama, presiding over the case. Altman and Brockman are expected to testify later this month.

After Musk left OpenAI, the AI lab began moving more towards commercialization, creating a for-profit subsidiary in 2018. The business started booming after the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022, and the subsequent raising of $10 billion in equity from Microsoft. 

Musk testified that he is not entirely against OpenAI having a for-profit unit, but he said it became “the tail wagging the dog.” He repeatedly accused Altman and Brockman of enriching themselves from a charity while also reaping the positive associations that come from running a nonprofit.

“What you can’t do is have your cake and eat it too,” Musk said from the stand.

Musk said he started OpenAI to serve as a “counterweight” to Google, which he viewed as having insufficient concerns surrounding AI safety. Musk said he got into an argument about the subject with Google co-founder Larry Page, a former friend, who called him a “speciesist for being pro-human.”

Musk said OpenAI wouldn’t exist without him. 

“I came up with the idea, the name, recruited the key people, taught them everything I know, provided all the initial funding,” Musk said.

In a January filing, Musk’s attorneys said their client should receive up to $134 billion in damages from OpenAI and Microsoft, which is also named as a defendant. Musk’s team now says any “ill-gotten gains” should be returned to OpenAI’s foundation.

Musk is also seeking to have Altman and Brockman removed from their roles and to “unwind OpenAI’s for-profit conversion and restructuring.” 

All that’s happening while Musk and Altman are pushing their respective companies towards public offerings that could be the largest in history. SpaceX has already filed confidentially with the SEC and is reportedly expected to launch its roadshow in mid-June for an IPO that could value the company in the trillions of dollars.

Following the end of Musk’s testimony on Thursday, his lawyers called Jared Birchall, who manages Musk’s family office, as their next witness.

Birchall testified about the specific donations Musk made to OpenAI, as well as his knowledge about Musk’s multibillion-dollar bid to acquire OpenAI last year. In February of 2025, Musk led a group of investors in offering to buy control of OpenAI for $97.4 billion, an effort that Altman immediately rejected.

Before the proceedings kicked off on Monday, Gonzalez Rogers opted to split the trial into two parts: a liability phase to determine whether any wrongdoing occurred, and a remedies phase to decide the appropriate outcomes and next steps. Gonzalez Rogers expects the former to conclude by May 21

The jury will weigh in during the liability phase only, and its verdict will be advisory, which means Gonzalez Rogers will make the final decision.

—CNBC’s Lora Kolodny contributed to this report.

WATCH: Musk fires back at OpenAI attorney

The nine-person jury was seated on Monday in the high-stakes legal battle between longtime friends turned rivals Elon Musk and Sam Altman at a federal courthouse in Oakland, California.

Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers is overseeing the proceedings between the world’s richest person and the CEO of OpenAI. Opening arguments are scheduled to begin on Tuesday, and CNBC is in the courtroom for the proceedings. 

Musk, who co-founded OpenAI in 2015, sued the company, Altman and Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s president, in 2024, alleging they reneged on their commitments to keep the artificial intelligence lab a nonprofit and follow its charitable mission. OpenAI has repeatedly dismissed Musk’s lawsuit as “baseless.” Musk left OpenAI’s board in 2018, and five years later started xAI as a rival, merging that company with SpaceX earlier this year.

Musk has sought a number of different remedies over the course of the case, including the removal of Altman and Brockman from their roles at OpenAI. Musk’s lawyers said in January that he should receive up to $134 billion in “wrongful gains,” though he has since asked to funnel those funds back into the OpenAI charity. 

Gonzalez Rogers opted to divide the trial into two parts: a liability phase to decide if any wrongdoing occurred, and a remedies phase to determine the appropriate damages and next steps. The jury will weigh in during the liability phase only, and its verdict will be advisory, which means Gonzalez Rogers will make the final decision in both sections of the trial. 

The liability phase of the trial is expected to wrap up by May 21, Gonzalez Rogers said Monday.

Gonzalez Rogers started the proceedings by welcoming the prospective jurors to the courtroom. She cracked some jokes as she explained the case laid out the trial’s schedule.

Lawyers grilled prospective jurors on their views on AI, Musk and Altman. Some confessed to holding negative views of Musk due to his political ideology.

“The reality is people don’t like him,” Gonzales Rogers said at one point. She expressed confidence that the jurors selected will respect the judicial process and the facts of the case.

Altman and Brockman were in the courtroom on Monday.

Musk alleges in his lawsuit that he was “assiduously manipulated” and “deceived” by OpenAI, Altman and Brockman and their promises to “chart a safer, more open course than profit-driven tech giants.” He has asked the judge to consider unwinding the company’s recent restructuring, which cemented its structure as a nonprofit with a controlling stake in its for-profit business.

Musk and Altman have been in a public war of words for months leading up to the trial. That continued on Monday, with Musk writing in a post on X, “Scam Altman and Greg Stockman stole a charity. Full stop.”

The comment followed a post from the OpenAI Newsroom account.

“We can’t wait to make our case in court where both the truth and the law are on our side,” OpenAI wrote. “This lawsuit has always been a baseless and jealous bid to derail a competitor.”

Of the 26 claims that Musk asserted in 2024, only two remain: unjust enrichment and breach of charitable trust. Musk’s lawyers dismissed two of the claims, fraud and constructive fraud, ahead of the trial in an effort to “streamline the case,” according to a filing

The trial lands as Musk prepares to take SpaceX public in what’s likely to be a record IPO and as OpenAI gears up for its own expect public offering later this year. The two companies combined are valued at over $2 trillion on the private market.

— CNBC’s Lora Kolodny contributed to this report.

WATCH: Elon Musk and Sam Altman go to court next week — here’s what to expect from the trial