Seeing Cursor’s acquisition by SpaceX – paid for in SpaceX shares – reminded me of John Law’s infamous Mississippi Company of the early 18th century.
At the height of the Mississippi Mania, shares traded in the Rue de Quincampoix at a furious pace. Charles MacKay, in Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, told of the poor and indigent renting out their backs as writing desks for the execution of sales, minting new “millionaires” (a term reportedly, contemporaneously coined) overnight.
No, what struck me about the Cursor acquisition isn’t the AI frenzy itself. It’s the medium of exchange – SpaceX paying in SpaceX shares.
When an asset is used to pay for other assets, it plays the role of money – it becomes a medium of exchange.
Much like John Law’s Mississippi shares did.
Edward Chancellor cites, in Devil Take the Hindmost, an anonymous pamphleteer writing on John Law’s bubble:
“The additional rise of [Mississippi shares] above the true capital will be only imaginary; one added to one, by any rules of vulgar arithmetic, will never make three and a half; consequently, all the fictitious value must be a loss to some person or other, first or last. The only way to prevent it to oneself must be to sell out betimes,
“and so let the Devil take the hindmost.”
Every great mania is rooted in some nugget of value. The Mississippi Company finally did finance (at least a few) real ventures. Railroads transformed the world. The Internet re-wrote the laws of commerce, of life. AI is supposed to change everything, everywhere, all at once.
The question isn’t the innovation – it’s who pays for it, at what price, and how.
Three hundred years after John Law's Mississippi Company, the question remains the same: Who will take the hindmost?
Tea Leaves #1: SPACEX AND MISSISSIPPI
Originally published June 20, 2026
