So SpaceX bought a $60B Option on Cursor, plus a bunch of services, for $10B.
If strike date comes and Cursor is in fact worth less than $60B... they can move to acquire it for that price. Or just let it "expire". And if it's worth more, they get a savage good deal. If the services were worth $8B anyway, it's hard to lose.
It seems less crazy to me through this lens. A straight acquisition, today, at $60B would in fact be crazy.
What's crazy is that a company that sells an IDE (that's not even a particularly good one compared to competitors like JetBrains) integrating some AI plugins could be worth more than $60B...
I thought both should be equal in solving problems - turns out Cursor with the same model selected somehow was able to solve tasks that Copilot would get stuck or run in loops.
They have some tricks on managing file access that others don’t.
Cynics on HN easily dismiss AI service wrappers (and many of them are in fact overblown and not worth their own code). But writing a genuinely good harness with lots of context engineering and solid tool integration is in fact not that easy. The biggest issue is that model providers also see what the community likes and often move on with their own offerings that are tailored to their own models, potentially at the training stage. So even if you have the best harness for something today, unless you are also a frontier LLM provider, there's zero guarantee you will still be relevant in the future. More like the opposite.
It's not like someone paid $60 billion for a product the way you pay for bananas at the store. They invested a much smaller amount and essentially bought an option to acquire. And even if you don't believe the company's assets are worth the current valuation, an acquisition can still make sense if you believe that valuation will go up further. And if they actually do acquire, it will probably still not be in cash. They'll just be swapping stocks. That is essentially how all startup funding works. There is nothing strange about this. It merely reached new dimensions thanks to AI.
> (...) writing a genuinely good harness with lots of context engineering and solid tool integration is in fact not that easy.
This. They are after the harness engineering experience of the Cursor people, I'd assume the they want to absorb all that into Grok's offerings.
The value and the room for innovation on the harness side seems to be underestimated.
Oddly the harness also affects model training, since even GLM/Z.ai for example train (I suspect) their model on the actual Claude Code harness. So the choises made by harness engineers affects the model. For Kimi/Moonshot and OpenAI the company makes their own harness. Alibaba uses Gemini.
Something being harder and attributing value to that makes no sense. Sure a big moat is important for value but "difficult to do" is just a unidimensional angle.
"But writing a genuinely good harness with lots of context engineering and solid tool integration is in fact not that easy."
It is surprisingly easy to do it once someone else has done the work. Increasingly that's the nature of AI-based software engineering: point it at an existing tool and ask it to carefully duplicate features until it has parity. As you pointed out, frontier LLM companies happen to be well positioned to sell the resulting products.
It can use local/oss models, but it doesn't make it simple to do (easiest with ollama) and it's not clear what else you 'lose' by making that choice.
If you had a really good (big) local model, maybe it's an option, but on the more common smaller (<32b) models, it will have similar problems in looping, losing context, etc. in my experience.
It's a nice TUI, but the ecosystem is what makes it good.
Their annualized revenue run rate is on track to surpass $6 billion by the end of 2026 so it's not ridiculous for them to be valued at $60 billion at some point. Also worth noting that if they do get access to SpaceX compute, they could start pretraining their own model. Composer is good but its built on top of Kimi 2.5.
I actually now think ai prompt writing in the IDE is completely overkill nowadays.
IDEs are made for just a human to interact with code. I think the paradigm of forcing these tools that weren’t built for this to do this, is us trying to fit a square peg in a round hole.
Call me old, but don’t put ai in my ide. My ide was made for a human, not an ai. For the established players for sure it makes sense since they already have space on our machines. But for the new ones imo terminal, or dedicated llm interfaces are where it’s at.
If I’m writing code sure suggest the next line. If the machine is writing code, let it, and just supervise properly. and have the proper interface that allows the strength of each
>They have some tricks on managing file access that others don’t.
I thought it was a Windows thing. My Windows work computer is so heavily managed and monitored I assumed that was why Copilot stops being able to get terminal output or find the file I'm looking at. It's the same problem in IntelliJ and VSCode, with different models trying to find things in different ways.
Now that I think of it though, I've only used Copilot at work. At home I use Debian but I've never tried using Copilot. Claude, OpenCode, Gemini, and IntelliJ's AI Chat pointed at local Ollama models never have issues finding files or reading files and terminal output.
They're using the code intelligence from the IDE to run the AI, while Claude Code only does greps.
AI coding is much more than just the model - all the tools that human use in IDE are also useful for AI. Claude Code on the other hand just works with grep.
They are now a Codex clone and without the subscription pricing. You have to spend thousands to get what you get from a $200 Codex subscription. How do they compete with this except from users who haven't caught on yet, or businesses that are unbothered to spend thousands a month per dev and wouldn't consider just subscribing to 1-3 $200 subscriptions instead?
And their price is so high because it's markup on API rates. API rates, even without markup, are just insanely irresponsible for anyone to be spending on full-time daily usage.
I suspect that as the value a company provides is more than its code, then increasing code churn does not lead to an equivalent increase in revenue. Even for a tech company, a business' concept, connections, knowledge, assets, non-coding staff, etc.. are a significant value and increasing code doesn't increase the throughput of that value. For non-tech companies code is the grease in the gears, not the gears themselves.
Whose pricing is above API rates? Not Cursor. It's 100% at each model provider's published API rate. With a bigger sub, you get it cheaper than that.
Cursor makes a ton of money because the product is great. It's easily the most sophisticated harness out there, and it isn't an IDE anymore. It's an agent dashboard since version 3.
Suffice it to say it's not all idiot money being thrown at them by users.
API rates on local models are quite cheap, and you can even run them locally. Yes, the hardware for doing so at speed is expensive, but people used to drop the equivalent of what would be $50k or $100k today on an individual workstation for full-time use. It's justified if the productivity gain is strong enough.
But that’s not competitive. The only reason to do that is out of need for privacy. Which is critical for some. The tradeoff is that the models are relatively bad. I don’t see how Cursor can win from this use case especially if to get the privacy benefit you need to spend a huge amount. You can already run Codex for free with local models too.
I've used Cursor a lot. Until recently it was mandated by my employer. I can't see the attraction at all. It's a (bad IMO) IDE integration, a reasonable model (but I still generally preferred Claude over Composer), and a bunch of other tools that weren't very developed (like cloud environments and multi-agent orchestration). It's a suite of tools, most of which have superior alternatives. What am I missing?
That’s the thing, I have never seen detailed costs of what people are spending their money on. I know that for Claude there’s a $200 monthly subscription through which assigned credits one burns pretty fast, at which point (and I may be wrong on this, because I’ve never used the thing) one can run extra code on a “pay as you use it” basis? Again, I might be wrong on this.
I’ve also seen it mentioned a lot of people having 2, 3 or even more subscriptions, which I’m pretty sure that can easily go South when it comes to costs.
But, again, and the most important point, I’ve never seen a detailed post on what people spend on this AI thing on a monthly basis (let’s say).
A company that cares more about cost than results is probably a terrible company to work for. They will give you 10yo dell laptop with 8gb memory and complain that you’re slow when it takes 15m to build the application.
Productivity is literally a statement of the relationship between the result and the cost, presumably you found that out after reading the reply and that is why you switched from "productivity" to "results" in your reply.
That feels more like a reflection of how terrible most GM cars are than about the inflated valuation of Cursor, which is what I infer you were trying to imply.
> I thought cursor became mostly obsolete with Claude Code and Codex TUIs?
I wouldn't think so. At work I have both cursor and claude code and while I use both, cursor is by far the most pleasant to use. If I had to give one up, I'd let claude go.
That's probably more a personal preference than objective measurement. A lot of people already spent most of their dev time in the terminal, so for someone like myself that uses neovim claude code or codex cli are much easier than using the GUIs.
The solution is use both. They both have their usecases. Cursor's autocomplete and quickly highlight a few lines -> throw into context, plus it's got a very good file index/API (which burns much less tokens than Claude's grep'ing) and whatever else they are doing underneath to optimize it for coding.
Claude is still gold standard if you're not in an IDE though.
Reading files is always the biggest token burning when coding. If it can't find stuff quickly or has to use less and head to trim it before finding it, then you're just wasting context window
Cursor both lets you highlight specific lines multiple times per chat and is much quicker at finding stuff.
That matches my anecdatal experience with a couple dozen devs. Many wnet hard on the Cursor train and have mostly gotten off now with CC and Codex TUIs available
Or devs are just different users who care about different things and have different experiences.
Reminds me of the famous dropbox post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 - I don't even know if dropbox still exists in 2026 but i'm still happily using rsync and mailing things around because dropbox has just absolutely never worked reliably for me, unlike my 2007 gmail account.
Likewise, if it were up to me, instagram and any business whose business model revolves around ads would be banned (because ads would be banned because advertisement is harmful in general).
It's fine to care about different stuff, but if you want to understand the valuation of a company, then your experience only goes so far. it's not going to make any sense unless you broaden your scope of interest to the metrics that impact valuation.
I don't read OP's post we're talking about ("What's crazy is that a company [...] could be worth more than $60B...") as not understanding, but as disagreeing that our world should work in such a way where this state of affair is even remotely considered acceptable
It's not about the tech, it's about the pool of users that use Cursor, by acquiring Cursor you get a bunch of users + subscribed and already paying pool of people instead of just rebuilding something from scratch and convincing people to change their tools with a new one
Is it about the users or the data the users generate. Pretty easy to see the day devs are replaced by the data they themselves generated. Companies are only going to get one chance to grad this data. Similar to the internet cutoff.
What they want is the massive user base, the data (Cursor has a lot of high quality coding data for training), the teams expertise in coding models and agents, and the Composer models
60 billion is a large number but these frontier labs are burning billions a month in compute alone, and SpaceX is IPOing soon so they'll have a lot of cash to spend
This is it. I can’t believe the other commenters are unaware that Cursor recently fine-tuned an open-source model and brought it to the frontier, even if it remained there briefly.
Elon/xAI want Grok to become useful for coding. Cursor has enough data and expertise to create a useful coding model. They found a price and an arrangement that made sense for both parties.
The numbers I could find says 1 million, with about 35% paying.
I'd say that a million users is pretty good, but 350.000 paying users isn't, if you're a $60B company. Someone else mentioned that Anysphere has a $1B ARR, but I seriously doubt that each user is forking over ~$3000 per year.
> What's crazy is that a company that sells an IDE (that's not even a particularly good one compared to competitors like JetBrains) integrating some AI plugins could be worth more than $60B...
Is this cash or compute? Elon has one of the world's biggest compute clusters spun up, and little inference demand to speak of.
Trading billions worth of idle compute, in exchange for a high-strike call option on the #3 player in the most-promising-vertical for AI, plus (presmuably) some access to their data, starts to sound like not a bad trade. Especially if you're pre-committed to betting your entire rocket company on winning in AI, and you're currently in sixth or seventh place.
It's true he could write off xAI today and the company could still fetch a trillion-dollar valuation. But I was more referring to his stated intentions - between his stated plans, his actions taking SpaceX from a profitable company to spending basically all their revenue (plus a rumored large chunk of what's raised via its IPO) on AI, and seeing his tendency to make bet-the-farm bets on Tesla, I think it's fair to say he's committing to bet all of SpaceX on xAI.
I heard he made a deal with a company to use his clusters. Is there good data on demand for Grok? Seems like relatively little chatter at least, in spite of tremendous investment.
He had a very close, decades long friendship with the most notorious sex-trafficker-of-children-to-rich-creeps in modern history for decades. And when imprisoned, that infamous pedophile died while in a federal prison under Trump's control, with a strange gap in the CCTV video footage. And Trump's handling of the entire Epstein Files saga makes it clear that Trump is described extensively in those files and he desperately wants to conceal it. What could be in there that he would use the entire justice department to try and redact? Trump is shameless about things that are legal even if they're salacious (like sleeping with porn star Stormy Daniels), so you have to wonder, what could Jeffery Epstein's good friend be trying to conceal?
Also, he owned the Miss Universe org (including Miss USA and Miss Teen USA) for decades, and he was known to walk into the dressing rooms of teen contestants as young as 15 while they were undressed. [0]
Also, he bragged about molesting women, and a court of law found that he sexually assaulted E Jean Carroll.
I haven't proven the case that Trump had sex with a minor, but there's way more than enough probable cause to believe it's more likely than not.
Imagine there's a camera continuously recording a cookie jar. A child eats all of the cookies and then deletes the footage from the time they ate the cookies. A parent returns to find their child covered in crumbs, loudly proclaiming they haven't eaten a cookie in years and actively interferes with the parent's investigation and tries to distract from it by throwing a brick through the window of an Iranian family down the street.
Are any of the facts in this hypothetical "evidence"? With the knowledge of the truth (that the kid ate the cookies), it's clear these are all relevant pieces of evidence. If we take knowledge of the truth out of the equation, would these facts still be evidence? Unambiguously they would.
Definitionally both circumstantial and direct evidence are forms of evidence. No modifier is necessary.
And incidentally you can be convicted in a court of law purely on circumstantial evidence, and that's the place in society where we have the highest standard of proof. The evidence all being circumstantial is not a gotcha.
This isn't court. The evidence, such as it is, is all of the smoke which commonly motivates people to look for fire. The strongest and most comprehensive that I've seen is the argument that if Trump was not implicated in the Epstein files, he would be publishing them in free book form himself and forcing every media outlet to advertise it. Slight exaggeration, but I think truly only slight.
Not really relevant to the thread, but there are simple answers to the "eViDeNcE??" question. You may have already known this.
Has the availability of deepfake porn generation reduced the demand for deepfake porn featuring real people? When deepfake generators are capable of creating convincing imagery of flawless ideal fake humans, why do you suppose there’s so many real humans who report being non-consensual subjects of deepfake porn?
> Has the availability of deepfake porn generation reduced the demand for deepfake porn featuring real people?
yes
> When deepfake generators are capable of creating convincing imagery of flawless ideal fake humans, why do you suppose there’s so many real humans who report being non-consensual subjects of deepfake porn?
> Doesn't have to be. You can train it on normal pictures of children and nude images of adults.
You say this so casually, as though it were a normal thing to know, or as if a normal person would know it. Does that actually seem true where you live right now?
And how do you know that, anyway, Harsh? I mean, all those "unblocked" games you stole to give away and that you also put on Github, that's one thing. But this...
Come on, it's not hard to come up with this idea. And it's not even true, model trained on clothed children and nude adults wouldn't know how children's genitals look like.
Problem is basically, that if the option works out (Cursor truly has the talent to train a frontier model on SpaceX's infrastructure, and were simply lacking the infra before) the fair price would be way way more than $60B.
OpenAI tried to acquire Windsurf last year for $3B and couldn't.
1) A gamble based on cursor's compute constraint
2) if 1) plays out, he can purchase cursor via shares of spaceX over valued shares, at a fixed price should the valuation increase.
This is a bit simplistic. It's the VS Code that everyone used before cc came to town. Real devs, on real projects. All that data they collected is worth a lot more than "just vscode". Their composer2 is better than kimi2.5 and it's just a finetune on that data.
xAI had a decent model in grok4 (it was even sota on a bunch of benchmarks for a few weeks), but they didn't have great coding models (code-fast was ok-ish but nothing to write home about, certainly nowhere near SotA). Now that they've been banned from using claude, they'll get their expertise + data to build a coding model on top of whatever grok5 will be + their cluster for compute.
It doesn't sound like a bad plan to me, financial shenanigans or not.
There's a lengthy discussion to be had here, and there's enough lawyerspeak in every provider's data retention policy to wiggle out of anything. A few notes from their current data use page:
> If you enable “Privacy Mode” in Cursor’s settings: zero data retention will be enabled for our model providers. Cursor may store some code data to provide extra features. None of your code will ever be trained on by us or any third-party.
Note the "may store some code data" and "none of your code will ever be trained on". In general you never want to include actual customer code in training the data, because of leaks that you may not want. Say someone has a hash somewhere, and your model autocompletes that hash. Bad. But that's not to say you couldn't train a reward model on pairs of prompts + completions. You have "some code data" (which could be acceptance rate) and use that. You just need to store the acceptance rate. And later, when you train new models, you check against that reward model. Does my new model reply close enough to score higher? If so, you're going in the right direction.
> If you choose to turn off “Privacy Mode”: we may use and store codebase data, prompts, editor actions, code snippets, and other code data and actions to improve our AI features and train our models.
Self explainatory.
> Even if you use your API key, your requests will still go through our backend!
They are collecting data even if you BYOK.
> If you choose to index your codebase, Cursor will upload your codebase in small chunks to our server to compute embeddings, but all plaintext code for computing embeddings ceases to exist after the life of the request. The embeddings and metadata about your codebase (hashes, file names) may be stored in our database.
They don't store (nor need to store) plain text, but they may store embeddings and metadata. Again, you can use those to train other things, not necessarily models. You can use metadata to check if you're going in the right direction.
Not quite first party, but composer 2 is far superior to grok for coding. Unless you're eluding to them using SpaceX infra to train their own model vs. using grok
Not only is it almost certainly compute (“services”) it’s likely priced at Anthropic rack-rate, or at least what Cursor’s been paying Anthropic.
The cluster’s already paid for, so likely in the $2B range for operating cash needs. Not more than $5.
If I imagine bringing in Cursor’s team to build a frontier model, ideally combined with Grok, which has one of the few truly proprietary data feeds available to it, and with a much larger custom model Cursor can solidify a place, and I get to do a stock swap to buy it, this sounds like a bet worth making.
Upshot - I bet there’s an MS/oAI deal on IP on the back of this; meanwhile the cluster goes brrr.
I'm not sure what you're referring to by "that" but I think you're right that it's 10B to not purchase or 60B to purchase, so as an option posting $10B for an option with a $50 strike price.
But they also get a whole bunch of AI Services from Cursor. Other comments have noted that xAI has fallen on bad times (idk one way or the other) so perhaps they were going to spend $5B on getting these services elsewhere, anyway.
SpaceX spending $1B a month on various AI services seems ~plausible
(EDIT - Or maybe it's an IP transfer, or maybe it's over a longer time horizon. Idk but SpaceX clearly expects value from 'our work together' even if they don't exercise.)
$1B per month on AI services does not seem remotely plausible to me... Engineers don't consume that many tokens...
And on the AI development side they're the ones providing compute in the form of a "million H100 equivalent Colossus training supercomputer"... On top of the cash.
Cursor has no AI services, they do not develop their own frontier models. I see no reason to understand why $10bn for Cursor's services is an advantage xAI versus say a $10bn deal with Anthropic, OpenAI or Google.
It's true that Cursor doesn't have their own frontier models, but they are training their own models. They just aren't at frontier level yet. The $60B/$10B deal looks like a bet that this is a capital/GPU constraint rather than a capability one.
Despite their impressive ARR, Cursor faces existential threat from not only BigLabs (Claude Code, Open AI Codex) but also BigTech (AWS Kiro, Google Antigravity, MS VSCode). I am sure the usual suspects would have lined up to purchase Cursor, and the deal from xAI was probably the best of the lot. Marks an end to a remarkable sprint for a 3yo company, and an admirable exit (considering the recent discombobulation of Windsurf's), just as investor money and/or hype is going belly up.
Having tried most (all?) of the commercially available + open source options, and even tangential competitors like CC, Conductor, Antimetal, etc. I haven't found anything that's close to the experience of Cursor. The harness they've built is incredible.
I'd even go so far as to say that any competitors that are direct (windsurf, kiro, etc.) aren't even in the same universe. Cursor is just so much better, faster, has better features (plan and debug mode), and squeezes much better results/code out of the same models. They absolutely have some secrete sauce that the other options just don't have.
Cursor is my favorite of the VS forks. Agree that it delivers better plans than others. I prefer using Claude in Cursor over CC CLI when I am heads down going through bugs. I am disappointed in how "little value" in token use Cursor provides compared to others.
It has shown surprising stickiness. Occupying some middle ground between full adoption and still ~in the code.
I am starting to see some potential in moving back away from pure terminal, a mixed modality with AI. But it is not in the direction of IDE in any traditional sense.
This valuation is absurd. Perhaps a year ago- sure, but there have been so many iterations of this “kind of editor” since then, not to mention countless alternatives.
So for me it’s more of a data deal - Elon buying himself some insight into codebases and real dev usage patterns? Oh finally someone to use his dirty data centres
I've been using Kilo Code (VS Code Plugin) for the last few days, and it does most of what I liked in Cursor without tying me to their particular subscription.
That said, people are increasingly migrating to CLI tools (Claude Code if you like the Claude models, Pi Agent if you want something that's highly customizable, Crush if you want something fun), or GUI tools that are less code-first (Codex GUI).
It has a CLI component and a very flashy TUI application. The TUI has lots of effort put in to layouts, color, and really pushing the boundaries of what a TUI can be. It looks a bit “hacker in a 2000s movie” except with pink instead of green as the dominant color.
Totally not for everybody though. I can see why some people would hate it.
That' all well and good and they had astounding growth rates but doesn't mean much. And 1B in ARR is not _that_ much in comparison.
Also, reportedly they spend all their revenue and they have no control over the spend-side. The models they use will very likely get much more expensive. All the foundation model companies have a competing product.
Cursor has the first mover advantage, but that will only help then so much. There have been plenty companies who grew fast, had huge revenue, but failed in the end, because they never got profitable. That's also in the cards for Cursor, if they don't fundamentally change their business model
Put 1B into a better product and 10B into marketing. If you can’t beat their 1B in revenue, the market for making your money back on the Cursor acquisition also isn’t there.
3 things bug me
Now why would cursor agree to that unless the offer was better than what their market valuation + acquisition premium < 60
This was a similar play for twitter by the same person
While an innovator at the time, today there are a lot of LLM coding solution, sold by model providers, model aggregators even open source ones , it’s not obvious what is being bought that isn’t a feature of vs code or one of the LLM agents ( as the dismissive saying goes )
Thinking of it as an option makes it much more rational.
Downside is capped (cost of services + deal structure), upside is asymmetric if Cursor outperforms.
That said, these deals always hinge on whether the “$8B in services” is real economic value or just internal accounting. If it’s the latter, the risk profile looks very different.
* X will have a total of ~2GW of GPU sometime this year largely not doing much outside of 'grok is this true'
* despite no longer being in vogue with consumer devs Cursor still has a lot of developer data that can assist in building a model
* Cursor have decent enterprise relationships (while for xAI it is ~zero) and that's where the real revenue for llms + agents is
* Cursor are paying retail for tokens and competing against the frontier model co's who are also their suppliers. Not sustainable (hence their in-house composer model).
* Cursor the product covers the gamut from lovable-style prompt-to-app, an IDE, cli and bugbot
* X are using "x bucks" to pay for a potential later acquisition which are arguably overvalued based on the space x IPO hype
Option there to give X a window to make it work, otherwise walk away with a $10B breakup fee for access to it's data
> largely not doing much outside of 'grok is this true'
Hey now, don't forget about it's super important other use, taking innocent photos of people and regenerating them in less clothing and compromising positions.
it's much funnier now, that by putting it behind a paywall, they're explicitly saying "it's okay for you to do this, you just have to purchase a license first"
Photoshop has been able to do that for 25 years. Do people realize that AI doesn’t magically know what their real bodies look like? AI is just pasting the averaged body parts from every porn image on top of what you were wearing. I know people love to be offended, but it’s weird to me that they’ve made up a right to not have someone privately mess with an image that has your face in it.
Maybe if this tech were completely secret and this was 1997, so a video of a naked Bill Clinton high-fiving Saddam Hussein in a hot tub was likely to shock the world, then it would be a big deal. But everyone knows all images (and especially surprising ones) are likely to be AI, I’m asking sincerely, does it really matter if people make fake photos for wanking purposes?
I've had hundreds of AI-powered vendor tools come across my desk as part of my job, and I have yet to see a single one that uses Grok. I'm also not aware of any publicly announced customers for Grok's enterprise offering. The Grok Enterprise website doesn't list any customers.
For Enterprises it's way easier to delist Cursor from the list of used tools than to have a relation with someone known publicly for neofascist aspirations.
xAI is not, and was not that bad, it's just everybody ignores it for anything serious due to obvious reasons.
I hate Musk, but Grok is not a bad LLM. It's very useful for tracking down old magazines that I'm looking for, which are public domain or copyright orphans. Often the major players will outright reject searching places like archive.org as they immediately assume you are trying to commit some level of copyright infringement. With Grok it'll either just do it, or do it with a mild prod or jailbreak.
You've literally got tools like opencode that are MIT licensed. Most of those points X could do on their own or are things that make this attractive for cursor not X.
e.g. Need developer data? Use some of that spare GPU compute, hand out free top end model coding access for a bit and you'll very rapidly have developer data
Yes I think you're right. Reinforcement learning is extremely compute heavy, which cursor doesn't have. And X.ai doesn't have the coding agent data anthropic/OpenAI has, but does have the compute.
However, one thing in AI is that while the usage goes up extremely quickly, it tends to go down just as fast. I know a lot of companies that are in the process of switching from Cursor to Claude Code, so in 6-12 months I'm not entirely sure of the data quality/quantity.
Also I think it is telling that they are calling them SpaceX not X. The X brand is absolutely toxic, especially in enterprise.
I think you're right. Other providers can offer coding subscriptions that use in-house models, and this sets the stage for a Grok coding plan that's built in to Cursor.
$60 billion seems expensive, but it gives them a much better chance at competing in the market than if they started their own harness from scratch.
Absolutely no enterprise - I work in enterprise cloud consulting - absolutely no company would trust Grok with their IP compared to Anthropic or OpenAI with Musk’s reputation on how he runs his businesses.
Anthropic just tolerates the money losing developers who pay $20/$200 for subscriptions.
They'll sign a contract, and the contract will be very clear about whether using user prompts as training data is allowed or not. They're not going to care much about reputation; they'll care about the terms they sign with.
I wouldn't trust a contract from one of Elon's companies unless they were willing to put in escrow an amount that would make me whole in case of a breach on their side. (And that amount would be quite large in the case of a potential breach involving using prompt data for training.)
Maybe the play here is a way to sneak sneak Grok into enterprise by calling it Cursor. Or they'll just give up on it and run Cursor's fine-tuned Kimi on Colossus.
> forgot to consider whether all this is worth $60B
I see two possibilities:
(1) SpaceX is paying with stock; and
(2) the $60bn pay-out is (a) conditional or (b) never going to be exercised—it was a stalking horse for negotiating the $10bn terms, which gives SpaceX everything it actually wants.
$1B to $2B ARR in a few months with projection of $6B ARR by years end. If xAi wants to have it's own tools just like OpenAI and Anthropic, then it's not an unusual move.
Extrapolating from a few months to a full year and calling it AnnualRecurring Revenue is one of modern startup valuation gimmicks that I cannot not laugh at.
Sometimes it helps to go back to the basics to understand company performance: money in, money out?
Sure, but early profit rarely tells the whole story. They already sell to half the fortune 500 and enterprise is sticky. Gains in efficiency, like a discount on data center access, can be remarkable for their profit outlook.
in these cases arr = annual run rate, commonly used when your revenue is either going vertical (cursor - good) or your revenue is choppy and full of short term projects (mercor - bad)
I think it also represents a bet that in some sense Cursor's model capabilities are resource limited rather than talent limited. If that's true, $60B will end up being a bargain. If not true, well it's an expensive lesson but that's the nature of things.
Forgot that claude is burning good will from it's own capacity constraints, leading to periods of 'dumbness'. It's a catalyst to cause me and others to switch back to cursor if they can get their act together
> Cursor still has a lot of developer data that can assist in building a model
Their composer model is seriously good. I’ve been eyeing a cursor sub just to use it in OpenCode. They have a nice moat here.
> Cursor have decent enterprise relationships (while for xAI it is ~zero)
That has a reason. Those enterprise relationships are almost certainly going to sour at least a bit, if not for Musk‘s toxic image then for his erratic behavior.
Just to point it out, Cursor has not made any good models themselves. Composer 2 is Kimi K2.5, and they tried to pass it as their own until people noticed that the api specified it as Kimi.
I’ve tried Kimi a bit (not much to be fair) and didn’t find it to be that great. Composer feels more „real world“ capable to me, which is not a big surprise since Cursor has all the data to tune it.
Yeah, Composer 2 is legitimately so impressive. It is my daily driver right now both on professional and personal projects. I only find myself reaching for 5.3 Codex/GPT 5.4 when exploring a lot of technical documentation or code and for Sonnet/Opus when working on UI. Everything else is Composer.
Even if it wasn't for Musk, are these relationships really worth so much?
There is a certain value in being on the approved vendor list, but it seems to me that there really isn't a lot of vendor lock-in.
I think most people could switch to opencode, claude code or codex pretty easily.
Maybe these relationships would be worth a lot if companies signed long-term contracts, but I doubt many did.
More likely is that they took a bunch of good usernames to sell - if you pay for their most expensive subscription one of the features is that you can rent a better username now.
Did you actually own it though, per their TOS? What title was granted, if so? Also, and no offense intended truly, I think your having a grand total of 2 followers after 19 years was apart of their risk calculus in this seizure.
Twitter's official position is that accounts/usernames are not assets of their users (this isn't an Elon-era argument, from what I understand). I found this out when they argued in Alex Jones' bankruptcy hearings that his account should not be repossessed/auctioned off, an argument Alex supported since that's where he's been moving his audience over to to keep the cash rolling in no matter what happens.
No, but one should definitely do it for those services where one is investing their time and resources into in a significant manner such that any disruption would be painful.
These responses strike me as unserious and flippant. You’d never accept these responses if it happened to you with something you care about.
Also, comparing a TOS to a formal contract by two parties is a bit disingenuous. A classic “yes it’s technically true” situation. TOS’s are not treated the same way as a signed and dated formal contract. Not even by companies putting them up. They are lower stakes and often pages and pages of legalese that you also skip over at times.
> Also, and no offense intended truly, I think your having a grand total of 2 followers after 19 years was apart of their risk calculus in this seizure.
My account was hijacked via domain/DNS takeover around the time it was acquired by fElon (due to both Crazy Domains and Twitter support's incompetence — both parties removed 2FA from my accounts, even despite me telling Crazy Domains specifically never to do so). I managed to recover both accounts after kicking up a fuss, but the hijacker was midway through an 3rd party account wiping script, and I'd lost all my followers because of that.
I had 33,300+ tweets in 2015, and a lot of that was private interaction with friends.
Billionaires have always owned the means of communication (just look at the Salzbergers, Murdochs, etc).
Digital decentralized protocols (smtp, http, etc) were the first time this wasn’t true. But you [we] voluntarily moved your communication off of open internet protocols onto private ad-based platforms.
Of course you don’t own anything there, you never did. The billionaires didn’t “seize” anything. You happily sold yourself out for a few clicks of less friction and an easier shot at digital fame by going “viral” on social media company land.
If this isn’t a much bigger indictment of the collective (who after decades still could not agree on a non-elitist, human understandable protocol that didn’t require a CS degree to use) than it is of the entrepreneurs who solved all the problems the collective refused to, I don’t know how else to get though to you.
One of the reasons why I got my HAM license this year was specifically to have a means of communication that required no infrastructure. The HAM community is also very similar to the OSS community in many respects w/r/t constantly developing new free ways to use their spectrum.
I want to get a HAM license (it seems like a nerd rite of passage) but don't really want to get one if I'm never going to use it, which seems like it could end up the case since the HAM community seems to be comprised of mostly middle aged men, which tend not to have the greatest opinions about me (a young transgender woman) and aren't afraid to expect me to agree with them. Also in the current political climate it seems like a bad idea to dox myself
Oh man, not sure if it's a good or bad memory... but that was the first linux bug I experienced as a newbie. Not so much a bug, but an unknown config I had to change so my first monitor would stop turning off when I moved the cursor to the second monitor.
I guess the hope is that combining two sub-par coding models (xAI's grok + cursor's composer) and combining the data they have access to, they can build something that can compete with OpenAI / Anthropic in the coding space...
I guess I kinda see it... it makes sense from both points of view (xAI needs data + places to run their models, cursor needs to not be reliant on Anthropic/OpenAI).
I think I don't see it working out... I just don't see an Elon company sustaining a culture that leads to a high-quality AI lab, even with the data + compute.
Have to call out that comment about grok code being sub par. I used it exclusively when it was free in Cursor and have nothing bad to say about it. And that was months ago. I imagine it’s a lot better now.
Composer-2 is based on Kimi K2.5, but with extensive RL. Cursor estimated 3x more compute on their RL than the original K2.5 training run (some details in https://cursor.com/blog/composer-2-technical-report).
I used to hate on Composer 2 but I'm coming around to it. Opus for the big stuff and multi-file operations, Composer for all the small day-to-day IDE tasks works pretty good for me.
I'm going to be brutally honest but I have not found Kimi to be useful at all. It simply cannot compete with what closed models from Codex and Claude offers. I don't want to risk using a model outside the ecosystem and introduce variables as most of my workflow is baked into two to three large company models.
That's interesting, Kimi K2.5 used through KimiCode was comparable to Sonnet in my tests, and is an excellent alternative to Anthropic models
That being said, I noticed that Kimi being served through Openrouter providers was trash. Whatever they do on the backend to optimize for throughput really compromised the intelligence of the model. You have to work with Kimi directly if you want the best results, and that's also probably why they released a test suite to verify the intelligence of their new models.
Guess I'll be looking for a replacement for Cursor now...
Anyone have recommendations? I like the plan/agent mode and the fact that it's an IDE, so I can use it in the traditional way as well as by yapping with a bunch of agents. Also the Cursor rules I've curated and they do their job well.
Yep this was the moment to finally remember to cancel my cursor subscription. I find it unconscionable to do business with someone who would do business with Elon.
Voluntarily choosing to not spend money in X related orgs ≠ using services that use X related orgs. As a consumer, our options to vote with our dollar is limited, but that doesn't make it pointless. Real life is not binary and the sentiment that one cannot criticize a system which they partake in is a thought terminating cliche. One only needs to ask "for who does this reflexive thought terminating cliche benefit the most" to find the lede.
Thanks for that but it's unrelated to what the OP said which was "I find it unconscionable to do business with someone who would do business with Elon.".
Having an X/Twitter account is doing business with Elon. You could say only paid X accounts qualify for this, but I would imagine most brands have paid accounts.
YCombinator has an X account. I suspect the OP is already asking for his Hacker News account to be deleted.
Integrates a lot of agents (I use it with OpenRouter and directly with Pi) natively, is fast (you don't realise how laggy VSCode and its forks are).
Biggest disadvantage: lack of extensions. Lots of quality of life missing (e.g. gitignore integration to add/append gitignore files for different languages).
Exactly that. I don't want lots of subscriptions. Zed with OpenRouter sounds all right except it'll be much more expensive than a subscription, I fear.
Not to mention the only company that would have any legitimate interest in acquiring Cursor would be Microsoft since they could just merge VSCode and Cursor into one product at very little cost.
Consider Nimbalyst, its a free visual workspace for Claude Code and Codex that has visual editing of markdown, mockups, diagrams, code with your agents with WYSYWIG diffs as well as task management and kanban session management tied into your agents. Its got a files/plan/editing mode and an agent/sessions mode.
Until yesterday I would have recommended VSCode + Copilot. They had the best pricing of any option. However the pricing was unsustainable and is therefor finished.
How's the ai autocomplete? It was unusable in November when I tried it last and went back to Cursor. Slow and when it finally did something it was just not good. Cursor is super fast and actually gives useful results. I just don't want to give my money to Elon, so I might cancel anyways.
Seriously this is such a common response and it is such an annoying response. Yes I need an IDE. Yes I still find ai autocomplete to be useful. That's why I asked about alternatives for Cursor autocomplete.
That structure hasn't changed, but they've recalibrated usage limits to be much worse and removed the useful, yet relatively cheap, Opus 4.5/4.6 models.
I'm sworn off from Musk-related products, and this will prob make cursor worse (switch to X's LLM for instance). So, any suggestions for switching? Codex; Claude Code? (I like my IDE and I like the freedom to choose a model, which is why I stuck with Cursor even when it felt more expensive)
I really doubt they'll swap in Grok. Grok seems pretty dead. Probably more likely they'll reuse the hardware for composer.
If value is a concern, Codex. It's pretty hard to beat those subsidies. If you really want model freedom, Copilot is surprisingly decent value and as of right now let's you use your sub in other harnesses like OpenCode.
Codex is not a replacement for an IDE. Yes I still need an IDE.
When coding agents work they're great. When they don't I still need the IDE. They usually don't work that great when I'm working on something novel or brownfield. Which happens quite regularly.
But I definitely still want ai autocomplete. I'm not a Vim user. Coding isn't about typing for me, it's about solving problems. So a tool that does lots of the typing for me is a godsend.
So do I go for VS Code + Copilot? Because it was bad when I tried it again for a few days in November. Slow to respond and gave poor results. Cursor is snappy and gives useful results most of the time.
Everyone talks badly about Cursor and it is kinda a piece of junk, but no, there's nothing that has the features of: being able to see agent diffs in an editor, seeing diffs inline in chat, be able to click them to jump to the code, and being able to click old chat messages to edit/fork them.
Those are basically my only requirements, and it feels like I've tried everything and they're all everything only has 1 of those features. Zed is the closest, it technically has those features, they're just buggy and have provider specific quirks.
So I'm stuck on Cursor until Anthropic invents IDE technology, or at least VS Code wrapper technology.
Jetbrains IDEs have AI support with all the things you've described, and in a more polished experience that requires significantly less maintenance and tuning. It does that while affording an actual IDE experience that works well for supported languages/projects out of the box, without the need to constantly tune plugins and experience jank misaligned UX that seems to be the norm for VSCode and derivatives.
No association with Jetbrains, and despite having a license, don't even use their AI support much myself (mostly using CC, with IDE integration for diff viewing). But if you haven't tried it recently, probably worth a revisit if you're open to Jetbrains products.
Same I'll be switching off Cursor today to either claude code or kiro. Luckily my company lets us choose which agentic software we want to use. I won't touch anything Musk is related to, he is toxic and anything he touches turns toxic and supports him.
I was required to use Cursor for my job when I first started, but once I figured out how to use the command line version of Codex, I kind of stopped seeing the point. It just kind of seemed like a bloated, overpriced wrapper around what I could do with the included ChatGPT membership I already had for work.
Maybe I was missing something, but I do not understand how it is worth sixty billion dollars.
The anti-Cursor sentiment here is baffling to me given how useful it is to me. I use it interactively and actively review everything it produces. I like how I can plan a feature and refine the plan before instructing the agent to implement it. Last I checked, vscode had none of those features. Do (seemingly most) people prefer Codex because it gives a greater degree of autonomy to the agents?
> I like how I can plan a feature and refine the plan before instructing the agent to implement it
You can do that with claude code, github copilot (built into vs code) and codex, in any of their IDE versions, plugins for other ides (jetbrains, vscode, anything else you care to name) and also, of course, the CLI versions of all of them. They're also integrated into github, jira, and everything else.
Seriously, try other tools! if only to get a more balanced perspective.
This all being said, its been a long time since I last tried cursor... I'll give it a go.
I am personally not a fan of VS Code regardless, but I guess I don’t understand what it buys you over one code editor window and a Codex window both being open?
I have, right now, a tmux session with Codex on the bottom and Neovim on the top. It does what I was doing in Cursor just fine.
I am not really “anti Cursor”, I just genuinely am confused as to what it actually buys me over the setup I just described.
Here's why I use Cursor. My company pays for it, although I could switch to Claude Code or use Codex more since I also have ChatGPT enterprise account.
* Perhaps could be solved with the right terminal software, but I like the GUI for seeing my running agents and viewing all my conversations
* Works with multiple model providers in the same tool. I probably worry about cost optimization more than my employer would care for me to, but I frequently switch between openai/anthropic and switch between model sizes to use the tool that I think can get the job done for the least money. Another thing I like is having a long conversation with an expensive model, then I can switch to 5.4-nano to cheaply extract some little piece of information or summary from the conversation. Really this is big being able to switch model providers throughout the months without having to change my interface.
* Good support for the various ways of providing context. Rules, AGENTs.MD/CLAUDE.md files (if you want it to automatically read those), skills. Good hook support.
* I think the agent diff review experience is pretty good, but maybe it works similarly when you hook the cli agents into an editor, IDK.
* The default shell sandbox behavior is quite good. Every shell command runs in some sort of sandbox so that read only commands work without approval. The model asks for more permissions when it tries to do something that needs more permissions like network access or writing outside of the workspace directory. I know Claude code has a similar feature you can use.
* Good fork / revert conversation to checkpoints, with the option of reverting the code or just reverting the conversation.
* Feels decent that I am an API customer through Cursor. I don't hit Claude limits. Cursor doesn't have an incentive to limit reasoning or token usage, although they do have an opposite incentive.
* They are reasonably responsive to bugs and feature requests through their forum.
* Works well with a lot of repos / folders added to your workspace. I probably should organize all my stuff under a single directory, but alas I have like 8 different folders added to my workspace and it handles this well. Perhaps Claude --add-dir support works fine too.
DOWNSIDES:
* They are not quickly adding the best open source models to Cursor. Like Kimi 2.6 or whatever. Possibly not incentivized to given their Composer models.
* Don't love the subagent support. I can define custom subagents although it is not easy to get models to use mine instead of the builtin ones. The builtin ones do not allow me to control what model they run, so they will always run something like composer-2-fast, which is a fine model for all I know, but I would like to control it. Also, I would like if you could optionally make the subagent experience more first class. Like browse all the subagents and continue conversations with them or switch their model etc, although that is probably tricky / weird.
My employer pays for Cursor and Claude but not Codex. I often find Claude dumb (yes, even Opus), thus I'm using Cursor with GPT-5.4. If you have Codex, you don't miss anything.
and I'm being completely neutral and objective in saying this: Elon Musk has been a horrible capital allocator but great at financial engineering. X is still struggling to win back advertisers (they will never come back) and still in the red. I have little reason to believe this is also another careful and shrewd financial decision.
He spun that story into "he was saving democracy" so it sounds like he paid for that reason. He will do the same here, he never does a wrong move you just can't see the 76D chess.
I do think the Codex harness is a bit better than others.
Doesn't make a ton of difference with OpenAI models, but with Google and Anthropic models the difference is quite noticeable I think.
Anyone saying this is an aquahire has it backwards. SpaceX is acquiring Cursor’s customers, all those enterprises including NVIDIA itself. I believe Jenson Huang is on the record about the engineers using Cursor everyday.
As far as I know, xAI’s enterprise market share is non-existent. This is their way to get some much needed customers.
NVIDIA has 42,000 employees. Even still, when their deal with Cursor comes to an end do we really expect them to stay loyal? And further, sign on with xAI?
When they could instead sign with the new hottest enterprise coding IDE (Claude, Codex, etc who are way more popular now). Maybe if it’s an acquihire, it’s the GTM/Sales that xAI is after?
They might. Elon will probably use his SpaceX/xAI spend (future SpaceX space datacenter dollars) as leverage. NVIDIA is so used to doing such deals by now, they’ll probably take it.
Space datacenters are such a dumb idea. We already have problems keeping spacecraft cool, and unless they send people up there with the datacenters who the heck is going to do maintenance? GPUs need upgrading and hard drives fail
> unless they send people up there with the datacenters who the heck is going to do maintenance
A fleet of special ships for orbital commute and future generation Optimus, no doubt.
OR - they follow the same approach as the current fleet of Starlink satellites. Probably have some redundancy baked in (eg 10 operational GPUs with 3 backup). They have rich data around hardware expectancy in space. Can’t hurt to have that for simulations.
at 42,000 employees and their own (infinite) compute on hand, there has to be at least one plucky junior internally who is suggesting using the open source equivalents, internal / open models and saving a big pile of money.
Lots of people in the comments talking about how this is about training data, but surely this is actually about hiring competent people after the mass exodus/firing at xAI?
Whoever thinks the talent pool is this limited that it requires offering Cursor of all places $60B is pattern-matching so hard they might as well be a quilt.
Note that Meta paid ~16b for Alexandr Wang, and Google paid ~3b for the windsurf executive team. You are making a category error -- the talent pool isn't "ML researcher" it's "competent leader"
The AI bubble music stops when one of these former-darling companies has a complete crashout rather than a "successful exit". The investors keep investing because even largely-failed products get acquihire paydays
The acquihire angle is probably part of it, but I'd note that Cursor's team is small — around 50 people — and the $60B valuation makes it expensive per head even by AI acquihire standards. You don't pay that multiple for talent alone.
What you might pay for is market signal + model distribution. Grok needs a story for why enterprises should switch. "The model that powers the tool you already use every day" is a much easier enterprise sales pitch than "our LLM benchmarks slightly better." The $60B is at least partially buying the answer to the question: why should any company bet on xAI?
I think composer has currently by far the best price to performance ratio for coding (not counting subsidized subscription cost by OpenAI and Anthropic).
It's based on Kimi K2, but I think it's fair to say, that their RL really sets it apart from the other open weight models.
@dang does nothing, he is unlikely to see it. If you actually want to reach the mods, email them. There's a Contact link at the bottom of almost every page here on HN.
EDIT: Parent commenter edited out the @dang from their comment making mine appear to be responding to something not in their comment.
It sort of implies the $10B is going to be paid with compute credits. So this could very well be xAI simply compensating Cursor by giving them $10 billion worth of tokens. (What’s a token worth in dollars these days?)
I just want to make the observation that this whole SpaceX IPO is turning out entirely unlike the CDOs that led to the 2008 financial crisis. There's no mixing of AAA level assets with a bunch of subprime stuff and then getting someone to buy it all as AAA. Not at all similar. Completely different. Will turn out just fine this time.
The assets weren’t AAA, you’re mixing it up a bond concepts. The deal had bonds that were AAA. And if you’re talking about CDOs then the assets were bonds which were usually BBB or similarly cuspy bonds.
You should learn about securitizations. It’s actually interesting. But people talk about it colloquially and so incorrectly that it’s mind dumbing.
Here’s a simplified example of how you can take something and turn it into a safe investment:
Suppose you have 10 loans and each has a 50% chance of default. Ignore coupon, and say they are $10 each. Expected value is $50
If you were to put this in a deal and cut it up into tranches, say the first tranche gets the first $10, this would be your AAA bond because odds of getting paid out you $10 would be > 99.9%. The equity (bottom tranches) would pay a lot less. For instance the expected value of the bottom half would be considerably less than $50 that is being promised. So there’s upside since you’ll be paying cents on the dollar and even though in the median scenario you’re making nothing, you have to weight the expected values of each scenario to figure out how to price it.
The problem w this model is that it only works if assets are relatively uncorrelated which wasn’t true (it was true in the past but ignored systematic risk and adverse selection in originations).
What this has to do w musk or spacex I’m still not sure
What you've described is how the base level mortgage-backed securities (MBSs) work. The tranches work because there actually exist mortgages that are at lower default risk (high home equity, well qualified borrowers, etc.), and the senior tranches are effective in capturing their underlying safety. What CDOs did was to take the lower, riskier tranches of MBSs from various sources and repackage them and divided them into tranches again. Then they got the ratings agencies to rate the top tranches of the CDOs as AAA as well. It's as if a teacher graded several classes and then took everyone that got a C or below from all the classes and then graded them on a curve again. And suddenly a lot of the C students became A students. It was outright financial insanity. Well, mixing a rocket/satellite company with a couple of also-ran AI outfits and the walking corpse of Twitter, and then calling the whole thing SpaceX and valued at $1.75T is a similarly level of financial insanity to me.
I don't see the distinction. They're still cashflows and you're just trading one for the other.
Mortgages are very cuspy. It's pretty wild that someone would give you a 30 year loan with 20% equity for a few percent higher than risk free. Also you could default on that loan and they can't garnish your wages. And if you default, your credit history would reset after 7 years. Oh and you can repay the loan at no cost, so if rates go down you can just pay it back and turn around and get another loan at a lower rate, or if rates go up you can hold on to it until 30 years.
It's the same thing with CDOs. You take something that has some undesirable characteristics (these cuspy BBB), structure it in such a way to create some safe and riskier assets. And hopefully the sum of the final tranches is worth more than the components.
It's like if you were forced to sell an animal whole. The individual components are worth more because people have different preferences. With CDOs (excluding synthetic), the amount of exposure is unchanged. It's a bit more concentrated where the riskiest parts are in these CDOs, but nothing changes.
I get that finance isn't really sexy and people see it as just pushing paper around, not creating any value. But there's real value in taking some components and creating something more valuable with it. It's like using flour + sugar + egg to create cookies worth a lot more than the individual components. There was fraud and negligence but people are mad at the wrong things.
Rating agencies did a poor job, but in their defense, delinquencies and defaults reached levels well outside expected values due to systematic risks. Also rating agencies are kind of a joke. Investors aren't dumb. Even today, look at debt, there's a big difference between bonds of the same rating and similar weighted average life.
The bad thing about rating agencies is how regulations rely on them to determine what "safe" is and capital requirements. Of course, mandated capital requirements shouldn't be the end all be all of risk management, but these guidelines that over rely on rating agencies don't help the matter.
Mixing rocket company with AI and social media is fine. It's just a conglomerate. Who cares? Look at Samsung, they sell smartphones, TVs, ships, they're involved in construction, even insurance and biotech.
The question is what is the underlying core competency they're relying on and it's obviously Musk. And he has been able to deliver innovative products (manufacturing and forward thinking technologies). He scaled up one of the largest training clusters in the world in a very short period of time. He created a large car company after decades of stagnation. He lowered cost of getting stuff to orbit by orders of magnitude and now handles something like 90% of rocket launches. He's gotta be doing something, right?
> Suppose you have 10 loans and each has a 50% chance of default. Ignore coupon, and say they are $10 each. Expected value is $50
And that naive statistical reasoning is where it goes terribly wrong. You have to consider the causal process that generates that distribution!
The type of people who would default on a coinflip are extremely sensitive to how the economy changes. The probabilities are very correlated, the expected value is rather meaningless then. It's closer to having a 50% chance to either get a full return or get zero returns, depending the macroeconomy, quite the gamble. Actually, those people were in a rather dodgy situation in the first place, or are not great at decision-making, so it might be more like 50% chance either of getting 50% return or getting 0% return.
PS: Just elaborating on your point, not meant as a counterargument, I know you said the same thing.
> The problem w this model is that it only works if assets are relatively uncorrelated (it was true in the past but ignored systematic risk and adverse selection in originations). What this has to do w musk or spacex I’m still not sure
What this has to do with with SpaceX is that there's the same blatant disregard for sound financial analysis by the very institutions that were/are supposed to know better. The NASDAQ 100 fast track decision is a similar level of financial malpractice as the ratings agencies slapping AAA on things that they knew were little better than junk. The abuses of the subprime mortgage originators were well known long before the actual meltdown. As were those systemic risks you spoke of. They were ignored by those whose entire job it was to not ignore them, and they sold out their credibility for a quick buck. If you can't see the similarities to the present situation then I can only wish you luck.
It is adversely selected, but it's not debt, it's equity, so price action can go real fast and nobody will be burned except folks who soberly-or-not opted into this. Everyone _knows_ Elon is the way he is, so nobody will be _surprised_ at things. No surprise, no crisis.
They're going to force a S&P500 index listing on IPO day so we're all going to be forced to baghold this regardless of if we want to or not unless you've got $0 in any major retirement fund.
So far only Nasdaq has changed its rules and will allow fast entry in 15 trading days. S&P has not changed its rules, not yet at least. Total indexed capital of Nasdaq is 1.4T vs 16T in the S&P500. Stated reason for fast tracking is that the indices are supposed to be a broad representation of the market, and leaving a 2T company out would be a significant tracking error.
I do agree that the optics of this aren’t great, and it’s rather easy to be cynical about motives.
I did a bit of research on this some time ago and it's not as bad as I originally thought. Index funds would need to count only liquid float of the company. So if Space X total valuation is 2 trillion, but float is 5%, then they need to count it as 100 billion for the purposes of index weight. Still more than I want, but not catastrophic.
You gotta do what you think is best, but I hope for future you's sake you decide to not pull the money out. Or if you do you have other retirement plans.
I'm trying to help my parents now their at retirement age and am seeing first hand what not planning for your future looks like. They hit retirement with nothing but a small social security check every month. Not even enough to cover rent in most places.
I don't know how much you have in your 401k, but it will be worth literally hundreds of thousands more if you pull it out when you retire. You aren't just paying the penalties now, you're paying for potentially decades of compounding.
You could just buy deep out of money SP500 puts expiring in 1+ year. That way you would be "insured" against the bubble popping.
The thing is, every dollar you spend on insurance is a dollar (and its interest) you lose. Furthermore, we don't know when it will pop. 1 year? 5 years?
The more reasonable solution is probably gradually reduce exposure to US markets by selling SP500 shares and turning to Europe and emerging markets ETFs. No need to cash out 401k.
If you just look at the past 20 years, the US has had exceptional returns compared to the rest of the world.
The thing is, historically, high PE ratios like what we're seeing in the US do not correlate with short term returns that are as high. Expected future returns decrease as the PE ratios go up in a pretty linear fashion.
Why 20 years? Just because we know, post hoc, the usa outperformed other places in the last 20 years, in no way means the next 20 years will be the same.
If you want a different point to backtest from, try Japan in the 80s and early 90s
I'm not an expert but it looks to my like 80% of my allocation won't be tracking spacex, because it's mid cap or small cap etc, and the 20% that's in the vanguard growth index might? I assume whoever sets the rules for the fund could change the rules to say companies must be listed for X months if they want to avoid this, right?
And I can change my allocation.
edit: Actually wait, isn't it only nasdaq 100 that's tracking it early, after 15 days rather than 3 months of trading? So 0% of my 401k is exposed to buying it quickly after IPO already, I think.
401k rollovers into IRA aren't that hard these days and you could always use that IRA to have a more customized strategy, more specifically direct indexing of a major fund minus key ticker symbols you don't want exposure to. Of course, that all presumes that you won't regret excluding this long term.
The question is, is everyone integrating a special SpaceX correction in their algorithmic trading? Because if a dip in the index due to SpaceX causes old algorithms to think it’s a more structural issue (well, more than it is), and sell on that indicator, will that cause a cascade?
If your retirement fund is an IRA you can invest it in any stock you want. For a 401k you probably have some fund options that are not exposed to the S&P500, like emerging markets or fixed income
Maybe this already exists, but it would be great if one of the major index ETFs omitted all the firms with problematic board governance like there is at Tesla, SpaceX.
S&P500 had a rule from 2017 to 2023 that prevented companies with dual classes of shares (the sort that allow them to maintain founder control- like what GOOG and META did) that went public after the rule was instituted from ever being in the index. To be clear, META and GOOG were both in the index, but it was to prevent new companies from coming along and doing it. (I think it was related to SNAP going public?)
They removed it largely because investors wanted higher returns, and the tech companies that had such dual classes (1) were doing really well, and the S&P ended up caving on that rule.
1: Perennial hot button around here Palantir did this in a more extreme fashion than most. The three founders F class shares will always be at 49.9999% of the votes and the early investors B class shares have 10 votes each as compared to the publicly traded A class shares 1 votes.
Friendly reminder that SpaceX is going straight to the index—Elon agitated for it. The 401k of everybody in America is serving as a bailout fund for X and now cursor, and whatever other trash he hovers up
> Nasdaq was the first to consider a rule change that would grant mega IPOs like SpaceX early admission to its flagship Nasdaq-100 index. The exchange and index provider began a consultation period in February to assess the viability of and industry response to a proposed “fast entry” rule. The change was approved on March 30 and will be effective on May 1.
It’s also worth noting that Musk helped successfully lobby the NASDAQ to implement a “fast entry” rule which takes effect at the beginning of May, suspiciously convenient timing for a SpaceX IPO, so much so that I believe it has been derisively called the “SpaceX Rule”. It allows mega-cap IPOs like SpaceX to join the Nasdaq-100 index in just 15 trading days.
Now why is this bad? Well, if you invest in a fund that is based off of the indices, you’re going to be investing in SpaceX whether you want to or not and I certainly don’t think 15 days is enough time to sus out whether this is a stable investment worthy of being in the index, but it’ll be great…until it drags a million retirement funds down with it.
Ug wants to borrow ten of my best sticks in exchange for future options to buy berries from his friend Og. Og has a watertight deal with Oog to invest the sticks in a five year mammoth hunting expedition but Oog first needs berries to exchange for sticks to cover his exposure on berry-puts he’s take out against Urrrg’s remortgaged stick pile.
Well, I said no. Not getting burned that way again!
it's just codex and anthropic rapidly improved their AI when they opened themselves to Developer workflows.
Google and others were sitting at the corner, laughing that they gonna burn their money for no reason! they turned out to be wrong.
Turns out offering discounted/subsized tokens to developers massively improves your AI compared to just being a talking parrot for normal user workflow where you do not get "instant feedback" on if it worked or not.
Well, there are some very important differences. 1) It’s super well known what’s going on with SpaceX. Every investor should know that there’s a lot of good stuff along with some steaming hot garbage. 2) SpaceX isn’t systemic to the economy. If SpaceX and all its subsidiaries shut down and its investors got nothing back, it wouldn’t be that big of a deal.
This type of bundling is just what conglomerates do. Is it a good thing? Not really. Many investors also hate this kind of stuff and avoid investing in these types of companies.
On point #2, they are trying to do that right now. If spacex is fast tracked into the indices, passive investors via index funds will be forced into buying.
Is anybody using Grok or Cursor still? I've not used Cursor since the summer of 2025 and I've never bothered with Grok for coding. Hell, I've used Windsurf briefly for a few months.
I know a ton of people that use Codex, Claude, OpenCode but can't name a single person that uses Cursor or Grok that is knee deep into agentic coding.
Our company (~25 engineers) uses it across the entire engineering and product orgs, and yes we are quite deep into agentic coding. We use their cloud agents for a lot of things, e.g. automated investigations of alarms, handling most customer support issues that end up hitting engineering, pre-processsing linear tickets before humans triage them, bugbot for PR reviewed with learned knowledge. Although recently they have felt like they are pulling the rug out on our legacy plan, so we may end up switching.
I'm on the legacy pricing annual pro plan (equates to $16/mo). I just use Opus 4.6 and have never hit more than 400 requests, so my pricing remains very cheap. That + the tab complete is what keeps me using it.
This news is very off-putting though. I will definitely not be renewing. I don't want to be associated with Musk in any way.
That's a hefty payday for a model that barely functions! Every time I run out of API credits and get kicked back to Composer 2 I feel like I'm better off just packing up for the rest of the month.
I feel like we're finally at a point where you don't have to constantly argue with and constantly babysit coding models, which makes it even more frustrating when you're suddenly forced to deal with one that ignores your instructions and gets stuck in thinking loops again.
I suspect it's the vast troves of training data rather than any tech that Cursor possesses that SpaceX is after...
Cursor is still the best coding environment and hardness. It's actually not really close. They are so good that they actually made Gemini usable.
The problem is they can't compete with Anthropic and OpenAI because they can't sell Opus and GPT at a discount to subscribers like OpenAI and Anthropic do with their subscriptions.
So they either need to build a competing model or slowly die.
I personally disagree on the first point. Claude code in a terminal with vim is much nicer. I just don’t see the need for the bloat of an IDE when the CLI versions work so damn well now.
> They are so good that they actually made Gemini usable
I think Gemini is best model out there, and it's not Cursor who you should praise. I use it with jetbrains junie. Vastly cheaper than claude, faster, produces better quality code, actually listens to your instructions, more accurate. I'm sure claude code cli has some cli magic that I'm missing out on, but having everything just work in a nice IDE (and llm to actually understand your symbol table) is like magic.
Tried 3.1 pro preview today a little bit, definitely blowing thru credits quicker, not sure about being better quality, but achieved all tasks perfectly.
IDK how Junie does it, but I spend less than $50 USD per month and I'm on it 30 hours per week.
That's why I'm so puzzled to why Composer doesn't work better when they have the ability to train it from scratch for their agent harness! Yet it still fails to apply edits, gets confused why it can't call some commands in its sandbox, the list goes on...
I doubt they're buying it for Composer, I imagine they're buying it for the agent harness. It's arguably the best non-Anthropic agentic coding harness, and you get _all the models_ for one subscription price.
I've subscribed to Jetbrains all product for years. If the agent coding is going to be the next wave. Jetbrains is really behind. Even Microsoft offer better agent coding with VScode and Github copilot cli.
They’re definitely playing catch up, but the IDE integration makes interactive development really nice. Claude is good for one-shotting things, but I find JetBrains AI integration really useful for working with large codebases where I may be unfamiliar with things.
I think they’ve been caught in a bad spot. They’re a profitable company, but nowhere on the scale of Microsoft. And they don’t have billions of VC to effectively price dump. Other tools that can focus on one thing and burn cash are advancing quickly and some of them don’t really need an IDE at all.
The semi-recent introduction of ACP integration in the JetBrains IDEs has been a nice bridge. But now it’s confusing how everything comes together. I really hope they can survive.
I honestly can’t believe how poorly JetBrains has done. I used to love PyCharm but now it’s so far behind. I still use DataGrip but it is absolute dogshit when it comes to agentic coding.
I use JetBrain's all you can eat subscription that comes with their Junie coding agent which includes some free tokens to cover my coding needs. I then top up tokens on on-need basis. Costs me about $100 / month in AI tokens (well I bill my clients for that separately so do not really care bout the price). All works as a charm. I mostly use their CLion, Webstorm and PyCharm IDE's for development, sometimes other as well. All in all dev experience is excellent and far exceeds that of Cursor I was trying to use for a while.
Not sure what problems people here have with JetBrains offerings
I use both (not IntelliJ but other IDEs) and quite frankly I fund VS Code and derivatives very much inferior. For C++ development for example CLion vs VS Code (needed plugins installed) is night and day and not to the benefit of VS Code.
I know JetBrain product could be sluggish on "normal" computers however all 4 of my development machines run on 16 cores AMD with 128GB RAM. It flies in environments like that
Unless you do Jakarta EE development, where Cursor with their simple LSP support is far, far behind. Cool for generating a bean, but when you got to debugging deployment descriptors you wish you were in IntelliJ.
Yeah, and it seems to be completely self-inflicted. I created a small personal skillset that explains to the agent how to use the JetBrains MCP tools for refactorings/find-usage/navigation, and it improved its performance by a lot.
Yet JetBrains tried to do everything themselves and failed :(
I was a massive jetbrains fan - still believe it's the best IDE even with it's massive performance issues.
But I just... barely use an IDE anymore. I think I have the lowest possible subscription price for "all products" you can have (at least as an outsider) and I think I'm going to cancel this year. I've been paying for a decade+
I am subscribed to their all you can eat plan and use their Junie coding agent which is included with subscription with some free tokens. I then pay for extra tokens on on-need basis and all works like a charm. So far I pay (well my clients do as I bill separately for that) about $100 a month to cover my current coding needs. All works as a charm. I mostly use their CLion, Webstorm and PyCharm IDE's for development, sometimes other as well. All in all dev experience is excellent and far exceeds that of Cursor I was trying to use for a while.
Not sure what problems people here have with JetBrains offerings
Once you work somewhere that gives you unlimited opus 4.6 and learn how to use it properly, your perspective of what you should be doing day to day shifts.
Honestly unlimited codex with 5.4 high has a similar effect.
SOTA models + harnesses used together is very different than it was 6 months ago. People that have significant software engineering experience can get so much done it's scary.
I have what you call "significant engineering experience", decades of it to be precise and have designed and developed many complex products successfully used in various industries.
I do not need to "shift my perspective" since I do use agents to the degree that I need and it helps help me very much. I am way more productive with them.
Generated code is still not perfect disregarding of any particular model (I have access to all). I have to watch and fix, sometimes by supplying more precise specs, sometimes asking to rewrite piece of code in such and such manner using this and that structures.
Cursor is great. I was using it up until recently. Then I switched oh my pi, and honestly I haven't looked back. I've also heard great things about open code.
I actually really like Composer 2. For my use case, between the planning tool, and getting it to ask a lot of clarifying questions, I regularly get very good results. I'm not doing anything complex though; mostly staying in the lane of very common web app type code.
It definitely feels sufficient for questions and planning, but it is surprisingly lacking in the actual coding department once you go for edits that need changes in multiple files. Which is surprising considering they should have been able to train it on their own harness!
I don’t think this is the case. With “accidentally” collecting an individual’s data, the company’s risk is that somebody cares enough to sue them based on vague and poorly defined damages. With “accidentally” collecting source code, you’ve not only violated your contract with 98% of your enterprise customers (many of which have dedicated legal departments) providing a very real and obvious path to lawsuits, you’ve also gained a strong reputation as a vendor never to be trusted. My employer uses cursor, and I strongly suspect we would cut ties and blacklist them at the first sign of them inappropriately retaining data.
Is Composer 2 a bad model because Cursor are bad at training models, or because they are compute constrained? This deal will provide the answer to that question.
Nobody mentioning how weird SpaceX is becoming? When it IPO it won’t be a space company anymore, but a weird whatever Elon latest ventures craziness conglomerate of some sort, plus “financial engineering” (euphemistic) shenanigans
Wow, we are seeing the dark underbelly of the beast here. Nobody talks about cursor anymore for a reason. Look, I'm not saying it's not useful and discounting anyone getting value out of it...
But it's clearly not worth 60B dollars in April 2026.
Yep. there's absolutely no way that Cursor is worth that much.
for contrast, Elon paid $44b for twitter back in 2022.
When you adjust for inflation, Twitter was acquired for $49b in 2026 money. Cursor getting bought for 1.22x more is just insanity.
Elon seems unwilling to shake off the image that he has basically no idea what he's doing.
Sounds like playful comments people do about nymphomaniacs. Sure nobody would mind being the wealthiest man in the world without the downsides. Look at the guy. He's not just clueless, he's actually totally lost. Do you know how many kids he has and how many broke all contact with him, the wealthiest man in the World? Does this look like an enviable situation?
1/14 isn't a bad ratio... except when we are talking of children, any of those numbers is terrible.
But in this specific context it's even crazier. It's one think to break contact with a parent but I think it's hard to imagine doing so when said parent is extremely rich (just because of both the privilege it gives, but also the risk of reprimand), even more so when they are the richest person on Earth.
> Nikita Bier @nikitabier
>
> If you’re seeing a bunch of Japanese posts, here are some fun facts:
> Japan has more daily active users and more time spent on X than any other country in the world.
> Over two thirds of the country is monthly active on X.
> X in Japan has one of the highest penetration rates of any social network in history.
I wouldn't be so sure when "any other country except US" usually apply to everything on the Internet, except Twitter after the power transfer
No. JP activity was always second to US, only the biggest "out there". Same is true for all Twitter-like social media, such as Mastodon and Bluesky. Even VRChat doesn't have a majority Japanese userbase. Japan actually becoming the top majority anywhere is an anomaly and a major reversal of power balance.
Google Plus? I wouldn't be sure if that was a strategic blunder or if they were seeing something us in the public didn't. I remember it was more popular among not-so-tech savvy male of parental to retirement ages, which are still masses but not the sweet spot in terms of demographics. Besides they have YouTube and its comment section full of kids, which is the sweet spot.
Elon Musk, the richest person on the planet, with multiple industry-changing companies built under his leadership, clearly has no idea what he's doing.
You want to keep on topic, so explain in a business-sense way how this acquisition makes sense? Cursor has no moat, just a lot of clients. If spacex would clone vscode, plop in Grok and and advertise it on X as subscription included with your X sub, they would immediately have more clients. Why pay this type of money for that if he is so clever? It is a question; maybe there is a reason, it just looks incredibly skewed towards cursor; they are the big winners with spacex overpaying a large margin for something that does not seem to make a lot of sense?
My argument isn't that I have insider information or even any meaningful knowledge or experience with literally billion dollar acquisitions and investments. My argument is that you don't either, and almost no one does, and Elon doesn't really have a track record of making decisions that have no explanation behind them - even if that basis is sometimes ideological rather than profit maximizing (buying twitter).
Elon is problematic in many ways and despite the cool things his companies do, I think he is also causing harm. However, he is not an idiot, he is very business savvy, he does things for real reasons, and if you're going to speculate that he's being an idiot and making a stupid decision, then I think it needs an argument of substance that actually understands the factors at play in spending billions of dollars on buying a company. Which I don't think either of us are equipped to provide.
Saying "this doesn't make sense" is basically an admission that it isn't understood, rather than evidence that Elon is being an idiot.
It is fair, however, people who are too big too fail have a lot of leeway after their brain goes. I think it could be an explanation as well. But we indeed do not know; don't have nor want billions. People like that definitely live in another world.
I don't see any evidence that Elon's brain is "going" and in fact he's literally more successful than ever - and more than almost anyone in history. Which isn't me trying to kiss his ass but rather just a statement of facts that anyone can see by looking at the net worth scoreboard. If we saw any evidence of senility or brain rot or whatever people want to accuse him of, then sure, maybe there can be room for "maybe Elon is starting to make truly idiotic business decisions".
I do agree wealth does cause brain rot and even the people trying to be most self-aware about it still fall victim to their bubbles and egos. I think Elon shows this plenty is many aspects of his life, but business is not one of them.
This is actually an amazing sweetheart deal for Cursor. Many times with these high profile acquisitions, most stock is tied to LPA's and employment at the company, and also earnout provisions. The company then finds a way to parachute them out early, which both voids the earnout and their employment, thus they never vest most of the units and the few units they do vest get bought out at 409A valuations which are typically much, much lower.
In the case of Cursor this is an amazing boon as SpaceX listed at an almost 100x multiple which is absolutely staggering. Had SpaceX stayed private they could have 409a'd Cursor and got it for effectively ~100M$ cash.
Just because it's not discussed much on HN does not imply it is not relevant in the broader space. Cursor is still very much prevalent there with 1 mil DAU.
I’m curious if that 1 million DAU still holds as of today. I think it was reported last year some time aka before December when Claude code exploded. A quick google didn’t turn up any results that actually contained sources for the number.
Rockets, satellites, social media, AI - the only thing missing from the SpaceX hype portfolio is a certain coworking company. That would really set them up for an exciting IPO.
This feels like another Twitter moment... unless he's absolutely desperate for engineers who can train LLMs. In that case it's basically an acquihire. Otherwise, this makes absolutely zero sense.
I have no idea what this has to do with aerospace, but I know a bit about software and this does not look great. Cursor is obviously on a serious decline and has little to no moat in the area they are building in (IDE), which we kinda now know is maybe not even the right area (CLI). I feel like this is just a bad move?
Isn’t it obvious? Musk bailed out his Twitter investors with xAI. Then he bailed out xAI with SpaceX. Now he realizes that no one thinks xAI is worth the hundreds of billions he claimed it was in that potentially fraudulent transaction, and is trying to make Grok and xAI relevant by getting access to customers in the AI coding space. But in the end, it’s SpaceX share holders who are being made fools of and soon, especially with the Nasdaq fast track changes to incorporate SpaceX forcefully into everyone’s passive investments, the public will be the one who is made poorer. But Musk will become a trillionaire.
SpaceX is just going to be the Musk Company minus Tesla. X Corp, the X parent, is a subsidiary of xAI which is a subsidiary of SpaceX. This seems back to front, but I suppose SpaceX has the better reputation for investors whereas if X owned SpaceX the IPO would be devalued by the association with Twitter.
AFAIK cursor is basically the only player right now not subsidizing tokens out the ass, and has been seeing solid growth across individual and enterprise with almost every model performing best in their harness. Not sure how that’s a serious decline.
On the contrary, anecdotally, myself and every engineer I know have switched fully from cursor to claude code since the start of the year. I now use zed with cc. I personally could not stand the buggy mess and constant UI changes of cursor. It’s also not good value in terms of claude tokens compared to claude code.
It’s fast, looks nice and since i really just review agent output these days, that’s good enough. They don’t move everything around and it moves at a nice pace.
Decent analogy in 2nd sentence BUT the 1st doesn't hold water. TIMTOWTDI, statements about "everyone" or "no one" are highly suspect, and the trend of code-assist -> agentic -> delegated / orchestration is just that (a trend), not a universal law. Even in a full-on maximalist yolo paperclip future, many experts will likely ALWAYS want access to a decent IDE. (Note I'm not saying Cursor is necessarily that IDE, and I'm not commenting on the valuation.)
OK, I'll concede that not everyone keeps getting pulled back to vim, the way I do. I simply don't like VS Code or its forks. I like Zed well enough, but I find I use it very rarely...two or three terminal tabs (Claude code, bash, and vim) is usually all I need, or tmux windows and/or panes if I'm working remotely, with Claude Code opened locally and configured to use tmux to talk to the remote system (using a wrapper I made to automate the setup: https://github.com/swelljoe/tandem).
But, even if you want a big all-in-one editor in an Electron app, it seems obvious VS Code is the way to go (or Zed, if you you aren't committed to using an Electron app). I just can't think of anything Cursor offers that makes it worth spending extra money for it.
Wouldn’t Cursor agreeing to such a deal be almost ironclad proof they are subsidizing tokens/inference out the ass? There’s wide speculation all the large revenue growing companies right now are selling inference at break even or a loss.
Claude/chatGPT are not subsidizing tokens via the API and are profitable for most enterprise consumption. This meme that they lose money on every query has zero evidence and is wrong outside of the 20/200$ a month plans.
I would like to know where you’re seeing this, because my strong impression is exactly the opposite: a year ago, everyone was talking about Cursor, but I haven’t heard anything about it in months. It’s all Claude Code and Codex now. In terms of mindshare they seem dead already.
wait a few months, been using claude code since beta, there are issues but it takes time to realise what they are. people who have been using claude since 2024 began moving away before Anthropic's marketing blitz at the end of last year.
Cursor's token utilization is significantly better than Claude Code. Composer's latest model, for coding, is very competitive on quality given price and was clearly well-optmiized (in two months, you will hear almost nothing else than how expensive Anthropic is...this is before they try to release the really expensive models). so many very obvious things like this if you have been using this tech every day for multiple years.
unfortunately, the competition in this space is very weak because of how dominant cursor has been (Kilo/Roo/Cline all have major implementation issues with token utilization, everyone else is trying to go all in on agentic). don't see this getting better until things get much worse because of anthropic/agentic. from the decisions that anthropic is making, it seems they are busily digging their own grave. growth will come after this.
Cursor seems to be pivoting to a Codex like desktop app.
The real product though is probably their decently tuned harness and their composer models.
I agree that their popularity has waned. I would attribute that mostly to customers chasing the most subsidized tokens and Cursor not having the pockets to keep up. Anthropic is already following suit and it seems unclear how long OpenAI is willing to continue. I think in a case of a market correction that forces model makers to adopt more reasonable growth targets, that Cursor is decently positioned.
ai trends seem to mirror general coding/software trends but compressed. People used to edit programs with sed, but the ide proved to be more powerful from every perspective. cli tools always have their place for "power-users" and other specialized intermediate usecases like tui's, but in general the ide has overtaken every aspect of cli use and many devs hardly ever use the terminal.
I suspect a similar thing will happen with ai.
SpaceX is no longer SpaceX per se, but SpaceX-xAI.
My TL; DR (and this is mine, personally) is its mission has pivoted from colonising Mars to building a Dyson sphere. Space-based datacentres are a demand excuse for putting lots of solar panels in space. Going one level down, more Cursor use is a demand excuse for putting lots of datacentres anywhere.
If we're talking Dyson spheres, this is like going from a half-marathon to running the distance from Earth to Betelgeuse. It's just not a realistic endeavor.
And in handstanding walk because you're better at hands than legs. All their advantages are in domains to be obsoleted by technologies required for such things.
Be it the Dyson shell thing or Lunar or Mars colonies, there's no way it'll be done relying on transports from Earth surface. It could only work if we could make them from asteroid pieces. Which makes most items on their tech tree from Starship forward obsolete. And they're already all-in on those techs. It makes so little sense in so many levels.
It's a mission, not a business plan. Colonising Mars was always a moonshot as well. But it aligned the company's priorities.
My point is regardless of what you think of a Dyson sphere, this theory seems to predict what the company does better than assuming everything's a ketamine fever dream.
> this theory seems to predict what the company does better than assuming everything's a ketamine fever dream.
I think Musk being a ketamine addict explains a lot and this is very aligned. Given that he can't build a self-driving car, he would have to be under the influence of very strong drugs to think he could build a Dyson sphere of all things.
That being said, some sort of financial fraud is even more on brand.
Dumb question, do the cybercab thingies not drive themselves? Having a safety driver doesn’t disqualify them if for the vast majority of the time they’re autonomous. It just means they’re earlier into chasing 9’s than Waymo.
The characterisation of “level 5” autonomy as the car handling any conceivable circumstance (not that you explicitly made this claim here) is just silly. Humans can’t handle any conceivable circumstance either.
this is Elon's desperate move to fix his weak coding problem. He recently stated he feels he is far behind in agentic coding, and that apparently that's what matters.
> He recently stated he feels he is far behind in agentic coding, and that apparently that's what matters
Sure. My question was why. And my loose interrogation of the question, together with some unique domain expertise, suggests he found an excuse to work towards a Dyson sphere.
Every time Musk does anything these days, it further reveals the shell game he's playing with his companies. This is going to be an Enron type of story eventually. I truly wish I had a choice to pull my tax money out of this particular subsidy.
Enron was absolute peanuts compared to the financial fraud Musk has been executing (with the apparent blessing of the SEC). At its peak Enron had a roughly $70B market cap, TSLA is currently sitting at $1.74T. We can expect similar numbers from the SpaceX IPO.
It's hard to compare these numbers directly since valuations have increased quite a bit since a quarter century ago. As a proportion of the S&P 500, Tesla (2.3%) is about 4x of Enron at that $70b (0.6%).
SpaceX is _not_ profitable by most reasonable measurements of accounting. If you discount rocket depreciation costs and R&D, then yeah its profitable from starlink revenue.
The entire space launch market is about $20B with multiple competitors in 2025. And by the most generous estimates it is going to be $80B by 2035. They can reuse the rockets as much as they like, the company isn’t worth $1.7T.
Yes because outside Starlink and govt contracts, there isn’t that massive of a demand growth in the sector. There a limit to how many satellites can be in orbit at a time and land based telecom infrastructure makes it so that satellite based infra isn’t necessary unless you’re in remote areas.
You’re comparing a publicly traded company where the supply demand economics have established a price to a company whose financials are not public, and is valuing itself at $1.7T and forcing everyone’s 401Ks and pension funds to fund it. Not the same thing.
> Isn’t the company worth exactly as much as people are willing to pay for its shares?
Really? We're still making claims like this in the year of our Lord 2026? People in the markets today are not predicting the real value of a company, they're gambling that the various political and financial machinations from people like Elon Musk will increase the share price enough that they can sell at a profit. The value of shares like Tesla are utterly disconnected from the value of the underlying business.
They are low earth orbit satellites. Generally, the lower the orbit, the faster they decay. You could also argue that this is a benefit in that they gain updated technology with each replacement.
> You could also argue that this is a benefit in that they gain updated technology with each replacement.
No, having the option to replace technology at your leisure would be a benefit. Being forced to replace your technology because it's destined to become aerosolized aluminum in less than five years is a detriment.
Given that it's one Musk company giving a mountain of money to another, and the only numbers floating around regarding SpaceX seem like marketing fluff, I don't think any meaningful conclusions can be reached until we get some real numbers giving a full look at the finances.
If underwriters think it’s worth $1.7T with a $16B revenue (not profit), they’re doing the same thing as the credit agencies did in 2008 by giving underwater mortgage backed securities a AAA rating.
If roadshows guaranteed accurate valuations, pets.com wouldn’t liquidate within a year of IPO.
Again, not debating that SpaceX isn’t a legit company or that it’s profitable. But underwriters agreeing with high valuations to stocks that collapse once they go public isn’t unheard of.
Edit: and I will concede that I should’ve phrased my initial thoughts better. Credit rating agencies and underwriters do very separate things, just like IPOs and MBS are two very separate things.
You said: "underwriters ... doing the same thing as the credit agencies did in 2008 by giving underwater mortgage backed securities a AAA rating"
That isn't what is happening at all.
In an IPO the underwriters and the company collaborate to set the price based on approximate demand and what they want the quality of the holders to look like.
In the roadshow, the company is very constrained as to what they can say or disclose outside of the scope of the S-1. They can't include MNPI, forward looking financial projections, etc. Underwriters are also prohibited from sharing MNPI, or publishing marketing disguised as research.
So I guess if you're saying the SpaceX S-1 is completely full of shit and there's hidden risk in it, than it could be similar to 2008, but in this case nobody is manufacturing a rating, and those material misrepresentations would constitute securities fraud. Investment banks and ratings agencies aren't the same thing at all, and the buyers of marginally profitable IPO stocks are (hopefully) different than those of AAA MBS.
Yes. I updated my earlier comment and I concede I should’ve worded my earlier comment better.
I agree underwriters and credit agencies are very different just like IPOs and MBS are very different. I don’t think SpaceX is committing fraud.
> That’s just money in the door and the underwriters that seem to think the business is worth $1.75T.
I was responding to this particular comment.
In 2008, the credit rating agencies weren’t necessarily found to be guilty of wrongdoing, but a variety of reasons let them roll with AAA ratings on junk MBS anyway. Similarly the underwriters are not going to be committing crimes to facilitate IPOs. They are after all taking the risk of guaranteeing the sale for the company. However, if a company wants to roll with a high valuation, even if the fundamentals aren’t matching the valuation, if there are buyers, the underwriters will set the price supporting that high valuation. They are not incentivized to accurately measure a company’s worth like the comment I was responding to suggests.
the ability to mine the moon or asteroid belt seems extremely lucrative, the logistics of transporting materials to earth costs less than shipping them across the ocean, an astounding level of value creation.
you don't have to ship things the moon, you just build a mass driver on the moon that sends things to earth. it doesn't need to yield diamonds, this would be lucrative with just fresh water
You actually believe that transporting _water_ from the moon to earth could ever be profitable, no, lucrative? Can you lay out the economics? Just so I understand.
Shipping on water has been, by far, the cheapest mode of long-distance shipping since the moment boats were invented. That is to say, since thousands of years before boats were ever powered by the shit that destroys our lungs.
It is valuable if they can find the right rocks and bring them back. A platinum group metal asteroid would be of immense value, at least the first one anyways. After that who knows, they might super saturate the global market for decades.
our use of platinum has been limited by its scarcity, having tons of it would completely change the things we could build. saturation isn't a real downstream effect of economics, it would instead be transformative
It is less about profitability and more about dilution of ownership. He seems to have a pattern of diluting the ownership of his profitable companies by folding in his less profitable/failed companies. You still own a share of a profitable company, but a smaller share, to his benefit.
How much of that profit was due to public subsidies of the sort that he killed for other companies but not for himself during his tenure as a special government employee?
just because a bunch of rockets went up without blowing up, does not mean they are profitable. it cost money to shot rocket, and it is very expensive, reusable or not. most launches are internal launch without external paying customers.
> Their market share of EVs in the US went from 40.9% in Q3 2025 to 58.9% in Q4 2025.
You’re not wrong factually, but it doesn’t mean what you’re suggesting it means. Their share went up because EVs aren’t selling as much anymore. All companies including Tesla are selling fewer EVs. They just have a bigger share of the smaller pie, which isn’t exactly a success when you only sell EVs, but your competitors also sell non EVs.
I'm aware of the reason. Their market share is, nonetheless, up. That's still good for Tesla, their sales remained constant while people stopped buying other EVs.
Edit: Constant is the wrong word. Resilient or consistent is what I was trying to say.
Competitors leaving the market means less competition which is a good thing for Tesla. If the market for EVs returns in the future (if, say, the next administration reimplements the incentives), Tesla will be there to reap the benefits.
Nobody is forced to buy shares of any company. Even automatic 401k investment plans let you specify what to buy if you so choose. Perhaps you could make the argument Elon makes false promises to boost the stock price, but at the end of the day, individual investors must decide what they believe in no matter the CEO's antics.
Matt Levine writes a bit about this - the Elon Musk Mars Conglomerate. And really if you're investing into e.g. SpaceX you're not investing into SpaceX you're investing into the Elon Musk Mars Conglomerate. And most people seem to want that.
Tesla's the odd one out: it's public but it's still in there, although Musk would probably prefer it to be private too.
Tesla is the free cashflow play that is probably the most important for mars as there is no distilled fermented dinosaur juice on mars, but considerably more by ratio of lithium / oil than the Earth. Our flintstone fire mobiles won’t work so well there, and battery / solar will be important there for everything, including mobility and armies of slave robots.
Mars gets less sunlight on a good day for solar power; the inverse cube law really hits you harder than you'd think. And that's before accounting for the planet wide dust storms that can last for months.
We're probably looking at nuclear fission generators to get started, then converting to geothermal at any appreciable (and maybe fusion, inshallah).
Regardless, fission, geo, fusion don’t fit well on a rover. The boring company makes the tunnels, Tesla makes the vehicles and robots, and batteries. Likely we will still use solar despite poor relative performance for bootstrap.
Did you follow Tesla's published instructions on how to use it (https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/modely/en_us/GUID-2CB6080...)? You're explicitly forbidden, for example, from assuming that it's going to make the right decision at intersections; you must manually inspect each intersection and evaluate whether it's "safe and/or appropriate" to continue. You're also not allowed to look away from the road or use your phone. YMMV, but to me that level of required attention doesn't match the term "self-driving".
What I see a lot of people do, unfortunately, is reconcile this contradiction by not following the published limitations of the "Full Self-Driving (Supervised)" product. They assume that Elon Musk wouldn't call it that if it couldn't be trusted to do what they expect. Then they get into fatal crashes, and someone sues, and Tesla argues that they can't be held accountable for bad drivers who don't follow the rules.
Your definition of Tesla's self-driving product is very different than what Tesla itself promised, and that's what the person you are replying to...is telling you as well.
I don't think L4 autonomy is a pipe dream. Indeed, it exists today and is widely available in the same city you drove your Tesla in. I think it's a pipe dream for Tesla specifically to achieve it, because for bizarre and idiosyncratic reasons Elon Musk won't let them use LiDAR or mount a roof sensor. They've been stuck at L2 for a decade now, and I don't see much reason to think that making that system incrementally more reliable will ever "unlock" L4.
It does! A system which drives indistinguishably different from Waymo 99.999% of the time is L2. You might very well never experience that unlucky 1 mile in 100,000, but if there's 1M Teslas on the road driving a daily average of 33 miles, it's going to happen hundreds of times each day. An L4 system must guarantee that it can come safely to a stop before human intervention is required, and I don't think you can achieve that guarantee by pushing the nines on an L2 system.
Words do mean something, and you could have taken 5 minutes of research to make a reasonable counterclaim
Tesla has an insane PE ratio because it’s a casino stock (~350x). As a comparison, NVIDIA IS 40x. SpaceX
Is projected to be 300-500x. These are fantasy, completely unrealizable valuations. Similar to Enron, and Enron was over 70x. Enron wasn’t some surprise either.
Typically when PE gets out of whack, market analyzers dig into what is happening because it’s usually chicanery. No longer. Everyone is along for the ride.
PE has literally nothing to do with what Enron did which was accounting fraud + cashflow problems because they actually didnt make any money, in fact they lost tons of money and used future earnings in current reporting
Having a high pe is not fraud. There are even companies that are losing money, and they're still worth something.
When people say something is like enron, they dont mean it has a high PE. Its like saying someone is like Hitler and meaning they are a failed art student
Tesla isn't that profitable, but SpaceX is likely generating boatloads of cash. From what I can tell Starlink alone has a free positive cash flow of about $2 billion. I'm not sure what the launch business is worth, but it's likely a lot given the absence of domestic competition.
I have a suspicion the reason Musk wanted to combine SpaceX and X.ai is the latter gives him losses to write off against all that cash from the former plus a chance for a big AI payoff.
In 2024 Gwynne Shotwell said Starlink had a $600 million positive free cash flow based on $8.2 billion in revenue. Last year revenue estimates from both SpaceX and from outside people adding up new military contracts came out to about $11.8 billion. Their fixed costs haven't gone up much, so the big unknown is development costs for military contracts. I think $2 billion is a reasonable, conservative estimate.
You can hate Elon or just be misguided about deals in general. This is brilliant. He’s buying revenue and, on the thesis of scaling agentic knowledge work replacement, a user of his GPU clusters and ultimately GPUs in space. A $60B option is a premium on their revenue - but it may look cheap if he accelerates their coding models. For Cursor, they get what’s nearly impossible to come by - real capacity guarantees and de-risking their reliance on Anthropic or OpenAI.
Laugh all you want. He may have the last laugh on this one.
Wow. Tech CEOs and investors have completely lost touch with what money really is worth.
How is a VSCode fork and a open weight LLM fine-tune worth $60B?
One would think Elon would learn his lesson after overpaying for Twitter and then having to merge his failures together to stay afloat. But no, more cash into the burning pile.
> How is a VSCode fork and a open weight LLM fine-tune worth $60B?
Ignoring future business ideas, Cursor reported reached $2 billion+ annualized revenue run rate in 2026, doubling from 2025. Recent financing rounds reached high-end valuation between $30 billion and $50 billion.
Revenue without expenses is meaningless. Annualized revenue is even worse. It's like a gambler bragging that they spin through $20,000 a month. Yeah, but for how long?
If you give me a billion, I can do an annualized revenue run rate of ~$12 billion just by selling a dollar for 99 cents.
“annualized revenue run rate” is a bogus accounting term. It’s like taking a paycheck and multiplying it by 365. Notice the complete lack of any mention of profits.
Taking my paycheck and multiplying would be an excellent measure of my yearly salary. I don't understand how that analogy is meant to imply that the approach is nonsensical.
But then the analogy doesn't work at all? ARR isn't calculated by multiplying revenue to 30 years and then saying that that's 1 year's revenue; what criticism is being made here?
they pick some month with the higest revenue. Unlike your income, a business makes different amounts each month based on some trends and many other factors, and they can varry wildly.
I'm talking about per-request model remember? With extensive prompt you realistically can have one request every 10 minutes because the agent will be busy for at least 10 minutes executing it. They aren't rate limiting that.
yeah i just canceled my cursor sub and switched back to vscode. work pays for my claude max sub, no point paying for cursor anymore when i can just use openrouter every few months to test other models if i want
I mean the best argument I see for cursor is that you can easily switch between AIs, which is convenient since they seem to run at 80-90% up time (with those 10-20% clustered at West coast working hours). But the big AI companies are likely to keep an edge over Open-source fine-tunes and they are able to subsidize the coding agents in a way Cursor can't.
To add to this, Cursor provides a high value go to market strategy for X.AI's modeling efforts. Cursor's own modeling efforts would require an extreme investment of capital to compete. Capital which X.AI has already spent or is planning to spend.
I don't think we can use normal valuation methods for these AI companies.
Things are moving so fast, and these companies have no moat whatsoever. Purchasing a company for 30x annual revenue (and as others have pointed out, how much of this revenue goes straight to companies like Anthropic?), without knowing if it's even going to exist in 3-5 years, seems bonkers.
I mean, congratulations to the founders on becoming billionaires in record time, but this is uncharted territory.
I don't think it's about worth any more at this point; it seems more about money laundry and manipulating the market. They are shifting power between each other and create an illusion of a healthy economy, not carrying about the damage they create for everyone else.
And not also the people who think that acquisitions are being made primarily because colluding CEOs have some interest in creating the illusion of a healthy economy?
Yes, and Whatsapp was just a messaging app with a stupid Erlang backend. These deals are not about the tech, they buy the business, that includes the brand and the user base. Whether we think it's worth that amount is indeed up for discussion.
Whatsapp was much much more at that point. It also had a huge userbase at a time when getting such a number of people was incredibly difficult. Many were also paying the $1 per year fee. Switching from Cursor to Kilo etc. takes nothing. There are no "friends" you need to convince to switch.
I feel like people are underestimating the market share of Cursor.
The value in acquisitions for investors typically comes from how much money is locked into multi-year deals. A lot of tech folks in leadership positions that I talk to are very aware that the best option in this space changes every 2 months. Right now it's Claude. Next month it might be Codex. A couple months after that it could be Gemini/Qwen/Composor/Kimi/xAI.
Locking in with Cursor where quick swapping your team between the changing options is the point is a better choice than locking in even a 1 year deal with any single option where you're still going to be paying for token cost on top of it.
> And it was "only" ~$20 billion. Inflation can't be this high.
While I'm not sure about this buy, Cursor does at least have revenue. WhatsApp was basically running on VC/private money (they had an extremely nominal fee, but I never had to pay it), and was sold to buy its userbase into the Facebook fold. I don't think you can compare that to a business that at least has some decent revenue.
If Whatsapp is burning through say ~$1B yearly with zero revenue and Cursor is burning through say ~$2B with a ~$1B revenue, they're both still in the hole.
I wish people would stop talking about just revenue. It's mostly meaningless without knowing their expenses.
I think revenue is common to talk about because profit is also meaningless when a company spends every penny it earns to grow (new engineers, marketing, etc). Iirc Amazon made zero profit for quite some time.
Also revenue is a signal for product market fit. Is it a great one? Dunno. But for example I'd be hard pressed to sell $1billion of anything, even if I had something everyone wanted.
But I think your point about burn rate is important. How long can they have this attrition on cash before they collapse?
I mean, the financials just don't look great either way.
Their main product is part VSCode, which is a market that's almost impossible to make money in, and part reselling already expensive LLM tokens.
You can look at more parameters and judge how well a company could do in the future. For Amazon, you can predict that once they stop growing, they can make a pretty penny.
But with Cursor that doesn't seem likely. Even if they had the talent for training models from scratch, which I don't think they do, and IF inference makes money, which is not clear at all, training models is still a huge money sink.
So, for them getting bought out by xAi which has a base model they can use makes sense. But what does xAi get here? Another endless money pit?
You're right. I was commenting mostly on "why companies usually talk about revenue than profit"
I think the truth is that it's a new frontier. No one knows if any of this will make money. Investors are just betting that someone else will learn to monetize sometime soon.
The cost of switching from WhatsApp to an alternative is huge. You will lose access to your family, friends, whomever you chat with. They need to switch with you and in turn their friends need to switch with them, and so on.
The cost of switching from cursor to codex or Claude code is minimal.
So what does Claude code actually have that spaceX can't imitate? Well, not much, but acquiring hot companies before your IPO is a good strategy to drive up your own valuation.
(non-chinese) asian equivalent of whatsapp is still whatsapp, it completely dominates in some of the biggest asian countries like india, indonesia or pakistan along with a bunch of other smaller places
Let's face it - Grok is not nearly as popular among programmers as Claude or Codex, and that means that xAI is not able to vacuum all the data that his competitors have access to.
Cursor is installed on a LOT of computers.
Once Grok becomes the default engine, it will raise adoption.
More importantly, if you have Cursor installed all your data may be sent to their labs whether you use it or not (unfortunately - this is par for the course for all the LLMs, a la Microsoft).
That's worth a lot - especially considering that Cursor might also grow with the shift to more powerful local models and the fact that it has a respectable income stream.
> How is a VSCode fork and an open weight LLM fine-tune worth $60B?
Corporate contracts. A lot of companies have signed onto Cursor. xAI has a pretty toxic brand with Elon and the nonconsensual sexual images scandal. xAI has a ton of compute and few corporate customers. Now they have a ton.
> One would think Elon would learn his lesson after overpaying for Twitter
I think he took over Twitter to control what people using it see and promote right wing viewpoints. To that end it’s been a wild success.
> Wow. Tech CEOs and investors have completely lost touch with what money really is worth.
Remember those stories of lottery winners who win millions then wind up broke AF, even homeless, in only a year or two because they have no impulse control and blew through it? Same people.
He bought Twitter to grab a megaphone to propagate his ego/agenda.
Grok was built for similar reasons.
He's buying Cursor to have a tool to push Grok on the world, and to have something of his own under his own ideological control to compete with SamA and Dario.
It's not the codebase they're purchasing, it's the customer list, R&D talent, and most importantly, data corpus.
X AI is weak on coding and most of their founding researchers have departed for greener pastures. Musk has a great datacenter, but no researchers or data to use it with. This acquisition makes sense in that context.
You have to look at it now like cryptocurrency “market cap” numbers. It’s more of a marketing tool than anything. This is just another honking whirlygig to bolt onto the SpaceX IPO to try and generate exit liquidity
> How is a VSCode fork and a open weight LLM fine-tune worth $60B?
The same way a rocket company that counts short-lived as satellites as an asset is worth 1.7 trillion. Congratulations to the Cursor folks, they are the only winners in this.
This is also part of the AI bubble delusion: agent assisted coding works, at least for some people, for some purposes. This deal perpetuates the illusion that AI will find high value use cases. The reality may be that software development has unique characteristics you won't find in law or medicine or other domains.
Buying Twitter played a key part in getting Trump re-elected, so I think Musk figures he got what he wanted in terms of deregulation, dropped prosecution, and damage to his political opponents.
This deal is different: SpaceX is heading for an IPO which is now complicated by xAI becoming a subsidiary. Cursor is actually popular and I’m sure this is all stock-based so as long as investors believe that those users stick to xAI it’ll juice the entire SpaceX IPO. I am skeptical but these days the market seems to be driven by a country-club full of guys in Connecticut who are constantly hyperventilating on X so maybe from that angle it’s just another way he’s getting what he wanted from Twitter.
Quoting a viral tweet:
“Elon is such a dumbass, he spent $44 billion on Twitter and all he got was control of all 3 branches of the federal government.”
He bought his way into politics, came in with a chainsaw (almost literally), realized he didn't want to be in politics after all and rage quit. It may not make him a dumbass, but it certainly makes him some sort of ass.
Buying Twitter played a key part in getting Trump re-elected
Some would say it was simply caused by the mediocrity of Bidden and more globally of the democrats. You don't need to brainwash people for this.
Sure, and many of those would be saying it because of something they heard on X. Musk didn’t pour money into political activity because he thought that outcome was highly likely.
Elon doesn't know what to do. Ani failed, no one apart from his alt accounts is interested in Grok pictures.
Since the firing of several Grok founders, Grok has decreased in capabilities. It is illogical and insults users when called out.
So he does what everyone does. Write more dev tools, slap a price on it and hope retail investors will be impressed in the IPO. The $60 billion is of course optional and will just be used in the IPO to inflate the valuation.
Snowflake bought streamlit (a python frontend that’s not even better than gradio, it’s main competitor) for 800 million in 2022. We are nowhere near mt stupid. ZIRP was the peak of mt stupid.
For a successful IPO and attract more capital you need a very good story/narrative. That what is being crafted here. Business fundamentals matter less with elon!
What's Cursor's moat here? I'm a bit surprised that xAI/SpaceX needs to buy them rather than building their own VScode forked IDE or an agentic UI/CLI.
same. i finally tried Claude Code and i just shrugged. Cursor definitely has a clunky UI with an identity crisis, but it pioneered plan mode, and auto / composer chugs along without rate limits for the most part.
Yeah, maybe it'll sober some people up to stop pretending they can't see how useful LLMs are in pretty much everything. A sharp tool to wield, easy to cut yourself with, but also extremely useful.
Honestly, it felt much stranger to me to learn, a few years ago, that they're 3D-printing rocket engines. With my experience limited to building my own PLA/ABS 3D printer out of salvaged motors and parts printed on another printer, it was hard to imagine how this is anywhere near safe and precise enough. But turns out, FDM-ing some plastic blobs is not the same as fusing Inconel powder with lasers. Same with using LLMs for software engineering (whether in aerospace culture or otherwise), it's just not the same as asking ChatGPT "please make me an app to do something idk how i cannot code send halp".
xAI also owns Twitter, which is even less useful for SpaceX.
They need xAI as a reason for the narrative that data centers will be in space, so SpaceX can project far more growth before the IPO. After the IPO they'll find out that data centers in space are too expensive and overheat.
This is a classic Elon move. He bundled up his company that is, shall we say, crap, into his most valuable company, then tried to hype it up as much as he could. Like when he promised Tesla cars would self drive in X years but it never happened, then pivoted to AI/robots, then re-routed Tesla’s GPUs to xAI, etc.
Cursor might not be the new hotness, but if we believe that agentic coding is the next wave and we’ve gone from asking chatbots to actually using agents for coding, then yes, this move makes sense for Elon to hype up a SpaceX IPO.
I really don't know what Elon is thinking here because SpaceX's IPO is already precarious, for several reasons:
1. It was used to rescue himself and key investors from overpaying for Twitter, which was first rescued through xAI (and I don't know why anyone thought investing in xAI was a good idea but here we are). If our regulators weren't defanged, this deal would've gotten alot more scrutiny (IMHO). Whatever the case, this is all diluting the SpaceX business for overpriced AI vaporware;
2. From what I can find, SpaceX's revenue in 2025 was ~$18B with a $5B loss. That doesn't sound like a $1.5T+ company to me;
3. The markets are being rigged to make the IPO a success by changing the rules to force passive funds to buy into it with a tiny float (5% instead of the normal 25%); and
4. Here's the big one. I think Starship is a badly designed program that's going to take many billions more to complete and commercialize. There's not really a market for bigger payloads (evidence: ~1 Falcony Heavy launch per year) and STarship will effectively have to compete with Falcon 9 at a time when reusable alternatives (eg from the Chinese as well as Blue Origin) are coming to market.
Starship won’t compete with F9, or BO because it is fully reusable and cost less than either. The Chinese are not a player in the global launch services market at all so don’t count.
Starship isn’t comparable to Falcon Heavy because it has vastly more volume, which will make it the cheapest way to launch Starlinks, which will be a lot of launches to begin with.
Starship is absolutely competing with Falcon 9 in two ways:
1. If F9 is cheaper, why would you use Starship?
2. If SpaceX decides to force Starship adoption by simply halting F9 launches or making them prohibitively expensive, well the market is still open for an F9 clone from someone else.
My point with FH is that there isn't a demand for much bigger payloads. Now, SpaceX wants to induce demand with STarlink launches. OK, so the viability of Starship is tied to the viability of Starlink. I thought Starlink was a clever way to prove F9 reusability but the first-mover advantage won't last forever.
My main point here was that F9 was developed, SpaceX's competition was the likes of ULA with their insanely expensive rockets but whether SpaceX uses F9 or not, it has become the new baseline.
SLS is insanely expensive to build and launch but it still has a much greater launch capacity. Starship's solution to this is essentially in-orbit refuelling where, I believe, it will take ~10 Starship launches to refuel a Starship in orbit. This too is an insanely complicated capability that they haven't even begun to develop yet.
And whatever the ultimate per-launch base cost works out to be the program R&D cost has to be amortized cross those launches so even if the base cost is $10M, if you spent $10B developing the program, it still matters if you launch 10 a year vs 100.
When SpaceX goes public, they're going to be forced to disclose a whole lot more information about the program cost and I suspect it's going to be a lot higher than the rosy projectsions you get on Twitter.
Another way to put it is I think Starship could be SpaceX's Cybertruck.
There is a lot resting on Starlink, 11 gigadollars in direct revenue that accounts for fully 60% of SpaceX's total revenue of 18 gigadollars. It's hard to see how that level of revenue can sustain a 1 terradollar valuation.
Like, TSLA had 94 gigadollars in revenue last year, and it's a 1.2 terradollar company, and most outside analysts are frankly skeptical of that multiple. SpaceX is trying to get a similar valuation on a fifth of that revenue.
This is the right partnership to happen. SpaceX has all the compute but is missing the talent for training LLMs, especially on the RL side. Cursor has the talent and RL stack, but doesn't have their own pretrained base model or own their compute. Both will be on a bad trajectory without cooperating because Claude Code and Codex have gained so much momentum already.
If SpaceX grabs cursor and then gets its models into use for a huge amount of companies and developers, this might actually be a very wise move. So I don't think SpaceX would only pay for the harness, but to access to a mass of potential users.
Could a mod please consider changing the story link to one of the actual articles shared in the post? I don’t think we should be giving the white nationalist, non-consensual-porn-generating social media site any free traffic.
I am part of a discord group with about 1000+ devs.
I polled them in Jan to see if they had dropped cursor for claude code.
80% of those responded (250ish in the group had). Bit of selection bias there from the question - but my impression was Cursor is very much dying to competition from the labs.
I am so actually beyond sad that I ever trusted Musk, all the signs were there, from the lies with Tesla to the nonesensical point to point "tourist" lies, to the Mars lies, to the fact that the spaceship they are developing right now requires an actual elevator to get astronauts down, it was never meant for humans, it was meant to deploy sats in space even cheaper, outcompete the competition and basically kill human spaceflight as a result... because less profitable human rated spacecraft won't be viable.
Oh yeah, did I mention how Starlink is literally already in the close to Kessler Syndrome territory? all it would need is for a strong enough solar storm to hit their sats.
First of all, yes I know about the elevator hence why I mentioned it, you know, first of all it's not that safe to be going down an elevator from what is basically a multiple stories high building while in space (#1) and (#2) why would you add complexity/failure points on purpose if your mission was being multiplanetary?
The spacecraft wasn't designed with humans in mind first.
ITT: The same geniuses that predicted with certainty X will fail are also predicting, with much less certainty, that "Oh God, let this be the end of Musk"
Wish I played that interview game better. I saw the success coming from a mile away (2022) but I can't vibe with people in the hire game right. It's like eye contact, smiling, facial expressions, stuff like that.
I guess there's a bunch of tools to not suck at this. Anyone had success here? The AI tools say I'm great because they can't pick up the kind of problems I'm talking about.
Pretend to and/or be motivated by things other than money, that’s the strongest thing interviewers drop people from, even though they’re motivated by money to be there.
Random data point: as a long time VSCode user when I first heard the hoopla about Cursor I rushed to try it. Didn't work (at all). So I added my name to the open bug report, waited a few months. Tried again. Still didn't work. Became a Claude Code user and never looked back.
I’m no fan of Elon Musk, but even from a neutral perspective I’m bewildered by the merger between X, X.ai, and SpaceX and now this acquisition of Cursor. What’s the endgame? How does this help with the whole vision of “we all live in space and mine resources from the Moon and have data centers on Mars”?
The endgame is to game the index funds by bribing or otherwise.. convincing the big stock exchanges to forgo their index inclusion rules so SpaceX will get included in Nasdaq 100 within 10 days or something stupid like that. SpaceX will initially float a tiny fraction of shares at a wildly inflated value and use a combination of artificial scarcity and Elon Stans (retail) to keep the stock from crashing until it gets included in the indexes. Then, your 401k will auto-buy SpaceX, letting insiders exit at their ludicrous valuation.
Eventually, stock prices will correct hard, and retail/passive investors will be left with the bag.
The idea that merging these companies has some business purpose is hilarious. It’s purely financial engineering. Unfortunately, our existing system has little consumer protection against this kind of fraud, so Elon will probably get away with it, at least in the short term
It gives them some amount of paying customer base using AI. That is some magic voodoo you need to sprinkle onto the public sale to get the highest possible price point.
The Elon Musk Company does what Elon Musk wants. Tesla is dying, X is a disaster, so he bundled everything into the one company that had a bright future, SpaceX. There is no grand vision or endgame beyond do as Elon Musk wants. Going to Mars or the Moon or whatever was never a vision or mission, just a story to tell.
> What’s the endgame? How does this help with the whole vision of “we all live in space and mine resources from the Moon and have data centers on Mars”?
I put this in the other thread, but my personal working hypothesis is the SpaceX/Musk mission has pivoted from colonising Mars to building a Dyson sphere.
Space-based datacenters are a demand excuse for putting solar panels (and eventually, solar-panel fabrication) in space. Cursor is a demand excuse for building more datacenters (and eventaully, learning to fabricate chips). If I'm correct, the next acquisition will be in some chip or solar-panel fabrication bottleneck.
To be clear, I'm not advocating for this mission. (Though I do think the space-based datacenter pitch has gotten more scepticism than it deserves. For realistic interest-rate and terrestrial-delay values, assuming ongoing AI demand, it breaks even for surprisingly-proximate radiator-mass values. Obviously more problems beyond my toy model to solve. But I expected the math to say fuck you out the gate.)
I'm saying this is a good working theory for explaining–and predicting–Musk and SpaceX's actions. Mars explains why SpaceX's engines burn methane. Dyson sphere explains why xAI is building massive datacenters and now finding acquisition targets to fill them with.
So they are trying to take everyone’s money in bigger and bigger chunks until there is no economy left but hype.
Folks, if we spent 1/10th of the time and money we spend on this bullshit on taking care of people’s basic needs and education we would be far closer to the sci-fi future everyone seems so motivated to get to. Covid and the Trump cult seem to have broken almost everyone’s brains and we’re all gonna pay for the hubris.
I remember using Cursor earlier this year and it was so unoptimised for average machines. An LLM provider extension on VS Code is so much better. I don't get why is Cursor still around. Is it because it was first to market?
It looks like this is just an "option" to acquire Cursor at that price? Implying they only plan to exercise the option under certain conditions (such as, one might presume, Cursor actually being worth that much. As right now it definitely isn't.)
I know Cursor is getting economically not so viable compared to OpenAI and Anthropic offerings but with a deal like this they could also offer $200/mo plans that are attractive. Obviously _if_ their models are good. We have to see!
I guess it makes more sense than shoe brands pivoting to GPU provider.
Spacex already owns Twitter and xai, trying to post-rationalize with justification like they have servers doesn't make a whole lot of sense. It's all accounting at this point.
I don’t doubt it is. End of the day, it’s a fine tuned Kimi. They tried to hide it and making their work sound more impressive than it is. It’s easy to have stuff be cheap when you don’t have to train your own model from scratch.
You sour pusses are wrong. This is a smart move that amplifies a brilliant team from cursor with serious compute, raising the odds Elon can get to the frontier, which is worth so much these numbers will all look like a drop in the bucket.
my only gripe rn is grok is still a shitty model to use. yeh it scores nearby openai and anthropic on benchmarks, but my personal experience has been underwhelming
You sour pusses are wrong. This is a smart move. Cursor has a brilliant, capable team with serious model chops who will be able to boost the odds of AGI success. They also come with a revenue generating machine.
If this is an acquihire, it doesn't compute for me (though I can't say I understand how things work in the world of the 60B level). LLMs are new enough that nobody has a big enough headstart to warrant a 60B personnel change.
The IPO angle also doesn't make sense. Musk cultists were gonna buy anyway; this doesn't change that. And for everyone else, who wants to pay down debt on an acquisition whose effect will almost certainly not be palpable in mainstream circles, if at all?
I don't fully understand the influence that comes with SpaceX subsidies and government contracts, but I gotta believe that rounding up non-lab AI chops are on that agenda?
The exact options - 60B for acquisition (obviously not a cash deal, right?) or 10B for unspecified services rendered... also don't make sense for either of the first two.
Is this just a way of the government securing contractors by proxy that wouldn't pass muster if done through the normal channels?
I really don't think Cursor is going to be acquired for $60 billion. That price is absolutely absurd. I agree their harness is excellent, but it's hard to argue they have an overwhelming competitive advantage over rivals like Claude Code and Codex, or open-source alternatives like OpenCode. What's left then is Cursor's data, talent, and user base — but even accounting for all of that, the price is still ridiculous.
I've personally watched a lot of developers around me (myself included) who were enthusiastic Cursor users when it first launched gradually migrate over to Claude Code and Codex. And I don't think this is just happening in my bubble.
My guess is this is some kind of strategic play ahead of SpaceX's upcoming IPO — an attempt to get a higher valuation stamped on the company. But I'll say it again: $60 billion is absolutely absurd.
"SpaceXAI and
@cursor_ai
are now working closely together to create the world’s best coding and knowledge work AI.
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 has also given SpaceX the right to acquire Cursor later this year for $60 billion or pay $10 billion for our work together."
That would make more sense if SpaceX hadn't absorbed xAi just 2 months ago. The rocket company already went AI. The signal was sent already. This is just a bad business decision.
Personally, I have been granted the option to buy Tesla for $30 trillion by the end of this year or pay $500 billion for a partnership. It'll all happen, I swear.
Absolutely retarded and absurdly overpriced for a tool that's basically fallen out of use. They're just trying to do anything they can to justify a crazy IPO valuation so they can keep pumping money into xAI.
Of all Musk’s “companies” this makes least sense to me. xAI is at least in the AI space, X.com is a true tech company and Tesla is also closer to AI than SpaceX.
Guess SpaceX is the only one with the money “available”.
You're forgetting that xAI and X.com have both already been folded into SpaceX (First xAI acquired X.com, then xAI got acquired by SpaceX, both mergers were all-stock acquisitions so they were done with funny money). So when people say "SpaceX" now that does encompass both xAI and X.com as well. The reason Tesla wouldn't do this is because Tesla is a public company so it's more difficult for them to do insane shit without being sued.
Every now and then I feel like I got a handle on AI and it makes sense. Then something like this happens and either my whole concept of it is wrong, or this makes no sense and is insane.
Is is me or the world of finance is going crazy. Or maybe it has always been.
SpaceX, a rocket company owned by Elon Musk bought xAI, an AI company also owned by Elon Musk for... reasons. Don't give me the datacenters in space narrative, we all know it is bullshit.
It is then buying the option to buy a company for which the only contribution is a glorified VSCode plugin and the reselling of other companies LLM services at an absurd price. I understand that it is more complicated than that but 60 fucking billions, that's the GDP of a small country!
And now, Elon Musk intends to IPO SpaceX, which means he expect people to buy into all this bullshit. And considering that unlike me and judging by his wealth, he seems to be really good at understanding the market, so he is likely to be right.
What really puzzles me is how years of woke insanity are forgotten / forgiven, but a nazi salute is not. Remember how Microslop employees used to start their presentations with a list of Native American tribes who owned the land their office was at? Maybe people don't read Orwell anymore... that stuff was straight out of 1984.
I see being downvoted on my question already - can people who hate Musk not see the difference between asking and supporting?
What microsoft employees do in the privacy of their own meeting rooms has basically no effect on me. When Elon Musk appears along side Tommy Robinson in my city, espousing racist "great replacement" to a crowd of drunken thugs and suggesting my neighbours and friends are problem to be expunged from society, well frankly he can fuck right off.
https://youtu.be/PraEcNDGSqY?t=310 privacy of their own meeting rooms? Let's not forget about her stating for the audience her race, sex, and skin color. Those are very important things in the context of a programming conference :) There is no baked in reverse racism here at all. Only those awful right wingers do racism.
Time to delete Cursor then. I refuse to support someone that is doing so much active damage to democracy and cut funding for some of the poorest people on the planet.
Government subsidized purchase of a private company. Fantastic. All funded by the taxpayer to send rockets to a dead planet and to burn up all the energy on our alive but suffering planet.
Point to any government subsidies for SpaceX - or do you think your salary is a subsidy and everything you do at work is worthless to your employer?
SpaceX has paid for contracts to deliver services to the government and those services have saved the government billions of dollars compared to the alternative.
A top government employee in the previous regime. Not some guy. You yourself can check and see that launch pricing for the government is cheaper from everyone apart from Boeing these days.
Turns out capping costs help. (See SLS) (See Europa Clipper)
Contracts aren't subsidies and you know that. It's straight up dishonesty to mix them up.
McDonald's and Burger King are government contractors
I said "government subsidized" and then later expanded out to subsidies, grants, and contracts. You know what I meant. There isn't dishonesty remotely anywhere.
And the point of conflict of interest still stands and is unargued while we still argue the meaning of "government subsidized".
So SpaceX bought a $60B Option on Cursor, plus a bunch of services, for $10B.
If strike date comes and Cursor is in fact worth less than $60B... they can move to acquire it for that price. Or just let it "expire". And if it's worth more, they get a savage good deal. If the services were worth $8B anyway, it's hard to lose.
It seems less crazy to me through this lens. A straight acquisition, today, at $60B would in fact be crazy.
What's crazy is that a company that sells an IDE (that's not even a particularly good one compared to competitors like JetBrains) integrating some AI plugins could be worth more than $60B...
In terms of IDE yeah it is not that great.
I do have Copilot in VSCode and Cursor.
I thought both should be equal in solving problems - turns out Cursor with the same model selected somehow was able to solve tasks that Copilot would get stuck or run in loops.
They have some tricks on managing file access that others don’t.
Cynics on HN easily dismiss AI service wrappers (and many of them are in fact overblown and not worth their own code). But writing a genuinely good harness with lots of context engineering and solid tool integration is in fact not that easy. The biggest issue is that model providers also see what the community likes and often move on with their own offerings that are tailored to their own models, potentially at the training stage. So even if you have the best harness for something today, unless you are also a frontier LLM provider, there's zero guarantee you will still be relevant in the future. More like the opposite.
> But writing a genuinely good harness with lots of context engineering and solid tool integration is in fact not that easy.
true, but its not worth $60 billion fucking quid.
It's not like someone paid $60 billion for a product the way you pay for bananas at the store. They invested a much smaller amount and essentially bought an option to acquire. And even if you don't believe the company's assets are worth the current valuation, an acquisition can still make sense if you believe that valuation will go up further. And if they actually do acquire, it will probably still not be in cash. They'll just be swapping stocks. That is essentially how all startup funding works. There is nothing strange about this. It merely reached new dimensions thanks to AI.
I mean yes, you are right, but they also paid $10 billion for that option. Which is also far too much for a harness.
it's insanity.
the whole thing is driven by irrational stock market investers who NEED ai to be the thing that saves the world.
they're betting everything on it.
I mean they doubled revenue from $1B/yr to $2B in a month.
At some point it can be valued as a high growth business, the code that backs it is almost irrelevant if the business is strong.
trusting a startup to accurately report its revenue in this market is about the dumbest thing you can do
> (...) writing a genuinely good harness with lots of context engineering and solid tool integration is in fact not that easy.
This. They are after the harness engineering experience of the Cursor people, I'd assume the they want to absorb all that into Grok's offerings.
The value and the room for innovation on the harness side seems to be underestimated.
Oddly the harness also affects model training, since even GLM/Z.ai for example train (I suspect) their model on the actual Claude Code harness. So the choises made by harness engineers affects the model. For Kimi/Moonshot and OpenAI the company makes their own harness. Alibaba uses Gemini.
Very interesting dynamics.
There are plenty of harder things in the world and very few are worth 60B.
Something being harder and attributing value to that makes no sense. Sure a big moat is important for value but "difficult to do" is just a unidimensional angle.
Showing naked butt on the internet seems easy.
Earning millions that way is much more complicated.
"But writing a genuinely good harness with lots of context engineering and solid tool integration is in fact not that easy."
It is surprisingly easy to do it once someone else has done the work. Increasingly that's the nature of AI-based software engineering: point it at an existing tool and ask it to carefully duplicate features until it has parity. As you pointed out, frontier LLM companies happen to be well positioned to sell the resulting products.
Isn't Codex TUI available for free though? Besides others like Pi and OpenCode of course.
It can use local/oss models, but it doesn't make it simple to do (easiest with ollama) and it's not clear what else you 'lose' by making that choice.
If you had a really good (big) local model, maybe it's an option, but on the more common smaller (<32b) models, it will have similar problems in looping, losing context, etc. in my experience.
It's a nice TUI, but the ecosystem is what makes it good.
mac studio 512gb versions are entirely sold out for this reason precisely
Sure, but is it worth 60 billion?
Their annualized revenue run rate is on track to surpass $6 billion by the end of 2026 so it's not ridiculous for them to be valued at $60 billion at some point. Also worth noting that if they do get access to SpaceX compute, they could start pretraining their own model. Composer is good but its built on top of Kimi 2.5.
Definitely not if someone frames it "shitty IDE with some plugins".
But if someone frames it "engineering talent that knows how to make LLMs even better at software development than competition" it might.
I see with my own work it works so it is not like Devin that was basically a scam that was valued at 10 billion.
In this kind of context yeah feels like it is quite possible to be worth 60 billion.
SpaceX thinks so.
SpaceX the space rocket and internet satellite company? Or SpaceX the Elon Musk piggy bank used to buy up all his financial misadventures?
You mean Musk thinks xAI need to be shown making AI investments to keep getting outside funding.
I actually now think ai prompt writing in the IDE is completely overkill nowadays.
IDEs are made for just a human to interact with code. I think the paradigm of forcing these tools that weren’t built for this to do this, is us trying to fit a square peg in a round hole.
Call me old, but don’t put ai in my ide. My ide was made for a human, not an ai. For the established players for sure it makes sense since they already have space on our machines. But for the new ones imo terminal, or dedicated llm interfaces are where it’s at.
If I’m writing code sure suggest the next line. If the machine is writing code, let it, and just supervise properly. and have the proper interface that allows the strength of each
My IDE has nicer tooling for things like diffs, and has all of my LSP's configured which the harness can utilize
>They have some tricks on managing file access that others don’t.
I thought it was a Windows thing. My Windows work computer is so heavily managed and monitored I assumed that was why Copilot stops being able to get terminal output or find the file I'm looking at. It's the same problem in IntelliJ and VSCode, with different models trying to find things in different ways.
Now that I think of it though, I've only used Copilot at work. At home I use Debian but I've never tried using Copilot. Claude, OpenCode, Gemini, and IntelliJ's AI Chat pointed at local Ollama models never have issues finding files or reading files and terminal output.
They're using the code intelligence from the IDE to run the AI, while Claude Code only does greps.
AI coding is much more than just the model - all the tools that human use in IDE are also useful for AI. Claude Code on the other hand just works with grep.
They are now a Codex clone and without the subscription pricing. You have to spend thousands to get what you get from a $200 Codex subscription. How do they compete with this except from users who haven't caught on yet, or businesses that are unbothered to spend thousands a month per dev and wouldn't consider just subscribing to 1-3 $200 subscriptions instead?
And their price is so high because it's markup on API rates. API rates, even without markup, are just insanely irresponsible for anyone to be spending on full-time daily usage.
> users who haven't caught on yet
They are catching up fast!
https://www.businessinsider.com/chamath-palihapitiya-ai-cost...
Tellingly, from his full post: "Mostly because I do not yet see an equivalent uptick in productivity or revenue..."
https://x.com/chamath/status/2029634071966666964
I suspect that as the value a company provides is more than its code, then increasing code churn does not lead to an equivalent increase in revenue. Even for a tech company, a business' concept, connections, knowledge, assets, non-coding staff, etc.. are a significant value and increasing code doesn't increase the throughput of that value. For non-tech companies code is the grease in the gears, not the gears themselves.
Codex is coming for those non coding use cases too. Is Cursor?
Whose pricing is above API rates? Not Cursor. It's 100% at each model provider's published API rate. With a bigger sub, you get it cheaper than that.
Cursor makes a ton of money because the product is great. It's easily the most sophisticated harness out there, and it isn't an IDE anymore. It's an agent dashboard since version 3.
Suffice it to say it's not all idiot money being thrown at them by users.
API rates on local models are quite cheap, and you can even run them locally. Yes, the hardware for doing so at speed is expensive, but people used to drop the equivalent of what would be $50k or $100k today on an individual workstation for full-time use. It's justified if the productivity gain is strong enough.
But that’s not competitive. The only reason to do that is out of need for privacy. Which is critical for some. The tradeoff is that the models are relatively bad. I don’t see how Cursor can win from this use case especially if to get the privacy benefit you need to spend a huge amount. You can already run Codex for free with local models too.
What's the advantage over github copilot actually? They seem to have all the same access and features (except for this sheduling thing?) for cheaper.
> users who haven't caught on yet
If you think this of users who use cursor then I don’t think you’ve used cursor much at all.
I've used Cursor a lot. Until recently it was mandated by my employer. I can't see the attraction at all. It's a (bad IMO) IDE integration, a reasonable model (but I still generally preferred Claude over Composer), and a bunch of other tools that weren't very developed (like cloud environments and multi-agent orchestration). It's a suite of tools, most of which have superior alternatives. What am I missing?
You have model choice in cursor… why would you use composer?
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What do you mean?
Only the foundation model companies offer cheap/subsidized compute.
If you're an app layer company, you're offering a 10x worse deal to your customers.
Foundation model companies are willing to lose money to win loyalty. Remains to be seen if it'll work.
If you’re more worried about cost than you are being productive and getting good results then sure, stick with foundational model company apps.
“Being productive” without taking inputs/costs into consideration is an oxymoron.
But euros spent on tokens is a tiny fraction of the overall costs of the project.
That’s the thing, I have never seen detailed costs of what people are spending their money on. I know that for Claude there’s a $200 monthly subscription through which assigned credits one burns pretty fast, at which point (and I may be wrong on this, because I’ve never used the thing) one can run extra code on a “pay as you use it” basis? Again, I might be wrong on this.
I’ve also seen it mentioned a lot of people having 2, 3 or even more subscriptions, which I’m pretty sure that can easily go South when it comes to costs.
But, again, and the most important point, I’ve never seen a detailed post on what people spend on this AI thing on a monthly basis (let’s say).
A company that cares more about cost than results is probably a terrible company to work for. They will give you 10yo dell laptop with 8gb memory and complain that you’re slow when it takes 15m to build the application.
So no it’s not an oxymoron.
Productivity is literally a statement of the relationship between the result and the cost, presumably you found that out after reading the reply and that is why you switched from "productivity" to "results" in your reply.
Until you learn what productivity is we can’t continue the conversation.
Please at least try to keep track of which sockpuppet you are using in this thread sighthrowaway.
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API rates are the real rates. Subscription costs are the "first hit is free" subsidized pricing.
They’re not the “real rates”, they’re the rates that are being charged for API use. API reportedly has a margin of profit
You also neglect that products like Cursor run on two margins, their own plus the API provider’s. That’s always going to come at a premium
Yes, the rates with a margin of profit are the real rates.
The rates without a margin of profit (or with a negative one) are not real.
General Motors is worth $72B.
That feels more like a reflection of how terrible most GM cars are than about the inflated valuation of Cursor, which is what I infer you were trying to imply.
Their revenue and growth justified it. Plus, for xAI that could be the only way to get a SOTA coding model they want so hard.
I thought cursor became mostly obsolete with Claude Code and Codex TUIs?
> I thought cursor became mostly obsolete with Claude Code and Codex TUIs?
I wouldn't think so. At work I have both cursor and claude code and while I use both, cursor is by far the most pleasant to use. If I had to give one up, I'd let claude go.
Are TUIs not yesterday’s hot thing?
The way I work now in the Codex desktop app is that I spin up 3-5 conversations which work in their dedicated git worktree.
So while the agent works and runs the test suite I can come back to other conversations to address blockers or do verification.
Important is that I can see which conversation has an update and getting desktop notifications.
Maybe I could set this up with tabs in the Terminal, but it does not sound like the best UX.
That's probably more a personal preference than objective measurement. A lot of people already spent most of their dev time in the terminal, so for someone like myself that uses neovim claude code or codex cli are much easier than using the GUIs.
The solution is use both. They both have their usecases. Cursor's autocomplete and quickly highlight a few lines -> throw into context, plus it's got a very good file index/API (which burns much less tokens than Claude's grep'ing) and whatever else they are doing underneath to optimize it for coding.
Claude is still gold standard if you're not in an IDE though.
Grep'ing doesn't use tokens, it uses grep.
Reading files is always the biggest token burning when coding. If it can't find stuff quickly or has to use less and head to trim it before finding it, then you're just wasting context window
Cursor both lets you highlight specific lines multiple times per chat and is much quicker at finding stuff.
Claude has to use more tokens to read the grep output.
That matches my anecdatal experience with a couple dozen devs. Many wnet hard on the Cursor train and have mostly gotten off now with CC and Codex TUIs available
Because of user count? Same was said about instagram. with all due respect, devs don't seem to understand business
Or devs are just different users who care about different things and have different experiences.
Reminds me of the famous dropbox post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 - I don't even know if dropbox still exists in 2026 but i'm still happily using rsync and mailing things around because dropbox has just absolutely never worked reliably for me, unlike my 2007 gmail account.
Likewise, if it were up to me, instagram and any business whose business model revolves around ads would be banned (because ads would be banned because advertisement is harmful in general).
It's fine to care about different stuff, but if you want to understand the valuation of a company, then your experience only goes so far. it's not going to make any sense unless you broaden your scope of interest to the metrics that impact valuation.
I don't read OP's post we're talking about ("What's crazy is that a company [...] could be worth more than $60B...") as not understanding, but as disagreeing that our world should work in such a way where this state of affair is even remotely considered acceptable
It's an interesting idea that society should somehow prevent companies valuation being linked to how many people use their product.
Unsure how it would work in practice.
But do devs know a which IDE is better? That seems to be a rather important question here.
It's not 'the' most important question.
Are you using the same AI engineering tools you were using 2-3 years ago? 1 year ago? I'm not. Without a network effect, capturing revenue is hard.
My use is not relevant. It's not ideal to extrapolate from your own personal habits. cursor's user volume and growth is the important thing
Who are the users? I haven't seen many pro users using cursor
Companies. Single devs can jump around IDEs and TUIs more easily but that’s not what companies tend to do.
can't X recreate one with 1B? As an IDE, honestly I can't even understand it needs more than 1M to create
It's not about the tech, it's about the pool of users that use Cursor, by acquiring Cursor you get a bunch of users + subscribed and already paying pool of people instead of just rebuilding something from scratch and convincing people to change their tools with a new one
Is it about the users or the data the users generate. Pretty easy to see the day devs are replaced by the data they themselves generated. Companies are only going to get one chance to grad this data. Similar to the internet cutoff.
True, especially with Composer (the finetuned model by cursor)
the IDE has little value
What they want is the massive user base, the data (Cursor has a lot of high quality coding data for training), the teams expertise in coding models and agents, and the Composer models
60 billion is a large number but these frontier labs are burning billions a month in compute alone, and SpaceX is IPOing soon so they'll have a lot of cash to spend
This is it. I can’t believe the other commenters are unaware that Cursor recently fine-tuned an open-source model and brought it to the frontier, even if it remained there briefly.
Elon/xAI want Grok to become useful for coding. Cursor has enough data and expertise to create a useful coding model. They found a price and an arrangement that made sense for both parties.
>and the Composer models
You mean Kimi K2.5? They can get that for free.
How massive is the Cursor user base?
The numbers I could find says 1 million, with about 35% paying.
I'd say that a million users is pretty good, but 350.000 paying users isn't, if you're a $60B company. Someone else mentioned that Anysphere has a $1B ARR, but I seriously doubt that each user is forking over ~$3000 per year.
Over $2B ARR now.
Why do you doubt $3k/yr? Corporate usage skews a lot higher, when it's evaluated against hiring, not as a nice to have addon.
If $10k/yr means you get work done with one less hire that's an easy decision.
enterprise contracts. ARR is almost definitely juiced by counting future contract value
Cursor sells its own models as well now
It's own RT'ed open source models right?
> What's crazy is that a company that sells an IDE (that's not even a particularly good one compared to competitors like JetBrains) integrating some AI plugins could be worth more than $60B...
yes. plus $2b ARR, 1m DAU
Welcome to the era of vibe-based valuations
* MicroSoft is shaking in the corner lol
MS is doing just fine I'm sure
AI yielding such incredible cost savings. /s
Cursor is useless
> that's not even a particularly good one compared to competitors like JetBrains
Massive understatement calling it "a not particularly good plugin". If it were that simple there wouldn't be a need to even do this.
Paying $10B for the option is also crazy though. Paying $10B for the thing outright and not just an option would be absurdly high.
Is this cash or compute? Elon has one of the world's biggest compute clusters spun up, and little inference demand to speak of.
Trading billions worth of idle compute, in exchange for a high-strike call option on the #3 player in the most-promising-vertical for AI, plus (presmuably) some access to their data, starts to sound like not a bad trade. Especially if you're pre-committed to betting your entire rocket company on winning in AI, and you're currently in sixth or seventh place.
> you're pre-committed to betting your entire rocket company on winning in AI
SpaceX has invested a small amount as a share of its value in XAI, and could survive the loss of its investment.
It's true he could write off xAI today and the company could still fetch a trillion-dollar valuation. But I was more referring to his stated intentions - between his stated plans, his actions taking SpaceX from a profitable company to spending basically all their revenue (plus a rumored large chunk of what's raised via its IPO) on AI, and seeing his tendency to make bet-the-farm bets on Tesla, I think it's fair to say he's committing to bet all of SpaceX on xAI.
I heard he made a deal with a company to use his clusters. Is there good data on demand for Grok? Seems like relatively little chatter at least, in spite of tremendous investment.
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I hate Trump as much as the next guy, but what is that evidence, again?
He had a very close, decades long friendship with the most notorious sex-trafficker-of-children-to-rich-creeps in modern history for decades. And when imprisoned, that infamous pedophile died while in a federal prison under Trump's control, with a strange gap in the CCTV video footage. And Trump's handling of the entire Epstein Files saga makes it clear that Trump is described extensively in those files and he desperately wants to conceal it. What could be in there that he would use the entire justice department to try and redact? Trump is shameless about things that are legal even if they're salacious (like sleeping with porn star Stormy Daniels), so you have to wonder, what could Jeffery Epstein's good friend be trying to conceal?
Also, he owned the Miss Universe org (including Miss USA and Miss Teen USA) for decades, and he was known to walk into the dressing rooms of teen contestants as young as 15 while they were undressed. [0]
Also, he bragged about molesting women, and a court of law found that he sexually assaulted E Jean Carroll.
I haven't proven the case that Trump had sex with a minor, but there's way more than enough probable cause to believe it's more likely than not.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20200111171647/https://www.rolli...
Obviously this looks very bad but you don't seriously think it constitutes evidence?
Imagine there's a camera continuously recording a cookie jar. A child eats all of the cookies and then deletes the footage from the time they ate the cookies. A parent returns to find their child covered in crumbs, loudly proclaiming they haven't eaten a cookie in years and actively interferes with the parent's investigation and tries to distract from it by throwing a brick through the window of an Iranian family down the street.
Are any of the facts in this hypothetical "evidence"? With the knowledge of the truth (that the kid ate the cookies), it's clear these are all relevant pieces of evidence. If we take knowledge of the truth out of the equation, would these facts still be evidence? Unambiguously they would.
you don't seriously think it constitutes evidence? Do you even know what the word evidence mean? It is not the same as proof.
Maybe you would want to insert the term "circumstantial" or so.
Definitionally both circumstantial and direct evidence are forms of evidence. No modifier is necessary.
And incidentally you can be convicted in a court of law purely on circumstantial evidence, and that's the place in society where we have the highest standard of proof. The evidence all being circumstantial is not a gotcha.
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https://www.thedailybeast.com/new-evidence-corroborates-clai...
Yeah that's pretty bad.
This isn't court. The evidence, such as it is, is all of the smoke which commonly motivates people to look for fire. The strongest and most comprehensive that I've seen is the argument that if Trump was not implicated in the Epstein files, he would be publishing them in free book form himself and forcing every media outlet to advertise it. Slight exaggeration, but I think truly only slight.
Not really relevant to the thread, but there are simple answers to the "eViDeNcE??" question. You may have already known this.
Again, circumstantial and speculative.
Clearly you don’t and that disingenuousness is frowned upon in discussions here.
So, where’s the evidence?
https://www.thedailybeast.com/new-evidence-corroborates-clai...
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Someone who works on a “sugar dating” app advocating for synthetic child porn? That’s… uncomfortable?
To say the least. Great catch! 'O brave new world, that has such people in 't.'
Has the availability of deepfake porn generation reduced the demand for deepfake porn featuring real people? When deepfake generators are capable of creating convincing imagery of flawless ideal fake humans, why do you suppose there’s so many real humans who report being non-consensual subjects of deepfake porn?
> Has the availability of deepfake porn generation reduced the demand for deepfake porn featuring real people?
yes
> When deepfake generators are capable of creating convincing imagery of flawless ideal fake humans, why do you suppose there’s so many real humans who report being non-consensual subjects of deepfake porn?
?
One obvious argument is what it was trained on.
Doesn't have to be. You can train it on normal pictures of children and nude images of adults.
> Doesn't have to be. You can train it on normal pictures of children and nude images of adults.
You say this so casually, as though it were a normal thing to know, or as if a normal person would know it. Does that actually seem true where you live right now?
And how do you know that, anyway, Harsh? I mean, all those "unblocked" games you stole to give away and that you also put on Github, that's one thing. But this...
Come on, it's not hard to come up with this idea. And it's not even true, model trained on clothed children and nude adults wouldn't know how children's genitals look like.
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If it's not in an 8K filing it isn't real.
Problem is basically, that if the option works out (Cursor truly has the talent to train a frontier model on SpaceX's infrastructure, and were simply lacking the infra before) the fair price would be way way more than $60B.
OpenAI tried to acquire Windsurf last year for $3B and couldn't.
Seems like Elon's move is two fold
1) A gamble based on cursor's compute constraint 2) if 1) plays out, he can purchase cursor via shares of spaceX over valued shares, at a fixed price should the valuation increase.
> Cursor truly has the talent to train a frontier model on SpaceX's infrastructure, and were simply lacking the infra before
Wild conjecture.
I think this was an “if” scenario
This makes more sense that my initial reading of it indeed
It reportedly has a $2B ARR, and a 5x multiplier doesn't seem insane to me, but who knows, honestly
But it's paying a 5x ARR multiplier for the right to buy at a 30x multiplier.
They have 2B ARR because their business model is about selling models cheaper than they cost.
The main frenzy with Cursor started when you could access Anthropic models practically for free.
Otherwise it is just VS Code.
> Otherwise it is just VS Code.
This is a bit simplistic. It's the VS Code that everyone used before cc came to town. Real devs, on real projects. All that data they collected is worth a lot more than "just vscode". Their composer2 is better than kimi2.5 and it's just a finetune on that data.
xAI had a decent model in grok4 (it was even sota on a bunch of benchmarks for a few weeks), but they didn't have great coding models (code-fast was ok-ish but nothing to write home about, certainly nowhere near SotA). Now that they've been banned from using claude, they'll get their expertise + data to build a coding model on top of whatever grok5 will be + their cluster for compute.
It doesn't sound like a bad plan to me, financial shenanigans or not.
What data? Their commercial terms promised they wouldn’t keep any for training.
There's a lengthy discussion to be had here, and there's enough lawyerspeak in every provider's data retention policy to wiggle out of anything. A few notes from their current data use page:
> If you enable “Privacy Mode” in Cursor’s settings: zero data retention will be enabled for our model providers. Cursor may store some code data to provide extra features. None of your code will ever be trained on by us or any third-party.
Note the "may store some code data" and "none of your code will ever be trained on". In general you never want to include actual customer code in training the data, because of leaks that you may not want. Say someone has a hash somewhere, and your model autocompletes that hash. Bad. But that's not to say you couldn't train a reward model on pairs of prompts + completions. You have "some code data" (which could be acceptance rate) and use that. You just need to store the acceptance rate. And later, when you train new models, you check against that reward model. Does my new model reply close enough to score higher? If so, you're going in the right direction.
> If you choose to turn off “Privacy Mode”: we may use and store codebase data, prompts, editor actions, code snippets, and other code data and actions to improve our AI features and train our models.
Self explainatory.
> Even if you use your API key, your requests will still go through our backend!
They are collecting data even if you BYOK.
> If you choose to index your codebase, Cursor will upload your codebase in small chunks to our server to compute embeddings, but all plaintext code for computing embeddings ceases to exist after the life of the request. The embeddings and metadata about your codebase (hashes, file names) may be stored in our database.
They don't store (nor need to store) plain text, but they may store embeddings and metadata. Again, you can use those to train other things, not necessarily models. You can use metadata to check if you're going in the right direction.
At 60B they might do it anyway and then pay 200M in fines when the court rules against them.
xAI needs a dev tool to compete with Codex and Claude Code.
Cursor needs their own 1st party backend model.
Sounds like a match made in heaven.
Not quite first party, but composer 2 is far superior to grok for coding. Unless you're eluding to them using SpaceX infra to train their own model vs. using grok
If they're the same company then Grok becomes first party to Cursor.
2B ARR at what cost base?
Not only is it almost certainly compute (“services”) it’s likely priced at Anthropic rack-rate, or at least what Cursor’s been paying Anthropic.
The cluster’s already paid for, so likely in the $2B range for operating cash needs. Not more than $5.
If I imagine bringing in Cursor’s team to build a frontier model, ideally combined with Grok, which has one of the few truly proprietary data feeds available to it, and with a much larger custom model Cursor can solidify a place, and I get to do a stock swap to buy it, this sounds like a bet worth making.
Upshot - I bet there’s an MS/oAI deal on IP on the back of this; meanwhile the cluster goes brrr.
Is that so or would those 10B be discounted from the purchase?
not that it isn't wild regardless
I'm not sure what you're referring to by "that" but I think you're right that it's 10B to not purchase or 60B to purchase, so as an option posting $10B for an option with a $50 strike price.
have concrete terms been published or is that an educated guess of the contract?
It's a statement based on the contents of the articles linked at the top of this comments section.
But they also get a whole bunch of AI Services from Cursor. Other comments have noted that xAI has fallen on bad times (idk one way or the other) so perhaps they were going to spend $5B on getting these services elsewhere, anyway.
SpaceX spending $1B a month on various AI services seems ~plausible
(EDIT - Or maybe it's an IP transfer, or maybe it's over a longer time horizon. Idk but SpaceX clearly expects value from 'our work together' even if they don't exercise.)
$1B per month on AI services does not seem remotely plausible to me... Engineers don't consume that many tokens...
And on the AI development side they're the ones providing compute in the form of a "million H100 equivalent Colossus training supercomputer"... On top of the cash.
Cursor has no AI services, they do not develop their own frontier models. I see no reason to understand why $10bn for Cursor's services is an advantage xAI versus say a $10bn deal with Anthropic, OpenAI or Google.
It's true that Cursor doesn't have their own frontier models, but they are training their own models. They just aren't at frontier level yet. The $60B/$10B deal looks like a bet that this is a capital/GPU constraint rather than a capability one.
Those other companies wouldn't also toss in a purchase option.
But I agree that it's hard to articulate what Cursor services you could blow this much money on.
Maybe it is all just an option! Or maybe they get a bunch of IP either way?
Plausible how? Explain please.
Tokens. Tokens spawning sub agents using more tokens. Maybe some training too.
I didn't say it was Wise.
I said it seems within possibility for this, very particular, corporation.
Despite their impressive ARR, Cursor faces existential threat from not only BigLabs (Claude Code, Open AI Codex) but also BigTech (AWS Kiro, Google Antigravity, MS VSCode). I am sure the usual suspects would have lined up to purchase Cursor, and the deal from xAI was probably the best of the lot. Marks an end to a remarkable sprint for a 3yo company, and an admirable exit (considering the recent discombobulation of Windsurf's), just as investor money and/or hype is going belly up.
Having tried most (all?) of the commercially available + open source options, and even tangential competitors like CC, Conductor, Antimetal, etc. I haven't found anything that's close to the experience of Cursor. The harness they've built is incredible.
I'd even go so far as to say that any competitors that are direct (windsurf, kiro, etc.) aren't even in the same universe. Cursor is just so much better, faster, has better features (plan and debug mode), and squeezes much better results/code out of the same models. They absolutely have some secrete sauce that the other options just don't have.
Cursor is my favorite of the VS forks. Agree that it delivers better plans than others. I prefer using Claude in Cursor over CC CLI when I am heads down going through bugs. I am disappointed in how "little value" in token use Cursor provides compared to others.
Do you have examples? I'm curious.
It has shown surprising stickiness. Occupying some middle ground between full adoption and still ~in the code.
I am starting to see some potential in moving back away from pure terminal, a mixed modality with AI. But it is not in the direction of IDE in any traditional sense.
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Do you really think anyone is using AWS Kiro or Google Antigravity? They are not real competitors in the slightest.
This valuation is absurd. Perhaps a year ago- sure, but there have been so many iterations of this “kind of editor” since then, not to mention countless alternatives.
So for me it’s more of a data deal - Elon buying himself some insight into codebases and real dev usage patterns? Oh finally someone to use his dirty data centres
Cursor is still the best I’ve used are there others I should try?
I've been using Kilo Code (VS Code Plugin) for the last few days, and it does most of what I liked in Cursor without tying me to their particular subscription.
That said, people are increasingly migrating to CLI tools (Claude Code if you like the Claude models, Pi Agent if you want something that's highly customizable, Crush if you want something fun), or GUI tools that are less code-first (Codex GUI).
What makes Crush fun?
It has a CLI component and a very flashy TUI application. The TUI has lots of effort put in to layouts, color, and really pushing the boundaries of what a TUI can be. It looks a bit “hacker in a 2000s movie” except with pink instead of green as the dominant color.
Totally not for everybody though. I can see why some people would hate it.
People keep saying this and they don't understand how businesses work.
Cursor has 1B in enterprise revenue. It doesn't matter if people can clone their product, those deals don't move slowly
> Cursor has 1B in enterprise revenue.
That' all well and good and they had astounding growth rates but doesn't mean much. And 1B in ARR is not _that_ much in comparison. Also, reportedly they spend all their revenue and they have no control over the spend-side. The models they use will very likely get much more expensive. All the foundation model companies have a competing product. Cursor has the first mover advantage, but that will only help then so much. There have been plenty companies who grew fast, had huge revenue, but failed in the end, because they never got profitable. That's also in the cards for Cursor, if they don't fundamentally change their business model
Put 1B into a better product and 10B into marketing. If you can’t beat their 1B in revenue, the market for making your money back on the Cursor acquisition also isn’t there.
If you pay 10B for options at 60B and the strike is 8B you ... just lost 10B. Thats it.
Add emotional hedges if needed but they are just emotional not financial.
Your argument is based on an assumption that cursor cannot lose value. Even if the market says it has.
No free lunch: an option is a bet for both sides. Zero sum.
3 things bug me Now why would cursor agree to that unless the offer was better than what their market valuation + acquisition premium < 60
This was a similar play for twitter by the same person
While an innovator at the time, today there are a lot of LLM coding solution, sold by model providers, model aggregators even open source ones , it’s not obvious what is being bought that isn’t a feature of vs code or one of the LLM agents ( as the dismissive saying goes )
Thinking of it as an option makes it much more rational.
Downside is capped (cost of services + deal structure), upside is asymmetric if Cursor outperforms.
That said, these deals always hinge on whether the “$8B in services” is real economic value or just internal accounting. If it’s the latter, the risk profile looks very different.
What services could SpaceX possibly be buying from Cursor that would cost $8bn?
To be worth $60B at a 50x P/E ratio this implies $1.2B in profit.
Not happening
knee-jerk is that it's weird, but makes sense:
* X will have a total of ~2GW of GPU sometime this year largely not doing much outside of 'grok is this true'
* despite no longer being in vogue with consumer devs Cursor still has a lot of developer data that can assist in building a model
* Cursor have decent enterprise relationships (while for xAI it is ~zero) and that's where the real revenue for llms + agents is
* Cursor are paying retail for tokens and competing against the frontier model co's who are also their suppliers. Not sustainable (hence their in-house composer model).
* Cursor the product covers the gamut from lovable-style prompt-to-app, an IDE, cli and bugbot
* X are using "x bucks" to pay for a potential later acquisition which are arguably overvalued based on the space x IPO hype
Option there to give X a window to make it work, otherwise walk away with a $10B breakup fee for access to it's data
> largely not doing much outside of 'grok is this true'
Hey now, don't forget about it's super important other use, taking innocent photos of people and regenerating them in less clothing and compromising positions.
I'm sad that I even know that.
They changed that recently, you need to be paying €10/mo for that now. The free plan and/or access for the basic Twitter plan are gone.
That doesn't make it better! It did somehow slow down the regulatory response because politicians are dumb, though.
It means X can identify users at least, so they are probably quite a bit less likely to do that.
You’ve obviously never attempted to complete a purchase while working under a regulatory body, required to test the theory.
What difference does that make?
it's much funnier now, that by putting it behind a paywall, they're explicitly saying "it's okay for you to do this, you just have to purchase a license first"
Security through enshittification. Nice.
Photoshop has been able to do that for 25 years. Do people realize that AI doesn’t magically know what their real bodies look like? AI is just pasting the averaged body parts from every porn image on top of what you were wearing. I know people love to be offended, but it’s weird to me that they’ve made up a right to not have someone privately mess with an image that has your face in it.
Maybe if this tech were completely secret and this was 1997, so a video of a naked Bill Clinton high-fiving Saddam Hussein in a hot tub was likely to shock the world, then it would be a big deal. But everyone knows all images (and especially surprising ones) are likely to be AI, I’m asking sincerely, does it really matter if people make fake photos for wanking purposes?
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I wouldn't be surprised if those enterprise relationships evaporate after this acquisition. There's a reason why xAI has zero enterprise customers.
> There's a reason why xAI has zero enterprise customers
I’m curious where you pull these stats from
I've had hundreds of AI-powered vendor tools come across my desk as part of my job, and I have yet to see a single one that uses Grok. I'm also not aware of any publicly announced customers for Grok's enterprise offering. The Grok Enterprise website doesn't list any customers.
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For Enterprises it's way easier to delist Cursor from the list of used tools than to have a relation with someone known publicly for neofascist aspirations.
xAI is not, and was not that bad, it's just everybody ignores it for anything serious due to obvious reasons.
I am not, I have a Grok subscription and I find Grok genuinely useful.
I hate Musk, but Grok is not a bad LLM. It's very useful for tracking down old magazines that I'm looking for, which are public domain or copyright orphans. Often the major players will outright reject searching places like archive.org as they immediately assume you are trying to commit some level of copyright infringement. With Grok it'll either just do it, or do it with a mild prod or jailbreak.
You've literally got tools like opencode that are MIT licensed. Most of those points X could do on their own or are things that make this attractive for cursor not X.
e.g. Need developer data? Use some of that spare GPU compute, hand out free top end model coding access for a bit and you'll very rapidly have developer data
>decent enterprise relationships
I guess. 60B worth of "relationships" though?
> hand out free top end model coding access for a bit and you'll very rapidly have developer data
They tried this - grok was free on openrouter for a while
Marketing push was there too, everyone was saying Grok had jumped Claude and Codex, yet I never got that when using all 3.
Turns out that benchmaxxing doesn't help if it's not very good when people actually try it.
It's more useful to have access your full code base compared to having access to only your input and the output they generate.
But imagine if they handed out free access to Kimi or GLM-5. Actually, I still wouldn't use it, because I avoid APIs that say they hold on to data.
And presumably they got data from it...
and then released a model that didn't really leave a mark with code performance
But if the developers are to presumably use the model you give out, what data are you going to get from them thats useful?
I don't know - was GP speculating that there is value there on a scale to justify 60B no me
Yes I think you're right. Reinforcement learning is extremely compute heavy, which cursor doesn't have. And X.ai doesn't have the coding agent data anthropic/OpenAI has, but does have the compute.
However, one thing in AI is that while the usage goes up extremely quickly, it tends to go down just as fast. I know a lot of companies that are in the process of switching from Cursor to Claude Code, so in 6-12 months I'm not entirely sure of the data quality/quantity.
Also I think it is telling that they are calling them SpaceX not X. The X brand is absolutely toxic, especially in enterprise.
> Also I think it is telling that they are calling them SpaceX not X. The X brand is absolutely toxic, especially in enterprise.
it might not help all that much once it turns into "grok" harness or otherwise associated with elon
doing much outside of 'grok is this true'
Hey...don't forget "grok is this person jewish(hint hint)"...or..just "grok do your thing"
https://www.threads.com/@trosen76/post/DTlYw7sFXvR
I think you're right. Other providers can offer coding subscriptions that use in-house models, and this sets the stage for a Grok coding plan that's built in to Cursor.
$60 billion seems expensive, but it gives them a much better chance at competing in the market than if they started their own harness from scratch.
Absolutely no enterprise - I work in enterprise cloud consulting - absolutely no company would trust Grok with their IP compared to Anthropic or OpenAI with Musk’s reputation on how he runs his businesses.
Anthropic just tolerates the money losing developers who pay $20/$200 for subscriptions.
They'll sign a contract, and the contract will be very clear about whether using user prompts as training data is allowed or not. They're not going to care much about reputation; they'll care about the terms they sign with.
I don't get the sense that Elon's companies care much for the contracts they sign.
e.g. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/12/twitter-stiffs-s...
I wouldn't trust a contract from one of Elon's companies unless they were willing to put in escrow an amount that would make me whole in case of a breach on their side. (And that amount would be quite large in the case of a potential breach involving using prompt data for training.)
Maybe the play here is a way to sneak sneak Grok into enterprise by calling it Cursor. Or they'll just give up on it and run Cursor's fine-tuned Kimi on Colossus.
You forgot to consider whether all this is worth $60B.
> forgot to consider whether all this is worth $60B
I see two possibilities:
(1) SpaceX is paying with stock; and
(2) the $60bn pay-out is (a) conditional or (b) never going to be exercised—it was a stalking horse for negotiating the $10bn terms, which gives SpaceX everything it actually wants.
I think both a) and b) can both be true. We dont know what the contingency is - could be something absurd.
Also one would definitely offer to pay in stock if they believe it is massively over-valued lmao.
$1B to $2B ARR in a few months with projection of $6B ARR by years end. If xAi wants to have it's own tools just like OpenAI and Anthropic, then it's not an unusual move.
Extrapolating from a few months to a full year and calling it Annual Recurring Revenue is one of modern startup valuation gimmicks that I cannot not laugh at.
Sometimes it helps to go back to the basics to understand company performance: money in, money out?
Sure, but early profit rarely tells the whole story. They already sell to half the fortune 500 and enterprise is sticky. Gains in efficiency, like a discount on data center access, can be remarkable for their profit outlook.
in these cases arr = annual run rate, commonly used when your revenue is either going vertical (cursor - good) or your revenue is choppy and full of short term projects (mercor - bad)
it's not dollars it's X bucks
I think it also represents a bet that in some sense Cursor's model capabilities are resource limited rather than talent limited. If that's true, $60B will end up being a bargain. If not true, well it's an expensive lesson but that's the nature of things.
Forgot that claude is burning good will from it's own capacity constraints, leading to periods of 'dumbness'. It's a catalyst to cause me and others to switch back to cursor if they can get their act together
> despite no longer being in vogue with consumer devs Cursor still has a lot of developer data that can assist in building a model
care to share more about this?
> Cursor still has a lot of developer data that can assist in building a model
Their composer model is seriously good. I’ve been eyeing a cursor sub just to use it in OpenCode. They have a nice moat here.
> Cursor have decent enterprise relationships (while for xAI it is ~zero)
That has a reason. Those enterprise relationships are almost certainly going to sour at least a bit, if not for Musk‘s toxic image then for his erratic behavior.
Just to point it out, Cursor has not made any good models themselves. Composer 2 is Kimi K2.5, and they tried to pass it as their own until people noticed that the api specified it as Kimi.
Cursor has released a technical paper [1] and several blog posts [2] describing the continued pretraining and RL they do on top of Kimi K2.5.
It is true that they were not transparent about the base model that they used until the model slug was discovered by a Twitter user via the API.
[1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.24477 [2]: https://cursor.com/blog/real-time-rl-for-composer
I’ve tried Kimi a bit (not much to be fair) and didn’t find it to be that great. Composer feels more „real world“ capable to me, which is not a big surprise since Cursor has all the data to tune it.
Kimi is the base, but they've done tons of finetuning on top to produce a really good completions model.
Yeah, Composer 2 is legitimately so impressive. It is my daily driver right now both on professional and personal projects. I only find myself reaching for 5.3 Codex/GPT 5.4 when exploring a lot of technical documentation or code and for Sonnet/Opus when working on UI. Everything else is Composer.
Even if it wasn't for Musk, are these relationships really worth so much? There is a certain value in being on the approved vendor list, but it seems to me that there really isn't a lot of vendor lock-in. I think most people could switch to opencode, claude code or codex pretty easily. Maybe these relationships would be worth a lot if companies signed long-term contracts, but I doubt many did.
Why not buy OpenCode subscription? You'll have access to better models. glm5.1 and qwen3.6 have been really good for me
> despite no longer being in vogue with consumer devs
Is it in vogue with enterprise devs?
British?
“Cursor have” and “Cursor are” is awkward to read.
Now you know what it feels like to be British reading practically any other English source on the Internet.
That's not British, that's just old people
apparently it is a British thing. https://editorsmanual.com/articles/collective-nouns-singular...
No, I'm claiming your source is outdated. It has become an old people thing now
hn is this true
Why would Elon do this if he knows full well the names X-Code and Codex are already taken?
> Why would Elon do this if he knows full well the names X-Code and Codex are already taken?
Steal their Twitter usernames anyway, just like he did mine.
Story time please lol
My @valentine got changed to @valentine_ without my consent.
https://web.archive.org/web/20150822195811/twitter.com/valen...
https://twitter.com/valentine_
(If any lawyers read this and feel up for taking this on contingency, I don't think I'm difficult to contact.)
Wow and it's not even used. I guess they took it to resell on their handle marketplace?
Was likely for a grok avatar named valentine (https://grok.com/valentine) but they used https://x.com/v instead which only ever made two posts all in October 2025
He probably had plans to use it for some sort of Ender's Game crap but then realized that grok wasn't smart enough to do it.
The word Grok comes from the novel Stranger in a Strange Land where the main character is Valentine.
More likely is that they took a bunch of good usernames to sell - if you pay for their most expensive subscription one of the features is that you can rent a better username now.
It's extremely unlikely Musk was personally involved in any way in the decision on the username.
In a normal business? Sure. When it comes to Musk and Twitter? Less sure.
Add grok to that list, it's pretty much his pet project
Did you actually own it though, per their TOS? What title was granted, if so? Also, and no offense intended truly, I think your having a grand total of 2 followers after 19 years was apart of their risk calculus in this seizure.
Twitter's official position is that accounts/usernames are not assets of their users (this isn't an Elon-era argument, from what I understand). I found this out when they argued in Alex Jones' bankruptcy hearings that his account should not be repossessed/auctioned off, an argument Alex supported since that's where he's been moving his audience over to to keep the cash rolling in no matter what happens.
https://fortune.com/2024/11/27/x-twitter-elon-musk-account-o...
It can’t be that hard for you to think of something digital that you (don’t) own and how you would feel if a comparable situation happened to you.
A TOS isn’t some magical shield from legitimate complaints and scrutiny any more than “it’s the law” makes something morally right.
One should know what contracts one is entering into.
But of course, one reads all of the ToS of every service one uses. It’s just something one does.
No, but one should definitely do it for those services where one is investing their time and resources into in a significant manner such that any disruption would be painful.
These responses strike me as unserious and flippant. You’d never accept these responses if it happened to you with something you care about.
Also, comparing a TOS to a formal contract by two parties is a bit disingenuous. A classic “yes it’s technically true” situation. TOS’s are not treated the same way as a signed and dated formal contract. Not even by companies putting them up. They are lower stakes and often pages and pages of legalese that you also skip over at times.
Unpacking the legal framework someone is operating in isn't the same as endorsing it morally, those are two separate questions worth keeping distinct.
> Also, and no offense intended truly, I think your having a grand total of 2 followers after 19 years was apart of their risk calculus in this seizure.
My account was hijacked via domain/DNS takeover around the time it was acquired by fElon (due to both Crazy Domains and Twitter support's incompetence — both parties removed 2FA from my accounts, even despite me telling Crazy Domains specifically never to do so). I managed to recover both accounts after kicking up a fuss, but the hijacker was midway through an 3rd party account wiping script, and I'd lost all my followers because of that.
I had 33,300+ tweets in 2015, and a lot of that was private interaction with friends.
couldn't your name have been changed by your hijacker and sold?
Turns out that when you are using some oligarch's platform, you don't own jack.
This is digital feudalism, and the billionaires have seized the means of communication.
Billionaires have always owned the means of communication (just look at the Salzbergers, Murdochs, etc).
Digital decentralized protocols (smtp, http, etc) were the first time this wasn’t true. But you [we] voluntarily moved your communication off of open internet protocols onto private ad-based platforms.
Of course you don’t own anything there, you never did. The billionaires didn’t “seize” anything. You happily sold yourself out for a few clicks of less friction and an easier shot at digital fame by going “viral” on social media company land.
If this isn’t a much bigger indictment of the collective (who after decades still could not agree on a non-elitist, human understandable protocol that didn’t require a CS degree to use) than it is of the entrepreneurs who solved all the problems the collective refused to, I don’t know how else to get though to you.
they didn't ever own radio, as evident by AM radio still being crazy and ham still being around
One of the reasons why I got my HAM license this year was specifically to have a means of communication that required no infrastructure. The HAM community is also very similar to the OSS community in many respects w/r/t constantly developing new free ways to use their spectrum.
I want to get a HAM license (it seems like a nerd rite of passage) but don't really want to get one if I'm never going to use it, which seems like it could end up the case since the HAM community seems to be comprised of mostly middle aged men, which tend not to have the greatest opinions about me (a young transgender woman) and aren't afraid to expect me to agree with them. Also in the current political climate it seems like a bad idea to dox myself
> lawyers
Best I can do is pretend to be a lawyer and forward all of ur stuff to ChatGPT Free. U down?
Laughed very hard at this. Well done. Feel like you must have made this observation a while ago and just waited for your moment.
Best I can do is CurXr
The whole thing is Curxed
Xursor?
Quick! Both the .com and .AI are available!
I'm putting it all on HaXor
Cuxed
That's curxed
XCursor (Linux nerds know)
Oh man, not sure if it's a good or bad memory... but that was the first linux bug I experienced as a newbie. Not so much a bug, but an unknown config I had to change so my first monitor would stop turning off when I moved the cursor to the second monitor.
Circa 2003
Nah, it's going to be XCursion.
Because Xurxor is free! If that's not a winning brand, I don't know what is.
Honestly, just shorten it to Xor. That's actually not half-bad dev branding.
I don’t know about you, but do you want Xenu and Zurvan’s love child in charge of your development?
Why not call it Xcodex instead?
XxX_codex420_XxX
Musk might still miss his 1999 startup, 'x.com'.
I guess the hope is that combining two sub-par coding models (xAI's grok + cursor's composer) and combining the data they have access to, they can build something that can compete with OpenAI / Anthropic in the coding space...
I guess I kinda see it... it makes sense from both points of view (xAI needs data + places to run their models, cursor needs to not be reliant on Anthropic/OpenAI).
I think I don't see it working out... I just don't see an Elon company sustaining a culture that leads to a high-quality AI lab, even with the data + compute.
Have to call out that comment about grok code being sub par. I used it exclusively when it was free in Cursor and have nothing bad to say about it. And that was months ago. I imagine it’s a lot better now.
I have a lot bad to say about it. It was ass compared to OAI/Anthropic models.
It was incredibly fast though, but that just meant it was writing buggy code at breakneck speed
> writing buggy code at breakneck speed
Vibe coding in a nutshell
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Wasn’t composer trained on Kimi? Has anyone had a chance to compare the latest Kimi model to composer?
Composer-2 is based on Kimi K2.5, but with extensive RL. Cursor estimated 3x more compute on their RL than the original K2.5 training run (some details in https://cursor.com/blog/composer-2-technical-report).
Composer-2 seems very useful in Cursor, while K2.6 according to AA seems to be a really useful general model: https://artificialanalysis.ai/articles/kimi-k2-6-the-new-lea...
I used to hate on Composer 2 but I'm coming around to it. Opus for the big stuff and multi-file operations, Composer for all the small day-to-day IDE tasks works pretty good for me.
I'm going to be brutally honest but I have not found Kimi to be useful at all. It simply cannot compete with what closed models from Codex and Claude offers. I don't want to risk using a model outside the ecosystem and introduce variables as most of my workflow is baked into two to three large company models.
That's interesting, Kimi K2.5 used through KimiCode was comparable to Sonnet in my tests, and is an excellent alternative to Anthropic models
That being said, I noticed that Kimi being served through Openrouter providers was trash. Whatever they do on the backend to optimize for throughput really compromised the intelligence of the model. You have to work with Kimi directly if you want the best results, and that's also probably why they released a test suite to verify the intelligence of their new models.
On the other hand, I found MiniMax M2.7 a reasonable model that I could trust.
I guess really depends on tastes
Kimi is my favorite of the Chinese models.
I found it much more consistent than glm or minimax
Which version of Kimi and served from where?
Can s.o. please explain, does the Cursor EULA really allow it to train on my code, as I really don't expect Claude Code or CODEX to do it either?
They will because there is no way to prove they didnt
It does unless you opt out
But 60B for a VsCode fork?!
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Guess I'll be looking for a replacement for Cursor now...
Anyone have recommendations? I like the plan/agent mode and the fact that it's an IDE, so I can use it in the traditional way as well as by yapping with a bunch of agents. Also the Cursor rules I've curated and they do their job well.
Yep this was the moment to finally remember to cancel my cursor subscription. I find it unconscionable to do business with someone who would do business with Elon.
You don't use any companies with a Twitter/X account? That must be tricky.
Voluntarily choosing to not spend money in X related orgs ≠ using services that use X related orgs. As a consumer, our options to vote with our dollar is limited, but that doesn't make it pointless. Real life is not binary and the sentiment that one cannot criticize a system which they partake in is a thought terminating cliche. One only needs to ask "for who does this reflexive thought terminating cliche benefit the most" to find the lede.
Thanks for that but it's unrelated to what the OP said which was "I find it unconscionable to do business with someone who would do business with Elon.".
Having an X/Twitter account is doing business with Elon. You could say only paid X accounts qualify for this, but I would imagine most brands have paid accounts.
YCombinator has an X account. I suspect the OP is already asking for his Hacker News account to be deleted.
>I find it unconscionable to do business with someone who would do business with Elon.
Just curious, why do you hate elon so much?
Zed - https://zed.dev/
Integrates a lot of agents (I use it with OpenRouter and directly with Pi) natively, is fast (you don't realise how laggy VSCode and its forks are).
Biggest disadvantage: lack of extensions. Lots of quality of life missing (e.g. gitignore integration to add/append gitignore files for different languages).
any IDE you like and Claude code - i have no idea why you'd want to use something like Cursor, it's time came and went.
Afaik Claude has 5 hour rolling window rate limits while Cursor has a monthly window on the $20 plan.
The 5 hour window sounds annoying for hobbyists who only use it time to time when they want to dive into some personal project.
Because cursor gives you access to tons of different models, not just the Claude models.
This is outdated,
Claude code can be run against any model you want, you just simply need to update the ENV vars.
Or if you have Ollama running locally you can do something like this:
ollama launch claude --model glm-5:cloud
Or if you feel brave and want to turn your laptop into BBQ
ollama launch claude --model minimax:2.5
or you could just use cursor and select between everything at will every request and not have to manage 15 subscriptions
Exactly that. I don't want lots of subscriptions. Zed with OpenRouter sounds all right except it'll be much more expensive than a subscription, I fear.
Not to mention the only company that would have any legitimate interest in acquiring Cursor would be Microsoft since they could just merge VSCode and Cursor into one product at very little cost.
Ironically I cancelled cursor a few days ago. I went back to good old VSCode and just use the Claude code and codex extensions.
Consider Nimbalyst, its a free visual workspace for Claude Code and Codex that has visual editing of markdown, mockups, diagrams, code with your agents with WYSYWIG diffs as well as task management and kanban session management tied into your agents. Its got a files/plan/editing mode and an agent/sessions mode.
I had never heard of it but it looks pretty slick: https://nimbalyst.com/
Thanks!
Until yesterday I would have recommended VSCode + Copilot. They had the best pricing of any option. However the pricing was unsustainable and is therefor finished.
How's the ai autocomplete? It was unusable in November when I tried it last and went back to Cursor. Slow and when it finally did something it was just not good. Cursor is super fast and actually gives useful results. I just don't want to give my money to Elon, so I might cancel anyways.
Honestly couldn't tell you anymore; a year ago I was using AI autocomplete, but today AI is writing all code for me.
Seriously this is such a common response and it is such an annoying response. Yes I need an IDE. Yes I still find ai autocomplete to be useful. That's why I asked about alternatives for Cursor autocomplete.
You asked him and he replied
I was planning to sign up to Copilot, since their pricing was per request not per token.
Has that changed now?
Opus 4.5 and 4.6 removed from all plans. 4.7 locked to medium reasoning with 7.5x request multiplier. Per token pricing starting next month.
But you can't actually sign up to Pro or Pro+; they disabled sign ups until the per token pricing starts.
That structure hasn't changed, but they've recalibrated usage limits to be much worse and removed the useful, yet relatively cheap, Opus 4.5/4.6 models.
I wouldn't jump to that ship.
In the same boat and landed on Kilo code.
Similar to Cursor, open source, based on open code, compatible with claude code configuration and works with all providers.
Seems quite future proof to me and you can toggle between providers seemlesly
Zed
(disclaimer: I work at ampcode)
Give the oracle at amp a go :) Our TUI is really nice as well. Get in touch for some credits.
I briefly used Cursor but stopped and went back to VSCode after the 3.0 rewrite when they ditched it.
The new UI is literally opt-in. Nothing changed for me.
You can use VS Code with Claude Code extension. Best of both worlds
Just use the codex plugin for vscode ?
there's probably an emacs thing out there
I'm sworn off from Musk-related products, and this will prob make cursor worse (switch to X's LLM for instance). So, any suggestions for switching? Codex; Claude Code? (I like my IDE and I like the freedom to choose a model, which is why I stuck with Cursor even when it felt more expensive)
Zed is snappy as an IDE, and ghostty for your CLI. I've done like 99% of my work in the past month just in ghostty + CC.
OpenCode and Github copilot are still options if you want the freedom to choose different models.
I really doubt they'll swap in Grok. Grok seems pretty dead. Probably more likely they'll reuse the hardware for composer.
If value is a concern, Codex. It's pretty hard to beat those subsidies. If you really want model freedom, Copilot is surprisingly decent value and as of right now let's you use your sub in other harnesses like OpenCode.
Codex is not a replacement for an IDE. Yes I still need an IDE.
When coding agents work they're great. When they don't I still need the IDE. They usually don't work that great when I'm working on something novel or brownfield. Which happens quite regularly.
But I definitely still want ai autocomplete. I'm not a Vim user. Coding isn't about typing for me, it's about solving problems. So a tool that does lots of the typing for me is a godsend.
So do I go for VS Code + Copilot? Because it was bad when I tried it again for a few days in November. Slow to respond and gave poor results. Cursor is snappy and gives useful results most of the time.
I like VSCode and can't really switch to Zed, but Zed has two very good autocomplete models
their own, called Zeta 2
and then Mercury by Inception. May also be available in VSCode through some third party extension like Kilo, not sure
Everyone talks badly about Cursor and it is kinda a piece of junk, but no, there's nothing that has the features of: being able to see agent diffs in an editor, seeing diffs inline in chat, be able to click them to jump to the code, and being able to click old chat messages to edit/fork them.
Those are basically my only requirements, and it feels like I've tried everything and they're all everything only has 1 of those features. Zed is the closest, it technically has those features, they're just buggy and have provider specific quirks.
So I'm stuck on Cursor until Anthropic invents IDE technology, or at least VS Code wrapper technology.
Jetbrains IDEs have AI support with all the things you've described, and in a more polished experience that requires significantly less maintenance and tuning. It does that while affording an actual IDE experience that works well for supported languages/projects out of the box, without the need to constantly tune plugins and experience jank misaligned UX that seems to be the norm for VSCode and derivatives.
No association with Jetbrains, and despite having a license, don't even use their AI support much myself (mostly using CC, with IDE integration for diff viewing). But if you haven't tried it recently, probably worth a revisit if you're open to Jetbrains products.
I switched to Windsurf recently and it's been pretty good for providing a Cursor-like experience; pricing is pretty similar.
Same I'll be switching off Cursor today to either claude code or kiro. Luckily my company lets us choose which agentic software we want to use. I won't touch anything Musk is related to, he is toxic and anything he touches turns toxic and supports him.
Kilo code; vscode extension as well but open source and based on OpenCode.
If you are very cost constrained, Codex. Otherwise, Claude Code.
If you only use AI casually, the $20/month subscription to Claude can be enough.
I use VSCode and Conductor right now.
I was required to use Cursor for my job when I first started, but once I figured out how to use the command line version of Codex, I kind of stopped seeing the point. It just kind of seemed like a bloated, overpriced wrapper around what I could do with the included ChatGPT membership I already had for work.
Maybe I was missing something, but I do not understand how it is worth sixty billion dollars.
It's not. It's a glorified code editor with no moat. Those are (massive) bubble prices.
Glad I’m not the only one who feels this way. Even though I personally use Cursor, there’s no way it’s even a fraction of $60B
It's 100% a fraction of $60B. That's not debatable it's just simply fact.
I dunno it seems pretty irrational to me.
The question is what's the denominator.
Yep that was the joke!
Why do you use it? Genuine question, I want to know what I'm missing.
I guess I don't really understand what it buys you over just running vanilla VS Code and Codex.
The anti-Cursor sentiment here is baffling to me given how useful it is to me. I use it interactively and actively review everything it produces. I like how I can plan a feature and refine the plan before instructing the agent to implement it. Last I checked, vscode had none of those features. Do (seemingly most) people prefer Codex because it gives a greater degree of autonomy to the agents?
> I like how I can plan a feature and refine the plan before instructing the agent to implement it
You can do that with claude code, github copilot (built into vs code) and codex, in any of their IDE versions, plugins for other ides (jetbrains, vscode, anything else you care to name) and also, of course, the CLI versions of all of them. They're also integrated into github, jira, and everything else.
Seriously, try other tools! if only to get a more balanced perspective.
This all being said, its been a long time since I last tried cursor... I'll give it a go.
I am personally not a fan of VS Code regardless, but I guess I don’t understand what it buys you over one code editor window and a Codex window both being open?
I have, right now, a tmux session with Codex on the bottom and Neovim on the top. It does what I was doing in Cursor just fine.
I am not really “anti Cursor”, I just genuinely am confused as to what it actually buys me over the setup I just described.
Here's why I use Cursor. My company pays for it, although I could switch to Claude Code or use Codex more since I also have ChatGPT enterprise account.
* Perhaps could be solved with the right terminal software, but I like the GUI for seeing my running agents and viewing all my conversations
* Works with multiple model providers in the same tool. I probably worry about cost optimization more than my employer would care for me to, but I frequently switch between openai/anthropic and switch between model sizes to use the tool that I think can get the job done for the least money. Another thing I like is having a long conversation with an expensive model, then I can switch to 5.4-nano to cheaply extract some little piece of information or summary from the conversation. Really this is big being able to switch model providers throughout the months without having to change my interface.
* Good support for the various ways of providing context. Rules, AGENTs.MD/CLAUDE.md files (if you want it to automatically read those), skills. Good hook support.
* I think the agent diff review experience is pretty good, but maybe it works similarly when you hook the cli agents into an editor, IDK.
* The default shell sandbox behavior is quite good. Every shell command runs in some sort of sandbox so that read only commands work without approval. The model asks for more permissions when it tries to do something that needs more permissions like network access or writing outside of the workspace directory. I know Claude code has a similar feature you can use.
* Good fork / revert conversation to checkpoints, with the option of reverting the code or just reverting the conversation.
* Feels decent that I am an API customer through Cursor. I don't hit Claude limits. Cursor doesn't have an incentive to limit reasoning or token usage, although they do have an opposite incentive.
* They are reasonably responsive to bugs and feature requests through their forum.
* Works well with a lot of repos / folders added to your workspace. I probably should organize all my stuff under a single directory, but alas I have like 8 different folders added to my workspace and it handles this well. Perhaps Claude --add-dir support works fine too.
DOWNSIDES:
* They are not quickly adding the best open source models to Cursor. Like Kimi 2.6 or whatever. Possibly not incentivized to given their Composer models.
* Don't love the subagent support. I can define custom subagents although it is not easy to get models to use mine instead of the builtin ones. The builtin ones do not allow me to control what model they run, so they will always run something like composer-2-fast, which is a fine model for all I know, but I would like to control it. Also, I would like if you could optionally make the subagent experience more first class. Like browse all the subagents and continue conversations with them or switch their model etc, although that is probably tricky / weird.
My employer pays for Cursor and Claude but not Codex. I often find Claude dumb (yes, even Opus), thus I'm using Cursor with GPT-5.4. If you have Codex, you don't miss anything.
I use the cursor cli, not the IDE. Why? Someone else is paying for it.
and I'm being completely neutral and objective in saying this: Elon Musk has been a horrible capital allocator but great at financial engineering. X is still struggling to win back advertisers (they will never come back) and still in the red. I have little reason to believe this is also another careful and shrewd financial decision.
He spun that story into "he was saving democracy" so it sounds like he paid for that reason. He will do the same here, he never does a wrong move you just can't see the 76D chess.
Let’s buyback my friends who invested in that thing and they will help pump my IPO
I mean, technically they also re-sell AI tokens. Unsure if that’s with a markup or a discount.
I do think the Codex harness is a bit better than others. Doesn't make a ton of difference with OpenAI models, but with Google and Anthropic models the difference is quite noticeable I think.
Anyone saying this is an aquahire has it backwards. SpaceX is acquiring Cursor’s customers, all those enterprises including NVIDIA itself. I believe Jenson Huang is on the record about the engineers using Cursor everyday.
As far as I know, xAI’s enterprise market share is non-existent. This is their way to get some much needed customers.
NVIDIA has 42,000 employees. Even still, when their deal with Cursor comes to an end do we really expect them to stay loyal? And further, sign on with xAI?
When they could instead sign with the new hottest enterprise coding IDE (Claude, Codex, etc who are way more popular now). Maybe if it’s an acquihire, it’s the GTM/Sales that xAI is after?
They might. Elon will probably use his SpaceX/xAI spend (future SpaceX space datacenter dollars) as leverage. NVIDIA is so used to doing such deals by now, they’ll probably take it.
Space datacenters are such a dumb idea. We already have problems keeping spacecraft cool, and unless they send people up there with the datacenters who the heck is going to do maintenance? GPUs need upgrading and hard drives fail
> unless they send people up there with the datacenters who the heck is going to do maintenance
A fleet of special ships for orbital commute and future generation Optimus, no doubt.
OR - they follow the same approach as the current fleet of Starlink satellites. Probably have some redundancy baked in (eg 10 operational GPUs with 3 backup). They have rich data around hardware expectancy in space. Can’t hurt to have that for simulations.
at 42,000 employees and their own (infinite) compute on hand, there has to be at least one plucky junior internally who is suggesting using the open source equivalents, internal / open models and saving a big pile of money.
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Lots of people in the comments talking about how this is about training data, but surely this is actually about hiring competent people after the mass exodus/firing at xAI?
Whoever thinks the talent pool is this limited that it requires offering Cursor of all places $60B is pattern-matching so hard they might as well be a quilt.
hi, im the quilt.
Note that Meta paid ~16b for Alexandr Wang, and Google paid ~3b for the windsurf executive team. You are making a category error -- the talent pool isn't "ML researcher" it's "competent leader"
These guys aren't 100000x leaders, they're investment vehicles. They're nfts in human form.
No, it's "I'm a more important person if I ok deals with big numbers" that always happens in a bubble.
It's not about the talent pool at all.
The AI bubble music stops when one of these former-darling companies has a complete crashout rather than a "successful exit". The investors keep investing because even largely-failed products get acquihire paydays
They could offer $20 million dollar signing bonuses to every Cursor employee if they wanted to hire them away and it would be much cheaper.
They’re buying the customers and the brand.
Buying the customers seems though, when it looks like they migrate to whomever offers the steepest subsidies.
A brand he’ll promptly burn to the ground by renaming it some garbage with an X in it.
The acquihire angle is probably part of it, but I'd note that Cursor's team is small — around 50 people — and the $60B valuation makes it expensive per head even by AI acquihire standards. You don't pay that multiple for talent alone.
What you might pay for is market signal + model distribution. Grok needs a story for why enterprises should switch. "The model that powers the tool you already use every day" is a much easier enterprise sales pitch than "our LLM benchmarks slightly better." The $60B is at least partially buying the answer to the question: why should any company bet on xAI?
Are cursor developers “competent” in creating frontier models? Aren’t they just using other company’s models?
I think composer has currently by far the best price to performance ratio for coding (not counting subsidized subscription cost by OpenAI and Anthropic). It's based on Kimi K2, but I think it's fair to say, that their RL really sets it apart from the other open weight models.
Training any large model at scale is hard, and Cursor has trained several including agentic ones. https://cursor.com/blog/composer
That's quite a pricey acquihire
$60 billion worth of competent people?
60b?
10b active it seems
Bloomberg reporting its an agreement to either acquire for $60B later this year or pay $10B to work together https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-04-21/spacex-sa...
Here’s the spaceX announcement (non-paywalled): https://x.com/spacex/status/2046713419978453374
Can you change the title?
NYTimes has updated the title "SpaceX Strikes Deal With Cursor for $60 Billion"
@dang does nothing, he is unlikely to see it. If you actually want to reach the mods, email them. There's a Contact link at the bottom of almost every page here on HN.
EDIT: Parent commenter edited out the @dang from their comment making mine appear to be responding to something not in their comment.
Thanks for the info! I removed the callout
yup - updated
Cursor's statement on the deal (which does not mention the option at all): https://cursor.com/blog/spacex-model-training
It sort of implies the $10B is going to be paid with compute credits. So this could very well be xAI simply compensating Cursor by giving them $10 billion worth of tokens. (What’s a token worth in dollars these days?)
That’s indeed the trick. Spacex “invests” in Cursor, looks good on their balance sheet.
And xAI now gets 10B of more revenue on their income statement.
Perfect financial statement boosting for the IPO which in turn will pay back these costs.
At least that’s the bet.
Can they really put $10B worth of options under "investment"?
If so that would seem like the most plausible take on why this is happening.
that seems incredibly shady
AI seems to be full of these kinds of circular deals. It's one reason to be wary of the financials of the business.
I just want to make the observation that this whole SpaceX IPO is turning out entirely unlike the CDOs that led to the 2008 financial crisis. There's no mixing of AAA level assets with a bunch of subprime stuff and then getting someone to buy it all as AAA. Not at all similar. Completely different. Will turn out just fine this time.
The assets weren’t AAA, you’re mixing it up a bond concepts. The deal had bonds that were AAA. And if you’re talking about CDOs then the assets were bonds which were usually BBB or similarly cuspy bonds.
You should learn about securitizations. It’s actually interesting. But people talk about it colloquially and so incorrectly that it’s mind dumbing.
Here’s a simplified example of how you can take something and turn it into a safe investment:
Suppose you have 10 loans and each has a 50% chance of default. Ignore coupon, and say they are $10 each. Expected value is $50
If you were to put this in a deal and cut it up into tranches, say the first tranche gets the first $10, this would be your AAA bond because odds of getting paid out you $10 would be > 99.9%. The equity (bottom tranches) would pay a lot less. For instance the expected value of the bottom half would be considerably less than $50 that is being promised. So there’s upside since you’ll be paying cents on the dollar and even though in the median scenario you’re making nothing, you have to weight the expected values of each scenario to figure out how to price it.
The problem w this model is that it only works if assets are relatively uncorrelated which wasn’t true (it was true in the past but ignored systematic risk and adverse selection in originations).
What this has to do w musk or spacex I’m still not sure
Just to well actually your well actually...
What you've described is how the base level mortgage-backed securities (MBSs) work. The tranches work because there actually exist mortgages that are at lower default risk (high home equity, well qualified borrowers, etc.), and the senior tranches are effective in capturing their underlying safety. What CDOs did was to take the lower, riskier tranches of MBSs from various sources and repackage them and divided them into tranches again. Then they got the ratings agencies to rate the top tranches of the CDOs as AAA as well. It's as if a teacher graded several classes and then took everyone that got a C or below from all the classes and then graded them on a curve again. And suddenly a lot of the C students became A students. It was outright financial insanity. Well, mixing a rocket/satellite company with a couple of also-ran AI outfits and the walking corpse of Twitter, and then calling the whole thing SpaceX and valued at $1.75T is a similarly level of financial insanity to me.
I don't see the distinction. They're still cashflows and you're just trading one for the other.
Mortgages are very cuspy. It's pretty wild that someone would give you a 30 year loan with 20% equity for a few percent higher than risk free. Also you could default on that loan and they can't garnish your wages. And if you default, your credit history would reset after 7 years. Oh and you can repay the loan at no cost, so if rates go down you can just pay it back and turn around and get another loan at a lower rate, or if rates go up you can hold on to it until 30 years.
It's the same thing with CDOs. You take something that has some undesirable characteristics (these cuspy BBB), structure it in such a way to create some safe and riskier assets. And hopefully the sum of the final tranches is worth more than the components.
It's like if you were forced to sell an animal whole. The individual components are worth more because people have different preferences. With CDOs (excluding synthetic), the amount of exposure is unchanged. It's a bit more concentrated where the riskiest parts are in these CDOs, but nothing changes.
I get that finance isn't really sexy and people see it as just pushing paper around, not creating any value. But there's real value in taking some components and creating something more valuable with it. It's like using flour + sugar + egg to create cookies worth a lot more than the individual components. There was fraud and negligence but people are mad at the wrong things.
Rating agencies did a poor job, but in their defense, delinquencies and defaults reached levels well outside expected values due to systematic risks. Also rating agencies are kind of a joke. Investors aren't dumb. Even today, look at debt, there's a big difference between bonds of the same rating and similar weighted average life.
The bad thing about rating agencies is how regulations rely on them to determine what "safe" is and capital requirements. Of course, mandated capital requirements shouldn't be the end all be all of risk management, but these guidelines that over rely on rating agencies don't help the matter.
Mixing rocket company with AI and social media is fine. It's just a conglomerate. Who cares? Look at Samsung, they sell smartphones, TVs, ships, they're involved in construction, even insurance and biotech.
The question is what is the underlying core competency they're relying on and it's obviously Musk. And he has been able to deliver innovative products (manufacturing and forward thinking technologies). He scaled up one of the largest training clusters in the world in a very short period of time. He created a large car company after decades of stagnation. He lowered cost of getting stuff to orbit by orders of magnitude and now handles something like 90% of rocket launches. He's gotta be doing something, right?
> this would be your AAA bond because odds of not getting paid out you $10 would be > 99.9%
I think you meant "the chances of getting paid", not of not getting paid.
Thanks. Updated
> Suppose you have 10 loans and each has a 50% chance of default. Ignore coupon, and say they are $10 each. Expected value is $50
And that naive statistical reasoning is where it goes terribly wrong. You have to consider the causal process that generates that distribution!
The type of people who would default on a coinflip are extremely sensitive to how the economy changes. The probabilities are very correlated, the expected value is rather meaningless then. It's closer to having a 50% chance to either get a full return or get zero returns, depending the macroeconomy, quite the gamble. Actually, those people were in a rather dodgy situation in the first place, or are not great at decision-making, so it might be more like 50% chance either of getting 50% return or getting 0% return.
PS: Just elaborating on your point, not meant as a counterargument, I know you said the same thing.
> The problem w this model is that it only works if assets are relatively uncorrelated (it was true in the past but ignored systematic risk and adverse selection in originations). What this has to do w musk or spacex I’m still not sure
What this has to do with with SpaceX is that there's the same blatant disregard for sound financial analysis by the very institutions that were/are supposed to know better. The NASDAQ 100 fast track decision is a similar level of financial malpractice as the ratings agencies slapping AAA on things that they knew were little better than junk. The abuses of the subprime mortgage originators were well known long before the actual meltdown. As were those systemic risks you spoke of. They were ignored by those whose entire job it was to not ignore them, and they sold out their credibility for a quick buck. If you can't see the similarities to the present situation then I can only wish you luck.
Are you familiar with how crypto tumblers work?
It is adversely selected, but it's not debt, it's equity, so price action can go real fast and nobody will be burned except folks who soberly-or-not opted into this. Everyone _knows_ Elon is the way he is, so nobody will be _surprised_ at things. No surprise, no crisis.
They're going to force a S&P500 index listing on IPO day so we're all going to be forced to baghold this regardless of if we want to or not unless you've got $0 in any major retirement fund.
So far only Nasdaq has changed its rules and will allow fast entry in 15 trading days. S&P has not changed its rules, not yet at least. Total indexed capital of Nasdaq is 1.4T vs 16T in the S&P500. Stated reason for fast tracking is that the indices are supposed to be a broad representation of the market, and leaving a 2T company out would be a significant tracking error.
I do agree that the optics of this aren’t great, and it’s rather easy to be cynical about motives.
I did a bit of research on this some time ago and it's not as bad as I originally thought. Index funds would need to count only liquid float of the company. So if Space X total valuation is 2 trillion, but float is 5%, then they need to count it as 100 billion for the purposes of index weight. Still more than I want, but not catastrophic.
Oh yes, thanks for reminding me. I’m going to cash out the 401(k).
You’ll pay massive penalties on that, another option is options (heh) but I’m not finance-literate enough to know how to pull it off.
Only penalties if you withdraw from 401k. Most 401k plans have some kind of moneymarket, bond fund, or similar
You can just reallocate away from an index fund.
I’ve made my peace with the “massive penalties”. I benefited from employer match in the past. I want the money now, not when I retire.
You gotta do what you think is best, but I hope for future you's sake you decide to not pull the money out. Or if you do you have other retirement plans.
I'm trying to help my parents now their at retirement age and am seeing first hand what not planning for your future looks like. They hit retirement with nothing but a small social security check every month. Not even enough to cover rent in most places.
I don't know how much you have in your 401k, but it will be worth literally hundreds of thousands more if you pull it out when you retire. You aren't just paying the penalties now, you're paying for potentially decades of compounding.
Retirement plan is rappelling accident before dotage.
Well can't argue with that lol
But if by some tragedy you don't die young, your older self is gonna be pissed at younger you for costing him hundreds of thousands of dollars.
You could just buy deep out of money SP500 puts expiring in 1+ year. That way you would be "insured" against the bubble popping.
The thing is, every dollar you spend on insurance is a dollar (and its interest) you lose. Furthermore, we don't know when it will pop. 1 year? 5 years?
The more reasonable solution is probably gradually reduce exposure to US markets by selling SP500 shares and turning to Europe and emerging markets ETFs. No need to cash out 401k.
You should backtest this strategy over the last 20 years before you make serious decisions off of the vibe from internet comments
20 years is not enough.
If you just look at the past 20 years, the US has had exceptional returns compared to the rest of the world.
The thing is, historically, high PE ratios like what we're seeing in the US do not correlate with short term returns that are as high. Expected future returns decrease as the PE ratios go up in a pretty linear fashion.
https://am.jpmorgan.com/us/en/asset-management/institutional...
Why 20 years? Just because we know, post hoc, the usa outperformed other places in the last 20 years, in no way means the next 20 years will be the same.
If you want a different point to backtest from, try Japan in the 80s and early 90s
What's the point of backtesting? Does backtesting say anything about the future?
The point of backtesting is to allow you to do what you want to do with a veneer of being data driven.
What are you basing this on?
I'm not an expert but it looks to my like 80% of my allocation won't be tracking spacex, because it's mid cap or small cap etc, and the 20% that's in the vanguard growth index might? I assume whoever sets the rules for the fund could change the rules to say companies must be listed for X months if they want to avoid this, right?
And I can change my allocation.
edit: Actually wait, isn't it only nasdaq 100 that's tracking it early, after 15 days rather than 3 months of trading? So 0% of my 401k is exposed to buying it quickly after IPO already, I think.
So far they're only getting fastracked into Nasdaq 100, not S&P 500.
401k rollovers into IRA aren't that hard these days and you could always use that IRA to have a more customized strategy, more specifically direct indexing of a major fund minus key ticker symbols you don't want exposure to. Of course, that all presumes that you won't regret excluding this long term.
The question is, is everyone integrating a special SpaceX correction in their algorithmic trading? Because if a dip in the index due to SpaceX causes old algorithms to think it’s a more structural issue (well, more than it is), and sell on that indicator, will that cause a cascade?
obviously no. if algos work in china, it will work with spacex
If your retirement fund is an IRA you can invest it in any stock you want. For a 401k you probably have some fund options that are not exposed to the S&P500, like emerging markets or fixed income
Maybe this already exists, but it would be great if one of the major index ETFs omitted all the firms with problematic board governance like there is at Tesla, SpaceX.
S&P500 had a rule from 2017 to 2023 that prevented companies with dual classes of shares (the sort that allow them to maintain founder control- like what GOOG and META did) that went public after the rule was instituted from ever being in the index. To be clear, META and GOOG were both in the index, but it was to prevent new companies from coming along and doing it. (I think it was related to SNAP going public?)
They removed it largely because investors wanted higher returns, and the tech companies that had such dual classes (1) were doing really well, and the S&P ended up caving on that rule.
1: Perennial hot button around here Palantir did this in a more extreme fashion than most. The three founders F class shares will always be at 49.9999% of the votes and the early investors B class shares have 10 votes each as compared to the publicly traded A class shares 1 votes.
My money's all in Bitcoin pats himself on the back
Kinda shocked SpaceX hasn't bailed out the DOGE-holders at this point..
the power of yet
The point of a rug pull is for the holders to lose money not to be bailed out.
Friendly reminder that SpaceX is going straight to the index—Elon agitated for it. The 401k of everybody in America is serving as a bailout fund for X and now cursor, and whatever other trash he hovers up
They are going straight to the Nasdaq. Most index investors are invested in the S&P 500
Nasdaq is an exchange. S&P 500 is an index.
S&P 500 includes companies from multiple exchanges. Like Nvidia, which lists on Nasdaq.
Nasdaq 100…
https://www.morningstar.com/funds/spacex-ipo-how-index-funds...
> Nasdaq was the first to consider a rule change that would grant mega IPOs like SpaceX early admission to its flagship Nasdaq-100 index. The exchange and index provider began a consultation period in February to assess the viability of and industry response to a proposed “fast entry” rule. The change was approved on March 30 and will be effective on May 1.
It’s also worth noting that Musk helped successfully lobby the NASDAQ to implement a “fast entry” rule which takes effect at the beginning of May, suspiciously convenient timing for a SpaceX IPO, so much so that I believe it has been derisively called the “SpaceX Rule”. It allows mega-cap IPOs like SpaceX to join the Nasdaq-100 index in just 15 trading days.
Now why is this bad? Well, if you invest in a fund that is based off of the indices, you’re going to be investing in SpaceX whether you want to or not and I certainly don’t think 15 days is enough time to sus out whether this is a stable investment worthy of being in the index, but it’ll be great…until it drags a million retirement funds down with it.
We are better now that we learned from the first time.
Ug wants to borrow ten of my best sticks in exchange for future options to buy berries from his friend Og. Og has a watertight deal with Oog to invest the sticks in a five year mammoth hunting expedition but Oog first needs berries to exchange for sticks to cover his exposure on berry-puts he’s take out against Urrrg’s remortgaged stick pile.
Well, I said no. Not getting burned that way again!
Learned how to get the general public to directly put their money into it this time with the ETF shenanigans
Institutional investors (ex: pension funds) matter more for such mega IPOs than general public, and those probably like SPAC-like supercorps?
it's just codex and anthropic rapidly improved their AI when they opened themselves to Developer workflows.
Google and others were sitting at the corner, laughing that they gonna burn their money for no reason! they turned out to be wrong.
Turns out offering discounted/subsized tokens to developers massively improves your AI compared to just being a talking parrot for normal user workflow where you do not get "instant feedback" on if it worked or not.
make the point directly - you are just avoiding further justification
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Well, there are some very important differences. 1) It’s super well known what’s going on with SpaceX. Every investor should know that there’s a lot of good stuff along with some steaming hot garbage. 2) SpaceX isn’t systemic to the economy. If SpaceX and all its subsidiaries shut down and its investors got nothing back, it wouldn’t be that big of a deal.
This type of bundling is just what conglomerates do. Is it a good thing? Not really. Many investors also hate this kind of stuff and avoid investing in these types of companies.
On point #2, they are trying to do that right now. If spacex is fast tracked into the indices, passive investors via index funds will be forced into buying.
A vscode fork with a modified Kimi model under the hood for 60 billion feels absolutely insane to me.
Especially for a rocket company
Is anybody using Grok or Cursor still? I've not used Cursor since the summer of 2025 and I've never bothered with Grok for coding. Hell, I've used Windsurf briefly for a few months.
I know a ton of people that use Codex, Claude, OpenCode but can't name a single person that uses Cursor or Grok that is knee deep into agentic coding.
Our company (~25 engineers) uses it across the entire engineering and product orgs, and yes we are quite deep into agentic coding. We use their cloud agents for a lot of things, e.g. automated investigations of alarms, handling most customer support issues that end up hitting engineering, pre-processsing linear tickets before humans triage them, bugbot for PR reviewed with learned knowledge. Although recently they have felt like they are pulling the rug out on our legacy plan, so we may end up switching.
I'm on the legacy pricing annual pro plan (equates to $16/mo). I just use Opus 4.6 and have never hit more than 400 requests, so my pricing remains very cheap. That + the tab complete is what keeps me using it.
This news is very off-putting though. I will definitely not be renewing. I don't want to be associated with Musk in any way.
There are entire companies that bought into Cursor to adopt across all of their engineering orgs.
I have claude and cursor. I enjoy cursor. It has shortcomings but its a strong product.
I use grok for various subagent tasks. It's super cheap and 100tps. Never for actual thinking though.
I don't know of Grok but we use Cursor (2000+ people, probably like 1000 devs)
That's a hefty payday for a model that barely functions! Every time I run out of API credits and get kicked back to Composer 2 I feel like I'm better off just packing up for the rest of the month.
I feel like we're finally at a point where you don't have to constantly argue with and constantly babysit coding models, which makes it even more frustrating when you're suddenly forced to deal with one that ignores your instructions and gets stuck in thinking loops again.
I suspect it's the vast troves of training data rather than any tech that Cursor possesses that SpaceX is after...
Cursor is still the best coding environment and hardness. It's actually not really close. They are so good that they actually made Gemini usable.
The problem is they can't compete with Anthropic and OpenAI because they can't sell Opus and GPT at a discount to subscribers like OpenAI and Anthropic do with their subscriptions.
So they either need to build a competing model or slowly die.
I personally disagree on the first point. Claude code in a terminal with vim is much nicer. I just don’t see the need for the bloat of an IDE when the CLI versions work so damn well now.
They have Cursor CLI.
Cursor is essentially all the Claude Code products but without the horrible bugs of Claude Code products.
You can transfer from CLI to web and it actually works.
And Claude can use CLI too. It's the perfect environment for coding agents.
> They are so good that they actually made Gemini usable
I think Gemini is best model out there, and it's not Cursor who you should praise. I use it with jetbrains junie. Vastly cheaper than claude, faster, produces better quality code, actually listens to your instructions, more accurate. I'm sure claude code cli has some cli magic that I'm missing out on, but having everything just work in a nice IDE (and llm to actually understand your symbol table) is like magic.
Are you using Gemini 3.1 Pro? Subscription or paying for the tokens?
Tried 3.1 pro preview today a little bit, definitely blowing thru credits quicker, not sure about being better quality, but achieved all tasks perfectly.
IDK how Junie does it, but I spend less than $50 USD per month and I'm on it 30 hours per week.
Bet they will become tied to grok pretty soon.
That's why I'm so puzzled to why Composer doesn't work better when they have the ability to train it from scratch for their agent harness! Yet it still fails to apply edits, gets confused why it can't call some commands in its sandbox, the list goes on...
They seemed to be doing fine with Kimi distillation. Not speaking from experience though, I prefer to use my editor.
I doubt they're buying it for Composer, I imagine they're buying it for the agent harness. It's arguably the best non-Anthropic agentic coding harness, and you get _all the models_ for one subscription price.
Maybe vertical integration is the main business case.
A controlled environment to determine effort and token usage, and to get plenty of exclusive training on code.
It could end up making sense. Idk if they needed to offer 60B though.
I'm not willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. I think this is purely Elon trying to take a pot shot at Anthropic.
JetBrains is crying in the corner...
I've subscribed to Jetbrains all product for years. If the agent coding is going to be the next wave. Jetbrains is really behind. Even Microsoft offer better agent coding with VScode and Github copilot cli.
They’re definitely playing catch up, but the IDE integration makes interactive development really nice. Claude is good for one-shotting things, but I find JetBrains AI integration really useful for working with large codebases where I may be unfamiliar with things.
I think they’ve been caught in a bad spot. They’re a profitable company, but nowhere on the scale of Microsoft. And they don’t have billions of VC to effectively price dump. Other tools that can focus on one thing and burn cash are advancing quickly and some of them don’t really need an IDE at all.
The semi-recent introduction of ACP integration in the JetBrains IDEs has been a nice bridge. But now it’s confusing how everything comes together. I really hope they can survive.
Jetbrains has gone so far downhill
I honestly can’t believe how poorly JetBrains has done. I used to love PyCharm but now it’s so far behind. I still use DataGrip but it is absolute dogshit when it comes to agentic coding.
I use JetBrain's all you can eat subscription that comes with their Junie coding agent which includes some free tokens to cover my coding needs. I then top up tokens on on-need basis. Costs me about $100 / month in AI tokens (well I bill my clients for that separately so do not really care bout the price). All works as a charm. I mostly use their CLion, Webstorm and PyCharm IDE's for development, sometimes other as well. All in all dev experience is excellent and far exceeds that of Cursor I was trying to use for a while.
Not sure what problems people here have with JetBrains offerings
IntelliJ is a bit dated, and its plugins are too. I use IntelliJ all the time, in its various incarnations, but vscode is really up there now.
I use both (not IntelliJ but other IDEs) and quite frankly I fund VS Code and derivatives very much inferior. For C++ development for example CLion vs VS Code (needed plugins installed) is night and day and not to the benefit of VS Code.
I know JetBrain product could be sluggish on "normal" computers however all 4 of my development machines run on 16 cores AMD with 128GB RAM. It flies in environments like that
Unless you do Jakarta EE development, where Cursor with their simple LSP support is far, far behind. Cool for generating a bean, but when you got to debugging deployment descriptors you wish you were in IntelliJ.
Yeah, and it seems to be completely self-inflicted. I created a small personal skillset that explains to the agent how to use the JetBrains MCP tools for refactorings/find-usage/navigation, and it improved its performance by a lot.
Yet JetBrains tried to do everything themselves and failed :(
I was a massive jetbrains fan - still believe it's the best IDE even with it's massive performance issues.
But I just... barely use an IDE anymore. I think I have the lowest possible subscription price for "all products" you can have (at least as an outsider) and I think I'm going to cancel this year. I've been paying for a decade+
I am subscribed to their all you can eat plan and use their Junie coding agent which is included with subscription with some free tokens. I then pay for extra tokens on on-need basis and all works like a charm. So far I pay (well my clients do as I bill separately for that) about $100 a month to cover my current coding needs. All works as a charm. I mostly use their CLion, Webstorm and PyCharm IDE's for development, sometimes other as well. All in all dev experience is excellent and far exceeds that of Cursor I was trying to use for a while.
Not sure what problems people here have with JetBrains offerings
Once you work somewhere that gives you unlimited opus 4.6 and learn how to use it properly, your perspective of what you should be doing day to day shifts.
Honestly unlimited codex with 5.4 high has a similar effect.
SOTA models + harnesses used together is very different than it was 6 months ago. People that have significant software engineering experience can get so much done it's scary.
I have what you call "significant engineering experience", decades of it to be precise and have designed and developed many complex products successfully used in various industries.
I do not need to "shift my perspective" since I do use agents to the degree that I need and it helps help me very much. I am way more productive with them.
Generated code is still not perfect disregarding of any particular model (I have access to all). I have to watch and fix, sometimes by supplying more precise specs, sometimes asking to rewrite piece of code in such and such manner using this and that structures.
Wasn't meant to be personal- I was using the proverbial "you".
I keep seeing what I'm referring to happen - folks are using / opening their editor less and less.
What's crazy is a developer can go on a walk and use tmux/tailscale and keep working as if they were sitting at their desk.
I keep hearing this, but I have yet to see “so much getting done” anywhere. I’d sure like to but things seem to be pretty much be business as normal.
This was absolutely the case - not actually that much more productive - until only a few months ago.
We hit some sort of tipping point between models and harnesses and people learning how to use the tools idk.
And directs / engineers / friends seem happier.
Simon Wilson recently did a podcast where he discussed his experience and it felt very familiar.
Worth listening (ignore the click bait title) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wc8FBhQtdsA
Cursor is great. I was using it up until recently. Then I switched oh my pi, and honestly I haven't looked back. I've also heard great things about open code.
I actually really like Composer 2. For my use case, between the planning tool, and getting it to ask a lot of clarifying questions, I regularly get very good results. I'm not doing anything complex though; mostly staying in the lane of very common web app type code.
It definitely feels sufficient for questions and planning, but it is surprisingly lacking in the actual coding department once you go for edits that need changes in multiple files. Which is surprising considering they should have been able to train it on their own harness!
Composer 2 is really good for me too.
They still just bought access to all the code you've ever fed into the model...
Cursor very reasonably had a “no retention” checkbox available to everyone, including those on free plans.
I'm sure those work as well as the "don't collect my data" checkboxes too.
I don’t think this is the case. With “accidentally” collecting an individual’s data, the company’s risk is that somebody cares enough to sue them based on vague and poorly defined damages. With “accidentally” collecting source code, you’ve not only violated your contract with 98% of your enterprise customers (many of which have dedicated legal departments) providing a very real and obvious path to lawsuits, you’ve also gained a strong reputation as a vendor never to be trusted. My employer uses cursor, and I strongly suspect we would cut ties and blacklist them at the first sign of them inappropriately retaining data.
Is Composer 2 a bad model because Cursor are bad at training models, or because they are compute constrained? This deal will provide the answer to that question.
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Nobody mentioning how weird SpaceX is becoming? When it IPO it won’t be a space company anymore, but a weird whatever Elon latest ventures craziness conglomerate of some sort, plus “financial engineering” (euphemistic) shenanigans
60B. That's a completely crazy price. Great for Cursor, I guess. If it happens, that is.
That price may not get paid. The only thing SpaceX has committed to so far is $10 billion for their shared work.
Great for the shareholders at least.
Wow, we are seeing the dark underbelly of the beast here. Nobody talks about cursor anymore for a reason. Look, I'm not saying it's not useful and discounting anyone getting value out of it...
But it's clearly not worth 60B dollars in April 2026.
Yep. there's absolutely no way that Cursor is worth that much.
for contrast, Elon paid $44b for twitter back in 2022. When you adjust for inflation, Twitter was acquired for $49b in 2026 money. Cursor getting bought for 1.22x more is just insanity.
Elon seems unwilling to shake off the image that he has basically no idea what he's doing.
I certainly wouldn't mind having that image if it meant being the wealthiest man in the world.
Sounds like playful comments people do about nymphomaniacs. Sure nobody would mind being the wealthiest man in the world without the downsides. Look at the guy. He's not just clueless, he's actually totally lost. Do you know how many kids he has and how many broke all contact with him, the wealthiest man in the World? Does this look like an enviable situation?
As far as I know of his fourteen children only one has broken contact.
1/14 isn't a bad ratio... except when we are talking of children, any of those numbers is terrible.
But in this specific context it's even crazier. It's one think to break contact with a parent but I think it's hard to imagine doing so when said parent is extremely rich (just because of both the privilege it gives, but also the risk of reprimand), even more so when they are the richest person on Earth.
I think X paid for itself, so it worked our for him.
1: https://twitter.com/nikitabier/status/2037764895064867061
I'm pretty sure that claim about Japanese Twitter activity was true for most of the site's history pre acquisition
No. JP activity was always second to US, only the biggest "out there". Same is true for all Twitter-like social media, such as Mastodon and Bluesky. Even VRChat doesn't have a majority Japanese userbase. Japan actually becoming the top majority anywhere is an anomaly and a major reversal of power balance.
Still blows me away that Google had complete dominance in Brazil and then just threw it all away and shut it down a few years later.
Google Plus? I wouldn't be sure if that was a strategic blunder or if they were seeing something us in the public didn't. I remember it was more popular among not-so-tech savvy male of parental to retirement ages, which are still masses but not the sweet spot in terms of demographics. Besides they have YouTube and its comment section full of kids, which is the sweet spot.
Orkut, which nobody now remembers.
Orkut
Source?
It paid in influence, not dollars. Billionaires don't buy newspapers or social media platforms because they think they are good businesses.
Elon Musk, the richest person on the planet, with multiple industry-changing companies built under his leadership, clearly has no idea what he's doing.
Its hard to think clearly when you are in a k-hole.
in ten the speed'll kick in, can of coke and a ciggy and he'll be right as rain
so now we're accusing him of being a habitual drug user? or is this some joke that's going over my head
You want to keep on topic, so explain in a business-sense way how this acquisition makes sense? Cursor has no moat, just a lot of clients. If spacex would clone vscode, plop in Grok and and advertise it on X as subscription included with your X sub, they would immediately have more clients. Why pay this type of money for that if he is so clever? It is a question; maybe there is a reason, it just looks incredibly skewed towards cursor; they are the big winners with spacex overpaying a large margin for something that does not seem to make a lot of sense?
My argument isn't that I have insider information or even any meaningful knowledge or experience with literally billion dollar acquisitions and investments. My argument is that you don't either, and almost no one does, and Elon doesn't really have a track record of making decisions that have no explanation behind them - even if that basis is sometimes ideological rather than profit maximizing (buying twitter).
Elon is problematic in many ways and despite the cool things his companies do, I think he is also causing harm. However, he is not an idiot, he is very business savvy, he does things for real reasons, and if you're going to speculate that he's being an idiot and making a stupid decision, then I think it needs an argument of substance that actually understands the factors at play in spending billions of dollars on buying a company. Which I don't think either of us are equipped to provide.
Saying "this doesn't make sense" is basically an admission that it isn't understood, rather than evidence that Elon is being an idiot.
It is fair, however, people who are too big too fail have a lot of leeway after their brain goes. I think it could be an explanation as well. But we indeed do not know; don't have nor want billions. People like that definitely live in another world.
I don't see any evidence that Elon's brain is "going" and in fact he's literally more successful than ever - and more than almost anyone in history. Which isn't me trying to kiss his ass but rather just a statement of facts that anyone can see by looking at the net worth scoreboard. If we saw any evidence of senility or brain rot or whatever people want to accuse him of, then sure, maybe there can be room for "maybe Elon is starting to make truly idiotic business decisions".
I do agree wealth does cause brain rot and even the people trying to be most self-aware about it still fall victim to their bubbles and egos. I think Elon shows this plenty is many aspects of his life, but business is not one of them.
It is not cash though. SpaceX does not have $60B liquid cash instruments.
More accurately it is 3.4% of SpaceX at the last rumored valuation of $1.75T.
No longer rumored as they filed for IPO!
This is actually an amazing sweetheart deal for Cursor. Many times with these high profile acquisitions, most stock is tied to LPA's and employment at the company, and also earnout provisions. The company then finds a way to parachute them out early, which both voids the earnout and their employment, thus they never vest most of the units and the few units they do vest get bought out at 409A valuations which are typically much, much lower.
In the case of Cursor this is an amazing boon as SpaceX listed at an almost 100x multiple which is absolutely staggering. Had SpaceX stayed private they could have 409a'd Cursor and got it for effectively ~100M$ cash.
Until there is public S-1 and a price range which very much could change during the roadshow, there is no known valuation or range.
There's not going to be $60B of exit liquidity if/when spacex IPOs. Maybe the suckers will be banks lending against the bubble valuation.
A crazy and lucky bailout for Cursor + investors.
Forget bailout, this is a massive payday for them
Elon got snowed…
Which includes OpenAI, btw.
Not just OpenAI, but OpenAI and OpenAI[1].
1: https://cursor.com/blog/series-a
They bought options.
The only reason I haven't switched back to VS Code is pure laziness, not using any AI features in Cursor other than resolving diffs these days.
Just because it's not discussed much on HN does not imply it is not relevant in the broader space. Cursor is still very much prevalent there with 1 mil DAU.
I’m curious if that 1 million DAU still holds as of today. I think it was reported last year some time aka before December when Claude code exploded. A quick google didn’t turn up any results that actually contained sources for the number.
It makes you wonder how much of this is essentially money laundering.
Rockets, satellites, social media, AI - the only thing missing from the SpaceX hype portfolio is a certain coworking company. That would really set them up for an exciting IPO.
what about blockchain? /s
This feels like another Twitter moment... unless he's absolutely desperate for engineers who can train LLMs. In that case it's basically an acquihire. Otherwise, this makes absolutely zero sense.
did cursor do model training? I thought it used models built by other companies
Yes, https://cursor.com/docs/models/cursor-composer-2
It's fine tuned Kimi, they didn't train it from scratch.
Sure, but so what? It seems that model size and RL are the determining factors these days.
What are we even doing here.
I have no idea what this has to do with aerospace, but I know a bit about software and this does not look great. Cursor is obviously on a serious decline and has little to no moat in the area they are building in (IDE), which we kinda now know is maybe not even the right area (CLI). I feel like this is just a bad move?
Isn’t it obvious? Musk bailed out his Twitter investors with xAI. Then he bailed out xAI with SpaceX. Now he realizes that no one thinks xAI is worth the hundreds of billions he claimed it was in that potentially fraudulent transaction, and is trying to make Grok and xAI relevant by getting access to customers in the AI coding space. But in the end, it’s SpaceX share holders who are being made fools of and soon, especially with the Nasdaq fast track changes to incorporate SpaceX forcefully into everyone’s passive investments, the public will be the one who is made poorer. But Musk will become a trillionaire.
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SpaceX is just going to be the Musk Company minus Tesla. X Corp, the X parent, is a subsidiary of xAI which is a subsidiary of SpaceX. This seems back to front, but I suppose SpaceX has the better reputation for investors whereas if X owned SpaceX the IPO would be devalued by the association with Twitter.
AFAIK cursor is basically the only player right now not subsidizing tokens out the ass, and has been seeing solid growth across individual and enterprise with almost every model performing best in their harness. Not sure how that’s a serious decline.
On the contrary, anecdotally, myself and every engineer I know have switched fully from cursor to claude code since the start of the year. I now use zed with cc. I personally could not stand the buggy mess and constant UI changes of cursor. It’s also not good value in terms of claude tokens compared to claude code.
What sold you on Zed?
I recently switched as well. Being able to work in a large monorepo without the editor freezing and taking 15+GB of RAM was a strong selling point :)
It’s fast, looks nice and since i really just review agent output these days, that’s good enough. They don’t move everything around and it moves at a nice pace.
No one wants an IDE, anymore. They're building a better horse.
In my opinion, the IDE interface still has not been beaten if you are working on a serious codebase where you are reviewing each diff.
I agree with you and I personally use Cursor. Just don’t see how there’s a moat that makes it worth $60b.
A team could build an AI IDE in a week, this could be a race to the bottom
Decent analogy in 2nd sentence BUT the 1st doesn't hold water. TIMTOWTDI, statements about "everyone" or "no one" are highly suspect, and the trend of code-assist -> agentic -> delegated / orchestration is just that (a trend), not a universal law. Even in a full-on maximalist yolo paperclip future, many experts will likely ALWAYS want access to a decent IDE. (Note I'm not saying Cursor is necessarily that IDE, and I'm not commenting on the valuation.)
OK, I'll concede that not everyone keeps getting pulled back to vim, the way I do. I simply don't like VS Code or its forks. I like Zed well enough, but I find I use it very rarely...two or three terminal tabs (Claude code, bash, and vim) is usually all I need, or tmux windows and/or panes if I'm working remotely, with Claude Code opened locally and configured to use tmux to talk to the remote system (using a wrapper I made to automate the setup: https://github.com/swelljoe/tandem).
But, even if you want a big all-in-one editor in an Electron app, it seems obvious VS Code is the way to go (or Zed, if you you aren't committed to using an Electron app). I just can't think of anything Cursor offers that makes it worth spending extra money for it.
Wouldn’t Cursor agreeing to such a deal be almost ironclad proof they are subsidizing tokens/inference out the ass? There’s wide speculation all the large revenue growing companies right now are selling inference at break even or a loss.
Claude/chatGPT are not subsidizing tokens via the API and are profitable for most enterprise consumption. This meme that they lose money on every query has zero evidence and is wrong outside of the 20/200$ a month plans.
I would like to know where you’re seeing this, because my strong impression is exactly the opposite: a year ago, everyone was talking about Cursor, but I haven’t heard anything about it in months. It’s all Claude Code and Codex now. In terms of mindshare they seem dead already.
wait a few months, been using claude code since beta, there are issues but it takes time to realise what they are. people who have been using claude since 2024 began moving away before Anthropic's marketing blitz at the end of last year.
Cursor's token utilization is significantly better than Claude Code. Composer's latest model, for coding, is very competitive on quality given price and was clearly well-optmiized (in two months, you will hear almost nothing else than how expensive Anthropic is...this is before they try to release the really expensive models). so many very obvious things like this if you have been using this tech every day for multiple years.
unfortunately, the competition in this space is very weak because of how dominant cursor has been (Kilo/Roo/Cline all have major implementation issues with token utilization, everyone else is trying to go all in on agentic). don't see this getting better until things get much worse because of anthropic/agentic. from the decisions that anthropic is making, it seems they are busily digging their own grave. growth will come after this.
cursors internal model efforts have not been able to meaningfully exceed the performance of the frontier models.
Cursor seems to be pivoting to a Codex like desktop app. The real product though is probably their decently tuned harness and their composer models. I agree that their popularity has waned. I would attribute that mostly to customers chasing the most subsidized tokens and Cursor not having the pockets to keep up. Anthropic is already following suit and it seems unclear how long OpenAI is willing to continue. I think in a case of a market correction that forces model makers to adopt more reasonable growth targets, that Cursor is decently positioned.
IDE is a moat with people who can code.
How much is Cursor really beyond a VSCode fork? Like, do we really think no one else could figure that out?
Trying to posture for Golden Dome, but politically he is likely locked out of the contract.
ai trends seem to mirror general coding/software trends but compressed. People used to edit programs with sed, but the ide proved to be more powerful from every perspective. cli tools always have their place for "power-users" and other specialized intermediate usecases like tui's, but in general the ide has overtaken every aspect of cli use and many devs hardly ever use the terminal. I suspect a similar thing will happen with ai.
While surely someone has done human-driven editing with sed, that's not what it's for. Remember that ed is the standard editor.
Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google are all investing heavily in their desktop type apps, I think the TUI phase is coming to an end.
> no idea what this has to do with aerospace
SpaceX is no longer SpaceX per se, but SpaceX-xAI.
My TL; DR (and this is mine, personally) is its mission has pivoted from colonising Mars to building a Dyson sphere. Space-based datacentres are a demand excuse for putting lots of solar panels in space. Going one level down, more Cursor use is a demand excuse for putting lots of datacentres anywhere.
This is like me, a couch potato, pivoting from "I'm going to run a half marathon" to "I'm going to do a marathon in under ten minutes"
If we're talking Dyson spheres, this is like going from a half-marathon to running the distance from Earth to Betelgeuse. It's just not a realistic endeavor.
More like "I'm going to run every possible marathon route on the Earth's road network."
And in handstanding walk because you're better at hands than legs. All their advantages are in domains to be obsoleted by technologies required for such things.
Be it the Dyson shell thing or Lunar or Mars colonies, there's no way it'll be done relying on transports from Earth surface. It could only work if we could make them from asteroid pieces. Which makes most items on their tech tree from Starship forward obsolete. And they're already all-in on those techs. It makes so little sense in so many levels.
It's a mission, not a business plan. Colonising Mars was always a moonshot as well. But it aligned the company's priorities.
My point is regardless of what you think of a Dyson sphere, this theory seems to predict what the company does better than assuming everything's a ketamine fever dream.
Mars was a moonshot, pivot to the actual moon. ;)
> this theory seems to predict what the company does better than assuming everything's a ketamine fever dream.
I think Musk being a ketamine addict explains a lot and this is very aligned. Given that he can't build a self-driving car, he would have to be under the influence of very strong drugs to think he could build a Dyson sphere of all things.
That being said, some sort of financial fraud is even more on brand.
Dumb question, do the cybercab thingies not drive themselves? Having a safety driver doesn’t disqualify them if for the vast majority of the time they’re autonomous. It just means they’re earlier into chasing 9’s than Waymo.
The characterisation of “level 5” autonomy as the car handling any conceivable circumstance (not that you explicitly made this claim here) is just silly. Humans can’t handle any conceivable circumstance either.
No they do not drive themselves. They're not Waymos (which do drive themselves, without a driver).
Plot twist: Build the Dyson sphere around Earth and charge for sunlight…
"Have You Ever Seen the Sun Set at 3pm?"
https://youtu.be/hjdMYyjnmks?si=iyoVV-oZAPmQtp1B
Arguably more accurate is that it pivoted from colonising Mars to Elon's personal piggy bank to bail out his other failing bets.
> its mission has pivoted from colonising Mars to building a Dyson sphere
Obligatory mention: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLzEX1TPBFM
She put it in the same category as AI or human-shaped robots. Those are two things Musk is working on. I stand by my theory.
SpaceXXX
this is Elon's desperate move to fix his weak coding problem. He recently stated he feels he is far behind in agentic coding, and that apparently that's what matters.
> He recently stated he feels he is far behind in agentic coding, and that apparently that's what matters
Sure. My question was why. And my loose interrogation of the question, together with some unique domain expertise, suggests he found an excuse to work towards a Dyson sphere.
He's offloading the loss from buying Twitter. This is the smoke and mirrors phase.
> He's offloading the loss from buying Twitter
That already happened with xAI-X merged with SpaceX.
Every time Musk does anything these days, it further reveals the shell game he's playing with his companies. This is going to be an Enron type of story eventually. I truly wish I had a choice to pull my tax money out of this particular subsidy.
Enron was absolute peanuts compared to the financial fraud Musk has been executing (with the apparent blessing of the SEC). At its peak Enron had a roughly $70B market cap, TSLA is currently sitting at $1.74T. We can expect similar numbers from the SpaceX IPO.
It's hard to compare these numbers directly since valuations have increased quite a bit since a quarter century ago. As a proportion of the S&P 500, Tesla (2.3%) is about 4x of Enron at that $70b (0.6%).
Tesla is profitable, as a matter of public record. And SpaceX is, by all accounts, extremely profitable.
SpaceX is _not_ profitable by most reasonable measurements of accounting. If you discount rocket depreciation costs and R&D, then yeah its profitable from starlink revenue.
They haven't released a 10k yet so we don't know, but from what I understand SpaceX+X.ai is not GAAP profitable.
SpaceX was, but SpaceTwitter is not. xAI is hoovering all the money out of SpaceX.
SpaceX reuses its boosters 20+ times. Surely the depreciation is tiny when compared to the revenue of 60M+ per launch?
The entire space launch market is about $20B with multiple competitors in 2025. And by the most generous estimates it is going to be $80B by 2035. They can reuse the rockets as much as they like, the company isn’t worth $1.7T.
3x growth in ten years is the “most generous” estimate?
Yes because outside Starlink and govt contracts, there isn’t that massive of a demand growth in the sector. There a limit to how many satellites can be in orbit at a time and land based telecom infrastructure makes it so that satellite based infra isn’t necessary unless you’re in remote areas.
Starlink is already most of the revenue.
What's the point of the except?
The main problem is the AI stuff.
How can you say “The company isn’t worth X”? Isn’t the company worth exactly as much as people are willing to pay for its shares?
I don’t personally think Google is worth $4T but the share price says otherwise.
You’re comparing a publicly traded company where the supply demand economics have established a price to a company whose financials are not public, and is valuing itself at $1.7T and forcing everyone’s 401Ks and pension funds to fund it. Not the same thing.
>forcing everyone’s 401Ks and pension funds to fund it.
Source?
https://theconversation.com/musks-spacex-is-shaping-up-as-th...
The source links in that website (which looks like clickbait) do not support your claim.
https://www.morningstar.com/funds/spacex-ipo-how-index-funds...
> S&P is reportedly considering a fast entry rule change to its flagship index, though it has not yet been approved, and details are scant.
> FTSE Russell is also considering a fast entry rule for its suite of US market indexes and is in a consultation period as of early April 2026.
Only Nasdaq 100 has changed its rules, but Nasdaq 100 is not (and should not be) in most retirement funds.
If 1/3 having changed rules and 2/3 considering changing the rules isn’t evidence enough then not really much to discuss here.
When someone says that it usually means they believe the price is bound to drop.
> Isn’t the company worth exactly as much as people are willing to pay for its shares?
Really? We're still making claims like this in the year of our Lord 2026? People in the markets today are not predicting the real value of a company, they're gambling that the various political and financial machinations from people like Elon Musk will increase the share price enough that they can sell at a profit. The value of shares like Tesla are utterly disconnected from the value of the underlying business.
They also have to replace 20%+ of their satellite network every year.
why is that ?
They are low earth orbit satellites. Generally, the lower the orbit, the faster they decay. You could also argue that this is a benefit in that they gain updated technology with each replacement.
> You could also argue that this is a benefit in that they gain updated technology with each replacement.
No, having the option to replace technology at your leisure would be a benefit. Being forced to replace your technology because it's destined to become aerosolized aluminum in less than five years is a detriment.
Planned obsolescence really only works well if someone else is paying.
The operational lifetime of their satellites is about 5 years.
Because they fall back to the ground…
No, the burn up in the atmosphere. Burning metals being added to the oxygen you breathe.
They fall back towards the ground... Happy now?
low earth orbit
because of gravity
More because of drag
Depreciation isn't the only thing that matters. R&D, manufacturing, maintenance, fuel, launch, support staff, and I'm sure there are countless others.
I'm not saying they aren't profitable. I don't know, but it's definitely not a given.
They did report FCF before xai and also invested at least $1B before they merged xai
Given that it's one Musk company giving a mountain of money to another, and the only numbers floating around regarding SpaceX seem like marketing fluff, I don't think any meaningful conclusions can be reached until we get some real numbers giving a full look at the finances.
What about the R&D costs of blowing up vehicle after vehicle?
They have over 300 falcon 9 launches in a row now, just in case you’re not caught up on the latest
C'mon, you know they're talking about Starship.
It's less than the yearly cost of ground stations (just under 1 million/year per installation)
5 million over 5 years capex+opex. Mostly opex
It's also a troll post
Between launches alone, Starlink and Starshield, SpaceX will likely be a money printing machine for a long time.
They had like $16B in revenue last year, half from Starlink.
That’s just money in the door and the underwriters seem to think the business is worth $1.75T.
If underwriters think it’s worth $1.7T with a $16B revenue (not profit), they’re doing the same thing as the credit agencies did in 2008 by giving underwater mortgage backed securities a AAA rating.
Do you have any evidence or analysis to back that up? How are those similar?
It's not the same at all. Do you know how an IPO roadshow works at all or are you just spouting bullshit?
If roadshows guaranteed accurate valuations, pets.com wouldn’t liquidate within a year of IPO.
Again, not debating that SpaceX isn’t a legit company or that it’s profitable. But underwriters agreeing with high valuations to stocks that collapse once they go public isn’t unheard of.
Edit: and I will concede that I should’ve phrased my initial thoughts better. Credit rating agencies and underwriters do very separate things, just like IPOs and MBS are two very separate things.
You said: "underwriters ... doing the same thing as the credit agencies did in 2008 by giving underwater mortgage backed securities a AAA rating"
That isn't what is happening at all.
In an IPO the underwriters and the company collaborate to set the price based on approximate demand and what they want the quality of the holders to look like.
In the roadshow, the company is very constrained as to what they can say or disclose outside of the scope of the S-1. They can't include MNPI, forward looking financial projections, etc. Underwriters are also prohibited from sharing MNPI, or publishing marketing disguised as research.
So I guess if you're saying the SpaceX S-1 is completely full of shit and there's hidden risk in it, than it could be similar to 2008, but in this case nobody is manufacturing a rating, and those material misrepresentations would constitute securities fraud. Investment banks and ratings agencies aren't the same thing at all, and the buyers of marginally profitable IPO stocks are (hopefully) different than those of AAA MBS.
Yes. I updated my earlier comment and I concede I should’ve worded my earlier comment better.
I agree underwriters and credit agencies are very different just like IPOs and MBS are very different. I don’t think SpaceX is committing fraud.
> That’s just money in the door and the underwriters that seem to think the business is worth $1.75T.
I was responding to this particular comment.
In 2008, the credit rating agencies weren’t necessarily found to be guilty of wrongdoing, but a variety of reasons let them roll with AAA ratings on junk MBS anyway. Similarly the underwriters are not going to be committing crimes to facilitate IPOs. They are after all taking the risk of guaranteeing the sale for the company. However, if a company wants to roll with a high valuation, even if the fundamentals aren’t matching the valuation, if there are buyers, the underwriters will set the price supporting that high valuation. They are not incentivized to accurately measure a company’s worth like the comment I was responding to suggests.
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They are decades ahead of their nearest competition, in multiple verticals, and their barrier to entry is a literal gravity well.
All the money they are burning is for grok. And it is not decades ahead.
BO has entered the chat New Glenn and are arguably equal to Super Heavy given they've also recovered and reused their heavy booster.
I think you're going to be surprised at the level of competition BO provides SpaceX in the Artemis program.
About those underwriters - to quote the venerable Charlie Munger "they will sell 'shit' as long as 'shit' can be sold".
the ability to mine the moon or asteroid belt seems extremely lucrative, the logistics of transporting materials to earth costs less than shipping them across the ocean, an astounding level of value creation.
This can’t a serious comment.
Did you notice the size of the Artemis rocket and the size of the payload it sends to the moon and back?
Do you expect there to be diamonds just laying these on the moon surface, no mining required.
you don't have to ship things the moon, you just build a mass driver on the moon that sends things to earth. it doesn't need to yield diamonds, this would be lucrative with just fresh water
You actually believe that transporting _water_ from the moon to earth could ever be profitable, no, lucrative? Can you lay out the economics? Just so I understand.
“Just” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.
There is no other mode of transportation cheaper than shipping across the ocean.
launching things via a mass driver from the moon to the earth requires a lot less fuel, is faster, and cheaper than shipping across the ocean
That one is subsidized by externalizing costs to our lungs.
Shipping on water has been, by far, the cheapest mode of long-distance shipping since the moment boats were invented. That is to say, since thousands of years before boats were ever powered by the shit that destroys our lungs.
So is pace travel. Then rockets are not green!
It is valuable if they can find the right rocks and bring them back. A platinum group metal asteroid would be of immense value, at least the first one anyways. After that who knows, they might super saturate the global market for decades.
our use of platinum has been limited by its scarcity, having tons of it would completely change the things we could build. saturation isn't a real downstream effect of economics, it would instead be transformative
It is less about profitability and more about dilution of ownership. He seems to have a pattern of diluting the ownership of his profitable companies by folding in his less profitable/failed companies. You still own a share of a profitable company, but a smaller share, to his benefit.
Im also profitable as an individual. I made a $100 this week, which makes me worth at least $30M.
SpaceX was profitable before the xAI thing happened. Now I imagine they're way in the red.
As was Enron
How much of that profit was due to public subsidies of the sort that he killed for other companies but not for himself during his tenure as a special government employee?
Pretty decent video released today by Wall Street Millennial that looks at the profitability of SpaceX (as part of looking at 'Terafab') :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSJi1oQFQzs
SpaceX was surely more profitable before it was used to bail out Elon's xAI which was used to bailout his purchase of Twitter.
Have you looked at their latest report?
They are only profitable because of subsidies. Pretty much 1:1.
just because a bunch of rockets went up without blowing up, does not mean they are profitable. it cost money to shot rocket, and it is very expensive, reusable or not. most launches are internal launch without external paying customers.
In part thanks to SpaceX purchase of CyberTrucks.
Tesla’s profits and market share has been declining for the past few years and it’s basically an overpriced meme stock.
Their market share of EVs in the US went from 40.9% in Q3 2025 to 58.9% in Q4 2025.
You may not have noticed because positive Musk related news doesn't seem to make headlines anymore.
> Their market share of EVs in the US went from 40.9% in Q3 2025 to 58.9% in Q4 2025.
You’re not wrong factually, but it doesn’t mean what you’re suggesting it means. Their share went up because EVs aren’t selling as much anymore. All companies including Tesla are selling fewer EVs. They just have a bigger share of the smaller pie, which isn’t exactly a success when you only sell EVs, but your competitors also sell non EVs.
I'm aware of the reason. Their market share is, nonetheless, up. That's still good for Tesla, their sales remained constant while people stopped buying other EVs.
Edit: Constant is the wrong word. Resilient or consistent is what I was trying to say.
Competitors leaving the market means less competition which is a good thing for Tesla. If the market for EVs returns in the future (if, say, the next administration reimplements the incentives), Tesla will be there to reap the benefits.
> their sales remained constant while people stopped buying other EVs.
Their sales did not remain constant.
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Genuine question, how do you know that without a 10K? Have the filed any document that shows their finances?
Tesla has a P/E ratio of 364.981. It's blatant fraud.
Nobody is forced to buy shares of any company. Even automatic 401k investment plans let you specify what to buy if you so choose. Perhaps you could make the argument Elon makes false promises to boost the stock price, but at the end of the day, individual investors must decide what they believe in no matter the CEO's antics.
I'm not sure I follow, here. What about this makes you think this is a shell game?
Matt Levine writes a bit about this - the Elon Musk Mars Conglomerate. And really if you're investing into e.g. SpaceX you're not investing into SpaceX you're investing into the Elon Musk Mars Conglomerate. And most people seem to want that.
Tesla's the odd one out: it's public but it's still in there, although Musk would probably prefer it to be private too.
Tesla is the free cashflow play that is probably the most important for mars as there is no distilled fermented dinosaur juice on mars, but considerably more by ratio of lithium / oil than the Earth. Our flintstone fire mobiles won’t work so well there, and battery / solar will be important there for everything, including mobility and armies of slave robots.
Mars gets less sunlight on a good day for solar power; the inverse cube law really hits you harder than you'd think. And that's before accounting for the planet wide dust storms that can last for months.
We're probably looking at nuclear fission generators to get started, then converting to geothermal at any appreciable (and maybe fusion, inshallah).
Regardless, fission, geo, fusion don’t fit well on a rover. The boring company makes the tunnels, Tesla makes the vehicles and robots, and batteries. Likely we will still use solar despite poor relative performance for bootstrap.
RTGs do. That's what Perseverance and Curiosity use today.
Right, right, all those facts... that's nothing compare to Musk's genius and will! /s
> Elon Musk Mars Conglomerate
That’s SpaceX’s version of Tesla’s self driving car pipe dream
Edit - I use self-driving car and Autopilot interchangeably
It's so pipe-dreamy that I used it for an hour today through SF rush hour traffic. Clearly never going to work though, right? right???
Did you follow Tesla's published instructions on how to use it (https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/modely/en_us/GUID-2CB6080...)? You're explicitly forbidden, for example, from assuming that it's going to make the right decision at intersections; you must manually inspect each intersection and evaluate whether it's "safe and/or appropriate" to continue. You're also not allowed to look away from the road or use your phone. YMMV, but to me that level of required attention doesn't match the term "self-driving".
What I see a lot of people do, unfortunately, is reconcile this contradiction by not following the published limitations of the "Full Self-Driving (Supervised)" product. They assume that Elon Musk wouldn't call it that if it couldn't be trusted to do what they expect. Then they get into fatal crashes, and someone sues, and Tesla argues that they can't be held accountable for bad drivers who don't follow the rules.
Your claim was that the product doesn't work, and I'm telling you it works without intervention consistently and in complicated traffic situations.
Any argument about how people don't pay enough attention since it isn't yet certified as a L4 system is irrelevant and tangential to the point.
Your definition of Tesla's self-driving product is very different than what Tesla itself promised, and that's what the person you are replying to...is telling you as well.
Anyone who thinks it is pipe dream given how it works today + rate of change is clueless, and that is putting it kindly.
I don't think L4 autonomy is a pipe dream. Indeed, it exists today and is widely available in the same city you drove your Tesla in. I think it's a pipe dream for Tesla specifically to achieve it, because for bizarre and idiosyncratic reasons Elon Musk won't let them use LiDAR or mount a roof sensor. They've been stuck at L2 for a decade now, and I don't see much reason to think that making that system incrementally more reliable will ever "unlock" L4.
In practice, Tesla on HW4 drives indistinguishably different from Waymo.
It does! A system which drives indistinguishably different from Waymo 99.999% of the time is L2. You might very well never experience that unlucky 1 mile in 100,000, but if there's 1M Teslas on the road driving a daily average of 33 miles, it's going to happen hundreds of times each day. An L4 system must guarantee that it can come safely to a stop before human intervention is required, and I don't think you can achieve that guarantee by pushing the nines on an L2 system.
I've been in Waymos that have needed teleop rescue multiple times in the last year so by that metric it's not a L4 system either.
Isn't Tesla FSD good enough and trending in the right direction to be called a "pipe dream"?
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Words do mean something, and you could have taken 5 minutes of research to make a reasonable counterclaim
Tesla has an insane PE ratio because it’s a casino stock (~350x). As a comparison, NVIDIA IS 40x. SpaceX Is projected to be 300-500x. These are fantasy, completely unrealizable valuations. Similar to Enron, and Enron was over 70x. Enron wasn’t some surprise either.
Typically when PE gets out of whack, market analyzers dig into what is happening because it’s usually chicanery. No longer. Everyone is along for the ride.
PE has literally nothing to do with what Enron did which was accounting fraud + cashflow problems because they actually didnt make any money, in fact they lost tons of money and used future earnings in current reporting
Having a high pe is not fraud. There are even companies that are losing money, and they're still worth something.
When people say something is like enron, they dont mean it has a high PE. Its like saying someone is like Hitler and meaning they are a failed art student
> How are any of these companies at all related to Enron?
There's a lot of parallels:
* Circular transactions between companies under the same control
* Using SPVs to keep debt off the books
* The supplier funding its own customer through investment to inflate revenue on both ends
* Valuations driven by a hyped up narrative and decoupled from actual fundamentals
SpaceX bought nearly 20% of Cyber Trucks sold in Q4. That makes me question the level of real profitability.
He shut down investigations into him for a reason.
Tesla isn't that profitable, but SpaceX is likely generating boatloads of cash. From what I can tell Starlink alone has a free positive cash flow of about $2 billion. I'm not sure what the launch business is worth, but it's likely a lot given the absence of domestic competition.
I have a suspicion the reason Musk wanted to combine SpaceX and X.ai is the latter gives him losses to write off against all that cash from the former plus a chance for a big AI payoff.
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In 2024 Gwynne Shotwell said Starlink had a $600 million positive free cash flow based on $8.2 billion in revenue. Last year revenue estimates from both SpaceX and from outside people adding up new military contracts came out to about $11.8 billion. Their fixed costs haven't gone up much, so the big unknown is development costs for military contracts. I think $2 billion is a reasonable, conservative estimate.
How much of that are they sinking into Starship?
Probably some, but $2 billion a year? That seems like too much.
Hopefully all of it. If Starship succeeds, and that seems incredibly likely given the tests thus far, it will create an entire industry.
People underestimate how much ships changed the world. It will happen again, the only question is when.
There's a few ways
They're prepping for an IPO and there have been some anonymous insider reports of the figures in the press
There are industry estimates
Much of their income comes from public contracts
pointers?
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You can hate Elon or just be misguided about deals in general. This is brilliant. He’s buying revenue and, on the thesis of scaling agentic knowledge work replacement, a user of his GPU clusters and ultimately GPUs in space. A $60B option is a premium on their revenue - but it may look cheap if he accelerates their coding models. For Cursor, they get what’s nearly impossible to come by - real capacity guarantees and de-risking their reliance on Anthropic or OpenAI.
Laugh all you want. He may have the last laugh on this one.
This seems like diworsification to me. Cursor has nothing to do with rocket launching, so it will be a distraction for management.
Wow. Tech CEOs and investors have completely lost touch with what money really is worth.
How is a VSCode fork and a open weight LLM fine-tune worth $60B?
One would think Elon would learn his lesson after overpaying for Twitter and then having to merge his failures together to stay afloat. But no, more cash into the burning pile.
> How is a VSCode fork and a open weight LLM fine-tune worth $60B?
Ignoring future business ideas, Cursor reported reached $2 billion+ annualized revenue run rate in 2026, doubling from 2025. Recent financing rounds reached high-end valuation between $30 billion and $50 billion.
Revenue without expenses is meaningless. Annualized revenue is even worse. It's like a gambler bragging that they spin through $20,000 a month. Yeah, but for how long?
If you give me a billion, I can do an annualized revenue run rate of ~$12 billion just by selling a dollar for 99 cents.
As the old joke goes:
We're losing money on every unit, but we'll make up for it in volume.
“annualized revenue run rate” is a bogus accounting term. It’s like taking a paycheck and multiplying it by 365. Notice the complete lack of any mention of profits.
Taking my paycheck and multiplying would be an excellent measure of my yearly salary. I don't understand how that analogy is meant to imply that the approach is nonsensical.
because your paycheck comes only one day per month, so that estimate would bee too high by a factor of 30
But then the analogy doesn't work at all? ARR isn't calculated by multiplying revenue to 30 years and then saying that that's 1 year's revenue; what criticism is being made here?
they pick some month with the higest revenue. Unlike your income, a business makes different amounts each month based on some trends and many other factors, and they can varry wildly.
Its your most recent months revenue * 12, its not that deep bro LMAO
a lot of companies I know are cancelling Cursor in favor of Claude Code or Codex
because they already have VSCode or IntelliJ for edits
A lot of enterprises were doing that but now they hit the 150 user limit on Claude and are paying seat+api rates.
Codex is still going strong but it’s hard to imagine they won’t do similar eventually.
So now im honestly hearing a lot more folk stick it out with cursor while waiting for the dust to settle.
>A lot of enterprises were doing that but now they hit the 150 user limit on Claude and are paying seat+api rates.
A lot of enterprises use Github Copilot which has per-request pricing model which effectively means unlimited tokens which eliminates this issue.
Github Copilot changed to token pricing earlier this week
Oh oh :(
This isn't true anymore.. GitHub are rate limiting people on pro and pro+ pretty hard
I'm talking about per-request model remember? With extensive prompt you realistically can have one request every 10 minutes because the agent will be busy for at least 10 minutes executing it. They aren't rate limiting that.
Each tool call requires a new request no?
The harness receives a response, has to parse out the tool call, execute it and then start a new request with the tool call result.
>Each tool call requires a new request no?
Nope, not unless you are doing steering.
Each new prompt = new request, but tool calls don't count.
yeah i just canceled my cursor sub and switched back to vscode. work pays for my claude max sub, no point paying for cursor anymore when i can just use openrouter every few months to test other models if i want
I did that then I switched back to Cursor after Claude kept running out immediately. Now I pay for both.
Cursor also has a very nice integrated DX that I miss in Claude's VSCode plugin.
I'm seeing the same thing, probably all will land in a combination of Antigravity Inbox experience, Devin and some OpenClaw omnipresence style UX.
I mean the best argument I see for cursor is that you can easily switch between AIs, which is convenient since they seem to run at 80-90% up time (with those 10-20% clustered at West coast working hours). But the big AI companies are likely to keep an edge over Open-source fine-tunes and they are able to subsidize the coding agents in a way Cursor can't.
I expect Cursor passes nearly every cent it collects on to Anthropic and OpenAI
So migrating them to a friendly x.ai pricing will bump profit margins.
At the expense of a worse product that will cause everyone to jump ship to something like Threads in the long-term, but sure...
Even more than that possibly. I don't imagine cursor has any deals in place with Anthropic. They likely pay API pricing like everyone else.
To add to this, Cursor provides a high value go to market strategy for X.AI's modeling efforts. Cursor's own modeling efforts would require an extreme investment of capital to compete. Capital which X.AI has already spent or is planning to spend.
I don't think we can use normal valuation methods for these AI companies.
Things are moving so fast, and these companies have no moat whatsoever. Purchasing a company for 30x annual revenue (and as others have pointed out, how much of this revenue goes straight to companies like Anthropic?), without knowing if it's even going to exist in 3-5 years, seems bonkers.
I mean, congratulations to the founders on becoming billionaires in record time, but this is uncharted territory.
I don't think it's about worth any more at this point; it seems more about money laundry and manipulating the market. They are shifting power between each other and create an illusion of a healthy economy, not carrying about the damage they create for everyone else.
[flagged]
People that think a crappy vscode fork is worth 60 billion dollars are the ones that need to touch grass.
And not also the people who think that acquisitions are being made primarily because colluding CEOs have some interest in creating the illusion of a healthy economy?
clankerlover
Yes, and Whatsapp was just a messaging app with a stupid Erlang backend. These deals are not about the tech, they buy the business, that includes the brand and the user base. Whether we think it's worth that amount is indeed up for discussion.
Whatsapp was much much more at that point. It also had a huge userbase at a time when getting such a number of people was incredibly difficult. Many were also paying the $1 per year fee. Switching from Cursor to Kilo etc. takes nothing. There are no "friends" you need to convince to switch.
Yes. But unlike cursor, Whatsapp had the following advantages:
1. It's cheap to run.
2. It has clear advantages over existing technology (SMS).
3. My mom uses it. She's never going to use cursor. Whatsapp had a huge userbase in Europe. Basically everyone I know uses it.
And it was "only" ~$20 billion. Inflation can't be this high.
I feel like people are underestimating the market share of Cursor.
The value in acquisitions for investors typically comes from how much money is locked into multi-year deals. A lot of tech folks in leadership positions that I talk to are very aware that the best option in this space changes every 2 months. Right now it's Claude. Next month it might be Codex. A couple months after that it could be Gemini/Qwen/Composor/Kimi/xAI.
Locking in with Cursor where quick swapping your team between the changing options is the point is a better choice than locking in even a 1 year deal with any single option where you're still going to be paying for token cost on top of it.
> And it was "only" ~$20 billion. Inflation can't be this high.
While I'm not sure about this buy, Cursor does at least have revenue. WhatsApp was basically running on VC/private money (they had an extremely nominal fee, but I never had to pay it), and was sold to buy its userbase into the Facebook fold. I don't think you can compare that to a business that at least has some decent revenue.
If Whatsapp is burning through say ~$1B yearly with zero revenue and Cursor is burning through say ~$2B with a ~$1B revenue, they're both still in the hole.
I wish people would stop talking about just revenue. It's mostly meaningless without knowing their expenses.
I think revenue is common to talk about because profit is also meaningless when a company spends every penny it earns to grow (new engineers, marketing, etc). Iirc Amazon made zero profit for quite some time.
Also revenue is a signal for product market fit. Is it a great one? Dunno. But for example I'd be hard pressed to sell $1billion of anything, even if I had something everyone wanted.
But I think your point about burn rate is important. How long can they have this attrition on cash before they collapse?
I mean, the financials just don't look great either way.
Their main product is part VSCode, which is a market that's almost impossible to make money in, and part reselling already expensive LLM tokens.
You can look at more parameters and judge how well a company could do in the future. For Amazon, you can predict that once they stop growing, they can make a pretty penny.
But with Cursor that doesn't seem likely. Even if they had the talent for training models from scratch, which I don't think they do, and IF inference makes money, which is not clear at all, training models is still a huge money sink.
So, for them getting bought out by xAi which has a base model they can use makes sense. But what does xAi get here? Another endless money pit?
You're right. I was commenting mostly on "why companies usually talk about revenue than profit"
I think the truth is that it's a new frontier. No one knows if any of this will make money. Investors are just betting that someone else will learn to monetize sometime soon.
they get their own platform like how Anthropic has Claude Code from which they can push out Grok and get training data (from free users or whatever)
whether that actually gets them ahead, that's another question....
WhatsApp was actually profitable pre-acquisition and they never needed the VC money. It was still in the bank + more when they got acquired
WhatsApp had real network effects built in, and network was the moat. Don’t think Cursor has any real moat.
The cost of switching from WhatsApp to an alternative is huge. You will lose access to your family, friends, whomever you chat with. They need to switch with you and in turn their friends need to switch with them, and so on.
The cost of switching from cursor to codex or Claude code is minimal.
So what does Claude code actually have that spaceX can't imitate? Well, not much, but acquiring hot companies before your IPO is a good strategy to drive up your own valuation.
Whatsapp was already the de-facto communication standard for a lot countries in America and Europe when Meta bought it.
I wonder if meta will ever buy the (non-chinese) asian equivalent, Line
(non-chinese) asian equivalent of whatsapp is still whatsapp, it completely dominates in some of the biggest asian countries like india, indonesia or pakistan along with a bunch of other smaller places
Let's face it - Grok is not nearly as popular among programmers as Claude or Codex, and that means that xAI is not able to vacuum all the data that his competitors have access to.
Cursor is installed on a LOT of computers.
Once Grok becomes the default engine, it will raise adoption.
More importantly, if you have Cursor installed all your data may be sent to their labs whether you use it or not (unfortunately - this is par for the course for all the LLMs, a la Microsoft).
That's worth a lot - especially considering that Cursor might also grow with the shift to more powerful local models and the fact that it has a respectable income stream.
> How is a VSCode fork and an open weight LLM fine-tune worth $60B?
Corporate contracts. A lot of companies have signed onto Cursor. xAI has a pretty toxic brand with Elon and the nonconsensual sexual images scandal. xAI has a ton of compute and few corporate customers. Now they have a ton.
> One would think Elon would learn his lesson after overpaying for Twitter
I think he took over Twitter to control what people using it see and promote right wing viewpoints. To that end it’s been a wild success.
> xAI has a ton of compute and few corporate customers. Now they have a ton.
For now, perhaps. I work with numerous companies who refuse to do business with his brands.
Yes, I think getting value for money here relies on a lot of corporate inertia. Which, to be honest, is usually a good bet.
I would also ask why is a rocket company buying a VSCode fork? Why not grok or xAI or x or Tesla or any of his other companies?
X is a subsidiary of xAI (responsible for Grok) is a subsidiary of SpaceX.
Tesla is the only major Elon business that’s independent of SpaceX at this point
That's such a weird structure
When you think of them as bailouts it makes more sense.
Well, that’s the order they acquired each other at least. I have no knowledge on the actual reporting/corporate structure.
xAI would have at least made sense
> Wow. Tech CEOs and investors have completely lost touch with what money really is worth.
Remember those stories of lottery winners who win millions then wind up broke AF, even homeless, in only a year or two because they have no impulse control and blew through it? Same people.
It's purely about control, not profit.
He bought Twitter to grab a megaphone to propagate his ego/agenda.
Grok was built for similar reasons.
He's buying Cursor to have a tool to push Grok on the world, and to have something of his own under his own ideological control to compete with SamA and Dario.
It's not the codebase they're purchasing, it's the customer list, R&D talent, and most importantly, data corpus.
X AI is weak on coding and most of their founding researchers have departed for greener pastures. Musk has a great datacenter, but no researchers or data to use it with. This acquisition makes sense in that context.
See also ($, Stratechery) https://stratechery.com/2026/john-ternus-and-apples-hardware...
You have to look at it now like cryptocurrency “market cap” numbers. It’s more of a marketing tool than anything. This is just another honking whirlygig to bolt onto the SpaceX IPO to try and generate exit liquidity
he doesn't act like he regrets buying Twitter/X/Xitter
maybe he's getting value from this? (also the deal was essentially secured with Tesla stock, so who knows what did he actually pay)
branding ... mindshare
> How is a VSCode fork and a open weight LLM fine-tune worth $60B?
The same way a rocket company that counts short-lived as satellites as an asset is worth 1.7 trillion. Congratulations to the Cursor folks, they are the only winners in this.
This is also part of the AI bubble delusion: agent assisted coding works, at least for some people, for some purposes. This deal perpetuates the illusion that AI will find high value use cases. The reality may be that software development has unique characteristics you won't find in law or medicine or other domains.
Ever heard of concept called acqui-user/acqui-hire?
Buying Twitter played a key part in getting Trump re-elected, so I think Musk figures he got what he wanted in terms of deregulation, dropped prosecution, and damage to his political opponents.
This deal is different: SpaceX is heading for an IPO which is now complicated by xAI becoming a subsidiary. Cursor is actually popular and I’m sure this is all stock-based so as long as investors believe that those users stick to xAI it’ll juice the entire SpaceX IPO. I am skeptical but these days the market seems to be driven by a country-club full of guys in Connecticut who are constantly hyperventilating on X so maybe from that angle it’s just another way he’s getting what he wanted from Twitter.
Quoting a viral tweet: “Elon is such a dumbass, he spent $44 billion on Twitter and all he got was control of all 3 branches of the federal government.”
He bought his way into politics, came in with a chainsaw (almost literally), realized he didn't want to be in politics after all and rage quit. It may not make him a dumbass, but it certainly makes him some sort of ass.
I mean, that still feels overpriced.
Biden won in 2020 with just ~$2 billion. Though he didn't get all the branches.
Neither did Obama, who won two terms for <$2 billion.
Are the house and courts really so expensive?
Buying Twitter played a key part in getting Trump re-elected Some would say it was simply caused by the mediocrity of Bidden and more globally of the democrats. You don't need to brainwash people for this.
Sure, and many of those would be saying it because of something they heard on X. Musk didn’t pour money into political activity because he thought that outcome was highly likely.
What does "global mediocrity of the democrats" actually mean?
Elon doesn't know what to do. Ani failed, no one apart from his alt accounts is interested in Grok pictures.
Since the firing of several Grok founders, Grok has decreased in capabilities. It is illogical and insults users when called out.
So he does what everyone does. Write more dev tools, slap a price on it and hope retail investors will be impressed in the IPO. The $60 billion is of course optional and will just be used in the IPO to inflate the valuation.
Why $60b and not $20b? Why not $10b or $500m?
We have reached peak stupid.
Snowflake bought streamlit (a python frontend that’s not even better than gradio, it’s main competitor) for 800 million in 2022. We are nowhere near mt stupid. ZIRP was the peak of mt stupid.
I thought the same during the NFT craze and the blockchain craze before that.
its definitely the worst case of money poisoning i've ever seen
$50bn for a harness makes no sense, what am I missing?
I assume someone knows someone, backroom deal perhaps? I'm not sure either, when Cursor has a lot of risk and not that much moat.
My 2c: they need to pump xAI usage (which nobody is using) to be able to keep the hype alive pre-ipo.
1. Pay them with shares of SpaceX
2. Make SpaceX valuation even higher before IPO
3. Boost XAI/usage of Grok.
I thought Cursor has started making their own models. Did I confuse them with someone else?
Their Composer 2 model is Kimi (an open model) with additional RL fine-tuning, for whatever that information is worth to you: https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/22/cursor-admits-its-new-codi...
Oh, I see.
Though, in fairness, that's probably the important part. Like a base model plus "coding smarts" is probably perfect for the situation.
But maybe not as much value as I was thinking.
They have a 'proprietary' model which is just an open source (kimi?) fine tune
Cursor has a significant enterprise userbase, that has to be worth something
For a successful IPO and attract more capital you need a very good story/narrative. That what is being crafted here. Business fundamentals matter less with elon!
money laundering and tax avoidance
How would this be money laundering?
Value shifting. Search for SolarCity and cousin Lyndon Rive.
That isn't laundering
Musk passing around his debt from purchasing Twitter.
That's an expensive VS Code fork.
They moved on from that code base iirc. Still insane, mind.
Do you mean the new desktop app? The Cursor IDE/editor or whatever you want to call it is still based VSCode, right?
I haven't been using it, but that's what I heard - see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSuS-zXMVwE
Galactic Empire has agreed to acquire a local lemonade stand in exchange for 10 death stars.
What's Cursor's moat here? I'm a bit surprised that xAI/SpaceX needs to buy them rather than building their own VScode forked IDE or an agentic UI/CLI.
It's data. Nobody is using Grok for SWE work, but they are using Cursor.
Could be contracts.
Dammit, I liked cursor
same. i finally tried Claude Code and i just shrugged. Cursor definitely has a clunky UI with an identity crisis, but it pioneered plan mode, and auto / composer chugs along without rate limits for the most part.
Opus, I watch my allotment creep up every turn…
It never occurred to me that LLMs would be used in the development of something like rockets and space-going vehicles..
A sobering thought.
Yeah, maybe it'll sober some people up to stop pretending they can't see how useful LLMs are in pretty much everything. A sharp tool to wield, easy to cut yourself with, but also extremely useful.
Honestly, it felt much stranger to me to learn, a few years ago, that they're 3D-printing rocket engines. With my experience limited to building my own PLA/ABS 3D printer out of salvaged motors and parts printed on another printer, it was hard to imagine how this is anywhere near safe and precise enough. But turns out, FDM-ing some plastic blobs is not the same as fusing Inconel powder with lasers. Same with using LLMs for software engineering (whether in aerospace culture or otherwise), it's just not the same as asking ChatGPT "please make me an app to do something idk how i cannot code send halp".
xAI also owns Twitter, which is even less useful for SpaceX.
They need xAI as a reason for the narrative that data centers will be in space, so SpaceX can project far more growth before the IPO. After the IPO they'll find out that data centers in space are too expensive and overheat.
Cursor ($60b) being valued the same as Twitter ($51b inflation adjusted) is _willlld_
This is a classic Elon move. He bundled up his company that is, shall we say, crap, into his most valuable company, then tried to hype it up as much as he could. Like when he promised Tesla cars would self drive in X years but it never happened, then pivoted to AI/robots, then re-routed Tesla’s GPUs to xAI, etc.
Cursor might not be the new hotness, but if we believe that agentic coding is the next wave and we’ve gone from asking chatbots to actually using agents for coding, then yes, this move makes sense for Elon to hype up a SpaceX IPO.
I feel Cursor isnt’t even worth $6B. What is the moat, the value, the sauce here?
The “apply” model to turn LLM output into code changes?
I like SpaceX a lot but this really doesn’t make sense at $60B
I'm out of the loop - what moat does Cursor even have now, and why is it worth $60B?
Why did a shoe company get $50 million in funding for their AI pivot?
Because VCs are braindead... I see your point.
I really don't know what Elon is thinking here because SpaceX's IPO is already precarious, for several reasons:
1. It was used to rescue himself and key investors from overpaying for Twitter, which was first rescued through xAI (and I don't know why anyone thought investing in xAI was a good idea but here we are). If our regulators weren't defanged, this deal would've gotten alot more scrutiny (IMHO). Whatever the case, this is all diluting the SpaceX business for overpriced AI vaporware;
2. From what I can find, SpaceX's revenue in 2025 was ~$18B with a $5B loss. That doesn't sound like a $1.5T+ company to me;
3. The markets are being rigged to make the IPO a success by changing the rules to force passive funds to buy into it with a tiny float (5% instead of the normal 25%); and
4. Here's the big one. I think Starship is a badly designed program that's going to take many billions more to complete and commercialize. There's not really a market for bigger payloads (evidence: ~1 Falcony Heavy launch per year) and STarship will effectively have to compete with Falcon 9 at a time when reusable alternatives (eg from the Chinese as well as Blue Origin) are coming to market.
Starship won’t compete with F9, or BO because it is fully reusable and cost less than either. The Chinese are not a player in the global launch services market at all so don’t count.
Starship isn’t comparable to Falcon Heavy because it has vastly more volume, which will make it the cheapest way to launch Starlinks, which will be a lot of launches to begin with.
Starship is absolutely competing with Falcon 9 in two ways:
1. If F9 is cheaper, why would you use Starship?
2. If SpaceX decides to force Starship adoption by simply halting F9 launches or making them prohibitively expensive, well the market is still open for an F9 clone from someone else.
My point with FH is that there isn't a demand for much bigger payloads. Now, SpaceX wants to induce demand with STarlink launches. OK, so the viability of Starship is tied to the viability of Starlink. I thought Starlink was a clever way to prove F9 reusability but the first-mover advantage won't last forever.
My main point here was that F9 was developed, SpaceX's competition was the likes of ULA with their insanely expensive rockets but whether SpaceX uses F9 or not, it has become the new baseline.
SLS is insanely expensive to build and launch but it still has a much greater launch capacity. Starship's solution to this is essentially in-orbit refuelling where, I believe, it will take ~10 Starship launches to refuel a Starship in orbit. This too is an insanely complicated capability that they haven't even begun to develop yet.
And whatever the ultimate per-launch base cost works out to be the program R&D cost has to be amortized cross those launches so even if the base cost is $10M, if you spent $10B developing the program, it still matters if you launch 10 a year vs 100.
When SpaceX goes public, they're going to be forced to disclose a whole lot more information about the program cost and I suspect it's going to be a lot higher than the rosy projectsions you get on Twitter.
Another way to put it is I think Starship could be SpaceX's Cybertruck.
> Starship won’t compete with F9, or BO because it is fully reusable and cost less than either.
Currently, this is not the case. Not fully reusable, and not costing less than F9 or BO.
There is a lot resting on Starlink, 11 gigadollars in direct revenue that accounts for fully 60% of SpaceX's total revenue of 18 gigadollars. It's hard to see how that level of revenue can sustain a 1 terradollar valuation.
Like, TSLA had 94 gigadollars in revenue last year, and it's a 1.2 terradollar company, and most outside analysts are frankly skeptical of that multiple. SpaceX is trying to get a similar valuation on a fifth of that revenue.
This is the right partnership to happen. SpaceX has all the compute but is missing the talent for training LLMs, especially on the RL side. Cursor has the talent and RL stack, but doesn't have their own pretrained base model or own their compute. Both will be on a bad trajectory without cooperating because Claude Code and Codex have gained so much momentum already.
Good on them to get $10B breakup terms, after the Twitter shitshow
If SpaceX grabs cursor and then gets its models into use for a huge amount of companies and developers, this might actually be a very wise move. So I don't think SpaceX would only pay for the harness, but to access to a mass of potential users.
“ Cursor has also given SpaceX the right to acquire Cursor later this year for $60 billion”
That isn’t an agreement to buy
Cursor better take the $60B because a VS Code fork with a crappy fine tune of Kimi is not worth that much.
Could a mod please consider changing the story link to one of the actual articles shared in the post? I don’t think we should be giving the white nationalist, non-consensual-porn-generating social media site any free traffic.
I am part of a discord group with about 1000+ devs. I polled them in Jan to see if they had dropped cursor for claude code.
80% of those responded (250ish in the group had). Bit of selection bias there from the question - but my impression was Cursor is very much dying to competition from the labs.
I am so actually beyond sad that I ever trusted Musk, all the signs were there, from the lies with Tesla to the nonesensical point to point "tourist" lies, to the Mars lies, to the fact that the spaceship they are developing right now requires an actual elevator to get astronauts down, it was never meant for humans, it was meant to deploy sats in space even cheaper, outcompete the competition and basically kill human spaceflight as a result... because less profitable human rated spacecraft won't be viable.
Oh yeah, did I mention how Starlink is literally already in the close to Kessler Syndrome territory? all it would need is for a strong enough solar storm to hit their sats.
The elevator was there when it was originally announced.
There's no Kessler Syndrome where Starlink is.
You'd know this if you read Kessler's first paper. It's online.
i.e if every single Starlink satellite crashes into another you won't get Kessler Syndrome.
And the same it true for the planned Kuiper.
First of all, yes I know about the elevator hence why I mentioned it, you know, first of all it's not that safe to be going down an elevator from what is basically a multiple stories high building while in space (#1) and (#2) why would you add complexity/failure points on purpose if your mission was being multiplanetary?
The spacecraft wasn't designed with humans in mind first.
And second:
This is a paper by Kessler himself:
https://conference.sdo.esoc.esa.int/proceedings/sdc9/paper/3...
https://xcancel.com/trq212/status/2046713419978453374
ITT: The same geniuses that predicted with certainty X will fail are also predicting, with much less certainty, that "Oh God, let this be the end of Musk"
Wish I played that interview game better. I saw the success coming from a mile away (2022) but I can't vibe with people in the hire game right. It's like eye contact, smiling, facial expressions, stuff like that.
I guess there's a bunch of tools to not suck at this. Anyone had success here? The AI tools say I'm great because they can't pick up the kind of problems I'm talking about.
Pretend to and/or be motivated by things other than money, that’s the strongest thing interviewers drop people from, even though they’re motivated by money to be there.
Interesting. I genuinely do not care about money.
The motivation of money is literally zero to me. Maybe that's a problem as well: they want people who Are motivated by money acting like they aren't?
I wanted in because I saw them doing exciting impactful things That's literally it.
I dunno. I've been struggling with this for decades
Just act hard for the duration of the interview season.
That's the key really. It's all kayfabe. I saw Kilo as a win too from the product announcement.
I told myself about ten years ago that I need to move when I see things I get that intuition on. But I haven't figured out how to get in the door yet.
What exactly did you predict in 2022?
I can call the winners but then I go with the losers
$60B for a VSCode fork with AI integration... It may show the value of the gap between vanilla LLM output and production-ready applications.
>acquire Cursor later this year for $60 billion or pay $10 billion for our work together.
This seems like an elaborate Elon rug pull. A Windsurf situation 2.0
Random data point: as a long time VSCode user when I first heard the hoopla about Cursor I rushed to try it. Didn't work (at all). So I added my name to the open bug report, waited a few months. Tried again. Still didn't work. Became a Claude Code user and never looked back.
Misleading title on the post - SpaceX has the OPTION to buy them for $60B later this year, or pay $10B for their work together.
I’m no fan of Elon Musk, but even from a neutral perspective I’m bewildered by the merger between X, X.ai, and SpaceX and now this acquisition of Cursor. What’s the endgame? How does this help with the whole vision of “we all live in space and mine resources from the Moon and have data centers on Mars”?
The endgame is to game the index funds by bribing or otherwise.. convincing the big stock exchanges to forgo their index inclusion rules so SpaceX will get included in Nasdaq 100 within 10 days or something stupid like that. SpaceX will initially float a tiny fraction of shares at a wildly inflated value and use a combination of artificial scarcity and Elon Stans (retail) to keep the stock from crashing until it gets included in the indexes. Then, your 401k will auto-buy SpaceX, letting insiders exit at their ludicrous valuation.
Eventually, stock prices will correct hard, and retail/passive investors will be left with the bag.
The idea that merging these companies has some business purpose is hilarious. It’s purely financial engineering. Unfortunately, our existing system has little consumer protection against this kind of fraud, so Elon will probably get away with it, at least in the short term
> endgame is to game the index funds
Buying Cursor does nothing for this.
It gives them some amount of paying customer base using AI. That is some magic voodoo you need to sprinkle onto the public sale to get the highest possible price point.
X doesnt yet have a paying customer base using AI?
idk but feels like this might be a new literal kind of acquihire, to bulk purchase workers in cash
The Elon Musk Company does what Elon Musk wants. Tesla is dying, X is a disaster, so he bundled everything into the one company that had a bright future, SpaceX. There is no grand vision or endgame beyond do as Elon Musk wants. Going to Mars or the Moon or whatever was never a vision or mission, just a story to tell.
Model Y is still the best selling car in the world (and still the best-selling car in China), but yeah Tesla is *dying.
> What’s the endgame? How does this help with the whole vision of “we all live in space and mine resources from the Moon and have data centers on Mars”?
I put this in the other thread, but my personal working hypothesis is the SpaceX/Musk mission has pivoted from colonising Mars to building a Dyson sphere.
Space-based datacenters are a demand excuse for putting solar panels (and eventually, solar-panel fabrication) in space. Cursor is a demand excuse for building more datacenters (and eventaully, learning to fabricate chips). If I'm correct, the next acquisition will be in some chip or solar-panel fabrication bottleneck.
To be clear, I'm not advocating for this mission. (Though I do think the space-based datacenter pitch has gotten more scepticism than it deserves. For realistic interest-rate and terrestrial-delay values, assuming ongoing AI demand, it breaks even for surprisingly-proximate radiator-mass values. Obviously more problems beyond my toy model to solve. But I expected the math to say fuck you out the gate.)
I'm saying this is a good working theory for explaining–and predicting–Musk and SpaceX's actions. Mars explains why SpaceX's engines burn methane. Dyson sphere explains why xAI is building massive datacenters and now finding acquisition targets to fill them with.
> building a Dyson sphere
So they are trying to take everyone’s money in bigger and bigger chunks until there is no economy left but hype.
Folks, if we spent 1/10th of the time and money we spend on this bullshit on taking care of people’s basic needs and education we would be far closer to the sci-fi future everyone seems so motivated to get to. Covid and the Trump cult seem to have broken almost everyone’s brains and we’re all gonna pay for the hubris.
https://archive.is/gbdJ8
I remember using Cursor earlier this year and it was so unoptimised for average machines. An LLM provider extension on VS Code is so much better. I don't get why is Cursor still around. Is it because it was first to market?
It looks like this is just an "option" to acquire Cursor at that price? Implying they only plan to exercise the option under certain conditions (such as, one might presume, Cursor actually being worth that much. As right now it definitely isn't.)
I know Cursor is getting economically not so viable compared to OpenAI and Anthropic offerings but with a deal like this they could also offer $200/mo plans that are attractive. Obviously _if_ their models are good. We have to see!
I guess it makes more sense than shoe brands pivoting to GPU provider.
Spacex already owns Twitter and xai, trying to post-rationalize with justification like they have servers doesn't make a whole lot of sense. It's all accounting at this point.
Guardian Link:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/apr/21/spacex-cu...
Welp this just removes them if they get bought (and likely also if they coordinate even more with an Elon company) from my list of tools I’ll use.
Crazy a fork of vscode is worth 60B. What’s vscode worth to Microsoft? 200B?
Never bet against Elon.
Surely you mean xAI right, surely it's a typo? Right...?
The same "mistake" that SpaceX bought 10% of Tesla CyberTruck?
Wait are they all Musk's companies? Is it a pattern?
/s obviously
Both statements would be correct. SpaceX bought xAI a couple months ago.
Some random article on the topic: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cq6vnrye06po
Damn, I somehow managed to miss that. Not sure if that's more ridiculous or not but thanks for the clarification!
xAI is working on virtualizing white collar workers. I'm guessing this is part of that.
See also: companies buying up the Slack and email archives of defunct startups, for training data.
I thought the world was agentic vibe coding. No idea needed. If this world materialized, then there would be no need for an IDE.
Hard to know whether development will remain an activity that lives on a local machine for much longer.
This could be a lot of money to spend to acquire users that may not be sticky.
I wonder if they are actually 'acquiring' some of the existing contracts between Cursor and X/Y/Z rather than the product itself.
Is this Cursor the product? Or AnySphere the company?
0 to $60B in less than 4 years ... impressive!
I'd be interested in this breakdown - what % of that is cursor's product(tech x customer) vs future tokens
Gross. We need more anti trust enforcement. Large incumbents killing all competition will make us weaker over time.
Last day for me using Cursor at work, I prefer to move to Codex and Claude Code that touch anything related to Elon.
Elon is determined to take down Altman
SpaceX, xAI, Collosus data centers, next space compute, X, Starlink and soon Cursor to join 2, 3 & 4 together?
This looks like SpaceX playing catchup to Claude and OpenAI that already provide coding solutions.
Complete waste of $60B. It's just a prompt+tools. This is how you destroy SpaceX from the inside.
That’s unfortunate. I’m not interested in using Musk associated products anymore than I have to.
60B for Composer 2…that is built from Kimi K2… what ever happened to “Grok being the best”?
Am I the only one that thinks Composer is really good, when you factor in the speed and the cost?
I don’t doubt it is. End of the day, it’s a fine tuned Kimi. They tried to hide it and making their work sound more impressive than it is. It’s easy to have stuff be cheap when you don’t have to train your own model from scratch.
Composer is clearly dumber than the rest but then I only ask it dumb questions and it answers them really quickly.
yes, you are
Clearly the intention behind this is to get access to user data (user code).
I don't know how they are going to justify the xAI acquisition with this...
Space rocket company acquires a text editor and tuned llm? Because......
I don't understand why a space company should buy a glorified IDE?
Ridiculous, this is some shady deal. Cursor's worth is around 150k :D.
If Twitter was when Musk jumped the shark this is definitely him sticking the landing.
some plausible analysis here on motivations https://x.com/0xrwu/status/2046721359263285478
every wrapper either gets acquired or stays long enough to be a zombie startup
If I stop paying for Cursor, will they threaten to sue like Twitter does?
What are the implications of this for Cursor being model agnostic?
You sour pusses are wrong. This is a smart move that amplifies a brilliant team from cursor with serious compute, raising the odds Elon can get to the frontier, which is worth so much these numbers will all look like a drop in the bucket.
SpaceX is going to have an AI coding "oops" in space.
So I have to switch away from cursor? Any recommendations?
my only gripe rn is grok is still a shitty model to use. yeh it scores nearby openai and anthropic on benchmarks, but my personal experience has been underwhelming
I think cursor is worth literally $0.
It is a complete rip off of someone else’s work vs code and is literally no better than copilot.
Makes me mad it’s even allowed to be a commercial company ripping off vs code.
It is a completely idiotic purchase. Literally one person could recreate the entire IDE themselves… like it’s so easy to make.
And there’s no brand loyalty to it because people want the best llm they don’t care about the little plugin so no moat
You sour pusses are wrong. This is a smart move. Cursor has a brilliant, capable team with serious model chops who will be able to boost the odds of AGI success. They also come with a revenue generating machine.
I imagine none of us had this on our bingo cards.
If this is an acquihire, it doesn't compute for me (though I can't say I understand how things work in the world of the 60B level). LLMs are new enough that nobody has a big enough headstart to warrant a 60B personnel change.
The IPO angle also doesn't make sense. Musk cultists were gonna buy anyway; this doesn't change that. And for everyone else, who wants to pay down debt on an acquisition whose effect will almost certainly not be palpable in mainstream circles, if at all?
I don't fully understand the influence that comes with SpaceX subsidies and government contracts, but I gotta believe that rounding up non-lab AI chops are on that agenda?
The exact options - 60B for acquisition (obviously not a cash deal, right?) or 10B for unspecified services rendered... also don't make sense for either of the first two.
Is this just a way of the government securing contractors by proxy that wouldn't pass muster if done through the normal channels?
Our of $60B, what does that make VSCode priced at?
I really don't think Cursor is going to be acquired for $60 billion. That price is absolutely absurd. I agree their harness is excellent, but it's hard to argue they have an overwhelming competitive advantage over rivals like Claude Code and Codex, or open-source alternatives like OpenCode. What's left then is Cursor's data, talent, and user base — but even accounting for all of that, the price is still ridiculous.
I've personally watched a lot of developers around me (myself included) who were enthusiastic Cursor users when it first launched gradually migrate over to Claude Code and Codex. And I don't think this is just happening in my bubble.
My guess is this is some kind of strategic play ahead of SpaceX's upcoming IPO — an attempt to get a higher valuation stamped on the company. But I'll say it again: $60 billion is absolutely absurd.
Makes sense. Cursor is extremely overhyped as well.
immediately unsubscribed from Cursor. Hello OpenCode!
same. moving to zed
Well I am glad I built my own IDE now so I can switch off of cursor and don’t have to participate in training the model of an aspiring monopoly.
DM me if you want an invite. I am keeping it to a small on purpose.
why dmes spacex need an ide?
At 50 employees, that is $1.2B an employee
Don't see how this works out financially.
I think this is great and helps x.ai building Grok Code and Grok Computer.
It is good to have more competition in this area.
So there aren’t just 2 big players which also have their ideological flaws.
is this just to drive up the buy price for others while having no intention of buying it themselves?
SpaceX’s announcement (non paywalled):
https://x.com/spacex/status/2046713419978453374
"SpaceXAI and @cursor_ai are now working closely together to create the world’s best coding and knowledge work AI.
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 has also given SpaceX the right to acquire Cursor later this year for $60 billion or pay $10 billion for our work together."
Is this to force cursor to use xAI
cursor was interesting about a year ago
Time to cancel my subscription.
reading this thread, I seem to be the only cursor user on earth on the free tier using tab-completes.
Good, I needed a reason to cancel my Cursor subscription.
I associate Musk with being user hostile, unreliable, meme oriented and disruptive in the worst sense; I’d like my work tools without that please.
shoe company goes AI, rocket company goes AI, it is market signaling.
That would make more sense if SpaceX hadn't absorbed xAi just 2 months ago. The rocket company already went AI. The signal was sent already. This is just a bad business decision.
Can't wait for this idiotic bullshit bubble to burst.
A rocket company buying a so so overvalued coding AI company is a joke even worse than the 2000s internet pet food companies were
So Cursor to the moon?
RIP Cursor.
but What exactly is SpaceX doing in the AI Space (Pun Intended) and Why?
these are weird times...
See also:
https://www.reuters.com/technology/spacex-says-it-has-option...
Personally, I have been granted the option to buy Tesla for $30 trillion by the end of this year or pay $500 billion for a partnership. It'll all happen, I swear.
Looking forward to seeing where this goes, both companies have a reputation for engineering excellence.
Seriously DONT CHANGE THE FUCKING POST TITLE AFTER SOMEONE HAS COMMENTED
Why SpaceX and not xAI?
Because spacex already bought xai.
$60 billion with a B???
Absolutely retarded and absurdly overpriced for a tool that's basically fallen out of use. They're just trying to do anything they can to justify a crazy IPO valuation so they can keep pumping money into xAI.
Of all Musk’s “companies” this makes least sense to me. xAI is at least in the AI space, X.com is a true tech company and Tesla is also closer to AI than SpaceX.
Guess SpaceX is the only one with the money “available”.
You're forgetting that xAI and X.com have both already been folded into SpaceX (First xAI acquired X.com, then xAI got acquired by SpaceX, both mergers were all-stock acquisitions so they were done with funny money). So when people say "SpaceX" now that does encompass both xAI and X.com as well. The reason Tesla wouldn't do this is because Tesla is a public company so it's more difficult for them to do insane shit without being sued.
I think perhaps you missed the previous news that SpaceX acquired xAI. Thus this is basically just xAI buying Cursor.
Ahh, yeah I did miss that.
Time to switch
Every now and then I feel like I got a handle on AI and it makes sense. Then something like this happens and either my whole concept of it is wrong, or this makes no sense and is insane.
A text editor?
Is is me or the world of finance is going crazy. Or maybe it has always been.
SpaceX, a rocket company owned by Elon Musk bought xAI, an AI company also owned by Elon Musk for... reasons. Don't give me the datacenters in space narrative, we all know it is bullshit.
It is then buying the option to buy a company for which the only contribution is a glorified VSCode plugin and the reselling of other companies LLM services at an absurd price. I understand that it is more complicated than that but 60 fucking billions, that's the GDP of a small country!
And now, Elon Musk intends to IPO SpaceX, which means he expect people to buy into all this bullshit. And considering that unlike me and judging by his wealth, he seems to be really good at understanding the market, so he is likely to be right.
anyone still using cursor?
My Hair's on Fire! OMG, Republicans Capitalist OMG Pigs! OMG!
I'm still loyal to Anthropic. Not perfect but I trust them. End of story.
Does that mean code that astronauts' lives depend on will be vibe-coded slop? Nothing is too insane any more these days.
So I won’t use stuff by Elon Musk, what is the next best alternative please
Ohh it’s not an acquisition, it’s right to buy later for $60B or we a work together for $10B. Huh?
That’s it. After 2 years with Cursor, I’m switching to Claude only. Fuck Elon.
really happy for the Cursor team but at the same time disappointed that the biggest non-lab AI company couldn't exist on their own.
shows how intense the power laws are around ai and how much of a capital game it is.
The real question is how the fuck is cursor worth $60B
Musk must be chronically surrounded by yes-men.
Dude, cursor's not even worth a billion.
Only 1.5 Twitters. Sort of pathetic!
Okay, now how do I cancel/refund the remaining portion of my pre-paid year subscription? No way in hell I will support a company owned by Elon Musk.
Another one bites the dust.
lol. Top business genius being a genius again, I see.
another 60 billion to save a failed AI endeavor.
these valuations are total madness
wat
wat
Wait... dude just use openclaw.
Like, 3 months ago: ok maybe....
But dear... just use openclaw.
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And you created this account just to say that?
Edit: wow, it seems to be a bot doing some PR ops for Vercel.
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Fuck. This is a problem.
Are there not a bunch of cursor clones? Seems like a really simple product to build
The moat is money. And now they’ll have access to plenty of it.
Time to download windsurf
60 Billion for an IDE?
I guess back to Jetbrains it is.
Is X political ideology extending to cursor?
I don't know but I won't touch anything Elon owns with a 10,000 foot pole.
Question for Musk hating people - I understand why you hate Musk, but why is doing business with Altman or Microslop any better?
Not much better but at least they're not speaking at far right rallys and lending support to fascist parties across Europe.
What really puzzles me is how years of woke insanity are forgotten / forgiven, but a nazi salute is not. Remember how Microslop employees used to start their presentations with a list of Native American tribes who owned the land their office was at? Maybe people don't read Orwell anymore... that stuff was straight out of 1984.
I see being downvoted on my question already - can people who hate Musk not see the difference between asking and supporting?
What microsoft employees do in the privacy of their own meeting rooms has basically no effect on me. When Elon Musk appears along side Tommy Robinson in my city, espousing racist "great replacement" to a crowd of drunken thugs and suggesting my neighbours and friends are problem to be expunged from society, well frankly he can fuck right off.
https://youtu.be/PraEcNDGSqY?t=310 privacy of their own meeting rooms? Let's not forget about her stating for the audience her race, sex, and skin color. Those are very important things in the context of a programming conference :) There is no baked in reverse racism here at all. Only those awful right wingers do racism.
Time to delete Cursor then. I refuse to support someone that is doing so much active damage to democracy and cut funding for some of the poorest people on the planet.
Government subsidized purchase of a private company. Fantastic. All funded by the taxpayer to send rockets to a dead planet and to burn up all the energy on our alive but suffering planet.
Point to any government subsidies for SpaceX - or do you think your salary is a subsidy and everything you do at work is worthless to your employer?
SpaceX has paid for contracts to deliver services to the government and those services have saved the government billions of dollars compared to the alternative.
You're claiming that SpaceX has not received governmnent subsidies, grants, and contracts?
> those services have saved the government billions of dollars compared to the alternative
Source? All I can find is some guy saying it.
And it doesn't really matter what they've saved. It doesn't excuse conflicts of interest.
A top government employee in the previous regime. Not some guy. You yourself can check and see that launch pricing for the government is cheaper from everyone apart from Boeing these days.
Turns out capping costs help. (See SLS) (See Europa Clipper)
Contracts aren't subsidies and you know that. It's straight up dishonesty to mix them up.
McDonald's and Burger King are government contractors
I said "government subsidized" and then later expanded out to subsidies, grants, and contracts. You know what I meant. There isn't dishonesty remotely anywhere.
And the point of conflict of interest still stands and is unargued while we still argue the meaning of "government subsidized".
The other day my colleague asked Grok:
"Please estimate Elon's IQ based on his timeline"
It estimated 115-130. A decision like this points to the lower end.