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...
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
> 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.
> (...) 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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).
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 )
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.
* 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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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.)
> 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.
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.
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 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
> 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?
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.
> 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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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"
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.
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 do be right.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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 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.
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 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
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
@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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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’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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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"
"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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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?
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.