Wow. Tech CEOs and investors have completely lost touch with what money really is worth.<p>How is a VSCode fork and a open weight LLM fine-tune worth $60B?<p>One would think Elon would learn his lesson after overpaying for Twitter and then having to merge his failures together to stay afloat. But no, more cash into the burning pile.
> How is a VSCode fork and a open weight LLM fine-tune worth $60B?<p>Ignoring future business ideas, Cursor reported reached $2 billion+ annualized revenue run rate in 2026, doubling from 2025. Recent financing rounds reached high-end valuation between $30 billion and $50 billion.
I don't think it's about worth any more at this point; it seems more about money laundry and manipulating the market. They are shifting power between each other and create an illusion of a healthy economy, not carrying about the damage they create for everyone else.
Yes, and Whatsapp was just a messaging app with a stupid Erlang backend. These deals are not about the tech, they buy the business, that includes the brand and the user base. Whether we think it's worth that amount is indeed up for discussion.
he doesn't act like he regrets buying Twitter/X/Xitter<p>maybe he's getting value from this? (also the deal was essentially secured with Tesla stock, so who knows what did he actually pay)
Buying Twitter played a key part in getting Trump re-elected, so I think Musk figures he got what he wanted in terms of deregulation, dropped prosecution, and damage to his political opponents.<p>This deal is different: SpaceX is heading for an IPO which is now complicated by xAI becoming a subsidiary. Cursor is actually popular and I’m sure this is all stock-based so as long as investors believe that those users stick to xAI it’ll juice the entire SpaceX IPO. I am skeptical but these days the market seems to be driven by a country-club full of guys in Connecticut who are constantly hyperventilating on X so maybe from that angle it’s just another way he’s getting what he wanted from Twitter.
branding ... mindshare
So SpaceX bought a $60B Option on Cursor, plus a bunch of services, for $10B.<p>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.<p>It seems less crazy to me through this lens. A straight acquisition, today, at $60B would in fact be crazy.
What's crazy is that a company that sells an IDE (that's not even a particularly good one compared to competitors like JetBrains) integrating some AI plugins could be worth more than $60B...
In terms of IDE yeah it is not that great.<p>I do have Copilot in VSCode and Cursor.<p>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.<p>They have some tricks on managing file access that others don’t.
Cynics on HN easily dismiss AI service wrappers (and many of them are in fact overblown and not worth their own code). But writing a genuinely good harness with lots of context engineering and solid tool integration is in fact not that easy. The biggest issue is that model providers also see what the community likes and often move on with their own offerings that are tailored to their own models, potentially at the training stage. So even if you have the best harness for something today, unless you are also a frontier LLM provider, there's zero guarantee you will still be relevant in the future. More like the opposite.
> But writing a genuinely good harness with lots of context engineering and solid tool integration is in fact not that easy.<p>true, but its not worth $60 billion fucking quid.
> (...) writing a genuinely good harness with lots of context engineering and solid tool integration is in fact not that easy.<p>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.<p>The value and the room for innovation on the harness side seems to be underestimated.<p>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.<p>Very interesting dynamics.
Isn't Codex TUI available for free though? Besides others like Pi and OpenCode of course.
Sure, but is it worth 60 billion?
Definitely not if someone frames it "shitty IDE with some plugins".<p>But if someone frames it "engineering talent that knows how to make LLMs even better at software development than competition" it might.<p>I see with my own work it works so it is not like Devin that was basically a scam that was valued at 10 billion.<p>In this kind of context yeah feels like it is quite possible to be worth 60 billion.
Their annualized revenue run rate is on track to surpass $6 billion by the end of 2026 so it's not ridiculous for them to be valued at $60 billion at some point. Also worth noting that if they do get access to SpaceX compute, they could start pretraining their own model. Composer is good but its built on top of Kimi 2.5.
SpaceX thinks so.
SpaceX the space rocket and internet satellite company? Or SpaceX the Elon Musk piggy bank used to buy up all his financial misadventures?
You mean Musk thinks xAI need to be shown making AI investments to keep getting outside funding.
Because of user count? Same was said about instagram. with all due respect, devs don't seem to understand business
Or devs are just different users who care about different things and have different experiences.<p>Reminds me of the famous dropbox post: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224</a> - I don't even know if dropbox still exists in 2026 but i'm still happily using rsync and mailing things around because dropbox has just absolutely never worked reliably for me, unlike my 2007 gmail account.<p>Likewise, if it were up to me, instagram and any business whose business model revolves around ads would be banned (because ads would be banned because advertisement is harmful in general).
It's fine to care about different stuff, but if you want to understand the valuation of a company, then your experience only goes so far. it's not going to make any sense unless you broaden your scope of interest to the metrics that impact valuation.
But do devs know a which IDE is better? That seems to be a rather important question here.
Who are the users? I haven't seen many pro users using cursor
Companies. Single devs can jump around IDEs and TUIs more easily but that’s not what companies tend to do.
<p><pre><code> you've formed an opinion on the value of the company without knowing how many users it has? Kind of proves my point, no?</code></pre>
General Motors is worth $72B.
Their revenue <i>and</i> growth justified it. Plus, for xAI that could be the only way to get a SOTA coding model they want so hard.
the IDE has little value<p>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<p>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...<p>yes. plus $2b ARR, 1m DAU
can't X recreate one with 1B?
As an IDE, honestly I can't even understand it needs more than 1M to create
It's not about the tech, it's about the pool of users that use Cursor, by acquiring Cursor you get a bunch of users + subscribed and already paying pool of people instead of just rebuilding something from scratch and convincing people to change their tools with a new one
Cursor sells its own models as well now
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?<p>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.
What's the advantage over github copilot actually?
They seem to have all the same access and features (except for this sheduling thing?) for cheaper.
> users who haven't caught on yet<p>They are catching up fast!<p><a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/chamath-palihapitiya-ai-costs-tokens-8090-2026-3" rel="nofollow">https://www.businessinsider.com/chamath-palihapitiya-ai-cost...</a>
Tellingly, from his full post: "Mostly because I do not yet see an equivalent uptick in productivity or revenue..."<p><a href="https://x.com/chamath/status/2029634071966666964" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/chamath/status/2029634071966666964</a><p>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.
> users who haven't caught on yet<p>If you think this of users who use cursor then I don’t think you’ve used cursor much at all.
I've used Cursor a lot. Until recently it was mandated by my employer. I can't see the attraction at all. It's a (bad IMO) IDE integration, a reasonable model (but I still generally preferred Claude over Composer), and a bunch of other tools that weren't very developed (like cloud environments and multi-agent orchestration). It's a suite of tools, most of which have superior alternatives. What am I missing?
What do you mean?<p>Only the foundation model companies offer cheap/subsidized compute.<p>If you're an app layer company, you're offering a 10x worse deal to your customers.<p>Foundation model companies are willing to lose money to win loyalty. Remains to be seen if it'll work.
API rates are the real rates. Subscription costs are the "first hit is free" subsidized pricing.
Welcome to the era of vibe-based valuations
* MicroSoft is shaking in the corner lol
AI yielding such incredible cost savings. /s
Cursor is useless
> that's not even a particularly good one compared to competitors like JetBrains<p>Massive understatement calling it "a not particularly good plugin". If it were that simple there wouldn't be a need to even do this.
Paying $10B for the option is also crazy though. Paying $10B for the thing outright and not just an option would be absurdly high.
Is this cash or compute? Elon has one of the world's biggest compute clusters spun up, and little inference demand to speak of.<p>Trading billions worth of idle compute, in exchange for a high-strike call option on the #3 player in the most-promising-vertical for AI, plus (presmuably) some access to their data, starts to sound like not a bad trade. Especially if you're pre-committed to betting your entire rocket company on winning in AI, and you're currently in sixth or seventh place.
> you're pre-committed to betting your entire rocket company on winning in AI<p>SpaceX has invested a small amount as a share of its value in XAI, and could survive the loss of its investment.
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.
If it's not in an 8K filing it isn't real.
Problem is basically, that if the option works out (Cursor truly has the talent to train a frontier model on SpaceX's infrastructure, and were simply lacking the infra before) the fair price would be way way more than $60B.<p>OpenAI tried to acquire Windsurf last year for $3B and couldn't.
> Cursor truly has the talent to train a frontier model on SpaceX's infrastructure, and were simply lacking the infra before<p>Wild conjecture.
Seems like Elon's move is two fold<p>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.
Is that so or would those 10B be discounted from the purchase?<p>not that it isn't wild regardless
It reportedly has a $2B ARR, and a 5x multiplier doesn't seem insane to me, but who knows, honestly
But it's paying a 5x ARR multiplier for the right to buy at a 30x multiplier.
They have 2B ARR because their business model is about selling models cheaper than they cost.<p>The main frenzy with Cursor started when you could access Anthropic models practically for free.<p>Otherwise it is just VS Code.
> Otherwise it is just VS Code.<p>This is a bit simplistic. It's the VS Code that <i>everyone</i> 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.<p>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.<p>It doesn't sound like a bad plan to me, financial shenanigans or not.
xAI needs a dev tool to compete with Codex and Claude Code.<p>Cursor needs their own 1st party backend model.<p>Sounds like a match made in heaven.
2B ARR at what cost base?
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.<p>SpaceX spending $1B a month on various AI services seems ~plausible<p>(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...<p>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 <i>frontier</i> models, but they are training their own models. They just aren't at frontier level yet. The $60B/$10B deal looks like a bet that this is a capital/GPU constraint rather than a capability one.
Those other companies wouldn't also toss in a purchase option.<p>But I agree that it's hard to articulate what Cursor services you could blow this much money on.<p>Maybe it is all just an option! Or maybe they get a bunch of IP either way?
Plausible how? Explain please.
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.<p>The cluster’s already paid for, so likely in the $2B range for operating cash needs. Not more than $5.<p>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.<p>Upshot - I bet there’s an MS/oAI deal on IP on the back of this; meanwhile the cluster goes brrr.
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.<p>So for me it’s more of a data deal - Elon buying himself some insight into codebases and real dev usage patterns? Oh finally someone to use his dirty data centres
Cursor is still the best I’ve used are there others I should try?
I've been using Kilo Code (VS Code Plugin) for the last few days, and it does most of what I liked in Cursor without tying me to their particular subscription.<p>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).
People keep saying this and they don't understand how businesses work.<p>Cursor has 1B in enterprise revenue. It doesn't matter if people can clone their product, those deals don't move slowly
> Cursor has 1B in enterprise revenue.<p>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<p>This was a similar play for twitter by the same person<p>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 )
If you pay 10B for options at 60B and the strike is 8B you ... just lost 10B. Thats it.<p>Add emotional hedges if needed but they are just emotional not financial.<p>Your argument is based on an assumption that cursor cannot lose value. Even if the market says it has.<p>No free lunch: an option is a bet for both sides. Zero sum.
What services could SpaceX possibly be buying from Cursor that would cost $8bn?
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.<p>I'd even go so far as to say that any competitors that are direct (windsurf, kiro, etc.) aren't even in the same universe. Cursor is just so much better, faster, has better features (plan and debug mode), and squeezes much better results/code out of the same models. They absolutely have some secrete sauce that the other options just don't have.
Cursor is my favorite of the VS forks. Agree that it delivers better plans than others. I prefer using Claude in Cursor over CC CLI when I am heads down going through bugs. I am disappointed in how "little value" in token use Cursor provides compared to others.
Do you have examples? I'm curious.
It has shown surprising stickiness. Occupying some middle ground between full adoption and still ~in the code.<p>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.
Do you really think anyone is using AWS Kiro or Google Antigravity? They are not real competitors in the slightest.
knee-jerk is that it's weird, but makes sense:<p>* X will have a total of ~2GW of GPU sometime this year largely not doing much outside of 'grok is this true'<p>* despite no longer being in vogue with consumer devs Cursor still has a lot of developer data that can assist in building a model<p>* Cursor have decent enterprise relationships (while for xAI it is ~zero) and that's where the real revenue for llms + agents is<p>* 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).<p>* Cursor the product covers the gamut from lovable-style prompt-to-app, an IDE, cli and bugbot<p>* X are using "x bucks" to pay for a potential later acquisition which are arguably overvalued based on the space x IPO hype<p>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'<p>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.<p>I'm sad that I even know that.
I wouldn't be surprised if those enterprise relationships evaporate after this acquisition. There's a reason why xAI has zero enterprise customers.
> There's a reason why xAI has zero enterprise customers<p>I’m curious where you pull these stats from
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.<p>xAI is not, and was not that bad, it's just everybody ignores it for anything serious due to obvious reasons.
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.<p>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<p>>decent enterprise relationships<p>I guess. 60B worth of "relationships" though?
> hand out free top end model coding access for a bit and you'll very rapidly have developer data<p>They tried this - grok was free on openrouter for a while
It's more useful to have access your full code base compared to having access to only your input and the output they generate.
Marketing push was there too, everyone was saying Grok had jumped Claude and Codex, yet I never got that when using all 3.
But imagine if they handed out free access to Kimi or GLM-5. Actually, I still wouldn't use it, because I avoid APIs that say they hold on to data.
And presumably they got data from it...
But if the developers are to presumably use the model you give out, what data are you going to get from them thats useful?
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>$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.
> Cursor still has a lot of developer data that can assist in building a model<p>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.<p>> Cursor have decent enterprise relationships (while for xAI it is ~zero)<p>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.
Cursor has released a technical paper [1] and several blog posts [2] describing the continued pretraining and RL they do on top of Kimi K2.5.<p>It is true that they were not transparent about the base model that they used until the model slug was discovered by a Twitter user via the API.<p>[1]: <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.24477" rel="nofollow">https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.24477</a>
[2]: <a href="https://cursor.com/blog/real-time-rl-for-composer" rel="nofollow">https://cursor.com/blog/real-time-rl-for-composer</a>
Kimi is the base, but they've done tons of finetuning on top to produce a really good completions model.
I think it also represents a bet that in some sense Cursor's model capabilities are resource limited rather than talent limited. If that's true, $60B will end up being a bargain. If not true, well it's an expensive lesson but that's the nature of things.
Forgot that claude is burning good will from it's own capacity constraints, leading to periods of 'dumbness'. It's a catalyst to cause me and others to switch back to cursor if they can get their act together
> despite no longer being in vogue with consumer devs Cursor still has a lot of developer data that can assist in building a model<p>care to share more about this?
You forgot to consider whether all this is worth $60B.
> <i>forgot to consider whether all this is worth $60B</i><p>I see two possibilities:<p>(1) SpaceX is paying with stock; and<p>(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.
it's not dollars it's X bucks
> despite no longer being in vogue with consumer devs<p>Is it in vogue with enterprise devs?
British?<p>“Cursor have” and “Cursor are” is awkward to read.
Now you know what it feels like to be British reading practically any other English source on the Internet.
That's not British, that's just old people
hn is this true
Why would Elon do this if he knows full well the names X-Code and Codex are already taken?
> <i>Why would Elon do this if he knows full well the names X-Code and Codex are already taken?</i><p>Steal their Twitter usernames anyway, just like he did mine.
Story time please lol
My @valentine got changed to @valentine_ without my consent.<p><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20150822195811/twitter.com/valentine" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20150822195811/twitter.com/valen...</a><p><a href="https://twitter.com/valentine_" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/valentine_</a><p>(If any lawyers read this and feel up for taking this on contingency, I don't think I'm difficult to contact.)
Wow and it's not even used. I guess they took it to resell on their handle marketplace?
He probably had plans to use it for some sort of Ender's Game crap but then realized that grok wasn't smart enough to do it.
The word Grok comes from the novel Stranger in a Strange Land where the main character is Valentine.
More likely is that they took a bunch of good usernames to sell - if you pay for their most expensive subscription one of the features is that you can rent a better username now.
It's extremely unlikely Musk was personally involved in any way in the decision on the username.
> lawyers<p>Best I can do is pretend to be a lawyer and forward all of ur stuff to ChatGPT Free. U down?
Did you actually own it though, per their TOS? What title was granted, if so? Also, and no offense intended truly, I think your having a grand total of 2 followers after 19 years was apart of their risk calculus in this seizure.
Twitter's official position is that accounts/usernames are not assets of their users (this isn't an Elon-era argument, from what I understand). I found this out when they argued in Alex Jones' bankruptcy hearings that his account should not be repossessed/auctioned off, an argument Alex supported since that's where he's been moving his audience over to to keep the cash rolling in no matter what happens.<p><a href="https://fortune.com/2024/11/27/x-twitter-elon-musk-account-ownership-alex-jones-bankruptcy/" rel="nofollow">https://fortune.com/2024/11/27/x-twitter-elon-musk-account-o...</a>
> <i>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.</i><p>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.<p>I had 33,300+ tweets in 2015, and a lot of that was private interaction with friends.
Turns out that when you are using some oligarch's platform, you don't own jack.<p>This is digital feudalism, and the billionaires have seized the means of communication.
Billionaires have always owned the means of communication (just look at the Salzbergers, Murdochs, etc).<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
Laughed very hard at this. Well done.
Feel like you must have made this observation a while ago and just waited for your moment.
Best I can do is CurXr
XCursor (Linux nerds know)
Oh man, not sure if it's a good or bad memory... but that was the first linux bug I experienced as a newbie. Not so much a bug, but an unknown config I had to change so my first monitor would stop turning off when I moved the cursor to the second monitor.<p>Circa 2003
Why not call it Xcodex instead?
Because Xurxor is free! If that's not a winning brand, I don't know what is.
Musk might still miss his 1999 startup, 'x.com'.
I guess the hope is that combining two sub-par coding models (xAI's grok + cursor's composer) and combining the data they have access to, they can build something that can compete with OpenAI / Anthropic in the coding space...<p>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).<p>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.
Wasn’t composer trained on Kimi? Has anyone had a chance to compare the latest Kimi model to composer?
Composer-2 is based on Kimi K2.5, but with extensive RL. Cursor estimated 3x more compute on their RL than the original K2.5 training run (some details in <a href="https://cursor.com/blog/composer-2-technical-report" rel="nofollow">https://cursor.com/blog/composer-2-technical-report</a>).<p>Composer-2 seems very useful in Cursor, while K2.6 according to AA seems to be a really useful general model: <a href="https://artificialanalysis.ai/articles/kimi-k2-6-the-new-leading-open-weights-model" rel="nofollow">https://artificialanalysis.ai/articles/kimi-k2-6-the-new-lea...</a>
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<p>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.
Kimi is my favorite of the Chinese models.<p>I found it much more consistent than glm or minimax
Which version of Kimi and served from where?
On the other hand, I found MiniMax M2.7 a reasonable model that I could trust.<p>I guess really depends on tastes
Can s.o. please explain, does the Cursor EULA really allow it to train on my code, as I really don't expect Claude Code or CODEX to do it either?
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Guess I'll be looking for a replacement for Cursor now...<p>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.
Zed - <a href="https://zed.dev/" rel="nofollow">https://zed.dev/</a><p>Integrates a lot of agents (I use it with OpenRouter and directly with Pi) natively, is fast (you don't realise how laggy VSCode and its forks are).<p>Biggest disadvantage: lack of extensions. Lots of quality of life missing (e.g. gitignore integration to add/append gitignore files for different languages).
any IDE you like and Claude code - i have no idea why you'd want to use something like Cursor, it's time came and went.
Because cursor gives you access to tons of different models, not just the Claude models.
Not to mention the only company that would have any legitimate interest in acquiring Cursor would be Microsoft since they could just merge VSCode and Cursor into one product at very little cost.
Ironically I cancelled cursor a few days ago. I went back to good old VSCode and just use the Claude code and codex extensions.
(disclaimer: I work at ampcode)<p>Give the oracle at amp a go :) Our TUI is really nice as well. Get in touch for some credits.
Zed
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.
I was planning to sign up to Copilot, since their pricing was per request not per token.<p>Has that changed now?
Consider Nimbalyst, its a free visual workspace for Claude Code and Codex that has visual editing of markdown, mockups, diagrams, code with your agents with WYSYWIG diffs as well as task management and kanban session management tied into your agents. Its got a files/plan/editing mode and an agent/sessions mode.
I briefly used Cursor but stopped and went back to VSCode after the 3.0 rewrite when they ditched it.
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.<p>Maybe I was missing something, but I do not understand how it is worth sixty billion dollars.
It's not. It's a glorified code editor with no moat. Those are (massive) bubble prices.
Glad I’m not the only one who feels this way. Even though I personally use Cursor, there’s no way it’s even a fraction of $60B
Why do you use it? Genuine question, I want to know what I'm missing.<p>I guess I don't really understand what it buys you over just running vanilla VS Code and Codex.
My employer pays for Cursor and Claude but not Codex. I often find Claude dumb (yes, even Opus), thus I'm using Cursor with GPT-5.4. If you have Codex, you don't miss anything.
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<p>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.<p>Seriously, try other tools! if only to get a more balanced perspective.<p>This all being said, its been a long time since I last tried cursor... I'll give it a go.
I use the cursor cli, not the IDE. Why? Someone else is paying for it.
It's 100% a fraction of $60B. That's not debatable it's just simply fact.
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.
Let’s buyback my friends who invested in that thing and they will help pump my IPO
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 mean, technically they also re-sell AI tokens. Unsure if that’s with a markup or a discount.
I do think the Codex harness is a bit better than others.
Doesn't make a ton of difference with OpenAI models, but with Google and Anthropic models the difference is quite noticeable I think.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
Zed is snappy as an IDE, and ghostty for your CLI. I've done like 99% of my work in the past month just in ghostty + CC.
OpenCode and Github copilot are still options if you want the freedom to choose different models.
If you are very cost constrained, Codex. Otherwise, Claude Code.
I use VSCode and Conductor right now.
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
Lots of people in the comments talking about how this is about training data, but surely this is actually about hiring competent people after the mass exodus/firing at xAI?
Whoever thinks the talent pool is this limited that it requires offering Cursor of all places $60B is pattern-matching so hard they might as well be a quilt.
hi, im the quilt.<p>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"
They could offer $20 million dollar signing bonuses to every Cursor employee if they wanted to hire them away and it would be much cheaper.<p>They’re buying the customers and the brand.
Buying the customers seems though, when it looks like they migrate to whomever offers the steepest subsidies.
A brand he’ll promptly burn to the ground by renaming it some
garbage with an X in it.
That's quite a pricey acquihire
$60 billion worth of competent people?
Are cursor developers “competent” in creating frontier models? Aren’t they just using other company’s models?
I think composer has currently by far the best price to performance ratio for coding (not counting subsidized subscription cost by OpenAI and Anthropic).
It's based on Kimi K2, but I think it's fair to say, that their RL really sets it apart from the other open weight models.
Training any large model at scale is hard, and Cursor has trained several including agentic ones. <a href="https://cursor.com/blog/composer" rel="nofollow">https://cursor.com/blog/composer</a>
60b?
Anyone saying this is an aquahire has it backwards. SpaceX is acquiring Cursor’s <i>customers</i>, all those enterprises including <i>NVIDIA</i> itself. I believe Jenson Huang is on the record about the engineers using Cursor everyday.<p>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?<p>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 literally just spent this weekend building a full-stack Next.js project from scratch using Cursor's Composer. The productivity boost is insane compared to my workflow a year ago. $60B sounds wild, but the value it provides to solo devs is very real.
A vscode fork with a modified Kimi model under the hood for 60 billion feels absolutely insane to me.
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.<p>You should learn about securitizations. It’s actually interesting. But people talk about it colloquially and so incorrectly that it’s mind dumbing.<p>Here’s a simplified example of how you can take something and turn it into a safe investment:<p>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<p>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.<p>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).<p>What this has to do w musk or spacex I’m still not sure
Just to well actually your well actually...<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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<p>And that naive statistical reasoning is where it goes terribly wrong. You have to consider the causal process that generates that distribution!<p>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.<p>PS: Just elaborating on your point, not meant as a counterargument, I know you said the same thing.
> <i>this would be your AAA bond because odds of not getting paid out you $10 would be > 99.9%</i><p>I think you meant "the chances of getting paid", not of not getting paid.
> 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<p>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 <i>they knew</i> were little better than junk. The abuses of the subprime mortgage originators were well known long before the actual meltdown. As were those systemic risks you spoke of. They were ignored by those whose entire job it was to not ignore them, and they sold out their credibility for a quick buck. If you can't see the similarities to the present situation then I can only wish you luck.
Are you familiar with how crypto tumblers work?
It is adversely selected, but it's not debt, it's equity, so price action can go real fast and nobody will be burned except folks who soberly-or-not opted into this. Everyone _knows_ Elon is the way he is, so nobody will be _surprised_ at things. No surprise, no crisis.
They're going to force a S&P500 index listing on IPO day so we're all going to be forced to baghold this regardless of if we want to or not unless you've got $0 in any major retirement fund.
So far only Nasdaq has changed its rules and will allow fast entry in 15 trading days. S&P has not changed its rules, not yet at least. Total indexed capital of Nasdaq is 1.4T vs 16T in the S&P500. Stated reason for fast tracking is that the indices are supposed to be a broad representation of the market, and leaving a 2T company out would be a significant tracking error.<p>I do agree that the optics of this aren’t great, and it’s rather easy to be cynical about motives.
I did a bit of research on this some time ago and it's not as bad as I originally thought. Index funds would need to count only liquid float of the company. So if Space X total valuation is 2 trillion, but float is 5%, then they need to count it as 100 billion for the purposes of index weight. Still more than I want, but not catastrophic.
Oh yes, thanks for reminding me. I’m going to cash out the 401(k).
What are you basing this on?<p>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?<p>And I can change my allocation.<p>edit: Actually wait, isn't it only nasdaq 100 that's tracking it early, after 15 days rather than 3 months of trading? So 0% of my 401k is exposed to buying it quickly after IPO already, I think.
So far they're only getting fastracked into Nasdaq 100, not S&P 500.
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?)<p>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.<p>1: Perennial hot button around here Palantir did this in a more extreme fashion than most. The three founders F class shares will always be at 49.9999% of the votes and the early investors B class shares have 10 votes each as compared to the publicly traded A class shares 1 votes.
My money's all in Bitcoin <i>pats himself on the back</i>
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
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.<p>Now why is this bad? Well, if you invest in a fund that is based off of the indices, you’re going to be investing in SpaceX whether you want to or not and I certainly don’t think 15 days is enough time to sus out whether this is a stable investment worthy of being in the index, but it’ll be great…until it drags a million retirement funds down with it.
We are better now that we learned from the first time.
Ug wants to borrow ten of my best sticks in exchange for future options to buy berries from his friend Og. Og has a watertight deal with Oog to invest the sticks in a five year mammoth hunting expedition but Oog first needs berries to exchange for sticks to cover his exposure on berry-puts he’s take out against Urrrg’s remortgaged stick pile.<p>Well, I said no. Not getting burned that way again!
Learned how to get the general public to directly put their money into it this time with the ETF shenanigans
it's just codex and anthropic rapidly improved their AI when they opened themselves to Developer workflows.<p>Google and others were sitting at the corner, laughing that they gonna burn their money for no reason! they turned out to be wrong.<p>Turns out offering discounted/subsized tokens to developers massively improves your AI compared to just being a talking parrot for normal user workflow where you do not get "instant feedback" on if it worked or not.
make the point directly - you are just avoiding further justification
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Well, there are some very important differences. 1) It’s super well known what’s going on with SpaceX. Every investor should know that there’s a lot of good stuff along with some steaming hot garbage. 2) SpaceX isn’t systemic to the economy. If SpaceX and all its subsidiaries shut down and its investors got nothing back, it wouldn’t be that big of a deal.<p>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.
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.<p>I know a ton of people that use Codex, Claude, OpenCode but can't name a single person that uses Cursor or Grok that is knee deep into agentic coding.
Our company (~25 engineers) uses it across the entire engineering and product orgs, and yes we are quite deep into agentic coding. We use their cloud agents for a lot of things, e.g. automated investigations of alarms, handling most customer support issues that end up hitting engineering, pre-processsing linear tickets before humans triage them, bugbot for PR reviewed with learned knowledge. Although recently they have felt like they are pulling the rug out on our legacy plan, so we may end up switching.
I have claude and cursor. I enjoy cursor. It has shortcomings but its a strong product.
There are entire companies that bought into Cursor to adopt across all of their engineering orgs.
I don't know of Grok but we use Cursor (2000+ people, probably like 1000 devs)
I use grok for various subagent tasks. It's super cheap and 100tps. Never for actual thinking though.
Cursor's statement on the deal (which does not mention the option at all): <a href="https://cursor.com/blog/spacex-model-training" rel="nofollow">https://cursor.com/blog/spacex-model-training</a>
It never occurred to me that LLMs would be used in the development of something like rockets and space-going vehicles..<p>A sobering thought.
Yeah, maybe it'll sober some people up to stop pretending they can't see how useful LLMs are in pretty much everything. A sharp tool to wield, easy to cut yourself with, but also extremely useful.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>So they either need to build a competing model or slowly die.
I personally disagree on the first point. Claude code in a terminal with vim is much nicer. I just don’t see the need for the bloat of an IDE when the CLI versions work so damn well now.
They have Cursor CLI.<p>Cursor is essentially all the Claude Code products but without the horrible bugs of Claude Code products.<p>You can transfer from CLI to web and it actually works.
And Claude can use CLI too. It's the perfect environment for coding agents.
That's why I'm so puzzled to why Composer doesn't work better when they have the ability to train it from scratch for their agent harness! Yet it still fails to apply edits, gets confused why it can't call some commands in its sandbox, the list goes on...
They seemed to be doing fine with Kimi distillation. Not speaking from experience though, I prefer to use my editor.
Bet they will become tied to grok pretty soon.
> They are so good that they actually made Gemini usable<p>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.
I doubt they're buying it for Composer, I imagine they're buying it for the agent harness. It's arguably the best non-Anthropic agentic coding harness, and you get _all the models_ for one subscription price.
Maybe vertical integration is the main business case.<p>A controlled environment to determine effort and token usage, and to get plenty of exclusive training on code.<p>It could end up making sense. Idk if they needed to offer 60B though.
JetBrains is crying in the corner...
I've subscribed to Jetbrains all product for years. If the agent coding is going to be the next wave. Jetbrains is really behind. Even Microsoft offer better agent coding with VScode and Github copilot cli.
They’re definitely playing catch up, but the IDE integration makes interactive development really nice. Claude is good for one-shotting things, but I find JetBrains AI integration really useful for working with large codebases where I may be unfamiliar with things.<p>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.<p>The semi-recent introduction of ACP integration in the JetBrains IDEs has been a nice bridge. But now it’s confusing how everything comes together. I really hope they can survive.
Jetbrains has gone so far downhill
I honestly can’t believe how poorly JetBrains has done. I used to love PyCharm but now it’s so far behind. I still use DataGrip but it is absolute dogshit when it comes to agentic coding.
I was a massive jetbrains fan - still believe it's the best IDE even with it's massive performance issues.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Honestly unlimited codex with 5.4 high has a similar effect.<p>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 keep hearing this, but I have yet to see “so much getting done” anywhere. I’d sure like to but things seem to be pretty much be business as normal.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Not sure what problems people here have with JetBrains offerings
IntelliJ is a bit dated, and its plugins are too. I use IntelliJ all the time, in its various incarnations, but vscode is really up there now.
Cursor is great. I was using it up until recently. Then I switched oh my pi, and honestly I haven't looked back. I've also heard great things about open code.
I actually really like Composer 2. For my use case, between the planning tool, and getting it to ask a lot of clarifying questions, I regularly get very good results. I'm not doing anything complex though; mostly staying in the lane of very common web app type code.
It definitely feels sufficient for questions and planning, but it is surprisingly lacking in the actual coding department once you go for edits that need changes in multiple files. Which is surprising considering they should have been able to train it on their own harness!
Composer 2 is really good for me too.
They still just bought access to all the code you've ever fed into the model...
Is Composer 2 a bad model because Cursor are bad at training models, or because they are compute constrained? This deal will provide the answer to that question.
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Clearly the intention behind this is to get access to user data (user code).
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...<p>But it's clearly not worth 60B dollars in April 2026.
Yep. there's absolutely no way that Cursor is worth that much.<p>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.<p>Elon seems unwilling to shake off the image that he has basically no idea what he's doing.
I certainly wouldn't mind having that image if it meant being the wealthiest man in the world.
Sounds like playful comments people do about nymphomaniacs. Sure nobody would mind being the wealthiest man in the world without the downsides. Look at the guy. He's not just clueless, he's actually totally lost. Do you know how many kids he has and how many broke all contact with him, the wealthiest man in the World? Does this look like an enviable situation?
I think X paid for itself, so it worked our for him.
<p><pre><code> > 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.
</code></pre>
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<p>1: <a href="https://twitter.com/nikitabier/status/2037764895064867061" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/nikitabier/status/2037764895064867061</a>
Source?
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.
It is not cash though. SpaceX does not have $60B liquid cash instruments.<p>More accurately it is 3.4% of SpaceX at the last rumored valuation of $1.75T.
No longer rumored as they filed for IPO!<p>This is actually an amazing sweetheart deal for Cursor. Many times with these high profile acquisitions, most stock is tied to LPA's and employment at the company, and also earnout provisions. The company then finds a way to parachute them out early, which both voids the earnout and their employment, thus they never vest most of the units and the few units they do vest get bought out at 409A valuations which are typically much, much lower.<p>In the case of Cursor this is an amazing boon as SpaceX listed at an almost 100x multiple which is absolutely staggering. Had SpaceX stayed private they could have 409a'd Cursor and got it for effectively ~100M$ cash.
There's not going to be $60B of exit liquidity if/when spacex IPOs. Maybe the suckers will be banks lending against the bubble valuation.
A crazy and lucky bailout for Cursor + investors.
Forget bailout, this is a massive payday for them
Which includes OpenAI, btw.<p>Not just OpenAI, but OpenAI and OpenAI[1].<p>1: <a href="https://cursor.com/blog/series-a" rel="nofollow">https://cursor.com/blog/series-a</a>
They bought options.
The only reason I haven't switched back to VS Code is pure laziness, not using any AI features in Cursor other than resolving diffs these days.
Just because it's not discussed much on HN does not imply it is not relevant in the broader space. Cursor is still very much prevalent there with 1 mil DAU.
It makes you wonder how much of this is essentially money laundering.
60B. That's a completely crazy price. Great for Cursor, I guess. If it happens, that is.
Bloomberg reporting its an agreement to either acquire for $60B later this year or pay $10B to work together <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-04-21/spacex-says-has-agreement-to-acquire-cursor-for-60-billion" rel="nofollow">https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-04-21/spacex-sa...</a>
Here’s the spaceX announcement (non-paywalled): <a href="https://x.com/spacex/status/2046713419978453374" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/spacex/status/2046713419978453374</a>
Can you change the title?
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.
Tesla is profitable, as a matter of public record. And SpaceX is, by all accounts, extremely profitable.
SpaceX is _not_ profitable by most reasonable measurements of accounting. If you discount rocket depreciation costs and R&D, then yeah its profitable from starlink revenue.
They haven't released a 10k yet so we don't know, but from what I understand SpaceX+X.ai is not GAAP profitable.
SpaceX reuses its boosters 20+ times. Surely the depreciation is tiny when compared to the revenue of 60M+ per launch?
The entire space launch market is about $20B with multiple competitors in 2025. And by the most generous estimates it is going to be $80B by 2035. They can reuse the rockets as much as they like, the company isn’t worth $1.7T.
3x growth in ten years is the “most generous” estimate?
How can you say “The company isn’t worth X”? Isn’t the company worth exactly as much as people are willing to pay for its shares?<p>I don’t personally think Google is worth $4T but the share price says otherwise.
You’re comparing a publicly traded company where the supply demand economics have established a price to a company whose financials are not public, and is valuing itself at $1.7T and forcing everyone’s 401Ks and pension funds to fund it. Not the same thing.
When someone says that it usually means they believe the price is bound to drop.
> Isn’t the company worth exactly as much as people are willing to pay for its shares?<p>Really? We're still making claims like this in the year of our Lord 2026? People in the markets today are not predicting the real value of a company, they're gambling that the various political and financial machinations from people like Elon Musk will increase the share price enough that they can sell at a profit. The value of shares like Tesla are utterly disconnected from the value of the underlying business.
They also have to replace 20%+ of their satellite network every year.
why is that ?
They are low earth orbit satellites. Generally, the lower the orbit, the faster they decay. You could also argue that this is a benefit in that they gain updated technology with each replacement.
<i>> You could also argue that this is a benefit in that they gain updated technology with each replacement.</i><p>No, having the <i>option</i> to replace technology at your leisure would be a benefit. Being <i>forced</i> to replace your technology because it's destined to become aerosolized aluminum in less than five years is a detriment.
Planned obsolescence really only works well if someone else is paying.
The operational lifetime of their satellites is about 5 years.
Because they fall back to the ground…
low earth orbit
because of gravity
What about the R&D costs of blowing up vehicle after vehicle?
Depreciation isn't the only thing that matters. R&D, manufacturing, maintenance, fuel, launch, support staff, and I'm sure there are countless others.<p>I'm not saying they aren't profitable. I don't know, but it's definitely not a given.
Between launches alone, Starlink and Starshield, SpaceX will likely be a money printing machine for a long time.
They had like $16B in revenue last year, half from Starlink.<p>That’s just money in the door and the underwriters seem to think the business is worth $1.75T.
If underwriters think it’s worth $1.7T with a $16B revenue (not profit), they’re doing the same thing as the credit agencies did in 2008 by giving underwater mortgage backed securities a AAA rating.
They are decades ahead of their nearest competition, in multiple verticals, and their barrier to entry is a literal gravity well.
All the money they are burning is for grok. And it is not decades ahead.
BO has entered the chat New Glenn and are arguably equal to Super Heavy given they've also recovered and reused their heavy booster.<p>I think you're going to be surprised at the level of competition BO provides SpaceX in the Artemis program.
About those underwriters - to quote the venerable Charlie Munger "they will sell 'shit' as long as 'shit' can be sold".
the ability to mine the moon or asteroid belt seems extremely lucrative, the logistics of transporting materials to earth costs less than shipping them across the ocean, an astounding level of value creation.
This can’t a serious comment.<p>Did you notice the size of the Artemis rocket and the size of the payload it sends to the moon and back?<p>Do you expect there to be diamonds just laying these on the moon surface, no mining required.
There is no other mode of transportation cheaper than shipping across the ocean.
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.
Im also profitable as an individual. I made a $100 this week, which makes me worth at least $30M.
SpaceX <i>was</i> profitable before the xAI thing happened. Now I imagine they're way in the red.
As was Enron
Pretty decent video released today by Wall Street Millennial that looks at the profitability of SpaceX (as part of looking at 'Terafab') :<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSJi1oQFQzs" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSJi1oQFQzs</a>
In part thanks to SpaceX purchase of CyberTrucks.
Have you looked at their latest report?<p>They are only profitable because of subsidies. Pretty much 1:1.
SpaceX was surely more profitable before it was used to bail out Elon's xAI which was used to bailout his purchase of Twitter.
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?
Genuine question, how do you know that without a 10K? Have the filed any document that shows their finances?
Tesla’s profits and market share has been declining for the past few years and it’s basically an overpriced meme stock.
Tesla has a P/E ratio of 364.981. It's blatant fraud.
Nobody is forced to buy shares of any company. Even automatic 401k investment plans let you specify what to buy if you so choose. Perhaps you could make the argument Elon makes false promises to boost the stock price, but at the end of the day, individual investors must decide what they believe in no matter the CEO's antics.
I'm not sure I follow, here. What about this makes you think this is a shell game?
Matt Levine writes a bit about this - the Elon Musk Mars Conglomerate. And really if you're investing into e.g. SpaceX you're not investing into SpaceX you're investing into the Elon Musk Mars Conglomerate. And most people seem to want that.<p>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.<p>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.
Right, right, all those facts... that's nothing compare to Musk's genius and will! /s
> Elon Musk Mars Conglomerate<p>That’s SpaceX’s version of Tesla’s self driving car pipe dream<p>Edit - I use self-driving car and Autopilot interchangeably
It's so pipe-dreamy that I used it for an hour today through SF rush hour traffic. Clearly never going to work though, right? right???
Did you follow Tesla's published instructions on how to use it (<a href="https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/modely/en_us/GUID-2CB60804-9CEA-4F4B-8B04-09B991368DC5.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/modely/en_us/GUID-2CB6080...</a>)? 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".<p>What I see a lot of people do, unfortunately, is reconcile this contradiction by <i>not</i> following the published limitations of the "Full Self-Driving (Supervised)" product. They assume that Elon Musk wouldn't call it that if it couldn't be trusted to do what they expect. Then they get into fatal crashes, and someone sues, and Tesla argues that they can't be held accountable for bad drivers who don't follow the rules.
Your claim was that the product doesn't work, and I'm telling you it works without intervention consistently and in complicated traffic situations.<p>Any argument about how people don't pay enough attention since it isn't yet certified as a L4 system is irrelevant and tangential to the point.
Isn't Tesla FSD good enough and trending in the right direction to be called a "pipe dream"?
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Words do mean something, and you could have taken 5 minutes of research to make a reasonable counterclaim<p>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.<p>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.<p>When people say something is like enron, they dont mean it has a high PE. Its like saying someone is like Hitler and meaning they are a failed art student
> How are any of these companies at all related to Enron?<p>There's a lot of parallels:<p>* Circular transactions between companies under the same control<p>* Using SPVs to keep debt off the books<p>* The supplier funding its own customer through investment to inflate revenue on both ends<p>* Valuations driven by a hyped up narrative and decoupled from actual fundamentals
SpaceX bought nearly 20% of Cyber Trucks sold in Q4. That makes me question the level of real profitability.
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.<p>I have a suspicion the reason Musk wanted to combine SpaceX and X.ai is the latter gives him losses to write off against all that cash from the former plus a chance for a big AI payoff.
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In 2024 Gwynne Shotwell said Starlink had a $600 million positive free cash flow based on $8.2 billion in revenue. Last year revenue estimates from both SpaceX and from outside people adding up new military contracts came out to about $11.8 billion. Their fixed costs haven't gone up much, so the big unknown is development costs for military contracts. I think $2 billion is a reasonable, conservative estimate.
There's a few ways<p>They're prepping for an IPO and there have been some anonymous insider reports of the figures in the press<p>There are industry estimates<p>Much of their income comes from public contracts
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Galactic Empire has agreed to acquire a local lemonade stand in exchange for 10 death stars.
What are we even doing here.<p>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.
What sold you on Zed?
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.
I recently switched as well. Being able to work in a large monorepo without the editor freezing and taking 15+GB of RAM was a strong selling point :)
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.
No one wants an IDE, anymore. They're building a better horse.
In my opinion, the IDE interface still has not been beaten if you are working on a serious codebase where you are reviewing each diff.
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: <a href="https://github.com/swelljoe/tandem" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/swelljoe/tandem</a>).<p>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.
cursors internal model efforts have not been able to meaningfully exceed the performance of the frontier models.
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.<p>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.<p>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.
IDE is a moat with people who can code.
Trying to posture for Golden Dome, but politically he is likely locked out of the contract.
ai trends seem to mirror general coding/software trends but compressed. People used to edit programs with sed, but the ide proved to be more powerful from every perspective. cli tools always have their place for "power-users" and other specialized intermediate usecases like tui's, but in general the ide has overtaken every aspect of cli use and many devs hardly ever use the terminal.
I suspect a similar thing will happen with ai.
Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google are all investing heavily in their desktop type apps, I think the TUI phase is coming to an end.
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.
> <i>no idea what this has to do with aerospace</i><p>SpaceX is no longer SpaceX <i>per se</i>, but SpaceX-xAI.<p>My TL; DR (and this is mine, personally) is its mission has pivoted from colonising Mars to building a Dyson sphere. Space-based datacentres are a demand excuse for putting lots of solar panels in space. Going one level down, more Cursor use is a demand excuse for putting lots of datacentres anywhere.
This is like me, a couch potato, pivoting from "I'm going to run a half marathon" to "I'm going to do a marathon in under ten minutes"
If we're talking Dyson spheres, this is like going from a half-marathon to running the distance from Earth to Betelgeuse. It's just not a realistic endeavor.
More like "I'm going to run every possible marathon route on the Earth's road network."
And in handstanding walk because you're better at hands than legs. All their advantages are in domains to be obsoleted by technologies required for such things.<p>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.<p>My point is regardless of what you think of a Dyson sphere, this theory seems to predict what the company does better than assuming everything's a ketamine fever dream.
Mars was a moonshot, pivot to the actual moon. ;)
> <i>this theory seems to predict what the company does better than assuming everything's a ketamine fever dream.</i><p>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 <i>very</i> strong drugs to think he could build a Dyson sphere of all things.<p>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.<p>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.
Arguably more accurate is that it pivoted from colonising Mars to Elon's personal piggy bank to bail out his other failing bets.
Plot twist: Build the Dyson sphere around Earth and charge for sunlight…
SpaceXXX
<i>> its mission has pivoted from colonising Mars to building a Dyson sphere</i><p>Obligatory mention: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLzEX1TPBFM" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLzEX1TPBFM</a>
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.
> <i>He recently stated he feels he is far behind in agentic coding, and that apparently that's what matters</i><p>Sure. My question was why. And my loose interrogation of the question, together with some unique domain expertise, suggests he found an excuse to work towards a Dyson sphere.
He's offloading the loss from buying Twitter. This is the smoke and mirrors phase.
We have reached peak stupid.
I thought the same during the NFT craze and the blockchain craze before that.
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.
its definitely the worst case of money poisoning i've ever seen
That's an expensive VS Code fork.
$50bn for a harness makes no sense, what am I missing?
I assume someone knows someone, backroom deal perhaps? I'm not sure either, when Cursor has a lot of risk and not that much moat.
My 2c: they need to pump xAI usage (which nobody is using) to be able to keep the hype alive pre-ipo.
Cursor has a significant enterprise userbase, that has to be worth something
I thought Cursor has started making their own models. Did I confuse them with someone else?
Their Composer 2 model is Kimi (an open model) with additional RL fine-tuning, for whatever that information is worth to you: <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/22/cursor-admits-its-new-coding-model-was-built-on-top-of-moonshot-ais-kimi/" rel="nofollow">https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/22/cursor-admits-its-new-codi...</a>
Oh, I see.<p>Though, in fairness, that's probably the important part. Like a base model plus "coding smarts" is probably perfect for the situation.<p>But maybe not as much value as I was thinking.
They have a 'proprietary' model which is just an open source (kimi?) fine tune
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!
1. Pay them with shares of SpaceX<p>2. Make SpaceX valuation even higher before IPO<p>3. Boost XAI/usage of Grok.
money laundering and tax avoidance
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.
Cursor ($60b) being valued the same as Twitter ($51b inflation adjusted) is _willlld_
Dammit, I liked cursor
same. i finally tried Claude Code and i just shrugged. Cursor definitely has a clunky UI with an identity crisis, but it pioneered plan mode, and auto / composer chugs along without rate limits for the most part.<p>Opus, I watch my allotment creep up every turn…
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.<p>Cursor might not be the new hotness, but if we believe that agentic coding is the next wave and we’ve gone from asking chatbots to actually using agents for coding, then yes, this move makes sense for Elon to hype up a SpaceX IPO.
I'm out of the loop - what moat does Cursor even have now, and why is it worth $60B?
Surely you mean xAI right, surely it's a typo? Right...?<p>The same "mistake" that SpaceX bought 10% of Tesla CyberTruck?<p>Wait are they all Musk's companies? Is it a pattern?<p>/s obviously
“ Cursor has also given SpaceX the right to acquire Cursor later this year for $60 billion”<p>That isn’t an agreement to buy
Elon doesn't know what to do. Ani failed, no one apart from his alt accounts is interested in Grok pictures.<p>Since the firing of several Grok founders, Grok has decreased in capabilities. It is illogical and insults users when called out.<p>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 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!
Random data point: as a long time VSCode user when I first heard the hoopla about Cursor I rushed to try it. Didn't work (at all). So I added my name to the open bug report, waited a few months. Tried again. Still didn't work. Became a Claude Code user and never looked back.
Good on them to get $10B breakup terms, after the Twitter shitshow
Cursor better take the $60B because a VS Code fork with a crappy fine tune of Kimi is not worth that much.
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.<p>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.
<a href="https://xcancel.com/trq212/status/2046713419978453374" rel="nofollow">https://xcancel.com/trq212/status/2046713419978453374</a>
I feel Cursor isnt’t even worth $6B. What is the moat, the value, the sauce here?<p>The “apply” model to turn LLM output into code changes?<p>I like SpaceX a lot but this really doesn’t make sense at $60B
$60B for a VSCode fork with AI integration...
It may show the value of the gap between vanilla LLM output and production-ready applications.
Is this to force cursor to use xAI
Never bet against Elon.
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.<p>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.
What exactly did you predict in 2022?
Elon is determined to take down Altman
>acquire Cursor later this year for $60 billion or pay $10 billion for our work together.<p>This seems like an elaborate Elon rug pull. A Windsurf situation 2.0
This looks like SpaceX playing catchup to Claude and OpenAI that already provide coding solutions.
At 50 employees, that is $1.2B an employee
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.<p>Eventually, stock prices will correct hard, and retail/passive investors will be left with the bag.<p>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
idk but feels like this might be a new literal kind of acquihire, to bulk purchase workers in cash
The Elon Musk Company does what Elon Musk wants. Tesla is dying, X is a disaster, so he bundled everything into the one company that had a bright future, SpaceX. There is no grand vision or endgame beyond do as Elon Musk wants. Going to Mars or the Moon or whatever was never a vision or mission, just a story to tell.
> <i>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><p>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.<p>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.<p>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.)<p>I'm saying this is a good working theory for explaining–and predicting–Musk and SpaceX's actions. Mars explains why SpaceX's engines burn methane. Dyson sphere explains why xAI is building massive datacenters and now finding acquisition targets to fill them with.
> building a Dyson sphere<p>So they are trying to take everyone’s money in bigger and bigger chunks until there is no economy left but hype.<p>Folks, if we spent 1/10th of the time and money we spend on this bullshit on taking care of people’s basic needs and education we would be far closer to the sci-fi future everyone seems so motivated to get to. Covid and the Trump cult seem to have broken almost everyone’s brains and we’re all gonna pay for the hubris.
I guess it makes more sense than shoe brands pivoting to GPU provider.<p>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.
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.)
Is is me or the world of finance is going crazy. Or maybe it has always been.<p>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.<p>It is then buying the <i>option</i> 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 <i>60 fucking billions</i>, that's the GDP of a small country!<p>And now, Elon Musk intends to IPO SpaceX, which means he expect people to buy into all this bullshit. And considering that unlike me and judging by his wealth, he seems to be really good at understanding the market, so he is likely to be right.
Gross. We need more anti trust enforcement. Large incumbents killing all competition will make us weaker over time.
Our of $60B, what does that make VSCode priced at?
Guardian Link:<p><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/apr/21/spacex-cursor-ai-startup" rel="nofollow">https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/apr/21/spacex-cu...</a>
<a href="https://archive.is/gbdJ8" rel="nofollow">https://archive.is/gbdJ8</a>
I'd be interested in this breakdown - what % of that is cursor's product(tech x customer) vs future tokens
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.
Last day for me using Cursor at work, I prefer to move to Codex and Claude Code that touch anything related to Elon.
So I have to switch away from cursor? Any recommendations?
That’s unfortunate. I’m not interested in using Musk associated products anymore than I have to.
Hard to know whether development will remain an activity that lives on a local machine for much longer.<p>This could be a lot of money to spend to acquire users that may not be sticky.
0 to $60B in less than 4 years ... impressive!
I don't know how they are going to justify the xAI acquisition with this...
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.<p>Laugh all you want. He may have the last laugh on this one.
shoe company goes AI, rocket company goes AI, it is market signaling.
I wonder if they are actually 'acquiring' some of the existing contracts between Cursor and X/Y/Z rather than the product itself.
Good, I needed a reason to cancel my Cursor subscription.<p>I associate Musk with being user hostile, unreliable, meme oriented and disruptive in the worst sense; I’d like my work tools without that please.
Is this Cursor the product? Or AnySphere the company?
some plausible analysis here on motivations <a href="https://x.com/0xrwu/status/2046721359263285478" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/0xrwu/status/2046721359263285478</a>
If I stop paying for Cursor, will they threaten to sue like Twitter does?
SpaceX, xAI, Collosus data centers, next space compute, X, Starlink and soon Cursor to join 2, 3 & 4 together?
I think this is great and helps x.ai building Grok Code and Grok Computer.<p>It is good to have more competition in this area.<p>So there aren’t just 2 big players which also have their ideological flaws.
60B for Composer 2…that is built from Kimi K2… what ever happened to “Grok being the best”?
Makes sense. Cursor is extremely overhyped as well.
SpaceX is going to have an AI coding "oops" in space.
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.
every wrapper either gets acquired or stays long enough to be a zombie startup
What are the implications of this for Cursor being model agnostic?
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.<p>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.<p>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.
If Twitter was when Musk jumped the shark this is definitely him sticking the landing.
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
Ridiculous, this is some shady deal. Cursor's worth is around 150k :D.
anyone still using cursor?
Don't see how this works out financially.
Why SpaceX and not xAI?
Well I am glad I built my own IDE now so I can switch off of cursor and don’t have to participate in training the model of an aspiring monopoly.<p>DM me if you want an invite. I am keeping it to a small on purpose.
cursor was interesting about a year ago
That’s it. After 2 years with Cursor, I’m switching to Claude only. Fuck Elon.
reading this thread, I seem to be the only cursor user on earth on the free tier using tab-completes.
Welp this just removes them if they get bought (and likely also if they coordinate even more with an Elon company) from my list of tools I’ll use.<p>Crazy a fork of vscode is worth 60B. What’s vscode worth to Microsoft? 200B?
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"
SpaceX’s announcement (non paywalled):<p><a href="https://x.com/spacex/status/2046713419978453374" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/spacex/status/2046713419978453374</a>
Does that mean code that astronauts' lives depend on will be vibe-coded slop? Nothing is too insane any more these days.
RIP Cursor.
but What exactly is SpaceX doing in the AI Space (Pun Intended) and Why?<p>these are weird times...
$60 billion with a B???
Looking forward to seeing where this goes, both companies have a reputation for engineering excellence.
Time to switch
Misleading title on the post - SpaceX has the OPTION to buy them for $60B later this year, or pay $10B for their work together.
is this just to drive up the buy price for others while having no intention of buying it themselves?
Complete waste of $60B. It's just a prompt+tools. This is how you destroy SpaceX from the inside.
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.<p>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.
A text editor?
See also:<p><a href="https://www.reuters.com/technology/spacex-says-it-has-option-acquire-startup-cursor-60-billion-2026-04-21/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reuters.com/technology/spacex-says-it-has-option...</a><p>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.
xAI is working on virtualizing white collar workers. I'm guessing this is part of that.<p>See also: companies buying up the Slack and email archives of defunct startups, for training data.
So I won’t use stuff by Elon Musk, what is the next best alternative please
I really don't know what Elon is thinking here because SpaceX's IPO is already precarious, for several reasons:<p>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;<p>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;<p>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<p>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.<p>Starship isn’t comparable to Falcon Heavy because it has vastly more volume, which will make it the cheapest way to launch Starlinks, which will be a lot of launches to begin with.
> Starship won’t compete with F9, or BO because it is fully reusable and cost less than either.<p>Currently, this is not the case. Not fully reusable, and not costing less than F9 or BO.
There is a <i>lot</i> 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.<p>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:<p>1. If F9 is cheaper, why would you use Starship?<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Another way to put it is I think Starship could be SpaceX's Cybertruck.
Ohh it’s not an acquisition, it’s right to buy later for $60B or we a work together for $10B. Huh?
really happy for the Cursor team but at the same time disappointed that the biggest non-lab AI company couldn't exist on their own.<p>shows how intense the power laws are around ai and how much of a capital game it is.
Dude, cursor's not even worth a billion.
immediately unsubscribed from Cursor. Hello OpenCode!
Can't wait for this idiotic bullshit bubble to burst.<p>A rocket company buying a so so overvalued coding AI company is a joke even worse than the 2000s internet pet food companies were
Musk must be chronically surrounded by yes-men.
Okay, now how do I cancel/refund the remaining portion of my pre-paid year subscription? No way in hell I will support a company owned by Elon Musk.
these valuations are total madness
Another one bites the dust.
My Hair's on Fire! OMG, Republicans Capitalist OMG Pigs! OMG!
another 60 billion to save a failed AI endeavor.
lol. Top business genius being a genius again, I see.
The real question is how the fuck is cursor worth $60B
Only 1.5 Twitters. Sort of pathetic!
I imagine none of us had this on our bingo cards.<p>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.<p>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?<p>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?<p>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.<p>Is this just a way of the government securing contractors by proxy that wouldn't pass muster if done through the normal channels?
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Fuck. This is a problem.
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.
Time to download windsurf
60 Billion for an IDE?<p>I guess back to Jetbrains it is.
Is X political ideology extending to cursor?
Question for Musk hating people - I understand why you hate Musk, but why is doing business with Altman or Microslop any better?
The other day my colleague asked Grok:<p>"Please estimate Elon's IQ based on his timeline"<p>It estimated 115-130. A decision like this points to the lower end.
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.