Tesla isn't that profitable, but SpaceX is likely generating boatloads of cash. From what I can tell Starlink alone has a free positive cash flow of about $2 billion. I'm not sure what the launch business is worth, but it's likely a lot given the absence of domestic competition. I have a suspicion the reason Musk wanted to combine SpaceX and X.ai is the latter gives him losses to write off against all that cash from…
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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.
Tesla is profitable, as a matter of public record. And SpaceX is, by all accounts, extremely profitable.
They had like $16B in revenue last year, half from Starlink. That’s just money in the door and the underwriters seem to think the business is worth $1.75T.
the ability to mine the moon or asteroid belt seems extremely lucrative, the logistics of transporting materials to earth costs less than shipping them across the ocean, an astounding level of value creation.
You’ll pay massive penalties on that, another option is options (heh) but I’m not finance-literate enough to know how to pull it off.
You could just buy deep out of money SP500 puts expiring in 1+ year. That way you would be "insured" against the bubble popping. The thing is, every dollar you spend on insurance is a dollar (and its interest) you lose. Furthermore, we don't know when it will pop. 1 year? 5 years? The more reasonable solution is probably gradually reduce exposure to US markets by selling SP500 shares and turning to Europe and emergin…
You should backtest this strategy over the last 20 years before you make serious decisions off of the vibe from internet comments
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 w…
IntelliJ is a bit dated, and its plugins are too. I use IntelliJ all the time, in its various incarnations, but vscode is really up there now.
I use both (not IntelliJ but other IDEs) and quite frankly I fund VS Code and derivatives very much inferior. For C++ development for example CLion vs VS Code (needed plugins installed) is night and day and not to the benefit of VS Code.
I know JetBrain product could be sluggish on "normal" computers however all 4 of my development machines run on 16 cores AMD with 128GB RAM. It flies in environments like that
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.
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.
But they also get a whole bunch of AI Services from Cursor. Other comments have noted that xAI has fallen on bad times (idk one way or the other) so perhaps they were going to spend $5B on getting these services elsewhere, anyway. SpaceX spending $1B a month on various AI services seems ~plausible (EDIT - Or maybe it's an IP transfer, or maybe it's over a longer time horizon. Idk but SpaceX clearly expects value from…
Cursor has no AI services, they do not develop their own frontier models. I see no reason to understand why $10bn for Cursor's services is an advantage xAI versus say a $10bn deal with Anthropic, OpenAI or Google.
It's true that Cursor doesn't have their own frontier models, but they are training their own models. They just aren't at frontier level yet. The $60B/$10B deal looks like a bet that this is a capital/GPU constraint rather than a capability one.
It is not cash though. SpaceX does not have $60B liquid cash instruments. More accurately it is 3.4% of SpaceX at the last rumored valuation of $1.75T.
No longer rumored as they filed for IPO! This is actually an amazing sweetheart deal for Cursor. Many times with these high profile acquisitions, most stock is tied to LPA's and employment at the company, and also earnout provisions. The company then finds a way to parachute them out early, which both voids the earnout and their employment, thus they never vest most of the units and the few units they do vest get bou…
Until there is public S-1 and a price range which very much could change during the roadshow, there is no known valuation or range.
Guess I'll be looking for a replacement for Cursor now... Anyone have recommendations? I like the plan/agent mode and the fact that it's an IDE, so I can use it in the traditional way as well as by yapping with a bunch of agents. Also the Cursor rules I've curated and they do their job well.
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.