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SpaceX says it has agreement to acquire Cursor for $60B

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Re: SpaceX says it has agreement to acquire Cursor for $60B

#481

Post by TeeWEE »

trollbridge wrote: post #428
Me1000 wrote: post #90

Cursor's statement on the deal (which does not mention the option at all): https://cursor.com/blog/spacex-model-training

It sort of implies the $10B is going to be paid with compute credits. So this could very well be xAI simply compensating Cursor by giving them $10 billion worth of tokens. (What’s a token worth in dollars these days?)

That’s indeed the trick. Spacex “invests” in Cursor, looks good on their balance sheet.

And xAI now gets 10B of more revenue on their income statement.

Perfect financial statement boosting for the IPO which in turn will pay back these costs.

At least that’s the bet.

Re: SpaceX says it has agreement to acquire Cursor for $60B

#482

Post by zuzululu »

jjordan wrote: post #304
tombert wrote: post #166

I was required to use Cursor for my job when I first started, but once I figured out how to use the command line version of Codex, I kind of stopped seeing the point. It just kind of seemed like a bloated, overpriced wrapper around what I could do with the included ChatGPT membership I already had for work. Maybe I was missing something, but I do not understand how it is worth sixty billion dollars.

It's not. It's a glorified code editor with no moat. Those are (massive) bubble prices.

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.

Re: SpaceX says it has agreement to acquire Cursor for $60B

#483

Post by kibwen »

andai wrote: post #418
xuki wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no other mode of transportation cheaper than shipping across the ocean.

That one is subsidized by externalizing costs to our lungs.

Shipping on water has been, by far, the cheapest mode of long-distance shipping since the moment boats were invented. That is to say, since thousands of years before boats were ever powered by the shit that destroys our lungs.

Re: SpaceX says it has agreement to acquire Cursor for $60B

#484

Post by Eufrat »

qzw wrote: post #212

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.

It’s also worth noting that Musk helped successfully lobby the NASDAQ to implement a “fast entry” rule which takes effect at the beginning of May, suspiciously convenient timing for a SpaceX IPO, so much so that I believe it has been derisively called the “SpaceX Rule”. It allows mega-cap IPOs like SpaceX to join the Nasdaq-100 index in just 15 trading days.

Now why is this bad? Well, if you invest in a fund that is based off of the indices, you’re going to be investing in SpaceX whether you want to or not and I certainly don’t think 15 days is enough time to sus out whether this is a stable investment worthy of being in the index, but it’ll be great…until it drags a million retirement funds down with it.

Re: SpaceX says it has agreement to acquire Cursor for $60B

#485

Post by rubiquity »

Lermatroid wrote: post #47
AirMax98 wrote: post #10

What are we even doing here. I have no idea what this has to do with aerospace, but I know a bit about software and this does not look great. Cursor is obviously on a serious decline and has little to no moat in the area they are building in (IDE), which we kinda now know is maybe not even the right area (CLI). I feel like this is just a bad move?

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.

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.

Re: SpaceX says it has agreement to acquire Cursor for $60B

#486

Post by princevegeta89 »

zuzululu wrote: post #474

Is anybody using Grok or Cursor still? I've not used Cursor since the summer of 2025 and I've never bothered with Grok for coding. Hell, I've used Windsurf briefly for a few months. I know a ton of people that use Codex, Claude, OpenCode but can't name a single person that uses Cursor or Grok that is knee deep into agentic coding.

There are entire companies that bought into Cursor to adopt across all of their engineering orgs.

Re: SpaceX says it has agreement to acquire Cursor for $60B

#487

Post by Reubend »

JustExAWS wrote: post #292
Reubend wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're right. Other providers can offer coding subscriptions that use in-house models, and this sets the stage for a Grok coding plan that's built in to Cursor. $60 billion seems expensive, but it gives them a much better chance at competing in the market than if they started their own harness from scratch.

Absolutely no enterprise - I work in enterprise cloud consulting - absolutely no company would trust Grok with their IP compared to Anthropic or OpenAI with Musk’s reputation on how he runs his businesses. Anthropic just tolerates the money losing developers who pay $20/$200 for subscriptions.

They'll sign a contract, and the contract will be very clear about whether using user prompts as training data is allowed or not. They're not going to care much about reputation; they'll care about the terms they sign with.

Re: SpaceX says it has agreement to acquire Cursor for $60B

#488

Post by jmyeet »

NetMageSCW wrote: post #89
jmyeet wrote: post #65

I really don't know what Elon is thinking here because SpaceX's IPO is already precarious, for several reasons: 1. It was used to rescue himself and key investors from overpaying for Twitter, which was first rescued through xAI (and I don't know why anyone thought investing in xAI was a good idea but here we are). If our regulators weren't defanged, this deal would've gotten alot more scrutiny (IMHO). Whatever the ca…

Starship won’t compete with F9, or BO because it is fully reusable and cost less than either. The Chinese are not a player in the global launch services market at all so don’t count. Starship isn’t comparable to Falcon Heavy because it has vastly more volume, which will make it the cheapest way to launch Starlinks, which will be a lot of launches to begin with.

Starship is absolutely competing with Falcon 9 in two ways:

1. If F9 is cheaper, why would you use Starship?

2. If SpaceX decides to force Starship adoption by simply halting F9 launches or making them prohibitively expensive, well the market is still open for an F9 clone from someone else.

My point with FH is that there isn't a demand for much bigger payloads. Now, SpaceX wants to induce demand with STarlink launches. OK, so the viability of Starship is tied to the viability of Starlink. I thought Starlink was a clever way to prove F9 reusability but the first-mover advantage won't last forever.

My main point here was that F9 was developed, SpaceX's competition was the likes of ULA with their insanely expensive rockets but whether SpaceX uses F9 or not, it has become the new baseline.

SLS is insanely expensive to build and launch but it still has a much greater launch capacity. Starship's solution to this is essentially in-orbit refuelling where, I believe, it will take ~10 Starship launches to refuel a Starship in orbit. This too is an insanely complicated capability that they haven't even begun to develop yet.

And whatever the ultimate per-launch base cost works out to be the program R&D cost has to be amortized cross those launches so even if the base cost is $10M, if you spent $10B developing the program, it still matters if you launch 10 a year vs 100.

When SpaceX goes public, they're going to be forced to disclose a whole lot more information about the program cost and I suspect it's going to be a lot higher than the rosy projectsions you get on Twitter.

Another way to put it is I think Starship could be SpaceX's Cybertruck.

Re: SpaceX says it has agreement to acquire Cursor for $60B

#489

Post by pythonaut_16 »

kakapo5672 wrote: post #254
jesse_dot_id wrote: post #186

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.

Tesla is profitable, as a matter of public record. And SpaceX is, by all accounts, extremely profitable.

SpaceX was surely more profitable before it was used to bail out Elon's xAI which was used to bailout his purchase of Twitter.

Re: SpaceX says it has agreement to acquire Cursor for $60B

#490

Post by verdverm »

hackernudes wrote: post #289
yungbeto wrote: post #109

Why would Elon do this if he knows full well the names X-Code and Codex are already taken?

XCursor (Linux nerds know)

Oh man, not sure if it's a good or bad memory... but that was the first linux bug I experienced as a newbie. Not so much a bug, but an unknown config I had to change so my first monitor would stop turning off when I moved the cursor to the second monitor.

Circa 2003

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