881–890 of 1001 posts
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> How is a VSCode fork and a open weight LLM fine-tune worth $60B? Ignoring future business ideas, Cursor reported reached $2 billion+ annualized revenue run rate in 2026, doubling from 2025. Recent financing rounds reached high-end valuation between $30 billion and $50 billion.
I expect Cursor passes nearly every cent it collects on to Anthropic and OpenAI
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I expect Cursor passes nearly every cent it collects on to Anthropic and OpenAI
So migrating them to a friendly x.ai pricing will bump profit margins.
Anyone saying this is an aquahire has it backwards. SpaceX is acquiring Cursor’s customers , all those enterprises including NVIDIA itself. I believe Jenson Huang is on the record about the engineers using Cursor everyday. As far as I know, xAI’s enterprise market share is non-existent. This is their way to get some much needed customers.
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?
What you might pay for is market signal + model distribution. Grok needs a story for why enterprises should switch. "The model that powers the tool you already use every day" is a much easier enterprise sales pitch than "our LLM benchmarks slightly better." The $60B is at least partially buying the answer to the question: why should any company bet on xAI?
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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.
Yes. But unlike cursor, Whatsapp had the following advantages: 1. It's cheap to run. 2. It has clear advantages over existing technology (SMS). 3. My mom uses it. She's never going to use cursor. Whatsapp had a huge userbase in Europe. Basically everyone I know uses it. And it was "only" ~$20 billion. Inflation can't be this high.
The value in acquisitions for investors typically comes from how much money is locked into multi-year deals. A lot of tech folks in leadership positions that I talk to are very aware that the best option in this space changes every 2 months. Right now it's Claude. Next month it might be Codex. A couple months after that it could be Gemini/Qwen/Composor/Kimi/xAI.
Locking in with Cursor where quick swapping your team between the changing options is the point is a better choice than locking in even a 1 year deal with any single option where you're still going to be paying for token cost on top of it.
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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 t…
There are plenty of harder things in the world and very few are worth 60B.
Wow. Tech CEOs and investors have completely lost touch with what money really is worth. How is a VSCode fork and a open weight LLM fine-tune worth $60B? One would think Elon would learn his lesson after overpaying for Twitter and then having to merge his failures together to stay afloat. But no, more cash into the burning pile.
He bought Twitter to grab a megaphone to propagate his ego/agenda.
Grok was built for similar reasons.
He's buying Cursor to have a tool to push Grok on the world, and to have something of his own under his own ideological control to compete with SamA and Dario.
knee-jerk is that it's weird, but makes sense: * X will have a total of ~2GW of GPU sometime this year largely not doing much outside of 'grok is this true' * despite no longer being in vogue with consumer devs Cursor still has a lot of developer data that can assist in building a model * Cursor have decent enterprise relationships (while for xAI it is ~zero) and that's where the real revenue for llms + agents is * C…
Hey...don't forget "grok is this person jewish(hint hint)"...or..just "grok do your thing"
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> How is a VSCode fork and a open weight LLM fine-tune worth $60B? Ignoring future business ideas, Cursor reported reached $2 billion+ annualized revenue run rate in 2026, doubling from 2025. Recent financing rounds reached high-end valuation between $30 billion and $50 billion.
“annualized revenue run rate” is a bogus accounting term. It’s like taking a paycheck and multiplying it by 365. Notice the complete lack of any mention of profits.