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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

#921
post #903
post #829

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what you're referring to by "that" but I think you're right that it's 10B to not purchase or 60B to purchase, so as an option posting $10B for an option with a $50 strike price.

have concrete terms been published or is that an educated guess of the contract?

It's a statement based on the contents of the articles linked at the top of this comments section.

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

#922

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mars gets less sunlight on a good day for solar power; the inverse cube law really hits you harder than you'd think. And that's before accounting for the planet wide dust storms that can last for months. We're probably looking at nuclear fission generators to get started, then converting to geothermal at any appreciable (and maybe fusion, inshallah).

Regardless, fission, geo, fusion don’t fit well on a rover. The boring company makes the tunnels, Tesla makes the vehicles and robots, and batteries. Likely we will still use solar despite poor relative performance for bootstrap.

RTGs do. That's what Perseverance and Curiosity use today.

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

#923

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't use any companies with a Twitter/X account? That must be tricky.

Voluntarily choosing to not spend money in X related orgs ≠ using services that use X related orgs. As a consumer, our options to vote with our dollar is limited, but that doesn't make it pointless. Real life is not binary and the sentiment that one cannot criticize a system which they partake in is a thought terminating cliche. One only needs to ask "for who does this reflexive thought terminating cliche benefit the…

Thanks for that but it's unrelated to what the OP said which was "I find it unconscionable to do business with someone who would do business with Elon.".

Having an X/Twitter account is doing business with Elon. You could say only paid X accounts qualify for this, but I would imagine most brands have paid accounts.

YCombinator has an X account. I suspect the OP is already asking for his Hacker News account to be deleted.

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

#924
post #897
post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

that seems incredibly shady

AI seems to be full of these kinds of circular deals. It's one reason to be wary of the financials of the business.

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

#926

So SpaceX bought a $60B Option on Cursor, plus a bunch of services, for $10B. If strike date comes and Cursor is in fact worth less than $60B... they can move to acquire it for that price. Or just let it "expire". And if it's worth more, they get a savage good deal. If the services were worth $8B anyway, it's hard to lose. It seems less crazy to me through this lens. A straight acquisition, today, at $60B would in fa…

To be worth $60B at a 50x P/E ratio this implies $1.2B in profit.

Not happening

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

#927

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But writing a genuinely good harness with lots of context engineering and solid tool integration is in fact not that easy. true, but its not worth $60 billion fucking quid.

It's not like someone paid $60 billion for a product the way you pay for bananas at the store. They invested a much smaller amount and essentially bought an option to acquire. And even if you don't believe the company's assets are worth the current valuation, an acquisition can still make sense if you believe that valuation will go up further. And if they actually do acquire, it will probably still not be in cash. Th…

I mean yes, you are right, but they also paid $10 billion for that option. Which is also far too much for a harness.

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

#928

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Billionaires have always owned the means of communication (just look at the Salzbergers, Murdochs, etc). Digital decentralized protocols (smtp, http, etc) were the first time this wasn’t true. But you [we] voluntarily moved your communication off of open internet protocols onto private ad-based platforms. Of course you don’t own anything there, you never did. The billionaires didn’t “seize” anything. You happily sold…

they didn't ever own radio, as evident by AM radio still being crazy and ham still being around

One of the reasons why I got my HAM license this year was specifically to have a means of communication that required no infrastructure. The HAM community is also very similar to the OSS community in many respects w/r/t constantly developing new free ways to use their spectrum.

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

#930
post #669

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 am personally not a fan of VS Code regardless, but I guess I don’t understand what it buys you over one code editor window and a Codex window both being open? I have, right now, a tmux session with Codex on the bottom and Neovim on the top. It does what I was doing in Cursor just fine. I am not really “anti Cursor”, I just genuinely am confused as to what it actually buys me over the setup I just described.

Here's why I use Cursor. My company pays for it, although I could switch to Claude Code or use Codex more since I also have ChatGPT enterprise account.

* Perhaps could be solved with the right terminal software, but I like the GUI for seeing my running agents and viewing all my conversations

* Works with multiple model providers in the same tool. I probably worry about cost optimization more than my employer would care for me to, but I frequently switch between openai/anthropic and switch between model sizes to use the tool that I think can get the job done for the least money. Another thing I like is having a long conversation with an expensive model, then I can switch to 5.4-nano to cheaply extract some little piece of information or summary from the conversation. Really this is big being able to switch model providers throughout the months without having to change my interface.

* Good support for the various ways of providing context. Rules, AGENTs.MD/CLAUDE.md files (if you want it to automatically read those), skills. Good hook support.

* I think the agent diff review experience is pretty good, but maybe it works similarly when you hook the cli agents into an editor, IDK.

* The default shell sandbox behavior is quite good. Every shell command runs in some sort of sandbox so that read only commands work without approval. The model asks for more permissions when it tries to do something that needs more permissions like network access or writing outside of the workspace directory. I know Claude code has a similar feature you can use.

* Good fork / revert conversation to checkpoints, with the option of reverting the code or just reverting the conversation.

* Feels decent that I am an API customer through Cursor. I don't hit Claude limits. Cursor doesn't have an incentive to limit reasoning or token usage, although they do have an opposite incentive.

* They are reasonably responsive to bugs and feature requests through their forum.

* Works well with a lot of repos / folders added to your workspace. I probably should organize all my stuff under a single directory, but alas I have like 8 different folders added to my workspace and it handles this well. Perhaps Claude --add-dir support works fine too.

DOWNSIDES:

* They are not quickly adding the best open source models to Cursor. Like Kimi 2.6 or whatever. Possibly not incentivized to given their Composer models.

* Don't love the subagent support. I can define custom subagents although it is not easy to get models to use mine instead of the builtin ones. The builtin ones do not allow me to control what model they run, so they will always run something like composer-2-fast, which is a fine model for all I know, but I would like to control it. Also, I would like if you could optionally make the subagent experience more first class. Like browse all the subagents and continue conversations with them or switch their model etc, although that is probably tricky / weird.

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