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SpaceX to buy Cursor for $60B

reuters.com

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Re: SpaceX to buy Cursor for $60B

#41

"SpaceX told investors during the IPO process that it sees an addressable market for AI products worth $26 trillion, roughly equivalent to U.S. GDP." This is unhinged.

I know it has become a meme by now, but IIRC the market for all foods (agriculture, processed food, etc.) on earth is around $10 trillion. So according to SpaceX, the market for AI is 2.5 larger than all the food sold on this planet. They're also saying that the AI market is worth roughly 10% of all global real estate.

I'm sure the finance market is much larger as well

Re: SpaceX to buy Cursor for $60B

#42
$60b is crazy.

Cursor is an extension for VS Code, a harness and a bunch of prompts.

They have their own model (Composer 2) which is based Kimi K2.5, but I don't think SpaceX would be interested in it.

If they need a harness for grok, they could fork PI.

What are they after for here? Customer base? Talent?

Re: SpaceX to buy Cursor for $60B

#43
post #13

Out of curiosity, anyone here still using cursor?

I use CC/Codex/Cursor.

CC is mostly my default for large tasks / features (ex. Plan > execute plan ) Biggest gripe with Claude Code is that it is painfully slow relative to the other two.

Cursor for small stuff like bug fixes since it has a lot of models to choose from. I love the review/ diff / checkpoint features. It's planning feature is on par with CC. I'd probably use Cursor as primary driver if it had better cost efficiency. Next version or two of Composer may fill that gap in cost/quality/speed.

Codex isn't allowed at my work, but I use it for personal projects. It has the best balance of quality / cost / speed even if it's planner is poor and quite frankly the codex harness needs to catch up with the other two.

CC for quality / cost. Cursor for quality / speed. Codex for balance of the 3.

Re: SpaceX to buy Cursor for $60B

#46
$60B is a huge price, but buying Cursor gives Musk something xAI has struggled to build: a popular coding product with real developer and enterprise adoption. It may be the fastest way to catch up in AI coding. The real question is whether SpaceX ownership improves Cursor or drives its users away.

Re: SpaceX to buy Cursor for $60B

#48
Back in the early days of Heroku (when I worked there), we were all fairly deep into the Ruby community. Ruby has never had a great reputation for performance, but... it seemed like almost a running joke that any time you went down a rabbit-hole trying to understand some weird performance issue you'd eventually discover that @tmm1 had already identified the same issue months earlier, patched it in core, and given an hour long talk about it somewhere. Despite his ability and willingness talk publicly about quite deep technical topics Aman always came across as an incredibly quiet and humble in person. Every Ruby developer has benefited from his attention to finding and fixing performance issues. I'm sure the same can probably said for every GitHub user (where he worked for years).

Congrats to the entire Cursor team! I don't know all of their stories, but I do like to smile and celebrate a little when I see people who are often hidden in the shadows quietly making things x% better for all of millions of us every day for many years getting reward for that effort.

Re: SpaceX to buy Cursor for $60B

#49

"SpaceX told investors during the IPO process that it sees an addressable market for AI products worth $26 trillion, roughly equivalent to U.S. GDP." This is unhinged.

I know it has become a meme by now, but IIRC the market for all foods (agriculture, processed food, etc.) on earth is around $10 trillion. So according to SpaceX, the market for AI is 2.5 larger than all the food sold on this planet. They're also saying that the AI market is worth roughly 10% of all global real estate.

Food is worth a lot more than that. If the alternative was starvation, we would pay approximately all the money for food. By that metric food is worth more than $100T. The difference between $100T and $10T is called the consumer surplus, one of the largest benefits of a free market economy.

AI might eventually provide $26T worth of value, but if it captures anywhere close to that amount of revenue that'll indicate a failure of the free market economy. Competition and open source will have failed and the oligarchy has won.

(Either that, or inflation will have made $26T a relatively smaller number).

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