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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

#811

Post by oceansky »

simgt wrote: post #772
dminik wrote: post #748

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.

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.

Whatsapp was already the de-facto communication standard for a lot countries in America and Europe when Meta bought it.

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

#812

Post by oceansky »

acdha wrote: post #776
dminik wrote: post #748

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.

Buying Twitter played a key part in getting Trump re-elected, so I think Musk figures he got what he wanted in terms of deregulation, dropped prosecution, and damage to his political opponents. This deal is different: SpaceX is heading for an IPO which is now complicated by xAI becoming a subsidiary. Cursor is actually popular and I’m sure this is all stock-based so as long as investors believe that those users stick…

Quoting a viral tweet: “Elon is such a dumbass, he spent $44 billion on Twitter and all he got was control of all 3 branches of the federal government.”

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

#813

Post by dminik »

andsoitis wrote: post #759
dminik wrote: post #748

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.

> 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.

Revenue without expenses is meaningless. Annualized revenue is even worse. It's like a gambler bragging that they spin through $20,000 a month. Yeah, but for how long?

If you give me a billion, I can do an annualized revenue run rate of ~$12 billion just by selling a dollar for 99 cents.

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

#814

Post by mobiuscog »

zozbot234 wrote: post #671
sigmoid10 wrote: post #630

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Isn't Codex TUI available for free though? Besides others like Pi and OpenCode of course.

It can use local/oss models, but it doesn't make it simple to do (easiest with ollama) and it's not clear what else you 'lose' by making that choice.

If you had a really good (big) local model, maybe it's an option, but on the more common smaller (It's a nice TUI, but the ecosystem is what makes it good.

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

#815

Post by Zigurd »

dminik wrote: post #748

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.

> How is a VSCode fork and a open weight LLM fine-tune worth $60B?

The same way a rocket company that counts short-lived as satellites as an asset is worth 1.7 trillion. Congratulations to the Cursor folks, they are the only winners in this.

This is also part of the AI bubble delusion: agent assisted coding works, at least for some people, for some purposes. This deal perpetuates the illusion that AI will find high value use cases. The reality may be that software development has unique characteristics you won't find in law or medicine or other domains.

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

#816

Post by ai_fry_ur_brain »

deanc wrote: post #560
anonymid wrote: post #153

I guess the hope is that combining two sub-par coding models (xAI's grok + cursor's composer) and combining the data they have access to, they can build something that can compete with OpenAI / Anthropic in the coding space... I guess I kinda see it... it makes sense from both points of view (xAI needs data + places to run their models, cursor needs to not be reliant on Anthropic/OpenAI). I think I don't see it worki…

Have to call out that comment about grok code being sub par. I used it exclusively when it was free in Cursor and have nothing bad to say about it. And that was months ago. I imagine it’s a lot better now.

[flagged]

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

#817

Post by zipy124 »

Insanity wrote: post #807

Of all Musk’s “companies” this makes least sense to me. xAI is at least in the AI space, X.com is a true tech company and Tesla is also closer to AI than SpaceX. Guess SpaceX is the only one with the money “available”.

I think perhaps you missed the previous news that SpaceX acquired xAI. Thus this is basically just xAI buying Cursor.

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

#818

Post by dminik »

simgt wrote: post #772
dminik wrote: post #748

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.

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.

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

#820

Post by [deleted] »

Stevvo wrote: post #712
Sammi wrote: post #704

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How's the ai autocomplete? It was unusable in November when I tried it last and went back to Cursor. Slow and when it finally did something it was just not good. Cursor is super fast and actually gives useful results. I just don't want to give my money to Elon, so I might cancel anyways.

Honestly couldn't tell you anymore; a year ago I was using AI autocomplete, but today AI is writing all code for me.

[deleted]
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