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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

#871

Post by dminik »

abustamam wrote: post #855
dminik wrote: post #833

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Whatsapp is burning through say ~$1B yearly with zero revenue and Cursor is burning through say ~$2B with a ~$1B revenue, they're both still in the hole. I wish people would stop talking about just revenue. It's mostly meaningless without knowing their expenses.

I think revenue is common to talk about because profit is also meaningless when a company spends every penny it earns to grow (new engineers, marketing, etc). Iirc Amazon made zero profit for quite some time. Also revenue is a signal for product market fit. Is it a great one? Dunno. But for example I'd be hard pressed to sell $1billion of anything, even if I had something everyone wanted. But I think your point about…

I mean, the financials just don't look great either way.

Their main product is part VSCode, which is a market that's almost impossible to make money in, and part reselling already expensive LLM tokens.

You can look at more parameters and judge how well a company could do in the future. For Amazon, you can predict that once they stop growing, they can make a pretty penny.

But with Cursor that doesn't seem likely. Even if they had the talent for training models from scratch, which I don't think they do, and IF inference makes money, which is not clear at all, training models is still a huge money sink.

So, for them getting bought out by xAi which has a base model they can use makes sense. But what does xAi get here? Another endless money pit?

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

#872

Post by ToValueFunfetti »

Eggpants wrote: post #810
andsoitis wrote: post #759

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Taking my paycheck and multiplying would be an excellent measure of my yearly salary. I don't understand how that analogy is meant to imply that the approach is nonsensical.

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

#873

Post by shmolyneaux »

anthonybsd wrote: post #808
robkop wrote: post #770

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of enterprises were doing that but now they hit the 150 user limit on Claude and are paying seat+api rates. Codex is still going strong but it’s hard to imagine they won’t do similar eventually. So now im honestly hearing a lot more folk stick it out with cursor while waiting for the dust to settle.

>A lot of enterprises were doing that but now they hit the 150 user limit on Claude and are paying seat+api rates. A lot of enterprises use Github Copilot which has per-request pricing model which effectively means unlimited tokens which eliminates this issue.

Github Copilot changed to token pricing earlier this week

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

#874

Post by ToValueFunfetti »

throwatdem12311 wrote: post #784
thegreatpeter wrote: post #771

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

People that think a crappy vscode fork is worth 60 billion dollars are the ones that need to touch grass.

And not also the people who think that acquisitions are being made primarily because colluding CEOs have some interest in creating the illusion of a healthy economy?

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

#875

Post by Insanity »

zipy124 wrote: post #817
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.

Ahh, yeah I did miss that.

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

#876

Post by lumost »

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.

To add to this, Cursor provides a high value go to market strategy for X.AI's modeling efforts. Cursor's own modeling efforts would require an extreme investment of capital to compete. Capital which X.AI has already spent or is planning to spend.

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

#877

Post by anthonybsd »

shmolyneaux wrote: post #873
anthonybsd wrote: post #808

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>A lot of enterprises were doing that but now they hit the 150 user limit on Claude and are paying seat+api rates. A lot of enterprises use Github Copilot which has per-request pricing model which effectively means unlimited tokens which eliminates this issue.

Github Copilot changed to token pricing earlier this week

Oh oh :(

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

#878

Post by Snoozus »

ToValueFunfetti wrote: post #872
Eggpants wrote: post #810

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“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.

Taking my paycheck and multiplying would be an excellent measure of my yearly salary. I don't understand how that analogy is meant to imply that the approach is nonsensical.

because your paycheck comes only one day per month, so that estimate would bee too high by a factor of 30

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

#879

Post by ToValueFunfetti »

Snoozus wrote: post #878
ToValueFunfetti wrote: post #872

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taking my paycheck and multiplying would be an excellent measure of my yearly salary. I don't understand how that analogy is meant to imply that the approach is nonsensical.

because your paycheck comes only one day per month, so that estimate would bee too high by a factor of 30

But then the analogy doesn't work at all? ARR isn't calculated by multiplying revenue to 30 years and then saying that that's 1 year's revenue; what criticism is being made here?

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

#880

Post by djeastm »

uxcolumbo wrote: post #710
Stevvo wrote: post #619

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until yesterday I would have recommended VSCode + Copilot. They had the best pricing of any option. However the pricing was unsustainable and is therefor finished.

I was planning to sign up to Copilot, since their pricing was per request not per token. Has that changed now?

That structure hasn't changed, but they've recalibrated usage limits to be much worse and removed the useful, yet relatively cheap, Opus 4.5/4.6 models.

I wouldn't jump to that ship.

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