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> What's crazy is that a company that sells an IDE (that's not even a particularly good one compared to competitors like JetBrains) integrating some AI plugins could be worth more than $60B...

yes. plus $2b ARR, 1m DAU

In terms of IDE yeah it is not that great.

I do have Copilot in VSCode and Cursor.

I thought both should be equal in solving problems - turns out Cursor with the same model selected somehow was able to solve tasks that Copilot would get stuck or run in loops.

They have some tricks on managing file access that others don’t.

> that's not even a particularly good one compared to competitors like JetBrains

Massive understatement calling it "a not particularly good plugin". If it were that simple there wouldn't be a need to even do this.

General Motors is worth $72B.

Because of user count? Same was said about instagram. with all due respect, devs don't seem to understand business

Their revenue and growth justified it. Plus, for xAI that could be the only way to get a SOTA coding model they want so hard.

can't X recreate one with 1B? As an IDE, honestly I can't even understand it needs more than 1M to create

Cursor sells its own models as well now

Welcome to the era of vibe-based valuations

They are now a Codex clone and without the subscription pricing. You have to spend thousands to get what you get from a $200 Codex subscription. How do they compete with this except from users who haven't caught on yet, or businesses that are unbothered to spend thousands a month per dev and wouldn't consider just subscribing to 1-3 $200 subscriptions instead?

And their price is so high because it's markup on API rates. API rates, even without markup, are just insanely irresponsible for anyone to be spending on full-time daily usage.

* MicroSoft is shaking in the corner lol

AI yielding such incredible cost savings. /s

Cursor is useless

Is this cash or compute? Elon has one of the world's biggest compute clusters spun up, and little inference demand to speak of.

Trading billions worth of idle compute, in exchange for a high-strike call option on the #3 player in the most-promising-vertical for AI, plus (presmuably) some access to their data, starts to sound like not a bad trade. Especially if you're pre-committed to betting your entire rocket company on winning in AI, and you're currently in sixth or seventh place.

Problem is basically, that if the option works out (Cursor truly has the talent to train a frontier model on SpaceX's infrastructure, and were simply lacking the infra before) the fair price would be way way more than $60B.

OpenAI tried to acquire Windsurf last year for $3B and couldn't.

It reportedly has a $2B ARR, and a 5x multiplier doesn't seem insane to me, but who knows, honestly

Not only is it almost certainly compute (“services”) it’s likely priced at Anthropic rack-rate, or at least what Cursor’s been paying Anthropic.

The cluster’s already paid for, so likely in the $2B range for operating cash needs. Not more than $5.

If I imagine bringing in Cursor’s team to build a frontier model, ideally combined with Grok, which has one of the few truly proprietary data feeds available to it, and with a much larger custom model Cursor can solidify a place, and I get to do a stock swap to buy it, this sounds like a bet worth making.

Upshot - I bet there’s an MS/oAI deal on IP on the back of this; meanwhile the cluster goes brrr.

But they also get a whole bunch of AI Services from Cursor. Other comments have noted that xAI has fallen on bad times (idk one way or the other) so perhaps they were going to spend $5B on getting these services elsewhere, anyway.

SpaceX spending $1B a month on various AI services seems ~plausible

(EDIT - Or maybe it's an IP transfer, or maybe it's over a longer time horizon. Idk but SpaceX clearly expects value from 'our work together' even if they don't exercise.)

Cursor is still the best I’ve used are there others I should try?

People keep saying this and they don't understand how businesses work.

Cursor has 1B in enterprise revenue. It doesn't matter if people can clone their product, those deals don't move slowly

Having tried most (all?) of the commercially available + open source options, and even tangential competitors like CC, Conductor, Antimetal, etc. I haven't found anything that's close to the experience of Cursor. The harness they've built is incredible.

I'd even go so far as to say that any competitors that are direct (windsurf, kiro, etc.) aren't even in the same universe. Cursor is just so much better, faster, has better features (plan and debug mode), and squeezes much better results/code out of the same models. They absolutely have some secrete sauce that the other options just don't have.

It has shown surprising stickiness. Occupying some middle ground between full adoption and still ~in the code.

I am starting to see some potential in moving back away from pure terminal, a mixed modality with AI. But it is not in the direction of IDE in any traditional sense.

Do you really think anyone is using AWS Kiro or Google Antigravity? They are not real competitors in the slightest.

Composer-2 is based on Kimi K2.5, but with extensive RL. Cursor estimated 3x more compute on their RL than the original K2.5 training run (some details in https://cursor.com/blog/composer-2-technical-report).

Composer-2 seems very useful in Cursor, while K2.6 according to AA seems to be a really useful general model: https://artificialanalysis.ai/articles/kimi-k2-6-the-new-lea...

I'm going to be brutally honest but I have not found Kimi to be useful at all. It simply cannot compete with what closed models from Codex and Claude offers. I don't want to risk using a model outside the ecosystem and introduce variables as most of my workflow is baked into two to three large company models.

It does unless you opt out

They will because there is no way to prove they didnt

Because cursor gives you access to tons of different models, not just the Claude models.

Not to mention the only company that would have any legitimate interest in acquiring Cursor would be Microsoft since they could just merge VSCode and Cursor into one product at very little cost.

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.

I was planning to sign up to Copilot, since their pricing was per request not per token.

Has that changed now?

I had never heard of it but it looks pretty slick: https://nimbalyst.com/

Thanks!

The new UI is literally opt-in. Nothing changed for me.

Glad I’m not the only one who feels this way. Even though I personally use Cursor, there’s no way it’s even a fraction of $60B

and I'm being completely neutral and objective in saying this: Elon Musk has been a horrible capital allocator but great at financial engineering. X is still struggling to win back advertisers (they will never come back) and still in the red. I have little reason to believe this is also another careful and shrewd financial decision.

I mean, technically they also re-sell AI tokens. Unsure if that’s with a markup or a discount.

at 42,000 employees and their own (infinite) compute on hand, there has to be at least one plucky junior internally who is suggesting using the open source equivalents, internal / open models and saving a big pile of money.

Just to well actually your well actually...

What you've described is how the base level mortgage-backed securities (MBSs) work. The tranches work because there actually exist mortgages that are at lower default risk (high home equity, well qualified borrowers, etc.), and the senior tranches are effective in capturing their underlying safety. What CDOs did was to take the lower, riskier tranches of MBSs from various sources and repackage them and divided them into tranches again. Then they got the ratings agencies to rate the top tranches of the CDOs as AAA as well. It's as if a teacher graded several classes and then took everyone that got a C or below from all the classes and then graded them on a curve again. And suddenly a lot of the C students became A students. It was outright financial insanity. Well, mixing a rocket/satellite company with a couple of also-ran AI outfits and the walking corpse of Twitter, and then calling the whole thing SpaceX and valued at $1.75T is a similarly level of financial insanity to me.

> Suppose you have 10 loans and each has a 50% chance of default. Ignore coupon, and say they are $10 each. Expected value is $50

And that naive statistical reasoning is where it goes terribly wrong. You have to consider the causal process that generates that distribution!

The type of people who would default on a coinflip are extremely sensitive to how the economy changes. The probabilities are very correlated, the expected value is rather meaningless then. It's closer to having a 50% chance to either get a full return or get zero returns, depending the macroeconomy, quite the gamble. Actually, those people were in a rather dodgy situation in the first place, or are not great at decision-making, so it might be more like 50% chance either of getting 50% return or getting 0% return.

PS: Just elaborating on your point, not meant as a counterargument, I know you said the same thing.

> this would be your AAA bond because odds of not getting paid out you $10 would be > 99.9%

I think you meant "the chances of getting paid", not of not getting paid.

> The problem w this model is that it only works if assets are relatively uncorrelated (it was true in the past but ignored systematic risk and adverse selection in originations). What this has to do w musk or spacex I’m still not sure

What this has to do with with SpaceX is that there's the same blatant disregard for sound financial analysis by the very institutions that were/are supposed to know better. The NASDAQ 100 fast track decision is a similar level of financial malpractice as the ratings agencies slapping AAA on things that they knew were little better than junk. The abuses of the subprime mortgage originators were well known long before the actual meltdown. As were those systemic risks you spoke of. They were ignored by those whose entire job it was to not ignore them, and they sold out their credibility for a quick buck. If you can't see the similarities to the present situation then I can only wish you luck.

Are you familiar with how crypto tumblers work?

They're going to force a S&P500 index listing on IPO day so we're all going to be forced to baghold this regardless of if we want to or not unless you've got $0 in any major retirement fund.

Friendly reminder that SpaceX is going straight to the index—Elon agitated for it. The 401k of everybody in America is serving as a bailout fund for X and now cursor, and whatever other trash he hovers up

Ug wants to borrow ten of my best sticks in exchange for future options to buy berries from his friend Og. Og has a watertight deal with Oog to invest the sticks in a five year mammoth hunting expedition but Oog first needs berries to exchange for sticks to cover his exposure on berry-puts he’s take out against Urrrg’s remortgaged stick pile.

Well, I said no. Not getting burned that way again!

Learned how to get the general public to directly put their money into it this time with the ETF shenanigans

On point #2, they are trying to do that right now. If spacex is fast tracked into the indices, passive investors via index funds will be forced into buying.

I certainly wouldn't mind having that image if it meant being the wealthiest man in the world.

I think X paid for itself, so it worked our for him.

Elon Musk, the richest person on the planet, with multiple industry-changing companies built under his leadership, clearly has no idea what he's doing.

No longer rumored as they filed for IPO!

This is actually an amazing sweetheart deal for Cursor. Many times with these high profile acquisitions, most stock is tied to LPA's and employment at the company, and also earnout provisions. The company then finds a way to parachute them out early, which both voids the earnout and their employment, thus they never vest most of the units and the few units they do vest get bought out at 409A valuations which are typically much, much lower.

In the case of Cursor this is an amazing boon as SpaceX listed at an almost 100x multiple which is absolutely staggering. Had SpaceX stayed private they could have 409a'd Cursor and got it for effectively ~100M$ cash.

There's not going to be $60B of exit liquidity if/when spacex IPOs. Maybe the suckers will be banks lending against the bubble valuation.

Forget bailout, this is a massive payday for them

Which includes OpenAI, btw.

Not just OpenAI, but OpenAI and OpenAI[1].

1: https://cursor.com/blog/series-a

They bought options.

I’m curious if that 1 million DAU still holds as of today. I think it was reported last year some time aka before December when Claude code exploded. A quick google didn’t turn up any results that actually contained sources for the number.

It's hard to compare these numbers directly since valuations have increased quite a bit since a quarter century ago. As a proportion of the S&P 500, Tesla (2.3%) is about 4x of Enron at that $70b (0.6%).

SpaceX is _not_ profitable by most reasonable measurements of accounting. If you discount rocket depreciation costs and R&D, then yeah its profitable from starlink revenue.

They had like $16B in revenue last year, half from Starlink.

That’s just money in the door and the underwriters seem to think the business is worth $1.75T.

It is less about profitability and more about dilution of ownership. He seems to have a pattern of diluting the ownership of his profitable companies by folding in his less profitable/failed companies. You still own a share of a profitable company, but a smaller share, to his benefit.

Im also profitable as an individual. I made a $100 this week, which makes me worth at least $30M.

SpaceX was profitable before the xAI thing happened. Now I imagine they're way in the red.

As was Enron

In part thanks to SpaceX purchase of CyberTrucks.

Pretty decent video released today by Wall Street Millennial that looks at the profitability of SpaceX (as part of looking at 'Terafab') :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSJi1oQFQzs

Have you looked at their latest report?

They are only profitable because of subsidies. Pretty much 1:1.

SpaceX was surely more profitable before it was used to bail out Elon's xAI which was used to bailout his purchase of Twitter.

just because a bunch of rockets went up without blowing up, does not mean they are profitable. it cost money to shot rocket, and it is very expensive, reusable or not. most launches are internal launch without external paying customers.

How much of that profit was due to public subsidies of the sort that he killed for other companies but not for himself during his tenure as a special government employee?

Genuine question, how do you know that without a 10K? Have the filed any document that shows their finances?

Tesla’s profits and market share has been declining for the past few years and it’s basically an overpriced meme stock.

Tesla has a P/E ratio of 364.981. It's blatant fraud.

Tesla is the free cashflow play that is probably the most important for mars as there is no distilled fermented dinosaur juice on mars, but considerably more by ratio of lithium / oil than the Earth. Our flintstone fire mobiles won’t work so well there, and battery / solar will be important there for everything, including mobility and armies of slave robots.

> Elon Musk Mars Conglomerate

That’s SpaceX’s version of Tesla’s self driving car pipe dream

Edit - I use self-driving car and Autopilot interchangeably

Because VCs are braindead... I see your point.

What really puzzles me is how years of woke insanity are forgotten / forgiven, but a nazi salute is not. Remember how Microslop employees used to start their presentations with a list of Native American tribes who owned the land their office was at? Maybe people don't read Orwell anymore... that stuff was straight out of 1984.

I see being downvoted on my question already - can people who hate Musk not see the difference between asking and supporting?