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.

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.

because they already have VSCode or IntelliJ for edits

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.

Corporate contracts. A lot of companies have signed onto Cursor. xAI has a pretty toxic brand with Elon and the nonconsensual sexual images scandal. xAI has a ton of compute and few corporate customers. Now they have a ton.

> One would think Elon would learn his lesson after overpaying for Twitter

I think he took over Twitter to control what people using it see and promote right wing viewpoints. To that end it’s been a wild success.

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 to xAI it’ll juice the entire SpaceX IPO. I am skeptical but these days the market seems to be driven by a country-club full of guys in Connecticut who are constantly hyperventilating on X so maybe from that angle it’s just another way he’s getting what he wanted from Twitter.

Cursor is installed on a LOT of computers.

Once Grok becomes the default engine, it will raise adoption.

More importantly, if you have Cursor installed all your data may be sent to their labs whether you use it or not (unfortunately - this is par for the course for all the LLMs, a la Microsoft).

That's worth a lot - especially considering that Cursor might also grow with the shift to more powerful local models and the fact that it has a respectable income stream.

maybe he's getting value from this? (also the deal was essentially secured with Tesla stock, so who knows what did he actually pay)

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 fact be crazy.

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.

true, but its not worth $60 billion fucking quid.

the whole thing is driven by irrational stock market investers who NEED ai to be the thing that saves the world.

they're betting everything on it.

But if someone frames it "engineering talent that knows how to make LLMs even better at software development than competition" it might.

I see with my own work it works so it is not like Devin that was basically a scam that was valued at 10 billion.

In this kind of context yeah feels like it is quite possible to be worth 60 billion.

Reminds me of the famous dropbox post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 - I don't even know if dropbox still exists in 2026 but i'm still happily using rsync and mailing things around because dropbox has just absolutely never worked reliably for me, unlike my 2007 gmail account.

Likewise, if it were up to me, instagram and any business whose business model revolves around ads would be banned (because ads would be banned because advertisement is harmful in general).

Unsure how it would work in practice.

The way I work now in the Codex desktop app is that I spin up 3-5 conversations which work in their dedicated git worktree.

So while the agent works and runs the test suite I can come back to other conversations to address blockers or do verification.

Important is that I can see which conversation has an update and getting desktop notifications.

Maybe I could set this up with tabs in the Terminal, but it does not sound like the best UX.

What they want is the massive user base, the data (Cursor has a lot of high quality coding data for training), the teams expertise in coding models and agents, and the Composer models

60 billion is a large number but these frontier labs are burning billions a month in compute alone, and SpaceX is IPOing soon so they'll have a lot of cash to spend

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.

They are catching up fast!

https://www.businessinsider.com/chamath-palihapitiya-ai-cost...

https://x.com/chamath/status/2029634071966666964

I suspect that as the value a company provides is more than its code, then increasing code churn does not lead to an equivalent increase in revenue. Even for a tech company, a business' concept, connections, knowledge, assets, non-coding staff, etc.. are a significant value and increasing code doesn't increase the throughput of that value. For non-tech companies code is the grease in the gears, not the gears themselves.

If you think this of users who use cursor then I don’t think you’ve used cursor much at all.

Only the foundation model companies offer cheap/subsidized compute.

If you're an app layer company, you're offering a 10x worse deal to your customers.

Foundation model companies are willing to lose money to win loyalty. Remains to be seen if it'll work.

So no it’s not an oxymoron.

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

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.

SpaceX has invested a small amount as a share of its value in XAI, and could survive the loss of its investment.

Also, he owned the Miss Universe org (including Miss USA and Miss Teen USA) for decades, and he was known to walk into the dressing rooms of teen contestants as young as 15 while they were undressed. [0]

Also, he bragged about molesting women, and a court of law found that he sexually assaulted E Jean Carroll.

I haven't proven the case that Trump had sex with a minor, but there's way more than enough probable cause to believe it's more likely than not.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20200111171647/https://www.rolli...

Not really relevant to the thread, but there are simple answers to the "eViDeNcE??" question. You may have already known this.

yes

> When deepfake generators are capable of creating convincing imagery of flawless ideal fake humans, why do you suppose there’s so many real humans who report being non-consensual subjects of deepfake porn?

?

You say this so casually, as though it were a normal thing to know, or as if a normal person would know it. Does that actually seem true where you live right now?

And how do you know that, anyway, Harsh? I mean, all those "unblocked" games you stole to give away and that you also put on Github, that's one thing. But this...

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

1) A gamble based on cursor's compute constraint 2) if 1) plays out, he can purchase cursor via shares of spaceX over valued shares, at a fixed price should the valuation increase.

Wild conjecture.

not that it isn't wild regardless

The main frenzy with Cursor started when you could access Anthropic models practically for free.

Otherwise it is just VS Code.

This is a bit simplistic. It's the VS Code that everyone used before cc came to town. Real devs, on real projects. All that data they collected is worth a lot more than "just vscode". Their composer2 is better than kimi2.5 and it's just a finetune on that data.

xAI had a decent model in grok4 (it was even sota on a bunch of benchmarks for a few weeks), but they didn't have great coding models (code-fast was ok-ish but nothing to write home about, certainly nowhere near SotA). Now that they've been banned from using claude, they'll get their expertise + data to build a coding model on top of whatever grok5 will be + their cluster for compute.

It doesn't sound like a bad plan to me, financial shenanigans or not.

> If you enable “Privacy Mode” in Cursor’s settings: zero data retention will be enabled for our model providers. Cursor may store some code data to provide extra features. None of your code will ever be trained on by us or any third-party.

Note the "may store some code data" and "none of your code will ever be trained on". In general you never want to include actual customer code in training the data, because of leaks that you may not want. Say someone has a hash somewhere, and your model autocompletes that hash. Bad. But that's not to say you couldn't train a reward model on pairs of prompts + completions. You have "some code data" (which could be acceptance rate) and use that. You just need to store the acceptance rate. And later, when you train new models, you check against that reward model. Does my new model reply close enough to score higher? If so, you're going in the right direction.

> If you choose to turn off “Privacy Mode”: we may use and store codebase data, prompts, editor actions, code snippets, and other code data and actions to improve our AI features and train our models.

Self explainatory.

> Even if you use your API key, your requests will still go through our backend!

They are collecting data even if you BYOK.

> If you choose to index your codebase, Cursor will upload your codebase in small chunks to our server to compute embeddings, but all plaintext code for computing embeddings ceases to exist after the life of the request. The embeddings and metadata about your codebase (hashes, file names) may be stored in our database.

They don't store (nor need to store) plain text, but they may store embeddings and metadata. Again, you can use those to train other things, not necessarily models. You can use metadata to check if you're going in the right direction.

Cursor needs their own 1st party backend model.

Sounds like a match made in heaven.

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.)

And on the AI development side they're the ones providing compute in the form of a "million H100 equivalent Colossus training supercomputer"... On top of the cash.

But I agree that it's hard to articulate what Cursor services you could blow this much money on.

Maybe it is all just an option! Or maybe they get a bunch of IP either way?

I didn't say it was Wise.

I said it seems within possibility for this, very particular, corporation.

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.

So for me it’s more of a data deal - Elon buying himself some insight into codebases and real dev usage patterns? Oh finally someone to use his dirty data centres

That said, people are increasingly migrating to CLI tools (Claude Code if you like the Claude models, Pi Agent if you want something that's highly customizable, Crush if you want something fun), or GUI tools that are less code-first (Codex GUI).

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

That' all well and good and they had astounding growth rates but doesn't mean much. And 1B in ARR is not _that_ much in comparison. Also, reportedly they spend all their revenue and they have no control over the spend-side. The models they use will very likely get much more expensive. All the foundation model companies have a competing product. Cursor has the first mover advantage, but that will only help then so much. There have been plenty companies who grew fast, had huge revenue, but failed in the end, because they never got profitable. That's also in the cards for Cursor, if they don't fundamentally change their business model

This was a similar play for twitter by the same person

While an innovator at the time, today there are a lot of LLM coding solution, sold by model providers, model aggregators even open source ones , it’s not obvious what is being bought that isn’t a feature of vs code or one of the LLM agents ( as the dismissive saying goes )

Add emotional hedges if needed but they are just emotional not financial.

Your argument is based on an assumption that cursor cannot lose value. Even if the market says it has.

No free lunch: an option is a bet for both sides. Zero sum.

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.

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.

* X will have a total of ~2GW of GPU sometime this year largely not doing much outside of 'grok is this true'

* despite no longer being in vogue with consumer devs Cursor still has a lot of developer data that can assist in building a model

* Cursor have decent enterprise relationships (while for xAI it is ~zero) and that's where the real revenue for llms + agents is

* Cursor are paying retail for tokens and competing against the frontier model co's who are also their suppliers. Not sustainable (hence their in-house composer model).

* Cursor the product covers the gamut from lovable-style prompt-to-app, an IDE, cli and bugbot

* X are using "x bucks" to pay for a potential later acquisition which are arguably overvalued based on the space x IPO hype

Option there to give X a window to make it work, otherwise walk away with a $10B breakup fee for access to it's data

Hey now, don't forget about it's super important other use, taking innocent photos of people and regenerating them in less clothing and compromising positions.

I'm sad that I even know that.

I’m curious where you pull these stats from

xAI is not, and was not that bad, it's just everybody ignores it for anything serious due to obvious reasons.

e.g. Need developer data? Use some of that spare GPU compute, hand out free top end model coding access for a bit and you'll very rapidly have developer data

>decent enterprise relationships

I guess. 60B worth of "relationships" though?

They tried this - grok was free on openrouter for a while

However, one thing in AI is that while the usage goes up extremely quickly, it tends to go down just as fast. I know a lot of companies that are in the process of switching from Cursor to Claude Code, so in 6-12 months I'm not entirely sure of the data quality/quantity.

Also I think it is telling that they are calling them SpaceX not X. The X brand is absolutely toxic, especially in enterprise.

it might not help all that much once it turns into "grok" harness or otherwise associated with elon

$60 billion seems expensive, but it gives them a much better chance at competing in the market than if they started their own harness from scratch.

Anthropic just tolerates the money losing developers who pay $20/$200 for subscriptions.

e.g. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/12/twitter-stiffs-s...

I wouldn't trust a contract from one of Elon's companies unless they were willing to put in escrow an amount that would make me whole in case of a breach on their side. (And that amount would be quite large in the case of a potential breach involving using prompt data for training.)

Their composer model is seriously good. I’ve been eyeing a cursor sub just to use it in OpenCode. They have a nice moat here.

> Cursor have decent enterprise relationships (while for xAI it is ~zero)

That has a reason. Those enterprise relationships are almost certainly going to sour at least a bit, if not for Musk‘s toxic image then for his erratic behavior.

It is true that they were not transparent about the base model that they used until the model slug was discovered by a Twitter user via the API.

[1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.24477 [2]: https://cursor.com/blog/real-time-rl-for-composer

care to share more about this?

I see two possibilities:

(1) SpaceX is paying with stock; and

(2) the $60bn pay-out is (a) conditional or (b) never going to be exercised—it was a stalking horse for negotiating the $10bn terms, which gives SpaceX everything it actually wants.

Also one would definitely offer to pay in stock if they believe it is massively over-valued lmao.

Sometimes it helps to go back to the basics to understand company performance: money in, money out?

Is it in vogue with enterprise devs?

“Cursor have” and “Cursor are” is awkward to read.

Steal their Twitter usernames anyway, just like he did mine.

https://web.archive.org/web/20150822195811/twitter.com/valen...

https://twitter.com/valentine_

(If any lawyers read this and feel up for taking this on contingency, I don't think I'm difficult to contact.)

https://fortune.com/2024/11/27/x-twitter-elon-musk-account-o...

My account was hijacked via domain/DNS takeover around the time it was acquired by fElon (due to both Crazy Domains and Twitter support's incompetence — both parties removed 2FA from my accounts, even despite me telling Crazy Domains specifically never to do so). I managed to recover both accounts after kicking up a fuss, but the hijacker was midway through an 3rd party account wiping script, and I'd lost all my followers because of that.

I had 33,300+ tweets in 2015, and a lot of that was private interaction with friends.

This is digital feudalism, and the billionaires have seized the means of communication.

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 yourself out for a few clicks of less friction and an easier shot at digital fame by going “viral” on social media company land.

If this isn’t a much bigger indictment of the collective (who after decades still could not agree on a non-elitist, human understandable protocol that didn’t require a CS degree to use) than it is of the entrepreneurs who solved all the problems the collective refused to, I don’t know how else to get though to you.

Circa 2003

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 working out... I just don't see an Elon company sustaining a culture that leads to a high-quality AI lab, even with the data + compute.

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...

That being said, I noticed that Kimi being served through Openrouter providers was trash. Whatever they do on the backend to optimize for throughput really compromised the intelligence of the model. You have to work with Kimi directly if you want the best results, and that's also probably why they released a test suite to verify the intelligence of their new models.

I found it much more consistent than glm or minimax

I guess really depends on tastes

Anyone have recommendations? I like the plan/agent mode and the fact that it's an IDE, so I can use it in the traditional way as well as by yapping with a bunch of agents. Also the Cursor rules I've curated and they do their job well.

Integrates a lot of agents (I use it with OpenRouter and directly with Pi) natively, is fast (you don't realise how laggy VSCode and its forks are).

Biggest disadvantage: lack of extensions. Lots of quality of life missing (e.g. gitignore integration to add/append gitignore files for different languages).

Give the oracle at amp a go :) Our TUI is really nice as well. Get in touch for some credits.

Has that changed now?

But you can't actually sign up to Pro or Pro+; they disabled sign ups until the per token pricing starts.

Thanks!

Maybe I was missing something, but I do not understand how it is worth sixty billion dollars.

I guess I don't really understand what it buys you over just running vanilla VS Code and Codex.

You can do that with claude code, github copilot (built into vs code) and codex, in any of their IDE versions, plugins for other ides (jetbrains, vscode, anything else you care to name) and also, of course, the CLI versions of all of them. They're also integrated into github, jira, and everything else.

Seriously, try other tools! if only to get a more balanced perspective.

This all being said, its been a long time since I last tried cursor... I'll give it a go.

If value is a concern, Codex. It's pretty hard to beat those subsidies. If you really want model freedom, Copilot is surprisingly decent value and as of right now let's you use your sub in other harnesses like OpenCode.

When coding agents work they're great. When they don't I still need the IDE. They usually don't work that great when I'm working on something novel or brownfield. Which happens quite regularly.

But I definitely still want ai autocomplete. I'm not a Vim user. Coding isn't about typing for me, it's about solving problems. So a tool that does lots of the typing for me is a godsend.

So do I go for VS Code + Copilot? Because it was bad when I tried it again for a few days in November. Slow to respond and gave poor results. Cursor is snappy and gives useful results most of the time.

They’re buying the customers and the brand.

As far as I know, xAI’s enterprise market share is non-existent. This is their way to get some much needed customers.

When they could instead sign with the new hottest enterprise coding IDE (Claude, Codex, etc who are way more popular now). Maybe if it’s an acquihire, it’s the GTM/Sales that xAI is after?

You should learn about securitizations. It’s actually interesting. But people talk about it colloquially and so incorrectly that it’s mind dumbing.

Here’s a simplified example of how you can take something and turn it into a safe investment:

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

If you were to put this in a deal and cut it up into tranches, say the first tranche gets the first $10, this would be your AAA bond because odds of getting paid out you $10 would be > 99.9%. The equity (bottom tranches) would pay a lot less. For instance the expected value of the bottom half would be considerably less than $50 that is being promised. So there’s upside since you’ll be paying cents on the dollar and even though in the median scenario you’re making nothing, you have to weight the expected values of each scenario to figure out how to price it.

The problem w this model is that it only works if assets are relatively uncorrelated which wasn’t true (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 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.

Mortgages are very cuspy. It's pretty wild that someone would give you a 30 year loan with 20% equity for a few percent higher than risk free. Also you could default on that loan and they can't garnish your wages. And if you default, your credit history would reset after 7 years. Oh and you can repay the loan at no cost, so if rates go down you can just pay it back and turn around and get another loan at a lower rate, or if rates go up you can hold on to it until 30 years.

It's the same thing with CDOs. You take something that has some undesirable characteristics (these cuspy BBB), structure it in such a way to create some safe and riskier assets. And hopefully the sum of the final tranches is worth more than the components.

It's like if you were forced to sell an animal whole. The individual components are worth more because people have different preferences. With CDOs (excluding synthetic), the amount of exposure is unchanged. It's a bit more concentrated where the riskiest parts are in these CDOs, but nothing changes.

I get that finance isn't really sexy and people see it as just pushing paper around, not creating any value. But there's real value in taking some components and creating something more valuable with it. It's like using flour + sugar + egg to create cookies worth a lot more than the individual components. There was fraud and negligence but people are mad at the wrong things.

Rating agencies did a poor job, but in their defense, delinquencies and defaults reached levels well outside expected values due to systematic risks. Also rating agencies are kind of a joke. Investors aren't dumb. Even today, look at debt, there's a big difference between bonds of the same rating and similar weighted average life.

The bad thing about rating agencies is how regulations rely on them to determine what "safe" is and capital requirements. Of course, mandated capital requirements shouldn't be the end all be all of risk management, but these guidelines that over rely on rating agencies don't help the matter.

Mixing rocket company with AI and social media is fine. It's just a conglomerate. Who cares? Look at Samsung, they sell smartphones, TVs, ships, they're involved in construction, even insurance and biotech.

The question is what is the underlying core competency they're relying on and it's obviously Musk. And he has been able to deliver innovative products (manufacturing and forward thinking technologies). He scaled up one of the largest training clusters in the world in a very short period of time. He created a large car company after decades of stagnation. He lowered cost of getting stuff to orbit by orders of magnitude and now handles something like 90% of rocket launches. He's gotta be doing something, right?

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.

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

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.

I do agree that the optics of this aren’t great, and it’s rather easy to be cynical about motives.

I'm trying to help my parents now their at retirement age and am seeing first hand what not planning for your future looks like. They hit retirement with nothing but a small social security check every month. Not even enough to cover rent in most places.

I don't know how much you have in your 401k, but it will be worth literally hundreds of thousands more if you pull it out when you retire. You aren't just paying the penalties now, you're paying for potentially decades of compounding.

But if by some tragedy you don't die young, your older self is gonna be pissed at younger you for costing him hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The thing is, every dollar you spend on insurance is a dollar (and its interest) you lose. Furthermore, we don't know when it will pop. 1 year? 5 years?

The more reasonable solution is probably gradually reduce exposure to US markets by selling SP500 shares and turning to Europe and emerging markets ETFs. No need to cash out 401k.

If you just look at the past 20 years, the US has had exceptional returns compared to the rest of the world.

The thing is, historically, high PE ratios like what we're seeing in the US do not correlate with short term returns that are as high. Expected future returns decrease as the PE ratios go up in a pretty linear fashion.

https://am.jpmorgan.com/us/en/asset-management/institutional...

If you want a different point to backtest from, try Japan in the 80s and early 90s

I'm not an expert but it looks to my like 80% of my allocation won't be tracking spacex, because it's mid cap or small cap etc, and the 20% that's in the vanguard growth index might? I assume whoever sets the rules for the fund could change the rules to say companies must be listed for X months if they want to avoid this, right?

And I can change my allocation.

edit: Actually wait, isn't it only nasdaq 100 that's tracking it early, after 15 days rather than 3 months of trading? So 0% of my 401k is exposed to buying it quickly after IPO already, I think.

They removed it largely because investors wanted higher returns, and the tech companies that had such dual classes (1) were doing really well, and the S&P ended up caving on that rule.

1: Perennial hot button around here Palantir did this in a more extreme fashion than most. The three founders F class shares will always be at 49.9999% of the votes and the early investors B class shares have 10 votes each as compared to the publicly traded A class shares 1 votes.

S&P 500 includes companies from multiple exchanges. Like Nvidia, which lists on Nasdaq.

https://www.morningstar.com/funds/spacex-ipo-how-index-funds...

> Nasdaq was the first to consider a rule change that would grant mega IPOs like SpaceX early admission to its flagship Nasdaq-100 index. The exchange and index provider began a consultation period in February to assess the viability of and industry response to a proposed “fast entry” rule. The change was approved on March 30 and will be effective on May 1.

Now why is this bad? Well, if you invest in a fund that is based off of the indices, you’re going to be investing in SpaceX whether you want to or not and I certainly don’t think 15 days is enough time to sus out whether this is a stable investment worthy of being in the index, but it’ll be great…until it drags a million retirement funds down with it.

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

Google and others were sitting at the corner, laughing that they gonna burn their money for no reason! they turned out to be wrong.

Turns out offering discounted/subsized tokens to developers massively improves your AI compared to just being a talking parrot for normal user workflow where you do not get "instant feedback" on if it worked or not.

This type of bundling is just what conglomerates do. Is it a good thing? Not really. Many investors also hate this kind of stuff and avoid investing in these types of companies.

I know a ton of people that use Codex, Claude, OpenCode but can't name a single person that uses Cursor or Grok that is knee deep into agentic coding.

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.

If so that would seem like the most plausible take on why this is happening.

I feel like we're finally at a point where you don't have to constantly argue with and constantly babysit coding models, which makes it even more frustrating when you're suddenly forced to deal with one that ignores your instructions and gets stuck in thinking loops again.

I suspect it's the vast troves of training data rather than any tech that Cursor possesses that SpaceX is after...

The problem is they can't compete with Anthropic and OpenAI because they can't sell Opus and GPT at a discount to subscribers like OpenAI and Anthropic do with their subscriptions.

So they either need to build a competing model or slowly die.

Cursor is essentially all the Claude Code products but without the horrible bugs of Claude Code products.

You can transfer from CLI to web and it actually works.

I think Gemini is best model out there, and it's not Cursor who you should praise. I use it with jetbrains junie. Vastly cheaper than claude, faster, produces better quality code, actually listens to your instructions, more accurate. I'm sure claude code cli has some cli magic that I'm missing out on, but having everything just work in a nice IDE (and llm to actually understand your symbol table) is like magic.

IDK how Junie does it, but I spend less than $50 USD per month and I'm on it 30 hours per week.

A controlled environment to determine effort and token usage, and to get plenty of exclusive training on code.

It could end up making sense. Idk if they needed to offer 60B though.

I think they’ve been caught in a bad spot. They’re a profitable company, but nowhere on the scale of Microsoft. And they don’t have billions of VC to effectively price dump. Other tools that can focus on one thing and burn cash are advancing quickly and some of them don’t really need an IDE at all.

The semi-recent introduction of ACP integration in the JetBrains IDEs has been a nice bridge. But now it’s confusing how everything comes together. I really hope they can survive.

But I just... barely use an IDE anymore. I think I have the lowest possible subscription price for "all products" you can have (at least as an outsider) and I think I'm going to cancel this year. I've been paying for a decade+

Not sure what problems people here have with JetBrains offerings

Honestly unlimited codex with 5.4 high has a similar effect.

SOTA models + harnesses used together is very different than it was 6 months ago. People that have significant software engineering experience can get so much done it's scary.

We hit some sort of tipping point between models and harnesses and people learning how to use the tools idk.

And directs / engineers / friends seem happier.

Simon Wilson recently did a podcast where he discussed his experience and it felt very familiar.

Worth listening (ignore the click bait title) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wc8FBhQtdsA

I do not need to "shift my perspective" since I do use agents to the degree that I need and it helps help me very much. I am way more productive with them.

Generated code is still not perfect disregarding of any particular model (I have access to all). I have to watch and fix, sometimes by supplying more precise specs, sometimes asking to rewrite piece of code in such and such manner using this and that structures.

I keep seeing what I'm referring to happen - folks are using / opening their editor less and less.

What's crazy is a developer can go on a walk and use tmux/tailscale and keep working as if they were sitting at their desk.

Yet JetBrains tried to do everything themselves and failed :(

Not sure what problems people here have with JetBrains offerings

I know JetBrain product could be sluggish on "normal" computers however all 4 of my development machines run on 16 cores AMD with 128GB RAM. It flies in environments like that

But it's clearly not worth 60B dollars in April 2026.

for contrast, Elon paid $44b for twitter back in 2022. When you adjust for inflation, Twitter was acquired for $49b in 2026 money. Cursor getting bought for 1.22x more is just insanity.

Elon seems unwilling to shake off the image that he has basically no idea what he's doing.

  > Nikita Bier @nikitabier
  >  
  > If you’re seeing a bunch of Japanese posts, here are some fun facts:
  > Japan has more daily active users and more time spent on X than any other country in the world.
  > Over two thirds of the country is monthly active on X. 
  > X in Japan has one of the highest penetration rates of any social network in history.

1: https://twitter.com/nikitabier/status/2037764895064867061

in ten the speed'll kick in, can of coke and a ciggy and he'll be right as rain

More accurately it is 3.4% of SpaceX at the last rumored valuation of $1.75T.

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.

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

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

A sobering thought.

Honestly, it felt much stranger to me to learn, a few years ago, that they're 3D-printing rocket engines. With my experience limited to building my own PLA/ABS 3D printer out of salvaged motors and parts printed on another printer, it was hard to imagine how this is anywhere near safe and precise enough. But turns out, FDM-ing some plastic blobs is not the same as fusing Inconel powder with lasers. Same with using LLMs for software engineering (whether in aerospace culture or otherwise), it's just not the same as asking ChatGPT "please make me an app to do something idk how i cannot code send halp".

They need xAI as a reason for the narrative that data centers will be in space, so SpaceX can project far more growth before the IPO. After the IPO they'll find out that data centers in space are too expensive and overheat.

EDIT: Parent commenter edited out the @dang from their comment making mine appear to be responding to something not in their comment.

I don’t personally think Google is worth $4T but the share price says otherwise.

Source?

https://www.morningstar.com/funds/spacex-ipo-how-index-funds...

> S&P is reportedly considering a fast entry rule change to its flagship index, though it has not yet been approved, and details are scant.

> FTSE Russell is also considering a fast entry rule for its suite of US market indexes and is in a consultation period as of early April 2026.

Only Nasdaq 100 has changed its rules, but Nasdaq 100 is not (and should not be) in most retirement funds.

Really? We're still making claims like this in the year of our Lord 2026? People in the markets today are not predicting the real value of a company, they're gambling that the various political and financial machinations from people like Elon Musk will increase the share price enough that they can sell at a profit. The value of shares like Tesla are utterly disconnected from the value of the underlying business.

No, having the option to replace technology at your leisure would be a benefit. Being forced to replace your technology because it's destined to become aerosolized aluminum in less than five years is a detriment.

5 million over 5 years capex+opex. Mostly opex

It's also a troll post

I'm not saying they aren't profitable. I don't know, but it's definitely not a given.

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

Again, not debating that SpaceX isn’t a legit company or that it’s profitable. But underwriters agreeing with high valuations to stocks that collapse once they go public isn’t unheard of.

Edit: and I will concede that I should’ve phrased my initial thoughts better. Credit rating agencies and underwriters do very separate things, just like IPOs and MBS are two very separate things.

That isn't what is happening at all.

In an IPO the underwriters and the company collaborate to set the price based on approximate demand and what they want the quality of the holders to look like.

In the roadshow, the company is very constrained as to what they can say or disclose outside of the scope of the S-1. They can't include MNPI, forward looking financial projections, etc. Underwriters are also prohibited from sharing MNPI, or publishing marketing disguised as research.

So I guess if you're saying the SpaceX S-1 is completely full of shit and there's hidden risk in it, than it could be similar to 2008, but in this case nobody is manufacturing a rating, and those material misrepresentations would constitute securities fraud. Investment banks and ratings agencies aren't the same thing at all, and the buyers of marginally profitable IPO stocks are (hopefully) different than those of AAA MBS.

I agree underwriters and credit agencies are very different just like IPOs and MBS are very different. I don’t think SpaceX is committing fraud.

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

I was responding to this particular comment.

In 2008, the credit rating agencies weren’t necessarily found to be guilty of wrongdoing, but a variety of reasons let them roll with AAA ratings on junk MBS anyway. Similarly the underwriters are not going to be committing crimes to facilitate IPOs. They are after all taking the risk of guaranteeing the sale for the company. However, if a company wants to roll with a high valuation, even if the fundamentals aren’t matching the valuation, if there are buyers, the underwriters will set the price supporting that high valuation. They are not incentivized to accurately measure a company’s worth like the comment I was responding to suggests.

I think you're going to be surprised at the level of competition BO provides SpaceX in the Artemis program.

Did you notice the size of the Artemis rocket and the size of the payload it sends to the moon and back?

Do you expect there to be diamonds just laying these on the moon surface, no mining required.

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

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

You’re not wrong factually, but it doesn’t mean what you’re suggesting it means. Their share went up because EVs aren’t selling as much anymore. All companies including Tesla are selling fewer EVs. They just have a bigger share of the smaller pie, which isn’t exactly a success when you only sell EVs, but your competitors also sell non EVs.

Edit: Constant is the wrong word. Resilient or consistent is what I was trying to say.

Competitors leaving the market means less competition which is a good thing for Tesla. If the market for EVs returns in the future (if, say, the next administration reimplements the incentives), Tesla will be there to reap the benefits.

Their sales did not remain constant.

We're probably looking at nuclear fission generators to get started, then converting to geothermal at any appreciable (and maybe fusion, inshallah).

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

Edit - I use self-driving car and Autopilot interchangeably

What I see a lot of people do, unfortunately, is reconcile this contradiction by not following the published limitations of the "Full Self-Driving (Supervised)" product. They assume that Elon Musk wouldn't call it that if it couldn't be trusted to do what they expect. Then they get into fatal crashes, and someone sues, and Tesla argues that they can't be held accountable for bad drivers who don't follow the rules.

Any argument about how people don't pay enough attention since it isn't yet certified as a L4 system is irrelevant and tangential to the point.

Tesla has an insane PE ratio because it’s a casino stock (~350x). As a comparison, NVIDIA IS 40x. SpaceX Is projected to be 300-500x. These are fantasy, completely unrealizable valuations. Similar to Enron, and Enron was over 70x. Enron wasn’t some surprise either.

Typically when PE gets out of whack, market analyzers dig into what is happening because it’s usually chicanery. No longer. Everyone is along for the ride.

When people say something is like enron, they dont mean it has a high PE. Its like saying someone is like Hitler and meaning they are a failed art student

There's a lot of parallels:

* Circular transactions between companies under the same control

* Using SPVs to keep debt off the books

* The supplier funding its own customer through investment to inflate revenue on both ends

* Valuations driven by a hyped up narrative and decoupled from actual fundamentals

I have a suspicion the reason Musk wanted to combine SpaceX and X.ai is the latter gives him losses to write off against all that cash from the former plus a chance for a big AI payoff.

They're prepping for an IPO and there have been some anonymous insider reports of the figures in the press

There are industry estimates

Much of their income comes from public contracts

I have no idea what this has to do with aerospace, but I know a bit about software and this does not look great. Cursor is obviously on a serious decline and has little to no moat in the area they are building in (IDE), which we kinda now know is maybe not even the right area (CLI). I feel like this is just a bad move?

A team could build an AI IDE in a week, this could be a race to the bottom

But, even if you want a big all-in-one editor in an Electron app, it seems obvious VS Code is the way to go (or Zed, if you you aren't committed to using an Electron app). I just can't think of anything Cursor offers that makes it worth spending extra money for it.

Cursor's token utilization is significantly better than Claude Code. Composer's latest model, for coding, is very competitive on quality given price and was clearly well-optmiized (in two months, you will hear almost nothing else than how expensive Anthropic is...this is before they try to release the really expensive models). so many very obvious things like this if you have been using this tech every day for multiple years.

unfortunately, the competition in this space is very weak because of how dominant cursor has been (Kilo/Roo/Cline all have major implementation issues with token utilization, everyone else is trying to go all in on agentic). don't see this getting better until things get much worse because of anthropic/agentic. from the decisions that anthropic is making, it seems they are busily digging their own grave. growth will come after this.

SpaceX is no longer SpaceX per se, but SpaceX-xAI.

My TL; DR (and this is mine, personally) is its mission has pivoted from colonising Mars to building a Dyson sphere. Space-based datacentres are a demand excuse for putting lots of solar panels in space. Going one level down, more Cursor use is a demand excuse for putting lots of datacentres anywhere.

Be it the Dyson shell thing or Lunar or Mars colonies, there's no way it'll be done relying on transports from Earth surface. It could only work if we could make them from asteroid pieces. Which makes most items on their tech tree from Starship forward obsolete. And they're already all-in on those techs. It makes so little sense in so many levels.

My point is regardless of what you think of a Dyson sphere, this theory seems to predict what the company does better than assuming everything's a ketamine fever dream.

I think Musk being a ketamine addict explains a lot and this is very aligned. Given that he can't build a self-driving car, he would have to be under the influence of very strong drugs to think he could build a Dyson sphere of all things.

That being said, some sort of financial fraud is even more on brand.

The characterisation of “level 5” autonomy as the car handling any conceivable circumstance (not that you explicitly made this claim here) is just silly. Humans can’t handle any conceivable circumstance either.

https://youtu.be/hjdMYyjnmks?si=iyoVV-oZAPmQtp1B

Obligatory mention: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLzEX1TPBFM

Sure. My question was why. And my loose interrogation of the question, together with some unique domain expertise, suggests he found an excuse to work towards a Dyson sphere.

That already happened with xAI-X merged with SpaceX.

Though, in fairness, that's probably the important part. Like a base model plus "coding smarts" is probably perfect for the situation.

But maybe not as much value as I was thinking.

2. Make SpaceX valuation even higher before IPO

3. Boost XAI/usage of Grok.

Opus, I watch my allotment creep up every turn…

Cursor might not be the new hotness, but if we believe that agentic coding is the next wave and we’ve gone from asking chatbots to actually using agents for coding, then yes, this move makes sense for Elon to hype up a SpaceX IPO.

That isn’t an agreement to buy

Since the firing of several Grok founders, Grok has decreased in capabilities. It is illogical and insults users when called out.

So he does what everyone does. Write more dev tools, slap a price on it and hope retail investors will be impressed in the IPO. The $60 billion is of course optional and will just be used in the IPO to inflate the valuation.

The same "mistake" that SpaceX bought 10% of Tesla CyberTruck?

Wait are they all Musk's companies? Is it a pattern?

/s obviously

Some random article on the topic: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cq6vnrye06po

80% of those responded (250ish in the group had). Bit of selection bias there from the question - but my impression was Cursor is very much dying to competition from the labs.

The “apply” model to turn LLM output into code changes?

I like SpaceX a lot but this really doesn’t make sense at $60B

I guess there's a bunch of tools to not suck at this. Anyone had success here? The AI tools say I'm great because they can't pick up the kind of problems I'm talking about.

The motivation of money is literally zero to me. Maybe that's a problem as well: they want people who Are motivated by money acting like they aren't?

I wanted in because I saw them doing exciting impactful things That's literally it.

I dunno. I've been struggling with this for decades

This seems like an elaborate Elon rug pull. A Windsurf situation 2.0

Eventually, stock prices will correct hard, and retail/passive investors will be left with the bag.

The idea that merging these companies has some business purpose is hilarious. It’s purely financial engineering. Unfortunately, our existing system has little consumer protection against this kind of fraud, so Elon will probably get away with it, at least in the short term

Buying Cursor does nothing for this.

Spacex already owns Twitter and xai, trying to post-rationalize with justification like they have servers doesn't make a whole lot of sense. It's all accounting at this point.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/apr/21/spacex-cu...

SpaceX, a rocket company owned by Elon Musk bought xAI, an AI company also owned by Elon Musk for... reasons. Don't give me the datacenters in space narrative, we all know it is bullshit.

It is then buying the option to buy a company for which the only contribution is a glorified VSCode plugin and the reselling of other companies LLM services at an absurd price. I understand that it is more complicated than that but 60 fucking billions, that's the GDP of a small country!

And now, Elon Musk intends to IPO SpaceX, which means he expect people to buy into all this bullshit. And considering that unlike me and judging by his wealth, he seems to be really good at understanding the market, so he is likely to be right.

This could be a lot of money to spend to acquire users that may not be sticky.

Laugh all you want. He may have the last laugh on this one.

I associate Musk with being user hostile, unreliable, meme oriented and disruptive in the worst sense; I’d like my work tools without that please.

I've personally watched a lot of developers around me (myself included) who were enthusiastic Cursor users when it first launched gradually migrate over to Claude Code and Codex. And I don't think this is just happening in my bubble.

My guess is this is some kind of strategic play ahead of SpaceX's upcoming IPO — an attempt to get a higher valuation stamped on the company. But I'll say it again: $60 billion is absolutely absurd.

https://x.com/spacex/status/2046713419978453374

The combination of Cursor’s leading product and distribution to expert software engineers with SpaceX’s million H100 equivalent Colossus training supercomputer will allow us to build the world’s most useful models.

Cursor has also given SpaceX the right to acquire Cursor later this year for $60 billion or pay $10 billion for our work together."

Crazy a fork of vscode is worth 60B. What’s vscode worth to Microsoft? 200B?

these are weird times...

Oh yeah, did I mention how Starlink is literally already in the close to Kessler Syndrome territory? all it would need is for a strong enough solar storm to hit their sats.

There's no Kessler Syndrome where Starlink is.

You'd know this if you read Kessler's first paper. It's online.

i.e if every single Starlink satellite crashes into another you won't get Kessler Syndrome.

And the same it true for the planned Kuiper.

The spacecraft wasn't designed with humans in mind first.

And second:

This is a paper by Kessler himself:

https://conference.sdo.esoc.esa.int/proceedings/sdc9/paper/3...

https://www.reuters.com/technology/spacex-says-it-has-option...

Personally, I have been granted the option to buy Tesla for $30 trillion by the end of this year or pay $500 billion for a partnership. It'll all happen, I swear.

See also: companies buying up the Slack and email archives of defunct startups, for training data.

1. It was used to rescue himself and key investors from overpaying for Twitter, which was first rescued through xAI (and I don't know why anyone thought investing in xAI was a good idea but here we are). If our regulators weren't defanged, this deal would've gotten alot more scrutiny (IMHO). Whatever the case, this is all diluting the SpaceX business for overpriced AI vaporware;

2. From what I can find, SpaceX's revenue in 2025 was ~$18B with a $5B loss. That doesn't sound like a $1.5T+ company to me;

3. The markets are being rigged to make the IPO a success by changing the rules to force passive funds to buy into it with a tiny float (5% instead of the normal 25%); and

4. Here's the big one. I think Starship is a badly designed program that's going to take many billions more to complete and commercialize. There's not really a market for bigger payloads (evidence: ~1 Falcony Heavy launch per year) and STarship will effectively have to compete with Falcon 9 at a time when reusable alternatives (eg from the Chinese as well as Blue Origin) are coming to market.

Starship isn’t comparable to Falcon Heavy because it has vastly more volume, which will make it the cheapest way to launch Starlinks, which will be a lot of launches to begin with.

Currently, this is not the case. Not fully reusable, and not costing less than F9 or BO.

Like, TSLA had 94 gigadollars in revenue last year, and it's a 1.2 terradollar company, and most outside analysts are frankly skeptical of that multiple. SpaceX is trying to get a similar valuation on a fifth of that revenue.

1. If F9 is cheaper, why would you use Starship?

2. If SpaceX decides to force Starship adoption by simply halting F9 launches or making them prohibitively expensive, well the market is still open for an F9 clone from someone else.

My point with FH is that there isn't a demand for much bigger payloads. Now, SpaceX wants to induce demand with STarlink launches. OK, so the viability of Starship is tied to the viability of Starlink. I thought Starlink was a clever way to prove F9 reusability but the first-mover advantage won't last forever.

My main point here was that F9 was developed, SpaceX's competition was the likes of ULA with their insanely expensive rockets but whether SpaceX uses F9 or not, it has become the new baseline.

SLS is insanely expensive to build and launch but it still has a much greater launch capacity. Starship's solution to this is essentially in-orbit refuelling where, I believe, it will take ~10 Starship launches to refuel a Starship in orbit. This too is an insanely complicated capability that they haven't even begun to develop yet.

And whatever the ultimate per-launch base cost works out to be the program R&D cost has to be amortized cross those launches so even if the base cost is $10M, if you spent $10B developing the program, it still matters if you launch 10 a year vs 100.

When SpaceX goes public, they're going to be forced to disclose a whole lot more information about the program cost and I suspect it's going to be a lot higher than the rosy projectsions you get on Twitter.

Another way to put it is I think Starship could be SpaceX's Cybertruck.

shows how intense the power laws are around ai and how much of a capital game it is.

A rocket company buying a so so overvalued coding AI company is a joke even worse than the 2000s internet pet food companies were

If this is an acquihire, it doesn't compute for me (though I can't say I understand how things work in the world of the 60B level). LLMs are new enough that nobody has a big enough headstart to warrant a 60B personnel change.

The IPO angle also doesn't make sense. Musk cultists were gonna buy anyway; this doesn't change that. And for everyone else, who wants to pay down debt on an acquisition whose effect will almost certainly not be palpable in mainstream circles, if at all?

I don't fully understand the influence that comes with SpaceX subsidies and government contracts, but I gotta believe that rounding up non-lab AI chops are on that agenda?

The exact options - 60B for acquisition (obviously not a cash deal, right?) or 10B for unspecified services rendered... also don't make sense for either of the first two.

Is this just a way of the government securing contractors by proxy that wouldn't pass muster if done through the normal channels?

SpaceX has paid for contracts to deliver services to the government and those services have saved the government billions of dollars compared to the alternative.

> those services have saved the government billions of dollars compared to the alternative

Source? All I can find is some guy saying it.

And it doesn't really matter what they've saved. It doesn't excuse conflicts of interest.

Turns out capping costs help. (See SLS) (See Europa Clipper)

Contracts aren't subsidies and you know that. It's straight up dishonesty to mix them up.

McDonald's and Burger King are government contractors

I guess back to Jetbrains it is.

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