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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.

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

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

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.)

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.

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.

They changed that recently, you need to be paying €10/mo for that now. The free plan and/or access for the basic Twitter plan are gone.

> hand out free top end model coding access for a bit and you'll very rapidly have developer data

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

But if the developers are to presumably use the model you give out, what data are you going to get from them thats useful?

> There's a reason why xAI has zero enterprise customers

I’m curious where you pull these stats from

> 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

Absolutely no enterprise - I work in enterprise cloud consulting - absolutely no company would trust Grok with their IP compared to Anthropic or OpenAI with Musk’s reputation on how he runs his businesses.

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

Just to point it out, Cursor has not made any good models themselves. Composer 2 is Kimi K2.5, and they tried to pass it as their own until people noticed that the api specified it as Kimi.

Even if it wasn't for Musk, are these relationships really worth so much? There is a certain value in being on the approved vendor list, but it seems to me that there really isn't a lot of vendor lock-in. I think most people could switch to opencode, claude code or codex pretty easily. Maybe these relationships would be worth a lot if companies signed long-term contracts, but I doubt many did.

Yeah, Composer 2 is legitimately so impressive. It is my daily driver right now both on professional and personal projects. I only find myself reaching for 5.3 Codex/GPT 5.4 when exploring a lot of technical documentation or code and for Sonnet/Opus when working on UI. Everything else is Composer.

> forgot to consider whether all this is worth $60B

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.

$1B to $2B ARR in a few months with projection of $6B ARR by years end. If xAi wants to have it's own tools just like OpenAI and Anthropic, then it's not an unusual move.

it's not dollars it's X bucks

Now you know what it feels like to be British reading practically any other English source on the Internet.

That's not British, that's just old people

Story time please lol

The whole thing is Curxed

Xursor?

I'm putting it all on HaXor

Cuxed

That's curxed

Oh man, not sure if it's a good or bad memory... but that was the first linux bug I experienced as a newbie. Not so much a bug, but an unknown config I had to change so my first monitor would stop turning off when I moved the cursor to the second monitor.

Circa 2003

Honestly, just shorten it to Xor. That's actually not half-bad dev branding.

They will because there is no way to prove they didnt

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.

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.

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.

If you only use AI casually, the $20/month subscription to Claude can be enough.

hi, im the quilt.

Note that Meta paid ~16b for Alexandr Wang, and Google paid ~3b for the windsurf executive team. You are making a category error -- the talent pool isn't "ML researcher" it's "competent leader"

A brand he’ll promptly burn to the ground by renaming it some garbage with an X in it.

Buying the customers seems though, when it looks like they migrate to whomever offers the steepest subsidies.

10b active it seems

I think composer has currently by far the best price to performance ratio for coding (not counting subsidized subscription cost by OpenAI and Anthropic). It's based on Kimi K2, but I think it's fair to say, that their RL really sets it apart from the other open weight models.

Training any large model at scale is hard, and Cursor has trained several including agentic ones. https://cursor.com/blog/composer

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.

> 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 personally disagree on the first point. Claude code in a terminal with vim is much nicer. I just don’t see the need for the bloat of an IDE when the CLI versions work so damn well now.

They seemed to be doing fine with Kimi distillation. Not speaking from experience though, I prefer to use my editor.

> They are so good that they actually made Gemini usable

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.

Bet they will become tied to grok pretty soon.

Maybe vertical integration is the main business case.

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.

JetBrains is crying in the corner...

Composer 2 is really good for me too.

Cursor very reasonably had a “no retention” checkbox available to everyone, including those on free plans.

That’s indeed the trick. Spacex “invests” in Cursor, looks good on their balance sheet.

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.

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.

NYTimes has updated the title "SpaceX Strikes Deal With Cursor for $60 Billion"

yup - updated

Yes, https://cursor.com/docs/models/cursor-composer-2

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

Have you looked at their latest report?

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

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

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

Words do mean something, and you could have taken 5 minutes of research to make a reasonable counterclaim

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.

> How are any of these companies at all related to Enron?

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

SpaceX bought nearly 20% of Cyber Trucks sold in Q4. That makes me question the level of real profitability.

Tesla isn't that profitable, but SpaceX is likely generating boatloads of cash. From what I can tell Starlink alone has a free positive cash flow of about $2 billion. I'm not sure what the launch business is worth, but it's likely a lot given the absence of domestic competition.

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.

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On the contrary, anecdotally, myself and every engineer I know have switched fully from cursor to claude code since the start of the year. I now use zed with cc. I personally could not stand the buggy mess and constant UI changes of cursor. It’s also not good value in terms of claude tokens compared to claude code.

Wouldn’t Cursor agreeing to such a deal be almost ironclad proof they are subsidizing tokens/inference out the ass? There’s wide speculation all the large revenue growing companies right now are selling inference at break even or a loss.

No one wants an IDE, anymore. They're building a better horse.

cursors internal model efforts have not been able to meaningfully exceed the performance of the frontier models.

Claude/chatGPT are not subsidizing tokens via the API and are profitable for most enterprise consumption. This meme that they lose money on every query has zero evidence and is wrong outside of the 20/200$ a month plans.

I would like to know where you’re seeing this, because my strong impression is exactly the opposite: a year ago, everyone was talking about Cursor, but I haven’t heard anything about it in months. It’s all Claude Code and Codex now. In terms of mindshare they seem dead already.

How much is Cursor really beyond a VSCode fork? Like, do we really think no one else could figure that out?

While surely someone has done human-driven editing with sed, that's not what it's for. Remember that ed is the standard editor.

[dead]

This is like me, a couch potato, pivoting from "I'm going to run a half marathon" to "I'm going to do a marathon in under ten minutes"

Arguably more accurate is that it pivoted from colonising Mars to Elon's personal piggy bank to bail out his other failing bets.

Plot twist: Build the Dyson sphere around Earth and charge for sunlight…

SpaceXXX

> its mission has pivoted from colonising Mars to building a Dyson sphere

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

this is Elon's desperate move to fix his weak coding problem. He recently stated he feels he is far behind in agentic coding, and that apparently that's what matters.

> He's offloading the loss from buying Twitter

That already happened with xAI-X merged with SpaceX.

Do you mean the new desktop app? The Cursor IDE/editor or whatever you want to call it is still based VSCode, right?

Their Composer 2 model is Kimi (an open model) with additional RL fine-tuning, for whatever that information is worth to you: https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/22/cursor-admits-its-new-codi...

They have a 'proprietary' model which is just an open source (kimi?) fine tune

How would this be money laundering?

Could be contracts.

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

Interesting. I genuinely do not care about money.

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

> endgame is to game the index funds

Buying Cursor does nothing for this.

Model Y is still the best selling car in the world (and still the best-selling car in China), but yeah Tesla is *dying.

> building a Dyson sphere

So they are trying to take everyone’s money in bigger and bigger chunks until there is no economy left but hype.

Folks, if we spent 1/10th of the time and money we spend on this bullshit on taking care of people’s basic needs and education we would be far closer to the sci-fi future everyone seems so motivated to get to. Covid and the Trump cult seem to have broken almost everyone’s brains and we’re all gonna pay for the hubris.

I don’t doubt it is. End of the day, it’s a fine tuned Kimi. They tried to hide it and making their work sound more impressive than it is. It’s easy to have stuff be cheap when you don’t have to train your own model from scratch.

Composer is clearly dumber than the rest but then I only ask it dumb questions and it answers them really quickly.

yes, you are

> Starship won’t compete with F9, or BO because it is fully reusable and cost less than either.

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

There is a lot resting on Starlink, 11 gigadollars in direct revenue that accounts for fully 60% of SpaceX's total revenue of 18 gigadollars. It's hard to see how that level of revenue can sustain a 1 terradollar valuation.

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.

Starship is absolutely competing with Falcon 9 in two ways:

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.

You're claiming that SpaceX has not received governmnent subsidies, grants, and contracts?

> 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.

The moat is money. And now they’ll have access to plenty of it.