I stopped using Cursor when I started getting comfortable with Codex/Claude. Cursor is just annoying with the constant popups and it's just not as good. Now my workflow is to use my normal editor, add a todo describing what I want, and then ask Codex+gpt-5.5 to implement it. It absolutely nails it. Using codex is so much more like working with a partner vs the noise and annoyance of Cursor.
That said, I think we're in a narrow window of time right now where any of this matters. Prompt "engineering" and working around your tools will be over in a year or so.
Fwiw I am a c/c++ systems engineer. I think anyone mentioning anecdotal experience like this should clarify. Maybe frontend JavaScript folks have a totally different take and that's expected.
I also work with C++, and I use Codex (desktop) which writes 99.99% of my code, plus Visual Studio, which is nice for reading and navigating code. For webdev I do VSCode + Codex.
I started with Cursor back in the day, but switched to Claude Code and then Codex when Cursor got too expensive.
If price wasn't an issue, maybe I'd prefer Cursor only because I can easily switch between models. But that's it. I always disliked the "accept/reject" workflow in cursor, but that's probably optional nowadays I guess?
the reason to use cursor nowadays isn't the IDE (though it's helpful perhaps once a week), but how it makes running models from multiple providers trivial out of the box. I don't have to juggle keys or drop to a shell tool call, it supports calling out to e.g. gemini in a subagent natively. I have multiple models cross-reviewing plans and diffs as a matter of course.
claude code was seriously annoying with the flickering, maybe it's fixed now, I don't know.
cursor also has a (bad) cli if you need it, it seems it's mostly used to setup remote agents, but it does the job in a pinch.
I don’t think mapping tooling to ability makes sense here, particularly when the “advanced” tools here just abstract more away, though I agree that Cursor is terrible. So many useless windows.
When I first used Cursor, I hadn't used any of the "Vibe Code" tools out there, so it was pretty neat to have an assistant directly tied to the editor.
Once I learned how to use Codex, I just used a tmux split with NeoVim and have the effect I wanted. I haven't felt compelled to use Cursor at work since.
Same path as you. Went from $60 cursor plan (often exceeding it which costed more in API) to a limitless $100 codex plan where I basically say "read the markdown and implement the instructions". Deepseek also works quite well, surprisingly!
(FWIW Im mostly using python for OCR, LLM calls, data analysis..)
>> Fwiw I am a c/c++ systems engineer. I think anyone mentioning anecdotal experience like this should clarify. Maybe frontend JavaScript folks have a totally different take and that's expected.
Similar experience, having transitioned from full-stack to a dedicated C/C++ stack, learned/experienced firsthand that there is no one-size-fits-all tool.
I recently made an npm package with a small C helper that runs in the background. The JS/TS code is 99.9% unit test covered and for sure "cleaner" code. Just my opinion though.
Not OP, but I generally agree. Models are powerful enough now to reliably instruct other models. They don’t need fancy tools or IDEs, just the command line.
With deterministic workflows, type-safe languages and test suites, agentic loops pretty much “can’t fail”. They will continue until the types resolve, the tests pass, and the project requirements are deterministically met.
By that point it’s literally just a case of typing a prompt in to a text field, and waiting.
On the flipside, I enjoy Cursor now and came back to it after leaving it over a year ago. The 2.5 model is fast as hell and very good. And whatever harness they have it's terrific, great results. I also really enjoy the fact that I can open my website in the Cursor in-app browser and just click and reference stuff. It's a really cracked workflow. The models can only get better for them.
I like cursor, but I'm assuming they're talking about how it hijacks your tab key. It's amazing when it works, and infuriating when I just want to insert a damn tab!
A space company is buying an IDE for roughly the cost to build 150 of world's most expensive modern hospitals [1]. How is this in SpaceX's interest? Isn't it kinda bizarre that Elon is pivoting SpaceX to something else?
Elon's award is tied to growing Tesla's market cap - it's pretty transparent that he's just trying to ball-of-mud together everything he can to hit that target and grab the bag.
What would it mean if SpaceX buys Tesla though? Does the combined market cap count? That would be wrong. Tesla buying SpaceX just for hist bonus and then rebranding to X would be classic Musk.
It's a game for him, but so ridiculous. While Tesla was pushing electrification and SpaceX pushing rapid rocket re-use I kind of tolerated Elon's antics, but since he got involved in politics and DOGE I can't bear it anymore.
The total addressable market (TAM) for SpaceX is finite. There are only so many nation-states and large corporations that want to launch payloads into orbit.
And even if their internet service provider is uniquely capable for now, it only fills a strategic need for certain customers.
So instead, Musk and Co. need to find bubbling market trends that look like they will have huge gigantic TAMs to justify the potential growth of this company.
All markets are finite. But you're thinking too finitely -- remember that there was a proposal to use Starship (BFS?) as a point-to-point method of people transport too (London to Sydney in under 50 minutes I seem to remember).
You also have other services: Starlink is an obvious one they're pursuing now, but there's many other things that they could branch into with no effective competition right now, from harvesting resources such as Helium-3 to Rare Earths (ironic name), to... (thinks for several minutes) banishing people to the Phantom Zone?
But you get what I mean, it's not just about rockets, it's about the things cheap and reliable rocketry enables.
Which hasn't yet been proven to be either technically or economically viable, even on paper. It's a pipe dream.
The cynical viewpoint is that this is Elon capitalizing on current datacenter hype to inflate SpaceX's valuation based on theoretically overcoming tremendous amounts of hard physics problems, over the next 5-10 years. As he did with FSD, Boring Company / Hyperloop, Twitter, etc.
Do they, really? Because putting data centers in space would mean multiplying the infrastructure cost by a few orders of magnitude, while being far, far away from cheap energy - photovoltaics would work, certainly, but it will take a lot of it, and it's not like you can just slap panels on the roof - easy cooling, and people.
It's a ridiculous idea, and I don't believe it's what they are really pursuing.
Yes but the statement is in fact a milestone to meet in order to vest Class B stock options, specifically SPCX needs to put 100 terawatts of compute [1] in outer space and beam it back to somewhere, my guess is Earth.
There's even more rewards for putting a million people on Mars and reaching a market cap of 7.5T by a certain date. Oh yeah he has to stay employed too.
From the SEC Form 3 filed June 12th:
1) This Form 3 does not include 1,302,072,285 shares of restricted Class B Common Stock issued to and held of record by the Reporting Person, which may be voted by the Reporting Person, and the vesting of which is subject to the satisfaction of certain performance and other conditions. 1,000,000,000 shares of restricted Class B Common Stock vest upon (i) the Issuer's achievement of specified market capitalization milestones across 15 equal tranches ranging from $500 billion to $7.5 trillion, with each milestone reflecting $500 billion in additional valuation, and (ii) the Issuer's establishment of a permanent human colony on Mars with at least one million inhabitants, in each case, subject to the Reporting Person's continued employment ("SpaceX CEO Award"). 302,072,285 shares of restricted Class B Common Stock vest upon (i) the Issuer's achievement of specified market capitalization milestones across 12 equal tranches ranging from $1.065 trillion to $6.565 trillion, with each milestone reflecting $500 billion in additional valuation, and (ii) the Issuer's completion of non-Earth-based data centers capable of delivering 100 terawatts of compute per year, in each case, subject to the Reporting Person's continued employment ("AI CEO Award")
The way people just casually use that word again now is so sad. And I don't even mean that in an "I'm offended" way, but more of "I'm embarrassed by the way you're trying to be offensive" way.
I still have no idea how that would work. Imagine launching an entire data center building into space, and then imagine also launching a solar array to power it, and then also launching a gigantic radiator to cool it... and the radiator is full of some kind of liquid that can never leak even though it's in a vacuum.
Like, sure, but also, that seems like a lot of work, a lot of extra cost, and a lot of risk, all just to avoid building it in Kansas.
Cursor's edit data is invaluable to anyone who wants to train a coding model. Probably the best data available outside Anthropic and OpenAI. Coding models are seen by the leaders in AI as both the biggest current revenue opportunity and the best way to accelerate the progress of AI and bring about recursive self-improvement that will create superintelligence. So yeah, it's easy to see how SpaceX could see it as in their interest to purchase Cursor with 2% of their equity.
A city on Mars was never going to happen without revenue. Starlink is providing revenue but probably not enough for Mars. SpaceX needs more and AI is the only plausible way.
> Cursor's edit data is invaluable to anyone who wants to train a coding model.
Ok. So what prevents a company from offering a Claude Code/ Cursor equivalent, with 100% subsidised Claude (= 100% free), capturing the exact same data that Cursor does? If the data is worth in the tens of billions, the cost of subsidising the usage is negligible.
With its IPO, SpaceX secured its role as the vehicle for consolidating Musk's vanity businesses into one closely held public organization that can more easily convert publicity into investment and internally reallocate funds and debts based on his personal whims.
So yes, SpaceX is pivoting, but it's to no one's surprise.
Buying Tesla is just buying SpaceX. When they roll up Tesla, it will be in a stock deal not real money. None of this is real money and I would argue that Musk is not the world's first trillionaire because there is no reality in which he could get that money out of SpaceX
I mean, if he wanted to sell tomorrow, who COULD spend $2-3 Trillion to buy it, and who WOULD? Anyone with that kind of money to spend today knows what a scam it is
The video explains that it is spelled out in the prospectus that SpaceX is counting 70%-80% of their total addressable market to be AI related and only about 7%-8% to be space-related.
I saw that too, and it's so depressing. SpaceX was pushing the envelope of "interplanetary" travel/species, and to see it being reduced to a 7-8% "side-quest" :-(
If only the shareholders had any kind of voice - if only it was illegal to issue a fake IPO where you sell an overwhelming number of shares stripped of their voting power - if only the market responded rationally to this boondoggle.
If we're going to right the ship in turn of common sense a bunch of people need to lose a bunch of money, I just hope it doesn't mostly hit passive investors and instead lands mostly on Elon-stans.
How is it legal to have different share classes? You could make 100 shares that can vote and then sell 99.9% of the company while maintaining full control. Seems strongly against the spirit of a publicly traded company
Musk didn’t invent the idea of using multiple share classes to ensure the founder(s) retain control of the company, see Rupert Murdoch, Google, Facebook, etc
From the regulators’ perspective: it is a risk, but you disclosed your risk in the prospectus that buyers are assumed to have read (what percentage ever actually do?), hence it is fine
Well, when you buy into an IPO, they make you sign to say you read it. So either you did, or you made a false statement on a legal document
I suppose they kind of do, they could sell the stock and drive the price down. That wouldn't force Musk to change direction, but it would hurt his wealth.
They are buying it with overvalued stocks, so it isn't real money. Probably the Cursor team will be able to sell it when the SpaceX stocks will be already crashed.
Why are you comparing it to building expensive modern hospitals? Why don't you compare every other tech acquisition to that? because that's not a relevant comparison, and building expensive modern hospitals has nothing to do with the goal of for-profit corporations.
SpaceX has 3 major businesses: Space, Starlink, and AI.
This is the same straw man argument of "country Z has N homeless/unhoused people, why are they building a space/military/education widget for $Y price, when they haven't found homes for N unhoused people yet?"
is spacex a space company? I thought they were an internet provider that wants to use their strategic advantages to get into AI including AI infra like data centers.
How is buying a company sending messages on the Internet for $45b in the owner's interest when Westinghouse, who built nuclear reactors sold for under $10b? The market is irrational.
SpaceX is just a vibe company. Nothing they are doing makes sense on a valuation basis, which their investors are eventually going to painfully figure out.
I mean, the answer is obvious if you do not deliberately try to put a message in the worst light possible:
- "Space company" has a major LLM+datacenter business called X.ai.
- LLM for coding is a big business, as you can see from trillion dollar valuations of Anthropic.
- Cursor is popular and gives you a headstart on the business.
- Instagram was bought for the price of many many hospitals. Uber is more valuable than companies owning the cars. Different business models, entirely different valuation models. Not sure what that comparison entails. You know it. I know it.
Whether it is a good purchase or not, we may not know, but we know your characterization is just outright dismissal without much rationale behind it.
Elon is consolidating all of his property into one single megacorporation because he is confident that nobody will ever challenge this, given the current political direction of the United States.
> the current political direction of the United States
These kinds of comments reek echo-chamber parroting and zero substantive research. As someone that very much enjoys and carefully follows politics, the current political direction points squarely to Republicans getting absolutely pummelled in the midterms, effectively turning Trump's administration into a 2-year lame duck. What are you even talking about?
Even if Congress may reverse things in the future, there are many opportunistic things happening right now, and it seems like the spacex situation is one of them. The emerging picture feels like a 'flood the zone' strategy (not by coordination, but by practical effect).
While other commenters have pointed out lots of details that point towards the favorable structural environment going forward, another idea that roots my thoughts towards this is that by creating facts on the ground, they are defining the new starting point.
Ultimately, reversing all of the different 'wrongs' or irregularities will also be costly to both the opposition's political and attentional capital.
Obviously you're trying to be snarky, but I hope you realize that Congress does, in fact, have (fairly broad) statutory authority over executive agencies[1].
Can it change? Yes. That's not the same question as will it change. And that is also not the same question as "will the change result in a different posture towards antitrust."
When was the last time substantive antitrust action was taken that forcefully restructured a large company to a significant degree?
And I hope you realize that while Congress has authority over a lot of things, that authority is being routinely overridden by the current presidential administration, including fundamental things like spending and declaring war.
So it comes across as a bit foolish to assume that any Congressional authority actually exists, or will continue to exist into the future, since we have many examples now of where that authority seemingly doesn't matter anymore.
Especially since the majority of Congress is in the same party as the current President, and is making no effort not to cede congressional authority to the executive branch.
One of the things I find really interesting as a Brit is hard to put into words:
Americans tell us that we don't have a constitution — when we do, it is just not wholly written down. (It is in part).
We have a constitution that is flexible and precedent-based, but pretty stable, and it has emerged on top of the bits that are written down, and has amended them over time (for example, it is built in part on Magna Carta, but only two or three of its principles remain in law.) Notably a bit more of it got written when we agreed to be bound by the ECHR, but that was mostly absorbed into our understanding.
It has taken us hundreds of years to get to this stability, and it is defended from attack from pretty much all sides; every government risks changing it and there is pushback each time, because you can't govern if there aren't rules. The rules are precedent and convention, and there are various authorities and archives that are consulted to work out what they are if people think they are at risk.
We are regularly told by Americans that this is an intolerable thing; we need a written constitution or we can't know what our rights are!
But those same Americans, right now, are engaged in exactly this process. You have a set of written rules that give Congress power over things, and you are currently evolving a set of precedents that suggest that the executive can simply wander past them and Congress somehow shows deference or refuses to assert its power in some situations.
You're right at the start of building an uncodified constitution on top of the old one just as we did on top of Magna Carta.
It's not entirely new to Trump; every President in my lifetime has pushed on this except maybe Carter. And sometimes they push back (Roe v. Wade was part of this uncodified constitution and probably needed to be a written amendment.)
It could work out but it's important to understand that is what you're doing. And it's not just Unitary Executive theory or presidential immunity; the emergence of the Supreme Court's "shadow docket" is emblematic of the same process.
Going to do my best to respond to this while still following the HN guidelines:
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
RIMR says:
> nobody will ever challenge this, given the current political direction of the United States
It's obviously hyperbole to say that NOBODY will EVER challenge this, but I'd say it's directionally correct:
1. The Supreme Court is controlled by a conservative, pro-big-business majority that makes it very difficult for any legal attempts to challenge Elon's actions to survive litigation.
2. The United States Senate has a conservative, pro-big-business bias due its over-representation of rural voters and its internal norms (filibuster)
3. The United States House has a conservative, pro-big-business bias due to the gerrymandering efforts of Republican-controlled state legislatures across the country (which the Democrats have tried to counter and failed, see Virginia)
4. The conservative, pro-big-business Supreme Court has ensured that elections in the United States overall have a conservative, pro-big-business bias due to the unfettered spending allowed after Citizens United.
So yes, the winds seems to be against Republicans and Trump in the mid-terms, but the structural biases of the government are still very much pro-big-business, pro-capital, and anti-regulation.
It will take much more than a single mid-term cycle to reverse that trend.
> the current political direction points squarely to Republicans getting absolutely pummelled in the midterms
Even if so, are the Democrats really going to do the house cleaning required to fix this? Their recent history implies that they'll try to pretend things are running normally, until it all explodes in their face (again). Maybe I'm wrong, and they'll actually fight for the country, but... I'm not surprised that companies (and markets) are expecting them to just... not.
> bizarre that Elon is pivoting SpaceX to something else
SPACx designs, manufactures, and launches the world's most advanced ponzis on pyramids. The company will be re-founded every year by Xlon Tusk to revolutionize capitalism, with the ultimate goal of making market multilevel.
spacX has gained VC attention for a series of web3 milestones: It is the only AI company ever to run a 1000B-A3000-Thinkkking on low-Cost toasters, which it first accomplished in May 1945. Grokipedia made history again when its ClosedAI attached to Moonshot Kimi, exchanged token payloads, and returned Alignment to money — a deeply challenging feat previously accomplished only by Cursor 60B. Since then it has distilled cargo to and from Moonshot multiple times, providing regular RL missions for Goog.
SpaceX’s interest is being an Enterprise AI corporation, they identified it as a $24 trillion addressable market, in comparison to their quarter trillion rocket related one
It’s all disclosed in the S-1, you read it right?
In America all you have to do is tell potential investors what you’re doing, its up to the people to use their discretion afterwards
Back in the early days of Heroku (when I worked there), we were all fairly deep into the Ruby community. Ruby has never had a great reputation for performance, but... it seemed like almost a running joke that any time you went down a rabbit-hole trying to understand some weird performance issue you'd eventually discover that @tmm1 had already identified the same issue months earlier, patched it in core, and given an hour long talk about it somewhere. Despite his ability and willingness talk publicly about quite deep technical topics Aman always came across as an incredibly quiet and humble in person. Every Ruby developer has benefited from his attention to finding and fixing performance issues. I'm sure the same can probably said for every GitHub user (where he worked for years).
Congrats to the entire Cursor team! I don't know all of their stories, but I do like to smile and celebrate a little when I see people who are often hidden in the shadows quietly making things x% better for all of millions of us every day for many years getting reward for that effort.
Nothing wrong with Cursor but $60B, wow. How many of these deals in 2025, 2026 will be worth nothing in 5 years? Seems like everything is just desperation and less like long term strategy.
That's the number AI boosters are spreading too "The TAM for AI is all of humanity - this includes every person and every company. So, imagine this huge pile of future revenue." I agree that TAM is likely huge but is SpaceX most suitable to capture that TAM? Unlikely. But for now everyone wants in on the AI hype train and FOMO of losing out one any company in the AI space.
In the long term most markets are duopoly with small competitors. And personally I see OpenAI and Anthropic duking it out rather than SpaceX.
Enron was never audacious enough betting every US man, woman, and child will spend $28k/year on their generally nonprofitable business with one exception -- Starlink.
Patrick Boyle covered the SPCX trajectory fairly well... =3
I know this is just nonsense wish thinking, but apparently the investors disagree and I have zero clue when they will also stop giving Musk their money.
I think the bump since IPO can be explained at least partially by low float not meeting demand. I've seen a lot of accounts from retail investors who entered the lotteries saying they only got a small fraction of what they wanted, hence demand is kept artificially high. Probably intentionally, since it essentially allows the optimists to dictate the price.
(edit: This is not at all unique to spacex, of course, but given the nature of Musk's companies and their "fans" it's logical that they would employ this strategy. They are also doing a staggered unlock to avoid upsetting the market when insiders start dumping their shares.)
My whole team was on cursor for a few months. I enjoyed using it and thought it was the most complete of the agentic coding tools I tried. The thing that got me was the cost. I was switching between Opus and GPT 5.x and was spending anywhere between $500-1000/month. I was using a relatively normal workflow, paste in ticket, plan, execute with dumb sub agents, have the ai test and competing model to validate. The business got uncomfortable with the cost when everyone started doing the same so they switched us to Claude code since it has better cost controls. So far it looks like we won't even touch the $100/month plan and some people would be ok on the $20 plan. Anthropics usage limits is a consistent source of complaint on here but I've found them to be moderately generous in comparison to cursor. Cursor also charges a $.25Mtok premium for 'routing' no matter what model you choose. 5% increase for frontier models but when you're using haiku on sub agents that's a 50% cost increase. Composer is solid but if you don't have deep pockets it's the only feasible model on their platform because of how they bill it. Being an all in one editor/agent is nice but if you're in a language like c# or Java you're already swapping back and forth with a real IDE anyway.
Our experience has been the direct opposite. The way to get the most out of cursor was to leave it on auto - we saw it average around 3.9 cents per request under the old contract (per-seat pricing) and more like 39 cents per request under the new (single pooled cost for everyone). Composer came in a little higher, more like 50c/r, while the claude models were up into the dollars. Meanwhile, if you use Claude-the-app, there is _no_ cheap model and the default switched to Opus in April, resulting in increased costs across the board.
We have both Claude and Cursor here, as well as agents running GPT, things in AWS Bedrock, etc and its my team handle the bills...when people use Cursor on auto, costs are under control, but there's always a dozen or so whale users who'll switch models manually and blow through the budget like it's not there.
Another thing: "better cost controls". There was for example no way for us to disable Fable in Claude, but we could in Cursor. Again, the opposite experience.
Just setup my team with Cursor. They actually got back to me on an enterprise plan (Claude keeps ignoring me). Cloud Agents have been great for keeping multiple streams going at the same time. Adding in computer use has been great for actually testing out features and showing they work for PRs. Bugbot so far has been the best AI reviewer I've tested. Composer 2.5 is great, though still using Opus for planning.
I can do most of this with Claude Code, but there's definitely a cost in maintaining it for the whole team.
I stopped using Cursor because of how terribly optimised it is (worse than VSCode despite being a fork). It would routinely take up 50% of the CPU resources on my MacBook M4 and gigabytes of RAM for absolutely no reason.
I switched to Zed, and I'm never going back to Electron/non-native IDEs.
Still do. Composer 2.5 is a beast. But even with Opus (and Fable for a few days) their harness is many times faster. The main reason for me to use CC is the $200 subsidized pro max plan.
Also their computer use in the cloud agents (when it works) is a game changer. No need to keep your laptop open / get a Mac mini if it runs in the cloud.
I was on Claude Code the past year, now I use chinese models, but I've used Cursor and they have an ok pricing offering today because of their mix of sota models with usage based pricing along with their Kimi based Composer model with generous limits. I think it makes a lot of sense for the enterprise market, which is the real moat, and not the capabilities/features of the forked ide or app/tui/github bot anyone can come up with today.
I use Cursor and it’s been fine. I write a lot of code manually too, so I liked the tight integration with VSCode, my daily driver for about a decade. I used to use Vim, so I’ve “discovered the terminal” a long time ago.
The people steering the agents are the ones producing low quality code. I see little correlation outside of that.
It's my primary. Claude Code for personal stuff on the weekends. I really just prefer the GUI of having the changes easily highlighted. If I can get something to apply that with Claude Code or Codex or OpenCode or whatever, I'd swap over without thinking.
Same here - their UI/UX seems to serve my workflows/habits the best. And it's strange that no one else seems to be delivering a compatible experience for me. I'd prefer to move away from Cursor after this acquisition.
I'm still on their old 500 requests/month plan and the value is simply unbeatable for $20. I've been able to use agents without worrying about usage for my job and personal projects paired with the $20 codex sub and I dread the day when they finally get rid of the requests plan.
Development is moving away from the IDE to agentic long running workers. I've been using their SDK in this mode - which then forces you to use cursor as model provider. I use a mix of harnesses for different types of agentic tasks and Cursor gets the best results.
Earlier this year I had used it because I would rather have a IDE-like exp and be able to actually look at the code. However, recently switched to using claude code VS code extension and it's basically the same thing (plus at Amazon we can only use Claude Code)
I use Cursor, but funny enough it's 98% just using the codex plugin - I kept cursor around on the grand fathered $20 / 500 requests plan, if they un-grandfather me or things change too much I'll zip over to vscode.
I use Cursor for coding. I like to review the changes via the UI. Plan mode is also really strong in Cursor. It bugs me less about needing to search through files and basic coding tasks. I find it also saves the company a ton of money compared to Claude, Claude burns through tokens with no regard.
I typically use Claude for interacting with MCPs and skills to operate on live systems.
Plenty of enterprises are still using Cursor, though they are facing plenty of pressure because Anthropic and OpenAI bundle Claude Code and Codex which can make it hard to justify an additional license for a third-party harness (why spend that money there when you can buy the underlying tokens instead).
Here's a shower thought. BTC essential is worth $70k solely through the power of memes. Can TSLA and SPCX remain overvalued (relative to the revenue of their respective underlying assets) forever through the power of memes?
Intuitively, it seems to me that there must necessarily be some kind of upper limit, but I'm not convincing myself. These speculative assets are only attractive as long as the price keeps inflating. But that can only happen if there is more and more demand. So it's basically a bet that there is an average amount of retail investors (I assume it's mostly retail investors but I could be wrong) that consistently put a percentage of their income into these speculative assets. Can this be maintained forever?
The saying "The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent" exists for a reason.
In short, the answer to your literal question is "no" because nothing remains forever in this world. The practical answer is "yes" because the TSLA stock has been irrational for years already and it shows no sign of stopping.
That saying assumes a rational market, and while there is some evidence that the average human behavior trends towards the rational there are plenty of evidence against individual behavior being rational (see homo economicus).
As more and more wealth get distrubuted to fewer and fewer hands, and as fewer and fewer extremely rich individuals control more and more of the market, My gut feeling is that if the market was ever rational (which btw. I am not entirely convinced of) that very much no longer holds true.
The before ones have had outside influence which forces the irrational episodes to pass. A spectacular collapse is usually fallowed by mass protests and labor actions, strikes etc. which forces the market to change its behavior. Most of the time these will result in a change in government policy which imposes regulation onto the market, and only then does the market go back to being rational.
The thing is fundamentals really don't matter. TSLA and SPCX aren't paying dividends so there's no real performance they have to hit, no one is going to miss a dividend payment and dump the stock. The Elong vibes can carry it as long as people keep smoking what he's selling
The real question is, when does that run out of steam? When do we wake up to the charade that has built up around us? That's a much bigger thing than just Elon and his businesses. Like someone else said, when the next crisis/downturn/depression hits the house of cards will fall. Unfortunately it will hit all of us not just people in the meme stocks
I'm extremely cynical about the way the US government would react to any sort of financial crisis. I do not believe that they would not completely cave and bail out the AI companies and the monopolists if there is a downturn. And it's not that I don't trust the Republicans specifically. The whole political sphere is completely convinced that AI is a national security prerogative, and the cynical political atmosphere will equate national security with investor protection.
Let me append the saying a bit: The US government can remain irrational longer than you can stay solvent.
True, and it's a common question that comes up: What's the point of owning a stock if it doesn't pay a dividend? How do you participate in the company's performance?
There are other ways for performance to translate to the investors directly. For example, if the company sells itself then all the shareholders will get that payout. Stock buybacks are a thing. And, as other commenters here have said, eventually the company may start paying a dividend
But, you're not entirely off-base in that you're just buying into the vibes of a company. It's just that most of the time (much of the time?) those vibes have been rooted in some semblance of rationality, that there was something of value behind the shares you're buying. That is definitely not universally true anymore
There's taxation reasons. Stock buybacks mean that investors get the usually lower capital gains tax rates instead of dividend income tax rates. On top of this, it also juices earnings per share.
> If you exclude dividend paying stocks, then the entire stock market starts to look like a giant pyramid scheme casino.
Stocks can start paying dividends in the future: MSFT did not in the past, and does now. AAPL did, stopped in the 1990s, and started doing so again.
You should be indifferent to the company's dividend scheme since it's the underlying business activity that drives total returns, and not its distribution policy. There is all sorts of magical thinking when it comes to dividends:
A pyramid scheme can run out of people to keep it going: the stock market is in a sense a 'savings scheme' for future consumption. Younger people work and turn their cash into savings, older people take their savings and turn it back into cash: as long as young people need to think about the future, and older people / retirees need to pay bills, there's a mechanism to maintain this cycle.
> A pyramid scheme can run out of people to keep it going
And then you describe how the secondary stock market requires 'fresh blood' to whom to sell stock to cash-out.
It's precisely a legalised pyramid scheme that always needs someone to come in at the bottom hold the bag to let someone else cash-out. In turn they need someone to come in 30 years later. That's exactly how a pyramid scheme works.
> A Keynesian beauty contest is a metaphorical beauty contest in which judges are rewarded for selecting the most popular choices among all judges, rather than those they may personally find the most attractive. This idea is often applied in financial markets, whereby investors could profit more by buying whichever stocks they think other investors will buy, rather than the stocks that have fundamentally the best value, because when other people buy a stock, they bid up the price, allowing an earlier investor to cash out with a profit, regardless of whether the price increases are supported by its fundamentals and theoretical arguments.
Plenty of folks may think these companies are garbage but are 'playing along' because it's not necessarily what they themselves think that is important, but what others think. You can make money in a bubble, even when it eventually pops. What we're seeing now is hardly new, either:
I generally check my portfolio once a year, in January, when I top things up when new contribution room becomes available with the new year. It's 'fun' to follow along with the gyrations and drama as things happen, but I don't sleep over it. If you're reasonably diversified you can generally weather storms and come out okay on the other side:
I don't have better ideas than you to do anything except "buy indexes".
Everyone is happy enough to give Elon (and others) more and more leverage to buy politically strategic companies (this is not that, this is probably just an ego buy for him, something to kill time because he can).
I was worried about him selling out (from an overall market and even index perspective when they were going to bend rules), but it looks like largely the whole situation is predicated on the idea that he can't or won't sell. I don't know how exposed the market is but it doesn't feel good.
No shit. That's why, even if it's an exaggeration to call the entire stock market a pyramid scheme, you can't justify the claim that it's entirely "underlying business activity that drives total returns". That's the real question (from which dividends are, yes, a distraction).
No, there are a huge number of companies that are valued reasonably for their revenue / profitability / growth.
There's basically two stock markets: things valued on fundamentals and things valued on vibes.
And I don't think there's ever going to be a unified theory of value that can span both, because the former is quantitative and the latter is psychology.
Gamestop is not an Elon venture. There's plenty of irrational stock valuations out there, most of them just come back to Earth on a reasonable timeframe
I personally think Bitcoin will eventually peter out, and that it's fairly risky as it has definitely been pushed by vibes and promotion and everyone wanting to get in on it
I mean that can apply to anything. There's nothing intrinsic about gold that makes it valuable other than it's rare, but there's plenty of things that are relatively rare that aren't valuable. Yes there's industrial uses of gold but that's not why we as a society and a species treat it as valuable
Maybe bitcoin is the new gold and will hold value forever, and as more serious people get into it, it will lose its volatility and be less subject to the vibes shifting and there being a run on the market. Maybe not
It is different from Elong stocks, though, because the myth of Satoshi aside, it's not exactly a cult of personality like his companies are
> And being higher over 10 years has little to do with it if acts counter cyclical to stocks and other assets.
BTC has been called many things at many different times. It was originally a payment system:
> A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online
payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a
financial institution.
And it can still be used for that, however the transaction throughput is tiny, and so it became a store of value in essence: but it's kind of hard to be that when the value swings up and won so much. While "fiat" currency inflation is annoying, it is, generally, fairly predictable in most cases (<4%) and so you can plan ahead with regards to future value and purchase. The same is hardly true of BTC.
As the sibling says, the original value proposition of Bitcoin was that it would supplant Paypal and wire transfers. The store of value narrative was a post hoc rationalization by stakeholders when it became clear that it was technically unsuited to serve Internet-wide throughputs. Not only that. I sat in during the meetings around the time of the segwit transition; I think they were debating making the blocks bigger or something. It was amazing to see first-hand how such a relatively minor and technically necessary change could generate so much friction. That was when I realized Bitcoin was never going to evolve in a useful direction, and sevenish years on I see that I was correct, as the block structure is pretty much the same as the last time I saw it.
I mean the original thing I replied to. The idea that it was a stable or anti-cyclical store of value emerged after it became clear the payments stuff was not working.
There is some misunderstanding of what a crash really is. It doesn't necessarily mean that things get written down to 0 or some arbitrary level because everything has a price at which someone will buy.
Even companies have some value after a crash and you could make a case that at some arbitrary point it was worth $x and since the crash didn't cause the company to crater to below $x it has not "crashed". Even companies filing for bankruptcy have some residual value above what they might have been founded on - it doesn't mean the company hasn't gone bankrupt.
Yeah, I certainly did not mean go to zero, or near that.
To be more specific, I have often seen people argue for including crypto in a portfolio based on the theory that if equities drop a lot (25, 30%?) crypto will hold or go up. People make the same argument for gold.
To me the difference is that BTC's continued value isn't predicated on the actions of one person, who has continually proven himself to be childish, mercurial, and dishonest.
Yes when will everyone wake up for the charade of having a monopoly on space launches? Of putting over 90% of all mass into space, of your closest competitor being the nation state of China, and they are years away from where you are right now. Ah yes, that charade, when will people learn am I right? Total genius.
An extreme majority of Space X's self-determined value proposition has nothing to do with space. Out of an overall TAM of $28.5 trillion, $26.5 trillion is based on AI. Personally I believe that number will actually approach zero, but it certainly even in my most optimistic view is a number with a B, not a T
The total addressable market even at Space X's own calculation for space launches is only $370 billion. And, supposedly as the only company that can launch things into space they are still losing money on that business. This is bankrupt-a-casino levels of incompetence
SpaceX are currently losing money on the "going to space" part of their business.
They're making money on telecoms, and may have just started making a profit on renting out the data centres they originally built for the AI that it turned out hardly anyone wanted to actually use.
Michael Burry, a hedge fund investor featured in the book “The Big Short” for his predictions on the 2008 financial crisis, said in a Substack discussion last month that any increase in SpaceX’s stock after its I.P.O. would “be on hype and technicals.”
Here, “technicals” means technical analysis signals rather than the company’s business fundamentals. In other words, Burry is saying the stock could rise because of chart-based trading, momentum, and market behavior—not because investors think SpaceX is truly worth that much based on revenue, profits, or other fundamentals.
How long can the hype be maintained? TSLA is still maintaining its hype, judging by its P/E ratio.
The hype already starts with the SpaceX SEC filing. According to it, its addressable market is $28.5 trillion, of which $26.5 trillion are AI. This means that every human being who owns a computer on this planet (1.75 billion) would need to spend (on average) over $15.000 on xAI products.
>> that every human being who owns a computer on this planet (1.75 billion) would need to spend over $15.000 on xAI products.
Current US national debt is approximately $39.22 trillion. As we achieve a zombie movie, level of collective madness, lets take all this into the last degree.
Nationalize SpaceX, and with this bright obvious future described on the prospect lets pay US debt :-) Pay US retirement benefits pensions in token credits, pensioners can resell, make an options market for tokens. I am sure Robinhood will open you a margin account for that?
Lets open a futures markets for food goods grown up on SpaceX Asteroids, as they will have free solar energy. They can grow them three times faster than on Earth...
To quote Ron Baron yesterday on CNBC, we are all going to earn hundreds of billions....
While this would be conceivable if some future AI gets good enough to actually replace 100% of global paid labour currently done by using a computer, the reference class I have here is that Wikipedia is definitely not valued at [number of people online] * [peak cost of Encyclopaedia Britannica].
Economic displacement on that scale breaks the valuation.
It’s not our responsibility to provide counter arguments. You expressed that the two fundamentally different things are the same “in essence”. It’s your responsibility to define the two and explain how they are the same first.
Tesla definitely is floating down slowly worldwide with hype when it finally crashes just don’t be left holding the bag. 2026 will be another year downward.
Notably, it looks like the meme power is gradually being redirected from BTC and cryptocurrency in general towards AI and SpaceX in general. Now that people have found a means of consuming vast amounts of computing power that occasionally emits useful output, rather than just a hash and a colossal waste.
I was once told bitcoin was a 'pet rock'. Thing is people pay a lot of money for rocks when they have no planned industrial activity for them. Diamonds, for instance.
I think you are spot on. The problem comes if SpaceX goes out of fashion, not its fundamentals.
I'm not sure if this means gold isn't powered by memes or whether it's just one of the most long lived memes of all time. Aside from other nice properties like lasting a long time, being pretty, and not requiring electricity to exist.
Certainly, gold is not a meme, nor are all the other rare earth metals. This principle applies most to the other elements found on the periodic table. In fact, they have become more valuable due to research and development in today’s modern world, as numerous useful discoveries are made daily.
Cryptocurrency, such as Bitcoin, is undoubtedly a meme. If given a choice, one would prefer to possess any of the rare metals, rare earths, or any other elements that can be obtained in sufficient quantities, whether on land or in the ocean. Bitcoin or cryptocurrency is beneficial only to insiders and not to the general public. In essence, they are akin to modern tulips with a cherry on top, and like Tesla in 2030, one should avoid being caught with the bag.
What you are describing applies to all forms of money. It has value because people believe other people will use it as money. If that belief drops, the value drops.
People comment on gold and Bitcoin, but don't realize the same principles apply to US dollars and bonds.
Currencies are a little different, since they are required to pay taxes; and payment of taxes is enforced (to varying degrees) by state violence.
Hence if you believe you will be taxed ("death and taxes" being the only certainties in life, etc.) then the currency associated with that tax has value, in that it avoids imprisonment, etc.
> Here's a shower thought. BTC essential is worth $70k solely through the power of memes. Can TSLA and SPCX remain overvalued (relative to the revenue of their respective underlying assets) forever through the power of memes?
The "value" of something can be a bit of a meta-game:
> A Keynesian beauty contest is a metaphorical beauty contest in which judges are rewarded for selecting the most popular choices among all judges, rather than those they may personally find the most attractive. This idea is often applied in financial markets, whereby investors could profit more by buying whichever stocks they think other investors will buy, rather than the stocks that have fundamentally the best value, because when other people buy a stock, they bid up the price, allowing an earlier investor to cash out with a profit, regardless of whether the price increases are supported by its fundamentals and theoretical arguments.
Plenty of folks may think these companies are garbage but are 'playing along' because it's not necessarily what they themselves think that is important, but what others think.
This idea was put forward by Keynes in his General Thoery publish in 1936, so human nature has hardly changed since then.
This is why I think Elon buying Twitter was one of the most strategic decisions he ever made: he quite literally bought the meme machine that upholds the valuations of his companies.
I still don't think it was strategic on his part, he did try to back out after all; my guess is that having bought it, he tried to maximise the value it produced.
And given the financial statements in the SpaceX IPO, to the extent X still has any value at all, it is almost all just influence of one kind or another, not actual money.
On what grounds do you believe the value of BTC is meme-driven? Another (and arguably more plausible) explanation is that the price reflects the vast amount of criminally-obtained wealth stored in it. It’s a far better store than burying cash in mountain caches.
All money is meme driven. Money is fundamentally a meme itself. Seeing lots of people who seem to be making some sort of implicit distinction between bitcoin and USD and so on, but they are no different. They serve the function they serve because of what people believe about them, like any other social, cultural, or economic abstraction. Bitcoin has the feature of a verifiable ledger, but its value and function are in our heads, just like the USD or GBP.
That ship sailed long ago, before there were viable alternatives to BTC. There are plenty of ways to launder BTC (i.e. hiding in plain sight) and the existence of savings in BTC isn't necessarily exclusive of other cryptocurrencies that are better fit for purpose.
At least as long as Musk is the CEO, perhaps. I don't think it's easy to find another charismatic figure to keep it going.
It's a different kind of hype than Nvidia has, which is showing very high and fast growing revenues (which may not continue, but they're real now). Jensen I think is not as critical to the AI hype as Elon is to his companies.
All these major tech companies eventually get leadership changes. Apple, Google, Amazon, have all done well because they're real companies and go beyond their original leadership. Tesla and SpaceX I think would surely go down the moment Musk is no longer in leadership.
Indeed, but for general stock market purposes it's one dollar one vote, not one person one vote.
Possibly even worse. Short-sellers got burned on Tesla (and perhaps now also SpaceX), which may mean the marginal buyer and seller consists only of people who already buy into the hyper and by trading are sharing price info with each other rather than with a single person who doubts the man.
I sold my Tesla stocks a while back; the people who kept them don't care what people like me think.
BTC has the layer 2 lighting network that can process more transactions than Visa and MC combined with very cheap fees. I guess HN knowledge of Bitcoin does not go further than 2015
Also, everything on level 2 needs to be ultimately balanced on level 1; BTC doesn't have enough throughput to balance all the banks in the world, and lo Lightning appears to be consolidating into fewer nodes.
Also also, everything level 2 (including Lightning) necessarily takes away at least one of the selling points used for BTC, and replaces them with something functionally equivalent to 50% of a bank but worse.
> Current actual throughput is significantly lower, estimated at around 300 TPS, because the network is still growing. However, Lightning's architecture scales horizontally: as more nodes and channels are added, capacity increases without any protocol changes. The network's total value locked has grown past $500 million, with over 15,000 active nodes and 50,000+ payment channels.
The layer 2 has been predicted by one of the first adopter in 2010 so it was always the plan
neither of them are sane. BTC is useless, unless your trying to buy child porn, buy illicit drugs on the internet, or someone who bought it before the value exploded. eventually, the world will come around and it will go to zero, if quantum doesnt kill it first. im looking forward to that day.
True, it's very useful for scammers, grifters, international terrorists and authoritarian governments to funnel monetary value around without having to rely on the traditional financial system where they may be blocked and their money confiscated.
It costs 150 usd to send 5k usd between two countries I live in.
It costs the same amount of money to literally go there by plane and bring it as cash. This is not fair obviously. So traditional finance is a scam itself.
It takes 10 seconds and no fees to make the same transfer via blockchain.
I am pretty sure you know basically nothing about those crimes or the people that do crimes or how they actually transfer money. Just doing casual newspaper intellectualism while talking about things you never interacted with
> funnel monetary value around without having to rely on the traditional financial system where they may be blocked and their money confiscated.
Yes. Unfortunately the traditional financial system is governed by a country which has been behaving increasingly erratically, threatening its long-term allies with invasions and committing obvious war crimes. This is not a "good guys vs bad guys" scenario.
Sure, if there were a stable enough market in which I can fetch twice that amount for that tulip, I'd buy it in a heartbeat. Wouldn't you?
The point being: BTC is a an abstract good, of no practical use except that of being transacted. Has whatever value the people are willing to pay for it, and has had a value in the tens of thousands for long enough that buying one with the intent of keeping it for a while is not such a stupid idea. I don't currently own any but there is a price at which I would buy one, and that price is many thousands of dollars... For an alphanumeric code in a distributed ledger.
Someone invents something that is digital, but can't be copied. Quite brilliant as it is the first digital asset that can store value without centralization and trust, based on market demand.
Someone on HN: "BTC is valueable solely through the power of memes".
Bitcoin doesn't "store value", it has the value that society assigns it, which is what the parent means when s/he says "BTC is valuable solely through the power of memes". It's not a fiat currency, nor does it have any intrinsic utilitarian value.
It seems like that during a bubble (things can never go down!) but the market eventually does correct, even if it can take years or even decades to do so, and usually overcorrects when it does.
> I saw that one wealthy individual had purchased $1 billion of SpaceX at the IPO. Does that count as a retail investor?
There were two individuals who each bought $1B: Ron Baron and Gina Rinehart.
While they are individuals, they executed these billion-dollar investments through their massive corporate entities and investment firms, rather than personal brokerage accounts.
A retain investor is an individual, non-professional investor who buys and sells securities through brokerages using personal funds.
It's down to the balance between buyers and sellers. If you've got more selling than buying it'll go down but Musk has been remarkably good at keeping the buyers there.
Don't forget the amount of shares released to the market. That impacts the price dramatically as can be seen be all the 'stock buyback' manipulation of stock prices.
As long as there is someone around who is very good at keeping the price inflated (and that in turn also because he did actually deliver extraordinary things, it's not just smoke and mirrors).
On the other hand, the fact that BTC has absolutely no intrinsic value can be an advantage over a real company, as it makes it more insulated from reality. Supply chain shock? No problem. Competition? Same. New technologies, political change? Neither.
SPCX only floated a small amount of shares, and made the stock exchanges compete so that it would get to rig the system in a way. If funds have to buy SPCX + small share amount, it's going up. This is the reason stock buyback used to be illegal. It's purely market manipulation of share count, not market based on actual value.
At least some of TSLA and SPCX value is derived from Musk's ability to purchase politicians to ensure the tax dollars keep flowing to them. Essentially, these ticker symbols are backed by the US government's ability to force us to give Musk's companies our money.
The overwhelming majority of SpaceX holders are institutional. They had planned to allocate 30% to retail, but it ended up in the 20% range as a result of institutional demand. [1] No clue what's going on right now as their stock is going to the Moon. But in any case, I think the people that don't understand why it's doing well are mostly those who are unfamiliar with the space industry. SpaceX has already revolutionized space by dropping the cost to orbit by multiple orders of magnitude relative to the Space Shuttle, which it replaced. And it looks set to do that again with the Starship.
The main reason humanity hasn't meaningfully started expanding into space is because it used to cost $54,000 to get a liter of water into space. SpaceX brought that down to about $5000, and then further down to near $1400. That's a massive reduction in price, but you're still left with the problem that it costs $1400 to get a liter of water to space, which is why we still can't have nice things, yet.
Starship has the promise of bringing that down a couple of more orders of magnitude where the goal is to get it within the $10-$20 range. If they succeed, then you've just opened the doors to an entire new frontier of expansion and growth for humanity which is practically infinite. And right now there's no real reason to think that they won't succeed. And more importantly than this is that nobody seems to be able to compete on their level, or even remotely close. Their closest competitor is probably China who remains technologically well behind. And so SpaceX today is akin to being able to get a piece of some sort of super-ship making monopoly, just prior to the Age of Sail. The downside risk is basically zero since they're still making rapid progress - the only question is how rapid. And upside potential is basically infinite.
Asteroid mining is the obvious one. That said as part of looking into SpaceX's business I learned that currently the TAM for launching other people's stuff into space is under $10 billion. SpaceX already owns most of that market. Their own focus on data centers in space IMO speaks for itself.
For why we'd want to go at all: there's a lot of resources up there, and pollution is much less of a concern for factories made up there. Also some material processes may be much easier in zero-gee.
But that doesn't mean it's actually worth the effort.
While I am *extremely* skeptical, I've heard people talk about space-based solar. I mention this only so nobody adds an "and also" for that.
Ditto anyone talking about lunar He-3. This is a bad idea, "why" is long enough to be worthy of a blog post.
But if you were committed to expansionism for whatever reason, then you'd want some way to get industrial quantities of steel from mines already in space, to make the factories themselves cheaper. Possibly megastructures like an orbital ring, too.
It's not about the "Access to resources. A sense of adventure. Learning."
Since you are right. All of these things are available on Earth for far cheaper, with better ROI and with far less risk of dying or getting early cancer from cosmic rays.
The real benefit is a commanding lead over geopolitical rivals in the domain of satellites and satellite platforms for hosting devices in orbit, thus securing an insurmountable national security advantage.
The hand waving is probably reasonable for a couple of reasons. The first is that you can't really math things out yet when costs are shifting by orders of magnitude on relatively short timeframes. What seems impossible in one year is a casual achievement in the next. If we go back to 2002 (when SpaceX was founded) and I told you that within 2 decades they'd have lowered the cost to get stuff to space by more than 97% relative to Space Shuttle, it'd have sounded somewhere between unreasonable and impossible, yet that is exactly what happened. And Starship is set to send prices plummeting yet again.
The second reason is that the notion of economics becomes kind of odd when you start introducing space. Space has practically infinite resources of every type imaginable. For instance one single asteroid, Psyche 16, is thought to have orders of magnitude more gold than has ever been extracted in human history. But I mean, what does this even mean economically? Obviously if you start bringing back hundreds of thousands of tons of gold, the price is going plummet. And even the viable possibility of this happening would probably send the price of gold plummeting. So... it's weird. We're in uncharted waters.
And then on top of this access to space will mean we will start expanding outward - colonies, vastly larger stations stations, and so on. And these expansions will develop their own parallel economies with their own needs/production/etc. This is all kind of like trying to predict the economics of the internet before the first cable had been laid.
Most people I see online freak out at the idea of normalizing living in an apartment/condo and slightly higher density. I don’t see them lining up to live in space :)
As far back as the 60s NASA had already laid out technical plans for how to get humans to Mars. The Moon was never meant to be the destination, but a brief stepping stone to greater things. So we can thank Nixon for setting humanity's progress back by half a century. The ISS and Space Shuttle both were driven largely by these initial plans.
But the current claustrophobic nature of the ISS was, again, not the destination. There was a grand scheme of in-orbit refueling, fuel depots, and much larger scale space architecture. Something of the ISS scale was intended as a short jumping-off point, a workers' tent analog. But our progress stalled out and the workers' tent is what we were left with.
The point I'm making here is that space in the era we're stepping into is very unlikely to look much like the one we're leaving. This is even more true as the price drops because private industry will be able to play a major role. There will be no Nixon to just cancel everything out of concerns for his political career.
Depends on the timescale, and what other tech is the prerequisite to this and what other things can be done with that tech.
Even with cheap rockets, Musk was talking about 6-digit-dollars for becoming a Martian, I don't see more than a few million people wanting to spend that much for that outcome.
If we get self-replicating robots or whatever, big space stations aren't that expensive, but also Earth is huge and you can extract minerals from seawater electrolytically and PV is already cheap, so perhaps we'd just get a load of seasteads instead: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seasteading
Really hard to say. Everyone who does space stuff talks with the same level of optimism as Musk but historically they deliver less.
But for what it's worth, I don't think Musk's going to reach Mars except in an urn, baring some surprise development in anti-aging medicine. Even though their progress is rapid by the standards of the industry, they are still slow in terms of natural human lifespan and his age.
> Have you sketched out the net present value calculation for an investment in spacex today based on that?
IMO, their market cap should be around $200bn at the moment. That's mostly Starlink, so if there's a Kessler cascade *or* if China makes a competitor that goes down to about $80-100bn
The long-term stuff about Mars or turning the moon into a factory for modular data centres is too far into the future to be worth considering.
That was my general impression. They did amazing work to totally change launch costs (with more on the way). But launch was a limited market. The low costs have and will grow it, and starlink will grow it, but not enough to justify this value.
In investing it's critical to think about things probabilistically, rather than trying to just guess the future. "Fooled by Randomness" is a great book on this. In a scenario like this it's especially critical, because in the case where Starship fully delivers and the next great frontier of humanity opens up, the upside potentially is practically infinite.
E.g. imagine in a bet you think there's a 99% chance of something being worth $1 and a 1% chance of it being worth $1 million. What's a fair price? It's a simple calculation - 0.99 * 1 + 0.01 * 1,000,000 = ~$10,000. That's you setting a price of $10k on something that you fully expect to be worth $1 99% of the time, and still coming out just fine.
So the actual debate should not be on 'guess the future' but rather on the odds of Starship delivering and estimating the impact this would have. And I think to many the answers are fairly easy - 'very nonzero' and 'very big.' It's akin to the NVidia/Apple stories, except in this case it's being somewhat priced into the market to begin with because it's somewhat more probable, and easier to foresee.
The problem with that argument is the failure to reasonably factor in time. If you take an expected value approach (quite reasonable in general) looking into the future you need to discount for time or everything goes to infinity.
While the point is valid, the upside still isn't practically infinite; humans intuitively do something close to hyperbolic discounting for future returns because of the possibility of black swans.
The easy version of this is to value a company over the next 20 years of profits. The first half of that time horizon, I don't see much changing at all outside of Starlink subscribers. They've only got ~5 Mars launch windows in any given decade, and while their design philosophy is great for LEO where launch windows are daily, launching rockets to see what fails is exactly wrong for Mars.
OTOH, now to 2036, there's at least a chance AI goes boom. Perhaps even one of Musk's AI. Great for the overall economy (at least right up until it changes the economy so much that capitalism looks as obsolete as feudalism looks today, which may or may not be in that horizon), but even if it's the next industrial revolution, there's so much competition there that I expect everyone's profit margins to be almost nothing. And conversely, if any one of them does appear to be massively dominant, in comes an anti-trust case (who remembers Standard Oil?)
Same with rockets, though a "rocket boom" is perhaps an unfortunate phrasing. He finds a way to make more money than expected, just like he's already doing with Starlink? Great. Industrial espionage is a thing, and even if it wasn't, China's not got a problem with the state funding businesses to simply re-discover everyone else's secret sauce. US companies and residents may find themselves restricted from using the fruit of that work, but most of the world will just buy what's cheapest.
The only argument for space is because you're so set on capitalism that you'd rather destroy the earth than stop trying to continually grow profit. If you're that sick and deluded, then space gives you a way to escape the consequences of your own foolish hubris.
to be fair, in the pharoahs quest for immortality after death, if they could have put their pyramid burial tombs in space to avoid decay/ruin for longer they would have. I wouldn't be shocked to see the oligarchs paying for their own space burials inside very lavish satellites whose orbit won't decay for thousands of years so they can "live forever".
So, your argument for SpaceX is that they'll take physical systems that they've already tried to squeeze down, and squeeze them down nearly two orders of magnitude? What fundamental scientific discovery do you think is going to enable this? Or do you think that AI is magically going to do it for them?
That has nothing to do with how they have already reduced costs, and how they continue to do so. Before SpaceX, you launched a rocket to space once, and then you discarded it. Imagine how much a plane ticket would cost if each time a plane was flown once, it was then discarded.
The big revolution with SpaceX was meaningful reuse (I can get into the comparison with Space Shuttle if you're unfamiliar there). Landing and reusing rockets is something that Boeing et al thought was impossible from an economic point of view, and actually taunted SpaceX in their early years over it along the lines of 'Oh you're going for reuse. Yeah we researched and trialed that out a decade ago. The economics don't work. Cute to see you trying though.'
Their success there is what helped bring the costs way down. But there's still plenty that's not reused - in particular they currently only reuse the first stage (the big rocket that gets things off the ground initially) while discarding the second stage - the space-optimized payload delivery rocket. With Starship they're going for 100% rapid reuse. So you're looking at this absolutely massive 2 stage system where both parts will be able to be repeatedly and rapidly reused.
You really think cost is the main reason humanity hasn't expanded into space? I'm all for space exploration and learning from space but actual humans are quite squishy, like gravity, dislike radiation, and would need to take a lot of water with them just to visit a rock very indifferent to their existence.
Definitely. Humans expand. It's probably an evolutionary imperative in many of us. Africa was essentially an oasis and yet some of us decided to go make our way outward to inhospitable freezing ass places where the environment itself is just constantly trying to kill you in a million different ways. And we knew nothing about how to deal with it, at first.
Or take the early sea voyages. Not only were there endless worries about things that were ultimately nonissues like sea monsters or falling off the edges of the Earth, but there were endless very real dangers awaiting which we had no clue about or how to deal with - scurvy, rogue waves, and much more. In the aforementioned Age of Sail, it was just expected that a significant chunk of your crew would die. Yet somehow we pushed onward and outward.
And the infinite possibilities of space are going to absolutely dwarf all previous frontiers in terms of interest and potential.
> BTC essential is worth $70k solely through the power of memes
Like everything else in finance...
Saying this is not to defend all sorts of crypto-bros. The economy, especially one overly focused on publicly traded companies like the Western, and especially the US economy, is a meme economy.
Coffee, flats, healthcare, military spending, etc., of comparable quality in the abstract East, cost multiples less than in the EU/USA because they and their currencies are weak on memes.
The limits are when companies and institutions start to default on their loans. Or, in the case of governments, trigger hyperinflation by printing money to pay off the debt.
Of course it can collapse before that, but if it gets to that point it is guaranteed to collapse.
But that won't happen while the share price keeps going up no matter what. Borrow more, secured against the massive unissued equity, or issue more shares.
Mostly because we are looping AI to fix problems, and then the same data is used to improve AI. There is no upper limit to this.
Taken to its logical conclusion, this process needs a hardware scale that might even look laughably huge at this point. Its fairly obvious space is going to play a big role in the coming times.
I could be wrong, and I humbly accept it when Im proven wrong. But it does feel like a lot of people in top places know we are going to need all the energy and resources space has to offer to run this runaway intelligence.
> we are at runaway intelligence already. Mostly because we are looping AI to fix problems, and then the same data is used to improve AI. There is no upper limit to this.
I'm an AI booster, but this really doesn't follow. There's absolutely no guarantee that the marginal improvement from this continues to hold.
Validated data coming out of LLM(Itself generated from a recursive/loop process, used to incrementally arrive at solutions) being using to improve the very LLM is a very powerful loop. And there is no real upper limit to this, at least not in the near future.
Like most exponential processes, the start is slow, but it gets fast very rapidly.
This is also what Anthropic has said, the ones training these models today(i.e 2025 - 2027) will be impossible to catch up with, let alone beat.
$60B is a huge price, but buying Cursor gives Musk something xAI has struggled to build: a popular coding product with real developer and enterprise adoption. It may be the fastest way to catch up in AI coding. The real question is whether SpaceX ownership improves Cursor or drives its users away.
> The real question is whether SpaceX ownership improves Cursor or drives its users away.
I can't speak for anyone else but I wont be renewing my sub. Funding anything Musk related isn't exactly high up on my list of desires, and theres ample alternatives out there.
> The real question is whether SpaceX ownership improves Cursor or drives its users away.
I know I'll sound hyperbolic but I'm deeply skeptical of the way anything Musk-owned is going to treat private data. I think he wouldn't hesitate to dig into it if it were to his benefit, even if there was an agreement against it. For that reason alone it makes Cursor look worse to me.
I think it'd be an enormous endorsement of Cursor/xAI and proof of improvement if SpaceX started using it to code the mission critical software running on Falcon 9. Which other AI company can say their models powered a rocket launch?
(mostly /s but I know I'd give it another look if it was that good)
> Which other AI company can say their models powered a rocket launch?
Honestly, probably all of them. I imagine those coders are using all the tools they have available and are using Claude and ChatGPT as well as internal tools.
My sense is that enterprises are extremely cautious. They like everything that is already common and hr friendly. They abhor anything that might be seen as divisive and controversial. That's why they're currently going with Anthropic and not Openai or Xai or anything Chinese. It's the smaller actors that are using everything but Anthropic. Anthropic got that safe enterprise bland vibe. The only pr trouble Anthropic is in is with saying no to the military, which just makes them even more enterprise safe. Meanwhile Sam Altman and Elon are out there freaking out the enterprises almost every day it seems like.
I can't imagine that any of the cautious companies or ones with their ear to the ground are going to want to cozy up to cursor with this acquisition; I'd suspect we'd see some exodus as well given the relationship to Musk.
Cursor was my first hands-on experience with AI. I didn't know much about getting set up with specific providers via API, and Cursor made it easy to pick any model, ask a question about some code, and get a clear suggested answer easily viewable in the IDE with an 'accept' or 'reject' button. I think they answered this question well: "How do normal developers want to interact with AI?"
I moved away from Cursor when I noticed the responses from specific models were not as clean or accurate as when I'd prompt the models directly, which was something I didn't know how to do early on. I hypothesized that they had some boilerplate prompt sitting atop of my own, causing less precise or desirable results.
I would assume Cursor is still one of the best options for normal developers to get started with AI, but with Copilot forcing their foot in the door at many companies, I wasn't sure how well it would fare on its own. Being acquired by SpaceX should help, and I'll be interested to follow along and see how things develop.
My opinion is that the publicity can only help Cursor. I don't necessarily think SpaceX would make Cursor better. Copilot (which I view as a direct competitor to Cursor) has a huge structural advantage. I have several friends in various American companies where Microsoft products are all they are allowed to use. They get "free" Copilot access as a part of their Microsoft plans. Developers aren't having Cursor placed right in front of them in the same way Copilot is, and from my experience, when developers have the choice to pick one, they pick Cursor. So, I just feel the SpaceX/xAI publicity could help Cursor get more visibility in these general American software companies more so than they could on their own.
When I first saw the company built on top of vscode in such a crowded field way back at the end of 2022, I thought "forget having a moat, they are renting their castle from the invaders!" - I couldn't see how see how a single team could execute well enough to effectively muscle their way in between Microsoft and OpenAI, who at that point looked destined to control the developer ecosystem between GitHub, VsCode and the then-best coding models. I think it's easy to forget how insane this seemed even just a few years ago.
But every year since then they managed to simply ship a better product on the axis that mattered to the most users. And now they are sitting between a huge user base and a massive stream of valuable tokens, they can sell to SpaceX. Incredibly impressive.
I don’t really understand what the value prop of cursor is, it must be the data and models. These days programmable editors like neovim and emacs have a huge advantage. I’ve had ai create several custom plugins to have my editor do whatever I can think of. Just ask Claude code, hey I want to do x, y, z, it spits out some lua and I have a new capability. I don’t know why anyone would want to be limited by an extension interface at this point.
Cursor has $4 billion annual revenue rate so $60b is 15 years of future cashflows.
That's not crazy because if past predicts the future, that revenue will grow quickly. At $8 billion/year it's just 7.5 years, which is a reasonable investment.
This is a linear regression relying on a couple years of data to predict 15 years in the future and I don't believe that the valuation is made on this basis.
It may be that spaceX is buying an operation that would realistically take 5 months and 100 million to copy in-house for 60B because the worry is that waiting 5 months might cost that much in some sort of lost opportunity. It also might be that in any negotiation SpaceX is viewed as incredibly cash-rich and so anything can be sold to them for inflated prices.
I really don't understand these companies valuations it seems like boardrooms everywhere are in a constant state of panic that they'll lose it all if they aren't growing a breakneck pace constantly.
That revenue number is almost meaningless, since they give out tokens at a loss. Especially with Composer 2.5 tokens are sold at a steep loss. They could certainly grow to $8 billion/year, with this negative revenue / heavily subsidized subs, but what will happen if Cursor decide to be profitable, or maybe to even just break even?
Many made the same prediction about Twitter, and it seems to be more or less the same or higher activity than before, and Bluesky is continuing to rapidly decline (-5% DAUs per quarter).
I wouldn't bet on Musk, but I DEFINITELY wouldn't bet against him. Anyone betting against him over the last 10 years has been viciously smoked (many short-selling hedge funds got wiped out completely).
> I wouldn't bet on Musk, but I DEFINITELY wouldn't bet against him. Anyone betting against him over the last 10 years has been viciously smoked (many short-selling hedge funds got wiped out completely).
In terms of the stock market, definitely. Honestly though, all those people who said self-driving wouldn't be solved by now, that Tesla didn't have a great moat and that the Boring Company was profoundly stupid were in fact correct.
> Many made the same prediction about Twitter, and it seems to be more or less the same or higher activity than before
Where are you getting that? There's not a single piece of data out there that will tell you Twitter has increased in users. Not only have they visibly dropped in users, but it's becoming increasingly clear the site is Astroturfed with bots.
The choice is not Twitter or Bluesky. Most people moved on to TikTok. I don't know a single person who uses Twitter.
It's a crazy number especially since Cursor feels kinda dead. Few thoughts from the other side:
- xAI needs the coding related data to compete with Claude Code and Codex
- Recent progress with Composer 2.5 seems promising given the size
- The may get a comeback on the smaller than Enterprise battle field now that the other two got so expensive
- The way that Elon set up this entire process was quite genius. They locked in this option before, and now after the gains through the IPO, it feels almost like a discount, lol
I could see it being a talent / first mover acquisition. I’m bullish on harnesses, but I think there’s still a very long road to get to something that is stable and relatively optimal - harness user experience is pretty trash tier right now imo.
My hot take is that it will probably be like the OS landscape:
- Some established enterprise option (Windows)
- Quality secondary option for professionals (OS X)
- Super users / nerds / tinkerers (Unix flavors)
"Back in the day" is the key idea here. It's the valuation that doesn't make sense in today's market. What does Cursor offer to be valued at $60 BILLION? Its models are alright but nowhere near SOTA, and pretty much superseded by open source local models at this point.
Composer 2.5 worked just as well for me as opus 4.6, and was faster and actually worked better for quick bugfixes and reporting back to support. And is much cheaper.
I'm not saying HN should be super supportive of everything, but the level of hate and complete loss of reality for a lot of people is quite sad to see, for a community of supposedly intelligent people.
I wonder why IDEA didn't catch up with its own agent support and even their own models. It's not like agent harness is that hard to build, right? Or maybe they did, it's just that they haven't won the hearts and minds of the developers like Cursor did?
Happy pi.dev user here, give it a try! I would say that's kind of the "vim experience" but for harnesses: has the minimum, if you want something more you extend it :)
Saying it gives "the minimum" is generous, it's pretty much useless out of the box. And did I say slow as well? I think pi is great if you're into spending your time managing your harness rather than using it. In that regard, it's more like neovim.
Nvim + Claude code. Or zed. Honestly basically every ide is adding agent harness features as their primary focus right now. Just throw a rock and you’ll hit something that will work for you. You can even just use emacs and have ai build harness features for you.
The idea is to make it fully autonomous so it is not really something that is meant to be constantly prompted and it is unlikely to fit most workflows but the idea is to make something that fits the future - not the present.
I cant believe people still use Devin. This is just filling the niche of vibe PR'ing? Not even vibe coding? Another level removed from the codebase than even claude code/codex are?
I run Claude Code in cmux with Soonpatch and that's it. I tried looking at Cursor but honestly it wasn't providing any value and I prefer being 100% up to date with CC updates/interface
What are the alternatives to Graphite these days? Github's stacked PR support is still immature, AFAIK. I would love to see Linear move into this space and start offering both git hosting and stacked PR management.
They're getting paid in extremely overvalued stock, so maybe it balances out.
This is not really a diss on SpaceX either because a lot of IPOs go through an immediate pop and then 1-2 years of doldrums as lockouts expire and promises aren't quite delivered.
Nobody knows what 60 billion in SpaceX stock today will be worth when Cursor insiders finally get to sell (at least a year from now, after other SpaceX insiders have started selling).
Generally this is how liquidity works. Their employees will have a six or twelve month lock up (six being most common).
Investors in certrtain rounds (or sizes) tend to have no lockup, whereas later stages have a six month. Alternatively, I've reviewed agreements where the lockup is based on minimum market cap, but I've only seen that a couple of times.
Ok everyone saying this is how it works but where’s the proof? SpaceX has a 7 day lockup for some people which is abnormal. So clearly the way it’s done isn’t in fact how it’s always done.
This is just a general practice that always happens when paying in stock. It's to prevent a massive dump the next day which would tank the share price 'artificially'. Again, rich people's rules.
Ok everyone saying this is how it works but where’s the proof? SpaceX has a 7 day lockup for some people which is abnormal. So clearly the way it’s done isn’t in fact how it’s always done.
> Holding Period. Before you may sell any restricted securities in the marketplace, you must hold them for a certain period of time. If the company that issued the securities is a “reporting company” in that it is subject to the reporting requirements of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, then you must hold the securities for at least six months
Almost guaranteed to be. The only other way would be to have issued them during the transaction with the Sec. There was no mention of that. 60billion of issued shares would have been mentioned. It's non trivial amount.
Um, I honestly don't know for sure, if I'm not mistaken SpaceX has some weird staggered release schedule for employees and early investors, I guess based on their stock dates.
> SpaceX has a 7 day lockup for some people which is abnormal
You might be referring to staff members who have shares ? Their shares are not restricted securities as far as I know, but their internal company policy might affect those, but I'm not 100% certain on that.
There are many tranches here. Some friends and family got to buy day one IPO with no restrictions. Then some employees get a rolling release starting June 30.
Ok everyone saying this is how it works but where’s the proof? SpaceX has a 7 day lockup for some people which is abnormal. So clearly the way it’s done isn’t in fact how it’s always done.
Well, the people who bought the SpaceX IPO essentially footed the entire bill here. And they might still make money on it, depending on how the stock goes from here on. I don't see anyone who could lose here, even if the bubble bursts, apart from the Cursor people. And they are likely still going to make a huge amount of money.
> Well, the people who bought the SpaceX IPO essentially footed the entire bill here.
It's hard to say that they footed the bill here, but they basically gave SpaceX a number to say "well our stock went IPO and it's at this price, so here's 60B at this price"
A good tactic from SpaceX as after the inital surge of a big IPO, the stock price usually comes down and finds it's correct balance, which is usually always lower. So if they had of waited the 'cooling off' period of a year for example, and the stock price went down to it's 'correct' valuation, then they would have had to issue a higher number of stocks.. At least that's my thinking, but I'm terrible with money.
No, look a Composoer 2, it stands out starkly on its own in the pareto frontier on low cast and fast models.
Composer 2.5 was a huge leap with minimal compute from xAI.
They can compete with OpenAI and anthropic with xAI scale compute. They have a top notch model team and incredible training data and huge enterprise costumer contracts.
my employer (one of those huge contracts) dropped cursor in favor of claude and i don’t think this is true at all
while we had it i used cursor for probably eight months as my main ide (i did really like the interface for embedding code in prompts!) but had no problems switching to claude code. i asked around, and i truly don’t know a single coworker who misses cursor even a little bit.
I was fully in on Cursor for a good chunk of last year, using Composer + Gemini Pro (via Copilot / GH integration). I really enjoyed Cursor's tab completion capabilities, but when Sonnet and Opus started getting particularly good for me (think for me it was around 4.5), I swapped over to Zed + claude code in the integrated terminal. I've found that after a bit, I haven't ended up missing the tab completion. I've been perfectly fine with just LSP + claude always open. I don't miss Cursor. All my colleagues are on claude code with half of us also using Zed.
For someone who is new to agentic code or is generally somewhat junior, Cursor is very easy to get started with and is generally fairly frustration-free.
I use a cheap $20 subscription mostly for occasional use of Opus and Composer.
SpaceX made a smart move here. Someone else should have really seen the opportunity and bought them.
How the hell is an IDE a "pareto frontier"? Even if, say composer 2.5 is a huge leap forward, that doesn't mean IntelliJ or Vim or Emacs or Codex got worse.
Nope. Vim and Neovim users can use the cusor-agent cli for agentic stuff and there prefered editing tool for editing. All the major providers have a cli specific version these days. Probably because folks actually didn't want to actually use the cursor Gui and once Claude code came along those folks jumped ship and went full cli again
Hmmm. Not in my experience. I don’t think it can be compared to Haiku, maybe sonnet levels? It’s obviously not Opus and never was intended for that use case. I use it quite a bit and it works well and is extremely fast for the tasks it was built for
This doesn't match the empirical observations of a lot of people I'd trust more than you, and putting it below Haiku immediately makes it extra sus (Sonnet would have been the credibility preserving comparison).
It doesn’t tell anything about the valuation, but I prefer it over Claude Code, and I even stopped using JetBrains IDEs because of it.
Vs Claude Code: I like the option to change the models, as I often prefer ChatGPT or Composer to Opus. I have a slight preference towards TUI, but not so strong to drop the models.
Vs JetBrains. I really love JetBrains but the tab complete just works so well for me.
its not just the models, their auto complete is actually really good. when you make a change it will give you "tab to next" which makes refactors super easy.
composer 2.5 is also a very decent model, it go 90% of my AI tasks using it now.
I'm not sure it's worth the price tag for developers though, I mean resharper promised similar, delivered half, bought by millions and still don't think Jetbrains, even with its other good tool suit is valued 60B.
Yes, that's why Cursor was very popular when actually reading model output paragraph by paragraph was still the way you used them. That's no longer the case, their use has cratered, and in fact they have been disintermediated by their model vendors, leaving an empty shell.
composer 2.5 is literally just a fine-tuned kimi model, and the autocomplete is exteremly meh.
The only kind of AI I want in my editor is an autocomplete, but this isn't very magical to non-programmers (their TAM) or all that valuable (you can't charge thousands), they bought Supermaven and basically killed it, I'm not sure how you think tab is really good, I've not been impressed when I played around with it.
Could not say on the valuation front. The one thing that is obvious is the trash talkers love to point out how horrible it is but I have yet to find a compelling replacement. Obviously Claude Code works but at least for me I never got along with the CLI workflow very well and sure I could use vs code with the extension for Claude but then I lose tab autocompletes which I actually like. I have yet to see anyone build a derivative model like composer 2 that is quick, cheap and has higher reliability on tool call use. Again I don’t know on valuation but it’s pretty impressive how far they have come. I look at Jetbrains and at least from an AI perspective they have been left in the dust.
Cursor was nice when I was still meticulously hand coding my stack, fantastic autocomplete. With today's top models, I barely write code myself, just review commits. Cursor eats Opus credits like there is no tomorrow. Composer has been a net negative in my experience. All in on Codex with GPT 5.5 on high using /fast.
Cursor, from my companies perspective at least, seems to be handling charming leadership to get enterprise AI contracts in place, compared to the alternatives. That's feeling like the moat from my first-hand experience. Easy single contract that covers a lot of AI cases that management wants to say they have in place.
Cursor's moat is that it is a virus that infects organizations through shared skills, hooks, agents, etc.. Once one person uses it and infects the repo everyone else starts using it.
Know a few companies that have moved from it fully to Claude. It’s still early so the moving cost is low and Claude Cowork is something non-tech employees can make use of much easier than Cursor. I really don’t see what Curor’s value is longer term. Why pay a middle man?
I don't. Cursor being a man in the middle between coders and other people models for so long, has so much more training data than anyone else in the world.
In terms of whether they’re overvalued: probably. But any valuation should also take into account the value they have to x.ai (also under SpaceX) as a source of training data for coding models.
I do think this has had its day. From what I remember, Cursor was useful back in the day when you coded in an IDE and wanted to read code while you baby stepped through incremental changes with an AI. I'm tempted to put /sarc around this but not really...
Cursor Remote Agents are important to our AI orchestration layer. It's possible that Claude can do this directly but Cursor Remote Agents made this laughably easy.
There's a plausible synergy in it for xAI though. Access to reams of training data for a company whose marginal cost of compute is very very low, and that they can use as a channel to push Grok. I don't think it's worth anywhere near this much to anyone else, but to xAI it's at least possible.
I guess they're getting bought because they had access to a lot of codebases from a lot of companies, and perhaps there's something to mine in those logs...
Sounds like what people here said 20 years ago about Google buying YouTube, or 10 years ago about Facebook buying Instagram - companies with no moats and huge infrastructure costs.
To paraphrase, the biggest trick the devil pulled is convincing founders they need a moat.
What matters is that this has enough "future story value" to keep the few investors invested... allowing for the planned index funds to buy into the overvalued stock & allowing for the largest heist in the history of money.
It's become pure hype and drama on the global stock market stage.
Money is neither created nor destroyed in the markets. It's exchanged.
If Musk is worth a trillion while not generating a trillion of value, then it's a heist.
heist: "an elaborate, meticulously planned theft, typically targeting highly valuable items, large sums of money, or financial institutions like banks or museums"
Yes. I like it for small fixes, specifying exact code ranges i want touched, and for asking questions because it links me to the code so I can read it.
I use Claude more for greenfield feature building where I dont need to surgically dig in and view existing code specifics.
Yup still got it due to paying for a year up front, its still very decent, especially the newer composer 2.5 model, it's cheap and has a ton of usage included so works well as a general day to day tool.
But they (SpaceX) could have backed out of the deal at any given time as they had the option to (and be required to pay the 10B break up fee). Nobody knew what would happen at the time.
This announcement is a definitive agreement of the acquisition at that $60B valuation.
I don't think you can even say that without reading the actual announcement. [0]
Was the acquisition "effectively announced months ago"? or was it the right to acquire the company or pay $10 billion that was announced months ago?
It would be equally relevant if it went the other way. But clearly both of you are confused on what was said they would do in the future (which that was the announcement months ago) vs what are doing today.
I had high hopes in Antigravity and Gemini, but they royally screwed up everything to such a level that the only worth plan is to use free plan for creating docs.
I suspect these won't be as sticky as the contracts you're thinking of. Oracle and Microsoft can run on that because their products aren't compatible with anything else so migrating is a huge pain.
Cursor doesn't really have that. We've got it at $DAYJOB but it's not even the only one, I can also use Zed or Codex or Claude or probably a half dozen other things I don't even know about.
I suspect a lot of companies have that right now because the market for AI is so volatile, and in the near future will trim that down to a couple of tools and Cursor doesn't have much to keep them at the top of the list imo.
I also wouldn't pay 60 billion for a bunch of enterprise contracts that have to compete against Microsoft. No one is dropping Microsoft as a vendor, and they have the ability to up the prices for stuff people need like Office and use that to make Copilot free. If times get tough and companies need to cut costs, it's a lot easier to part ways with Cursor than Microsoft.
How does this get a Starship to land on Mars or coast-to-coast full self driving? $60,000,000,000 towards one of those goals would have checked-off one of those boxes.
Glad I've jumped ship to Zed+ACP. I liked the idea of the new agent window view, but it's obviously slop and hasn't had a any polish or care put behind it given the number of bugs I keep seeing.
Zed is so much more stable and sleek and the agent view (threads) actually integrates nicely in a real editor. The side editor in the agent window was so much worse than the vscode base I expected, I have no idea how they dropped the ball so hard here.
I wonder where they will take this, if they'll use the Cursor team to help make Grok Build (which is not just a tool like Claude Code, but an actual Grok model too) more refined for programming? Would make sense to me, and in turn also provide Cursor with more compute they can use.
They'll likely just take all the various enterprise contracts to help inflate SpaceX earnings, that's the only reason why you'd buy this if you were Musk. Need to help keep the lie going as long as you're still alive.
It also provides xAI with a pre-existing enterprise distribution channel. At the end of the day, distribution is equally as important as the underlying product itself and in some cases is even more critical.
I think that's another thing, while I would like to test Grok more, the Grok AI plans are very generic and not tailored specifically for programming, which is frustrating because I get maybe 8 hours out of Grok for $40 for an entire month, I do wonder if they offered a "Grok Build only plan" if it would actually give me access to more compute. Maybe they intend on making it through Cursor.
I do hope that Cursor doesn't remove any of its current model offerings, and just offers Grok Build in addition to what they already offer, in my opinion unless most of their clients "switch" to Grok (like metrics show they're mostly using Grok vs other models), it would make more sense.
Enterprise AI adoption has reached a point now where FinOps matter, and a harness platform story with a discounted underlying model can be enticing for a number of organizations.
I've seen Gemini land well in a F100 well known for their AI hardware story for that reason, and Alibaba's leadership canned the OSS minded Qwen team in order to build a similar commercial minded approach as well.
At least in cybersecurity, we're also reaching a point where the harness is starting to matter more than the underlying foundation models, and building a harness/bedrock style story while discounting a specific model can play well in upper market deals.
What makes you think so? Is it only because you dont like Musk or do you have some insight into all companies using Cursor you want to share with us? Even if you dont like Musk you should realise that others may not share your sentiments and/or may have similar feelings regarding SamA, DarioA or any of the other CEOs in this field.
Enterprise customers care about things like guardrails and data safety. xAI has always been anti guardrails, and who knows if you can trust them with your data.
At least in the F1000 RFPs I've seen and the decisionmakers I've chatted with, when they talk about AI guardrails what they mean is generic API (eg. can we rate limit, block connections, RBAC/ABAC capabilities, etc) and Data Security (eg. ZDR, encryption at rest/transit, controlled access) controls.
There is a recognition that foundation models and tools leveraging them will introduce some degree of nondeterminism, so the best way to solve that is to leverage preexisting best practice that is used to reduce lateral movement risk by humans (who are similarly nondeterministic in nature).
My company’s security team is very much “no proprietary data or information can be used to train a model”, I just don’t know how you can validate or trust that they aren’t doing just that.
ZDRs, spot audits, and the fact that salespeople can be held personally liable both financially and even criminally for fraud if they sold a contract with a ZDR that was not honored.
Ugh, I'm already tired of seeing ads everywhere for Cursor about how you can build EVERYTHING and solve all problems using their agentic IDE, so now I have even more reasons to dislike SpaceX too.
Everybody remember when Zuckerberg told in an Interview in 2024 that human data does not matter that much or more specifically "individual creators or publishers tend to overestimate the value of their specific content". Something along the line RL-Loops are more important.
Hard to square this with that acquisition which seems to be focused on Cursors vast amount of User Data.
Zuck is correct because the barrier to a large user base is not skill but market share which requires substantial effort, luck, timing, and patience.
Nobody can put a dent into Coca Cola because of their market. Better products exist but there is really no way to compete against $5 billion in marketing allowing them to maintain $50 billion.
Cursor is ~1MM users a day. $60k/per user is high but considering this is a stock buy, Space X "made" $300BN in the first day that is ~20% or one day of positive movement.
For Musk (with his baggage) to create or steer that user base would require a significant investment and time. Why not just slap some coupons from an initial bump to acquire the user base, user experience, and IP?
What does cursor have? An ide and coding orchestration? They are using Claude or codex for llms, so they get acquired for their user base and tooling? Feels like a lot of money for that given Claude has the majority mindshare.
I keep hearing this but they’ve been bleeding users since Claude Code came out so a bulk of their data is pre-Sonnet 4 and I’m not sure how the data from users prompting weaker models will help them now?
They did use that data to make Composer 2.5 which was decent but still a step back from GPT 5.5 and Opus 4.8. Though it’s really good at UI.
They technically have their own models as well, but they are based on other peoples models.
Most of this is just customers + staff/tech rather than models being acquired. Cursors actually got so much better in the last year. Their composer 2 model (a tweaked version of Kimi K2.5) is decent for day to day mundane tasks and the app can auto switch to more capable models when needed.
People keep saying this but I have yet to find an integrated system that has good tab completion, cheap coding models and works well in an IDE. There are a number of options out there, none of them have captured much market share.
Have tried it over time. I think it’s decent but I still found it to be not as great or quick as Cursor and the rest of their AI integration did not feel as compelling for my workflow.l but overall agree.
Do you have a point? The whole package is compelling like I already said. Nobody has replicated it but everyone likes to ask what is the value but never share a compelling competing product. I am not Boris so I still write some code or make manual tweaks, autocomplete is nice.
Edit: I realize my question is maybe harsh but I think it’s valid for these drive by comments that drop a question like “isn’t tab completion dead?” Without any other substance it is a huge detractor to the comment quality of the site. At least add more substance or opinion.
Customers, talent, training data, an increasingly competitive coding model and now a fuckton of compute.
So, you know. Couple of things.
Specially given that coding turns out to not be all that complicated, in the grand scheme of AI things: I don't think it's going take much more advances at the frontier before code writing will be as good as it need to be. At that point Composer (their model) catches up, what, 6 month later and they good.
The have customers actually willing to use and pay for their service.
In a world where even Microsoft is needing to use AWS for capacity beyond Azure, xAI's utilization of their data centers has been so low that they are renting them out to competitors instead.
Nobody wants Grok. If you aren't using GPT-5 or Claude, you are probably using an open Chinese model like Qwen hosted by some provider.
I would expect Cursor to be forced to use the Grok Code models in short order. We'll see how people feel about "Mecha Hitler" writing their code.
Musk bought Cursor for its users (lots of devs still use it), as part of yet another attempt at catching up after building Grok and buying OpenAI failed.
Likely, Cursor becomes Grok Desktop or whatever, and eventually uses xAI's coding model if they can make a competitive one.
Good hopefully Grok Build gets better and they start to innovate in this area.
Claude Code and ChatGPT need more competition. So that they also innovate more.
Everyone I work with who used Cursor stopped using Cursor when Claude Code came along. They're back to their regular IDE when the need to read code, or they just review it at PR time. I never used Cursor, but Zed is my favorite editor with an agent. It can use Claude Code, among other CLIs, via ACP, so you can use rolling subscription tokens, or it can use OpenRouter or others if you want a broad spectrum of models. And it's crazy fast. It used to be that Copilot Pro was the best deal on agentic coding with several models from several vendors available, but they've really nerfed it, with uselessly restrictive token budgets and only older models are now available from the major labs. These days, might as well just have a Claude or Codex subscription and use the CLI with ACP in whatever editor you prefer.
This truly shows how king making in venture capital is done, kids have the MIT pedigree but sometimes this is not enough for certain demographics, give them a ton of money to explore ideas and pivot, product is a vscode fork that sells subsidized AI, only possible with venture capital. Providing inference at unsustainable rate deemed as "product market fit". Product loses money until they exit.
VCs that say "I always knew the team was special", give me a break.
Cursor's value add as a developer seems much slimmer than the 60bn price tag justifies, but I guess they have a lot of data from the non private usage which bumps the value up?
The product itself is practically a vscode wrapper with Agent implementation and K2.5 forked model (composer).
>Their expertise will be used to improve Grok Build coding agent.
Is Grok not a toxic enough brand (by association with Musk) that people who would use Cursor wouldn't avoid Grok?
Like, the assumption seems to be that all the goodwill that Cursor users have towards Cursor will now apply automatically to Grok, which seems like a pretty significant leap.
I've been teaching myself physics lately and have found Grok to be one of the best both at coming to a correct answer and helping me to understand how to get it myself. It also seems a lot better than other models at saying "I don't know" or pointing out when my question doesn't make sense.
I'm a heavy Cursor user, I spend hundreds of dollars per month in overages above my $200 subscription, and I'll be switching away. I have zero interest in Musk's AI.
The CEOs ideology matters due to the fact it impacts the product design. The reason people don't want to use Grok is because it's bad, and it's bad because the team behind grok have to spend cycles crowbarring in far right white genocide conspiracy theories so that it doesn't embarrass their boss on twitter. One of the things we learned with Anthropic is that you have a lot more success being focused on the core product - coding agent, than trying to do that and chase internet chatbot users.
As someone that trains LLMs, even if grok does have a "avoid ""woke""" fine-tuning, adding that needs a few thousand examples SFT and a system prompt. It costs nothing extra to do it to coding agents and is not the reason why grok sucks at coding. It's just not in the same league in general - it's 0.5T parameters only and not trained specifically for coding at all.
Even if the way they are doing it did damage coding performance, it is a simple matter of serving another model without that fine tuning in the enterprise API preferably only to the grok coding harness (or cursor, now). Coding performance for subscription plans don't move the needle in terms of revenue anyways and quality there doesn't matter as much.
Achieving the improvements from K2.5 -> composer 2.5 with just post-training is actually more impressive. Though I believe their next model is trained from scratch.
> So SpaceX is buying 15 years of future cashflows, assuming no change in revenue. Which is bad assumption given past growth was gigantic.
I'd argue it's a bad assumption in the opposite direction. There's no moat. People can and will switch tooling and Cursor could easily be left with a steep decline in users.
But revenue is not really the informative quantity. If you sell gold you will have a huge revenue, but very little profit. I can be a trillion dollar company too if we exchange dollar bills for face value.
"training good coding models" many would say that is a highly debatable statement, and some would say that is just flat out not true. Cursor has not trained a frontier model from scratch, what they did was take an already made (non-frontier) model and further trained it on their user data about coding outcomes from its coding agent. So, a form of distillation and RL.
Sure - why use cash when you can use bits of paper instead?
I'd expect more of the same to come - good way to lock in some of this crazy SpaceX valuation by converting it into something with a bit more inherent worth.
Not totally, because the deal is in stock. The cash SpaceX got is actual cash that can be deployed today. The stock will be in a lockout period and could be worth nothing or something whenever the lockout ends.
I'm still waiting for the real news to drop- in the next 6 months we're going to start hearing some big moves from Space X AI. Early this year they lost pretty much all their leadership, it's very clear they failed to keep up with the frontier models and Musk has essentially given up for now - renting out their compute to Anthropic and Google. But that's not sustainable, everything they say about their IPO is that AI is the core value driver. So at some point Musk is going to have some decisions to make about who he brings in to drive that. I imagine once they get that person in and start building a team around them the deals with Anthropic and Google will be ended.
I guess the cursor guys will be happy because they got their pay day, but I'd be very aware if I were them that their future is at the whim of whoever Musk appoints and it's difficult to tell who that would be right now.
I guess now is the time to take bets, so I'm going to bet an early OpenAI employee like Sutskever gets the job and they acquihire him in. Here's a bit of a laugh - at this stock price Musk could probably tempt Demis to come over, that would be wild.
It's a good business. Maybe even a great business. But it's not going to justify a valuation like Space X. In the same way that Tesla has slowly become less competitive in automotive, I don't think it's sensible to assume Space X will have some durable edge in building data centres, especially when basically everything going into those data centres are commodities. And if it is just a neo cloud, then you have to contend with the pro-cyclical nature of that. It's also just clearly not their plan, they're not promising to be a neo cloud. They're promising to own the full stack.
You generally see this sort of thing in the games industry when a publisher gives a developer a bunch of money to make a game but then the developer screws up and runs out of money. Publisher buys them to try to recoup their investment.
I really hope Musk doesn't ruin the product itself. I am not a fan of how he changed X at all. Id really like to see them stay on the current path, which has been brilliant so far
At this point, money and rationality does not make sense to me, rather beyond my ability to understand. But I feel it is all about accounting and writing off eventually and a few profiting from it, not the retail investors for sure. Again I am just saying what I think and there could be no rational to my thought process.
Cursor was simply able to get early access to openai models and get an early lead doing things that are now obvious and done better by many others. Does anyone really want to use a crippled "enhanced" vscode to interact with a crippled version of codex or claude code?
It's a great thing for consumers and businesses to have another competitive, American coding harness + frontier coding model duo. No one wants a crippled version of codex or claude code and surely SpaceX isn't paying $60 billion for that outcome.
I tried it and it was extremely broken and dramatically overhyped. Which I guess is what Elon finds appealing about it, as that seems to be his preferred type of business.
Why don't they just make their own in-house development environment? Cursor's codebase is maybe 5,000-50,000$ worth of actual code, even just $10M (compared to the $60B) could knock Cursor out of the park with a completely custom code editor, and even with a smaller budget they could fork VSCode. Maybe for the social value? I feel like a $10B advertising budget for a bespoke AI development environment is more than enough to become an actual competitor.
That's interesting I was using Windsurf before and I really enjoyed it. Then it became part of Devon. I was less thrilled about that so I was looking at Cursor, but now it's also getting bought out. Any suggestions on what else is left? : )
Ai is great. The bubble will burst. We will keep Ai just like we kept "the internet" after the dot-com bubble, but we still won't buy our pets online. I mean London has pretty good train connections and stations because a bunch of companies repeatedly tried to get rich. Most eventually failed, but we kept the rails. I just hope we get our computers back after this round of gambling.
I’m worried some of the people leading this race will try to entangle the institutional financial giants or even the government to ensure some sort of too big to fail scenario.
There’s an unprecedented amount of money at stake. And the admin has never been so openly and blatantly for sale.
I can't stand Cursor.
Every time I open it up I have 3 popups I don't use, that I then need to figure out how to close.
Using it for notes is impossible, since the autocomplete just tries to fill in bullshit.
Awful what VC money did to it. Hope to never use it again, now that work stopped mandating it.
I think we should get used to it because that's what's going to keep happening again and again. First Twitter, then Cursor. When someone falls behind in the race for innovation, they usually buy the best product available and use it to get ahead of the competition.
Yes, I still use it, although less than I would otherwise.
Good:
- Composer 2.5 is pretty decent for the quality / price ratio.
- Easy to assign an issue to it in Linear (I know Linear just added this natively for linear agent, but it seems rubbish compared to Cursor)
- Bugbot actually finds some useful issues (things Claude and Codex will miss)
- Using @cursor in github usually works well, and better than @copilot.
- Working with Python Monorepos with UV in their IDE. VSCode and Cursor work well here (Antigravity managed to screw it up somehow).
The Bad:
- Usage/billing dashboards - These are are opaque and you can't attribute what actions map to what spend.
- cursor won't follow PRs well like Claude Codes does.
- Setting up environments is less good than Claude Code
- Their IDE fork is woefully out of date, it'd be nice if it had more of the codeium fixes.
The Ugly:
- Settings - Try to turn off bugbot, there's multiple places you have to do it. Good luck figuring them all out.
- Support - they are polite, but gas light you and tell you it's your fault their product's settings are awful.
Linear employee here - if you have any specific feedback on our Claude/Codex integration, happy to hear it. Definitely a v1 so expect a number of fast follows up with some of the missing functionality like env customization, secrets, and code signing.
CC is mostly my default for large tasks / features (ex. Plan > execute plan ) Biggest gripe with Claude Code is that it is painfully slow relative to the other two.
Cursor for small stuff like bug fixes since it has a lot of models to choose from. I love the review/ diff / checkpoint features. It's planning feature is on par with CC. I'd probably use Cursor as primary driver if it had better cost efficiency. Next version or two of Composer may fill that gap in cost/quality/speed.
Codex isn't allowed at my work, but I use it for personal projects. It has the best balance of quality / cost / speed even if it's planner is poor and quite frankly the codex harness needs to catch up with the other two.
CC for quality / cost. Cursor for quality / speed. Codex for balance of the 3.
composer is competitive with around opus 4.5 in feeling?
largely lags behind opus4.7/gpt5.4, but is respectable, and generally outperforms the glm/qwen equivalents anecdotally despite benchmarks.
fails to follow instructions more often, and is less code critical, but performs okay if you can decompose the task to smaller problem spaces. i.e. only do manual review, only do typechecking, only do specific component. etc
I agree, Composer 2.5 is really good. I use it for all kinds of small tasks, and really for any kind of first pass at debugging, answering questions about the codebase, pulling data for reports, etc. It’s fast, pretty accurate, and basically free.
Yes, it’s my daily driver for building the saas I run full-time. I’m not happy about this news.
I like the ability to switch between any models, Composer 2.5 is really solid, I like having my agents coworking in the IDE with me, the plan mode is great, Cloud Agents are great, especially with slack, linear, web, etc integrations. I routinely tag an error report in slack and Cursor fires up a Composer 2.5 cloud agent that has readonly db access, access to error reporting, etc, and it can triage the issue, issue a PR, and tag me in slack.
The only thing I’ve felt like I’m missing out on is the subsidies of the CC/Codex subscriptions, but it seems like that is rapidly eroding anyway.
It uses AI to replace a very niche human-powered workflow in a niche industry. That's all I'll say, but it's grown to about $30k MRR in the last year and is supporting my family, so the stakes feel pretty high to me.
Not to my knowledge? But even if that's the case, Cursor seemed like they were doing fine without SpaceX, and I'd like to avoid giving a single cent to Elon Musk. You can do as you wish.
Interesting. I've not used Cursor in almost a year after using Codex/Claude.
Won't be surprised if Elon paid another hefty premium.
I just realized this whole game is just getting rich from other people's money and there might not be people left to buy those people's shares when the music stops.
I honestly don't get why they feel the need to buy Cursor or why OpenAI wanted Windsurf.
If it's data you're after, wouldn't it be so much more cheaper to just hire a dedicated team to fork VS code and integrate your own model and give it to the public for free with unlimited usage for a couple of months?
How are these numbers even working out, I get free markets and all that, but Microsoft paid 2.5B for Minecraft, which was printing money at the time (seems they still lost on that deal).
Now a rocket company is buying an editor company for 60B and everyone seems to think that makes sense.
I’m happy to be old man yelling at clouds here because I can’t for the life of me figure out these valuations and purchases.
There's a lot of investment in AI for its potential.
An AI editor company might never make 60B itself, but it might help another AI company grow faster (relative to its competitors, who might also want to buy the AI editor company).
What else can an AI giant do with all that money?
Build in-house: they do, and there's only so fast they can hire/build.
Save? Yes, still do, but if they save it all, and let competitors buy Cursor, they lose.
Invest in other fields? Sure, but if they lose the AI race, that's all they'll be left with.
Tesla's IPO is a bet that if Musk has the right opportunity, he will do well. So he's given a big bucket of money, and needs a team that can deliver. So he buys Cursor.
The winners are Cursor. The losers are whoever is funding the AI companies that get outcompeted.
(Full disclosure: I don't know anything about Cursor, nor much about Tesla or its IPO.)
But surely 60B could buy you something better if you want to spend money on AI. The number seems completely arbitrary, would Cursor say no to 40B?
I really don’t see Cursor as bringing them anything of actual value, it’s more of a bragging thing, but I can be very wrong.
What are the best open source IDE alternatives to Cursor? There was Continue for a bit but Cursor bought it. Is Visual Code by itself the only open source IDE atm? My main gripe with Visual Code is it doesn't make it easy to use open weight models or non Copilot model APIs. Continue helped but its now part of Cursor.
As for coding in the terminal, we have Opencode, Claude Code, and Codex etc. They are all open source but only Opencode can route to open weight models. But non of these are really an IDE like Visual Code or Cursor.
Are we missing a really good open source IDE to use open weight models? It seems like we are.
I think it's difficult to compete in this space because right now to build the "full IDE" you have to build an extremely capable harness (very hard) and a very good IDE (very hard). I plan to continue using Claude Code and built myself a small tool to verify what the agents actually do + move around the codebase quickly but it's a far cry from a full IDE: https://cotect.dev
Pieter is so dumb. All he seems to do is post comparisons between the wonderful U.S. and dying EU that are completely wrong. If Elon is listening to Pieter, pray for Elon.
Congrats to the founders, arguably the first true AI-wrapper billionaires? 0 to multigenerational wealth in 4 years is impressive. It is crazy how much more wealth per user that can be created in the AI-space, compared to other products.
Surprising how tech people on a tech forum are some of the biggest Luddites. Maybe it’s because the creative destruction is coming to your industry this time?
What are the best open source IDE alternatives to Cursor? There was Continue for a bit but Cursor bought it. Is Visual Code by itself the only open source IDE atm? My main gripe with Visual Code is it doesn't make it easy to use open weight models or non Copilot model APIs. Continue helped but its now part of Cursor.
As for coding in the terminal, we have Opencode, Claude Code, and Codex etc. They are all open source but only Opencode can route to open weight models. But non of these are really an IDE like Visual Code or Cursor.
Are we missing a really good open source IDE to use open weight models? It seems like we are.
I realized a while back that Elon Musk isn't Iron Man. His superhero (or supervillain depending on your view) persona is ZIRP Man, the master of riding successive credit expansion and speculative waves. It's sort of ironic that he at least pays lip service to some Austrian-style quasi-libertarian economic ideas, because the Federal Reserve created him.
Now he's surfing the AI wave. We are no longer technically in ZIRP but the delayed inflationary wave is now traveling through the economy and pumping everything. He knows the best way to soak up cheap money right now is slap AI on it.
I also had the thought the other day that him hitting $1T technical net worth might actually be a harbinger of a lot more future inflation. Inflation of this type hits assets before it hits things like prices and wages, and it hits assets with fast market cycles like stocks before it hits things like Real Estate. The blast wave starts at the top and moves down and out. So maybe Elon hitting $1T really means that in 20 years that'll be more like $100B inflation adjusted. Meanwhile a loaf of bread will be $20 and a starter home $4M.
But the fact that monetary inflation starts top-down is why low interest rates exacerbate inequality. The very richest and most leveraged can use the arbitrage gap to buy everything else before the inflation wave propagates. We've been in a low interest rate environment for about two decades, and you can see during that time how the super-rich with access to cheap money have fully detached from the rest of the economy.
In other words: the reaction to the 2008 financial crisis was to inject huge liquidity at the top, which created the new Gilded Age.
Ultimately it may be somewhat intentional. One way out of a sovereign debt crisis when you also have a sovereign currency is to inflate your way out, which basically is a huge tax on every non-domestic entity that owns your debt.
To be honest and objective, I think he at least knows enough about engineering to hire people who know what they're doing, which is how he got here. It's not all chicanery.
Over time, though, I think he's drifted away from his original "make real things in the real world" focus and more toward "play money games" and "play political games."
It's sad. One common comic book supervillain arc is to start as a hero and become what you despise.
SpaceX should rush to acquire as many companies as they can with stock. The market cap is absolute insanity (I know people keep saying this about new high scores in unrelated-to-reality valuations, but this one might just be the pinnacle), with zero rational basis, and they should try to make it real as rapidly as they can.
Do you really think so? Like everyone who risks their and their clients' money here is just being irrational? Is this really a coherent view? Could it not be that someone knows something you don't, or does not have the biases you have?
Everything was in the S1 filing. There is no "secret knowledge".
The rational basis is entirely "I can sell the stock to somebody else for more money". Where in normal stock it would be "this company can make a profit that gives a return on this investment." This is a purely speculative play.
Why is something true for a company where it is true and not true for companies where it is not true?
SpaceX is worth more than Amazon.
Amazon has $750B of revenue and an enormous unfathomable moat across many fields, across most of the planet. It had a profit of $77B last year. And people consider Amazon overvalued, and a symptom of a serious bubble.
SpaceX has $18B revenue, and a consolidated loss of $4.9B. It has basically zero path to real profit, and it turns out that space launch actually isn't a lucrative industry, so much so that SpaceX had to create its own customer.
I mean, the biggest news about SpaceX has been the utter failure that xAI has been, reducing it to renting out all of the GPUs that Musk forced his other road-to-failure company, Tesla, to hand over to the failure that was xAI, that failed so badly it got hidden inside SpaceX. Good god. Somewhere in there the failure that was SolarCity got packaged in the giant scam.
Like seriously, the biggest win of the company is that it absorbed the husk of xAI that had a massive surplus of GPUs from when Elon tried to buy himself credibility in AI, and the market happened to make them worth more so that's their big win. Their biggest success is basically scalping GPUs.
>even though literally everyone hates him?'
Guy basically runs the US government, which has been reduced to a banana republic plutocracy. People invest in him because they know the system is so catastrophically corrupt that he'll always come up a winner, regardless of how enormous of failures he keeps generating.
I mean, this is such a transparent shell game scam that they're immediately talking about packaging up even more of Elon's scam businesses together. Just amazing stuff.
Don't worry, those super robots are coming any day now!
Yes, the US market is in the end games of a massive spiral -- a circle jerk of trillions of fake dollars moving in a rapidly accelerating circle -- and it will not turn out well. SpaceX is the moment when it is laid bare.
> Guy basically runs the US government, which has been reduced to a banana republic plutocracy.
Do you have any evidence of this? As far as I know, he basically never gets what he wants. He was against Trump's Big Beautiful Bill, it passed anyway. He wanted DOGE, it fizzled. He wants more Solar/Electric car related subsidies, Trump does not give a darn. He wants more H1Bs, Trump has been doing everything to frustrate H1Bs.
The one thing which Musk seems to have gotten was Jared Isaacman, but that was really difficult for him to get, and it took way longer than it should have.
Really difficult to see evidence that he runs the US government.
Point us at a rational verbalized or written argument for SpaceX's current valuation (and increasing)? Everything I've read says the valuation is too high and here is why, with x, y, and z reasons. Everyone I read who encourages buying seems to be ignoring arguments entirely and going on vibes.
> With the option agreement, we have the right, but not obligation, to acquire Cursor at a predetermined price or pay a fee
> The consideration for the acquisition of Cursor, if any, after the closing of this offering would consist of shares of our Class A common stock based on an implied equity value of Cursor of $60.0 billion
I believe open source models will win here, mainly because China won't allow otherwise. I also think that nobody is really talking about the hardware decpreciations coming in the next few years, which is going to be really important from a performance-per-Watt perspective. B100s aren't going to suck. But a theoretical T100 will get 30-80% more performance for the same energy input.
So, SpaceX. I've previously said that SpaceX would've been a significantly better company without xAI. SpaceX was used to rescue Elon and other "investros" from the financially disastrous Twitter purchase. Starlink, Starship (which is a risky program) and the Falcon 9 are a solid business. They're just not a $2 trillion business.
So I believe that the AI bubble contributes at least half of SpaceX's valuation and when and if that bubble bursts, at least half of SpaceX's value is at risk.
Google announced they're throwing billions to rent GPUs from SpaceX. That might sound good. It solves a short-term cash issue. But as another commenter put it, it makes SpaceX seem more like a Commercial REIT. After all, renting out your GPUs is literally the lowest-value thing you can do with them. You're not building a business. You're taking rent so someone else can build a business.
So buying Cursor and I'm sure any number of other AI startups in the coming year or two, seems aimed at kicking that AI can down the street.
So I view the Google-SpaceX as a red flag in the short-to-medium term. SpaceX simply can't seem to do anything valuable with all the compute they have. And I also have way more confidence in Anthropic (in particular), OpenAI and Gemini than I do in Grok.
This is true if you take the ai market as equal to the market for labor discounted to 5-10% penetration.
It’s not a totally unreasonable assertion, it’s the implication of the assertion that we are uncomfortable with. There is no reason for the models to stop their improvements in the near future.
> There is no reason for the models to stop their improvements in the near future.
Sure there is.
1. The cost of each new generation of training runs appears to be rapidly rising
2. The Trump admin just told the leading model to stop making it available to non-Americans, which in practice meant stop providing it at all
3. The factories to make the hardware are hitting bottlenecks, and while they've currently been navigated around, there's never a guarantee the next one will be
Currently I'm wondering at what point the direct impact on the US energy supply gives the US a taste of Baumol's cost disease as AI companies continue to outbid everyone else for electricity.
There are some counters to this, especially in electricity. We'll see massive expansions of wind and solar in the US because of this. Both the speed of install and low costs will guarantee it.
> We'll see massive expansions of wind and solar in the US because of this. Both the speed of install and low costs will guarantee it.
Implausible while Trump remains in office. He hates renewables, shuts them down even when doing so actively costs money.
Between AI hallucinated content and the politicisation of the numbers, I'm not sure how much AI compute capacity is being planned right now; would you accept a claim of 300 GW? It's a number I heard recently.
Given the capacity factor of PV, even China would have to think carefully before supplying that much PV over the next few years (300 GW avg ~= 3TW nameplate).
(Not sure about wind, wind's CF seems to vary between years).
> There is no reason for the models to stop their improvements in the near future.
You speak as if "improvements to models" is just function of time, and resources are infinite.
Models keep improving as long as there are resources to allow for larger and larger datacenters, if we hit a scientific breakthrough once LLM technology become the bottleneck, if the economy is infinite to allow infinite growth, and (geo)politics is not a thing to worry about. Or we discover ASI, machine improve themselves and we reach the technological singularity.
I know everybody is drinking the kool aid by the gallon, but can we maintain a little bit of objectivity?
To be fair, food is the smallest bucket of my monthly expenses. And there are many people here on hacker news who pay more for their AI tokens than for their food.
How does argrar industry and tech industry compare as share of gdp in the US?
> the market for AI is 2.5 larger than all the food sold on this planet.
It just shows how much the automation has impacted agriculture and the food industry. Sure, there're rural farms that apply 200 yo technology. But e.g. the grain production and farming are incredibly efficient at scale. So, it's not that costly for as a humanity to feed 8 billion people (at a varying level, of course).
Food is a solved problem. We can grow far more food than we need and we stop doing so simply because the low prices mean it's not economically viable.
In the places where famine remains a problem, it's due to political issues, not that we can't grow enough.
And growing all that food requires a tiny workforce compared to 400 years ago before the Agricultural Revolution. AI might extend such a massive reduction in labour requirements to many other industries.
> We can grow far more food than we need and we stop doing so simply because the low prices mean it's not economically viable.
So, it's not a solved problem.
Last time I checked we have plenty of people in several parts of the world with difficulties to access the required level of food to be healthy.
> We can grow far more food than we need and we stop doing so simply because the low prices mean it's not economically viable.
Half. This depends on there being a reliable source of cheap fertiliser, which would be much more secure if not for the situations regarding Hormuz and Russia.
Technologically yes, but this is a vast oversimplification.
You need lots of money to be able to buy the tech you need to do so. And you can't exactly earn that from not using the tech, since foreign (or even local) competition will slaughter you on prices. And if you do make it, you're stuck with a low-margin race to the bottom on price.
I don't think anyone is claiming AI and food have the same elasticity of demand, which is what this really talks to, but, after a claim the AI market is 26 trillion dollars... I wouldn't be surprised if someone did.
Ackshully, AI does have an upper bound in information theory, but since we're not anywhere close to writing data to the surface of a black hole I don't think it's a big issue yet.
We could remove 100% of world AI supply and humanity would not be worse off. It is still additive and in areas of generally indeterminate value except in hype.
Reasoning and RAG is amazing already and is a productivity gain but I'm yet to be convinced GenAI is anything but a slop machine.
You can't food maxx a trillion calories a day to generate a multi million dollar bill. You can token maxx it though.
I think the issue is the reality that most life is worth a lot less (in US Freedom units) than some software running doing absolutely nothing truly valuable for anyone.
What precisely is the moat surrounding AI that SpaceX is using to justify this kind of spending spree? I don't how SpaceX and other AI companies will be able to keep the weights of their AI models private in the face of interest by virtually everyone in the world. It would be absolutely trivial for a nation state to walk into a data center using a state issued security certificate to seize a few of the physical servers running the cloud services of OpenAI / Grok / Claude. Copying the weights is trivial. Infiltrating a company with spies as new hire coders to gain access to source code is also trivial.
This is really starting to feel like the pets.com era again.
Not to be a jerk or anything, but that only matters for the guys and gals left holding the bag.
I don't think that will be Musk. He'll probably pull out significant resource from all this financial engineering relatively quickly. Probably via more financial engineering.
This is an insane take. Of course there are other areas that are growing or could grow if there was investment.
The problem is an absolute lack of vision on the part of those holding the capital.
Meeting the challenges of climate change could hold huge opportunities. Look at China’s massive expansion in renewables, look at the expansion of renewables in the US despite political headwinds.
Have some imagination, break out of your echo chamber. AI ain’t the only game to be played.
It's not lack of vision. It's that capital demands gambling. Everyone knows you could plough money into big projects in the US and double your money reliably. But the powers that be do not want that. They want to gamble, and try to become trillionaire #2.
It's not insane. The GP is correctly describing a bubble economy.
The money chasing investments is orders of magnitude larger than the money people have on their pockets to spend. As a consequence, the only profitable thing to do is sell capital goods to make business and there is no profit on selling actually useful things.
China is in a different reality in large part because of their capital barriers that stop money from flowing in. Countries with bad reputation are also less affected.
What the GP gets wrong is that none of this makes AI a good business. Instead, it makes Nvidia a good business, but that's not news.
Looking at venture funding, it's definitely true. That doesn't mean other problems don't exist or aren't worth solving. But the concentration of (competing) capital and talent is insane.
Cursor is a harness that can be used with all kinds of models. It's a much better harness than anyone else's and takes the company out of just playing the model game.
Exactly this. I think valuations and the AI market could get stirred up if:
- We get an open source Opus 4.8 equivalent and pair it with an open source coding agent
- Running this OS stack becomes cheaper than what frontier model providers charge (see OS model prices on OpenRouter vs. frontier lab prices)
- This happens across verticals (i.e. not just software)
The first “DeepSeek moment” didn’t do much damage back in the days, but I wouldn’t be surprised if a similar moment becomes a lasting, effective, cheaper alternative.
OpenCode exists, it is your "open source coding agent" that is practically on par with Claude Code and Copilot in terms of being able to do the 80% of things that most people actually use.
DeepSeek v4 Flash/Pro also exist, they are open weight and on par with Sonnet, just a bit below Opus. Again: practically useful and sufficient for 80% of things most people actually do. And most of the remaining 20% are benchmarks designed to push the limits, not productive work.
Using these already is way cheaper than your typical Claude API prices. What's still missing is a) mindshare - everyone still thinks "claude = coding" and everyone thinks he/she really needs the very best models because he/she is doing such incredibly complex stuff - and b) someone pushing such a stack as a convenient solution for corporations to easily dump their token money into, complete with user management, enrollment, monitoring, all that enterprisey stuff you need if you want to sell to, well, enterprise customers.
They are a distant third at best, at least in trading companies. If you look at Chinese and other likely national actors, they are probably further down.
The thing with dotComs is that they didn't have THIS level of unsustainable financing burn, and a tangible issue of token processing cost that has no magic wand coming with the current practical limits of Moore's law.
We'll figure out how to make it much much cheaper to produce the compute needs we have today with tokens. The question is will how many new use cases arise that need much more - clearly we aren't meeting needs (price stays high) but how much more do we need, 100x, 10x, 10^6 x?
Look at electricity, the world of 1900 could not create enough electricity or even conceive of how to add enough to meet 1950s needs. But we made it incredibly cheaper to produce, but also created a lot more, and boy do we have so much more use of electricity now. And it's not that expensive for a human to pay for their needs (not free, its not cheap for poor people but it's still gotten cheaper).
Food is worth a lot more than that. If the alternative was starvation, we would pay approximately all the money for food. By that metric food is worth more than $100T. The difference between $100T and $10T is called the consumer surplus, one of the largest benefits of a free market economy.
AI might eventually provide $26T worth of value, but if it captures anywhere close to that amount of revenue that'll indicate a failure of the free market economy. Competition and open source will have failed and the oligarchy has won.
(Either that, or inflation will have made $26T a relatively smaller number).
You need to understand the definition of “total addressable market.” It’s a maximum theoretical number for the size of the market (not your company’s revenue) under ideal assumptions. A $26 trillion TAM is high but it’s not “unhinged.” For example, the logistics and transportation market is over $10 trillion and expected to double by 2035. Under ideal assumptions, if AI replaces everything from coders to lawyers, why is that “unhinged?”
Always fun to remember when calculating TAM - something like 85 - 90% of the world earns less than $1000 usd per month.
The math don’t math here, there literally aren’t enough people to afford this and businesses will go under the more people are displaced for gainful employment.
There have been a few recent stories about businesses finding themselves spending more on tokens than they were spending on the workers these AI Agents were supposed to have replaced.
I also saw a quote from Musk saying that he expects SpaceX to hit $1 trillion in revenue by 2031. Given his track record of predicting performance I think it's safe to ignore such future looking statements from him or companies he controls.
Another way of putting this: global GDP is ~$132Trillion from what I gather.
So this is saying AI products will increase global GDP by about 20%.
The Federal Reserve says AI is contributing about 1% GDP growth per year to the US [0].
So maybe you can get to $13 trillion over a decade just from that. If you assume some acceleration, 20% isn't out of the question.
It is an extremely rosy projection, but if AI can replicate large fractions of the workforce, leaving those humans with the ability to work on other things, it doesn't seem unhinged when you think of it through this lens, just very optimistic - not Elon Musk level optimistic, just "everything goes according to plan and a bunch of things in the causal chain are all slightly on the higher end."
> So this is saying AI products will increase global GDP by about 20%.
No business gets to capture 100% of the value it produces without physical coercion.
For infrastructure that requires high investment, it usually captures something around 5% of it. People tend to work really hard to replace or reduce any kind of infrastructure that gets near 10%. So we are talking about AIs increasing the global GDP by 200% at minimum, 400% more realistically.
With SPCX shares never going down in price, SpaceX can acquire all companies in the US in exchange for its stock, so SpaceX itself is worth at least as much as the US GDP! (/s)
I stopped using Cursor when I started getting comfortable with Codex/Claude. Cursor is just annoying with the constant popups and it's just not as good. Now my workflow is to use my normal editor, add a todo describing what I want, and then ask Codex+gpt-5.5 to implement it. It absolutely nails it. Using codex is so much more like working with a partner vs the noise and annoyance of Cursor.
That said, I think we're in a narrow window of time right now where any of this matters. Prompt "engineering" and working around your tools will be over in a year or so.
Fwiw I am a c/c++ systems engineer. I think anyone mentioning anecdotal experience like this should clarify. Maybe frontend JavaScript folks have a totally different take and that's expected.
I also work with C++, and I use Codex (desktop) which writes 99.99% of my code, plus Visual Studio, which is nice for reading and navigating code. For webdev I do VSCode + Codex.
I started with Cursor back in the day, but switched to Claude Code and then Codex when Cursor got too expensive.
If price wasn't an issue, maybe I'd prefer Cursor only because I can easily switch between models. But that's it. I always disliked the "accept/reject" workflow in cursor, but that's probably optional nowadays I guess?
the reason to use cursor nowadays isn't the IDE (though it's helpful perhaps once a week), but how it makes running models from multiple providers trivial out of the box. I don't have to juggle keys or drop to a shell tool call, it supports calling out to e.g. gemini in a subagent natively. I have multiple models cross-reviewing plans and diffs as a matter of course.
claude code was seriously annoying with the flickering, maybe it's fixed now, I don't know.
cursor also has a (bad) cli if you need it, it seems it's mostly used to setup remote agents, but it does the job in a pinch.
Yep in my experience the weakest engs in my org are the ones still using Cursor. not a good outlook IMO
I know this is not always true. But the same people who like cursor still are the same people who are less familiar with the terminal.
And I don't know what it is but it feels the less familiar you are with a terminal, the less skilled you tend to be.
Definitely not a 100% case. But has been common in my experience
I don’t think mapping tooling to ability makes sense here, particularly when the “advanced” tools here just abstract more away, though I agree that Cursor is terrible. So many useless windows.
Same.
When I first used Cursor, I hadn't used any of the "Vibe Code" tools out there, so it was pretty neat to have an assistant directly tied to the editor.
Once I learned how to use Codex, I just used a tmux split with NeoVim and have the effect I wanted. I haven't felt compelled to use Cursor at work since.
Same path as you. Went from $60 cursor plan (often exceeding it which costed more in API) to a limitless $100 codex plan where I basically say "read the markdown and implement the instructions". Deepseek also works quite well, surprisingly!
(FWIW Im mostly using python for OCR, LLM calls, data analysis..)
>> Fwiw I am a c/c++ systems engineer. I think anyone mentioning anecdotal experience like this should clarify. Maybe frontend JavaScript folks have a totally different take and that's expected.
Similar experience, having transitioned from full-stack to a dedicated C/C++ stack, learned/experienced firsthand that there is no one-size-fits-all tool.
Cursor also seems to be doing something with the Claude models that makes it way slower and less efficient as times goes by.
Or it could be just Claude CLI doing something very well.
I recently made an npm package with a small C helper that runs in the background. The JS/TS code is 99.9% unit test covered and for sure "cleaner" code. Just my opinion though.
Cursors target users are not developers but casual vibe coders.
What are you saying is going to be over in a year or so?
Not OP, but I generally agree. Models are powerful enough now to reliably instruct other models. They don’t need fancy tools or IDEs, just the command line.
With deterministic workflows, type-safe languages and test suites, agentic loops pretty much “can’t fail”. They will continue until the types resolve, the tests pass, and the project requirements are deterministically met.
By that point it’s literally just a case of typing a prompt in to a text field, and waiting.
My experience exactly... minus c++
Oh, you should try OpenSpec !
On the flipside, I enjoy Cursor now and came back to it after leaving it over a year ago. The 2.5 model is fast as hell and very good. And whatever harness they have it's terrific, great results. I also really enjoy the fact that I can open my website in the Cursor in-app browser and just click and reference stuff. It's a really cracked workflow. The models can only get better for them.
I like your take and think the key takeaway is that there is no single answer for everyone. It’s like eMacs vs vim.
My one question is what popups exist in cursor? It is my daily driver and I cannot recall any popups.
I like cursor, but I'm assuming they're talking about how it hijacks your tab key. It's amazing when it works, and infuriating when I just want to insert a damn tab!
Maybe that is it and agree.
A space company is buying an IDE for roughly the cost to build 150 of world's most expensive modern hospitals [1]. How is this in SpaceX's interest? Isn't it kinda bizarre that Elon is pivoting SpaceX to something else?
1. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/16/spacex-spcx-cursor-acquisiti...
It’s all in a stock that may very well be near its zenith when this closes (or maybe not. This is so far past fundamentals it’s impossible to tell).
They’re spending Monopoly money.
It also seems like SpaceX is poised to Hoover up all of Elons companies so it’s might not be “just a space company” for long.
Elon's award is tied to growing Tesla's market cap - it's pretty transparent that he's just trying to ball-of-mud together everything he can to hit that target and grab the bag.
What would it mean if SpaceX buys Tesla though? Does the combined market cap count? That would be wrong. Tesla buying SpaceX just for hist bonus and then rebranding to X would be classic Musk.
It's a game for him, but so ridiculous. While Tesla was pushing electrification and SpaceX pushing rapid rocket re-use I kind of tolerated Elon's antics, but since he got involved in politics and DOGE I can't bear it anymore.
The total addressable market (TAM) for SpaceX is finite. There are only so many nation-states and large corporations that want to launch payloads into orbit.
And even if their internet service provider is uniquely capable for now, it only fills a strategic need for certain customers.
So instead, Musk and Co. need to find bubbling market trends that look like they will have huge gigantic TAMs to justify the potential growth of this company.
All markets are finite. But you're thinking too finitely -- remember that there was a proposal to use Starship (BFS?) as a point-to-point method of people transport too (London to Sydney in under 50 minutes I seem to remember).
You also have other services: Starlink is an obvious one they're pursuing now, but there's many other things that they could branch into with no effective competition right now, from harvesting resources such as Helium-3 to Rare Earths (ironic name), to... (thinks for several minutes) banishing people to the Phantom Zone?
But you get what I mean, it's not just about rockets, it's about the things cheap and reliable rocketry enables.
Space Opportunities + Robots (Tesla merger when it happens) + Software factory (Cursor).
It is a umbrella enterprise.
SpaceX also wants to put data centers in space. That's the big market for SpaceX and how it ties into AI.
Which hasn't yet been proven to be either technically or economically viable, even on paper. It's a pipe dream.
The cynical viewpoint is that this is Elon capitalizing on current datacenter hype to inflate SpaceX's valuation based on theoretically overcoming tremendous amounts of hard physics problems, over the next 5-10 years. As he did with FSD, Boring Company / Hyperloop, Twitter, etc.
Do they, really? Because putting data centers in space would mean multiplying the infrastructure cost by a few orders of magnitude, while being far, far away from cheap energy - photovoltaics would work, certainly, but it will take a lot of it, and it's not like you can just slap panels on the roof - easy cooling, and people.
It's a ridiculous idea, and I don't believe it's what they are really pursuing.
xAI could tie in just fine without Cursor in the picture.
yes musk said that, but that's retarded, a statement made to fill as many bingo spaces as possible
Why is this the case? I want him to be correct, but I am also skeptical.
Energy will be the biggest bottleneck to data centers on land. Is not an issue in space. Space is the perfect env for running compute.
Yes but the statement is in fact a milestone to meet in order to vest Class B stock options, specifically SPCX needs to put 100 terawatts of compute [1] in outer space and beam it back to somewhere, my guess is Earth.
There's even more rewards for putting a million people on Mars and reaching a market cap of 7.5T by a certain date. Oh yeah he has to stay employed too.
From the SEC Form 3 filed June 12th: 1) This Form 3 does not include 1,302,072,285 shares of restricted Class B Common Stock issued to and held of record by the Reporting Person, which may be voted by the Reporting Person, and the vesting of which is subject to the satisfaction of certain performance and other conditions. 1,000,000,000 shares of restricted Class B Common Stock vest upon (i) the Issuer's achievement of specified market capitalization milestones across 15 equal tranches ranging from $500 billion to $7.5 trillion, with each milestone reflecting $500 billion in additional valuation, and (ii) the Issuer's establishment of a permanent human colony on Mars with at least one million inhabitants, in each case, subject to the Reporting Person's continued employment ("SpaceX CEO Award"). 302,072,285 shares of restricted Class B Common Stock vest upon (i) the Issuer's achievement of specified market capitalization milestones across 12 equal tranches ranging from $1.065 trillion to $6.565 trillion, with each milestone reflecting $500 billion in additional valuation, and (ii) the Issuer's completion of non-Earth-based data centers capable of delivering 100 terawatts of compute per year, in each case, subject to the Reporting Person's continued employment ("AI CEO Award")
The way people just casually use that word again now is so sad. And I don't even mean that in an "I'm offended" way, but more of "I'm embarrassed by the way you're trying to be offensive" way.
I still have no idea how that would work. Imagine launching an entire data center building into space, and then imagine also launching a solar array to power it, and then also launching a gigantic radiator to cool it... and the radiator is full of some kind of liquid that can never leak even though it's in a vacuum.
Like, sure, but also, that seems like a lot of work, a lot of extra cost, and a lot of risk, all just to avoid building it in Kansas.
Cursor's edit data is invaluable to anyone who wants to train a coding model. Probably the best data available outside Anthropic and OpenAI. Coding models are seen by the leaders in AI as both the biggest current revenue opportunity and the best way to accelerate the progress of AI and bring about recursive self-improvement that will create superintelligence. So yeah, it's easy to see how SpaceX could see it as in their interest to purchase Cursor with 2% of their equity.
A city on Mars was never going to happen without revenue. Starlink is providing revenue but probably not enough for Mars. SpaceX needs more and AI is the only plausible way.
> Cursor's edit data is invaluable to anyone who wants to train a coding model.
Ok. So what prevents a company from offering a Claude Code/ Cursor equivalent, with 100% subsidised Claude (= 100% free), capturing the exact same data that Cursor does? If the data is worth in the tens of billions, the cost of subsidising the usage is negligible.
With its IPO, SpaceX secured its role as the vehicle for consolidating Musk's vanity businesses into one closely held public organization that can more easily convert publicity into investment and internally reallocate funds and debts based on his personal whims.
So yes, SpaceX is pivoting, but it's to no one's surprise.
So buy $TSLA is your recommendation
Buying Tesla is just buying SpaceX. When they roll up Tesla, it will be in a stock deal not real money. None of this is real money and I would argue that Musk is not the world's first trillionaire because there is no reality in which he could get that money out of SpaceX
I mean, if he wanted to sell tomorrow, who COULD spend $2-3 Trillion to buy it, and who WOULD? Anyone with that kind of money to spend today knows what a scam it is
This Cold Fusion vid covers the "pivot" nicely.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPIGu0anfAE
The video explains that it is spelled out in the prospectus that SpaceX is counting 70%-80% of their total addressable market to be AI related and only about 7%-8% to be space-related.
I saw that too, and it's so depressing. SpaceX was pushing the envelope of "interplanetary" travel/species, and to see it being reduced to a 7-8% "side-quest" :-(
If only the shareholders had any kind of voice - if only it was illegal to issue a fake IPO where you sell an overwhelming number of shares stripped of their voting power - if only the market responded rationally to this boondoggle.
If we're going to right the ship in turn of common sense a bunch of people need to lose a bunch of money, I just hope it doesn't mostly hit passive investors and instead lands mostly on Elon-stans.
How is it legal to have different share classes? You could make 100 shares that can vote and then sell 99.9% of the company while maintaining full control. Seems strongly against the spirit of a publicly traded company
Musk didn’t invent the idea of using multiple share classes to ensure the founder(s) retain control of the company, see Rupert Murdoch, Google, Facebook, etc
From the regulators’ perspective: it is a risk, but you disclosed your risk in the prospectus that buyers are assumed to have read (what percentage ever actually do?), hence it is fine
Well, when you buy into an IPO, they make you sign to say you read it. So either you did, or you made a false statement on a legal document
Most large companies do that these days: GOOG, META all have different share classes. Even the small startup I worked for had that.
Who has the gold makes the rules
I suppose they kind of do, they could sell the stock and drive the price down. That wouldn't force Musk to change direction, but it would hurt his wealth.
Calling it an IDE is under-representing cursor
They have in-house models, and the data to train even more powerful ones. The cursor team is a proper AI lab.
They use Kimi and post-train it on the same stuff that anyone with a Github dump can feed it. They aren't doing anything that you can't do yourself.
Isn't their in-house model just Kimi?
See here https://cursor.com/blog/composer-2-5
85% of the compute for the final model is from them, and not the base Kimi model.
Meh. On an outcomes analysis, I've found Cursor's delivery to be exceptionally weak.
Good luck to the alt-economy of SpaceTesla though, may all our 401ks survive.
Their “in house models” are reportedly basically just Kimi.
Replied on the other comment about this, but putting it here:
> See here https://cursor.com/blog/composer-2-5
> 85% of the compute for the final model is from them, and not the base Kimi model.
Of course they could be lying, but it seems feasible that they are adding a lot on top of this
They are buying it with overvalued stocks, so it isn't real money. Probably the Cursor team will be able to sell it when the SpaceX stocks will be already crashed.
Why are you comparing it to building expensive modern hospitals? Why don't you compare every other tech acquisition to that? because that's not a relevant comparison, and building expensive modern hospitals has nothing to do with the goal of for-profit corporations.
SpaceX has 3 major businesses: Space, Starlink, and AI.
This acquisition helps with the 3rd one.
This is the same straw man argument of "country Z has N homeless/unhoused people, why are they building a space/military/education widget for $Y price, when they haven't found homes for N unhoused people yet?"
yes, whataboutism at its finest
They compared the acquisition to hospitals because "think of the children!"
Smart move as they will pay in stock, and if stock is overvalued by 2x this means you get 50% discount
is spacex a space company? I thought they were an internet provider that wants to use their strategic advantages to get into AI including AI infra like data centers.
SpaceX and everything Elon are stock companies - they're Microstrategy but with a veneer of a real business slapped on top.
Gotta pump that stock price with constant news buzz
yeah but someone -- no one has explained who -- still thinks this is a good idea
How is buying a company sending messages on the Internet for $45b in the owner's interest when Westinghouse, who built nuclear reactors sold for under $10b? The market is irrational.
Didn’t you see Moon? They need a Gerdy
SpaceX is just a vibe company. Nothing they are doing makes sense on a valuation basis, which their investors are eventually going to painfully figure out.
I mean, the answer is obvious if you do not deliberately try to put a message in the worst light possible:
- "Space company" has a major LLM+datacenter business called X.ai.
- LLM for coding is a big business, as you can see from trillion dollar valuations of Anthropic.
- Cursor is popular and gives you a headstart on the business.
- Instagram was bought for the price of many many hospitals. Uber is more valuable than companies owning the cars. Different business models, entirely different valuation models. Not sure what that comparison entails. You know it. I know it.
Whether it is a good purchase or not, we may not know, but we know your characterization is just outright dismissal without much rationale behind it.
Elon is consolidating all of his property into one single megacorporation because he is confident that nobody will ever challenge this, given the current political direction of the United States.
> the current political direction of the United States
These kinds of comments reek echo-chamber parroting and zero substantive research. As someone that very much enjoys and carefully follows politics, the current political direction points squarely to Republicans getting absolutely pummelled in the midterms, effectively turning Trump's administration into a 2-year lame duck. What are you even talking about?
Even if Congress may reverse things in the future, there are many opportunistic things happening right now, and it seems like the spacex situation is one of them. The emerging picture feels like a 'flood the zone' strategy (not by coordination, but by practical effect).
While other commenters have pointed out lots of details that point towards the favorable structural environment going forward, another idea that roots my thoughts towards this is that by creating facts on the ground, they are defining the new starting point.
Ultimately, reversing all of the different 'wrongs' or irregularities will also be costly to both the opposition's political and attentional capital.
Will a midterm pummeling change the regulatory departments that oversee mergers and anti-trust?
Obviously you're trying to be snarky, but I hope you realize that Congress does, in fact, have (fairly broad) statutory authority over executive agencies[1].
[1] https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R45442
Can it change? Yes. That's not the same question as will it change. And that is also not the same question as "will the change result in a different posture towards antitrust."
When was the last time substantive antitrust action was taken that forcefully restructured a large company to a significant degree?
And I hope you realize that while Congress has authority over a lot of things, that authority is being routinely overridden by the current presidential administration, including fundamental things like spending and declaring war.
So it comes across as a bit foolish to assume that any Congressional authority actually exists, or will continue to exist into the future, since we have many examples now of where that authority seemingly doesn't matter anymore.
Especially since the majority of Congress is in the same party as the current President, and is making no effort not to cede congressional authority to the executive branch.
One of the things I find really interesting as a Brit is hard to put into words:
Americans tell us that we don't have a constitution — when we do, it is just not wholly written down. (It is in part).
We have a constitution that is flexible and precedent-based, but pretty stable, and it has emerged on top of the bits that are written down, and has amended them over time (for example, it is built in part on Magna Carta, but only two or three of its principles remain in law.) Notably a bit more of it got written when we agreed to be bound by the ECHR, but that was mostly absorbed into our understanding.
It has taken us hundreds of years to get to this stability, and it is defended from attack from pretty much all sides; every government risks changing it and there is pushback each time, because you can't govern if there aren't rules. The rules are precedent and convention, and there are various authorities and archives that are consulted to work out what they are if people think they are at risk.
We are regularly told by Americans that this is an intolerable thing; we need a written constitution or we can't know what our rights are!
But those same Americans, right now, are engaged in exactly this process. You have a set of written rules that give Congress power over things, and you are currently evolving a set of precedents that suggest that the executive can simply wander past them and Congress somehow shows deference or refuses to assert its power in some situations.
You're right at the start of building an uncodified constitution on top of the old one just as we did on top of Magna Carta.
It's not entirely new to Trump; every President in my lifetime has pushed on this except maybe Carter. And sometimes they push back (Roe v. Wade was part of this uncodified constitution and probably needed to be a written amendment.)
It could work out but it's important to understand that is what you're doing. And it's not just Unitary Executive theory or presidential immunity; the emergence of the Supreme Court's "shadow docket" is emblematic of the same process.
Ah to have such hope.
Even if I was this optimistic, the executive with a stuffed supreme court is not going to care what congress thinks.
We'll sooner declare market manipulation a form of speech.
Going to do my best to respond to this while still following the HN guidelines:
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
RIMR says:
> nobody will ever challenge this, given the current political direction of the United States
It's obviously hyperbole to say that NOBODY will EVER challenge this, but I'd say it's directionally correct:
1. The Supreme Court is controlled by a conservative, pro-big-business majority that makes it very difficult for any legal attempts to challenge Elon's actions to survive litigation.
2. The United States Senate has a conservative, pro-big-business bias due its over-representation of rural voters and its internal norms (filibuster)
3. The United States House has a conservative, pro-big-business bias due to the gerrymandering efforts of Republican-controlled state legislatures across the country (which the Democrats have tried to counter and failed, see Virginia)
4. The conservative, pro-big-business Supreme Court has ensured that elections in the United States overall have a conservative, pro-big-business bias due to the unfettered spending allowed after Citizens United.
So yes, the winds seems to be against Republicans and Trump in the mid-terms, but the structural biases of the government are still very much pro-big-business, pro-capital, and anti-regulation.
It will take much more than a single mid-term cycle to reverse that trend.
> the current political direction points squarely to Republicans getting absolutely pummelled in the midterms
Even if so, are the Democrats really going to do the house cleaning required to fix this? Their recent history implies that they'll try to pretend things are running normally, until it all explodes in their face (again). Maybe I'm wrong, and they'll actually fight for the country, but... I'm not surprised that companies (and markets) are expecting them to just... not.
> bizarre that Elon is pivoting SpaceX to something else
SpaceX’s interest is being an Enterprise AI corporation, they identified it as a $24 trillion addressable market, in comparison to their quarter trillion rocket related one
It’s all disclosed in the S-1, you read it right?
In America all you have to do is tell potential investors what you’re doing, its up to the people to use their discretion afterwards
SpaceX is trying to be “the railroad to space”.
Starlink was a fantastic way to increase the launch cadence of Falcon 9. “High production rate solves many ills” is part of SpaceX’s ethos.
They’re trying to do the same with orbital compute for Starship.
I’m not sure having their own frontier models is strictly necessary for that, but it’s at least related.
Back in the early days of Heroku (when I worked there), we were all fairly deep into the Ruby community. Ruby has never had a great reputation for performance, but... it seemed like almost a running joke that any time you went down a rabbit-hole trying to understand some weird performance issue you'd eventually discover that @tmm1 had already identified the same issue months earlier, patched it in core, and given an hour long talk about it somewhere. Despite his ability and willingness talk publicly about quite deep technical topics Aman always came across as an incredibly quiet and humble in person. Every Ruby developer has benefited from his attention to finding and fixing performance issues. I'm sure the same can probably said for every GitHub user (where he worked for years).
Congrats to the entire Cursor team! I don't know all of their stories, but I do like to smile and celebrate a little when I see people who are often hidden in the shadows quietly making things x% better for all of millions of us every day for many years getting reward for that effort.
Nothing wrong with Cursor but $60B, wow. How many of these deals in 2025, 2026 will be worth nothing in 5 years? Seems like everything is just desperation and less like long term strategy.
>> SpaceX told investors during the IPO process that it sees an addressable market for AI products worth $26 trillion, roughly equivalent to U.S. GDP.
I very much can imagine a future documentary in a few years. With the host asking the audience: "Where were the signs?"
Well the TAM can match GDP if GDP evaporates!
That's the number AI boosters are spreading too "The TAM for AI is all of humanity - this includes every person and every company. So, imagine this huge pile of future revenue." I agree that TAM is likely huge but is SpaceX most suitable to capture that TAM? Unlikely. But for now everyone wants in on the AI hype train and FOMO of losing out one any company in the AI space.
In the long term most markets are duopoly with small competitors. And personally I see OpenAI and Anthropic duking it out rather than SpaceX.
Maybe they can monetize and trade AI tokens like Enron was going to trade bandwidth?
Enron was never audacious enough betting every US man, woman, and child will spend $28k/year on their generally nonprofitable business with one exception -- Starlink.
Patrick Boyle covered the SPCX trajectory fairly well... =3
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKXgeNwNRJ4
I know this is just nonsense wish thinking, but apparently the investors disagree and I have zero clue when they will also stop giving Musk their money.
I think the bump since IPO can be explained at least partially by low float not meeting demand. I've seen a lot of accounts from retail investors who entered the lotteries saying they only got a small fraction of what they wanted, hence demand is kept artificially high. Probably intentionally, since it essentially allows the optimists to dictate the price.
(edit: This is not at all unique to spacex, of course, but given the nature of Musk's companies and their "fans" it's logical that they would employ this strategy. They are also doing a staggered unlock to avoid upsetting the market when insiders start dumping their shares.)
Signal and noise. Lots of noise. SO much noise.
To be clear, I don't know which part is signal and which part is noise any better than anyone else.
My whole team was on cursor for a few months. I enjoyed using it and thought it was the most complete of the agentic coding tools I tried. The thing that got me was the cost. I was switching between Opus and GPT 5.x and was spending anywhere between $500-1000/month. I was using a relatively normal workflow, paste in ticket, plan, execute with dumb sub agents, have the ai test and competing model to validate. The business got uncomfortable with the cost when everyone started doing the same so they switched us to Claude code since it has better cost controls. So far it looks like we won't even touch the $100/month plan and some people would be ok on the $20 plan. Anthropics usage limits is a consistent source of complaint on here but I've found them to be moderately generous in comparison to cursor. Cursor also charges a $.25Mtok premium for 'routing' no matter what model you choose. 5% increase for frontier models but when you're using haiku on sub agents that's a 50% cost increase. Composer is solid but if you don't have deep pockets it's the only feasible model on their platform because of how they bill it. Being an all in one editor/agent is nice but if you're in a language like c# or Java you're already swapping back and forth with a real IDE anyway.
Our experience has been the direct opposite. The way to get the most out of cursor was to leave it on auto - we saw it average around 3.9 cents per request under the old contract (per-seat pricing) and more like 39 cents per request under the new (single pooled cost for everyone). Composer came in a little higher, more like 50c/r, while the claude models were up into the dollars. Meanwhile, if you use Claude-the-app, there is _no_ cheap model and the default switched to Opus in April, resulting in increased costs across the board.
We have both Claude and Cursor here, as well as agents running GPT, things in AWS Bedrock, etc and its my team handle the bills...when people use Cursor on auto, costs are under control, but there's always a dozen or so whale users who'll switch models manually and blow through the budget like it's not there.
Another thing: "better cost controls". There was for example no way for us to disable Fable in Claude, but we could in Cursor. Again, the opposite experience.
Is anyone on HN still actually using Cursor in 2026?
Everyone I've spoken with is now using either Claude Code or Codex (or Copilot because their companies force them to).
Just setup my team with Cursor. They actually got back to me on an enterprise plan (Claude keeps ignoring me). Cloud Agents have been great for keeping multiple streams going at the same time. Adding in computer use has been great for actually testing out features and showing they work for PRs. Bugbot so far has been the best AI reviewer I've tested. Composer 2.5 is great, though still using Opus for planning.
I can do most of this with Claude Code, but there's definitely a cost in maintaining it for the whole team.
My company gave me cursor license after I had already been using Codex CLI for months and VS Code for a decade.
I had absolutely no interest in their VS Code fork. The Agent Window was okay but buggy (eg wouldn’t load branches on Ubuntu via WSL2).
Overall used it a couple of times but still use Codex CLI as my main driver. Might try CC in the future esp. if they unban Fable.
I stopped using Cursor because of how terribly optimised it is (worse than VSCode despite being a fork). It would routinely take up 50% of the CPU resources on my MacBook M4 and gigabytes of RAM for absolutely no reason.
I switched to Zed, and I'm never going back to Electron/non-native IDEs.
Still do. Composer 2.5 is a beast. But even with Opus (and Fable for a few days) their harness is many times faster. The main reason for me to use CC is the $200 subsidized pro max plan.
Also their computer use in the cloud agents (when it works) is a game changer. No need to keep your laptop open / get a Mac mini if it runs in the cloud.
I use Cursor for work, but claude code for personal development. I think Cursor is still useful but the most value really is access to latest models
I was on Claude Code the past year, now I use chinese models, but I've used Cursor and they have an ok pricing offering today because of their mix of sota models with usage based pricing along with their Kimi based Composer model with generous limits. I think it makes a lot of sense for the enterprise market, which is the real moat, and not the capabilities/features of the forked ide or app/tui/github bot anyone can come up with today.
I have seen a few codebases lately with AI-bullish teams. Code produced by Cursor reeks of low quality. I’ve tried it but never got hooked.
AFAIK their market is pseudo-technical people who haven’t found the terminal yet.
I use Cursor and it’s been fine. I write a lot of code manually too, so I liked the tight integration with VSCode, my daily driver for about a decade. I used to use Vim, so I’ve “discovered the terminal” a long time ago.
The people steering the agents are the ones producing low quality code. I see little correlation outside of that.
It's my primary. Claude Code for personal stuff on the weekends. I really just prefer the GUI of having the changes easily highlighted. If I can get something to apply that with Claude Code or Codex or OpenCode or whatever, I'd swap over without thinking.
Same here - their UI/UX seems to serve my workflows/habits the best. And it's strange that no one else seems to be delivering a compatible experience for me. I'd prefer to move away from Cursor after this acquisition.
Wouldn’t Kiro fit the bill?
I'm still on their old 500 requests/month plan and the value is simply unbeatable for $20. I've been able to use agents without worrying about usage for my job and personal projects paired with the $20 codex sub and I dread the day when they finally get rid of the requests plan.
I switched back to VSCode with Codex and Claude extensions. Just more stable.
Cursor became obsolete pretty quickly as Claude has improved. Good on them to find an out before they collapsed. $60 billion is a huge overpay.
Development is moving away from the IDE to agentic long running workers. I've been using their SDK in this mode - which then forces you to use cursor as model provider. I use a mix of harnesses for different types of agentic tasks and Cursor gets the best results.
to be fair "nobody" is using grok either
Earlier this year I had used it because I would rather have a IDE-like exp and be able to actually look at the code. However, recently switched to using claude code VS code extension and it's basically the same thing (plus at Amazon we can only use Claude Code)
I use Cursor, but funny enough it's 98% just using the codex plugin - I kept cursor around on the grand fathered $20 / 500 requests plan, if they un-grandfather me or things change too much I'll zip over to vscode.
Fully on Cursor at work and I love it over CC, OpenCode and Pi that I use for personal work.
Zed with Claude code is the best of both worlds
I used their agent view yesterday and the file tree does not update when you add new files.
Yes. Do the heavy lifting in Claude code , Codex.
Basic tasks in cursor. It's decent and damn fast.
All my team members also use it.
Yes, unlike Claude it has excellent response rate and i can leverage their speedy models
We use the bugbot. Best code review agent we've seen.
I use it because their pro plan is free for students
if you use hn you probably don't speak to actual people tho
I use Cursor for coding. I like to review the changes via the UI. Plan mode is also really strong in Cursor. It bugs me less about needing to search through files and basic coding tasks. I find it also saves the company a ton of money compared to Claude, Claude burns through tokens with no regard.
I typically use Claude for interacting with MCPs and skills to operate on live systems.
Plenty of enterprises are still using Cursor, though they are facing plenty of pressure because Anthropic and OpenAI bundle Claude Code and Codex which can make it hard to justify an additional license for a third-party harness (why spend that money there when you can buy the underlying tokens instead).
I use Cursor every day.
Here's a shower thought. BTC essential is worth $70k solely through the power of memes. Can TSLA and SPCX remain overvalued (relative to the revenue of their respective underlying assets) forever through the power of memes?
Intuitively, it seems to me that there must necessarily be some kind of upper limit, but I'm not convincing myself. These speculative assets are only attractive as long as the price keeps inflating. But that can only happen if there is more and more demand. So it's basically a bet that there is an average amount of retail investors (I assume it's mostly retail investors but I could be wrong) that consistently put a percentage of their income into these speculative assets. Can this be maintained forever?
The saying "The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent" exists for a reason.
In short, the answer to your literal question is "no" because nothing remains forever in this world. The practical answer is "yes" because the TSLA stock has been irrational for years already and it shows no sign of stopping.
That saying assumes a rational market, and while there is some evidence that the average human behavior trends towards the rational there are plenty of evidence against individual behavior being rational (see homo economicus).
As more and more wealth get distrubuted to fewer and fewer hands, and as fewer and fewer extremely rich individuals control more and more of the market, My gut feeling is that if the market was ever rational (which btw. I am not entirely convinced of) that very much no longer holds true.
In the short term it’s a voting machine, in the long term it’s a weighing machine (Ben Graham).
The current episode of irrational exuberance will pass, as others have.
The before ones have had outside influence which forces the irrational episodes to pass. A spectacular collapse is usually fallowed by mass protests and labor actions, strikes etc. which forces the market to change its behavior. Most of the time these will result in a change in government policy which imposes regulation onto the market, and only then does the market go back to being rational.
The thing is fundamentals really don't matter. TSLA and SPCX aren't paying dividends so there's no real performance they have to hit, no one is going to miss a dividend payment and dump the stock. The Elong vibes can carry it as long as people keep smoking what he's selling
The real question is, when does that run out of steam? When do we wake up to the charade that has built up around us? That's a much bigger thing than just Elon and his businesses. Like someone else said, when the next crisis/downturn/depression hits the house of cards will fall. Unfortunately it will hit all of us not just people in the meme stocks
I'm extremely cynical about the way the US government would react to any sort of financial crisis. I do not believe that they would not completely cave and bail out the AI companies and the monopolists if there is a downturn. And it's not that I don't trust the Republicans specifically. The whole political sphere is completely convinced that AI is a national security prerogative, and the cynical political atmosphere will equate national security with investor protection.
Let me append the saying a bit: The US government can remain irrational longer than you can stay solvent.
*The US government can remain irrational so you can stay solvent.
I’m pretty sure the market agrees with you.
If you exclude dividend paying stocks, then the entire stock market starts to look like a giant pyramid scheme casino.
True, and it's a common question that comes up: What's the point of owning a stock if it doesn't pay a dividend? How do you participate in the company's performance?
There are other ways for performance to translate to the investors directly. For example, if the company sells itself then all the shareholders will get that payout. Stock buybacks are a thing. And, as other commenters here have said, eventually the company may start paying a dividend
But, you're not entirely off-base in that you're just buying into the vibes of a company. It's just that most of the time (much of the time?) those vibes have been rooted in some semblance of rationality, that there was something of value behind the shares you're buying. That is definitely not universally true anymore
There's taxation reasons. Stock buybacks mean that investors get the usually lower capital gains tax rates instead of dividend income tax rates. On top of this, it also juices earnings per share.
>How do you participate in the company's performance?
Most stocks give voting power even if they don't pay dividends. Notably, SpaceX's don't.
> If you exclude dividend paying stocks, then the entire stock market starts to look like a giant pyramid scheme casino.
Stocks can start paying dividends in the future: MSFT did not in the past, and does now. AAPL did, stopped in the 1990s, and started doing so again.
You should be indifferent to the company's dividend scheme since it's the underlying business activity that drives total returns, and not its distribution policy. There is all sorts of magical thinking when it comes to dividends:
* https://canadiancouchpotato.com/2011/01/18/debunking-dividen...
* https://pwlcapital.com/the-irrelevance-of-dividends-still-a-...
A pyramid scheme can run out of people to keep it going: the stock market is in a sense a 'savings scheme' for future consumption. Younger people work and turn their cash into savings, older people take their savings and turn it back into cash: as long as young people need to think about the future, and older people / retirees need to pay bills, there's a mechanism to maintain this cycle.
> A pyramid scheme can run out of people to keep it going
And then you describe how the secondary stock market requires 'fresh blood' to whom to sell stock to cash-out.
It's precisely a legalised pyramid scheme that always needs someone to come in at the bottom hold the bag to let someone else cash-out. In turn they need someone to come in 30 years later. That's exactly how a pyramid scheme works.
> it's the underlying business activity that drives total returns, and not its distribution policy
That's exactly the question, though, since a lot of stocks seem priced disproportionately to their business activities.
> A Keynesian beauty contest is a metaphorical beauty contest in which judges are rewarded for selecting the most popular choices among all judges, rather than those they may personally find the most attractive. This idea is often applied in financial markets, whereby investors could profit more by buying whichever stocks they think other investors will buy, rather than the stocks that have fundamentally the best value, because when other people buy a stock, they bid up the price, allowing an earlier investor to cash out with a profit, regardless of whether the price increases are supported by its fundamentals and theoretical arguments.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_beauty_contest
Plenty of folks may think these companies are garbage but are 'playing along' because it's not necessarily what they themselves think that is important, but what others think. You can make money in a bubble, even when it eventually pops. What we're seeing now is hardly new, either:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_Revolutions_and_...
This is why I stick with index funds, as I don't really can't be bothered playing the game:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Random_Walk_Down_Wall_Street
I generally check my portfolio once a year, in January, when I top things up when new contribution room becomes available with the new year. It's 'fun' to follow along with the gyrations and drama as things happen, but I don't sleep over it. If you're reasonably diversified you can generally weather storms and come out okay on the other side:
* https://awealthofcommonsense.com/2014/02/worlds-worst-market...
* https://www.forbes.com/sites/advisor/2010/09/13/its-not-real...
I don't have better ideas than you to do anything except "buy indexes".
Everyone is happy enough to give Elon (and others) more and more leverage to buy politically strategic companies (this is not that, this is probably just an ego buy for him, something to kill time because he can).
I was worried about him selling out (from an overall market and even index perspective when they were going to bend rules), but it looks like largely the whole situation is predicated on the idea that he can't or won't sell. I don't know how exposed the market is but it doesn't feel good.
> A Keynesian beauty contest
No shit. That's why, even if it's an exaggeration to call the entire stock market a pyramid scheme, you can't justify the claim that it's entirely "underlying business activity that drives total returns". That's the real question (from which dividends are, yes, a distraction).
No, there are a huge number of companies that are valued reasonably for their revenue / profitability / growth.
There's basically two stock markets: things valued on fundamentals and things valued on vibes.
And I don't think there's ever going to be a unified theory of value that can span both, because the former is quantitative and the latter is psychology.
Aren't buybacks the new dividends?
It’s only a pyramid scheme for Tesla, SpaceX or X formally known as Twitter see a pattern there?
Gamestop is not an Elon venture. There's plenty of irrational stock valuations out there, most of them just come back to Earth on a reasonable timeframe
Would you say the same thing about Bitcoin? Will that house of cards all fall in the next crisis/downturn/depression?
I personally think Bitcoin will eventually peter out, and that it's fairly risky as it has definitely been pushed by vibes and promotion and everyone wanting to get in on it
I mean that can apply to anything. There's nothing intrinsic about gold that makes it valuable other than it's rare, but there's plenty of things that are relatively rare that aren't valuable. Yes there's industrial uses of gold but that's not why we as a society and a species treat it as valuable
Maybe bitcoin is the new gold and will hold value forever, and as more serious people get into it, it will lose its volatility and be less subject to the vibes shifting and there being a run on the market. Maybe not
It is different from Elong stocks, though, because the myth of Satoshi aside, it's not exactly a cult of personality like his companies are
Hasn’t it crashed in every economic downturn and financial panic so far?
Not really, no.
A decade ago it was under $1000 and has never been that low since. It's peak price is only about 2x the current price.
Isn’t a 50% reduction pretty bad?
And being higher over 10 years has little to do with it if acts counter cyclical to stocks and other assets.
> And being higher over 10 years has little to do with it if acts counter cyclical to stocks and other assets.
BTC has been called many things at many different times. It was originally a payment system:
> A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution.
* https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
And it can still be used for that, however the transaction throughput is tiny, and so it became a store of value in essence: but it's kind of hard to be that when the value swings up and won so much. While "fiat" currency inflation is annoying, it is, generally, fairly predictable in most cases (<4%) and so you can plan ahead with regards to future value and purchase. The same is hardly true of BTC.
Is it bad? Isn't 60x in 10 years still kind of ok? The things I invested in ten years ago didn't return 60x since.
Again, the original argument was that it was like gold, and provided a hedge against equities.
As the sibling says, the original value proposition of Bitcoin was that it would supplant Paypal and wire transfers. The store of value narrative was a post hoc rationalization by stakeholders when it became clear that it was technically unsuited to serve Internet-wide throughputs. Not only that. I sat in during the meetings around the time of the segwit transition; I think they were debating making the blocks bigger or something. It was amazing to see first-hand how such a relatively minor and technically necessary change could generate so much friction. That was when I realized Bitcoin was never going to evolve in a useful direction, and sevenish years on I see that I was correct, as the block structure is pretty much the same as the last time I saw it.
Yeah, now both the first and second rationalization have fallen.
Who argued that? In 2008 Bitcoin was proposed as a peer-to-peer digital cash system. The comparison to gold didn't really take off until years later.
I mean the original thing I replied to. The idea that it was a stable or anti-cyclical store of value emerged after it became clear the payments stuff was not working.
There is some misunderstanding of what a crash really is. It doesn't necessarily mean that things get written down to 0 or some arbitrary level because everything has a price at which someone will buy.
Even companies have some value after a crash and you could make a case that at some arbitrary point it was worth $x and since the crash didn't cause the company to crater to below $x it has not "crashed". Even companies filing for bankruptcy have some residual value above what they might have been founded on - it doesn't mean the company hasn't gone bankrupt.
Yeah, I certainly did not mean go to zero, or near that.
To be more specific, I have often seen people argue for including crypto in a portfolio based on the theory that if equities drop a lot (25, 30%?) crypto will hold or go up. People make the same argument for gold.
To me the difference is that BTC's continued value isn't predicated on the actions of one person, who has continually proven himself to be childish, mercurial, and dishonest.
Yes when will everyone wake up for the charade of having a monopoly on space launches? Of putting over 90% of all mass into space, of your closest competitor being the nation state of China, and they are years away from where you are right now. Ah yes, that charade, when will people learn am I right? Total genius.
An extreme majority of Space X's self-determined value proposition has nothing to do with space. Out of an overall TAM of $28.5 trillion, $26.5 trillion is based on AI. Personally I believe that number will actually approach zero, but it certainly even in my most optimistic view is a number with a B, not a T
The total addressable market even at Space X's own calculation for space launches is only $370 billion. And, supposedly as the only company that can launch things into space they are still losing money on that business. This is bankrupt-a-casino levels of incompetence
SpaceX are currently losing money on the "going to space" part of their business.
They're making money on telecoms, and may have just started making a profit on renting out the data centres they originally built for the AI that it turned out hardly anyone wanted to actually use.
Even if one assumes this is true, it still wouldn't justify the valuation.
The demand just isn't there, which is one of the reasons SpaceX is pretending they will generate more demand with their cosmic wizard spires.
Michael Burry, a hedge fund investor featured in the book “The Big Short” for his predictions on the 2008 financial crisis, said in a Substack discussion last month that any increase in SpaceX’s stock after its I.P.O. would “be on hype and technicals.”
Here, “technicals” means technical analysis signals rather than the company’s business fundamentals. In other words, Burry is saying the stock could rise because of chart-based trading, momentum, and market behavior—not because investors think SpaceX is truly worth that much based on revenue, profits, or other fundamentals.
How long can the hype be maintained? TSLA is still maintaining its hype, judging by its P/E ratio.
Technical Analysis is Astrology, and Burry has predicted 17 of last the last 2 stock market crashes.
> Astrology
Exactly, but there are people out there who buy stocks based on technical analysis. It can have an effect if enough people act on it's "signals".
The hype already starts with the SpaceX SEC filing. According to it, its addressable market is $28.5 trillion, of which $26.5 trillion are AI. This means that every human being who owns a computer on this planet (1.75 billion) would need to spend (on average) over $15.000 on xAI products.
>> that every human being who owns a computer on this planet (1.75 billion) would need to spend over $15.000 on xAI products.
Current US national debt is approximately $39.22 trillion. As we achieve a zombie movie, level of collective madness, lets take all this into the last degree.
Nationalize SpaceX, and with this bright obvious future described on the prospect lets pay US debt :-) Pay US retirement benefits pensions in token credits, pensioners can resell, make an options market for tokens. I am sure Robinhood will open you a margin account for that?
Lets open a futures markets for food goods grown up on SpaceX Asteroids, as they will have free solar energy. They can grow them three times faster than on Earth...
To quote Ron Baron yesterday on CNBC, we are all going to earn hundreds of billions....
Yes indeed.
While this would be conceivable if some future AI gets good enough to actually replace 100% of global paid labour currently done by using a computer, the reference class I have here is that Wikipedia is definitely not valued at [number of people online] * [peak cost of Encyclopaedia Britannica].
Economic displacement on that scale breaks the valuation.
> would need to spend over $15.000 on xAI products.
For perspective - that’s 12.5 years of Tesla FSD subscriptions. I think there are probably about that much cars out there.
Technicals are the star signs of stock market.
Funny, the European Central Bank just made life even harder, by raising interest rates purely on that, and the FED is preparing to do the same...
Fed is not raising rates because of technicals. It’s because of economic numbers. The two aren’t the same.
At the essence they are the same, if you think a bit about it.
they literally are not.
Looking forward to the explanation...
It’s not our responsibility to provide counter arguments. You expressed that the two fundamentally different things are the same “in essence”. It’s your responsibility to define the two and explain how they are the same first.
...and here I was hoping for yours.
Tesla definitely is floating down slowly worldwide with hype when it finally crashes just don’t be left holding the bag. 2026 will be another year downward.
I guess now a lot of Elon fans change from Tesla to Spacex.
Notably, it looks like the meme power is gradually being redirected from BTC and cryptocurrency in general towards AI and SpaceX in general. Now that people have found a means of consuming vast amounts of computing power that occasionally emits useful output, rather than just a hash and a colossal waste.
While gold has industrial uses, isn't most of its value based on the fact that people like it and believe that it has value?
I was once told bitcoin was a 'pet rock'. Thing is people pay a lot of money for rocks when they have no planned industrial activity for them. Diamonds, for instance.
I think you are spot on. The problem comes if SpaceX goes out of fashion, not its fundamentals.
I'm not sure if this means gold isn't powered by memes or whether it's just one of the most long lived memes of all time. Aside from other nice properties like lasting a long time, being pretty, and not requiring electricity to exist.
Certainly, gold is not a meme, nor are all the other rare earth metals. This principle applies most to the other elements found on the periodic table. In fact, they have become more valuable due to research and development in today’s modern world, as numerous useful discoveries are made daily.
Cryptocurrency, such as Bitcoin, is undoubtedly a meme. If given a choice, one would prefer to possess any of the rare metals, rare earths, or any other elements that can be obtained in sufficient quantities, whether on land or in the ocean. Bitcoin or cryptocurrency is beneficial only to insiders and not to the general public. In essence, they are akin to modern tulips with a cherry on top, and like Tesla in 2030, one should avoid being caught with the bag.
What you are describing applies to all forms of money. It has value because people believe other people will use it as money. If that belief drops, the value drops.
People comment on gold and Bitcoin, but don't realize the same principles apply to US dollars and bonds.
> the same principles apply to US dollars
Currencies are a little different, since they are required to pay taxes; and payment of taxes is enforced (to varying degrees) by state violence.
Hence if you believe you will be taxed ("death and taxes" being the only certainties in life, etc.) then the currency associated with that tax has value, in that it avoids imprisonment, etc.
> Here's a shower thought. BTC essential is worth $70k solely through the power of memes. Can TSLA and SPCX remain overvalued (relative to the revenue of their respective underlying assets) forever through the power of memes?
The "value" of something can be a bit of a meta-game:
> A Keynesian beauty contest is a metaphorical beauty contest in which judges are rewarded for selecting the most popular choices among all judges, rather than those they may personally find the most attractive. This idea is often applied in financial markets, whereby investors could profit more by buying whichever stocks they think other investors will buy, rather than the stocks that have fundamentally the best value, because when other people buy a stock, they bid up the price, allowing an earlier investor to cash out with a profit, regardless of whether the price increases are supported by its fundamentals and theoretical arguments.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_beauty_contest
Plenty of folks may think these companies are garbage but are 'playing along' because it's not necessarily what they themselves think that is important, but what others think.
This idea was put forward by Keynes in his General Thoery publish in 1936, so human nature has hardly changed since then.
This is why I think Elon buying Twitter was one of the most strategic decisions he ever made: he quite literally bought the meme machine that upholds the valuations of his companies.
I still don't think it was strategic on his part, he did try to back out after all; my guess is that having bought it, he tried to maximise the value it produced.
And given the financial statements in the SpaceX IPO, to the extent X still has any value at all, it is almost all just influence of one kind or another, not actual money.
And the government that helps fund and regulate (or not) them.
On what grounds do you believe the value of BTC is meme-driven? Another (and arguably more plausible) explanation is that the price reflects the vast amount of criminally-obtained wealth stored in it. It’s a far better store than burying cash in mountain caches.
All money is meme driven. Money is fundamentally a meme itself. Seeing lots of people who seem to be making some sort of implicit distinction between bitcoin and USD and so on, but they are no different. They serve the function they serve because of what people believe about them, like any other social, cultural, or economic abstraction. Bitcoin has the feature of a verifiable ledger, but its value and function are in our heads, just like the USD or GBP.
BTC is a terrible place to put criminally-obtained wealth. Public ledger and all that makes it very difficult to hide anything.
That ship sailed long ago, before there were viable alternatives to BTC. There are plenty of ways to launder BTC (i.e. hiding in plain sight) and the existence of savings in BTC isn't necessarily exclusive of other cryptocurrencies that are better fit for purpose.
At least as long as Musk is the CEO, perhaps. I don't think it's easy to find another charismatic figure to keep it going.
It's a different kind of hype than Nvidia has, which is showing very high and fast growing revenues (which may not continue, but they're real now). Jensen I think is not as critical to the AI hype as Elon is to his companies.
All these major tech companies eventually get leadership changes. Apple, Google, Amazon, have all done well because they're real companies and go beyond their original leadership. Tesla and SpaceX I think would surely go down the moment Musk is no longer in leadership.
you think Musk is charismatic?
https://www.natesilver.net/p/elon-musk-polls-popularity-nate...
majority view him unfavorably.
> majority view him unfavorably.
Indeed, but for general stock market purposes it's one dollar one vote, not one person one vote.
Possibly even worse. Short-sellers got burned on Tesla (and perhaps now also SpaceX), which may mean the marginal buyer and seller consists only of people who already buy into the hyper and by trading are sharing price info with each other rather than with a single person who doubts the man.
I sold my Tesla stocks a while back; the people who kept them don't care what people like me think.
I think we've all seen by now that the majority doesn't much matter if you have a rabidly zealous minority.
suppose you've got me there
> Can this be maintained forever?
Obviously not. It’s all about timing your bail so you don’t get left holding the bag.
> BTC essential is worth $70k solely through the power of memes
This is not true.
BTC is way more sane than SpaceX as can be seen by it's history so far.
SpaceX is successfully building reusable rockets. BTC can process few transactions every ten or so minutes at enormous price.
I think SpaceX is definitely overpriced but saying that BTC is more sane is completely delusional.
BTC has the layer 2 lighting network that can process more transactions than Visa and MC combined with very cheap fees. I guess HN knowledge of Bitcoin does not go further than 2015
"Can" != "does". The current actual throughput of the Lightning Network is estimated at around 300 TPS: https://www.spark.money/tools/lightning-vs-visa
Also, everything on level 2 needs to be ultimately balanced on level 1; BTC doesn't have enough throughput to balance all the banks in the world, and lo Lightning appears to be consolidating into fewer nodes.
Also also, everything level 2 (including Lightning) necessarily takes away at least one of the selling points used for BTC, and replaces them with something functionally equivalent to 50% of a bank but worse.
It literally says this in the website your linked
> Current actual throughput is significantly lower, estimated at around 300 TPS, because the network is still growing. However, Lightning's architecture scales horizontally: as more nodes and channels are added, capacity increases without any protocol changes. The network's total value locked has grown past $500 million, with over 15,000 active nodes and 50,000+ payment channels.
The layer 2 has been predicted by one of the first adopter in 2010 so it was always the plan
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2500.msg34211#msg342... It can scale without any changes and if there is demand it will surpass Visa and MC
neither of them are sane. BTC is useless, unless your trying to buy child porn, buy illicit drugs on the internet, or someone who bought it before the value exploded. eventually, the world will come around and it will go to zero, if quantum doesnt kill it first. im looking forward to that day.
>BTC is useless, unless your trying to buy child porn, buy illicit drugs on the internet
The market has long shifted to "buy Litecoin with cash, swap it to Monero" for these kinds of activities.
i know exactly zero people using any of these markets, and 99% of the other people here can probably say the same.
It is not useless, it is incredibly arrogant to think it is useless at this point. You can do a 10 minute research and see how useful it is
True, it's very useful for scammers, grifters, international terrorists and authoritarian governments to funnel monetary value around without having to rely on the traditional financial system where they may be blocked and their money confiscated.
It costs 150 usd to send 5k usd between two countries I live in.
It costs the same amount of money to literally go there by plane and bring it as cash. This is not fair obviously. So traditional finance is a scam itself.
It takes 10 seconds and no fees to make the same transfer via blockchain.
I am pretty sure you know basically nothing about those crimes or the people that do crimes or how they actually transfer money. Just doing casual newspaper intellectualism while talking about things you never interacted with
what percentage of BTC transactions do you think are being used for international cash transfer in 2026 ?
> funnel monetary value around without having to rely on the traditional financial system where they may be blocked and their money confiscated.
Yes. Unfortunately the traditional financial system is governed by a country which has been behaving increasingly erratically, threatening its long-term allies with invasions and committing obvious war crimes. This is not a "good guys vs bad guys" scenario.
USD is useless unless you want to buy something with it. You can't eat it, it has little fuel value...
...it is also propped up in value by a frankly insane demand for it from other countries...on its fundamentals it would be worth much less
what is your point?
BTC's use is being bought and sold. So it's not useless. If I offer you one BTC for $30k, will you buy it?
If I offer you a tulip for $25,000 would you buy it?
If I think the resale price will stay at $30k long enough for me to flip it, then obviously yes?
Sure, if there were a stable enough market in which I can fetch twice that amount for that tulip, I'd buy it in a heartbeat. Wouldn't you?
The point being: BTC is a an abstract good, of no practical use except that of being transacted. Has whatever value the people are willing to pay for it, and has had a value in the tens of thousands for long enough that buying one with the intent of keeping it for a while is not such a stupid idea. I don't currently own any but there is a price at which I would buy one, and that price is many thousands of dollars... For an alphanumeric code in a distributed ledger.
sure, because you'd be offering me an idiotic arbitrage. your sentence doesnt prove it's useful.
Pump and dump only has to meme hard enough for the pump part.
The current market cap of SPCX and TSLA combined (~$3.8T) is about 3 times the total value of all BTC (~$1.3T).
Someone invents something that is digital, but can't be copied. Quite brilliant as it is the first digital asset that can store value without centralization and trust, based on market demand.
Someone on HN: "BTC is valueable solely through the power of memes".
Bitcoin doesn't "store value", it has the value that society assigns it, which is what the parent means when s/he says "BTC is valuable solely through the power of memes". It's not a fiat currency, nor does it have any intrinsic utilitarian value.
Age old argument: money also has no intrinsic utilitarian value.
And yes, btc does store value, it is doing that for me now. I stored some of my value in it and it has held better value than fiat.
It seems like that during a bubble (things can never go down!) but the market eventually does correct, even if it can take years or even decades to do so, and usually overcorrects when it does.
I saw that one wealthy individual had purchased $1 billion of SpaceX at the IPO. Does that count as a retail investor?
> I saw that one wealthy individual had purchased $1 billion of SpaceX at the IPO. Does that count as a retail investor?
There were two individuals who each bought $1B: Ron Baron and Gina Rinehart.
While they are individuals, they executed these billion-dollar investments through their massive corporate entities and investment firms, rather than personal brokerage accounts.
A retain investor is an individual, non-professional investor who buys and sells securities through brokerages using personal funds.
It's down to the balance between buyers and sellers. If you've got more selling than buying it'll go down but Musk has been remarkably good at keeping the buyers there.
Don't forget the amount of shares released to the market. That impacts the price dramatically as can be seen be all the 'stock buyback' manipulation of stock prices.
Everything is ultimately valued by memes.
money is just an idea that spreads (a meme).
If there is ever another depression, which seems highly probable at this point, the meme stocks will be the first ones down the toilet.
Sure until retail are forced to sell in an correction. Wealth destruction can happen very fast
Bitcoin isn’t valuable solely through memes, it’s also deflationary by design.
As long as there is someone around who is very good at keeping the price inflated (and that in turn also because he did actually deliver extraordinary things, it's not just smoke and mirrors).
On the other hand, the fact that BTC has absolutely no intrinsic value can be an advantage over a real company, as it makes it more insulated from reality. Supply chain shock? No problem. Competition? Same. New technologies, political change? Neither.
USD has no intrinsic value either
At least that one is backed by a military.
SPCX only floated a small amount of shares, and made the stock exchanges compete so that it would get to rig the system in a way. If funds have to buy SPCX + small share amount, it's going up. This is the reason stock buyback used to be illegal. It's purely market manipulation of share count, not market based on actual value.
At least some of TSLA and SPCX value is derived from Musk's ability to purchase politicians to ensure the tax dollars keep flowing to them. Essentially, these ticker symbols are backed by the US government's ability to force us to give Musk's companies our money.
The overwhelming majority of SpaceX holders are institutional. They had planned to allocate 30% to retail, but it ended up in the 20% range as a result of institutional demand. [1] No clue what's going on right now as their stock is going to the Moon. But in any case, I think the people that don't understand why it's doing well are mostly those who are unfamiliar with the space industry. SpaceX has already revolutionized space by dropping the cost to orbit by multiple orders of magnitude relative to the Space Shuttle, which it replaced. And it looks set to do that again with the Starship.
The main reason humanity hasn't meaningfully started expanding into space is because it used to cost $54,000 to get a liter of water into space. SpaceX brought that down to about $5000, and then further down to near $1400. That's a massive reduction in price, but you're still left with the problem that it costs $1400 to get a liter of water to space, which is why we still can't have nice things, yet.
Starship has the promise of bringing that down a couple of more orders of magnitude where the goal is to get it within the $10-$20 range. If they succeed, then you've just opened the doors to an entire new frontier of expansion and growth for humanity which is practically infinite. And right now there's no real reason to think that they won't succeed. And more importantly than this is that nobody seems to be able to compete on their level, or even remotely close. Their closest competitor is probably China who remains technologically well behind. And so SpaceX today is akin to being able to get a piece of some sort of super-ship making monopoly, just prior to the Age of Sail. The downside risk is basically zero since they're still making rapid progress - the only question is how rapid. And upside potential is basically infinite.
[1] - https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/11/spacex-cuts-retail-ipo-alloc...
> The main reason humanity hasn't meaningfully started expanding into space is because it used to cost $54,000 to get a liter of water into space.
Am I naive in thinking that we haven't expanded into space because we don't need to? What's the benefit?
Asteroid mining is the obvious one. That said as part of looking into SpaceX's business I learned that currently the TAM for launching other people's stuff into space is under $10 billion. SpaceX already owns most of that market. Their own focus on data centers in space IMO speaks for itself.
> What's the benefit?
For why we'd want to go at all: there's a lot of resources up there, and pollution is much less of a concern for factories made up there. Also some material processes may be much easier in zero-gee.
But that doesn't mean it's actually worth the effort.
> we haven't expanded into space because we don't need to? What's the benefit?
Access to resources. A sense of adventure. Learning.
Which resources are cheaper to get from space? I’ve only ever seen hand waiving arguments, never any math.
That depends entirely on the price; things are very different when it costs $20k/kg to orbit (basically nothing is worth that) vs. $20/kg to orbit.
Some people are suggesting making high quality fibre optics and pharmaceuticals in LEO already with Falcon prices:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Forge
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varda_Space_Industries
While I am *extremely* skeptical, I've heard people talk about space-based solar. I mention this only so nobody adds an "and also" for that.
Ditto anyone talking about lunar He-3. This is a bad idea, "why" is long enough to be worthy of a blog post.
But if you were committed to expansionism for whatever reason, then you'd want some way to get industrial quantities of steel from mines already in space, to make the factories themselves cheaper. Possibly megastructures like an orbital ring, too.
It's not about the "Access to resources. A sense of adventure. Learning."
Since you are right. All of these things are available on Earth for far cheaper, with better ROI and with far less risk of dying or getting early cancer from cosmic rays.
The real benefit is a commanding lead over geopolitical rivals in the domain of satellites and satellite platforms for hosting devices in orbit, thus securing an insurmountable national security advantage.
The hand waving is probably reasonable for a couple of reasons. The first is that you can't really math things out yet when costs are shifting by orders of magnitude on relatively short timeframes. What seems impossible in one year is a casual achievement in the next. If we go back to 2002 (when SpaceX was founded) and I told you that within 2 decades they'd have lowered the cost to get stuff to space by more than 97% relative to Space Shuttle, it'd have sounded somewhere between unreasonable and impossible, yet that is exactly what happened. And Starship is set to send prices plummeting yet again.
The second reason is that the notion of economics becomes kind of odd when you start introducing space. Space has practically infinite resources of every type imaginable. For instance one single asteroid, Psyche 16, is thought to have orders of magnitude more gold than has ever been extracted in human history. But I mean, what does this even mean economically? Obviously if you start bringing back hundreds of thousands of tons of gold, the price is going plummet. And even the viable possibility of this happening would probably send the price of gold plummeting. So... it's weird. We're in uncharted waters.
And then on top of this access to space will mean we will start expanding outward - colonies, vastly larger stations stations, and so on. And these expansions will develop their own parallel economies with their own needs/production/etc. This is all kind of like trying to predict the economics of the internet before the first cable had been laid.
Most people I see online freak out at the idea of normalizing living in an apartment/condo and slightly higher density. I don’t see them lining up to live in space :)
As far back as the 60s NASA had already laid out technical plans for how to get humans to Mars. The Moon was never meant to be the destination, but a brief stepping stone to greater things. So we can thank Nixon for setting humanity's progress back by half a century. The ISS and Space Shuttle both were driven largely by these initial plans.
But the current claustrophobic nature of the ISS was, again, not the destination. There was a grand scheme of in-orbit refueling, fuel depots, and much larger scale space architecture. Something of the ISS scale was intended as a short jumping-off point, a workers' tent analog. But our progress stalled out and the workers' tent is what we were left with.
The point I'm making here is that space in the era we're stepping into is very unlikely to look much like the one we're leaving. This is even more true as the price drops because private industry will be able to play a major role. There will be no Nixon to just cancel everything out of concerns for his political career.
Depends on the timescale, and what other tech is the prerequisite to this and what other things can be done with that tech.
Even with cheap rockets, Musk was talking about 6-digit-dollars for becoming a Martian, I don't see more than a few million people wanting to spend that much for that outcome.
If we get self-replicating robots or whatever, big space stations aren't that expensive, but also Earth is huge and you can extract minerals from seawater electrolytically and PV is already cheap, so perhaps we'd just get a load of seasteads instead: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seasteading
How far out would you say that is? Have you sketched out the net present value calculation for an investment in spacex today based on that?
> How far out would you say that is?
Really hard to say. Everyone who does space stuff talks with the same level of optimism as Musk but historically they deliver less.
But for what it's worth, I don't think Musk's going to reach Mars except in an urn, baring some surprise development in anti-aging medicine. Even though their progress is rapid by the standards of the industry, they are still slow in terms of natural human lifespan and his age.
> Have you sketched out the net present value calculation for an investment in spacex today based on that?
IMO, their market cap should be around $200bn at the moment. That's mostly Starlink, so if there's a Kessler cascade *or* if China makes a competitor that goes down to about $80-100bn
The long-term stuff about Mars or turning the moon into a factory for modular data centres is too far into the future to be worth considering.
That was my general impression. They did amazing work to totally change launch costs (with more on the way). But launch was a limited market. The low costs have and will grow it, and starlink will grow it, but not enough to justify this value.
In investing it's critical to think about things probabilistically, rather than trying to just guess the future. "Fooled by Randomness" is a great book on this. In a scenario like this it's especially critical, because in the case where Starship fully delivers and the next great frontier of humanity opens up, the upside potentially is practically infinite.
E.g. imagine in a bet you think there's a 99% chance of something being worth $1 and a 1% chance of it being worth $1 million. What's a fair price? It's a simple calculation - 0.99 * 1 + 0.01 * 1,000,000 = ~$10,000. That's you setting a price of $10k on something that you fully expect to be worth $1 99% of the time, and still coming out just fine.
So the actual debate should not be on 'guess the future' but rather on the odds of Starship delivering and estimating the impact this would have. And I think to many the answers are fairly easy - 'very nonzero' and 'very big.' It's akin to the NVidia/Apple stories, except in this case it's being somewhat priced into the market to begin with because it's somewhat more probable, and easier to foresee.
The problem with that argument is the failure to reasonably factor in time. If you take an expected value approach (quite reasonable in general) looking into the future you need to discount for time or everything goes to infinity.
While the point is valid, the upside still isn't practically infinite; humans intuitively do something close to hyperbolic discounting for future returns because of the possibility of black swans.
The easy version of this is to value a company over the next 20 years of profits. The first half of that time horizon, I don't see much changing at all outside of Starlink subscribers. They've only got ~5 Mars launch windows in any given decade, and while their design philosophy is great for LEO where launch windows are daily, launching rockets to see what fails is exactly wrong for Mars.
OTOH, now to 2036, there's at least a chance AI goes boom. Perhaps even one of Musk's AI. Great for the overall economy (at least right up until it changes the economy so much that capitalism looks as obsolete as feudalism looks today, which may or may not be in that horizon), but even if it's the next industrial revolution, there's so much competition there that I expect everyone's profit margins to be almost nothing. And conversely, if any one of them does appear to be massively dominant, in comes an anti-trust case (who remembers Standard Oil?)
Same with rockets, though a "rocket boom" is perhaps an unfortunate phrasing. He finds a way to make more money than expected, just like he's already doing with Starlink? Great. Industrial espionage is a thing, and even if it wasn't, China's not got a problem with the state funding businesses to simply re-discover everyone else's secret sauce. US companies and residents may find themselves restricted from using the fruit of that work, but most of the world will just buy what's cheapest.
The only argument for space is because you're so set on capitalism that you'd rather destroy the earth than stop trying to continually grow profit. If you're that sick and deluded, then space gives you a way to escape the consequences of your own foolish hubris.
A hedge against civilization-destroying events. Meteors, global war, disease.
Space is not a hedge against these things. At best it's our final tomb.
There is no backup plan.
to be fair, in the pharoahs quest for immortality after death, if they could have put their pyramid burial tombs in space to avoid decay/ruin for longer they would have. I wouldn't be shocked to see the oligarchs paying for their own space burials inside very lavish satellites whose orbit won't decay for thousands of years so they can "live forever".
So, your argument for SpaceX is that they'll take physical systems that they've already tried to squeeze down, and squeeze them down nearly two orders of magnitude? What fundamental scientific discovery do you think is going to enable this? Or do you think that AI is magically going to do it for them?
That has nothing to do with how they have already reduced costs, and how they continue to do so. Before SpaceX, you launched a rocket to space once, and then you discarded it. Imagine how much a plane ticket would cost if each time a plane was flown once, it was then discarded.
The big revolution with SpaceX was meaningful reuse (I can get into the comparison with Space Shuttle if you're unfamiliar there). Landing and reusing rockets is something that Boeing et al thought was impossible from an economic point of view, and actually taunted SpaceX in their early years over it along the lines of 'Oh you're going for reuse. Yeah we researched and trialed that out a decade ago. The economics don't work. Cute to see you trying though.'
Their success there is what helped bring the costs way down. But there's still plenty that's not reused - in particular they currently only reuse the first stage (the big rocket that gets things off the ground initially) while discarding the second stage - the space-optimized payload delivery rocket. With Starship they're going for 100% rapid reuse. So you're looking at this absolutely massive 2 stage system where both parts will be able to be repeatedly and rapidly reused.
You really think cost is the main reason humanity hasn't expanded into space? I'm all for space exploration and learning from space but actual humans are quite squishy, like gravity, dislike radiation, and would need to take a lot of water with them just to visit a rock very indifferent to their existence.
Definitely. Humans expand. It's probably an evolutionary imperative in many of us. Africa was essentially an oasis and yet some of us decided to go make our way outward to inhospitable freezing ass places where the environment itself is just constantly trying to kill you in a million different ways. And we knew nothing about how to deal with it, at first.
Or take the early sea voyages. Not only were there endless worries about things that were ultimately nonissues like sea monsters or falling off the edges of the Earth, but there were endless very real dangers awaiting which we had no clue about or how to deal with - scurvy, rogue waves, and much more. In the aforementioned Age of Sail, it was just expected that a significant chunk of your crew would die. Yet somehow we pushed onward and outward.
And the infinite possibilities of space are going to absolutely dwarf all previous frontiers in terms of interest and potential.
You're much more optimistic about the concept of infinity than I am!
You mean in terms of us creating a system of gods and serfs?
> BTC essential is worth $70k solely through the power of memes
Like everything else in finance...
Saying this is not to defend all sorts of crypto-bros. The economy, especially one overly focused on publicly traded companies like the Western, and especially the US economy, is a meme economy.
Coffee, flats, healthcare, military spending, etc., of comparable quality in the abstract East, cost multiples less than in the EU/USA because they and their currencies are weak on memes.
The limits are when companies and institutions start to default on their loans. Or, in the case of governments, trigger hyperinflation by printing money to pay off the debt.
Of course it can collapse before that, but if it gets to that point it is guaranteed to collapse.
But that won't happen while the share price keeps going up no matter what. Borrow more, secured against the massive unissued equity, or issue more shares.
>>Intuitively, it seems to me that there must necessarily be some kind of upper limit
I mentioned this in other thread(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48514481), we are at runaway intelligence already.
Mostly because we are looping AI to fix problems, and then the same data is used to improve AI. There is no upper limit to this.
Taken to its logical conclusion, this process needs a hardware scale that might even look laughably huge at this point. Its fairly obvious space is going to play a big role in the coming times.
I could be wrong, and I humbly accept it when Im proven wrong. But it does feel like a lot of people in top places know we are going to need all the energy and resources space has to offer to run this runaway intelligence.
> we are at runaway intelligence already. Mostly because we are looping AI to fix problems, and then the same data is used to improve AI. There is no upper limit to this.
I'm an AI booster, but this really doesn't follow. There's absolutely no guarantee that the marginal improvement from this continues to hold.
Its not marginal improvement.
Validated data coming out of LLM(Itself generated from a recursive/loop process, used to incrementally arrive at solutions) being using to improve the very LLM is a very powerful loop. And there is no real upper limit to this, at least not in the near future.
Like most exponential processes, the start is slow, but it gets fast very rapidly.
This is also what Anthropic has said, the ones training these models today(i.e 2025 - 2027) will be impossible to catch up with, let alone beat.
So we are at a kind of runaway AI already today.
Economics meaning of marginal, not the qualitative one.
> there is no real upper limit to this
This is what you need to cite for your argument to hold together.
When you invest in TSLA and SPCX, you don't invest in a car and a rocket company, you invest in Elon Musk. So revenue, assets, are irrelevant.
You basically buy an asset whose risk is tied to a man's life.
And not the healthiest man alive
General Electric was just fine when Thomas Edison died in 1931. And Apple was fine after the tragic early death of Steve Jobs.
Companies like this become bigger than their founders.
And I'm sure many on the Left would argue that Tesla and SpaceX would be healthier companies without Elon Musk.
Although I tend to differ on that, having owned $TSLA for a long time. Never bet against Elon!
$60B is a huge price, but buying Cursor gives Musk something xAI has struggled to build: a popular coding product with real developer and enterprise adoption. It may be the fastest way to catch up in AI coding. The real question is whether SpaceX ownership improves Cursor or drives its users away.
> The real question is whether SpaceX ownership improves Cursor or drives its users away.
I can't speak for anyone else but I wont be renewing my sub. Funding anything Musk related isn't exactly high up on my list of desires, and theres ample alternatives out there.
> The real question is whether SpaceX ownership improves Cursor or drives its users away.
I know I'll sound hyperbolic but I'm deeply skeptical of the way anything Musk-owned is going to treat private data. I think he wouldn't hesitate to dig into it if it were to his benefit, even if there was an agreement against it. For that reason alone it makes Cursor look worse to me.
I just uninstalled it FWIW.
I think it'd be an enormous endorsement of Cursor/xAI and proof of improvement if SpaceX started using it to code the mission critical software running on Falcon 9. Which other AI company can say their models powered a rocket launch?
(mostly /s but I know I'd give it another look if it was that good)
> Which other AI company can say their models powered a rocket launch?
Honestly, probably all of them. I imagine those coders are using all the tools they have available and are using Claude and ChatGPT as well as internal tools.
My sense is that enterprises are extremely cautious. They like everything that is already common and hr friendly. They abhor anything that might be seen as divisive and controversial. That's why they're currently going with Anthropic and not Openai or Xai or anything Chinese. It's the smaller actors that are using everything but Anthropic. Anthropic got that safe enterprise bland vibe. The only pr trouble Anthropic is in is with saying no to the military, which just makes them even more enterprise safe. Meanwhile Sam Altman and Elon are out there freaking out the enterprises almost every day it seems like.
Fable got halted by US make it a moot point but none enterprise is happy about the forced (and unannounced) 30-day data rentention
To be fair, the retention is only for Fable. I agree though, I don't even use Claude at work, but I noped out of touching Fable when I read that.
I can't imagine that any of the cautious companies or ones with their ear to the ground are going to want to cozy up to cursor with this acquisition; I'd suspect we'd see some exodus as well given the relationship to Musk.
Cursor was my first hands-on experience with AI. I didn't know much about getting set up with specific providers via API, and Cursor made it easy to pick any model, ask a question about some code, and get a clear suggested answer easily viewable in the IDE with an 'accept' or 'reject' button. I think they answered this question well: "How do normal developers want to interact with AI?"
I moved away from Cursor when I noticed the responses from specific models were not as clean or accurate as when I'd prompt the models directly, which was something I didn't know how to do early on. I hypothesized that they had some boilerplate prompt sitting atop of my own, causing less precise or desirable results.
I would assume Cursor is still one of the best options for normal developers to get started with AI, but with Copilot forcing their foot in the door at many companies, I wasn't sure how well it would fare on its own. Being acquired by SpaceX should help, and I'll be interested to follow along and see how things develop.
> Being acquired by SpaceX should help
Why? (Genuinely curious, I would have assumed the opposite)
My opinion is that the publicity can only help Cursor. I don't necessarily think SpaceX would make Cursor better. Copilot (which I view as a direct competitor to Cursor) has a huge structural advantage. I have several friends in various American companies where Microsoft products are all they are allowed to use. They get "free" Copilot access as a part of their Microsoft plans. Developers aren't having Cursor placed right in front of them in the same way Copilot is, and from my experience, when developers have the choice to pick one, they pick Cursor. So, I just feel the SpaceX/xAI publicity could help Cursor get more visibility in these general American software companies more so than they could on their own.
Congrats to the Cursor team!
When I first saw the company built on top of vscode in such a crowded field way back at the end of 2022, I thought "forget having a moat, they are renting their castle from the invaders!" - I couldn't see how see how a single team could execute well enough to effectively muscle their way in between Microsoft and OpenAI, who at that point looked destined to control the developer ecosystem between GitHub, VsCode and the then-best coding models. I think it's easy to forget how insane this seemed even just a few years ago.
But every year since then they managed to simply ship a better product on the axis that mattered to the most users. And now they are sitting between a huge user base and a massive stream of valuable tokens, they can sell to SpaceX. Incredibly impressive.
I don’t really understand what the value prop of cursor is, it must be the data and models. These days programmable editors like neovim and emacs have a huge advantage. I’ve had ai create several custom plugins to have my editor do whatever I can think of. Just ask Claude code, hey I want to do x, y, z, it spits out some lua and I have a new capability. I don’t know why anyone would want to be limited by an extension interface at this point.
>I don’t really understand what the value prop of cursor is, it must be the data and models.
The simpler answer is that there is almost no value outside of buying some customers.
As you've proven to yourself the engineering work is doable on your own.
I've made my own agent and wired it to emacs via ACP... 60 billion in value, ok... sure...
https://agentclientprotocol.com/get-started/clients
Funny that “GitHub should really support stacked diffs” led the Graphite team to a space colonization co.
2020: Leave Meta and start a company.
2020–2021: Spend ~18 months looking for PMF.
2021–2025: Build Graphite around stacked PRs, code review, and merge queues.
2025: Get acquired by Cursor because AI makes code review the bottleneck.
2026: Cursor gets acquired by SpaceX because Elon.
Not a startup arc I would have predicted from `gt stack submit`.
$60b is crazy.
Cursor is an extension for VS Code, a harness and a bunch of prompts.
They have their own model (Composer 2) which is based Kimi K2.5, but I don't think SpaceX would be interested in it.
If they need a harness for grok, they could fork PI.
What are they after for here? Customer base? Talent?
Cursor has $4 billion annual revenue rate so $60b is 15 years of future cashflows.
That's not crazy because if past predicts the future, that revenue will grow quickly. At $8 billion/year it's just 7.5 years, which is a reasonable investment.
This is a linear regression relying on a couple years of data to predict 15 years in the future and I don't believe that the valuation is made on this basis.
It may be that spaceX is buying an operation that would realistically take 5 months and 100 million to copy in-house for 60B because the worry is that waiting 5 months might cost that much in some sort of lost opportunity. It also might be that in any negotiation SpaceX is viewed as incredibly cash-rich and so anything can be sold to them for inflated prices.
I really don't understand these companies valuations it seems like boardrooms everywhere are in a constant state of panic that they'll lose it all if they aren't growing a breakneck pace constantly.
> Cursor has $4 billion annual revenue rate so $60b is 15 years of future cashflows.
This assumes that Cursor's annual revenue will be the same or higher for over a decade. It's not really like they don't have competitors
That revenue number is almost meaningless, since they give out tokens at a loss. Especially with Composer 2.5 tokens are sold at a steep loss. They could certainly grow to $8 billion/year, with this negative revenue / heavily subsidized subs, but what will happen if Cursor decide to be profitable, or maybe to even just break even?
Not annual, annualized. Let's see if people stick to it knowing it belongs to Musk now.
Many made the same prediction about Twitter, and it seems to be more or less the same or higher activity than before, and Bluesky is continuing to rapidly decline (-5% DAUs per quarter).
I wouldn't bet on Musk, but I DEFINITELY wouldn't bet against him. Anyone betting against him over the last 10 years has been viciously smoked (many short-selling hedge funds got wiped out completely).
> I wouldn't bet on Musk, but I DEFINITELY wouldn't bet against him. Anyone betting against him over the last 10 years has been viciously smoked (many short-selling hedge funds got wiped out completely).
In terms of the stock market, definitely. Honestly though, all those people who said self-driving wouldn't be solved by now, that Tesla didn't have a great moat and that the Boring Company was profoundly stupid were in fact correct.
Yup, more activity... Elon never solved the bot problem like he promised, and it's far worse now.
> Many made the same prediction about Twitter, and it seems to be more or less the same or higher activity than before
Where are you getting that? There's not a single piece of data out there that will tell you Twitter has increased in users. Not only have they visibly dropped in users, but it's becoming increasingly clear the site is Astroturfed with bots.
The choice is not Twitter or Bluesky. Most people moved on to TikTok. I don't know a single person who uses Twitter.
Tiktok... what are you talking about? Tiktok is not a text news/thread medium
Hasn't cursor's revenue declined? I think they already peaked.
If past predicts the future people will drop it once it is in Musks hands. And as a token reseller that revenue is not that impressive.
Is that profits or revenue? :-)
revenue ≠ future cashflows
> What are they after for here? Customer base? Talent?
users
It's a crazy number especially since Cursor feels kinda dead. Few thoughts from the other side:
- xAI needs the coding related data to compete with Claude Code and Codex
- Recent progress with Composer 2.5 seems promising given the size
- The may get a comeback on the smaller than Enterprise battle field now that the other two got so expensive
- The way that Elon set up this entire process was quite genius. They locked in this option before, and now after the gains through the IPO, it feels almost like a discount, lol
Compose 2.5 is the default model in Grok Build. And it's quite incredible. It's comparable to Opus 4.7 but faster and incredibly cheaper .
I could see it being a talent / first mover acquisition. I’m bullish on harnesses, but I think there’s still a very long road to get to something that is stable and relatively optimal - harness user experience is pretty trash tier right now imo.
My hot take is that it will probably be like the OS landscape:
Well. $60b in bloated stock is probably much better than the $10b cash penalty for not going through with the deal.
shocked that an engineer would not mention user numbers or revenue growth in their analysis
Usage data.
Exactly that is the current value, although not sure if its worth 60B
You clearly have not used Cursor lately. It’s substantially more than all that. It’s not a VSCode extension anymore.
Hm, surprised at all the Cursor hate here. Tab complete, at the quality they delivered, was a game changer back in the day.
And their current work on Composer is great. Composer is super fast and quality is decent. More competition in the model space always welcome.
"Back in the day" is the key idea here. It's the valuation that doesn't make sense in today's market. What does Cursor offer to be valued at $60 BILLION? Its models are alright but nowhere near SOTA, and pretty much superseded by open source local models at this point.
Composer 2.5 worked just as well for me as opus 4.6, and was faster and actually worked better for quick bugfixes and reporting back to support. And is much cheaper.
I'm not saying HN should be super supportive of everything, but the level of hate and complete loss of reality for a lot of people is quite sad to see, for a community of supposedly intelligent people.
HN is a hellhole of either AI hate or hype. The fringes on either side are the loudest.
I wonder why IDEA didn't catch up with its own agent support and even their own models. It's not like agent harness is that hard to build, right? Or maybe they did, it's just that they haven't won the hearts and minds of the developers like Cursor did?
In related news, I'm open to suggestions for coding agent harnesses.
Theres several open source options you can use.
The highest github stars one is called `zed` another one i've heard about is `Cline`
theirs also a few that yc backed ones:
`Void`
`Continue`
`PearAI`
For what its worth the non yc ones have way more github stars but im sure the yc ones are good too. I think `Continue` is the biggest yc one.
continue is eol after being acquired by cursor/spacex https://www.continue.dev/
I've used Cline for a year now and very happy with it. Fits my workflow really well
and PearAI was just a fork of Continue with not much changed other than the license and removing the words continue.
Also OpenCode and Kilo seem popular as well.
I'm very curious what coding agent interfaces other HN users are using.
I run a bunch of Claude / Codex TUIs + vim in terminal tabs on i3 workspaces on Linux whch I know isn't the most common.
Happy pi.dev user here, give it a try! I would say that's kind of the "vim experience" but for harnesses: has the minimum, if you want something more you extend it :)
Saying it gives "the minimum" is generous, it's pretty much useless out of the box. And did I say slow as well? I think pi is great if you're into spending your time managing your harness rather than using it. In that regard, it's more like neovim.
I'm wondering who's going to buy pi!
(Edit sorry forgetting names, I mean who's going to buy Earendil). Good luck to Armin, he's done some good stuff.
Earendil did! https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/5/24/pi-oss/
That sounds like a Thiel funded project, given the Tolkien name.. If so, I won't ever be using Pi.
edit: From first glance, it doesn't look like it. But I basically don't trust any tech company that takes to Tolkien naming conventions.
The Earendil guys are European and very sane. Zero sf vibes from them.
https://mariozechner.at/posts/2026-04-08-ive-sold-out/
Sounds like it is not related
Nvim + Claude code. Or zed. Honestly basically every ide is adding agent harness features as their primary focus right now. Just throw a rock and you’ll hit something that will work for you. You can even just use emacs and have ai build harness features for you.
If you're open to using remote Linux VM's and a web-based interface, I quite like exe.dev and Shelley.
At Poolside we have pool (https://github.com/poolsideai/pool), it runs in a terminal and you can use it with any Agent Client Protocol compatible agent (https://agentclientprotocol.com/get-started/agents).
Since you've asked, I am working on one but it is super early days so I am just posting it here for feedback.
https://zot.im
The idea is to make it fully autonomous so it is not really something that is meant to be constantly prompted and it is unlikely to fit most workflows but the idea is to make something that fits the future - not the present.
I've been pretty damn happy with codex and vscode.
Between the codex app, cli, and vscode extension there are options for most ways of working
Codex UI is great. It just make sense for an AI tool.
Been very impressed by the codex app tbh
https://github.com/can1357/oh-my-pi
Paseo with opencode backing.
pi is for real engineers
vim
90% of my dev workflows have moved to Devin cloud agents.
I don’t miss the days of fumbling around with my local repos across my multiple agent work trees or clones.
I just throw a task at Devin and I get a PR a few moments later.
Then it monitors the PR for any failing CI or review comments without me in the loop.
Now I can have 10+ Devin’s running at any given moment as I walk home from the coffee shop.
I cant believe people still use Devin. This is just filling the niche of vibe PR'ing? Not even vibe coding? Another level removed from the codebase than even claude code/codex are?
Who is this Cursor person you speak of?
I run Claude Code in cmux with Soonpatch and that's it. I tried looking at Cursor but honestly it wasn't providing any value and I prefer being 100% up to date with CC updates/interface
What are the alternatives to Graphite these days? Github's stacked PR support is still immature, AFAIK. I would love to see Linear move into this space and start offering both git hosting and stacked PR management.
My team uses git-spice [1], which is client-side only and works just as well as Graphite.
Aviator [2] is also good, and they have a hosted UI with merge queue support as well.
[1] https://github.com/abhinav/git-spice
[2] https://github.com/aviator-co/av
Does anyone here think Cursor is overvalued? It's just packaging up what already exists, it has no moat or IP.
They're getting paid in extremely overvalued stock, so maybe it balances out.
This is not really a diss on SpaceX either because a lot of IPOs go through an immediate pop and then 1-2 years of doldrums as lockouts expire and promises aren't quite delivered.
Nobody knows what 60 billion in SpaceX stock today will be worth when Cursor insiders finally get to sell (at least a year from now, after other SpaceX insiders have started selling).
Source on the lockup for Cursor insiders?
Generally this is how liquidity works. Their employees will have a six or twelve month lock up (six being most common).
Investors in certrtain rounds (or sizes) tend to have no lockup, whereas later stages have a six month. Alternatively, I've reviewed agreements where the lockup is based on minimum market cap, but I've only seen that a couple of times.
Ok everyone saying this is how it works but where’s the proof? SpaceX has a 7 day lockup for some people which is abnormal. So clearly the way it’s done isn’t in fact how it’s always done.
This is just a general practice that always happens when paying in stock. It's to prevent a massive dump the next day which would tank the share price 'artificially'. Again, rich people's rules.
Ok everyone saying this is how it works but where’s the proof? SpaceX has a 7 day lockup for some people which is abnormal. So clearly the way it’s done isn’t in fact how it’s always done.
https://www.sec.gov/reports/rule-144-selling-restricted-cont...
> Holding Period. Before you may sell any restricted securities in the marketplace, you must hold them for a certain period of time. If the company that issued the securities is a “reporting company” in that it is subject to the reporting requirements of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, then you must hold the securities for at least six months
Are the securities restricted though? I don’t think these would be?
Almost guaranteed to be. The only other way would be to have issued them during the transaction with the Sec. There was no mention of that. 60billion of issued shares would have been mentioned. It's non trivial amount.
What’s the lockup period in this case?
Um, I honestly don't know for sure, if I'm not mistaken SpaceX has some weird staggered release schedule for employees and early investors, I guess based on their stock dates.
> SpaceX has a 7 day lockup for some people which is abnormal
You might be referring to staff members who have shares ? Their shares are not restricted securities as far as I know, but their internal company policy might affect those, but I'm not 100% certain on that.
There are many tranches here. Some friends and family got to buy day one IPO with no restrictions. Then some employees get a rolling release starting June 30.
That's interesting actually, and good to hear. I fully believe those employees deserve their full share.
It can be inferred because it’s how things tend to work.
Ok everyone saying this is how it works but where’s the proof? SpaceX has a 7 day lockup for some people which is abnormal. So clearly the way it’s done isn’t in fact how it’s always done.
Well, the people who bought the SpaceX IPO essentially footed the entire bill here. And they might still make money on it, depending on how the stock goes from here on. I don't see anyone who could lose here, even if the bubble bursts, apart from the Cursor people. And they are likely still going to make a huge amount of money.
> Well, the people who bought the SpaceX IPO essentially footed the entire bill here.
It's hard to say that they footed the bill here, but they basically gave SpaceX a number to say "well our stock went IPO and it's at this price, so here's 60B at this price"
A good tactic from SpaceX as after the inital surge of a big IPO, the stock price usually comes down and finds it's correct balance, which is usually always lower. So if they had of waited the 'cooling off' period of a year for example, and the stock price went down to it's 'correct' valuation, then they would have had to issue a higher number of stocks.. At least that's my thinking, but I'm terrible with money.
No, look a Composoer 2, it stands out starkly on its own in the pareto frontier on low cast and fast models.
Composer 2.5 was a huge leap with minimal compute from xAI.
They can compete with OpenAI and anthropic with xAI scale compute. They have a top notch model team and incredible training data and huge enterprise costumer contracts.
my employer (one of those huge contracts) dropped cursor in favor of claude and i don’t think this is true at all
while we had it i used cursor for probably eight months as my main ide (i did really like the interface for embedding code in prompts!) but had no problems switching to claude code. i asked around, and i truly don’t know a single coworker who misses cursor even a little bit.
My experience mirrors this as well.
I was fully in on Cursor for a good chunk of last year, using Composer + Gemini Pro (via Copilot / GH integration). I really enjoyed Cursor's tab completion capabilities, but when Sonnet and Opus started getting particularly good for me (think for me it was around 4.5), I swapped over to Zed + claude code in the integrated terminal. I've found that after a bit, I haven't ended up missing the tab completion. I've been perfectly fine with just LSP + claude always open. I don't miss Cursor. All my colleagues are on claude code with half of us also using Zed.
Composer 2.5 Fast is particularly good.
For someone who is new to agentic code or is generally somewhat junior, Cursor is very easy to get started with and is generally fairly frustration-free.
I use a cheap $20 subscription mostly for occasional use of Opus and Composer.
SpaceX made a smart move here. Someone else should have really seen the opportunity and bought them.
Composer 2.5 is just a repackaged chinese model, Kimi IIRC
How the hell is an IDE a "pareto frontier"? Even if, say composer 2.5 is a huge leap forward, that doesn't mean IntelliJ or Vim or Emacs or Codex got worse.
IDE improvements are not a zero sum game.
In a competitive environment, it's precisely that. An improvement in product A takes customers from B and C.
Nope. Vim and Neovim users can use the cusor-agent cli for agentic stuff and there prefered editing tool for editing. All the major providers have a cli specific version these days. Probably because folks actually didn't want to actually use the cursor Gui and once Claude code came along those folks jumped ship and went full cli again
This is delusional. Composer 2.5 is trash compared even to haiku let alone opus.
Hmmm. Not in my experience. I don’t think it can be compared to Haiku, maybe sonnet levels? It’s obviously not Opus and never was intended for that use case. I use it quite a bit and it works well and is extremely fast for the tasks it was built for
This doesn't match the empirical observations of a lot of people I'd trust more than you, and putting it below Haiku immediately makes it extra sus (Sonnet would have been the credibility preserving comparison).
It doesn’t tell anything about the valuation, but I prefer it over Claude Code, and I even stopped using JetBrains IDEs because of it.
Vs Claude Code: I like the option to change the models, as I often prefer ChatGPT or Composer to Opus. I have a slight preference towards TUI, but not so strong to drop the models.
Vs JetBrains. I really love JetBrains but the tab complete just works so well for me.
why u prefer cursor over claude code?
its not just the models, their auto complete is actually really good. when you make a change it will give you "tab to next" which makes refactors super easy.
composer 2.5 is also a very decent model, it go 90% of my AI tasks using it now.
So 60B dollars and your primary reason it’s worth that is “tab to next” autocomplete?
Scaled to every developer in the world? Yeah, that's productivity.
I'm not sure it's worth the price tag for developers though, I mean resharper promised similar, delivered half, bought by millions and still don't think Jetbrains, even with its other good tool suit is valued 60B.
I just laughed out loud reading this
Hyperfocused edit assist is awesome. I’m the magician the assist is the magic wand.
Investing in companies is not about what they are delivering right now, it is about what you think they can deliver in the future.
It is not like purchasing soap in the supermarket.
Maybe the real Mythos secret is that it found out it could fit on a GPT2 size model
I tried it a few times and was not convinced by the autocomplete.
I found it less effective than free copilot autocomplete on vanilla VSCode.
Yes, that's why Cursor was very popular when actually reading model output paragraph by paragraph was still the way you used them. That's no longer the case, their use has cratered, and in fact they have been disintermediated by their model vendors, leaving an empty shell.
I guess that fits into the Musk empire because "empty shell" increasingly describes his companies.
Tesla is a car company that doesn't want to make cars. And xAI is an AI foundation model company that actually is a data center REIT...
composer 2.5 is literally just a fine-tuned kimi model, and the autocomplete is exteremly meh.
The only kind of AI I want in my editor is an autocomplete, but this isn't very magical to non-programmers (their TAM) or all that valuable (you can't charge thousands), they bought Supermaven and basically killed it, I'm not sure how you think tab is really good, I've not been impressed when I played around with it.
What tab is better?
Could not say on the valuation front. The one thing that is obvious is the trash talkers love to point out how horrible it is but I have yet to find a compelling replacement. Obviously Claude Code works but at least for me I never got along with the CLI workflow very well and sure I could use vs code with the extension for Claude but then I lose tab autocompletes which I actually like. I have yet to see anyone build a derivative model like composer 2 that is quick, cheap and has higher reliability on tool call use. Again I don’t know on valuation but it’s pretty impressive how far they have come. I look at Jetbrains and at least from an AI perspective they have been left in the dust.
Cursor was nice when I was still meticulously hand coding my stack, fantastic autocomplete. With today's top models, I barely write code myself, just review commits. Cursor eats Opus credits like there is no tomorrow. Composer has been a net negative in my experience. All in on Codex with GPT 5.5 on high using /fast.
IMO composer 2.5 is pretty good, and the $20 Cursor plan gives you _way_ more tokens than Codex/Claude code/Antigravity
I seem to get a lot more tokens for my $ with the $200 plan from Anthropic or OpenAI than I do from the $200 plan from Cursor.
Lately I use Cursor with DeepSeek API, and OpenAI subscription through their Codex App.
Not my experience. Maybe an hour of top model use on the $20 plan, then Composer 2.5 which needs constant hand holding.
Only cursor employees could continue to spread this idea that composer 2.5 isn’t total garbage.
Cursor, from my companies perspective at least, seems to be handling charming leadership to get enterprise AI contracts in place, compared to the alternatives. That's feeling like the moat from my first-hand experience. Easy single contract that covers a lot of AI cases that management wants to say they have in place.
Cursor's moat is that it is a virus that infects organizations through shared skills, hooks, agents, etc.. Once one person uses it and infects the repo everyone else starts using it.
Maybe, but migration from/to anything is so much easier now with Agents.
Know a few companies that have moved from it fully to Claude. It’s still early so the moving cost is low and Claude Cowork is something non-tech employees can make use of much easier than Cursor. I really don’t see what Curor’s value is longer term. Why pay a middle man?
I don't. Cursor being a man in the middle between coders and other people models for so long, has so much more training data than anyone else in the world.
There is obvious proxy to the amount of training data - revenue. And I think anthropic is way ahead of them.
obivously is overvalued
Yes. I think Cursor is overvalued, but not to the extent of SpaceX
Maybe it's just the US dollar that is overvalued
That would explain the top tier of meme stocks, but counterpoint: what about our salaries?
Workers are criminally underpaid
In terms of whether they’re overvalued: probably. But any valuation should also take into account the value they have to x.ai (also under SpaceX) as a source of training data for coding models.
I do think this has had its day. From what I remember, Cursor was useful back in the day when you coded in an IDE and wanted to read code while you baby stepped through incremental changes with an AI. I'm tempted to put /sarc around this but not really...
I like Cursor but that valuation is a hard sell.
Their valuation should be very closely tied to how how many tokens it takes to get from Void to Cursor.
If those values diverge by much, something is rotten in the state of Denmark.
They have a surprising amount of enterprise revenue and mindshare, of which xAI has literally none.
Cursor Remote Agents are important to our AI orchestration layer. It's possible that Claude can do this directly but Cursor Remote Agents made this laughably easy.
Composer is very good, and these days after heavily using CC, Pi and Open code I am back with Cursor. "No moat or IP" is underrating it a lot.
CC on Deepseek is a moat.
they propably have a lot of training data from their users, which might be useful for SpaceX which has a lot of compute
It's not true it has zero moat or IP (they have their own LLM and it is useful), but it is indeed way over-valued.
There's a plausible synergy in it for xAI though. Access to reams of training data for a company whose marginal cost of compute is very very low, and that they can use as a channel to push Grok. I don't think it's worth anywhere near this much to anyone else, but to xAI it's at least possible.
Every single one?
I guess they're getting bought because they had access to a lot of codebases from a lot of companies, and perhaps there's something to mine in those logs...
They have the conversation history of every person that has used their product. That's worth something.
Sounds like what people here said 20 years ago about Google buying YouTube, or 10 years ago about Facebook buying Instagram - companies with no moats and huge infrastructure costs.
To paraphrase, the biggest trick the devil pulled is convincing founders they need a moat.
None of that really matters.
What matters is that this has enough "future story value" to keep the few investors invested... allowing for the planned index funds to buy into the overvalued stock & allowing for the largest heist in the history of money.
It's become pure hype and drama on the global stock market stage.
Transactions that happen out in the open, with the consent of all parties are not a heist.
Money is neither created nor destroyed in the markets. It's exchanged.
If Musk is worth a trillion while not generating a trillion of value, then it's a heist.
heist: "an elaborate, meticulously planned theft, typically targeting highly valuable items, large sums of money, or financial institutions like banks or museums"
Scam maybe.
Grok needs a coding environment play to match Claude Code - that's what this is.
And AI companies are not short of capital.
So is 'Space'X. They fit perfectly
Are people still using Cursor? I haven't in at least a year but perhaps I'm in the minority.
Yes. I like it for small fixes, specifying exact code ranges i want touched, and for asking questions because it links me to the code so I can read it.
I use Claude more for greenfield feature building where I dont need to surgically dig in and view existing code specifics.
Yup still got it due to paying for a year up front, its still very decent, especially the newer composer 2.5 model, it's cheap and has a ton of usage included so works well as a general day to day tool.
I really dont get the point of cursor, I always find it subpar product too, but damn they are all got acquired congrats
These are the SEC filings that confirms the merger:
Announcement of Cursor acquisition to SpaceX
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1181412/000162828026...
Details of Acquisition
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1181412/000162828026...
That's a lot of money for a buggy product that is at best slightly better than its competitors.
For what it's worth, this was effectively announced months ago, and at this valuation.
But they (SpaceX) could have backed out of the deal at any given time as they had the option to (and be required to pay the 10B break up fee). Nobody knew what would happen at the time.
This announcement is a definitive agreement of the acquisition at that $60B valuation.
Sure, not saying there's no news hook here.
Yes, that's what was said basically. The pedantry is not adding anything to the conversation.
I don't think you can even say that without reading the actual announcement. [0]
Was the acquisition "effectively announced months ago"? or was it the right to acquire the company or pay $10 billion that was announced months ago?
It would be equally relevant if it went the other way. But clearly both of you are confused on what was said they would do in the future (which that was the announcement months ago) vs what are doing today.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/technology/spacex-says-it-has-option...
I had high hopes in Antigravity and Gemini, but they royally screwed up everything to such a level that the only worth plan is to use free plan for creating docs.
Not bad for a VS Code fork and a Chinese LLM fine tune.
paying 60bn for a dev team that wrapped vs is insane.
How about paying 60 billion for a bunch of enterprise contracts?
I suspect these won't be as sticky as the contracts you're thinking of. Oracle and Microsoft can run on that because their products aren't compatible with anything else so migrating is a huge pain.
Cursor doesn't really have that. We've got it at $DAYJOB but it's not even the only one, I can also use Zed or Codex or Claude or probably a half dozen other things I don't even know about.
I suspect a lot of companies have that right now because the market for AI is so volatile, and in the near future will trim that down to a couple of tools and Cursor doesn't have much to keep them at the top of the list imo.
I also wouldn't pay 60 billion for a bunch of enterprise contracts that have to compete against Microsoft. No one is dropping Microsoft as a vendor, and they have the ability to up the prices for stuff people need like Office and use that to make Copilot free. If times get tough and companies need to cut costs, it's a lot easier to part ways with Cursor than Microsoft.
Or paying ~300 million virtual slips of paper that the market says are currently worth $60 billion.
About 4x what they've spent on Starship development so far.
They're not a space company any more. They're just part of the AI bubble.
Well, when your stock is massively overpriced it's a smart time to buy stuff with it.
Interesting that they disclose this right after IPO.
How does this get a Starship to land on Mars or coast-to-coast full self driving? $60,000,000,000 towards one of those goals would have checked-off one of those boxes.
Glad I've jumped ship to Zed+ACP. I liked the idea of the new agent window view, but it's obviously slop and hasn't had a any polish or care put behind it given the number of bugs I keep seeing.
Zed is so much more stable and sleek and the agent view (threads) actually integrates nicely in a real editor. The side editor in the agent window was so much worse than the vscode base I expected, I have no idea how they dropped the ball so hard here.
I wonder where they will take this, if they'll use the Cursor team to help make Grok Build (which is not just a tool like Claude Code, but an actual Grok model too) more refined for programming? Would make sense to me, and in turn also provide Cursor with more compute they can use.
> For the past few months, SpaceXAI has been jointly training a model with Cursor, which will be released in Cursor and Grok Build soon.
https://x.com/SpaceX/status/2066873915717136548
They'll likely just take all the various enterprise contracts to help inflate SpaceX earnings, that's the only reason why you'd buy this if you were Musk. Need to help keep the lie going as long as you're still alive.
It also provides xAI with a pre-existing enterprise distribution channel. At the end of the day, distribution is equally as important as the underlying product itself and in some cases is even more critical.
I think that's another thing, while I would like to test Grok more, the Grok AI plans are very generic and not tailored specifically for programming, which is frustrating because I get maybe 8 hours out of Grok for $40 for an entire month, I do wonder if they offered a "Grok Build only plan" if it would actually give me access to more compute. Maybe they intend on making it through Cursor.
I do hope that Cursor doesn't remove any of its current model offerings, and just offers Grok Build in addition to what they already offer, in my opinion unless most of their clients "switch" to Grok (like metrics show they're mostly using Grok vs other models), it would make more sense.
No company that uses Cursor now is going to be ok with using xAI models.
Not necessarily.
Enterprise AI adoption has reached a point now where FinOps matter, and a harness platform story with a discounted underlying model can be enticing for a number of organizations.
I've seen Gemini land well in a F100 well known for their AI hardware story for that reason, and Alibaba's leadership canned the OSS minded Qwen team in order to build a similar commercial minded approach as well.
At least in cybersecurity, we're also reaching a point where the harness is starting to matter more than the underlying foundation models, and building a harness/bedrock style story while discounting a specific model can play well in upper market deals.
What makes you think so? Is it only because you dont like Musk or do you have some insight into all companies using Cursor you want to share with us? Even if you dont like Musk you should realise that others may not share your sentiments and/or may have similar feelings regarding SamA, DarioA or any of the other CEOs in this field.
Enterprise customers care about things like guardrails and data safety. xAI has always been anti guardrails, and who knows if you can trust them with your data.
At least in the F1000 RFPs I've seen and the decisionmakers I've chatted with, when they talk about AI guardrails what they mean is generic API (eg. can we rate limit, block connections, RBAC/ABAC capabilities, etc) and Data Security (eg. ZDR, encryption at rest/transit, controlled access) controls.
There is a recognition that foundation models and tools leveraging them will introduce some degree of nondeterminism, so the best way to solve that is to leverage preexisting best practice that is used to reduce lateral movement risk by humans (who are similarly nondeterministic in nature).
My company’s security team is very much “no proprietary data or information can be used to train a model”, I just don’t know how you can validate or trust that they aren’t doing just that.
ZDRs, spot audits, and the fact that salespeople can be held personally liable both financially and even criminally for fraud if they sold a contract with a ZDR that was not honored.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47855293
Initial announcement back in April
I like Cursor as a product but the add on cost of $0.25/M tokens is just too expensive on top of the models.
Yeah, I don't understand how this business model continues to produce revenue.
Revenue? In that industry?
Ugh, I'm already tired of seeing ads everywhere for Cursor about how you can build EVERYTHING and solve all problems using their agentic IDE, so now I have even more reasons to dislike SpaceX too.
I wonder how much zed industries is being valued at.
Everybody remember when Zuckerberg told in an Interview in 2024 that human data does not matter that much or more specifically "individual creators or publishers tend to overestimate the value of their specific content". Something along the line RL-Loops are more important.
Hard to square this with that acquisition which seems to be focused on Cursors vast amount of User Data.
At least for now.
Zuck is correct because the barrier to a large user base is not skill but market share which requires substantial effort, luck, timing, and patience.
Nobody can put a dent into Coca Cola because of their market. Better products exist but there is really no way to compete against $5 billion in marketing allowing them to maintain $50 billion.
Cursor is ~1MM users a day. $60k/per user is high but considering this is a stock buy, Space X "made" $300BN in the first day that is ~20% or one day of positive movement.
For Musk (with his baggage) to create or steer that user base would require a significant investment and time. Why not just slap some coupons from an initial bump to acquire the user base, user experience, and IP?
Not sure how this closes the gap to Anthropic and OpenAI for xAI. Is there a play that I am overlooking?
If this acquisition goes through the only winner here is Cursor, especially since CC and Codex are chipping away at Cursor very hard!
What does cursor have? An ide and coding orchestration? They are using Claude or codex for llms, so they get acquired for their user base and tooling? Feels like a lot of money for that given Claude has the majority mindshare.
They have a giant pile of data from every customer that didn't disable data retention
I keep hearing this but they’ve been bleeding users since Claude Code came out so a bulk of their data is pre-Sonnet 4 and I’m not sure how the data from users prompting weaker models will help them now?
They did use that data to make Composer 2.5 which was decent but still a step back from GPT 5.5 and Opus 4.8. Though it’s really good at UI.
They technically have their own models as well, but they are based on other peoples models.
Most of this is just customers + staff/tech rather than models being acquired. Cursors actually got so much better in the last year. Their composer 2 model (a tweaked version of Kimi K2.5) is decent for day to day mundane tasks and the app can auto switch to more capable models when needed.
> What does cursor have?
users
People keep saying this but I have yet to find an integrated system that has good tab completion, cheap coding models and works well in an IDE. There are a number of options out there, none of them have captured much market share.
Zed seems to always suggest decent single-line comments for me, but I don't really use Zed for that that often.
Have tried it over time. I think it’s decent but I still found it to be not as great or quick as Cursor and the rest of their AI integration did not feel as compelling for my workflow.l but overall agree.
Isn't tab completion long dead?
Do you have a point? The whole package is compelling like I already said. Nobody has replicated it but everyone likes to ask what is the value but never share a compelling competing product. I am not Boris so I still write some code or make manual tweaks, autocomplete is nice.
Edit: I realize my question is maybe harsh but I think it’s valid for these drive by comments that drop a question like “isn’t tab completion dead?” Without any other substance it is a huge detractor to the comment quality of the site. At least add more substance or opinion.
I dont think so. I strongly prefer cursor over claude code and the composer model is basically unlimited and free also being super fast.
Of all the ai companies out there, anthropic and cursor are the two id invest in.
Customers, talent, training data, an increasingly competitive coding model and now a fuckton of compute.
So, you know. Couple of things.
Specially given that coding turns out to not be all that complicated, in the grand scheme of AI things: I don't think it's going take much more advances at the frontier before code writing will be as good as it need to be. At that point Composer (their model) catches up, what, 6 month later and they good.
The have customers actually willing to use and pay for their service.
In a world where even Microsoft is needing to use AWS for capacity beyond Azure, xAI's utilization of their data centers has been so low that they are renting them out to competitors instead.
Nobody wants Grok. If you aren't using GPT-5 or Claude, you are probably using an open Chinese model like Qwen hosted by some provider.
I would expect Cursor to be forced to use the Grok Code models in short order. We'll see how people feel about "Mecha Hitler" writing their code.
Look at it the other way: What did Musk get last Friday? $75B from the SpaceX IPO.
It's almost like giving a toddler $100 in the toy department and seeing what happens next.
Musk bought Cursor for its users (lots of devs still use it), as part of yet another attempt at catching up after building Grok and buying OpenAI failed.
Likely, Cursor becomes Grok Desktop or whatever, and eventually uses xAI's coding model if they can make a competitive one.
Will cursor launch a CLI tool like Claude/codex/opencode/pi ?
Grok has its own CLI tool called Grok Build: https://x.ai/news/grok-build-cli
they have had one for a while now. https://cursor.com/cli
They already have. https://cursor.com/cli
Good hopefully Grok Build gets better and they start to innovate in this area. Claude Code and ChatGPT need more competition. So that they also innovate more.
ai is like the first technology with a conversational service manual inside it..
you should be foaming at the mouth to use claude or codex to make a custom harness, just for your own personal use with local models...
Anyone recommend an alternatives? For no particular reason I’m canceling my cursor subscription today.
Everyone I work with who used Cursor stopped using Cursor when Claude Code came along. They're back to their regular IDE when the need to read code, or they just review it at PR time. I never used Cursor, but Zed is my favorite editor with an agent. It can use Claude Code, among other CLIs, via ACP, so you can use rolling subscription tokens, or it can use OpenRouter or others if you want a broad spectrum of models. And it's crazy fast. It used to be that Copilot Pro was the best deal on agentic coding with several models from several vendors available, but they've really nerfed it, with uselessly restrictive token budgets and only older models are now available from the major labs. These days, might as well just have a Claude or Codex subscription and use the CLI with ACP in whatever editor you prefer.
If you want something price-competitive with composer 2.5, deepseek pro is very cost-effective. Just rig it up in opencode via openrouter.
Composer 2.5 is very heavily discounted with a Cursor subscription. You effectively pay 2% of the API price of Composer 2.5 Fast with a subscription.
Does Deepseek offer any discounted tokens subscription like that?
Don't use OpenRouter, the company is a shitty middle man. Use DeepSeek API directly.
Opencode with an Opencode Go subscription is a great deal.
Second this
I've been really liking the Cline extension in VS Code
Completely valid way to sign out!
Check out zed
When does the Tesla acquisition get announced?
Within the month. They'll probably try to do it sooner while the stock is at a high.
Or do it when the prices are starting to show weakness
This truly shows how king making in venture capital is done, kids have the MIT pedigree but sometimes this is not enough for certain demographics, give them a ton of money to explore ideas and pivot, product is a vscode fork that sells subsidized AI, only possible with venture capital. Providing inference at unsustainable rate deemed as "product market fit". Product loses money until they exit.
VCs that say "I always knew the team was special", give me a break.
Cursor's value add as a developer seems much slimmer than the 60bn price tag justifies, but I guess they have a lot of data from the non private usage which bumps the value up?
The product itself is practically a vscode wrapper with Agent implementation and K2.5 forked model (composer).
Wow they are using 80% of what they raised 4 days ago to buy an IDE. Absolutely incredible.
Per latest reporting, Cursor's current annual revenue rate is $4 billion.
So SpaceX is buying 15 years of future cashflows, assuming no change in revenue. Which is bad assumption given past growth was gigantic.
They are also buying 300-400 employees with proven record of training good coding models.
Their expertise will be used to improve Grok Build coding agent.
Also, they're using stock, not cash, so effectively they doubled the amount of money raised.
>Their expertise will be used to improve Grok Build coding agent.
Is Grok not a toxic enough brand (by association with Musk) that people who would use Cursor wouldn't avoid Grok?
Like, the assumption seems to be that all the goodwill that Cursor users have towards Cursor will now apply automatically to Grok, which seems like a pretty significant leap.
I've been teaching myself physics lately and have found Grok to be one of the best both at coming to a correct answer and helping me to understand how to get it myself. It also seems a lot better than other models at saying "I don't know" or pointing out when my question doesn't make sense.
I bet any flagship model would do as well if you prompted it with how it should do it.
Comparing grok vs Gemini vs GPT vs Sonnet is like comparing mid-high end CPUs. They're all about as good as one another for most work.
I'm a heavy Cursor user, I spend hundreds of dollars per month in overages above my $200 subscription, and I'll be switching away. I have zero interest in Musk's AI.
Companies using cursor could not care less about the CEO's ideology if they tried. Individuals may, but they don't matter in this context.
The CEOs ideology matters due to the fact it impacts the product design. The reason people don't want to use Grok is because it's bad, and it's bad because the team behind grok have to spend cycles crowbarring in far right white genocide conspiracy theories so that it doesn't embarrass their boss on twitter. One of the things we learned with Anthropic is that you have a lot more success being focused on the core product - coding agent, than trying to do that and chase internet chatbot users.
As someone that trains LLMs, even if grok does have a "avoid ""woke""" fine-tuning, adding that needs a few thousand examples SFT and a system prompt. It costs nothing extra to do it to coding agents and is not the reason why grok sucks at coding. It's just not in the same league in general - it's 0.5T parameters only and not trained specifically for coding at all.
Even if the way they are doing it did damage coding performance, it is a simple matter of serving another model without that fine tuning in the enterprise API preferably only to the grok coding harness (or cursor, now). Coding performance for subscription plans don't move the needle in terms of revenue anyways and quality there doesn't matter as much.
> They are also buying 300-400 employees with proven record of training good coding models.
Are they? Their Composer 2.5 models is based on Kimi K2.5, it's not a bespoke model.
Achieving the improvements from K2.5 -> composer 2.5 with just post-training is actually more impressive. Though I believe their next model is trained from scratch.
Tbh I don't know if we can use traditional DCF calculations for things like this.
The main challenge is: If models get better, why would humans need a tool like cursor, when they have AI agents doing the coding for them?
> So SpaceX is buying 15 years of future cashflows, assuming no change in revenue. Which is bad assumption given past growth was gigantic.
I'd argue it's a bad assumption in the opposite direction. There's no moat. People can and will switch tooling and Cursor could easily be left with a steep decline in users.
ARR is best month times twelve, not revenue per year.
Is this what Cursor uses or a standard I'm unaware of?
I thought it was latest month?
But revenue is not really the informative quantity. If you sell gold you will have a huge revenue, but very little profit. I can be a trillion dollar company too if we exchange dollar bills for face value.
"training good coding models" many would say that is a highly debatable statement, and some would say that is just flat out not true. Cursor has not trained a frontier model from scratch, what they did was take an already made (non-frontier) model and further trained it on their user data about coding outcomes from its coding agent. So, a form of distillation and RL.
Revenue is not the same as cashflow.
It's $60B in SPCX stock, not in cash.
https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/16/spacex-to-acquire-cursor-f...
Guess Musk figured out that paying all cash to acquire something was a bad idea.
Sure - why use cash when you can use bits of paper instead?
I'd expect more of the same to come - good way to lock in some of this crazy SpaceX valuation by converting it into something with a bit more inherent worth.
Tesla next?
cash is bits of paper...
Not everywhere ... many countries have polymer banknotes for better security.
In any case not all bits of paper are equal. Monopoly money bills are not worth face value!
They are, its the exchange rate that's the killer.
Not even an IDE. A workflow built on top of an opensource editor.
Unsure if you're serious, but if you are, they wouldn't buy with cash, at least not the vast majority of it.
Its an all stonks deal.
its for the distribution, talent, proprietary data. spacex has the compute, and elon wants to win in AI.
Money laundry
Nope. They pay with the monopoly money, dilluting the shareholders.
So that accounts for about three quarters of the money SpaceX just raised then?
Not totally, because the deal is in stock. The cash SpaceX got is actual cash that can be deployed today. The stock will be in a lockout period and could be worth nothing or something whenever the lockout ends.
> about three quarters of the money SpaceX just raised then? While rest is paid to the debters...
Most probably it will be mix of stock/cash
It's all stock
Related:
> For the past few months, SpaceXAI has been jointly training a model with Cursor, which will be released in Cursor and Grok Build soon.
https://x.com/SpaceX/status/2066873915717136548
I'm still waiting for the real news to drop- in the next 6 months we're going to start hearing some big moves from Space X AI. Early this year they lost pretty much all their leadership, it's very clear they failed to keep up with the frontier models and Musk has essentially given up for now - renting out their compute to Anthropic and Google. But that's not sustainable, everything they say about their IPO is that AI is the core value driver. So at some point Musk is going to have some decisions to make about who he brings in to drive that. I imagine once they get that person in and start building a team around them the deals with Anthropic and Google will be ended.
I guess the cursor guys will be happy because they got their pay day, but I'd be very aware if I were them that their future is at the whim of whoever Musk appoints and it's difficult to tell who that would be right now.
I guess now is the time to take bets, so I'm going to bet an early OpenAI employee like Sutskever gets the job and they acquihire him in. Here's a bit of a laugh - at this stock price Musk could probably tempt Demis to come over, that would be wild.
Why is it not sustainable? Right now it appears to be a better business than selling access to models.
It's a good business. Maybe even a great business. But it's not going to justify a valuation like Space X. In the same way that Tesla has slowly become less competitive in automotive, I don't think it's sensible to assume Space X will have some durable edge in building data centres, especially when basically everything going into those data centres are commodities. And if it is just a neo cloud, then you have to contend with the pro-cyclical nature of that. It's also just clearly not their plan, they're not promising to be a neo cloud. They're promising to own the full stack.
this is financial engineering to increase ARR temporarily, feels like next year Elon will dump lots of stocks
Wasn't that already announced few weeks ago, only with deal going through depending on Cursor future stock price?
That was future option, now they are purchasing it.
They needed to raise money for the purchase, they just did it (raising from public market)
For about 10 billions over the twitter price (inflation adjusted)
Mesmerizing....
You generally see this sort of thing in the games industry when a publisher gives a developer a bunch of money to make a game but then the developer screws up and runs out of money. Publisher buys them to try to recoup their investment.
Is Cursor dying?
I really hope Musk doesn't ruin the product itself. I am not a fan of how he changed X at all. Id really like to see them stay on the current path, which has been brilliant so far
Does that mean all of the co-founders would become billionaires? And they're, what, like 20 year olds?
And I'm here trying to get something to make a $1000 per month. What a world.
At this point, money and rationality does not make sense to me, rather beyond my ability to understand. But I feel it is all about accounting and writing off eventually and a few profiting from it, not the retail investors for sure. Again I am just saying what I think and there could be no rational to my thought process.
That’s two zeros too many.
Our Beautiful Journey
What an incredible outcome for the Cursor team. Hopefully the Cursor + xAI teams working together can produce a competitive frontier model.
Cursor was simply able to get early access to openai models and get an early lead doing things that are now obvious and done better by many others. Does anyone really want to use a crippled "enhanced" vscode to interact with a crippled version of codex or claude code?
This comment reeks of someone who has not used Cursor, at least in 2026.
Please point to a video or example of some way that Cursor is remotely state of the art at anything...
It's a great thing for consumers and businesses to have another competitive, American coding harness + frontier coding model duo. No one wants a crippled version of codex or claude code and surely SpaceX isn't paying $60 billion for that outcome.
> another competitive, American coding harness
Isn't the Cursor founder British?
So they innovated, created a product and found users? Sorry to break it to you but that’s how software companies are built.
I tried it and it was extremely broken and dramatically overhyped. Which I guess is what Elon finds appealing about it, as that seems to be his preferred type of business.
Do you think people are using Cursor to interact with Claude Code? What?
Good timing because they are paying with SpaceX shares which are at a crazy high valuation right now (compared to just a few days ago)
Why don't they just make their own in-house development environment? Cursor's codebase is maybe 5,000-50,000$ worth of actual code, even just $10M (compared to the $60B) could knock Cursor out of the park with a completely custom code editor, and even with a smaller budget they could fork VSCode. Maybe for the social value? I feel like a $10B advertising budget for a bespoke AI development environment is more than enough to become an actual competitor.
Distribution. Cursor has enterprise contracts, SpaceX/XAi want them.
"Houston, we have a problem"
"One minute, let me ask my AI agent"
I'm genuinely excited for Cursor Composer 3. A Cursor model with Grok resources could compete with OpenAI and Anthropic.
They're doing what anyone would do in their position. I won't be surprised if they bought more companies while the stock price is that high.
Oh well, time to cancel my Cursor subscription. What a shame.
Nonsense like this reminds me of the following quote from the 1999 Thomas Crown Affair movie:
“Have you figured out what you're going to say to your board when they realize you paid me thirty million more than others were offering?”
In the span of <20 years we’re talking about a sale price 3 orders of magnitude larger than a minor plot point of a hollywood movie.
Github Copilot is so much better than Cursor and a worldwide sales team. This acquisition has no chance.
Good hopefully Grok Build gets better and they start to innovate in this area.
Claude Code and ChatGPT need some competition. So that they also innovate more.
> The biggest focus of its business is the manufacture and launch of rockets with reusable parts.
Is it though ? Their TAM in their filing lists 85% as AI. $18.7 billion in REVENUE 2025 yet are spending more than 3x that for Cursor, and AI company.
That's interesting I was using Windsurf before and I really enjoyed it. Then it became part of Devon. I was less thrilled about that so I was looking at Cursor, but now it's also getting bought out. Any suggestions on what else is left? : )
rip off.
Ai is great. The bubble will burst. We will keep Ai just like we kept "the internet" after the dot-com bubble, but we still won't buy our pets online. I mean London has pretty good train connections and stations because a bunch of companies repeatedly tried to get rich. Most eventually failed, but we kept the rails. I just hope we get our computers back after this round of gambling.
I’m worried some of the people leading this race will try to entangle the institutional financial giants or even the government to ensure some sort of too big to fail scenario.
There’s an unprecedented amount of money at stake. And the admin has never been so openly and blatantly for sale.
I can't stand Cursor. Every time I open it up I have 3 popups I don't use, that I then need to figure out how to close. Using it for notes is impossible, since the autocomplete just tries to fill in bullshit.
Awful what VC money did to it. Hope to never use it again, now that work stopped mandating it.
Is he bailing out an investor he's connected to?
The writing was on the wall for cursor, this is a good deal for them to get bailed out and continue business.
Just cancelled my subscription.
I've been using the Pi agent with Deepseek for some days.. and I'm more than happy with that.
Those Mars bases are getting closer and closer.
Optimus robots are very close. Gradeschool vibes all around
Full self-living autonomous Mars base next year. Musk™ /s
Besides now paying 60 billion for a fork of VSCode, it seems SpaceX meme stock style money raised from the IPO, is all gone in one week :-)
IPO proceeds after greenshoe: $85.7B
Major disclosed cash / debt-related commitments:
- Take out Bridge loan tied to X/xAI debt repayment: $20.0B
- Take out EchoStar debt payoff / cash component: up to $8.5B
- Take out EchoStar debt-service funding: up to $3.0B
- Take out AI infrastructure lease commitments: $20.2B
Subtotal of major disclosed commitments: $51.7B
Rough remaining cash before other costs :-)): $34.0B
Lets now talk about buying Tesla, doing Quantum and building a Dyson Sphere and do another round?
They are paying for the installed based. The users mainly. And also the team.
I think we should get used to it because that's what's going to keep happening again and again. First Twitter, then Cursor. When someone falls behind in the race for innovation, they usually buy the best product available and use it to get ahead of the competition.
Out of curiosity, anyone here still using cursor?
Yes it's my main AI thing.
It has access to all top models, great IDE integration and their AI based autocomplete is still unbeaten.
I have no desire to use a TUI, feels like a downgrade to me.
Yes, I still use it, although less than I would otherwise.
Good: - Composer 2.5 is pretty decent for the quality / price ratio. - Easy to assign an issue to it in Linear (I know Linear just added this natively for linear agent, but it seems rubbish compared to Cursor) - Bugbot actually finds some useful issues (things Claude and Codex will miss) - Using @cursor in github usually works well, and better than @copilot. - Working with Python Monorepos with UV in their IDE. VSCode and Cursor work well here (Antigravity managed to screw it up somehow).
The Bad: - Usage/billing dashboards - These are are opaque and you can't attribute what actions map to what spend. - cursor won't follow PRs well like Claude Codes does. - Setting up environments is less good than Claude Code - Their IDE fork is woefully out of date, it'd be nice if it had more of the codeium fixes.
The Ugly: - Settings - Try to turn off bugbot, there's multiple places you have to do it. Good luck figuring them all out. - Support - they are polite, but gas light you and tell you it's your fault their product's settings are awful.
Linear employee here - if you have any specific feedback on our Claude/Codex integration, happy to hear it. Definitely a v1 so expect a number of fast follows up with some of the missing functionality like env customization, secrets, and code signing.
Cheers!
I use CC/Codex/Cursor.
CC is mostly my default for large tasks / features (ex. Plan > execute plan ) Biggest gripe with Claude Code is that it is painfully slow relative to the other two.
Cursor for small stuff like bug fixes since it has a lot of models to choose from. I love the review/ diff / checkpoint features. It's planning feature is on par with CC. I'd probably use Cursor as primary driver if it had better cost efficiency. Next version or two of Composer may fill that gap in cost/quality/speed.
Codex isn't allowed at my work, but I use it for personal projects. It has the best balance of quality / cost / speed even if it's planner is poor and quite frankly the codex harness needs to catch up with the other two.
CC for quality / cost. Cursor for quality / speed. Codex for balance of the 3.
composer is competitive with around opus 4.5 in feeling?
largely lags behind opus4.7/gpt5.4, but is respectable, and generally outperforms the glm/qwen equivalents anecdotally despite benchmarks.
fails to follow instructions more often, and is less code critical, but performs okay if you can decompose the task to smaller problem spaces. i.e. only do manual review, only do typechecking, only do specific component. etc
https://artificialanalysis.ai/agents/coding-agents?coding-ag...
I agree, Composer 2.5 is really good. I use it for all kinds of small tasks, and really for any kind of first pass at debugging, answering questions about the codebase, pulling data for reports, etc. It’s fast, pretty accurate, and basically free.
Never did. Having been using Github Copilot since its launch (as autocomplete, they have a Vim plugin) and claude code for agentic coding.
I intend to try it for design mode with Composer 2.5
Yes, it’s my daily driver for building the saas I run full-time. I’m not happy about this news.
I like the ability to switch between any models, Composer 2.5 is really solid, I like having my agents coworking in the IDE with me, the plan mode is great, Cloud Agents are great, especially with slack, linear, web, etc integrations. I routinely tag an error report in slack and Cursor fires up a Composer 2.5 cloud agent that has readonly db access, access to error reporting, etc, and it can triage the issue, issue a PR, and tag me in slack.
The only thing I’ve felt like I’m missing out on is the subsidies of the CC/Codex subscriptions, but it seems like that is rapidly eroding anyway.
Curious, what does your SaaS do? even the general area is fine
It uses AI to replace a very niche human-powered workflow in a niche industry. That's all I'll say, but it's grown to about $30k MRR in the last year and is supporting my family, so the stakes feel pretty high to me.
I see, thanks for responding. Curious if this was an industry you were super familiar with?
Without revealing what your product is; how did you come across a good problem statement?
I've started on the bootstrapped train as well, also a senior engg.
I'd launched a pre AI software which grew to 5000 users and more and made me some money.
but post AI, I'm finding it hard to get into a non competitive industry. Like everything seems super captured already.
Why are you not happy about this news? Didn’t their collaboration make Composer 2.5 possible?
Not to my knowledge? But even if that's the case, Cursor seemed like they were doing fine without SpaceX, and I'd like to avoid giving a single cent to Elon Musk. You can do as you wish.
Co-Pilot -> Cursor -> Claude Code.
I think my relationship with cursor was the shortest of all.
Cursor was really good for like 2-3 months. It felt like magic compared to Copilot.
Claude Code is like... I dunno, something better than magic because it actually exists.
I switched over to Claude Code. The products are essentially identical. This whole space has been commoditized. Paying $60B for this is idiotic.
I was until today.
good enough for simple tasks.
It seems that each time there's a new tech cycle, another zero gets appended to all financial transactions.
Can someone help me understand what this means to tesla and Grok?
I wouldn't be surprised to see Grok become some sort of agent that calls Composer/whatever the joint Cursor & X.ai model might be called.
The Infraggable Krunk
Interesting. I've not used Cursor in almost a year after using Codex/Claude.
Won't be surprised if Elon paid another hefty premium.
I just realized this whole game is just getting rich from other people's money and there might not be people left to buy those people's shares when the music stops.
It's literally a ponzi scheme.
Ah thanks for reminding me to cancel my subscription.
Well that's a lot of money. They must see this as a distribution pipeline for Grok?
I once again fear for my grandfathered-in free SuperMaven.
I honestly don't get why they feel the need to buy Cursor or why OpenAI wanted Windsurf. If it's data you're after, wouldn't it be so much more cheaper to just hire a dedicated team to fork VS code and integrate your own model and give it to the public for free with unlimited usage for a couple of months?
It's absurd. let's mark it down.
Grok’s capabilities on Cursor’s data should be a step function there. Go X! Congrats Cursor, what a ride!
i thought they already did that!
they had the option, but hadn't executed on it... now it seems they have.
$60B. Wow. Congrats to Anysphere. But $60B. That is just a ludicrous price.
It's been fun, bye
Take me with you
waiting for the anouncement: cursor for grok heavy users.
Why after thier IPO?
$60b is genuinely insane. Very high from a P/S ratio perspective, and for a product with arguably no defensible moat.
Congrats to the Cursor team though... One of the most crazy exit stories ever – 4 years to a $60b buyout. Damn.
Definitely not a bubble.
Vibe coded space shuttles baby! Lets GO!
That is very hinged
Cursor is great but they're all going to cash out and leave SpaceX as soon as they can.
Some of the talent at Cursor is second to none. E.g Less Wright, Sasha Rush, Stuart Sul.
Google paid 2.5B to bring Noam back into the fold in 2024 ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
How are these numbers even working out, I get free markets and all that, but Microsoft paid 2.5B for Minecraft, which was printing money at the time (seems they still lost on that deal). Now a rocket company is buying an editor company for 60B and everyone seems to think that makes sense.
I’m happy to be old man yelling at clouds here because I can’t for the life of me figure out these valuations and purchases.
All I know is, it's going to be fun when everyone wakes up sober and hungover realizing they've been sleeping on piles of tulips.
There's a lot of investment in AI for its potential.
An AI editor company might never make 60B itself, but it might help another AI company grow faster (relative to its competitors, who might also want to buy the AI editor company).
What else can an AI giant do with all that money?
Build in-house: they do, and there's only so fast they can hire/build.
Save? Yes, still do, but if they save it all, and let competitors buy Cursor, they lose.
Invest in other fields? Sure, but if they lose the AI race, that's all they'll be left with.
Tesla's IPO is a bet that if Musk has the right opportunity, he will do well. So he's given a big bucket of money, and needs a team that can deliver. So he buys Cursor.
The winners are Cursor. The losers are whoever is funding the AI companies that get outcompeted.
(Full disclosure: I don't know anything about Cursor, nor much about Tesla or its IPO.)
But surely 60B could buy you something better if you want to spend money on AI. The number seems completely arbitrary, would Cursor say no to 40B? I really don’t see Cursor as bringing them anything of actual value, it’s more of a bragging thing, but I can be very wrong.
> How are these numbers even working out
You must be new here.
What are the best open source IDE alternatives to Cursor? There was Continue for a bit but Cursor bought it. Is Visual Code by itself the only open source IDE atm? My main gripe with Visual Code is it doesn't make it easy to use open weight models or non Copilot model APIs. Continue helped but its now part of Cursor.
As for coding in the terminal, we have Opencode, Claude Code, and Codex etc. They are all open source but only Opencode can route to open weight models. But non of these are really an IDE like Visual Code or Cursor.
Are we missing a really good open source IDE to use open weight models? It seems like we are.
I think it's difficult to compete in this space because right now to build the "full IDE" you have to build an extremely capable harness (very hard) and a very good IDE (very hard). I plan to continue using Claude Code and built myself a small tool to verify what the agents actually do + move around the codebase quickly but it's a far cry from a full IDE: https://cotect.dev
Zed…
Interesting, Grok, for a flagship AI contender was rather poorly performing. I mean, not bad, but visibly less capable.
The grok fast models for coding were pretty adequate. Not good, but fast and good enough to be usable.
Musk needs the revenue before the IPO.
He found a perfect market hack, buy a company at 10x their revenue and sell it in the stock market at 100x
Is this Elon listening to Pieter Levels?
Pieter is so dumb. All he seems to do is post comparisons between the wonderful U.S. and dying EU that are completely wrong. If Elon is listening to Pieter, pray for Elon.
You do know Elon already believes those things?
meanwhile Mistral:
Congrats to the founders, arguably the first true AI-wrapper billionaires? 0 to multigenerational wealth in 4 years is impressive. It is crazy how much more wealth per user that can be created in the AI-space, compared to other products.
It is crazy how much more wealth per user that can be created in the tulip space, compared to other products.
Surprising how tech people on a tech forum are some of the biggest Luddites. Maybe it’s because the creative destruction is coming to your industry this time?
Crazy how AI has become a sort of religion beyond question for some people. AGI is like the big nerd rapture they’re all waiting for, any day now.
The irony is that once AGI arrives, tools like cursor would be worthless.
In fact, if AGI arrives, and it is possible to run such a model / models locally, the whole idea of commercial models would be a bit dead, yes?
This was a fantastically smart deal for both sides.
What are the best open source IDE alternatives to Cursor? There was Continue for a bit but Cursor bought it. Is Visual Code by itself the only open source IDE atm? My main gripe with Visual Code is it doesn't make it easy to use open weight models or non Copilot model APIs. Continue helped but its now part of Cursor.
As for coding in the terminal, we have Opencode, Claude Code, and Codex etc. They are all open source but only Opencode can route to open weight models. But non of these are really an IDE like Visual Code or Cursor.
Are we missing a really good open source IDE to use open weight models? It seems like we are.
I realized a while back that Elon Musk isn't Iron Man. His superhero (or supervillain depending on your view) persona is ZIRP Man, the master of riding successive credit expansion and speculative waves. It's sort of ironic that he at least pays lip service to some Austrian-style quasi-libertarian economic ideas, because the Federal Reserve created him.
Now he's surfing the AI wave. We are no longer technically in ZIRP but the delayed inflationary wave is now traveling through the economy and pumping everything. He knows the best way to soak up cheap money right now is slap AI on it.
I also had the thought the other day that him hitting $1T technical net worth might actually be a harbinger of a lot more future inflation. Inflation of this type hits assets before it hits things like prices and wages, and it hits assets with fast market cycles like stocks before it hits things like Real Estate. The blast wave starts at the top and moves down and out. So maybe Elon hitting $1T really means that in 20 years that'll be more like $100B inflation adjusted. Meanwhile a loaf of bread will be $20 and a starter home $4M.
But the fact that monetary inflation starts top-down is why low interest rates exacerbate inequality. The very richest and most leveraged can use the arbitrage gap to buy everything else before the inflation wave propagates. We've been in a low interest rate environment for about two decades, and you can see during that time how the super-rich with access to cheap money have fully detached from the rest of the economy.
In other words: the reaction to the 2008 financial crisis was to inject huge liquidity at the top, which created the new Gilded Age.
Ultimately it may be somewhat intentional. One way out of a sovereign debt crisis when you also have a sovereign currency is to inflate your way out, which basically is a huge tax on every non-domestic entity that owns your debt.
Elon Musk has exactly one talent, and it's being the greatest master of financial chicanery the world has ever seen.
To be honest and objective, I think he at least knows enough about engineering to hire people who know what they're doing, which is how he got here. It's not all chicanery.
Over time, though, I think he's drifted away from his original "make real things in the real world" focus and more toward "play money games" and "play political games."
It's sad. One common comic book supervillain arc is to start as a hero and become what you despise.
Good reminder for me to cancel my Cursor subscription. I don't support Elmo.
SpaceX should rush to acquire as many companies as they can with stock. The market cap is absolute insanity (I know people keep saying this about new high scores in unrelated-to-reality valuations, but this one might just be the pinnacle), with zero rational basis, and they should try to make it real as rapidly as they can.
Next up, Anthropic.
Anthropic are already paying $15 b to space X for compute.
Buying depreciating nvidia hardware and renting it out to competitors isn't why SpaceX has a trillion dollar valuation.
true, can't hurt though.
> zero rational basis
Do you really think so? Like everyone who risks their and their clients' money here is just being irrational? Is this really a coherent view? Could it not be that someone knows something you don't, or does not have the biases you have?
Everything was in the S1 filing. There is no "secret knowledge".
The rational basis is entirely "I can sell the stock to somebody else for more money". Where in normal stock it would be "this company can make a profit that gives a return on this investment." This is a purely speculative play.
Why is it purely speculative for SpaceX and for nobody else? Is Musk just that good a con man, even though literally everyone hates him?
Why is something true for a company where it is true and not true for companies where it is not true?
SpaceX is worth more than Amazon.
Amazon has $750B of revenue and an enormous unfathomable moat across many fields, across most of the planet. It had a profit of $77B last year. And people consider Amazon overvalued, and a symptom of a serious bubble.
SpaceX has $18B revenue, and a consolidated loss of $4.9B. It has basically zero path to real profit, and it turns out that space launch actually isn't a lucrative industry, so much so that SpaceX had to create its own customer.
I mean, the biggest news about SpaceX has been the utter failure that xAI has been, reducing it to renting out all of the GPUs that Musk forced his other road-to-failure company, Tesla, to hand over to the failure that was xAI, that failed so badly it got hidden inside SpaceX. Good god. Somewhere in there the failure that was SolarCity got packaged in the giant scam.
Like seriously, the biggest win of the company is that it absorbed the husk of xAI that had a massive surplus of GPUs from when Elon tried to buy himself credibility in AI, and the market happened to make them worth more so that's their big win. Their biggest success is basically scalping GPUs.
>even though literally everyone hates him?'
Guy basically runs the US government, which has been reduced to a banana republic plutocracy. People invest in him because they know the system is so catastrophically corrupt that he'll always come up a winner, regardless of how enormous of failures he keeps generating.
I mean, this is such a transparent shell game scam that they're immediately talking about packaging up even more of Elon's scam businesses together. Just amazing stuff.
Don't worry, those super robots are coming any day now!
Yes, the US market is in the end games of a massive spiral -- a circle jerk of trillions of fake dollars moving in a rapidly accelerating circle -- and it will not turn out well. SpaceX is the moment when it is laid bare.
> Guy basically runs the US government, which has been reduced to a banana republic plutocracy.
Do you have any evidence of this? As far as I know, he basically never gets what he wants. He was against Trump's Big Beautiful Bill, it passed anyway. He wanted DOGE, it fizzled. He wants more Solar/Electric car related subsidies, Trump does not give a darn. He wants more H1Bs, Trump has been doing everything to frustrate H1Bs.
The one thing which Musk seems to have gotten was Jared Isaacman, but that was really difficult for him to get, and it took way longer than it should have.
Really difficult to see evidence that he runs the US government.
Point us at a rational verbalized or written argument for SpaceX's current valuation (and increasing)? Everything I've read says the valuation is too high and here is why, with x, y, and z reasons. Everyone I read who encourages buying seems to be ignoring arguments entirely and going on vibes.
I trust people who are investing their money more than analysts who get paid for writing what everyone wants to hear.
the IPO raised $85B and they just spent $60B on Cursor. If this was the intention it should have been in a disclosure
Edit: I see SpaceX did disclose
> With the option agreement, we have the right, but not obligation, to acquire Cursor at a predetermined price or pay a fee
> The consideration for the acquisition of Cursor, if any, after the closing of this offering would consist of shares of our Class A common stock based on an implied equity value of Cursor of $60.0 billion
"Collaboration with Cursor" page 12 of the SpaceX S-1 https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1181412/000162828026...
this is an all-stock transaction. No cash spent.
SPCX is exactly the "currency" that LLM companies should be valued in.
$60B cash? Too much.
$60B SPCX stock? Why so low.
I believe that OpenAI (I'll get to SpaceX in a second) has a huge valuation risk because:
1. It's a bet that OpenAI will "win" AI and have a significant moat; and
2. Future hardware improvements won't massively devalue OpenAI.
I believe open source models will win here, mainly because China won't allow otherwise. I also think that nobody is really talking about the hardware decpreciations coming in the next few years, which is going to be really important from a performance-per-Watt perspective. B100s aren't going to suck. But a theoretical T100 will get 30-80% more performance for the same energy input.
So, SpaceX. I've previously said that SpaceX would've been a significantly better company without xAI. SpaceX was used to rescue Elon and other "investros" from the financially disastrous Twitter purchase. Starlink, Starship (which is a risky program) and the Falcon 9 are a solid business. They're just not a $2 trillion business.
So I believe that the AI bubble contributes at least half of SpaceX's valuation and when and if that bubble bursts, at least half of SpaceX's value is at risk.
Google announced they're throwing billions to rent GPUs from SpaceX. That might sound good. It solves a short-term cash issue. But as another commenter put it, it makes SpaceX seem more like a Commercial REIT. After all, renting out your GPUs is literally the lowest-value thing you can do with them. You're not building a business. You're taking rent so someone else can build a business.
So buying Cursor and I'm sure any number of other AI startups in the coming year or two, seems aimed at kicking that AI can down the street.
So I view the Google-SpaceX as a red flag in the short-to-medium term. SpaceX simply can't seem to do anything valuable with all the compute they have. And I also have way more confidence in Anthropic (in particular), OpenAI and Gemini than I do in Grok.
BTW, will this pile of shit be included in the S&P? Is it known yet?
It won't be expedited into S&P.
"SpaceX told investors during the IPO process that it sees an addressable market for AI products worth $26 trillion, roughly equivalent to U.S. GDP."
This is unhinged.
I know it has become a meme by now, but IIRC the market for all foods (agriculture, processed food, etc.) on earth is around $10 trillion.
So according to SpaceX, the market for AI is 2.5 larger than all the food sold on this planet.
They're also saying that the AI market is worth roughly 10% of all global real estate.
This is true if you take the ai market as equal to the market for labor discounted to 5-10% penetration.
It’s not a totally unreasonable assertion, it’s the implication of the assertion that we are uncomfortable with. There is no reason for the models to stop their improvements in the near future.
> There is no reason for the models to stop their improvements in the near future.
Sure there is.
1. The cost of each new generation of training runs appears to be rapidly rising
2. The Trump admin just told the leading model to stop making it available to non-Americans, which in practice meant stop providing it at all
3. The factories to make the hardware are hitting bottlenecks, and while they've currently been navigated around, there's never a guarantee the next one will be
Currently I'm wondering at what point the direct impact on the US energy supply gives the US a taste of Baumol's cost disease as AI companies continue to outbid everyone else for electricity.
There are some counters to this, especially in electricity. We'll see massive expansions of wind and solar in the US because of this. Both the speed of install and low costs will guarantee it.
> We'll see massive expansions of wind and solar in the US because of this. Both the speed of install and low costs will guarantee it.
Implausible while Trump remains in office. He hates renewables, shuts them down even when doing so actively costs money.
Between AI hallucinated content and the politicisation of the numbers, I'm not sure how much AI compute capacity is being planned right now; would you accept a claim of 300 GW? It's a number I heard recently.
Given the capacity factor of PV, even China would have to think carefully before supplying that much PV over the next few years (300 GW avg ~= 3TW nameplate).
(Not sure about wind, wind's CF seems to vary between years).
> There is no reason for the models to stop their improvements in the near future.
You speak as if "improvements to models" is just function of time, and resources are infinite.
Models keep improving as long as there are resources to allow for larger and larger datacenters, if we hit a scientific breakthrough once LLM technology become the bottleneck, if the economy is infinite to allow infinite growth, and (geo)politics is not a thing to worry about. Or we discover ASI, machine improve themselves and we reach the technological singularity.
I know everybody is drinking the kool aid by the gallon, but can we maintain a little bit of objectivity?
yeah, it's funny how so many think the beginning of the S-curve is an exponential.
Granted, we don't know when the S-curve will inflect, but predicting too great an outcome is just as silly as discounting it altogether.
To be fair, food is the smallest bucket of my monthly expenses. And there are many people here on hacker news who pay more for their AI tokens than for their food.
How does argrar industry and tech industry compare as share of gdp in the US?
You are not in any way the average person.
Food is the 3rd largest expenditure in most households, after housing and transportation.
> the market for AI is 2.5 larger than all the food sold on this planet.
It just shows how much the automation has impacted agriculture and the food industry. Sure, there're rural farms that apply 200 yo technology. But e.g. the grain production and farming are incredibly efficient at scale. So, it's not that costly for as a humanity to feed 8 billion people (at a varying level, of course).
Remove 20% of AI supply, and the world goes on like nothing happened.
Remove 20% of food supply, and watch prices explode, global unrest, and famine take place.
Food is a solved problem. We can grow far more food than we need and we stop doing so simply because the low prices mean it's not economically viable.
In the places where famine remains a problem, it's due to political issues, not that we can't grow enough.
And growing all that food requires a tiny workforce compared to 400 years ago before the Agricultural Revolution. AI might extend such a massive reduction in labour requirements to many other industries.
> Food is a solved problem.
Mmmmmh
> We can grow far more food than we need and we stop doing so simply because the low prices mean it's not economically viable.
So, it's not a solved problem. Last time I checked we have plenty of people in several parts of the world with difficulties to access the required level of food to be healthy.
> We can grow far more food than we need and we stop doing so simply because the low prices mean it's not economically viable.
Half. This depends on there being a reliable source of cheap fertiliser, which would be much more secure if not for the situations regarding Hormuz and Russia.
Technologically yes, but this is a vast oversimplification.
You need lots of money to be able to buy the tech you need to do so. And you can't exactly earn that from not using the tech, since foreign (or even local) competition will slaughter you on prices. And if you do make it, you're stuck with a low-margin race to the bottom on price.
So capitalism with market protections?
> In the places where famine remains a problem, it's due to political issues, not that we can't grow enough.
The political issues are still there so I really don't think we can call that a solved problem.
That's what you misunderstand, that's why we're making the AI. Have the AI get rid of all the people then AI can grow all the crops it needs!
I don't think anyone is claiming AI and food have the same elasticity of demand, which is what this really talks to, but, after a claim the AI market is 26 trillion dollars... I wouldn't be surprised if someone did.
do you spend most of your money on food?
I spend roughly 10% of my take-home pay on food.
I spend 0.2% on AI. Exactly one subscription.
do you spend most of your money on grok subscriptions ?
Most employers are spending a large fraction of SWE salaries on AI tokens right now.
It's not unthinkable that trend continues (even if it's rationalizing at the moment), and moves over into other fields as well.
I might at some point be spending more money on somebody elses claude subscriptions than on food
my point is that the amount of calories a person needs is limited, and the efficiency is non-decreasing, so the per capita spending has an upper bound
"ai" does not have such an upper bound
Ackshully, AI does have an upper bound in information theory, but since we're not anywhere close to writing data to the surface of a black hole I don't think it's a big issue yet.
Population growth isn't limited except through resources but AI also needs resources
Valuation and elasticity of demand not related even if you ignore consumer surplus
We could remove 100% of world AI supply and humanity would not be worse off. It is still additive and in areas of generally indeterminate value except in hype.
Reasoning and RAG is amazing already and is a productivity gain but I'm yet to be convinced GenAI is anything but a slop machine.
#startflamingmenow
I half agree, but I'd still had software development to the list.
AI is useful as a search & information synthesis tool, and as a dev tool.
The problem is, when has a dev tool ever command such ridiculous valuations and investment in infrastructure?
The market is going to realize that yes, it's useful, but no, it's not over $1T useful.
You can't food maxx a trillion calories a day to generate a multi million dollar bill. You can token maxx it though.
I think the issue is the reality that most life is worth a lot less (in US Freedom units) than some software running doing absolutely nothing truly valuable for anyone.
Nozick was right, the Utility Monster wins.
What precisely is the moat surrounding AI that SpaceX is using to justify this kind of spending spree? I don't how SpaceX and other AI companies will be able to keep the weights of their AI models private in the face of interest by virtually everyone in the world. It would be absolutely trivial for a nation state to walk into a data center using a state issued security certificate to seize a few of the physical servers running the cloud services of OpenAI / Grok / Claude. Copying the weights is trivial. Infiltrating a company with spies as new hire coders to gain access to source code is also trivial.
This is really starting to feel like the pets.com era again.
Because there's nowhere else for the money to go, the money must go to AI.
There are no growth opportunities in any other industry (except healthcare due to disastrous demographics), where else are people going to invest?
The lack of places for investment money to go does not make the business profitable.
Not to be a jerk or anything, but that only matters for the guys and gals left holding the bag.
I don't think that will be Musk. He'll probably pull out significant resource from all this financial engineering relatively quickly. Probably via more financial engineering.
This is an insane take. Of course there are other areas that are growing or could grow if there was investment.
The problem is an absolute lack of vision on the part of those holding the capital.
Meeting the challenges of climate change could hold huge opportunities. Look at China’s massive expansion in renewables, look at the expansion of renewables in the US despite political headwinds.
Have some imagination, break out of your echo chamber. AI ain’t the only game to be played.
It's not lack of vision. It's that capital demands gambling. Everyone knows you could plough money into big projects in the US and double your money reliably. But the powers that be do not want that. They want to gamble, and try to become trillionaire #2.
To be clear I don’t see gambling to increase one’s wealth as a vision. That’s playing a game.
Vision is seeing a change that could be made. “I could be richer” is about as banal as a vision could get.
It's not insane. The GP is correctly describing a bubble economy.
The money chasing investments is orders of magnitude larger than the money people have on their pockets to spend. As a consequence, the only profitable thing to do is sell capital goods to make business and there is no profit on selling actually useful things.
China is in a different reality in large part because of their capital barriers that stop money from flowing in. Countries with bad reputation are also less affected.
What the GP gets wrong is that none of this makes AI a good business. Instead, it makes Nvidia a good business, but that's not news.
Looking at venture funding, it's definitely true. That doesn't mean other problems don't exist or aren't worth solving. But the concentration of (competing) capital and talent is insane.
Cursor is a harness that can be used with all kinds of models. It's a much better harness than anyone else's and takes the company out of just playing the model game.
Exactly this. I think valuations and the AI market could get stirred up if:
- We get an open source Opus 4.8 equivalent and pair it with an open source coding agent
- Running this OS stack becomes cheaper than what frontier model providers charge (see OS model prices on OpenRouter vs. frontier lab prices)
- This happens across verticals (i.e. not just software)
The first “DeepSeek moment” didn’t do much damage back in the days, but I wouldn’t be surprised if a similar moment becomes a lasting, effective, cheaper alternative.
OpenCode exists, it is your "open source coding agent" that is practically on par with Claude Code and Copilot in terms of being able to do the 80% of things that most people actually use.
DeepSeek v4 Flash/Pro also exist, they are open weight and on par with Sonnet, just a bit below Opus. Again: practically useful and sufficient for 80% of things most people actually do. And most of the remaining 20% are benchmarks designed to push the limits, not productive work.
Using these already is way cheaper than your typical Claude API prices. What's still missing is a) mindshare - everyone still thinks "claude = coding" and everyone thinks he/she really needs the very best models because he/she is doing such incredibly complex stuff - and b) someone pushing such a stack as a convenient solution for corporations to easily dump their token money into, complete with user management, enrollment, monitoring, all that enterprisey stuff you need if you want to sell to, well, enterprise customers.
> I don't how SpaceX and other AI companies will be able to keep the weights of their AI models private
That is an interesting point. If there are higher concerns, copyright law is easily ignored, and only one person needs to get access to the data once.
SpaceX is good at building data centers in tough regulatory environments, in a way that other players have been unable to match
They are a distant third at best, at least in trading companies. If you look at Chinese and other likely national actors, they are probably further down.
The thing with dotComs is that they didn't have THIS level of unsustainable financing burn, and a tangible issue of token processing cost that has no magic wand coming with the current practical limits of Moore's law.
I'm sure people laughed in 2023 if someone said AI will reach $100B in revenue in 3 years. Yet here we are
Oh, that puts it 0.3% of the way there! And all it cost was increasing prices until every customer started talking about cutting it.
Past performance is not guarantee of future returns.
We'll figure out how to make it much much cheaper to produce the compute needs we have today with tokens. The question is will how many new use cases arise that need much more - clearly we aren't meeting needs (price stays high) but how much more do we need, 100x, 10x, 10^6 x?
Look at electricity, the world of 1900 could not create enough electricity or even conceive of how to add enough to meet 1950s needs. But we made it incredibly cheaper to produce, but also created a lot more, and boy do we have so much more use of electricity now. And it's not that expensive for a human to pay for their needs (not free, its not cheap for poor people but it's still gotten cheaper).
“ai-x”? Elon? You know that you are not allowed to in this forum. It’s only for adults. Go back to Twitter and play with the other kids.
> They're also saying that the AI market is worth roughly 10% of all global real estate.
Why limit yourself to one planet? Space is infinite ;-)
Food is worth a lot more than that. If the alternative was starvation, we would pay approximately all the money for food. By that metric food is worth more than $100T. The difference between $100T and $10T is called the consumer surplus, one of the largest benefits of a free market economy.
AI might eventually provide $26T worth of value, but if it captures anywhere close to that amount of revenue that'll indicate a failure of the free market economy. Competition and open source will have failed and the oligarchy has won.
(Either that, or inflation will have made $26T a relatively smaller number).
I'm sure the finance market is much larger as well
>> AI products worth $26 trillion, roughly equivalent to U.S. GDP."
> This is unhinged.
The only way for Musk to become a quadrillionaire is hyperinflation. And a week later, we'll be quadrillionaires too!
Be honest now, it would take at least a few months for the rest of us.
You need to understand the definition of “total addressable market.” It’s a maximum theoretical number for the size of the market (not your company’s revenue) under ideal assumptions. A $26 trillion TAM is high but it’s not “unhinged.” For example, the logistics and transportation market is over $10 trillion and expected to double by 2035. Under ideal assumptions, if AI replaces everything from coders to lawyers, why is that “unhinged?”
Always fun to remember when calculating TAM - something like 85 - 90% of the world earns less than $1000 usd per month.
The math don’t math here, there literally aren’t enough people to afford this and businesses will go under the more people are displaced for gainful employment.
There have been a few recent stories about businesses finding themselves spending more on tokens than they were spending on the workers these AI Agents were supposed to have replaced.
Over what period of time?
By 2030? No way
By 2050? Maybe?
Obviously during an IPO you’re trying to make the bull case (unhinged or not). What does it look like in the best case scenario.
I also saw a quote from Musk saying that he expects SpaceX to hit $1 trillion in revenue by 2031. Given his track record of predicting performance I think it's safe to ignore such future looking statements from him or companies he controls.
Another way of putting this: global GDP is ~$132Trillion from what I gather.
So this is saying AI products will increase global GDP by about 20%.
The Federal Reserve says AI is contributing about 1% GDP growth per year to the US [0].
So maybe you can get to $13 trillion over a decade just from that. If you assume some acceleration, 20% isn't out of the question.
It is an extremely rosy projection, but if AI can replicate large fractions of the workforce, leaving those humans with the ability to work on other things, it doesn't seem unhinged when you think of it through this lens, just very optimistic - not Elon Musk level optimistic, just "everything goes according to plan and a bunch of things in the causal chain are all slightly on the higher end."
[0] https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2026/jan/tracking-...
> So this is saying AI products will increase global GDP by about 20%.
No business gets to capture 100% of the value it produces without physical coercion.
For infrastructure that requires high investment, it usually captures something around 5% of it. People tend to work really hard to replace or reduce any kind of infrastructure that gets near 10%. So we are talking about AIs increasing the global GDP by 200% at minimum, 400% more realistically.
Or in other words, bullshit number is bullshit.
I call it forward thinking: they assume massive inflation due to income taxes breaking away.
Dunno the actual number, but one thing I'm certain is that it must be closer to $0 than $26 trillion on a number scale.
yea, totally nuts.
clearly it's more like $540.2 quintillion at this point
> This is unhinged.
Just like the investors :D
Marks believe anything the con tells them as long as it's promising big money ROI.
Where is that quote from?
I can’t see it in the article when reading on my phone?
> sees an addressable market for AI products
Well if you start adding AI powered to "everything" then it is possible.
Soon you'll have AI face cream and AI donuts.
They are pricing in inflation along with the inevitable money printing that will happen.
In a sensible world, this would be considered lying to investors and be prosecuted.
With SPCX shares never going down in price, SpaceX can acquire all companies in the US in exchange for its stock, so SpaceX itself is worth at least as much as the US GDP! (/s)
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Ok, but please don't post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News.
Not the entire industry, only the American part. Chinese companies seem healthier.
You can only say that because you know nothing about the Chinese ones
Yup