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 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
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.
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.
Micheal burry doesn’t know shit about GPUs and especially GPU depreciation schedules. He should be ignored with extreme prejudice right now. He’s criminally stupid and keeps saying bullshit to mislead other investors (I.e that A100 GPUs couldn’t possible have useful economic lives of 7+ years, they couldn’t possible by worth more than 2 dollars an hour right now!, etc)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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).
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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).
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.
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 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.
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?
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.
> 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
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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 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
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.
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.
Micheal burry doesn’t know shit about GPUs and especially GPU depreciation schedules. He should be ignored with extreme prejudice right now. He’s criminally stupid and keeps saying bullshit to mislead other investors (I.e that A100 GPUs couldn’t possible have useful economic lives of 7+ years, they couldn’t possible by worth more than 2 dollars an hour right now!, etc)
The market will stay irrational for longer than Michael Burry will stay correct.
If there is ever another depression, which seems highly probable at this point, the meme stocks will be the first ones down the toilet.
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'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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
ok boomer
I saw that one wealthy individual had purchased $1 billion of SpaceX at the IPO. Does that count as a retail investor?
The current market cap of SPCX and TSLA combined (~$3.8T) is about 3 times the total value of all BTC (~$1.3T).
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
It can be inferred because it’s how things tend to work.
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.
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...
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.
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.
This is delusional. Composer 2.5 is trash compared even to haiku let alone opus.
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?
I just laughed out loud reading this
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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 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.
Yes. I think Cursor is overvalued, but not to the extent of SpaceX
Maybe it's just the US dollar that is overvalued
They have a surprising amount of enterprise revenue and mindshare, of which xAI has literally none.
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.
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.
they propably have a lot of training data from their users, which might be useful for SpaceX which has a lot of compute
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.
Every single one?
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.
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
Well, when your stock is massively overpriced it's a smart time to buy stuff with it.
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).
I used their agent view yesterday and the file tree does not update when you add new files.
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.
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.
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.
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)
We use the bugbot. Best code review agent we've seen.
to be fair "nobody" is using grok either
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
Fully on Cursor at work and I love it over CC, OpenCode and Pi that I use for personal work.
I use it because their pro plan is free for students
I use Cursor every day.
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).
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.
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
Just cancelled my subscription.
I've been using the Pi agent with Deepseek for some days.. and I'm more than happy with that.
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
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.
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).
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.
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?
paying 60bn for a dev team that wrapped vs is insane.
How about paying 60 billion for a bunch of enterprise contracts?
Or paying ~300 million virtual slips of paper that the market says are currently worth $60 billion.
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.
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).
I wonder how much zed industries is being valued at.
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
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.
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)
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.
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 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.
this is financial engineering to increase ARR temporarily, feels like next year Elon will dump lots of stocks
Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48553224
Grok’s capabilities on Cursor’s data should be a step function there. Go X! Congrats Cursor, what a ride!
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?
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?
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?
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.
This comment reeks of someone who has not used Cursor, at least in 2026.
For about 10 billions over the twitter price (inflation adjusted)
Mesmerizing....
This entire industry looks like one big scam
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
I once again fear for my grandfathered-in free SuperMaven.
meanwhile Mistral:
Why after thier IPO?
Good reminder for me to cancel my Cursor subscription. I don't support Elmo.
waiting for the anouncement: cursor for grok heavy users.
It's been fun, bye
i thought they already did that!
they had the option, but hadn't executed on it... now it seems they have.
the IPO raised $85B and they just spent $60B on Cursor. If this was the intention it should have been in a disclosure
> 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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
> How are these numbers even working out
You must be new here.
Some more discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48553224
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.
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?
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.
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.