How is a VSCode fork and a open weight LLM fine-tune worth $60B?
One would think Elon would learn his lesson after overpaying for Twitter and then having to merge his failures together to stay afloat. But no, more cash into the burning pile.
Ignoring future business ideas, Cursor reported reached $2 billion+ annualized revenue run rate in 2026, doubling from 2025. Recent financing rounds reached high-end valuation between $30 billion and $50 billion.
Cursor is installed on a LOT of computers.
Once Grok becomes the default engine, it will raise adoption.
More importantly, if you have Cursor installed all your data may be sent to their labs whether you use it or not (unfortunately - this is par for the course for all the LLMs, a la Microsoft).
That's worth a lot - especially considering that Cursor might also grow with the shift to more powerful local models and the fact that it has a respectable income stream.
Corporate contracts. A lot of companies have signed onto Cursor. xAI has a pretty toxic brand with Elon and the nonconsensual sexual images scandal. xAI has a ton of compute and few corporate customers. Now they have a ton.
> One would think Elon would learn his lesson after overpaying for Twitter
I think he took over Twitter to control what people using it see and promote right wing viewpoints. To that end it’s been a wild success.
Remember those stories of lottery winners who win millions then wind up broke AF, even homeless, in only a year or two because they have no impulse control and blew through it? Same people.
He bought Twitter to grab a megaphone to propagate his ego/agenda.
Grok was built for similar reasons.
He's buying Cursor to have a tool to push Grok on the world, and to have something of his own under his own ideological control to compete with SamA and Dario.
X AI is weak on coding and most of their founding researchers have departed for greener pastures. Musk has a great datacenter, but no researchers or data to use it with. This acquisition makes sense in that context.
See also ($, Stratechery) https://stratechery.com/2026/john-ternus-and-apples-hardware...
maybe he's getting value from this? (also the deal was essentially secured with Tesla stock, so who knows what did he actually pay)
The same way a rocket company that counts short-lived as satellites as an asset is worth 1.7 trillion. Congratulations to the Cursor folks, they are the only winners in this.
This is also part of the AI bubble delusion: agent assisted coding works, at least for some people, for some purposes. This deal perpetuates the illusion that AI will find high value use cases. The reality may be that software development has unique characteristics you won't find in law or medicine or other domains.
This deal is different: SpaceX is heading for an IPO which is now complicated by xAI becoming a subsidiary. Cursor is actually popular and I’m sure this is all stock-based so as long as investors believe that those users stick to xAI it’ll juice the entire SpaceX IPO. I am skeptical but these days the market seems to be driven by a country-club full of guys in Connecticut who are constantly hyperventilating on X so maybe from that angle it’s just another way he’s getting what he wanted from Twitter.
* X will have a total of ~2GW of GPU sometime this year largely not doing much outside of 'grok is this true'
* despite no longer being in vogue with consumer devs Cursor still has a lot of developer data that can assist in building a model
* Cursor have decent enterprise relationships (while for xAI it is ~zero) and that's where the real revenue for llms + agents is
* Cursor are paying retail for tokens and competing against the frontier model co's who are also their suppliers. Not sustainable (hence their in-house composer model).
* Cursor the product covers the gamut from lovable-style prompt-to-app, an IDE, cli and bugbot
* X are using "x bucks" to pay for a potential later acquisition which are arguably overvalued based on the space x IPO hype
Option there to give X a window to make it work, otherwise walk away with a $10B breakup fee for access to it's data
Hey now, don't forget about it's super important other use, taking innocent photos of people and regenerating them in less clothing and compromising positions.
I'm sad that I even know that.
e.g. Need developer data? Use some of that spare GPU compute, hand out free top end model coding access for a bit and you'll very rapidly have developer data
>decent enterprise relationships
I guess. 60B worth of "relationships" though?
However, one thing in AI is that while the usage goes up extremely quickly, it tends to go down just as fast. I know a lot of companies that are in the process of switching from Cursor to Claude Code, so in 6-12 months I'm not entirely sure of the data quality/quantity.
Also I think it is telling that they are calling them SpaceX not X. The X brand is absolutely toxic, especially in enterprise.
Hey...don't forget "grok is this person jewish(hint hint)"...or..just "grok do your thing"
$60 billion seems expensive, but it gives them a much better chance at competing in the market than if they started their own harness from scratch.
care to share more about this?
Their composer model is seriously good. I’ve been eyeing a cursor sub just to use it in OpenCode. They have a nice moat here.
> Cursor have decent enterprise relationships (while for xAI it is ~zero)
That has a reason. Those enterprise relationships are almost certainly going to sour at least a bit, if not for Musk‘s toxic image then for his erratic behavior.
Is it in vogue with enterprise devs?
Anyone have recommendations? I like the plan/agent mode and the fact that it's an IDE, so I can use it in the traditional way as well as by yapping with a bunch of agents. Also the Cursor rules I've curated and they do their job well.
Integrates a lot of agents (I use it with OpenRouter and directly with Pi) natively, is fast (you don't realise how laggy VSCode and its forks are).
Biggest disadvantage: lack of extensions. Lots of quality of life missing (e.g. gitignore integration to add/append gitignore files for different languages).
Similar to Cursor, open source, based on open code, compatible with claude code configuration and works with all providers.
Seems quite future proof to me and you can toggle between providers seemlesly
Give the oracle at amp a go :) Our TUI is really nice as well. Get in touch for some credits.
If strike date comes and Cursor is in fact worth less than $60B... they can move to acquire it for that price. Or just let it "expire". And if it's worth more, they get a savage good deal. If the services were worth $8B anyway, it's hard to lose.
It seems less crazy to me through this lens. A straight acquisition, today, at $60B would in fact be crazy.
So for me it’s more of a data deal - Elon buying himself some insight into codebases and real dev usage patterns? Oh finally someone to use his dirty data centres
Add emotional hedges if needed but they are just emotional not financial.
Your argument is based on an assumption that cursor cannot lose value. Even if the market says it has.
No free lunch: an option is a bet for both sides. Zero sum.
This was a similar play for twitter by the same person
While an innovator at the time, today there are a lot of LLM coding solution, sold by model providers, model aggregators even open source ones , it’s not obvious what is being bought that isn’t a feature of vs code or one of the LLM agents ( as the dismissive saying goes )
Downside is capped (cost of services + deal structure), upside is asymmetric if Cursor outperforms.
That said, these deals always hinge on whether the “$8B in services” is real economic value or just internal accounting. If it’s the latter, the risk profile looks very different.
Not happening
I have no idea what this has to do with aerospace, but I know a bit about software and this does not look great. Cursor is obviously on a serious decline and has little to no moat in the area they are building in (IDE), which we kinda now know is maybe not even the right area (CLI). I feel like this is just a bad move?
SpaceX is no longer SpaceX per se, but SpaceX-xAI.
My TL; DR (and this is mine, personally) is its mission has pivoted from colonising Mars to building a Dyson sphere. Space-based datacentres are a demand excuse for putting lots of solar panels in space. Going one level down, more Cursor use is a demand excuse for putting lots of datacentres anywhere.
Those are basically my only requirements, and it feels like I've tried everything and they're all everything only has 1 of those features. Zed is the closest, it technically has those features, they're just buggy and have provider specific quirks.
So I'm stuck on Cursor until Anthropic invents IDE technology, or at least VS Code wrapper technology.
If value is a concern, Codex. It's pretty hard to beat those subsidies. If you really want model freedom, Copilot is surprisingly decent value and as of right now let's you use your sub in other harnesses like OpenCode.
Steal their Twitter usernames anyway, just like he did mine.
They’re buying the customers and the brand.
What you might pay for is market signal + model distribution. Grok needs a story for why enterprises should switch. "The model that powers the tool you already use every day" is a much easier enterprise sales pitch than "our LLM benchmarks slightly better." The $60B is at least partially buying the answer to the question: why should any company bet on xAI?
You should learn about securitizations. It’s actually interesting. But people talk about it colloquially and so incorrectly that it’s mind dumbing.
Here’s a simplified example of how you can take something and turn it into a safe investment:
Suppose you have 10 loans and each has a 50% chance of default. Ignore coupon, and say they are $10 each. Expected value is $50
If you were to put this in a deal and cut it up into tranches, say the first tranche gets the first $10, this would be your AAA bond because odds of getting paid out you $10 would be > 99.9%. The equity (bottom tranches) would pay a lot less. For instance the expected value of the bottom half would be considerably less than $50 that is being promised. So there’s upside since you’ll be paying cents on the dollar and even though in the median scenario you’re making nothing, you have to weight the expected values of each scenario to figure out how to price it.
The problem w this model is that it only works if assets are relatively uncorrelated which wasn’t true (it was true in the past but ignored systematic risk and adverse selection in originations).
What this has to do w musk or spacex I’m still not sure
Now why is this bad? Well, if you invest in a fund that is based off of the indices, you’re going to be investing in SpaceX whether you want to or not and I certainly don’t think 15 days is enough time to sus out whether this is a stable investment worthy of being in the index, but it’ll be great…until it drags a million retirement funds down with it.
Google and others were sitting at the corner, laughing that they gonna burn their money for no reason! they turned out to be wrong.
Turns out offering discounted/subsized tokens to developers massively improves your AI compared to just being a talking parrot for normal user workflow where you do not get "instant feedback" on if it worked or not.
This type of bundling is just what conglomerates do. Is it a good thing? Not really. Many investors also hate this kind of stuff and avoid investing in these types of companies.
I know a ton of people that use Codex, Claude, OpenCode but can't name a single person that uses Cursor or Grok that is knee deep into agentic coding.
This news is very off-putting though. I will definitely not be renewing. I don't want to be associated with Musk in any way.
2. Make SpaceX valuation even higher before IPO
3. Boost XAI/usage of Grok.
I feel like we're finally at a point where you don't have to constantly argue with and constantly babysit coding models, which makes it even more frustrating when you're suddenly forced to deal with one that ignores your instructions and gets stuck in thinking loops again.
I suspect it's the vast troves of training data rather than any tech that Cursor possesses that SpaceX is after...
The problem is they can't compete with Anthropic and OpenAI because they can't sell Opus and GPT at a discount to subscribers like OpenAI and Anthropic do with their subscriptions.
So they either need to build a competing model or slowly die.
But it's clearly not worth 60B dollars in April 2026.
for contrast, Elon paid $44b for twitter back in 2022. When you adjust for inflation, Twitter was acquired for $49b in 2026 money. Cursor getting bought for 1.22x more is just insanity.
Elon seems unwilling to shake off the image that he has basically no idea what he's doing.
More accurately it is 3.4% of SpaceX at the last rumored valuation of $1.75T.
I guess I kinda see it... it makes sense from both points of view (xAI needs data + places to run their models, cursor needs to not be reliant on Anthropic/OpenAI).
I think I don't see it working out... I just don't see an Elon company sustaining a culture that leads to a high-quality AI lab, even with the data + compute.
Tesla's the odd one out: it's public but it's still in there, although Musk would probably prefer it to be private too.
Maybe I was missing something, but I do not understand how it is worth sixty billion dollars.
A sobering thought.
Honestly, it felt much stranger to me to learn, a few years ago, that they're 3D-printing rocket engines. With my experience limited to building my own PLA/ABS 3D printer out of salvaged motors and parts printed on another printer, it was hard to imagine how this is anywhere near safe and precise enough. But turns out, FDM-ing some plastic blobs is not the same as fusing Inconel powder with lasers. Same with using LLMs for software engineering (whether in aerospace culture or otherwise), it's just not the same as asking ChatGPT "please make me an app to do something idk how i cannot code send halp".
They need xAI as a reason for the narrative that data centers will be in space, so SpaceX can project far more growth before the IPO. After the IPO they'll find out that data centers in space are too expensive and overheat.
As far as I know, xAI’s enterprise market share is non-existent. This is their way to get some much needed customers.
When they could instead sign with the new hottest enterprise coding IDE (Claude, Codex, etc who are way more popular now). Maybe if it’s an acquihire, it’s the GTM/Sales that xAI is after?
Since the firing of several Grok founders, Grok has decreased in capabilities. It is illogical and insults users when called out.
So he does what everyone does. Write more dev tools, slap a price on it and hope retail investors will be impressed in the IPO. The $60 billion is of course optional and will just be used in the IPO to inflate the valuation.
Opus, I watch my allotment creep up every turn…
1. It was used to rescue himself and key investors from overpaying for Twitter, which was first rescued through xAI (and I don't know why anyone thought investing in xAI was a good idea but here we are). If our regulators weren't defanged, this deal would've gotten alot more scrutiny (IMHO). Whatever the case, this is all diluting the SpaceX business for overpriced AI vaporware;
2. From what I can find, SpaceX's revenue in 2025 was ~$18B with a $5B loss. That doesn't sound like a $1.5T+ company to me;
3. The markets are being rigged to make the IPO a success by changing the rules to force passive funds to buy into it with a tiny float (5% instead of the normal 25%); and
4. Here's the big one. I think Starship is a badly designed program that's going to take many billions more to complete and commercialize. There's not really a market for bigger payloads (evidence: ~1 Falcony Heavy launch per year) and STarship will effectively have to compete with Falcon 9 at a time when reusable alternatives (eg from the Chinese as well as Blue Origin) are coming to market.
Starship isn’t comparable to Falcon Heavy because it has vastly more volume, which will make it the cheapest way to launch Starlinks, which will be a lot of launches to begin with.
Laugh all you want. He may have the last laugh on this one.
Cursor might not be the new hotness, but if we believe that agentic coding is the next wave and we’ve gone from asking chatbots to actually using agents for coding, then yes, this move makes sense for Elon to hype up a SpaceX IPO.
The “apply” model to turn LLM output into code changes?
I like SpaceX a lot but this really doesn’t make sense at $60B
That isn’t an agreement to buy
80% of those responded (250ish in the group had). Bit of selection bias there from the question - but my impression was Cursor is very much dying to competition from the labs.
Oh yeah, did I mention how Starlink is literally already in the close to Kessler Syndrome territory? all it would need is for a strong enough solar storm to hit their sats.
I guess there's a bunch of tools to not suck at this. Anyone had success here? The AI tools say I'm great because they can't pick up the kind of problems I'm talking about.
This seems like an elaborate Elon rug pull. A Windsurf situation 2.0
Spacex already owns Twitter and xai, trying to post-rationalize with justification like they have servers doesn't make a whole lot of sense. It's all accounting at this point.
Crazy a fork of vscode is worth 60B. What’s vscode worth to Microsoft? 200B?
See also: companies buying up the Slack and email archives of defunct startups, for training data.
This could be a lot of money to spend to acquire users that may not be sticky.
The same "mistake" that SpaceX bought 10% of Tesla CyberTruck?
Wait are they all Musk's companies? Is it a pattern?
/s obviously
If this is an acquihire, it doesn't compute for me (though I can't say I understand how things work in the world of the 60B level). LLMs are new enough that nobody has a big enough headstart to warrant a 60B personnel change.
The IPO angle also doesn't make sense. Musk cultists were gonna buy anyway; this doesn't change that. And for everyone else, who wants to pay down debt on an acquisition whose effect will almost certainly not be palpable in mainstream circles, if at all?
I don't fully understand the influence that comes with SpaceX subsidies and government contracts, but I gotta believe that rounding up non-lab AI chops are on that agenda?
The exact options - 60B for acquisition (obviously not a cash deal, right?) or 10B for unspecified services rendered... also don't make sense for either of the first two.
Is this just a way of the government securing contractors by proxy that wouldn't pass muster if done through the normal channels?
I've personally watched a lot of developers around me (myself included) who were enthusiastic Cursor users when it first launched gradually migrate over to Claude Code and Codex. And I don't think this is just happening in my bubble.
My guess is this is some kind of strategic play ahead of SpaceX's upcoming IPO — an attempt to get a higher valuation stamped on the company. But I'll say it again: $60 billion is absolutely absurd.
DM me if you want an invite. I am keeping it to a small on purpose.
It is good to have more competition in this area.
So there aren’t just 2 big players which also have their ideological flaws.
I associate Musk with being user hostile, unreliable, meme oriented and disruptive in the worst sense; I’d like my work tools without that please.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/spacex-says-it-has-option...
Personally, I have been granted the option to buy Tesla for $30 trillion by the end of this year or pay $500 billion for a partnership. It'll all happen, I swear.
It is a complete rip off of someone else’s work vs code and is literally no better than copilot.
Makes me mad it’s even allowed to be a commercial company ripping off vs code.
It is a completely idiotic purchase. Literally one person could recreate the entire IDE themselves… like it’s so easy to make.
And there’s no brand loyalty to it because people want the best llm they don’t care about the little plugin so no moat
these are weird times...
A rocket company buying a so so overvalued coding AI company is a joke even worse than the 2000s internet pet food companies were
Guess SpaceX is the only one with the money “available”.
SpaceX, a rocket company owned by Elon Musk bought xAI, an AI company also owned by Elon Musk for... reasons. Don't give me the datacenters in space narrative, we all know it is bullshit.
It is then buying the option to buy a company for which the only contribution is a glorified VSCode plugin and the reselling of other companies LLM services at an absurd price. I understand that it is more complicated than that but 60 fucking billions, that's the GDP of a small country!
And now, Elon Musk intends to IPO SpaceX, which means he expect people to buy into all this bullshit. And considering that unlike me and judging by his wealth, he seems to be really good at understanding the market, so he is likely to be right.
shows how intense the power laws are around ai and how much of a capital game it is.
wat
Wait... dude just use openclaw.
Like, 3 months ago: ok maybe....
But dear... just use openclaw.
I guess back to Jetbrains it is.
"Please estimate Elon's IQ based on his timeline"
It estimated 115-130. A decision like this points to the lower end.
