So SpaceX bought a $60B Option on Cursor, plus a bunch of services, for $10B.
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.
Is this cash or compute? Elon has one of the world's biggest compute clusters spun up, and little inference demand to speak of.
Trading billions worth of idle compute, in exchange for a high-strike call option on the #3 player in the most-promising-vertical for AI, plus (presmuably) some access to their data, starts to sound like not a bad trade. Especially if you're pre-committed to betting your entire rocket company on winning in AI, and you're currently in sixth or seventh place.
I heard he made a deal with a company to use his clusters. Is there good data on demand for Grok? Seems like relatively little chatter at least, in spite of tremendous investment.
Grok is among online pedophiles' most favored image generators because it so freely produces CSAM.
Their own public discussions reflect this. You can see as much any day on 4chan. (If you look in on them, be smart like me and do it in a browser that has image loading turned off.)
Some day, the public record will likewise reflect X PMs' (currently presumptive) efforts to suppress internal concerns about this, from line workers who would rather sleep at night than make money by enabling child molesters. (But not so much rather as to quit, of course. Who would ever walk away from Omelas? Why, that would be really unhinged behavior! Do you have any drooz? Just thinking about...that...)
Tech sociopaths love writing everything down as much as Nazis did in the forties. Just like them, your own words will hang you. Notion can't even protect your PII! You think they can fight a subpoena? - that they would try, for you? So that documentary evidence I just talked about will come out, and when it does it will help establish both mens rea - that you know you are committing a crime - and premeditation. Please respond to this warning by attempting to scrub such records! That will further show you know at this time that what you are doing is both wrong and illegal. It will add years to your sentence!
But of course Elon - famously loyal to his people, and definitely never beat up and punched in his dumb fucking eye by his ex-boss His Excellency - will place no limit on the resources he'll expend to protect you, and when that fails he'll make sure you never want for a thing in your commissary. Right? Right?
I get what you're saying, but it's unlikely anyone is going to be prosecuted for allowing these images when there is evidence the sitting president is a child molester and nobody is going after him legally.
Problem is basically, that if the option works out (Cursor truly has the talent to train a frontier model on SpaceX's infrastructure, and were simply lacking the infra before) the fair price would be way way more than $60B.
OpenAI tried to acquire Windsurf last year for $3B and couldn't.
1) A gamble based on cursor's compute constraint
2) if 1) plays out, he can purchase cursor via shares of spaceX over valued shares, at a fixed price should the valuation increase.
This is a bit simplistic. It's the VS Code that everyone used before cc came to town. Real devs, on real projects. All that data they collected is worth a lot more than "just vscode". Their composer2 is better than kimi2.5 and it's just a finetune on that data.
xAI had a decent model in grok4 (it was even sota on a bunch of benchmarks for a few weeks), but they didn't have great coding models (code-fast was ok-ish but nothing to write home about, certainly nowhere near SotA). Now that they've been banned from using claude, they'll get their expertise + data to build a coding model on top of whatever grok5 will be + their cluster for compute.
It doesn't sound like a bad plan to me, financial shenanigans or not.
Not quite first party, but composer 2 is far superior to grok for coding. Unless you're eluding to them using SpaceX infra to train their own model vs. using grok
But they also get a whole bunch of AI Services from Cursor. Other comments have noted that xAI has fallen on bad times (idk one way or the other) so perhaps they were going to spend $5B on getting these services elsewhere, anyway.
SpaceX spending $1B a month on various AI services seems ~plausible
(EDIT - Or maybe it's an IP transfer, or maybe it's over a longer time horizon. Idk but SpaceX clearly expects value from 'our work together' even if they don't exercise.)
$1B per month on AI services does not seem remotely plausible to me... Engineers don't consume that many tokens...
And on the AI development side they're the ones providing compute in the form of a "million H100 equivalent Colossus training supercomputer"... On top of the cash.
Cursor has no AI services, they do not develop their own frontier models. I see no reason to understand why $10bn for Cursor's services is an advantage xAI versus say a $10bn deal with Anthropic, OpenAI or Google.
It's true that Cursor doesn't have their own frontier models, but they are training their own models. They just aren't at frontier level yet. The $60B/$10B deal looks like a bet that this is a capital/GPU constraint rather than a capability one.
Not only is it almost certainly compute (“services”) it’s likely priced at Anthropic rack-rate, or at least what Cursor’s been paying Anthropic.
The cluster’s already paid for, so likely in the $2B range for operating cash needs. Not more than $5.
If I imagine bringing in Cursor’s team to build a frontier model, ideally combined with Grok, which has one of the few truly proprietary data feeds available to it, and with a much larger custom model Cursor can solidify a place, and I get to do a stock swap to buy it, this sounds like a bet worth making.
Upshot - I bet there’s an MS/oAI deal on IP on the back of this; meanwhile the cluster goes brrr.
This valuation is absurd. Perhaps a year ago- sure, but there have been so many iterations of this “kind of editor” since then, not to mention countless alternatives.
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
Despite their impressive ARR, Cursor faces existential threat from not only BigLabs (Claude Code, Open AI Codex) but also BigTech (AWS Kiro, Google Antigravity, MS VSCode). I am sure the usual suspects would have lined up to purchase Cursor, and the deal from xAI was probably the best of the lot. Marks an end to a remarkable sprint for a 3yo company, and an admirable exit (considering the recent discombobulation of Windsurf's), just as investor money and/or hype is going belly up.
Having tried most (all?) of the commercially available + open source options, and even tangential competitors like CC, Conductor, Antimetal, etc. I haven't found anything that's close to the experience of Cursor. The harness they've built is incredible.
I'd even go so far as to say that any competitors that are direct (windsurf, kiro, etc.) aren't even in the same universe. Cursor is just so much better, faster, has better features (plan and debug mode), and squeezes much better results/code out of the same models. They absolutely have some secrete sauce that the other options just don't have.
It has shown surprising stickiness. Occupying some middle ground between full adoption and still ~in the code.
I am starting to see some potential in moving back away from pure terminal, a mixed modality with AI. But it is not in the direction of IDE in any traditional sense.
I guess the hope is that combining two sub-par coding models (xAI's grok + cursor's composer) and combining the data they have access to, they can build something that can compete with OpenAI / Anthropic in the coding space...
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.
I'm going to be brutally honest but I have not found Kimi to be useful at all. It simply cannot compete with what closed models from Codex and Claude offers. I don't want to risk using a model outside the ecosystem and introduce variables as most of my workflow is baked into two to three large company models.
I was required to use Cursor for my job when I first started, but once I figured out how to use the command line version of Codex, I kind of stopped seeing the point. It just kind of seemed like a bloated, overpriced wrapper around what I could do with the included ChatGPT membership I already had for work.
Maybe I was missing something, but I do not understand how it is worth sixty billion dollars.
and I'm being completely neutral and objective in saying this: Elon Musk has been a horrible capital allocator but great at financial engineering. X is still struggling to win back advertisers (they will never come back) and still in the red. I have little reason to believe this is also another careful and shrewd financial decision.
He spun that story into "he was saving democracy" so it sounds like he paid for that reason. He will do the same here, he never does a wrong move you just can't see the 76D chess.
I do think the Codex harness is a bit better than others.
Doesn't make a ton of difference with OpenAI models, but with Google and Anthropic models the difference is quite noticeable I think.
Is anybody using Grok or Cursor still? I've not used Cursor since the summer of 2025 and I've never bothered with Grok for coding. Hell, I've used Windsurf briefly for a few months.
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.
Our company (~25 engineers) uses it across the entire engineering and product orgs, and yes we are quite deep into agentic coding. We use their cloud agents for a lot of things, e.g. automated investigations of alarms, handling most customer support issues that end up hitting engineering, pre-processsing linear tickets before humans triage them, bugbot for PR reviewed with learned knowledge. Although recently they have felt like they are pulling the rug out on our legacy plan, so we may end up switching.
Guess I'll be looking for a replacement for Cursor now...
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.
Yep this was the moment to finally remember to cancel my cursor subscription. I find it unconscionable to do business with someone who would do business with Elon.
Consider Nimbalyst, its a free visual workspace for Claude Code and Codex that has visual editing of markdown, mockups, diagrams, code with your agents with WYSYWIG diffs as well as task management and kanban session management tied into your agents. Its got a files/plan/editing mode and an agent/sessions mode.
Anyone saying this is an aquahire has it backwards. SpaceX is acquiring Cursor’s customers, all those enterprises including NVIDIA itself. I believe Jenson Huang is on the record about the engineers using Cursor everyday.
As far as I know, xAI’s enterprise market share is non-existent. This is their way to get some much needed customers.
NVIDIA has 42,000 employees. Even still, when their deal with Cursor comes to an end do we really expect them to stay loyal? And further, sign on with xAI?
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?
I just want to make the observation that this whole SpaceX IPO is turning out entirely unlike the CDOs that led to the 2008 financial crisis. There's no mixing of AAA level assets with a bunch of subprime stuff and then getting someone to buy it all as AAA. Not at all similar. Completely different. Will turn out just fine this time.
The assets weren’t AAA, you’re mixing it up a bond concepts. The deal had bonds that were AAA. And if you’re talking about CDOs then the assets were bonds which were usually BBB or similarly cuspy bonds.
You should learn about securitizations. It’s actually interesting. But people talk about it colloquially and so incorrectly that it’s mind dumbing.
Here’s a simplified example of how you can take something and turn it into a safe investment:
Suppose you have 10 loans and each has a 50% chance of default. Ignore coupon, and say they are $10 each. Expected value is $50
If you were to put this in a deal and cut it up into tranches, say the first tranche gets the first $10, this would be your AAA bond because odds of getting paid out you $10 would be > 99.9%. The equity (bottom tranches) would pay a lot less. For instance the expected value of the bottom half would be considerably less than $50 that is being promised. So there’s upside since you’ll be paying cents on the dollar and even though in the median scenario you’re making nothing, you have to weight the expected values of each scenario to figure out how to price it.
The problem w this model is that it only works if assets are relatively uncorrelated which wasn’t true (it was true in the past but ignored systematic risk and adverse selection in originations).
What this has to do w musk or spacex I’m still not sure
What you've described is how the base level mortgage-backed securities (MBSs) work. The tranches work because there actually exist mortgages that are at lower default risk (high home equity, well qualified borrowers, etc.), and the senior tranches are effective in capturing their underlying safety. What CDOs did was to take the lower, riskier tranches of MBSs from various sources and repackage them and divided them into tranches again. Then they got the ratings agencies to rate the top tranches of the CDOs as AAA as well. It's as if a teacher graded several classes and then took everyone that got a C or below from all the classes and then graded them on a curve again. And suddenly a lot of the C students became A students. It was outright financial insanity. Well, mixing a rocket/satellite company with a couple of also-ran AI outfits and the walking corpse of Twitter, and then calling the whole thing SpaceX and valued at $1.75T is a similarly level of financial insanity to me.
> The problem w this model is that it only works if assets are relatively uncorrelated (it was true in the past but ignored systematic risk and adverse selection in originations). What this has to do w musk or spacex I’m still not sure
What this has to do with with SpaceX is that there's the same blatant disregard for sound financial analysis by the very institutions that were/are supposed to know better. The NASDAQ 100 fast track decision is a similar level of financial malpractice as the ratings agencies slapping AAA on things that they knew were little better than junk. The abuses of the subprime mortgage originators were well known long before the actual meltdown. As were those systemic risks you spoke of. They were ignored by those whose entire job it was to not ignore them, and they sold out their credibility for a quick buck. If you can't see the similarities to the present situation then I can only wish you luck.
It is adversely selected, but it's not debt, it's equity, so price action can go real fast and nobody will be burned except folks who soberly-or-not opted into this. Everyone _knows_ Elon is the way he is, so nobody will be _surprised_ at things. No surprise, no crisis.
They're going to force a S&P500 index listing on IPO day so we're all going to be forced to baghold this regardless of if we want to or not unless you've got $0 in any major retirement fund.
So far only Nasdaq has changed its rules and will allow fast entry in 15 trading days. S&P has not changed its rules, not yet at least. Total indexed capital of Nasdaq is 1.4T vs 16T in the S&P500. Stated reason for fast tracking is that the indices are supposed to be a broad representation of the market, and leaving a 2T company out would be a significant tracking error.
I do agree that the optics of this aren’t great, and it’s rather easy to be cynical about motives.
I did a bit of research on this some time ago and it's not as bad as I originally thought. Index funds would need to count only liquid float of the company. So if Space X total valuation is 2 trillion, but float is 5%, then they need to count it as 100 billion for the purposes of index weight. Still more than I want, but not catastrophic.
You gotta do what you think is best, but I hope for future you's sake you decide to not pull the money out. Or if you do you have other retirement plans.
I'm trying to help my parents now their at retirement age and am seeing first hand what not planning for your future looks like. They hit retirement with nothing but a small social security check every month. Not even enough to cover rent in most places.
I don't know how much you have in your 401k, but it will be worth literally hundreds of thousands more if you pull it out when you retire. You aren't just paying the penalties now, you're paying for potentially decades of compounding.
You could just buy deep out of money SP500 puts expiring in 1+ year. That way you would be "insured" against the bubble popping.
The thing is, every dollar you spend on insurance is a dollar (and its interest) you lose. Furthermore, we don't know when it will pop. 1 year? 5 years?
The more reasonable solution is probably gradually reduce exposure to US markets by selling SP500 shares and turning to Europe and emerging markets ETFs. No need to cash out 401k.
If you just look at the past 20 years, the US has had exceptional returns compared to the rest of the world.
The thing is, historically, high PE ratios like what we're seeing in the US do not correlate with short term returns that are as high. Expected future returns decrease as the PE ratios go up in a pretty linear fashion.
Why 20 years? Just because we know, post hoc, the usa outperformed other places in the last 20 years, in no way means the next 20 years will be the same.
If you want a different point to backtest from, try Japan in the 80s and early 90s
I'm not an expert but it looks to my like 80% of my allocation won't be tracking spacex, because it's mid cap or small cap etc, and the 20% that's in the vanguard growth index might? I assume whoever sets the rules for the fund could change the rules to say companies must be listed for X months if they want to avoid this, right?
And I can change my allocation.
edit: Actually wait, isn't it only nasdaq 100 that's tracking it early, after 15 days rather than 3 months of trading? So 0% of my 401k is exposed to buying it quickly after IPO already, I think.
The question is, is everyone integrating a special SpaceX correction in their algorithmic trading? Because if a dip in the index due to SpaceX causes old algorithms to think it’s a more structural issue (well, more than it is), and sell on that indicator, will that cause a cascade?
If your retirement fund is an IRA you can invest it in any stock you want. For a 401k you probably have some fund options that are not exposed to the S&P500, like emerging markets or fixed income
Maybe this already exists, but it would be great if one of the major index ETFs omitted all the firms with problematic board governance like there is at Tesla, SpaceX.
S&P500 had a rule from 2017 to 2023 that prevented companies with dual classes of shares (the sort that allow them to maintain founder control- like what GOOG and META did) that went public after the rule was instituted from ever being in the index. To be clear, META and GOOG were both in the index, but it was to prevent new companies from coming along and doing it. (I think it was related to SNAP going public?)
They removed it largely because investors wanted higher returns, and the tech companies that had such dual classes (1) were doing really well, and the S&P ended up caving on that rule.
1: Perennial hot button around here Palantir did this in a more extreme fashion than most. The three founders F class shares will always be at 49.9999% of the votes and the early investors B class shares have 10 votes each as compared to the publicly traded A class shares 1 votes.
401k rollovers into IRA aren't that hard these days and you could always use that IRA to have a more customized strategy, more specifically direct indexing of a major fund minus key ticker symbols you don't want exposure to. Of course, that all presumes that you won't regret excluding this long term.
Friendly reminder that SpaceX is going straight to the index—Elon agitated for it. The 401k of everybody in America is serving as a bailout fund for X and now cursor, and whatever other trash he hovers up
> Nasdaq was the first to consider a rule change that would grant mega IPOs like SpaceX early admission to its flagship Nasdaq-100 index. The exchange and index provider began a consultation period in February to assess the viability of and industry response to a proposed “fast entry” rule. The change was approved on March 30 and will be effective on May 1.
It’s also worth noting that Musk helped successfully lobby the NASDAQ to implement a “fast entry” rule which takes effect at the beginning of May, suspiciously convenient timing for a SpaceX IPO, so much so that I believe it has been derisively called the “SpaceX Rule”. It allows mega-cap IPOs like SpaceX to join the Nasdaq-100 index in just 15 trading days.
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.
Ug wants to borrow ten of my best sticks in exchange for future options to buy berries from his friend Og. Og has a watertight deal with Oog to invest the sticks in a five year mammoth hunting expedition but Oog first needs berries to exchange for sticks to cover his exposure on berry-puts he’s take out against Urrrg’s remortgaged stick pile.
Well, I said no. Not getting burned that way again!
it's just codex and anthropic rapidly improved their AI when they opened themselves to Developer workflows.
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.
Well, there are some very important differences. 1) It’s super well known what’s going on with SpaceX. Every investor should know that there’s a lot of good stuff along with some steaming hot garbage. 2) SpaceX isn’t systemic to the economy. If SpaceX and all its subsidiaries shut down and its investors got nothing back, it wouldn’t be that big of a deal.
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.
On point #2, they are trying to do that right now. If spacex is fast tracked into the indices, passive investors via index funds will be forced into buying.
Wow, we are seeing the dark underbelly of the beast here. Nobody talks about cursor anymore for a reason. Look, I'm not saying it's not useful and discounting anyone getting value out of it...
But it's clearly not worth 60B dollars in April 2026.
Yep. there's absolutely no way that Cursor is worth that much.
for contrast, Elon paid $44b for twitter back in 2022.
When you adjust for inflation, Twitter was acquired for $49b in 2026 money. Cursor getting bought for 1.22x more is just insanity.
Elon seems unwilling to shake off the image that he has basically no idea what he's doing.
> Nikita Bier @nikitabier
>
> If you’re seeing a bunch of Japanese posts, here are some fun facts:
> Japan has more daily active users and more time spent on X than any other country in the world.
> Over two thirds of the country is monthly active on X.
> X in Japan has one of the highest penetration rates of any social network in history.
I wouldn't be so sure when "any other country except US" usually apply to everything on the Internet, except Twitter after the power transfer
No. JP activity was always second to US, only the biggest "out there". Same is true for all Twitter-like social media, such as Mastodon and Bluesky. Even VRChat doesn't have a majority Japanese userbase. Japan actually becoming the top majority anywhere is an anomaly and a major reversal of power balance.
Google Plus? I wouldn't be sure if that was a strategic blunder or if they were seeing something us in the public didn't. I remember it was more popular among not-so-tech savvy male of parental to retirement ages, which are still masses but not the sweet spot in terms of demographics. Besides they have YouTube and its comment section full of kids, which is the sweet spot.
Elon Musk, the richest person on the planet, with multiple industry-changing companies built under his leadership, clearly has no idea what he's doing.
This is actually an amazing sweetheart deal for Cursor. Many times with these high profile acquisitions, most stock is tied to LPA's and employment at the company, and also earnout provisions. The company then finds a way to parachute them out early, which both voids the earnout and their employment, thus they never vest most of the units and the few units they do vest get bought out at 409A valuations which are typically much, much lower.
In the case of Cursor this is an amazing boon as SpaceX listed at an almost 100x multiple which is absolutely staggering. Had SpaceX stayed private they could have 409a'd Cursor and got it for effectively ~100M$ cash.
Just because it's not discussed much on HN does not imply it is not relevant in the broader space. Cursor is still very much prevalent there with 1 mil DAU.
I’m curious if that 1 million DAU still holds as of today. I think it was reported last year some time aka before December when Claude code exploded. A quick google didn’t turn up any results that actually contained sources for the number.
Every time Musk does anything these days, it further reveals the shell game he's playing with his companies. This is going to be an Enron type of story eventually. I truly wish I had a choice to pull my tax money out of this particular subsidy.
Enron was absolute peanuts compared to the financial fraud Musk has been executing (with the apparent blessing of the SEC). At its peak Enron had a roughly $70B market cap, TSLA is currently sitting at $1.74T. We can expect similar numbers from the SpaceX IPO.
It's hard to compare these numbers directly since valuations have increased quite a bit since a quarter century ago. As a proportion of the S&P 500, Tesla (2.3%) is about 4x of Enron at that $70b (0.6%).
SpaceX is _not_ profitable by most reasonable measurements of accounting. If you discount rocket depreciation costs and R&D, then yeah its profitable from starlink revenue.
The entire space launch market is about $20B with multiple competitors in 2025. And by the most generous estimates it is going to be $80B by 2035. They can reuse the rockets as much as they like, the company isn’t worth $1.7T.
Yes because outside Starlink and govt contracts, there isn’t that massive of a demand growth in the sector. There a limit to how many satellites can be in orbit at a time and land based telecom infrastructure makes it so that satellite based infra isn’t necessary unless you’re in remote areas.
You’re comparing a publicly traded company where the supply demand economics have established a price to a company whose financials are not public, and is valuing itself at $1.7T and forcing everyone’s 401Ks and pension funds to fund it. Not the same thing.
> Isn’t the company worth exactly as much as people are willing to pay for its shares?
Really? We're still making claims like this in the year of our Lord 2026? People in the markets today are not predicting the real value of a company, they're gambling that the various political and financial machinations from people like Elon Musk will increase the share price enough that they can sell at a profit. The value of shares like Tesla are utterly disconnected from the value of the underlying business.
They are low earth orbit satellites. Generally, the lower the orbit, the faster they decay. You could also argue that this is a benefit in that they gain updated technology with each replacement.
> You could also argue that this is a benefit in that they gain updated technology with each replacement.
No, having the option to replace technology at your leisure would be a benefit. Being forced to replace your technology because it's destined to become aerosolized aluminum in less than five years is a detriment.
If underwriters think it’s worth $1.7T with a $16B revenue (not profit), they’re doing the same thing as the credit agencies did in 2008 by giving underwater mortgage backed securities a AAA rating.
If roadshows guaranteed accurate valuations, pets.com wouldn’t liquidate within a year of IPO.
Again, not debating that SpaceX isn’t a legit company or that it’s profitable. But underwriters agreeing with high valuations to stocks that collapse once they go public isn’t unheard of.
Edit: and I will concede that I should’ve phrased my initial thoughts better. Credit rating agencies and underwriters do very separate things, just like IPOs and MBS are two very separate things.
You said: "underwriters ... doing the same thing as the credit agencies did in 2008 by giving underwater mortgage backed securities a AAA rating"
That isn't what is happening at all.
In an IPO the underwriters and the company collaborate to set the price based on approximate demand and what they want the quality of the holders to look like.
In the roadshow, the company is very constrained as to what they can say or disclose outside of the scope of the S-1. They can't include MNPI, forward looking financial projections, etc. Underwriters are also prohibited from sharing MNPI, or publishing marketing disguised as research.
So I guess if you're saying the SpaceX S-1 is completely full of shit and there's hidden risk in it, than it could be similar to 2008, but in this case nobody is manufacturing a rating, and those material misrepresentations would constitute securities fraud. Investment banks and ratings agencies aren't the same thing at all, and the buyers of marginally profitable IPO stocks are (hopefully) different than those of AAA MBS.
Yes. I updated my earlier comment and I concede I should’ve worded my earlier comment better.
I agree underwriters and credit agencies are very different just like IPOs and MBS are very different. I don’t think SpaceX is committing fraud.
> That’s just money in the door and the underwriters that seem to think the business is worth $1.75T.
I was responding to this particular comment.
In 2008, the credit rating agencies weren’t necessarily found to be guilty of wrongdoing, but a variety of reasons let them roll with AAA ratings on junk MBS anyway. Similarly the underwriters are not going to be committing crimes to facilitate IPOs. They are after all taking the risk of guaranteeing the sale for the company. However, if a company wants to roll with a high valuation, even if the fundamentals aren’t matching the valuation, if there are buyers, the underwriters will set the price supporting that high valuation. They are not incentivized to accurately measure a company’s worth like the comment I was responding to suggests.
the ability to mine the moon or asteroid belt seems extremely lucrative, the logistics of transporting materials to earth costs less than shipping them across the ocean, an astounding level of value creation.
Shipping on water has been, by far, the cheapest mode of long-distance shipping since the moment boats were invented. That is to say, since thousands of years before boats were ever powered by the shit that destroys our lungs.
It is valuable if they can find the right rocks and bring them back. A platinum group metal asteroid would be of immense value, at least the first one anyways. After that who knows, they might super saturate the global market for decades.
It is less about profitability and more about dilution of ownership. He seems to have a pattern of diluting the ownership of his profitable companies by folding in his less profitable/failed companies. You still own a share of a profitable company, but a smaller share, to his benefit.
just because a bunch of rockets went up without blowing up, does not mean they are profitable. it cost money to shot rocket, and it is very expensive, reusable or not. most launches are internal launch without external paying customers.
How much of that profit was due to public subsidies of the sort that he killed for other companies but not for himself during his tenure as a special government employee?
> Their market share of EVs in the US went from 40.9% in Q3 2025 to 58.9% in Q4 2025.
You’re not wrong factually, but it doesn’t mean what you’re suggesting it means. Their share went up because EVs aren’t selling as much anymore. All companies including Tesla are selling fewer EVs. They just have a bigger share of the smaller pie, which isn’t exactly a success when you only sell EVs, but your competitors also sell non EVs.
I'm aware of the reason. Their market share is, nonetheless, up. That's still good for Tesla, their sales remained constant while people stopped buying other EVs.
Edit: Constant is the wrong word. Resilient or consistent is what I was trying to say.
Competitors leaving the market means less competition which is a good thing for Tesla. If the market for EVs returns in the future (if, say, the next administration reimplements the incentives), Tesla will be there to reap the benefits.
Nobody is forced to buy shares of any company. Even automatic 401k investment plans let you specify what to buy if you so choose. Perhaps you could make the argument Elon makes false promises to boost the stock price, but at the end of the day, individual investors must decide what they believe in no matter the CEO's antics.
Matt Levine writes a bit about this - the Elon Musk Mars Conglomerate. And really if you're investing into e.g. SpaceX you're not investing into SpaceX you're investing into the Elon Musk Mars Conglomerate. And most people seem to want that.
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.
Did you follow Tesla's published instructions on how to use it (https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/modely/en_us/GUID-2CB6080...)? You're explicitly forbidden, for example, from assuming that it's going to make the right decision at intersections; you must manually inspect each intersection and evaluate whether it's "safe and/or appropriate" to continue. You're also not allowed to look away from the road or use your phone. YMMV, but to me that level of required attention doesn't match the term "self-driving".
What I see a lot of people do, unfortunately, is reconcile this contradiction by not following the published limitations of the "Full Self-Driving (Supervised)" product. They assume that Elon Musk wouldn't call it that if it couldn't be trusted to do what they expect. Then they get into fatal crashes, and someone sues, and Tesla argues that they can't be held accountable for bad drivers who don't follow the rules.
Your definition of Tesla's self-driving product is very different than what Tesla itself promised, and that's what the person you are replying to...is telling you as well.
I don't think L4 autonomy is a pipe dream. Indeed, it exists today and is widely available in the same city you drove your Tesla in. I think it's a pipe dream for Tesla specifically to achieve it, because for bizarre and idiosyncratic reasons Elon Musk won't let them use LiDAR or mount a roof sensor. They've been stuck at L2 for a decade now, and I don't see much reason to think that making that system incrementally more reliable will ever "unlock" L4.
Tesla is the free cashflow play that is probably the most important for mars as there is no distilled fermented dinosaur juice on mars, but considerably more by ratio of lithium / oil than the Earth. Our flintstone fire mobiles won’t work so well there, and battery / solar will be important there for everything, including mobility and armies of slave robots.
Mars gets less sunlight on a good day for solar power; the inverse cube law really hits you harder than you'd think. And that's before accounting for the planet wide dust storms that can last for months.
We're probably looking at nuclear fission generators to get started, then converting to geothermal at any appreciable (and maybe fusion, inshallah).
This is a classic Elon move. He bundled up his company that is, shall we say, crap, into his most valuable company, then tried to hype it up as much as he could. Like when he promised Tesla cars would self drive in X years but it never happened, then pivoted to AI/robots, then re-routed Tesla’s GPUs to xAI, etc.
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.
You can hate Elon or just be misguided about deals in general. This is brilliant. He’s buying revenue and, on the thesis of scaling agentic knowledge work replacement, a user of his GPU clusters and ultimately GPUs in space. A $60B option is a premium on their revenue - but it may look cheap if he accelerates their coding models. For Cursor, they get what’s nearly impossible to come by - real capacity guarantees and de-risking their reliance on Anthropic or OpenAI.
Laugh all you want. He may have the last laugh on this one.
This is the right partnership to happen. SpaceX has all the compute but is missing the talent for training LLMs, especially on the RL side. Cursor has the talent and RL stack, but doesn't have their own pretrained base model or own their compute. Both will be on a bad trajectory without cooperating because Claude Code and Codex have gained so much momentum already.
I guess it makes more sense than shoe brands pivoting to GPU provider.
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.
It looks like this is just an "option" to acquire Cursor at that price? Implying they only plan to exercise the option under certain conditions (such as, one might presume, Cursor actually being worth that much. As right now it definitely isn't.)
I really don't think Cursor is going to be acquired for $60 billion. That price is absolutely absurd. I agree their harness is excellent, but it's hard to argue they have an overwhelming competitive advantage over rivals like Claude Code and Codex, or open-source alternatives like OpenCode. What's left then is Cursor's data, talent, and user base — but even accounting for all of that, the price is still ridiculous.
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.
You sour pusses are wrong. This is a smart move that amplifies a brilliant team from cursor with serious compute, raising the odds Elon can get to the frontier, which is worth so much these numbers will all look like a drop in the bucket.
You sour pusses are wrong. This is a smart move. Cursor has a brilliant, capable team with serious model chops who will be able to boost the odds of AGI success. They also come with a revenue generating machine.
my only gripe rn is grok is still a shitty model to use. yeh it scores nearby openai and anthropic on benchmarks, but my personal experience has been underwhelming
ITT: The same geniuses that predicted with certainty X will fail are also predicting, with much less certainty, that "Oh God, let this be the end of Musk"
I am so actually beyond sad that I ever trusted Musk, all the signs were there, from the lies with Tesla to the nonesensical point to point "tourist" lies, to the Mars lies, to the fact that the spaceship they are developing right now requires an actual elevator to get astronauts down, it was never meant for humans, it was meant to deploy sats in space even cheaper, outcompete the competition and basically kill human spaceflight as a result... because less profitable human rated spacecraft won't be viable.
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.
Gross. We need more anti trust enforcement. Large incumbents killing all competition will make us weaker over time.
So SpaceX bought a $60B Option on Cursor, plus a bunch of services, for $10B.
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.
Paying $10B for the option is also crazy though. Paying $10B for the thing outright and not just an option would be absurdly high.
Is this cash or compute? Elon has one of the world's biggest compute clusters spun up, and little inference demand to speak of.
Trading billions worth of idle compute, in exchange for a high-strike call option on the #3 player in the most-promising-vertical for AI, plus (presmuably) some access to their data, starts to sound like not a bad trade. Especially if you're pre-committed to betting your entire rocket company on winning in AI, and you're currently in sixth or seventh place.
> you're pre-committed to betting your entire rocket company on winning in AI
SpaceX has invested a small amount as a share of its value in XAI, and could survive the loss of its investment.
If it's not in an 8K filing it isn't real.
I heard he made a deal with a company to use his clusters. Is there good data on demand for Grok? Seems like relatively little chatter at least, in spite of tremendous investment.
Grok is among online pedophiles' most favored image generators because it so freely produces CSAM.
Their own public discussions reflect this. You can see as much any day on 4chan. (If you look in on them, be smart like me and do it in a browser that has image loading turned off.)
Some day, the public record will likewise reflect X PMs' (currently presumptive) efforts to suppress internal concerns about this, from line workers who would rather sleep at night than make money by enabling child molesters. (But not so much rather as to quit, of course. Who would ever walk away from Omelas? Why, that would be really unhinged behavior! Do you have any drooz? Just thinking about...that...)
Tech sociopaths love writing everything down as much as Nazis did in the forties. Just like them, your own words will hang you. Notion can't even protect your PII! You think they can fight a subpoena? - that they would try, for you? So that documentary evidence I just talked about will come out, and when it does it will help establish both mens rea - that you know you are committing a crime - and premeditation. Please respond to this warning by attempting to scrub such records! That will further show you know at this time that what you are doing is both wrong and illegal. It will add years to your sentence!
But of course Elon - famously loyal to his people, and definitely never beat up and punched in his dumb fucking eye by his ex-boss His Excellency - will place no limit on the resources he'll expend to protect you, and when that fails he'll make sure you never want for a thing in your commissary. Right? Right?
I get what you're saying, but it's unlikely anyone is going to be prosecuted for allowing these images when there is evidence the sitting president is a child molester and nobody is going after him legally.
Problem is basically, that if the option works out (Cursor truly has the talent to train a frontier model on SpaceX's infrastructure, and were simply lacking the infra before) the fair price would be way way more than $60B.
OpenAI tried to acquire Windsurf last year for $3B and couldn't.
Seems like Elon's move is two fold
1) A gamble based on cursor's compute constraint 2) if 1) plays out, he can purchase cursor via shares of spaceX over valued shares, at a fixed price should the valuation increase.
It reportedly has a $2B ARR, and a 5x multiplier doesn't seem insane to me, but who knows, honestly
But it's paying a 5x ARR multiplier for the right to buy at a 30x multiplier.
They have 2B ARR because their business model is about selling models cheaper than they cost.
The main frenzy with Cursor started when you could access Anthropic models practically for free.
Otherwise it is just VS Code.
> Otherwise it is just VS Code.
This is a bit simplistic. It's the VS Code that everyone used before cc came to town. Real devs, on real projects. All that data they collected is worth a lot more than "just vscode". Their composer2 is better than kimi2.5 and it's just a finetune on that data.
xAI had a decent model in grok4 (it was even sota on a bunch of benchmarks for a few weeks), but they didn't have great coding models (code-fast was ok-ish but nothing to write home about, certainly nowhere near SotA). Now that they've been banned from using claude, they'll get their expertise + data to build a coding model on top of whatever grok5 will be + their cluster for compute.
It doesn't sound like a bad plan to me, financial shenanigans or not.
xAI needs a dev tool to compete with Codex and Claude Code.
Cursor needs their own 1st party backend model.
Sounds like a match made in heaven.
Not quite first party, but composer 2 is far superior to grok for coding. Unless you're eluding to them using SpaceX infra to train their own model vs. using grok
2B ARR at what cost base?
But they also get a whole bunch of AI Services from Cursor. Other comments have noted that xAI has fallen on bad times (idk one way or the other) so perhaps they were going to spend $5B on getting these services elsewhere, anyway.
SpaceX spending $1B a month on various AI services seems ~plausible
(EDIT - Or maybe it's an IP transfer, or maybe it's over a longer time horizon. Idk but SpaceX clearly expects value from 'our work together' even if they don't exercise.)
$1B per month on AI services does not seem remotely plausible to me... Engineers don't consume that many tokens...
And on the AI development side they're the ones providing compute in the form of a "million H100 equivalent Colossus training supercomputer"... On top of the cash.
Cursor has no AI services, they do not develop their own frontier models. I see no reason to understand why $10bn for Cursor's services is an advantage xAI versus say a $10bn deal with Anthropic, OpenAI or Google.
It's true that Cursor doesn't have their own frontier models, but they are training their own models. They just aren't at frontier level yet. The $60B/$10B deal looks like a bet that this is a capital/GPU constraint rather than a capability one.
Those other companies wouldn't also toss in a purchase option.
But I agree that it's hard to articulate what Cursor services you could blow this much money on.
Maybe it is all just an option! Or maybe they get a bunch of IP either way?
Plausible how? Explain please.
Tokens. Tokens spawning sub agents using more tokens. Maybe some training too.
I didn't say it was Wise.
I said it seems within possibility for this, very particular, corporation.
Not only is it almost certainly compute (“services”) it’s likely priced at Anthropic rack-rate, or at least what Cursor’s been paying Anthropic.
The cluster’s already paid for, so likely in the $2B range for operating cash needs. Not more than $5.
If I imagine bringing in Cursor’s team to build a frontier model, ideally combined with Grok, which has one of the few truly proprietary data feeds available to it, and with a much larger custom model Cursor can solidify a place, and I get to do a stock swap to buy it, this sounds like a bet worth making.
Upshot - I bet there’s an MS/oAI deal on IP on the back of this; meanwhile the cluster goes brrr.
This valuation is absurd. Perhaps a year ago- sure, but there have been so many iterations of this “kind of editor” since then, not to mention countless alternatives.
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
Cursor is still the best I’ve used are there others I should try?
People keep saying this and they don't understand how businesses work.
Cursor has 1B in enterprise revenue. It doesn't matter if people can clone their product, those deals don't move slowly
Despite their impressive ARR, Cursor faces existential threat from not only BigLabs (Claude Code, Open AI Codex) but also BigTech (AWS Kiro, Google Antigravity, MS VSCode). I am sure the usual suspects would have lined up to purchase Cursor, and the deal from xAI was probably the best of the lot. Marks an end to a remarkable sprint for a 3yo company, and an admirable exit (considering the recent discombobulation of Windsurf's), just as investor money and/or hype is going belly up.
Having tried most (all?) of the commercially available + open source options, and even tangential competitors like CC, Conductor, Antimetal, etc. I haven't found anything that's close to the experience of Cursor. The harness they've built is incredible.
I'd even go so far as to say that any competitors that are direct (windsurf, kiro, etc.) aren't even in the same universe. Cursor is just so much better, faster, has better features (plan and debug mode), and squeezes much better results/code out of the same models. They absolutely have some secrete sauce that the other options just don't have.
It has shown surprising stickiness. Occupying some middle ground between full adoption and still ~in the code.
I am starting to see some potential in moving back away from pure terminal, a mixed modality with AI. But it is not in the direction of IDE in any traditional sense.
I guess the hope is that combining two sub-par coding models (xAI's grok + cursor's composer) and combining the data they have access to, they can build something that can compete with OpenAI / Anthropic in the coding space...
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.
Can s.o. please explain, does the Cursor EULA really allow it to train on my code, as I really don't expect Claude Code or CODEX to do it either?
They will because there is no way to prove they didnt
Wasn’t composer trained on Kimi? Has anyone had a chance to compare the latest Kimi model to composer?
I'm going to be brutally honest but I have not found Kimi to be useful at all. It simply cannot compete with what closed models from Codex and Claude offers. I don't want to risk using a model outside the ecosystem and introduce variables as most of my workflow is baked into two to three large company models.
On the other hand, I found MiniMax M2.7 a reasonable model that I could trust.
I guess really depends on tastes
I was required to use Cursor for my job when I first started, but once I figured out how to use the command line version of Codex, I kind of stopped seeing the point. It just kind of seemed like a bloated, overpriced wrapper around what I could do with the included ChatGPT membership I already had for work.
Maybe I was missing something, but I do not understand how it is worth sixty billion dollars.
It's not. It's a glorified code editor with no moat. Those are (massive) bubble prices.
Glad I’m not the only one who feels this way. Even though I personally use Cursor, there’s no way it’s even a fraction of $60B
Why do you use it? Genuine question, I want to know what I'm missing.
I guess I don't really understand what it buys you over just running vanilla VS Code and Codex.
I use the cursor cli, not the IDE. Why? Someone else is paying for it.
It's 100% a fraction of $60B. That's not debatable it's just simply fact.
and I'm being completely neutral and objective in saying this: Elon Musk has been a horrible capital allocator but great at financial engineering. X is still struggling to win back advertisers (they will never come back) and still in the red. I have little reason to believe this is also another careful and shrewd financial decision.
Let’s buyback my friends who invested in that thing and they will help pump my IPO
He spun that story into "he was saving democracy" so it sounds like he paid for that reason. He will do the same here, he never does a wrong move you just can't see the 76D chess.
I mean, technically they also re-sell AI tokens. Unsure if that’s with a markup or a discount.
I do think the Codex harness is a bit better than others. Doesn't make a ton of difference with OpenAI models, but with Google and Anthropic models the difference is quite noticeable I think.
Is anybody using Grok or Cursor still? I've not used Cursor since the summer of 2025 and I've never bothered with Grok for coding. Hell, I've used Windsurf briefly for a few months.
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.
Our company (~25 engineers) uses it across the entire engineering and product orgs, and yes we are quite deep into agentic coding. We use their cloud agents for a lot of things, e.g. automated investigations of alarms, handling most customer support issues that end up hitting engineering, pre-processsing linear tickets before humans triage them, bugbot for PR reviewed with learned knowledge. Although recently they have felt like they are pulling the rug out on our legacy plan, so we may end up switching.
I have claude and cursor. I enjoy cursor. It has shortcomings but its a strong product.
I don't know of Grok but we use Cursor (2000+ people, probably like 1000 devs)
There are entire companies that bought into Cursor to adopt across all of their engineering orgs.
I use grok for various subagent tasks. It's super cheap and 100tps. Never for actual thinking though.
Guess I'll be looking for a replacement for Cursor now...
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.
Yep this was the moment to finally remember to cancel my cursor subscription. I find it unconscionable to do business with someone who would do business with Elon.
any IDE you like and Claude code - i have no idea why you'd want to use something like Cursor, it's time came and went.
Consider Nimbalyst, its a free visual workspace for Claude Code and Codex that has visual editing of markdown, mockups, diagrams, code with your agents with WYSYWIG diffs as well as task management and kanban session management tied into your agents. Its got a files/plan/editing mode and an agent/sessions mode.
I had never heard of it but it looks pretty slick: https://nimbalyst.com/
Thanks!
I briefly used Cursor but stopped and went back to VSCode after the 3.0 rewrite when they ditched it.
The new UI is literally opt-in. Nothing changed for me.
Anyone saying this is an aquahire has it backwards. SpaceX is acquiring Cursor’s customers, all those enterprises including NVIDIA itself. I believe Jenson Huang is on the record about the engineers using Cursor everyday.
As far as I know, xAI’s enterprise market share is non-existent. This is their way to get some much needed customers.
NVIDIA has 42,000 employees. Even still, when their deal with Cursor comes to an end do we really expect them to stay loyal? And further, sign on with xAI?
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?
I just want to make the observation that this whole SpaceX IPO is turning out entirely unlike the CDOs that led to the 2008 financial crisis. There's no mixing of AAA level assets with a bunch of subprime stuff and then getting someone to buy it all as AAA. Not at all similar. Completely different. Will turn out just fine this time.
The assets weren’t AAA, you’re mixing it up a bond concepts. The deal had bonds that were AAA. And if you’re talking about CDOs then the assets were bonds which were usually BBB or similarly cuspy bonds.
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
Just to well actually your well actually...
What you've described is how the base level mortgage-backed securities (MBSs) work. The tranches work because there actually exist mortgages that are at lower default risk (high home equity, well qualified borrowers, etc.), and the senior tranches are effective in capturing their underlying safety. What CDOs did was to take the lower, riskier tranches of MBSs from various sources and repackage them and divided them into tranches again. Then they got the ratings agencies to rate the top tranches of the CDOs as AAA as well. It's as if a teacher graded several classes and then took everyone that got a C or below from all the classes and then graded them on a curve again. And suddenly a lot of the C students became A students. It was outright financial insanity. Well, mixing a rocket/satellite company with a couple of also-ran AI outfits and the walking corpse of Twitter, and then calling the whole thing SpaceX and valued at $1.75T is a similarly level of financial insanity to me.
> this would be your AAA bond because odds of not getting paid out you $10 would be > 99.9%
I think you meant "the chances of getting paid", not of not getting paid.
Thanks. Updated
> The problem w this model is that it only works if assets are relatively uncorrelated (it was true in the past but ignored systematic risk and adverse selection in originations). What this has to do w musk or spacex I’m still not sure
What this has to do with with SpaceX is that there's the same blatant disregard for sound financial analysis by the very institutions that were/are supposed to know better. The NASDAQ 100 fast track decision is a similar level of financial malpractice as the ratings agencies slapping AAA on things that they knew were little better than junk. The abuses of the subprime mortgage originators were well known long before the actual meltdown. As were those systemic risks you spoke of. They were ignored by those whose entire job it was to not ignore them, and they sold out their credibility for a quick buck. If you can't see the similarities to the present situation then I can only wish you luck.
Are you familiar with how crypto tumblers work?
It is adversely selected, but it's not debt, it's equity, so price action can go real fast and nobody will be burned except folks who soberly-or-not opted into this. Everyone _knows_ Elon is the way he is, so nobody will be _surprised_ at things. No surprise, no crisis.
They're going to force a S&P500 index listing on IPO day so we're all going to be forced to baghold this regardless of if we want to or not unless you've got $0 in any major retirement fund.
So far only Nasdaq has changed its rules and will allow fast entry in 15 trading days. S&P has not changed its rules, not yet at least. Total indexed capital of Nasdaq is 1.4T vs 16T in the S&P500. Stated reason for fast tracking is that the indices are supposed to be a broad representation of the market, and leaving a 2T company out would be a significant tracking error.
I do agree that the optics of this aren’t great, and it’s rather easy to be cynical about motives.
I did a bit of research on this some time ago and it's not as bad as I originally thought. Index funds would need to count only liquid float of the company. So if Space X total valuation is 2 trillion, but float is 5%, then they need to count it as 100 billion for the purposes of index weight. Still more than I want, but not catastrophic.
Oh yes, thanks for reminding me. I’m going to cash out the 401(k).
You’ll pay massive penalties on that, another option is options (heh) but I’m not finance-literate enough to know how to pull it off.
Only penalties if you withdraw from 401k. Most 401k plans have some kind of moneymarket, bond fund, or similar
I’ve made my peace with the “massive penalties”. I benefited from employer match in the past. I want the money now, not when I retire.
You gotta do what you think is best, but I hope for future you's sake you decide to not pull the money out. Or if you do you have other retirement plans.
I'm trying to help my parents now their at retirement age and am seeing first hand what not planning for your future looks like. They hit retirement with nothing but a small social security check every month. Not even enough to cover rent in most places.
I don't know how much you have in your 401k, but it will be worth literally hundreds of thousands more if you pull it out when you retire. You aren't just paying the penalties now, you're paying for potentially decades of compounding.
Retirement plan is rappelling accident before dotage.
You can just reallocate away from an index fund.
You could just buy deep out of money SP500 puts expiring in 1+ year. That way you would be "insured" against the bubble popping.
The thing is, every dollar you spend on insurance is a dollar (and its interest) you lose. Furthermore, we don't know when it will pop. 1 year? 5 years?
The more reasonable solution is probably gradually reduce exposure to US markets by selling SP500 shares and turning to Europe and emerging markets ETFs. No need to cash out 401k.
You should backtest this strategy over the last 20 years before you make serious decisions off of the vibe from internet comments
20 years is not enough.
If you just look at the past 20 years, the US has had exceptional returns compared to the rest of the world.
The thing is, historically, high PE ratios like what we're seeing in the US do not correlate with short term returns that are as high. Expected future returns decrease as the PE ratios go up in a pretty linear fashion.
https://am.jpmorgan.com/us/en/asset-management/institutional...
Why 20 years? Just because we know, post hoc, the usa outperformed other places in the last 20 years, in no way means the next 20 years will be the same.
If you want a different point to backtest from, try Japan in the 80s and early 90s
What's the point of backtesting? Does backtesting say anything about the future?
The point of backtesting is to allow you to do what you want to do with a veneer of being data driven.
What are you basing this on?
I'm not an expert but it looks to my like 80% of my allocation won't be tracking spacex, because it's mid cap or small cap etc, and the 20% that's in the vanguard growth index might? I assume whoever sets the rules for the fund could change the rules to say companies must be listed for X months if they want to avoid this, right?
And I can change my allocation.
edit: Actually wait, isn't it only nasdaq 100 that's tracking it early, after 15 days rather than 3 months of trading? So 0% of my 401k is exposed to buying it quickly after IPO already, I think.
So far they're only getting fastracked into Nasdaq 100, not S&P 500.
The question is, is everyone integrating a special SpaceX correction in their algorithmic trading? Because if a dip in the index due to SpaceX causes old algorithms to think it’s a more structural issue (well, more than it is), and sell on that indicator, will that cause a cascade?
If your retirement fund is an IRA you can invest it in any stock you want. For a 401k you probably have some fund options that are not exposed to the S&P500, like emerging markets or fixed income
Maybe this already exists, but it would be great if one of the major index ETFs omitted all the firms with problematic board governance like there is at Tesla, SpaceX.
S&P500 had a rule from 2017 to 2023 that prevented companies with dual classes of shares (the sort that allow them to maintain founder control- like what GOOG and META did) that went public after the rule was instituted from ever being in the index. To be clear, META and GOOG were both in the index, but it was to prevent new companies from coming along and doing it. (I think it was related to SNAP going public?)
They removed it largely because investors wanted higher returns, and the tech companies that had such dual classes (1) were doing really well, and the S&P ended up caving on that rule.
1: Perennial hot button around here Palantir did this in a more extreme fashion than most. The three founders F class shares will always be at 49.9999% of the votes and the early investors B class shares have 10 votes each as compared to the publicly traded A class shares 1 votes.
My money's all in Bitcoin pats himself on the back
Kinda shocked SpaceX hasn't bailed out the DOGE-holders at this point..
the power of yet
401k rollovers into IRA aren't that hard these days and you could always use that IRA to have a more customized strategy, more specifically direct indexing of a major fund minus key ticker symbols you don't want exposure to. Of course, that all presumes that you won't regret excluding this long term.
Friendly reminder that SpaceX is going straight to the index—Elon agitated for it. The 401k of everybody in America is serving as a bailout fund for X and now cursor, and whatever other trash he hovers up
They are going straight to the Nasdaq. Most index investors are invested in the S&P 500
Nasdaq is an exchange. S&P 500 is an index.
S&P 500 includes companies from multiple exchanges. Like Nvidia, which lists on Nasdaq.
Nasdaq 100…
https://www.morningstar.com/funds/spacex-ipo-how-index-funds...
> Nasdaq was the first to consider a rule change that would grant mega IPOs like SpaceX early admission to its flagship Nasdaq-100 index. The exchange and index provider began a consultation period in February to assess the viability of and industry response to a proposed “fast entry” rule. The change was approved on March 30 and will be effective on May 1.
It’s also worth noting that Musk helped successfully lobby the NASDAQ to implement a “fast entry” rule which takes effect at the beginning of May, suspiciously convenient timing for a SpaceX IPO, so much so that I believe it has been derisively called the “SpaceX Rule”. It allows mega-cap IPOs like SpaceX to join the Nasdaq-100 index in just 15 trading days.
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.
We are better now that we learned from the first time.
Ug wants to borrow ten of my best sticks in exchange for future options to buy berries from his friend Og. Og has a watertight deal with Oog to invest the sticks in a five year mammoth hunting expedition but Oog first needs berries to exchange for sticks to cover his exposure on berry-puts he’s take out against Urrrg’s remortgaged stick pile.
Well, I said no. Not getting burned that way again!
Learned how to get the general public to directly put their money into it this time with the ETF shenanigans
Institutional investors (ex: pension funds) matter more for such mega IPOs than general public, and those probably like SPAC-like supercorps?
it's just codex and anthropic rapidly improved their AI when they opened themselves to Developer workflows.
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.
Well, there are some very important differences. 1) It’s super well known what’s going on with SpaceX. Every investor should know that there’s a lot of good stuff along with some steaming hot garbage. 2) SpaceX isn’t systemic to the economy. If SpaceX and all its subsidiaries shut down and its investors got nothing back, it wouldn’t be that big of a deal.
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.
On point #2, they are trying to do that right now. If spacex is fast tracked into the indices, passive investors via index funds will be forced into buying.
Galactic Empire has agreed to acquire a local lemonade stand in exchange for 10 death stars.
Wow, we are seeing the dark underbelly of the beast here. Nobody talks about cursor anymore for a reason. Look, I'm not saying it's not useful and discounting anyone getting value out of it...
But it's clearly not worth 60B dollars in April 2026.
Yep. there's absolutely no way that Cursor is worth that much.
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.
I certainly wouldn't mind having that image if it meant being the wealthiest man in the world.
I think X paid for itself, so it worked our for him.
Source?
It paid in influence, not dollars. Billionaires don't buy newspapers or social media platforms because they think they are good businesses.
1: https://twitter.com/nikitabier/status/2037764895064867061
I'm pretty sure that claim about Japanese Twitter activity was true for most of the site's history pre acquisition
No. JP activity was always second to US, only the biggest "out there". Same is true for all Twitter-like social media, such as Mastodon and Bluesky. Even VRChat doesn't have a majority Japanese userbase. Japan actually becoming the top majority anywhere is an anomaly and a major reversal of power balance.
Still blows me away that Google had complete dominance in Brazil and then just threw it all away and shut it down a few years later.
Google Plus? I wouldn't be sure if that was a strategic blunder or if they were seeing something us in the public didn't. I remember it was more popular among not-so-tech savvy male of parental to retirement ages, which are still masses but not the sweet spot in terms of demographics. Besides they have YouTube and its comment section full of kids, which is the sweet spot.
Elon Musk, the richest person on the planet, with multiple industry-changing companies built under his leadership, clearly has no idea what he's doing.
It is not cash though. SpaceX does not have $60B liquid cash instruments.
More accurately it is 3.4% of SpaceX at the last rumored valuation of $1.75T.
No longer rumored as they filed for IPO!
This is actually an amazing sweetheart deal for Cursor. Many times with these high profile acquisitions, most stock is tied to LPA's and employment at the company, and also earnout provisions. The company then finds a way to parachute them out early, which both voids the earnout and their employment, thus they never vest most of the units and the few units they do vest get bought out at 409A valuations which are typically much, much lower.
In the case of Cursor this is an amazing boon as SpaceX listed at an almost 100x multiple which is absolutely staggering. Had SpaceX stayed private they could have 409a'd Cursor and got it for effectively ~100M$ cash.
Until there is public S-1 and a price range which very much could change during the roadshow, there is no known valuation or range.
There's not going to be $60B of exit liquidity if/when spacex IPOs. Maybe the suckers will be banks lending against the bubble valuation.
A crazy and lucky bailout for Cursor + investors.
Forget bailout, this is a massive payday for them
Elon got snowed…
Which includes OpenAI, btw.
Not just OpenAI, but OpenAI and OpenAI[1].
1: https://cursor.com/blog/series-a
They bought options.
The only reason I haven't switched back to VS Code is pure laziness, not using any AI features in Cursor other than resolving diffs these days.
Just because it's not discussed much on HN does not imply it is not relevant in the broader space. Cursor is still very much prevalent there with 1 mil DAU.
I’m curious if that 1 million DAU still holds as of today. I think it was reported last year some time aka before December when Claude code exploded. A quick google didn’t turn up any results that actually contained sources for the number.
It makes you wonder how much of this is essentially money laundering.
Every time Musk does anything these days, it further reveals the shell game he's playing with his companies. This is going to be an Enron type of story eventually. I truly wish I had a choice to pull my tax money out of this particular subsidy.
Enron was absolute peanuts compared to the financial fraud Musk has been executing (with the apparent blessing of the SEC). At its peak Enron had a roughly $70B market cap, TSLA is currently sitting at $1.74T. We can expect similar numbers from the SpaceX IPO.
It's hard to compare these numbers directly since valuations have increased quite a bit since a quarter century ago. As a proportion of the S&P 500, Tesla (2.3%) is about 4x of Enron at that $70b (0.6%).
Tesla is profitable, as a matter of public record. And SpaceX is, by all accounts, extremely profitable.
SpaceX is _not_ profitable by most reasonable measurements of accounting. If you discount rocket depreciation costs and R&D, then yeah its profitable from starlink revenue.
They haven't released a 10k yet so we don't know, but from what I understand SpaceX+X.ai is not GAAP profitable.
SpaceX was, but SpaceTwitter is not. xAI is hoovering all the money out of SpaceX.
SpaceX reuses its boosters 20+ times. Surely the depreciation is tiny when compared to the revenue of 60M+ per launch?
The entire space launch market is about $20B with multiple competitors in 2025. And by the most generous estimates it is going to be $80B by 2035. They can reuse the rockets as much as they like, the company isn’t worth $1.7T.
3x growth in ten years is the “most generous” estimate?
Yes because outside Starlink and govt contracts, there isn’t that massive of a demand growth in the sector. There a limit to how many satellites can be in orbit at a time and land based telecom infrastructure makes it so that satellite based infra isn’t necessary unless you’re in remote areas.
Starlink is already most of the revenue.
What's the point of the except?
The main problem is the AI stuff.
How can you say “The company isn’t worth X”? Isn’t the company worth exactly as much as people are willing to pay for its shares?
I don’t personally think Google is worth $4T but the share price says otherwise.
You’re comparing a publicly traded company where the supply demand economics have established a price to a company whose financials are not public, and is valuing itself at $1.7T and forcing everyone’s 401Ks and pension funds to fund it. Not the same thing.
>forcing everyone’s 401Ks and pension funds to fund it.
Source?
https://theconversation.com/musks-spacex-is-shaping-up-as-th...
The source links in that website (which looks like clickbait) do not support your claim.
https://www.morningstar.com/funds/spacex-ipo-how-index-funds...
> S&P is reportedly considering a fast entry rule change to its flagship index, though it has not yet been approved, and details are scant.
> FTSE Russell is also considering a fast entry rule for its suite of US market indexes and is in a consultation period as of early April 2026.
Only Nasdaq 100 has changed its rules, but Nasdaq 100 is not (and should not be) in most retirement funds.
If 1/3 having changed rules and 2/3 considering changing the rules isn’t evidence enough then not really much to discuss here.
When someone says that it usually means they believe the price is bound to drop.
> Isn’t the company worth exactly as much as people are willing to pay for its shares?
Really? We're still making claims like this in the year of our Lord 2026? People in the markets today are not predicting the real value of a company, they're gambling that the various political and financial machinations from people like Elon Musk will increase the share price enough that they can sell at a profit. The value of shares like Tesla are utterly disconnected from the value of the underlying business.
They also have to replace 20%+ of their satellite network every year.
why is that ?
They are low earth orbit satellites. Generally, the lower the orbit, the faster they decay. You could also argue that this is a benefit in that they gain updated technology with each replacement.
> You could also argue that this is a benefit in that they gain updated technology with each replacement.
No, having the option to replace technology at your leisure would be a benefit. Being forced to replace your technology because it's destined to become aerosolized aluminum in less than five years is a detriment.
Planned obsolescence really only works well if someone else is paying.
The operational lifetime of their satellites is about 5 years.
Because they fall back to the ground…
No, the burn up in the atmosphere. Burning metals being added to the oxygen you breathe.
because of gravity
More because of drag
low earth orbit
What about the R&D costs of blowing up vehicle after vehicle?
They have over 300 falcon 9 launches in a row now, just in case you’re not caught up on the latest
C'mon, you know they're talking about Starship.
It's less than the yearly cost of ground stations (just under 1 million/year per installation)
5 million over 5 years capex+opex. Mostly opex
It's also a troll post
Depreciation isn't the only thing that matters. R&D, manufacturing, maintenance, fuel, launch, support staff, and I'm sure there are countless others.
I'm not saying they aren't profitable. I don't know, but it's definitely not a given.
They did report FCF before xai and also invested at least $1B before they merged xai
Between launches alone, Starlink and Starshield, SpaceX will likely be a money printing machine for a long time.
They had like $16B in revenue last year, half from Starlink.
That’s just money in the door and the underwriters seem to think the business is worth $1.75T.
If underwriters think it’s worth $1.7T with a $16B revenue (not profit), they’re doing the same thing as the credit agencies did in 2008 by giving underwater mortgage backed securities a AAA rating.
Do you have any evidence or analysis to back that up? How are those similar?
It's not the same at all. Do you know how an IPO roadshow works at all or are you just spouting bullshit?
If roadshows guaranteed accurate valuations, pets.com wouldn’t liquidate within a year of IPO.
Again, not debating that SpaceX isn’t a legit company or that it’s profitable. But underwriters agreeing with high valuations to stocks that collapse once they go public isn’t unheard of.
Edit: and I will concede that I should’ve phrased my initial thoughts better. Credit rating agencies and underwriters do very separate things, just like IPOs and MBS are two very separate things.
You said: "underwriters ... doing the same thing as the credit agencies did in 2008 by giving underwater mortgage backed securities a AAA rating"
That isn't what is happening at all.
In an IPO the underwriters and the company collaborate to set the price based on approximate demand and what they want the quality of the holders to look like.
In the roadshow, the company is very constrained as to what they can say or disclose outside of the scope of the S-1. They can't include MNPI, forward looking financial projections, etc. Underwriters are also prohibited from sharing MNPI, or publishing marketing disguised as research.
So I guess if you're saying the SpaceX S-1 is completely full of shit and there's hidden risk in it, than it could be similar to 2008, but in this case nobody is manufacturing a rating, and those material misrepresentations would constitute securities fraud. Investment banks and ratings agencies aren't the same thing at all, and the buyers of marginally profitable IPO stocks are (hopefully) different than those of AAA MBS.
Yes. I updated my earlier comment and I concede I should’ve worded my earlier comment better.
I agree underwriters and credit agencies are very different just like IPOs and MBS are very different. I don’t think SpaceX is committing fraud.
> That’s just money in the door and the underwriters that seem to think the business is worth $1.75T.
I was responding to this particular comment.
In 2008, the credit rating agencies weren’t necessarily found to be guilty of wrongdoing, but a variety of reasons let them roll with AAA ratings on junk MBS anyway. Similarly the underwriters are not going to be committing crimes to facilitate IPOs. They are after all taking the risk of guaranteeing the sale for the company. However, if a company wants to roll with a high valuation, even if the fundamentals aren’t matching the valuation, if there are buyers, the underwriters will set the price supporting that high valuation. They are not incentivized to accurately measure a company’s worth like the comment I was responding to suggests.
They are decades ahead of their nearest competition, in multiple verticals, and their barrier to entry is a literal gravity well.
All the money they are burning is for grok. And it is not decades ahead.
BO has entered the chat New Glenn and are arguably equal to Super Heavy given they've also recovered and reused their heavy booster.
I think you're going to be surprised at the level of competition BO provides SpaceX in the Artemis program.
About those underwriters - to quote the venerable Charlie Munger "they will sell 'shit' as long as 'shit' can be sold".
the ability to mine the moon or asteroid belt seems extremely lucrative, the logistics of transporting materials to earth costs less than shipping them across the ocean, an astounding level of value creation.
This can’t a serious comment.
Did you notice the size of the Artemis rocket and the size of the payload it sends to the moon and back?
Do you expect there to be diamonds just laying these on the moon surface, no mining required.
There is no other mode of transportation cheaper than shipping across the ocean.
That one is subsidized by externalizing costs to our lungs.
Shipping on water has been, by far, the cheapest mode of long-distance shipping since the moment boats were invented. That is to say, since thousands of years before boats were ever powered by the shit that destroys our lungs.
So is pace travel. Then rockets are not green!
It is valuable if they can find the right rocks and bring them back. A platinum group metal asteroid would be of immense value, at least the first one anyways. After that who knows, they might super saturate the global market for decades.
It is less about profitability and more about dilution of ownership. He seems to have a pattern of diluting the ownership of his profitable companies by folding in his less profitable/failed companies. You still own a share of a profitable company, but a smaller share, to his benefit.
Im also profitable as an individual. I made a $100 this week, which makes me worth at least $30M.
SpaceX was profitable before the xAI thing happened. Now I imagine they're way in the red.
As was Enron
Pretty decent video released today by Wall Street Millennial that looks at the profitability of SpaceX (as part of looking at 'Terafab') :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSJi1oQFQzs
SpaceX was surely more profitable before it was used to bail out Elon's xAI which was used to bailout his purchase of Twitter.
just because a bunch of rockets went up without blowing up, does not mean they are profitable. it cost money to shot rocket, and it is very expensive, reusable or not. most launches are internal launch without external paying customers.
How much of that profit was due to public subsidies of the sort that he killed for other companies but not for himself during his tenure as a special government employee?
Genuine question, how do you know that without a 10K? Have the filed any document that shows their finances?
Tesla’s profits and market share has been declining for the past few years and it’s basically an overpriced meme stock.
Their market share of EVs in the US went from 40.9% in Q3 2025 to 58.9% in Q4 2025.
You may not have noticed because positive Musk related news doesn't seem to make headlines anymore.
> Their market share of EVs in the US went from 40.9% in Q3 2025 to 58.9% in Q4 2025.
You’re not wrong factually, but it doesn’t mean what you’re suggesting it means. Their share went up because EVs aren’t selling as much anymore. All companies including Tesla are selling fewer EVs. They just have a bigger share of the smaller pie, which isn’t exactly a success when you only sell EVs, but your competitors also sell non EVs.
I'm aware of the reason. Their market share is, nonetheless, up. That's still good for Tesla, their sales remained constant while people stopped buying other EVs.
Edit: Constant is the wrong word. Resilient or consistent is what I was trying to say.
Competitors leaving the market means less competition which is a good thing for Tesla. If the market for EVs returns in the future (if, say, the next administration reimplements the incentives), Tesla will be there to reap the benefits.
> their sales remained constant while people stopped buying other EVs.
Their sales did not remain constant.
Tesla has a P/E ratio of 364.981. It's blatant fraud.
Nobody is forced to buy shares of any company. Even automatic 401k investment plans let you specify what to buy if you so choose. Perhaps you could make the argument Elon makes false promises to boost the stock price, but at the end of the day, individual investors must decide what they believe in no matter the CEO's antics.
I'm not sure I follow, here. What about this makes you think this is a shell game?
Matt Levine writes a bit about this - the Elon Musk Mars Conglomerate. And really if you're investing into e.g. SpaceX you're not investing into SpaceX you're investing into the Elon Musk Mars Conglomerate. And most people seem to want that.
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.
> Elon Musk Mars Conglomerate
That’s SpaceX’s version of Tesla’s self driving car pipe dream
Edit - I use self-driving car and Autopilot interchangeably
It's so pipe-dreamy that I used it for an hour today through SF rush hour traffic. Clearly never going to work though, right? right???
Did you follow Tesla's published instructions on how to use it (https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/modely/en_us/GUID-2CB6080...)? You're explicitly forbidden, for example, from assuming that it's going to make the right decision at intersections; you must manually inspect each intersection and evaluate whether it's "safe and/or appropriate" to continue. You're also not allowed to look away from the road or use your phone. YMMV, but to me that level of required attention doesn't match the term "self-driving".
What I see a lot of people do, unfortunately, is reconcile this contradiction by not following the published limitations of the "Full Self-Driving (Supervised)" product. They assume that Elon Musk wouldn't call it that if it couldn't be trusted to do what they expect. Then they get into fatal crashes, and someone sues, and Tesla argues that they can't be held accountable for bad drivers who don't follow the rules.
Your claim was that the product doesn't work, and I'm telling you it works without intervention consistently and in complicated traffic situations.
Any argument about how people don't pay enough attention since it isn't yet certified as a L4 system is irrelevant and tangential to the point.
Your definition of Tesla's self-driving product is very different than what Tesla itself promised, and that's what the person you are replying to...is telling you as well.
Anyone who thinks it is pipe dream given how it works today + rate of change is clueless, and that is putting it kindly.
I don't think L4 autonomy is a pipe dream. Indeed, it exists today and is widely available in the same city you drove your Tesla in. I think it's a pipe dream for Tesla specifically to achieve it, because for bizarre and idiosyncratic reasons Elon Musk won't let them use LiDAR or mount a roof sensor. They've been stuck at L2 for a decade now, and I don't see much reason to think that making that system incrementally more reliable will ever "unlock" L4.
In practice, Tesla on HW4 drives indistinguishably different from Waymo.
Isn't Tesla FSD good enough and trending in the right direction to be called a "pipe dream"?
Tesla is the free cashflow play that is probably the most important for mars as there is no distilled fermented dinosaur juice on mars, but considerably more by ratio of lithium / oil than the Earth. Our flintstone fire mobiles won’t work so well there, and battery / solar will be important there for everything, including mobility and armies of slave robots.
Mars gets less sunlight on a good day for solar power; the inverse cube law really hits you harder than you'd think. And that's before accounting for the planet wide dust storms that can last for months.
We're probably looking at nuclear fission generators to get started, then converting to geothermal at any appreciable (and maybe fusion, inshallah).
Last day for me using Cursor at work, I prefer to move to Codex and Claude Code that touch anything related to Elon.
I'd be interested in this breakdown - what % of that is cursor's product(tech x customer) vs future tokens
This is a classic Elon move. He bundled up his company that is, shall we say, crap, into his most valuable company, then tried to hype it up as much as he could. Like when he promised Tesla cars would self drive in X years but it never happened, then pivoted to AI/robots, then re-routed Tesla’s GPUs to xAI, etc.
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.
You can hate Elon or just be misguided about deals in general. This is brilliant. He’s buying revenue and, on the thesis of scaling agentic knowledge work replacement, a user of his GPU clusters and ultimately GPUs in space. A $60B option is a premium on their revenue - but it may look cheap if he accelerates their coding models. For Cursor, they get what’s nearly impossible to come by - real capacity guarantees and de-risking their reliance on Anthropic or OpenAI.
Laugh all you want. He may have the last laugh on this one.
Cursor ($60b) being valued the same as Twitter ($51b inflation adjusted) is _willlld_
I'm out of the loop - what moat does Cursor even have now, and why is it worth $60B?
Why did a shoe company get $50 million in funding for their AI pivot?
Because VCs are braindead... I see your point.
That’s unfortunate. I’m not interested in using Musk associated products anymore than I have to.
I think this is great and helps x.ai building Grok Code and Grok Computer.
It is good to have more competition in this area.
So there aren’t just 2 big players which also have their ideological flaws.
“ Cursor has also given SpaceX the right to acquire Cursor later this year for $60 billion”
That isn’t an agreement to buy
This is the right partnership to happen. SpaceX has all the compute but is missing the talent for training LLMs, especially on the RL side. Cursor has the talent and RL stack, but doesn't have their own pretrained base model or own their compute. Both will be on a bad trajectory without cooperating because Claude Code and Codex have gained so much momentum already.
$60B for a VSCode fork with AI integration... It may show the value of the gap between vanilla LLM output and production-ready applications.
I feel Cursor isnt’t even worth $6B. What is the moat, the value, the sauce here?
The “apply” model to turn LLM output into code changes?
I like SpaceX a lot but this really doesn’t make sense at $60B
https://xcancel.com/trq212/status/2046713419978453374
SpaceX is going to have an AI coding "oops" in space.
Good on them to get $10B breakup terms, after the Twitter shitshow
I guess it makes more sense than shoe brands pivoting to GPU provider.
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.
Makes sense. Cursor is extremely overhyped as well.
It looks like this is just an "option" to acquire Cursor at that price? Implying they only plan to exercise the option under certain conditions (such as, one might presume, Cursor actually being worth that much. As right now it definitely isn't.)
0 to $60B in less than 4 years ... impressive!
Guardian Link:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/apr/21/spacex-cu...
some plausible analysis here on motivations https://x.com/0xrwu/status/2046721359263285478
Hard to know whether development will remain an activity that lives on a local machine for much longer.
This could be a lot of money to spend to acquire users that may not be sticky.
If I stop paying for Cursor, will they threaten to sue like Twitter does?
I really don't think Cursor is going to be acquired for $60 billion. That price is absolutely absurd. I agree their harness is excellent, but it's hard to argue they have an overwhelming competitive advantage over rivals like Claude Code and Codex, or open-source alternatives like OpenCode. What's left then is Cursor's data, talent, and user base — but even accounting for all of that, the price is still ridiculous.
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.
I wonder if they are actually 'acquiring' some of the existing contracts between Cursor and X/Y/Z rather than the product itself.
You sour pusses are wrong. This is a smart move that amplifies a brilliant team from cursor with serious compute, raising the odds Elon can get to the frontier, which is worth so much these numbers will all look like a drop in the bucket.
Don't see how this works out financially.
What are the implications of this for Cursor being model agnostic?
You sour pusses are wrong. This is a smart move. Cursor has a brilliant, capable team with serious model chops who will be able to boost the odds of AGI success. They also come with a revenue generating machine.
Time to switch
every wrapper either gets acquired or stays long enough to be a zombie startup
my only gripe rn is grok is still a shitty model to use. yeh it scores nearby openai and anthropic on benchmarks, but my personal experience has been underwhelming
Well I am glad I built my own IDE now so I can switch off of cursor and don’t have to participate in training the model of an aspiring monopoly.
DM me if you want an invite. I am keeping it to a small on purpose.
ITT: The same geniuses that predicted with certainty X will fail are also predicting, with much less certainty, that "Oh God, let this be the end of Musk"
$60 billion with a B???
cursor was interesting about a year ago
reading this thread, I seem to be the only cursor user on earth on the free tier using tab-completes.
RIP Cursor.
but What exactly is SpaceX doing in the AI Space (Pun Intended) and Why?
these are weird times...
So I won’t use stuff by Elon Musk, what is the next best alternative please
Looking forward to seeing where this goes, both companies have a reputation for engineering excellence.
Seriously DONT CHANGE THE FUCKING POST TITLE AFTER SOMEONE HAS COMMENTED
Complete waste of $60B. It's just a prompt+tools. This is how you destroy SpaceX from the inside.
I am so actually beyond sad that I ever trusted Musk, all the signs were there, from the lies with Tesla to the nonesensical point to point "tourist" lies, to the Mars lies, to the fact that the spaceship they are developing right now requires an actual elevator to get astronauts down, it was never meant for humans, it was meant to deploy sats in space even cheaper, outcompete the competition and basically kill human spaceflight as a result... because less profitable human rated spacecraft won't be viable.
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.
The elevator was there when it was originally announced.
There's no Kessler Syndrome where Starlink is.
You'd know this if you read Kessler's first paper. It's online.
i.e if every single Starlink satellite crashes into another you won't get Kessler Syndrome.
And the same it true for the planned Kuiper.
A text editor?
Can't wait for this idiotic bullshit bubble to burst.
A rocket company buying a so so overvalued coding AI company is a joke even worse than the 2000s internet pet food companies were
Dude, cursor's not even worth a billion.
Okay, now how do I cancel/refund the remaining portion of my pre-paid year subscription? No way in hell I will support a company owned by Elon Musk.
Another one bites the dust.
another 60 billion to save a failed AI endeavor.
immediately unsubscribed from Cursor. Hello OpenCode!
same. moving to zed
Musk must be chronically surrounded by yes-men.
My Hair's on Fire! OMG, Republicans Capitalist OMG Pigs! OMG!
The real question is how the fuck is cursor worth $60B
lol. Top business genius being a genius again, I see.