alt Hacker NewsSpaceX to buy Cursor for $60B
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Aaaand now I'm using OpenCode instead, and trying out OpenCode Go.
Vibe coded space shuttles baby! Lets GO!
God fucking dammit I like cursor
How are these numbers even working out, I get free markets and all that, but Microsoft paid 2.5B for Minecraft, which was printing money at the time (seems they still lost on that deal). Now a rocket company is buying an editor company for 60B and everyone seems to think that makes sense.
I’m happy to be old man yelling at clouds here because I can’t for the life of me figure out these valuations and purchases.
Cursor is great but they're all going to cash out and leave SpaceX as soon as they can.
They should rename it to XCode. Oh wait…
They should rename it to CodeX. Oh wait…
Some of the talent at Cursor is second to none. E.g Less Wright, Sasha Rush, Stuart Sul.
Google paid 2.5B to bring Noam back into the fold in 2024 ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
What are the best open source IDE alternatives to Cursor? There was Continue for a bit but Cursor bought it. Is Visual Code by itself the only open source IDE atm? My main gripe with Visual Code is it doesn't make it easy to use open weight models or non Copilot model APIs. Continue helped but its now part of Cursor.
As for coding in the terminal, we have Opencode, Claude Code, and Codex etc. They are all open source but only Opencode can route to open weight models. But non of these are really an IDE like Visual Code or Cursor.
Are we missing a really good open source IDE to use open weight models? It seems like we are.
Interesting, Grok, for a flagship AI contender was rather poorly performing. I mean, not bad, but visibly less capable.
rip off.
Congrats to the founders, arguably the first true AI-wrapper billionaires? 0 to multigenerational wealth in 4 years is impressive. It is crazy how much more wealth per user that can be created in the AI-space, compared to other products.
A fucking text editor?
This was a fantastically smart deal for both sides.
What are the best open source IDE alternatives to Cursor? There was Continue for a bit but Cursor bought it. Is Visual Code by itself the only open source IDE atm? My main gripe with Visual Code is it doesn't make it easy to use open weight models or non Copilot model APIs. Continue helped but its now part of Cursor.
As for coding in the terminal, we have Opencode, Claude Code, and Codex etc. They are all open source but only Opencode can route to open weight models. But non of these are really an IDE like Visual Code or Cursor.
Are we missing a really good open source IDE to use open weight models? It seems like we are.
I realized a while back that Elon Musk isn't Iron Man. His superhero (or supervillain depending on your view) persona is ZIRP Man, the master of riding successive credit expansion and speculative waves. It's sort of ironic that he at least pays lip service to some Austrian-style quasi-libertarian economic ideas, because the Federal Reserve created him.
Now he's surfing the AI wave. We are no longer technically in ZIRP but the delayed inflationary wave is now traveling through the economy and pumping everything. He knows the best way to soak up cheap money right now is slap AI on it.
I also had the thought the other day that him hitting $1T technical net worth might actually be a harbinger of a lot more future inflation. Inflation of this type hits assets before it hits things like prices and wages, and it hits assets with fast market cycles like stocks before it hits things like Real Estate. The blast wave starts at the top and moves down and out. So maybe Elon hitting $1T really means that in 20 years that'll be more like $100B inflation adjusted. Meanwhile a loaf of bread will be $20 and a starter home $4M.
But the fact that monetary inflation starts top-down is why low interest rates exacerbate inequality. The very richest and most leveraged can use the arbitrage gap to buy everything else before the inflation wave propagates. We've been in a low interest rate environment for about two decades, and you can see during that time how the super-rich with access to cheap money have fully detached from the rest of the economy.
In other words: the reaction to the 2008 financial crisis was to inject huge liquidity at the top, which created the new Gilded Age.
Ultimately it may be somewhat intentional. One way out of a sovereign debt crisis when you also have a sovereign currency is to inflate your way out, which basically is a huge tax on every non-domestic entity that owns your debt.
So there's yet another $10B+ company swallowed by the $T+ company.
meanwhile Mistral:
SpaceX should rush to acquire as many companies as they can with stock. The market cap is absolute insanity (I know people keep saying this about new high scores in unrelated-to-reality valuations, but this one might just be the pinnacle), with zero rational basis, and they should try to make it real as rapidly as they can.
Next up, Anthropic.
Interesting. I've not used Cursor in almost a year after using Codex/Claude.
Won't be surprised if Elon paid another hefty premium.
I just realized this whole game is just getting rich from other people's money and there might not be people left to buy those people's shares when the music stops.
It's literally a ponzi scheme.
Good reminder for me to cancel my Cursor subscription. I don't support Elmo.
Musk found a perfect market hack, buy a company at 10x their revenue and sell it in the stock market at 100x
the IPO raised $85B and they just spent $60B on Cursor. If this was the intention it should have been in a disclosure
Edit: I see SpaceX did disclose
I believe that OpenAI (I'll get to SpaceX in a second) has a huge valuation risk because:
1. It's a bet that OpenAI will "win" AI and have a significant moat; and
2. Future hardware improvements won't massively devalue OpenAI.
I believe open source models will win here, mainly because China won't allow otherwise. I also think that nobody is really talking about the hardware decpreciations coming in the next few years, which is going to be really important from a performance-per-Watt perspective. B100s aren't going to suck. But a theoretical T100 will get 30-80% more performance for the same energy input.
So, SpaceX. I've previously said that SpaceX would've been a significantly better company without xAI. SpaceX was used to rescue Elon and other "investros" from the financially disastrous Twitter purchase. Starlink, Starship (which is a risky program) and the Falcon 9 are a solid business. They're just not a $2 trillion business.
So I believe that the AI bubble contributes at least half of SpaceX's valuation and when and if that bubble bursts, at least half of SpaceX's value is at risk.
Google announced they're throwing billions to rent GPUs from SpaceX. That might sound good. It solves a short-term cash issue. But as another commenter put it, it makes SpaceX seem more like a Commercial REIT. After all, renting out your GPUs is literally the lowest-value thing you can do with them. You're not building a business. You're taking rent so someone else can build a business.
So buying Cursor and I'm sure any number of other AI startups in the coming year or two, seems aimed at kicking that AI can down the street.
So I view the Google-SpaceX as a red flag in the short-to-medium term. SpaceX simply can't seem to do anything valuable with all the compute they have. And I also have way more confidence in Anthropic (in particular), OpenAI and Gemini than I do in Grok.
BTW, will this pile of shit be included in the S&P? Is it known yet?
"SpaceX told investors during the IPO process that it sees an addressable market for AI products worth $26 trillion, roughly equivalent to U.S. GDP."
This is unhinged.
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Well the posts here will be rational and well-informed, I'm sure.
/s
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That is very hinged