Comment by Alifatisk
17 days ago
A space company is buying an IDE for roughly the cost to build 150 of world's most expensive modern hospitals [1]. How is this in SpaceX's interest? Isn't it kinda bizarre that Elon is pivoting SpaceX to something else?
1. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/16/spacex-spcx-cursor-acquisiti...
It’s all in a stock that may very well be near its zenith when this closes (or maybe not. This is so far past fundamentals it’s impossible to tell).
They’re spending Monopoly money.
It also seems like SpaceX is poised to Hoover up all of Elons companies so it’s might not be “just a space company” for long.
The company that just IPOed is already overwhelmingly "X AI" financially, regardless of the fact that it says "Space X" in the marketing. Whether SpaceX also buys Tesla is hardly even going to move the needle.
$10 how "space x" will sell for peanuts the starlink portion to musk and keep only the sinking Ai pieces for the bag holders
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Elon's award is tied to growing Tesla's market cap - it's pretty transparent that he's just trying to ball-of-mud together everything he can to hit that target and grab the bag.
What would it mean if SpaceX buys Tesla though? Does the combined market cap count? That would be wrong. Tesla buying SpaceX just for hist bonus and then rebranding to X would be classic Musk.
It's a game for him, but so ridiculous. While Tesla was pushing electrification and SpaceX pushing rapid rocket re-use I kind of tolerated Elon's antics, but since he got involved in politics and DOGE I can't bear it anymore.
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No. He is making it an AI company. The prospectus makes that clear. Everything is in service of training and deploying AI. Twitter is data, distribution and marketing, space x is distribution with data centers and internet in space. Cursor is training data and hostile distillation.
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I agree with this, but it seems so crazy to me. How can money be a motivator when you're that rich. I'm not even "rich" but I'm already at a point where money is far from my #1 motivator.
I LOVE puppies, but if I had a trillion of them the last thing I'd want is another puppy.
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> it's pretty transparent that he's just trying to ball-of-mud together everything he can to hit that target and grab the bag.
I agree, and most people do too, yet he'll get away with it. We're in the kleptocracy phase of the fall.
His award is also tied to numbers of vehicles and robots sold.
So just increasing market cap won’t do it alone.
Even if he merged them, they still have to produce WAY more than they are now.
That’s not how it works. There’s provisions to adjust the targets if there’s M&A.
Yep, bundle it all together, rename the whole company X (for added confusion), get a few final pay outs in the hundred of billions if not trillions and then Elon flees to Argentina as the whole house of cards crumbles.
Does anyone really believe he’s doing all of this just to sell out and live on a beach somewhere? This dude sleeps at his own factories. He literally works like 24/7 and has no personal life. If this was all a cash grab he’s had dozens of opportunities to cut and run with well beyond F U money. If you wanted to scam people there are a lot easier ways to do it than repeatedly founding revolutionary technology companies.
I’m not denying that his companies are awash in zany financials, but I don’t think that’s ever been the point
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Elon flees to Mars*
Everything will be folded in "X" eventually, anyway.
Yup - given that it’s $60bn of stock, now is an excellent time to do it, as the current valuation isn’t even irrational. And I say that as someone who believes they have great long term prospects.
> They’re spending Monopoly money.
They also seem to be desperate to buy their way into a monopoly, even though the company itself has a long track record of failing to deliver anything noteworthy.
FOMO; Apple grew to one of the biggest companies over time and people were like "h*ck I should've bought it years ago". Tesla then seemed somewhat similar - also 5 years ahead of the curve for EVs, even if they reinvented things that didn't need to and their construction was substandard, so one group of investors bought and boosted the stock to impossible heights. Now SpaceX is the next one, and people want to get on board.
I don't think anybody actually believes SpaceX will be worth it. I think some still believed Tesla would be, but their competition has caught up. Everybody is just there to ride the wave of mass hype and FOMO, thinking everybody else is an idiot.
This has been coming in a few waves over the years in Tesla, cryptocurrencies, the Everything Bubble, etc.
> Stock that may very well be near its zenith when this closes (or maybe not. This is so far past fundamentals it’s impossible to tell).
Nah, not in a bubble or anything at all.
"The market can remain irrational..."
I called bubble on Tesla and Bitcoin both over 10 years ago.
Still going strong.
It's a whole lotta chaos, fueling some pretty messed up stuff. It is hard to watch.
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> It’s all in a stock that may very well be near its zenith when this closes
No, it is not. This is not legal or financial advice, but I believe the stock could easily rise 2.5x - not because of its current or future financial condition, but because it is run by what may be the most skilled fraudster our planet has ever breed. Charles Ponzi himself couldn't have pulled this off. While most CEOs are careful about what they publicly say or "predict," Musk's companies are fueled by increasingly fantastical projections. The consequences have amounted to some $1.5 million in SEC fines that, relative to the value created, were negligible - and that was under the previous administration. The current one won't be any more aggressive. The closest comparison I can think of is Trevor Milton and his famous "electric" truck that was filmed rolling downhill under its own momentum. He went to prison for that, although he was later pardoned by Trump. Many people have lost fortunes betting against Tesla based on fundamentals. SpaceX's shareholder list includes so many influential and powerful names, including people closely connected to the current administration, that I find it hard to imagine the stock being allowed to fail in any meaningful percentage. Obviously I'm exaggerating when I say the government would send agents door-to-door to collect valuables from American households to plug any hole in the balance sheet before allowing the stock to fall significantly. But that's honestly closer to how protected I think the company is than what traditional financial analysis would suggest. I'm nobody special, just someone with about $1.8 million in a stock portfolio. Yet this thing called SpaceX stock gives ordinary investors like me a chance to ride alongside the biggest players on their way to even larger fortunes. They are guaranteed not to lose money, and to me its not personal.
I mostly agree but it still seems like a huge risk to play along with the memestock-ery. I have no idea how long this can be sustained. Like, would the upcoming elections going a certain way cause things to unravel? Or, say, the Anthropic IPO tanking and shaking investor confidence (highly doubtful, but a relevant example.) Or would some other unrelated event essentially cause a gigantic rug-pull?
And this is before getting to worrying about what kind of large-scale market manipulations we're up against (e.g. relevant example: https://www.forbes.com/sites/hershshefrin/2025/04/05/signifi...) Compounding this is the fear that even the indexes seem to be compromised (fast-tracking SpaceX etc.) I'm paranoid but at times the entire US stock market looks like a gigantic pump-and-dump. (Seriously, some of the stocks, like NET, rise and fall with highly predictable regularity.)
I can't tell, and I know I'm not nearly smart enough, attentive enough, and definitely not well-connected enough to have the perfect timing required to survive a sudden shift or whatever game it is the big players are playing, so I'm just trying to play it safe (which is also hard, because everything is impacted at this scale!)
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The total addressable market (TAM) for SpaceX is finite. There are only so many nation-states and large corporations that want to launch payloads into orbit.
And even if their internet service provider is uniquely capable for now, it only fills a strategic need for certain customers.
So instead, Musk and Co. need to find bubbling market trends that look like they will have huge gigantic TAMs to justify the potential growth of this company.
All markets are finite. But you're thinking too finitely -- remember that there was a proposal to use Starship (BFS?) as a point-to-point method of people transport too (London to Sydney in under 50 minutes I seem to remember).
You also have other services: Starlink is an obvious one they're pursuing now, but there's many other things that they could branch into with no effective competition right now, from harvesting resources such as Helium-3 to Rare Earths (ironic name), to... (thinks for several minutes) banishing people to the Phantom Zone?
But you get what I mean, it's not just about rockets, it's about the things cheap and reliable rocketry enables.
Musk is a genius creating really exciting ideas. No doubt about that.
But as they say,"the devil is in the details"
- Can Starship transport people from London to Sydney safely economically, compared to Boom, which is working on a supersonic passenger aircraft ?
-Why can the boring machine dig tunnel at much lower cost than it's competitors? Maybe it's because the everyone else tries to dig tunnels for trains, which have a much larger diameter than Musk's boring machine, which only fits his "Teslas at a tunnel" concept? And it might be a good idea. Worth a try. But be honest about it.
-Sure, data centers in space probably have some great uses, and I'm happy he's trying, but will they ever be more economical than deploying servers on the ocean? On countries with very cool climate?, powered by new energy technologies?
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SpaceX also wants to put data centers in space. That's the big market for SpaceX and how it ties into AI.
Which hasn't yet been proven to be either technically or economically viable, even on paper. It's a pipe dream.
The cynical viewpoint is that this is Elon capitalizing on current datacenter hype to inflate SpaceX's valuation based on theoretically overcoming tremendous amounts of hard physics problems, over the next 5-10 years. As he did with FSD, Boring Company / Hyperloop, Twitter, etc.
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Do they, really? Because putting data centers in space would mean multiplying the infrastructure cost by a few orders of magnitude, while being far, far away from cheap energy - photovoltaics would work, certainly, but it will take a lot of it, and it's not like you can just slap panels on the roof - easy cooling, and people.
It's a ridiculous idea, and I don't believe it's what they are really pursuing.
I still have no idea how that would work. Imagine launching an entire data center building into space, and then imagine also launching a solar array to power it, and then also launching a gigantic radiator to cool it... and the radiator is full of some kind of liquid that can never leak even though it's in a vacuum.
Like, sure, but also, that seems like a lot of work, a lot of extra cost, and a lot of risk, all just to avoid building it in Kansas.
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It's much more likely SpaceX will continue building more ground data centers and using their sat relays to make global connection faster than ground connections can allow.
A great business for the rocket logistics company since radiators are a thing.
A less good business for the data center company.
xAI could tie in just fine without Cursor in the picture.
yes musk said that, but that's retarded, a statement made to fill as many bingo spaces as possible
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A global centralized internet provider? I mean, just that, might be a trillion dollar company. Let alone build out datacenters? Those are not easy or cheap here on earth. You can build out datacenters at scale with minimal need for power or cooling. I think the current rate for a data center (not gpu) is 120million. Datacenters are super hip now too.
More like a giant military radar larping as an space based ISP.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbp3kdJZ1_A
Elon has always been a Department of Defense/intelligence asset larping as a capitalists. You can't exactly go to congress and get a quarter of the government budget to do globe spanning surveillance from space, or convince them to let you fund, build and maintain a platform for psyopping your own civilian population (x) So you go get your illegal projects funded through capital markets with through an asset like Elon. As soon as the department of defense started focusing on subterranean warfare and how its the future of wars Elon starts a tunneling company.
Elon is just Howard Hughes v2, they're running the same script again.
Space Opportunities + Robots (Tesla merger when it happens) + Software factory (Cursor).
It is a umbrella enterprise.
Is the TAM for airlines finite? They ship an indefinitely growing volume of cargo and people. Reusable rockets will be no different. Cargo into space, people in point-to-point orbital flights and to Mars.
Not a sound argument because you would have said the same thing before they did Starlink. "The TAM for launch services is finite. There are only so many countries/companies that want to launch satellites."
Musk would argue infinite. They literally want to create offworld colonies, with everything that entails. Obviously it's crazy, but it beats the pants off more adtech.
I'm bullish on DC in space with laser links. The whole sentient sun/railgun on the moon... hey, go big or go home. I would have probably just asked MBS for money on that one, and renamed the railgun "the line (of ketamine)".
It’s insane enough to consider undertaking the risk of a moon or mars colony. But doing so with him as the sole load bearing link in your supply chain? What if mars turns out to be woke and you’re fed into a wood chipper like USAID?
Last week a 13 year old video of ceo of Ariane Airspace got popular on twitter. When asked about spacex and reusable rockets he said: "there are only 25 satellites launched a year, every year, and that’s not going to change"
Currently a single Starlink launch is 25 satellites. And there are 100 such launches a year.
If only the shareholders had any kind of voice - if only it was illegal to issue a fake IPO where you sell an overwhelming number of shares stripped of their voting power - if only the market responded rationally to this boondoggle.
If we're going to right the ship in turn of common sense a bunch of people need to lose a bunch of money, I just hope it doesn't mostly hit passive investors and instead lands mostly on Elon-stans.
If only you there were companies who could choose which type of shares they'd like to offer...and if only people could buy the types they want from the company that aligns with their ideas...
Passive "investors" can go and invest in ETF or whatever else that does not include company shares without voting rights.
How is it legal to have different share classes? You could make 100 shares that can vote and then sell 99.9% of the company while maintaining full control. Seems strongly against the spirit of a publicly traded company
Most large companies do that these days: GOOG, META all have different share classes. Even the small startup I worked for had that.
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There's some companies (Snap being one of them) where certain classes of shares have NO voting rights. If you think SpaceX is lopsided, look at Snap's shares. They have A, B, and C class. The founders of Snap own 95% of the voting through their Class C shares... literally only pre-IPO folks have any voting rights.
Musk didn’t invent the idea of using multiple share classes to ensure the founder(s) retain control of the company, see Rupert Murdoch, Google, Facebook, etc
From the regulators’ perspective: it is a risk, but you disclosed that risk in the prospectus that buyers are assumed to have read (what percentage ever actually do?), hence it is fine
Well, when you buy into an IPO, they make you sign to say you read it. So either you did, or you made a false statement on a legal document
Who has the gold makes the rules
I suppose they kind of do, they could sell the stock and drive the price down. That wouldn't force Musk to change direction, but it would hurt his wealth.
If he was smart it'd be to a very limited extent.
If you have this much wealth in something as unpredictable as the stock market I think the very wise move is to start converting it into stock backed loans[1] that you leverage to buy real assets - buy islands and small countries, buy other successful large companies and just let them keep trending slowly upwards, pick up that New Zealand bunker... just try and get your money diversified and into things that would survive a stock price collapse. Even if Elon did this with 1% or 10% of his wealth and kept the vast majority of his assets invested in this one clump of companies and they went to zero he'd still be sitting on an insane pile of cash.
1. Lets all pour out a drink to the bankers who authorize such insane loan agreements.
With its IPO, SpaceX secured its role as the vehicle for consolidating Musk's vanity businesses into one closely held public organization that can more easily convert publicity into investment and internally reallocate funds and debts based on his personal whims.
So yes, SpaceX is pivoting, but it's to no one's surprise.
So buy $TSLA is your recommendation
Buying Tesla is just buying SpaceX. When they roll up Tesla, it will be in a stock deal not real money. None of this is real money and I would argue that Musk is not the world's first trillionaire because there is no reality in which he could get that money out of SpaceX
I mean, if he wanted to sell tomorrow, who COULD spend $2-3 Trillion to buy it, and who WOULD? Anyone with that kind of money to spend today knows what a scam it is
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Cursor's edit data is invaluable to anyone who wants to train a coding model. Probably the best data available outside Anthropic and OpenAI. Coding models are seen by the leaders in AI as both the biggest current revenue opportunity and the best way to accelerate the progress of AI and bring about recursive self-improvement that will create superintelligence. So yeah, it's easy to see how SpaceX could see it as in their interest to purchase Cursor with 2% of their equity.
Mars was never going to happen without revenue. Starlink is providing revenue but probably not enough to build a whole city on Mars within our lifetimes. SpaceX needs more and AI is the only near-term way.
> Cursor's edit data is invaluable to anyone who wants to train a coding model.
Ok. So what prevents a company from offering a Claude Code/ Cursor equivalent, with 100% subsidised Claude (= 100% free), capturing the exact same data that Cursor does? If the data is worth in the tens of billions, the cost of subsidising the usage is negligible.
Cursor also has a large customer base including most of the Fortune 500, talent, and their own coding model and training infrastructure using their data. You wouldn't get those automatically by subsidizing Claude, and the many months or even years it would take to ramp up your own IDE/coding hardness from scratch and acquire customers to match Cursor would put you way behind in a field where the SOTA climbs every month. It's also not clear that Anthropic would let you undercut everyone else using their API; they could cut you off at any time. That would be a very precarious position.
This Cold Fusion vid covers the "pivot" nicely.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPIGu0anfAE
The video explains that it is spelled out in the prospectus that SpaceX is counting 70%-80% of their total addressable market to be AI related and only about 7%-8% to be space-related.
I saw that too, and it's so depressing. SpaceX was pushing the envelope of "interplanetary" travel/species, and to see it being reduced to a 7-8% "side-quest" :-(
> was pushing the envelope of "interplanetary" travel/species
I don't think they were. All the Mars stuff is just dressed up version of The Boring Company - a distraction by Elon to better position his other interests.
There's no money in going to Mars and there's no reason to, from a financial perspective, and Elon doesn't care about anything beyond wealth and power.
> SpaceX was pushing the envelope of "interplanetary" travel/species
We already have a perfectly usable planet. It just need to be taken care of.
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Calling it an IDE is under-representing cursor
They have in-house models, and the data to train even more powerful ones. The cursor team is a proper AI lab.
> Calling it an IDE is under-representing cursor
On the contrary, it's over selling it: it's a not even a stand-alone IDE (like Zed, for instance) it's a mere fork of VSCode.
In the same sense that chrome is just a safari fork I suppose
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Isn't their in-house model just Kimi?
See here https://cursor.com/blog/composer-2-5
85% of the compute for the final model is from them, and not the base Kimi model.
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They use Kimi and post-train it on the same stuff that anyone with a Github dump can feed it. They aren't doing anything that you can't do yourself.
Dumping github into a model is not post training, thats pre training. And every base model already has all of github.
Composer post training is clearly very good, only second to Anthropic and OpenAI.
It does irk me a bit that they try to hide the fact that it's based on a chinese pretrained model though.
why comment on something you clearly don't know anything about? it's on-policy RL trained not just on coding text
listen and learn :)
Meh. On an outcomes analysis, I've found Cursor's delivery to be exceptionally weak.
Good luck to the alt-economy of SpaceTesla though, may all our 401ks survive.
Their “in house models” are reportedly basically just Kimi.
Replied on the other comment about this, but putting it here:
> See here https://cursor.com/blog/composer-2-5
> 85% of the compute for the final model is from them, and not the base Kimi model.
Of course they could be lying, but it seems feasible that they are adding a lot on top of this
>One of the things that makes @SpaceX so valuable is how valuable it is. The Cursor acquisition costs materially less in dilution because of SpaceX’s high valuation.
https://x.com/BillAckman/status/2066866144154161555?s=20
They are buying it with overvalued stocks, so it isn't real money. Probably the Cursor team will be able to sell it when the SpaceX stocks will be already crashed.
Why are you comparing it to building expensive modern hospitals? Why don't you compare every other tech acquisition to that? because that's not a relevant comparison, and building expensive modern hospitals has nothing to do with the goal of for-profit corporations.
SpaceX has 3 major businesses: Space, Starlink, and AI.
This acquisition helps with the 3rd one.
This is the same straw man argument of "country Z has N homeless/unhoused people, why are they building a space/military/education widget for $Y price, when they haven't found homes for N unhoused people yet?"
Except businesses tend be focused on core competencies and not sprawling in a lot of unrelated directions.
yes, whataboutism at its finest
They compared the acquisition to hospitals because "think of the children!"
Evidently, at some point money just stops being real. Also, it's not even $60b. It's a 100% stock deal.
The markets have quite literally given Elon a carte blanche. Can it last forever? I doubt it.
> all-stock deal
It's not like they could easily cash out all of those $60B. I always find it troublesome that we generally conflate cash with stonks, market caps, and such.
> It's not like they could easily cash out all of those $60B.
They probably have a vesting period of some sort (as they would with cash as well) but beyond that they will definitely be able to cash out all of their money as soon as they are allowed to.
$60B is 3% of SpaceX at today's valuation, Musk had no issue selling this amount of Tesla shares to buy Twitter. The idea that stocks are somehow not liquid is an nonsensical urban legend.
I wish we’d stopped calling him Elon like he’s a family uncle or something. I chuckled at Heilon Musk, but I’d settle for just Musk.
Back-of-the-napkin math tells me Google’s top 20 acquisitions combined are cheaper than Cursor.
Elon is consolidating all of his property into one single megacorporation because he is confident that nobody will ever challenge this, given the current political direction of the United States.
> the current political direction of the United States
These kinds of comments reek echo-chamber parroting and zero substantive research. As someone that very much enjoys and carefully follows politics, the current political direction points squarely to Republicans getting absolutely pummelled in the midterms, effectively turning Trump's administration into a 2-year lame duck. What are you even talking about?
Will a midterm pummeling change the regulatory departments that oversee mergers and anti-trust?
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Even if Congress may reverse things in the future, there are many opportunistic things happening right now, and it seems like the spacex situation is one of them. The emerging picture feels like a 'flood the zone' strategy (not by coordination, but by practical effect).
While other commenters have pointed out lots of details that point towards the favorable structural environment going forward, another idea that roots my thoughts towards this is that by creating facts on the ground, they are defining the new starting point.
Ultimately, reversing all of the different 'wrongs' or irregularities will be costly to both the opposition's political and attentional capital.
> the current political direction points squarely to Republicans getting absolutely pummelled in the midterms
Even if so, are the Democrats really going to do the house cleaning required to fix this? Their recent history implies that they'll try to pretend things are running normally, until it all explodes in their face (again). Maybe I'm wrong, and they'll actually fight for the country, but... I'm not surprised that companies (and markets) are expecting them to just... not.
Ah to have such hope.
Even if I was this optimistic, the executive with a stuffed supreme court is not going to care what congress thinks.
We'll sooner declare market manipulation a form of speech.
Brother I'm not clear there will be a midterm election and I'm confident most of the electorate on both sides feel very disenfranchised voting and suspect the system is not working on the level.
Going to do my best to respond to this while still following the HN guidelines:
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
RIMR says:
> nobody will ever challenge this, given the current political direction of the United States
It's obviously hyperbole to say that NOBODY will EVER challenge this, but I'd say it's directionally correct:
1. The Supreme Court is controlled by a conservative, pro-big-business majority that makes it very difficult for any legal attempts to challenge Elon's actions to survive litigation.
2. The United States Senate has a conservative, pro-big-business bias due its over-representation of rural voters and its internal norms (filibuster)
3. The United States House has a conservative, pro-big-business bias due to the gerrymandering efforts of Republican-controlled state legislatures across the country (which the Democrats have tried to counter and failed, see Virginia)
4. The conservative, pro-big-business Supreme Court has ensured that elections in the United States overall have a conservative, pro-big-business bias due to the unfettered spending allowed after Citizens United.
So yes, the winds seems to be against Republicans and Trump in the mid-terms, but the structural biases of the government are still very much pro-big-business, pro-capital, and anti-regulation.
It will take much more than a single mid-term cycle to reverse that trend.
> the current political direction points squarely to Republicans getting absolutely pummelled in the midterms,
I am not this optimistic and I think it is dangerous to be this optimistic. Even putting aside mischief, just as a matter of reality, the gap always closes. A loss, yes. Hopefully. A slap around the face, maybe. Perhaps enough to get a clear win in the House. A pummelling? Nah. I think they might still keep the Senate.
Trump supporters falling out of love for him could well just lead them to focus their attention on down-ticket Republicans who figure out how to make them feel OK about their past choices, and since they need to feel OK, they will come out. Wholesale rejection of the party is unlikely since it is already splitting into two factions.
is spacex a space company? I thought they were an internet provider that wants to use their strategic advantages to get into AI including AI infra like data centers.
SpaceX since the IPO is an AI company with two side projects: social networks and space.
I say this based on their filing which says that the vast majority of predicted profits will come from their AI company, citing a $36.5T total addressable market.
This is peanuts compared to the 100T TAM in my prospectus around posting insightful comments on HN and Reddit that will help transform humanity.
SpaceX and everything Elon are stock companies - they're Microstrategy but with a veneer of a real business slapped on top.
That’s the real response. It’s all financial engineering
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> 150 of world’s most expensive modern hospitals
https://sfyimby.com/2024/06/construction-underway-for-4-3-bi...
Probably not the most expensive , just first I thought of … so maybe it’s more like 10-15 typical urban hospitals.
SpaceX isn't a space company anymore, it's an AI company. In their IPO filing, of their projected $28T total addressable market, only $370B (~1-2%) of that is from space [1]. The rest is primarily AI, with a sprinkling of Telecom revenue from Starlink.
Given xAI's Grok is way behind ChatGPT & Claude on coding capabilities, whereas Cursor was able to get in spitting distance of them w/ Composer 2.5 by simply running post-training on Kimi K2.5, I'm not sure Elon could dream up a more perfect strategic fit.
Cursor likely has the largest, highest quality dataset of any private firm for training new coding models, which would compete SpaceX's trifecta of becoming a viable competitor in the AI race:
1. Access to compute (they have so much that they're renting capacity to Anthropic & Google)
2. Liquidity for R&D+M&A (largest IPO in history)
3. High quality training data (this Cursor acquisition)
> Isn't it kinda bizarre that Elon is pivoting SpaceX to something else?
In a vacuum, absolutely yes. But in the bizarre context of the AI economics, chaotically scrambling to bring everything you need to compete in-house makes perfect sense.
Arguably, when compared with either OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google, SpaceX/xAI now own the most compute, are the most financially liquid, and (assuming the Cursor acquisition goes through) have the largest corpus of high quality training data.
We may very well be a couple of months away from a Grok release that goes toe-to-toe w/ other American frontier models, IMHO.
So when you look at this as a $60B play to capture an additional 10-20% of an estimated $26T total addressable market, it makes a lot more sense. Now, whether that projected TAM is even remotely close to reality (or even just enough to make Cursor worth $60B) is another question entirely.
[1]: https://www.satellitetoday.com/finance/2026/05/20/spacexs-ip...
* edited to add source for IPO numbers & tweak grammar/formatting
No, it really still makes no sense. Where's the moat around what Cursor provides? If Cursor is really that great, surely something equally great could be developed for a measly $1 billion or so? Is it brand recognition? An established customer base? Surely they don't have $60 billion worth of either.
The key point I think you're missing is Cursor's "moat" isn't around their product or brand, it's around the gigantic corpus of usage data they've almost certainly collected.
It is simply not feasible train an LLM to be as good as these frontier models are without a TON of high-quality examples of what "good" looks like. Every time a Cursor user (who didn't opt out of analytics) does/doesn't hit a "retry" button, or rejects/accepts an LLMs output, it allows Cursor to log record of a specific LLMs output and a binary signal of that output's quality.
Given they've been at this since 2022, and for most of that time sat comfortably at #1 in market share among comparable AI coding tools (only recently getting topped by Claude code), Cursor likely has the largest, highest-quality, SWE-specific dataset in the industry by a sizable margin.
Grok being so late to the party could only train on twitter data in combination with whatever they could source publicly or purchase privately, and likely hasn't had anywhere near the usage they'd need to build up their own competitive dataset from scratch anytime soon.
If you believe (as SpaceX seems to) that the AI's total addressable market is over $26T, and acquiring proprietary, high-quality training data is the difference between capturing ~1-2% of that market and ~10-20%, then $60B starts to look like a bargain.
>they have so much that they're renting capacity to Anthropic & Google
they could not make use of it! That's why they're renting, they don't have access to good distributed training software, so the heterogenous cluster they made was bad for training and they don't have enough demand for inference.
>Arguably, when compared with either OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google, SpaceX/xAI now own the most compute,
lol wut. You think they have more compute than Google?
> are the most financially liquid,
You think they have the most cashflow?
>the largest corpus of high quality training data.
What? You think they have higher quality training data than Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI?
>We may very well be a couple of months away from a Grok release that goes toe-to-toe w/ other American frontier models, IMHO.
Training on what? They rented both of their data centers away!!!
They are building a new one right?
> they could not make use of it!
Grok 4.3 was made on Colossus 1? It's not frontier quality, but it's definitely not nothing. Also, Cursor brings more expertise to help them improve their utilization further.
Additionally, I struggle to see how renting out excess capacity is anything but good. It brings in a ton of cash at a price premium, and ensures they have headroom to gradually phase out rental capacity as their internal demand increases.
> You think they have more compute than Google?
Fair point. No way they have more raw compute, but I do think it'd be fair to say they have more "excess compute capacity" than Google, but even that is pretty speculative.
> You think they have the most cashflow?
Again fair point. I was overestimating how much cash comes from a $2T IPO before actually looking at the numbers. My revised take is that SpaceX/xAI are now in-line with the other labs on cash liquidity, rather than leading (where pre-IPO they were way behind)
> You think they have higher quality training data than Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI?
Yes -- I'm standing by this one. Cursor has a multi-year head start on agentic coding data collection, and a GUI UX that likely provides richer user sentiment & quality signals than something like Claude Code.
Obviously OpenAI & Anthropic have far larger proprietary datasets for chat histories, and Google is an undisputed leader in data hoarding. But when it comes to agentic coding specifically (AI's most compelling use-case, IMO), I think Cursor's data is a HUGE deal. This is backed up by how good Composer 2.5 was given it was essentially Kimi K2.5 + Cursor data.
Additionally, I also suspect its possible to mine Twitter for user engagement & sentiment analysis to create surprisingly useful datasets.
> Training on what? They rented both of their data centers away!!!
I thought they only rented Colossus 1, but you're right they're also renting out a portion of Colossus 2. That said, they still have 2/3 of their Colossus 2 facility available for internal, which is likely enough to build something competitive. They also have 90-day termination agreements in place once they forecast a need for more internal capacity.
All that said, while I appreciate your pushback & I was overly hyperbolic on a few key points in my last comment, I stand by my core theses: The Cursor acquisition (assuming it goes through) combined with the SpaceX IPO puts xAI/Grok right in-line with the other big labs, at least in terms of positioning.
Whether they're able to execute remains to be seen, but I would not at all surprised to see a frontier-quality Grok 5 or Composer 3 release before the end of the year.
Because cursor gets some of the highest quality training data from the world's programmers and responses from the full ecosystem of model vendors and access to active code bases. XAI wants the data.
Highest is extremely subjective in case of cursor. It’s not exactly used by the experienced programmers and caters mainly to neophytes
> caters mainly to neophytes
Perhaps that's where the money and strategy is. (a) stronger need; (b) if you can build systems without real expertise, you don't have to stomach their salaries or politics.
Umm. It’s real development work in real settings with real model output. That is a high quality dataset. The fact that it isn’t good code from elite engineers is confusing what good means in the context of coding agents. First is how to respond to a range of prompts. For that you need diverse real world conversations. Second is the ability to respond with good code. That is about labeling or other data curation after the fact or other training methods. So it’s a downstream consideration
Ah hah, this is it. I was also confused - the tool isn't the thing. It's the behavior analysis capability.
Plus user-funded model distillation lol.
Since Cursor is kind of a Select-Your-Model front end for various AI coding systems, how much of it could be to just make sure Grok gets to the top or default choice of that Select-Your-Model list?
How is buying a company sending messages on the Internet for $45b in the owner's interest when Westinghouse, who built nuclear reactors sold for under $10b? The market is irrational.
It might not be irrational if there is more revenue in people who are willing to spend money on internet messages than there are on those willing to spend for nuclear reactors.
So far, I see way more companies paying each other in a circular fashion than individuals forking out anything near whatever tam SpaceX is projecting for AI.
I think it has something to do with the fact that the first company is better at spreading messages on the Internet than the other at building reactors.
when you see the list of major investors in Cursor that will never break even if it stays independent, and compare it to the investors in SpaceX, it all makes sense.
Please don't let Musk know that his money can be used for the real world, mundane stuff.
Because he will buy 150 hospitals and drive them to ruin, private equity style.
We are way better off when he pays abstract amounts of it for abstract stuff to some random nerds and grifters.
His money is not a resource that could be put to any good use. It's a liability for all of us.
Prediction -- SpaceX rebrands within a decade like Meta or Alphabet. And they turn out to be a AI company not a space company.
Gotta pump that stock price with constant news buzz
Why do you think it's a space company? SpaceX didn't even define ITSELF as a space company in its IPO filing.
it is called SpaceX .
Hardly the fault of anyone is it for not reading a 100+page document meant for investors when it literally in the name .
If they don’t want us to think of them as a Space company they could have taken the xAI name (like how grammarly did with superhuman) or called it Musk Inc or whatever else.
Weak. Would Yamaha list itself as just a musical instrument company?
It’s not real money, there’s no check being written for that amount and then deposited into someone’s bank account.
I mean, the answer is obvious if you do not deliberately try to put a message in the worst light possible:
- "Space company" has a major LLM+datacenter business called X.ai.
- LLM for coding is a big business, as you can see from trillion dollar valuations of Anthropic.
- Cursor is popular and gives you a headstart on the business.
- Instagram was bought for the price of many many hospitals. Uber is more valuable than companies owning the cars. Different business models, entirely different valuation models. Not sure what that comparison entails. You know it. I know it.
Whether it is a good purchase or not, we may not know, but we know your characterization is just outright dismissal without much rationale behind it.
Smart move as they will pay in stock, and if stock is overvalued by 2x this means you get 50% discount
xAI is a subsidiary of SpaceX and runs several of the worlds largest compute datacenters.
yeah but someone -- no one has explained who -- still thinks this is a good idea
Giving retail traders a reason to turn their life savings into exit liquidity
I would agree but in this case they are buying the talent and the data.
Might be a play for talent. Recruiting in this space is hard... and expensive
50 billion worth of talent?
XAi is part of SpaceX.
Space exploration requires significant software development.
Take a look at the Apollo 11 movie: There was quite significant computing power for the 1960s putting a person on the moon.
Composer-2.5 is a good model, grok-4 is not.
Its that simple.
Tesla isn't a car company anymore either.
SpaceX is planning to do data centers in orbit. Engineering issues aside, that might dovetail with Cursor nicely if timings work out.
I cannot believe full grown adult are taking that seriously
As long as the stock goes up, everyone is happy, right?
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It is crazy that a company like SpaceX was allowed to exist.
The whole big tech industry needs Microsoft/MSN style breakups again.
Part of Elon Musks strategy seems to sell some kind of hype that does not materialise or at least won't for long (Mars, autonomous Cars) The vast amounts of money collected are then used to develop products that are still a significant progress in its market. Now AI is where all the hype is. It's difficult to sell some hype without AI currently.
I bought a small amount (4 shares) of SpaceX stock on IPO day for $160/share. This Cursor purchase does not upset me as a very minor shareholder. Elon Musk seems to have a unique ability to help grow companies that lead to shareholder value. In particular, it seems that xAI overbuilt data centers because their model fell behind. SpaceX could lease data center capacity to Google or other big players (which they're doing), or they can use it internally. Buying Cursor lets them do it internally.
My employer recently switched us all from Cursor to Claude Code. Aside from my personal preference for having a chat window inside VSCode, Claude Code is painfully slow compared to Cursor for my workloads. I think part of this is due to Claude's massive bump in popularity without a similarly rapid build-out of compute. So, the low-hanging fruit for Cursor is to have a massive speed advantage over Claude Code and regain popularity that way. (My current paid AI subscriptions are ChatGPT, Gemini and Cursor. I do not personally pay for Claude.)
And as far as the pivot goes, there seems to be speculation that Elon Musk wishes to roll up all his companies into one big company. So, it doesn't really matter if the AI company lives inside SpaceX or Tesla, since it'll all be one big thing in the future.
> bizarre that Elon is pivoting SpaceX to something else
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Didn’t you see Moon? They need a Gerdy
SpaceX is just a vibe company. Nothing they are doing makes sense on a valuation basis, which their investors are eventually going to painfully figure out.
I’m worried all this crap will distract and damage the things they are great at (rockets) similar to what happened to Tesla where outside the stock price it’s pretty dismal
Like Tesla the stock is held by many powerful and rich people.
Elon is smart and doesn't buy things alone, he brings in many people so they all have a interest to protect their investment.
SpaceX’s interest is being an Enterprise AI corporation, they identified it as a $24 trillion addressable market, in comparison to their quarter trillion rocket related one
It’s all disclosed in the S-1, you read it right?
In America all you have to do is tell potential investors what you’re doing, its up to the people to use their discretion afterwards