Comment by h14h
16 days ago
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.