Here's a shower thought. BTC essential is worth $70k solely through the power of memes. Can TSLA and SPCX remain overvalued (relative to the revenue of their respective underlying assets) forever through the power of memes?
Intuitively, it seems to me that there must necessarily be some kind of upper limit, but I'm not convincing myself. These speculative assets are only attractive as long as the price keeps inflating. But that can only happen if there is more and more demand. So it's basically a bet that there is an average amount of retail investors (I assume it's mostly retail investors but I could be wrong) that consistently put a percentage of their income into these speculative assets. Can this be maintained forever?
drakythe 3 hours ago [-]
The saying "The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent" exists for a reason.
In short, the answer to your literal question is "no" because nothing remains forever in this world. The practical answer is "yes" because the TSLA stock has been irrational for years already and it shows no sign of stopping.
mixdup 3 hours ago [-]
The thing is fundamentals really don't matter. TSLA and SPCX aren't paying dividends so there's no real performance they have to hit, no one is going to miss a dividend payment and dump the stock. The Elong vibes can carry it as long as people keep smoking what he's selling
The real question is, when does that run out of steam? When do we wake up to the charade that has built up around us? That's a much bigger thing than just Elon and his businesses. Like someone else said, when the next crisis/downturn/depression hits the house of cards will fall. Unfortunately it will hit all of us not just people in the meme stocks
philistine 54 minutes ago [-]
I'm extremely cynical about the way the US government would react to any sort of financial crisis. I do not believe that they would not completely cave and bail out the AI companies and the monopolists if there is a downturn. And it's not that I don't trust the Republicans specifically. The whole political sphere is completely convinced that AI is a national security prerogative, and the cynical political atmosphere will equate national security with investor protection.
Let me append the saying a bit: The US government can remain irrational longer than you can stay solvent.
fluoridation 16 minutes ago [-]
*The US government can remain irrational so you can stay solvent.
lossolo 2 hours ago [-]
If you exclude dividend paying stocks, then the entire stock market starts to look like a giant pyramid scheme casino.
throw0101c 2 hours ago [-]
> If you exclude dividend paying stocks, then the entire stock market starts to look like a giant pyramid scheme casino.
Stocks can start paying dividends in the future: MSFT did not in the past, and does now. AAPL did, stopped in the 1990s, and started doing so again.
You should be indifferent to the company's dividend scheme since it's the underlying business activity that drives total returns, and not its distribution policy. There is all sorts of magical thinking when it comes to dividends:
A pyramid scheme can run out of people to keep it going: the stock market is in a sense a 'savings scheme' for future consumption. Younger people work and turn their cash into savings, older people take their savings and turn it back into cash: as long as young people need to think about the future, and older people / retirees need to pay bills, there's a mechanism to maintain this cycle.
dingaling 21 minutes ago [-]
> A pyramid scheme can run out of people to keep it going
And then you describe how the secondary stock market requires 'fresh blood' to whom to sell stock to cash-out.
It's precisely a legalised pyramid scheme that always needs someone to come in at the bottom hold the bag to let someone else cash-out. In turn they need someone to come in 30 years later. That's exactly how a pyramid scheme works.
andrewflnr 1 hours ago [-]
> it's the underlying business activity that drives total returns, and not its distribution policy
That's exactly the question, though, since a lot of stocks seem priced disproportionately to their business activities.
throw0101c 1 hours ago [-]
> A Keynesian beauty contest is a metaphorical beauty contest in which judges are rewarded for selecting the most popular choices among all judges, rather than those they may personally find the most attractive. This idea is often applied in financial markets, whereby investors could profit more by buying whichever stocks they think other investors will buy, rather than the stocks that have fundamentally the best value, because when other people buy a stock, they bid up the price, allowing an earlier investor to cash out with a profit, regardless of whether the price increases are supported by its fundamentals and theoretical arguments.
Plenty of folks may think these companies are garbage but are 'playing along' because it's not necessarily what they themselves think that is important, but what others think. You can make money in a bubble, even when it eventually pops. What we're seeing now is hardly new, either:
I generally check my portfolio once a year, in January, when I top things up when new contribution room becomes available with the new year. It's 'fun' to follow along with the gyrations and drama as things happen, but I don't sleep over it. If you're reasonably diversified you can generally weather storms and come out okay on the other side:
No shit. That's why, even if it's an exaggeration to call the entire stock market a pyramid scheme, you can't justify the claim that it's entirely "underlying business activity that drives total returns". That's the real question (from which dividends are, yes, a distraction).
ethbr1 2 hours ago [-]
No, there are a huge number of companies that are valued reasonably for their revenue / profitability / growth.
There's basically two stock markets: things valued on fundamentals and things valued on vibes.
And I don't think there's ever going to be a unified theory of value that can span both, because the former is quantitative and the latter is psychology.
PyWoody 1 hours ago [-]
Aren't buybacks the new dividends?
Danox 2 hours ago [-]
It’s only a pyramid scheme for Tesla, SpaceX or X formally known as Twitter see a pattern there?
criddell 2 hours ago [-]
Would you say the same thing about Bitcoin? Will that house of cards all fall in the next crisis/downturn/depression?
lokar 2 hours ago [-]
Hasn’t it crashed in every economic downturn and financial panic so far?
criddell 2 hours ago [-]
Not really, no.
A decade ago it was under $1000 and has never been that low since. It's peak price is only about 2x the current price.
lokar 2 hours ago [-]
Isn’t a 50% reduction pretty bad?
And being higher over 10 years has little to do with it if acts counter cyclical to stocks and other assets.
throw0101c 1 hours ago [-]
> And being higher over 10 years has little to do with it if acts counter cyclical to stocks and other assets.
BTC has been called many things at many different times. It was originally a payment system:
> A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online
payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a
financial institution.
And it can still be used for that, however the transaction throughput is tiny, and so it became a store of value in essence: but it's kind of hard to be that when the value swings up and won so much. While "fiat" currency inflation is annoying, it is, generally, fairly predictable in most cases (<4%) and so you can plan ahead with regards to future value and purchase. The same is hardly true of BTC.
tasuki 2 hours ago [-]
Is it bad? Isn't 60x in 10 years still kind of ok? The things I invested in ten years ago didn't return 60x since.
lokar 2 hours ago [-]
Again, the original argument was that it was like gold, and provided a hedge against equities.
fluoridation 2 minutes ago [-]
As the sibling says, the original value proposition of Bitcoin was that it would supplant Paypal and wire transfers. The store of value narrative was a post hoc rationalization by stakeholders when it became clear that it was both technically unsuited to serve Internet-wide throughputs. Not only that. I sat in during the meetings around the time of the segwit transition; I think they were debating making the blocks bigger or something. It was amazing to see first-hand how such a relatively minor and technically necessary change could generate so much friction. That was when I realized Bitcoin was never going to evolve in a useful direction, and sevenish years on I see that I'm correct, as the block structure is pretty much the same as the last time I saw it.
criddell 48 minutes ago [-]
Who argued that? In 2008 Bitcoin was proposed as a peer-to-peer digital cash system. The comparison to gold didn't really take off until years later.
thisisit 59 minutes ago [-]
There is some misunderstanding of what a crash really is. It doesn't necessarily mean that things get written down to 0 or some arbitrary level because everything has a price at which someone will buy.
Even companies have some value after a crash and you could make a case that at some arbitrary point it was worth $x and since the crash didn't cause the company to crater to below $x it has not "crashed". Even companies filing for bankruptcy have some residual value above what they might have been founded on - it doesn't mean the company hasn't gone bankrupt.
senordevnyc 49 minutes ago [-]
To me the difference is that BTC's continued value isn't predicated on the actions of one person, who has continually proven himself to be childish, mercurial, and dishonest.
ahcharades 2 hours ago [-]
Yes when will everyone wake up for the charade of having a monopoly on space launches? Of putting over 90% of all mass into space, of your closest competitor being the nation state of China, and they are years away from where you are right now. Ah yes, that charade, when will people learn am I right? Total genius.
ben_w 1 hours ago [-]
SpaceX are currently losing money on the "going to space" part of their business.
They're making money on telecoms, and may have just started making a profit on renting out the data centres they originally built for the AI that it turned out hardly anyone wanted to actually use.
V__ 2 hours ago [-]
Even if one assumes this is true, it still wouldn't justify the valuation.
1 hours ago [-]
petilon 3 hours ago [-]
Michael Burry, a hedge fund investor featured in the book “The Big Short” for his predictions on the 2008 financial crisis, said in a Substack discussion last month that any increase in SpaceX’s stock after its I.P.O. would “be on hype and technicals.”
Here, “technicals” means technical analysis signals rather than the company’s business fundamentals. In other words, Burry is saying the stock could rise because of chart-based trading, momentum, and market behavior—not because investors think SpaceX is truly worth that much based on revenue, profits, or other fundamentals.
How long can the hype be maintained? TSLA is still maintaining its hype, judging by its P/E ratio.
TaupeRanger 2 hours ago [-]
Technical Analysis is Astrology, and Burry has predicted 17 of last the last 2 stock market crashes.
UncleOxidant 52 minutes ago [-]
> Astrology
Exactly, but there are people out there who buy stocks based on technical analysis. It can have an effect if enough people act on it's "signals".
rob74 2 hours ago [-]
The hype already starts with the SpaceX SEC filing. According to it, its addressable market is $28.5 trillion, of which $26.5 trillion are AI. This means that every human being who owns a computer on this planet (1.75 billion) would need to spend (on average) over $15.000 on xAI products.
root-parent 2 hours ago [-]
>> that every human being who owns a computer on this planet (1.75 billion) would need to spend over $15.000 on xAI products.
Current US national debt is approximately $39.22 trillion. As we achieve a zombie movie, level of collective madness, lets take all this into the last degree.
Nationalize SpaceX, and with this bright obvious future described on the prospect lets pay US debt :-) Pay US retirement benefits pensions in token credits, pensioners can resell, make an options market for tokens. I am sure Robinhood will open you a margin account for that?
Lets open a futures markets for food goods grown up on SpaceX Asteroids, as they will have free solar energy. They can grow them three times faster than on Earth...
To quote Ron Baron yesterday on CNBC, we are all going to earn hundreds of billions....
ben_w 2 hours ago [-]
Yes indeed.
While this would be conceivable if some future AI gets good enough to actually replace 100% of global paid labour currently done by using a computer, the reference class I have here is that Wikipedia is definitely not valued at [number of people online] * [peak cost of Encyclopaedia Britannica].
Economic displacement on that scale breaks the valuation.
dzhiurgis 1 hours ago [-]
> would need to spend over $15.000 on xAI products.
For perspective - that’s 12.5 years of Tesla FSD subscriptions. I think there are probably about that much cars out there.
darth_avocado 2 hours ago [-]
Technicals are the star signs of stock market.
root-parent 2 hours ago [-]
Funny, the European Central Bank just made life even harder, by raising interest rates purely on that, and the FED is preparing to do the same...
darth_avocado 1 hours ago [-]
Fed is not raising rates because of technicals. It’s because of economic numbers. The two aren’t the same.
root-parent 1 hours ago [-]
At the essence they are the same, if you think a bit about it.
gpderetta 16 minutes ago [-]
they literally are not.
root-parent 9 minutes ago [-]
Looking forward to the explanation...
Danox 2 hours ago [-]
Tesla definitely is floating down slowly worldwide with hype when it finally crashes just don’t be left holding the bag. 2026 will be another year downward.
Der_Einzige 3 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
tcp_handshaker 3 hours ago [-]
The market will stay irrational for longer than Michael Burry will stay correct.
pjc50 2 hours ago [-]
Notably, it looks like the meme power is gradually being redirected from BTC and cryptocurrency in general towards AI and SpaceX in general. Now that people have found a means of consuming vast amounts of computing power that occasionally emits useful output, rather than just a hash and a colossal waste.
jld 3 hours ago [-]
While gold has industrial uses, isn't most of its value based on the fact that people like it and believe that it has value?
jimnotgym 2 hours ago [-]
I was once told bitcoin was a 'pet rock'. Thing is people pay a lot of money for rocks when they have no planned industrial activity for them. Diamonds, for instance.
I think you are spot on. The problem comes if SpaceX goes out of fashion, not its fundamentals.
jpadkins 2 hours ago [-]
What you are describing applies to all forms of money. It has value because people believe other people will use it as money. If that belief drops, the value drops.
People comment on gold and Bitcoin, but don't realize the same principles apply to US dollars and bonds.
chriswarbo 9 minutes ago [-]
> the same principles apply to US dollars
Currencies are a little different, since they are required to pay taxes; and payment of taxes is enforced (to varying degrees) by state violence.
Hence if you believe you will be taxed ("death and taxes" being the only certainties in life, etc.) then the currency associated with that tax has value, in that it avoids imprisonment, etc.
interstice 3 hours ago [-]
I'm not sure if this means gold isn't powered by memes or whether it's just one of the most long lived memes of all time. Aside from other nice properties like lasting a long time, being pretty, and not requiring electricity to exist.
Danox 1 hours ago [-]
Certainly, gold is not a meme, nor are all the other rare earth metals. This principle applies most to the other elements found on the periodic table. In fact, they have become more valuable due to research and development in today’s modern world, as numerous useful discoveries are made daily.
Cryptocurrency, such as Bitcoin, is undoubtedly a meme. If given a choice, one would prefer to possess any of the rare metals, rare earths, or any other elements that can be obtained in sufficient quantities, whether on land or in the ocean. Bitcoin or cryptocurrency is beneficial only to insiders and not to the general public. In essence, they are akin to modern tulips with a cherry on top, and like Tesla in 2030, one should avoid being caught with the bag.
infinitewars 3 hours ago [-]
[dead]
throw0101c 2 hours ago [-]
> Here's a shower thought. BTC essential is worth $70k solely through the power of memes. Can TSLA and SPCX remain overvalued (relative to the revenue of their respective underlying assets) forever through the power of memes?
The "value" of something can be a bit of a meta-game:
> A Keynesian beauty contest is a metaphorical beauty contest in which judges are rewarded for selecting the most popular choices among all judges, rather than those they may personally find the most attractive. This idea is often applied in financial markets, whereby investors could profit more by buying whichever stocks they think other investors will buy, rather than the stocks that have fundamentally the best value, because when other people buy a stock, they bid up the price, allowing an earlier investor to cash out with a profit, regardless of whether the price increases are supported by its fundamentals and theoretical arguments.
Plenty of folks may think these companies are garbage but are 'playing along' because it's not necessarily what they themselves think that is important, but what others think.
This idea was put forward by Keynes in his General Thoery publish in 1936, so human nature has hardly changed since then.
yousif_123123 2 hours ago [-]
At least as long as Musk is the CEO, perhaps. I don't think it's easy to find another charismatic figure to keep it going.
It's a different kind of hype than Nvidia has, which is showing very high and fast growing revenues (which may not continue, but they're real now). Jensen I think is not as critical to the AI hype as Elon is to his companies.
All these major tech companies eventually get leadership changes. Apple, Google, Amazon, have all done well because they're real companies and go beyond their original leadership. Tesla and SpaceX I think would surely go down the moment Musk is no longer in leadership.
Indeed, but for general stock market purposes it's one dollar one vote, not one person one vote.
Possibly even worse. Short-sellers got burned on Tesla (and perhaps now also SpaceX), which may mean the marginal buyer and seller consists only of people who already buy into the hyper and by trading are sharing price info with each other rather than with a single person who doubts the man.
I sold my Tesla stocks a while back; the people who kept them don't care what people like me think.
SketchySeaBeast 2 hours ago [-]
I think we've all seen by now that the majority doesn't much matter if you have a rabidly zealous minority.
functionmouse 2 hours ago [-]
suppose you've got me there
rapind 3 hours ago [-]
> Can this be maintained forever?
Obviously not. It’s all about timing your bail so you don’t get left holding the bag.
ozgrakkurt 3 hours ago [-]
> BTC essential is worth $70k solely through the power of memes
This is not true.
BTC is way more sane than SpaceX as can be seen by it's history so far.
rebolek 2 hours ago [-]
SpaceX is successfully building reusable rockets. BTC can process few transactions every ten or so minutes at enormous price.
I think SpaceX is definitely overpriced but saying that BTC is more sane is completely delusional.
Overpower0416 1 hours ago [-]
BTC has the layer 2 lighting network that can process more transactions than Visa and MC combined with very cheap fees. I guess HN knowledge of Bitcoin does not go further than 2015
Also, everything on level 2 needs to be ultimately balanced on level 1; BTC doesn't have enough throughput to balance all the banks in the world, and lo Lightning appears to be consolidating into fewer nodes.
Also also, everything level 2 (including Lightning) necessarily takes away at least one of the selling points used for BTC, and replaces them with something functionally equivalent to 50% of a bank but worse.
misiti3780 3 hours ago [-]
neither of them are sane. BTC is useless, unless your trying to buy child porn, buy illicit drugs on the internet, or someone who bought it before the value exploded. eventually, the world will come around and it will go to zero, if quantum doesnt kill it first. im looking forward to that day.
vovavili 2 hours ago [-]
>BTC is useless, unless your trying to buy child porn, buy illicit drugs on the internet
The market has long shifted to "buy Litecoin with cash, swap it to Monero" for these kinds of activities.
jimnotgym 2 hours ago [-]
USD is useless unless you want to buy something with it. You can't eat it, it has little fuel value...
...it is also propped up in value by a frankly insane demand for it from other countries...on its fundamentals it would be worth much less
btcbigtimer 3 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
throw310822 3 hours ago [-]
BTC's use is being bought and sold. So it's not useless. If I offer you one BTC for $30k, will you buy it?
tcp_handshaker 3 hours ago [-]
If I offer you a tulip for $25,000 would you buy it?
throw310822 2 hours ago [-]
Sure, if there were a stable enough market in which I can fetch twice that amount for that tulip, I'd buy it in a heartbeat. Wouldn't you?
The point being: BTC is a an abstract good, of no practical use except that of being transacted. Has whatever value the people are willing to pay for it, and has had a value in the tens of thousands for long enough that buying one with the intent of keeping it for a while is not such a stupid idea. I don't currently own any but there is a price at which I would buy one, and that price is many thousands of dollars... For an alphanumeric code in a distributed ledger.
petesergeant 2 hours ago [-]
If I think the resale price will stay at $30k long enough for me to flip it, then obviously yes?
ozgrakkurt 3 hours ago [-]
It is not useless, it is incredibly arrogant to think it is useless at this point. You can do a 10 minute research and see how useful it is
Slartie 3 hours ago [-]
True, it's very useful for scammers, grifters, international terrorists and authoritarian governments to funnel monetary value around without having to rely on the traditional financial system where they may be blocked and their money confiscated.
ozgrakkurt 2 hours ago [-]
It costs 150 usd to send 5k usd between two countries I live in.
It costs the same amount of money to literally go there by plane and bring it as cash. This is not fair obviously. So traditional finance is a scam itself.
It takes 10 seconds and no fees to make the same transfer via blockchain.
I am pretty sure you know basically nothing about those crimes or the people that do crimes or how they actually transfer money. Just doing casual newspaper intellectualism while talking about things you never interacted with
tasuki 2 hours ago [-]
> funnel monetary value around without having to rely on the traditional financial system where they may be blocked and their money confiscated.
Yes. Unfortunately the traditional financial system is governed by a country which has been behaving increasingly erratically, threatening its long-term allies with invasions and committing obvious war crimes. This is not a "good guys vs bad guys" scenario.
stetrain 3 hours ago [-]
The current market cap of SPCX and TSLA combined (~$3.8T) is about 3 times the total value of all BTC (~$1.3T).
teekert 2 hours ago [-]
Someone invents something that is digital, but can't be copied. Quite brilliant as it is the first digital asset that can store value without centralization and trust, based on market demand.
Someone on HN: "BTC is valueable solely through the power of memes".
throwaway894345 2 hours ago [-]
Bitcoin doesn't "store value", it has the value that society assigns it, which is what the parent means when s/he says "BTC is valuable solely through the power of memes". It's not a fiat currency, nor does it have any intrinsic utilitarian value.
teekert 8 minutes ago [-]
Age old argument: money also has no intrinsic utilitarian value.
And yes, btc does store value, it is doing that for me now. I stored some of my value in it and it has held better value than fiat.
otterley 2 hours ago [-]
On what grounds do you believe the value of BTC is meme-driven? Another (and arguably more plausible) explanation is that the price reflects the vast amount of criminally-obtained wealth stored in it. It’s a far better store than burying cash in mountain caches.
observationist 2 hours ago [-]
All money is meme driven. Money is fundamentally a meme itself. Seeing lots of people who seem to be making some sort of implicit distinction between bitcoin and USD and so on, but they are no different. They serve the function they serve because of what people believe about them, like any other social, cultural, or economic abstraction. Bitcoin has the feature of a verifiable ledger, but its value and function are in our heads, just like the USD or GBP.
Stevvo 2 hours ago [-]
BTC is a terrible place to put criminally-obtained wealth. Public ledger and all that makes it very difficult to hide anything.
grey-area 1 hours ago [-]
It seems like that during a bubble (things can never go down!) but the market eventually does correct, even if it can take years or even decades to do so, and usually overcorrects when it does.
jtbayly 3 hours ago [-]
I saw that one wealthy individual had purchased $1 billion of SpaceX at the IPO. Does that count as a retail investor?
andsoitis 2 hours ago [-]
> I saw that one wealthy individual had purchased $1 billion of SpaceX at the IPO. Does that count as a retail investor?
There were two individuals who each bought $1B: Ron Baron and Gina Rinehart.
While they are individuals, they executed these billion-dollar investments through their massive corporate entities and investment firms, rather than personal brokerage accounts.
A retain investor is an individual, non-professional investor who buys and sells securities through brokerages using personal funds.
tim333 2 hours ago [-]
It's down to the balance between buyers and sellers. If you've got more selling than buying it'll go down but Musk has been remarkably good at keeping the buyers there.
_DeadFred_ 46 minutes ago [-]
Don't forget the amount of shares released to the market. That impacts the price dramatically as can be seen be all the 'stock buyback' manipulation of stock prices.
instalabsai 2 hours ago [-]
This is why I think Elon buying Twitter was one of the most strategic decisions he ever made: he quite literally bought the meme machine that upholds the valuations of his companies.
ben_w 2 hours ago [-]
I still don't think it was strategic on his part, he did try to back out after all; my guess is that having bought it, he tried to maximise the value it produced.
And given the financial statements in the SpaceX IPO, to the extent X still has any value at all, it is almost all just influence of one kind or another, not actual money.
ceejayoz 2 hours ago [-]
And the government that helps fund and regulate (or not) them.
bilsbie 2 hours ago [-]
Everything is ultimately valued by memes.
jpadkins 2 hours ago [-]
money is just an idea that spreads (a meme).
alpineman 2 hours ago [-]
Sure until retail are forced to sell in an correction. Wealth destruction can happen very fast
jesse_dot_id 3 hours ago [-]
If there is ever another depression, which seems highly probable at this point, the meme stocks will be the first ones down the toilet.
2 hours ago [-]
Grombobulous 2 hours ago [-]
Bitcoin isn’t valuable solely through memes, it’s also deflationary by design.
_DeadFred_ 51 minutes ago [-]
SPCX only floated a small amount of shares, and made the stock exchanges compete so that it would get to rig the system in a way. If funds have to buy SPCX + small share amount, it's going up. This is the reason stock buyback used to be illegal. It's purely market manipulation of share count, not market based on actual value.
throw310822 3 hours ago [-]
As long as there is someone around who is very good at keeping the price inflated (and that in turn also because he did actually deliver extraordinary things, it's not just smoke and mirrors).
On the other hand, the fact that BTC has absolutely no intrinsic value can be an advantage over a real company, as it makes it more insulated from reality. Supply chain shock? No problem. Competition? Same. New technologies, political change? Neither.
jimnotgym 2 hours ago [-]
USD has no intrinsic value either
throwaway894345 2 hours ago [-]
At least some of TSLA and SPCX value is derived from Musk's ability to purchase politicians to ensure the tax dollars keep flowing to them. Essentially, these ticker symbols are backed by the US government's ability to force us to give Musk's companies our money.
somenameforme 2 hours ago [-]
The overwhelming majority of SpaceX holders are institutional. They had planned to allocate 30% to retail, but it ended up in the 20% range as a result of institutional demand. [1] No clue what's going on right now as their stock is going to the Moon. But in any case, I think the people that don't understand why it's doing well are mostly those who are unfamiliar with the space industry. SpaceX has already revolutionized space by dropping the cost to orbit by multiple orders of magnitude relative to the Space Shuttle, which it replaced. And it looks set to do that again with the Starship.
The main reason humanity hasn't meaningfully started expanding into space is because it used to cost $54,000 to get a liter of water into space. SpaceX brought that down to about $5000, and then further down to near $1400. That's a massive reduction in price, but you're still left with the problem that it costs $1400 to get a liter of water to space, which is why we still can't have nice things, yet.
Starship has the promise of bringing that down a couple of more orders of magnitude where the goal is to get it within the $10-$20 range. If they succeed, then you've just opened the doors to an entire new frontier of expansion and growth for humanity which is practically infinite. And right now there's no real reason to think that they won't succeed. And more importantly than this is that nobody seems to be able to compete on their level, or even remotely close. Their closest competitor is probably China who remains technologically well behind. And so SpaceX today is akin to being able to get a piece of some sort of super-ship making monopoly, just prior to the Age of Sail. The downside risk is basically zero since they're still making rapid progress - the only question is how rapid. And upside potential is basically infinite.
> The main reason humanity hasn't meaningfully started expanding into space is because it used to cost $54,000 to get a liter of water into space.
Am I naive in thinking that we haven't expanded into space because we don't need to? What's the benefit?
ajmurmann 1 hours ago [-]
Asteroid mining is the obvious one. That said as part of looking into SpaceX's business I learned that currently the TAM for launching other people's stuff into space is under $10 billion. SpaceX already owns most of that market. Their own focus on data centers in space IMO speaks for itself.
ben_w 2 hours ago [-]
> What's the benefit?
For why we'd want to go at all: there's a lot of resources up there, and pollution is much less of a concern for factories made up there. Also some material processes may be much easier in zero-gee.
But that doesn't mean it's actually worth the effort.
andsoitis 2 hours ago [-]
> we haven't expanded into space because we don't need to? What's the benefit?
Access to resources. A sense of adventure. Learning.
lokar 2 hours ago [-]
Which resources are cheaper to get from space? I’ve only ever seen hand waiving arguments, never any math.
ben_w 1 hours ago [-]
That depends entirely on the price; things are very different when it costs $20k/kg to orbit (basically nothing is worth that) vs. $20/kg to orbit.
Some people are suggesting making high quality fibre optics and pharmaceuticals in LEO already with Falcon prices:
While I am *extremely* skeptical, I've heard people talk about space-based solar. I mention this only so nobody adds an "and also" for that.
Ditto anyone talking about lunar He-3. This is a bad idea, "why" is long enough to be worthy of a blog post.
But if you were committed to expansionism for whatever reason, then you'd want some way to get industrial quantities of steel from mines already in space, to make the factories themselves cheaper. Possibly megastructures like an orbital ring, too.
petrocrat 1 hours ago [-]
It's not about the "Access to resources. A sense of adventure. Learning."
Since you are right. All of these things are available on Earth for far cheaper, with better ROI and with far less risk of dying or getting early cancer from cosmic rays.
The real benefit is a commanding lead over geopolitical rivals in the domain of satellites and satellite platforms for hosting devices in orbit, thus securing an insurmountable national security advantage.
somenameforme 2 hours ago [-]
The hand waving is probably reasonable for a couple of reasons. The first is that you can't really math things out yet when costs are shifting by orders of magnitude on relatively short timeframes. What seems impossible in one year is a casual achievement in the next. If we go back to 2002 (when SpaceX was founded) and I told you that within 2 decades they'd have lowered the cost to get stuff to space by more than 97% relative to Space Shuttle, it'd have sounded somewhere between unreasonable and impossible, yet that is exactly what happened. And Starship is set to send prices plummeting yet again.
The second reason is that the notion of economics becomes kind of odd when you start introducing space. Space has practically infinite resources of every type imaginable. For instance one single asteroid, Psyche 16, is thought to have orders of magnitude more gold than has ever been extracted in human history. But I mean, what does this even mean economically? Obviously if you start bringing back hundreds of thousands of tons of gold, the price is going plummet. And even the viable possibility of this happening would probably send the price of gold plummeting. So... it's weird. We're in uncharted waters.
And then on top of this access to space will mean we will start expanding outward - colonies, vastly larger stations stations, and so on. And these expansions will develop their own parallel economies with their own needs/production/etc. This is all kind of like trying to predict the economics of the internet before the first cable had been laid.
lokar 1 hours ago [-]
Most people I see online freak out at the idea of normalizing living in an apartment/condo and slightly higher density. I don’t see them lining up to live in space :)
somenameforme 56 minutes ago [-]
As far back as the 60s NASA had already laid out technical plans for how to get humans to Mars. The Moon was never meant to be the destination, but a brief stepping stone to greater things. So we can thank Nixon for setting humanity's progress back by half a century. The ISS and Space Shuttle both were driven largely by these initial plans.
But the current claustrophobic nature of the ISS was, again, not the destination. There was a grand scheme of in-orbit refueling, fuel depots, and much larger scale space architecture. Something of the ISS scale was intended as a short jumping-off point, a workers' tent analog. But our progress stalled out and the workers' tent is what we were left with.
The point I'm making here is that space in the era we're stepping into is very unlikely to look much like the one we're leaving. This is even more true as the price drops because private industry will be able to play a major role. There will be no Nixon to just cancel everything out of concerns for his political career.
ben_w 1 hours ago [-]
Depends on the timescale, and what other tech is the prerequisite to this and what other things can be done with that tech.
Even with cheap rockets, Musk was talking about 6-digit-dollars for becoming a Martian, I don't see more than a few million people wanting to spend that much for that outcome.
If we get self-replicating robots or whatever, big space stations aren't that expensive, but also Earth is huge and you can extract minerals from seawater electrolytically and PV is already cheap, so perhaps we'd just get a load of seasteads instead: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seasteading
lokar 1 hours ago [-]
How far out would you say that is? Have you sketched out the net present value calculation for an investment in spacex today based on that?
ben_w 49 minutes ago [-]
> How far out would you say that is?
Really hard to say. Everyone who does space stuff talks with the same level of optimism as Musk but historically they deliver less.
But for what it's worth, I don't think Musk's going to reach Mars except in an urn, baring some surprise development in anti-aging medicine. Even though their progress is rapid by the standards of the industry, they are still slow in terms of natural human lifespan and his age.
> Have you sketched out the net present value calculation for an investment in spacex today based on that?
IMO, their market cap should be around $200bn at the moment. That's mostly Starlink, so if there's a Kessler cascade *or* if China makes a competitor that goes down to about $80-100bn
The long-term stuff about Mars or turning the moon into a factory for modular data centres is too far into the future to be worth considering.
lokar 1 minutes ago [-]
That was my general impression. They did amazing work to totally change launch costs (with more on the way). But launch was a limited market. The low costs have and will grow it, and starlink will grow it, but not enough to justify this value.
CuriouslyC 2 hours ago [-]
The only argument for space is because you're so set on capitalism that you'd rather destroy the earth than stop trying to continually grow profit. If you're that sick and deluded, then space gives you a way to escape the consequences of your own foolish hubris.
chrissnell 2 hours ago [-]
A hedge against civilization-destroying events. Meteors, global war, disease.
phlakaton 2 hours ago [-]
Space is not a hedge against these things. At best it's our final tomb.
There is no backup plan.
petrocrat 29 minutes ago [-]
to be fair, in the pharoahs quest for immortality after death, if they could have put their pyramid burial tombs in space to avoid decay/ruin for longer they would have. I wouldn't be shocked to see the oligarchs paying for their own space burials inside very lavish satellites whose orbit won't decay for thousands of years so they can "live forever".
CuriouslyC 2 hours ago [-]
So, your argument for SpaceX is that they'll take physical systems that they've already tried to squeeze down, and squeeze them down nearly two orders of magnitude? What fundamental scientific discovery do you think is going to enable this? Or do you think that AI is magically going to do it for them?
somenameforme 2 hours ago [-]
That has nothing to do with how they have already reduced costs, and how they continue to do so. Before SpaceX, you launched a rocket to space once, and then you discarded it. Imagine how much a plane ticket would cost if each time a plane was flown once, it was then discarded.
The big revolution with SpaceX was meaningful reuse (I can get into the comparison with Space Shuttle if you're unfamiliar there). Landing and reusing rockets is something that Boeing et al thought was impossible from an economic point of view, and actually taunted SpaceX in their early years over it along the lines of 'Oh you're going for reuse. Yeah we researched and trialed that out a decade ago. The economics don't work. Cute to see you trying though.'
Their success there is what helped bring the costs way down. But there's still plenty that's not reused - in particular they currently only reuse the first stage (the big rocket that gets things off the ground initially) while discarding the second stage - the space-optimized payload delivery rocket. With Starship they're going for 100% rapid reuse. So you're looking at this absolutely massive 2 stage system where both parts will be able to be repeatedly and rapidly reused.
threetonesun 2 hours ago [-]
You really think cost is the main reason humanity hasn't expanded into space? I'm all for space exploration and learning from space but actual humans are quite squishy, like gravity, dislike radiation, and would need to take a lot of water with them just to visit a rock very indifferent to their existence.
somenameforme 2 hours ago [-]
Definitely. Humans expand. It's probably an evolutionary imperative in many of us. Africa was essentially an oasis and yet some of us decided to go make our way outward to inhospitable freezing ass places where the environment itself is just constantly trying to kill you in a million different ways. And we knew nothing about how to deal with it, at first.
Or take the early sea voyages. Not only were there endless worries about things that were ultimately nonissues like sea monsters or falling off the edges of the Earth, but there were endless very real dangers awaiting which we had no clue about or how to deal with - scurvy, rogue waves, and much more. In the aforementioned Age of Sail, it was just expected that a significant chunk of your crew would die. Yet somehow we pushed onward and outward.
And the infinite possibilities of space are going to absolutely dwarf all previous frontiers in terms of interest and potential.
threetonesun 2 hours ago [-]
You're much more optimistic about the concept of infinity than I am!
somenameforme 1 hours ago [-]
You mean in terms of us creating a system of gods and serfs?
brachkow 2 hours ago [-]
> BTC essential is worth $70k solely through the power of memes
Like everything else in finance...
Saying this is not to defend all sorts of crypto-bros. The economy, especially one overly focused on publicly traded companies like the Western, and especially the US economy, is a meme economy.
Coffee, flats, healthcare, military spending, etc., of comparable quality in the abstract East, cost multiples less than in the EU/USA because they and their currencies are weak on memes.
DanielHB 3 hours ago [-]
The limits are when companies and institutions start to default on their loans. Or, in the case of governments, trigger hyperinflation by printing money to pay off the debt.
Of course it can collapse before that, but if it gets to that point it is guaranteed to collapse.
jimnotgym 2 hours ago [-]
But that won't happen while the share price keeps going up no matter what. Borrow more, secured against the massive unissued equity, or issue more shares.
kamaal 2 hours ago [-]
>>Intuitively, it seems to me that there must necessarily be some kind of upper limit
Mostly because we are looping AI to fix problems, and then the same data is used to improve AI. There is no upper limit to this.
Taken to its logical conclusion, this process needs a hardware scale that might even look laughably huge at this point. Its fairly obvious space is going to play a big role in the coming times.
I could be wrong, and I humbly accept it when Im proven wrong. But it does feel like a lot of people in top places know we are going to need all the energy and resources space has to offer to run this runaway intelligence.
petesergeant 2 hours ago [-]
> we are at runaway intelligence already. Mostly because we are looping AI to fix problems, and then the same data is used to improve AI. There is no upper limit to this.
I'm an AI booster, but this really doesn't follow. There's absolutely no guarantee that the marginal improvement from this continues to hold.
kamaal 2 hours ago [-]
Its not marginal improvement.
Validated data coming out of LLM(Itself generated from a recursive/loop process, used to incrementally arrive at solutions) being using to improve the very LLM is a very powerful loop. And there is no real upper limit to this, at least not in the near future.
Like most exponential processes, the start is slow, but it gets fast very rapidly.
This is also what Anthropic has said, the ones training these models today(i.e 2025 - 2027) will be impossible to catch up with, let alone beat.
So we are at a kind of runaway AI already today.
petesergeant 1 hours ago [-]
Economics meaning of marginal, not the qualitative one.
> there is no real upper limit to this
This is what you need to cite for your argument to hold together.
dist-epoch 3 hours ago [-]
When you invest in TSLA and SPCX, you don't invest in a car and a rocket company, you invest in Elon Musk. So revenue, assets, are irrelevant.
fofoz 3 hours ago [-]
You basically buy an asset whose risk is tied to a man's life.
alpineman 2 hours ago [-]
And not the healthiest man alive
cbeach 3 hours ago [-]
General Electric was just fine when Thomas Edison died in 1931. And Apple was fine after the tragic early death of Steve Jobs.
Companies like this become bigger than their founders.
And I'm sure many on the Left would argue that Tesla and SpaceX would be healthier companies without Elon Musk.
Although I tend to differ on that, having owned $TSLA for a long time. Never bet against Elon!
guidedlight 4 hours ago [-]
Does anyone here think Cursor is overvalued? It's just packaging up what already exists, it has no moat or IP.
pavlov 4 hours ago [-]
They're getting paid in extremely overvalued stock, so maybe it balances out.
This is not really a diss on SpaceX either because a lot of IPOs go through an immediate pop and then 1-2 years of doldrums as lockouts expire and promises aren't quite delivered.
Nobody knows what 60 billion in SpaceX stock today will be worth when Cursor insiders finally get to sell (at least a year from now, after other SpaceX insiders have started selling).
bix6 3 hours ago [-]
Source on the lockup for Cursor insiders?
cik 3 hours ago [-]
Generally this is how liquidity works. Their employees will have a six or twelve month lock up (six being most common).
Investors in certrtain rounds (or sizes) tend to have no lockup, whereas later stages have a six month. Alternatively, I've reviewed agreements where the lockup is based on minimum market cap, but I've only seen that a couple of times.
bix6 2 hours ago [-]
Ok everyone saying this is how it works but where’s the proof? SpaceX has a 7 day lockup for some people which is abnormal. So clearly the way it’s done isn’t in fact how it’s always done.
bilekas 3 hours ago [-]
This is just a general practice that always happens when paying in stock. It's to prevent a massive dump the next day which would tank the share price 'artificially'. Again, rich people's rules.
bix6 2 hours ago [-]
Ok everyone saying this is how it works but where’s the proof? SpaceX has a 7 day lockup for some people which is abnormal. So clearly the way it’s done isn’t in fact how it’s always done.
> Holding Period. Before you may sell any restricted securities in the marketplace, you must hold them for a certain period of time. If the company that issued the securities is a “reporting company” in that it is subject to the reporting requirements of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, then you must hold the securities for at least six months
bix6 41 minutes ago [-]
Are the securities restricted though? I don’t think these would be?
bilekas 32 minutes ago [-]
Almost guaranteed to be. The only other way would be to have issued them during the transaction with the Sec. There was no mention of that. 60billion of issued shares would have been mentioned. It's non trivial amount.
kyleee 1 hours ago [-]
What’s the lockup period in this case?
bilekas 53 minutes ago [-]
Um, I honestly don't know for sure, if I'm not mistaken SpaceX has some weird staggered release schedule for employees and early investors, I guess based on their stock dates.
bilekas 1 hours ago [-]
> SpaceX has a 7 day lockup for some people which is abnormal
You might be referring to staff members who have shares ? Their shares are not restricted securities as far as I know, but their internal company policy might affect those, but I'm not 100% certain on that.
bix6 39 minutes ago [-]
There are many tranches here. Some friends and family got to buy day one IPO with no restrictions. Then some employees get a rolling release starting June 30.
UqWBcuFx6NV4r 3 hours ago [-]
It can be inferred because it’s how things tend to work.
bix6 2 hours ago [-]
Ok everyone saying this is how it works but where’s the proof? SpaceX has a 7 day lockup for some people which is abnormal. So clearly the way it’s done isn’t in fact how it’s always done.
sigmoid10 3 hours ago [-]
Well, the people who bought the SpaceX IPO essentially footed the entire bill here. And they might still make money on it, depending on how the stock goes from here on. I don't see anyone who could lose here, even if the bubble bursts, apart from the Cursor people. And they are likely still going to make a huge amount of money.
bilekas 3 hours ago [-]
> Well, the people who bought the SpaceX IPO essentially footed the entire bill here.
It's hard to say that they footed the bill here, but they basically gave SpaceX a number to say "well our stock went IPO and it's at this price, so here's 60B at this price"
A good tactic from SpaceX as after the inital surge of a big IPO, the stock price usually comes down and finds it's correct balance, which is usually always lower. So if they had of waited the 'cooling off' period of a year for example, and the stock price went down to it's 'correct' valuation, then they would have had to issue a higher number of stocks.. At least that's my thinking, but I'm terrible with money.
nbardy 3 hours ago [-]
No, look a Composoer 2, it stands out starkly on its own in the pareto frontier on low cast and fast models.
Composer 2.5 was a huge leap with minimal compute from xAI.
They can compete with OpenAI and anthropic with xAI scale compute. They have a top notch model team and incredible training data and huge enterprise costumer contracts.
trial3 3 hours ago [-]
my employer (one of those huge contracts) dropped cursor in favor of claude and i don’t think this is true at all
while we had it i used cursor for probably eight months as my main ide (i did really like the interface for embedding code in prompts!) but had no problems switching to claude code. i asked around, and i truly don’t know a single coworker who misses cursor even a little bit.
JoshStrobl 3 hours ago [-]
My experience mirrors this as well.
I was fully in on Cursor for a good chunk of last year, using Composer + Gemini Pro (via Copilot / GH integration). I really enjoyed Cursor's tab completion capabilities, but when Sonnet and Opus started getting particularly good for me (think for me it was around 4.5), I swapped over to Zed + claude code in the integrated terminal. I've found that after a bit, I haven't ended up missing the tab completion. I've been perfectly fine with just LSP + claude always open. I don't miss Cursor. All my colleagues are on claude code with half of us also using Zed.
trollbridge 3 hours ago [-]
Composer 2.5 Fast is particularly good.
For someone who is new to agentic code or is generally somewhat junior, Cursor is very easy to get started with and is generally fairly frustration-free.
I use a cheap $20 subscription mostly for occasional use of Opus and Composer.
SpaceX made a smart move here. Someone else should have really seen the opportunity and bought them.
whywhywhywhy 2 hours ago [-]
Composer 2.5 is just a repackaged chinese model, Kimi IIRC
malfist 3 hours ago [-]
How the hell is an IDE a "pareto frontier"? Even if, say composer 2.5 is a huge leap forward, that doesn't mean IntelliJ or Vim or Emacs or Codex got worse.
IDE improvements are not a zero sum game.
lallysingh 3 hours ago [-]
In a competitive environment, it's precisely that. An improvement in product A takes customers from B and C.
drbojingle 1 hours ago [-]
Nope. Vim and Neovim users can use the cusor-agent cli for agentic stuff and there prefered editing tool for editing. All the major providers have a cli specific version these days. Probably because folks actually didn't want to actually use the cursor Gui and once Claude code came along those folks jumped ship and went full cli again
Der_Einzige 3 hours ago [-]
This is delusional. Composer 2.5 is trash compared even to haiku let alone opus.
infecto 2 hours ago [-]
Hmmm. Not in my experience. I don’t think it can be compared to Haiku, maybe sonnet levels? It’s obviously not Opus and never was intended for that use case. I use it quite a bit and it works well and is extremely fast for the tasks it was built for
CuriouslyC 2 hours ago [-]
This doesn't match the empirical observations of a lot of people I'd trust more than you, and putting it below Haiku immediately makes it extra sus (Sonnet would have been the credibility preserving comparison).
puszczyk 2 hours ago [-]
It doesn’t tell anything about the valuation, but I prefer it over Claude Code, and I even stopped using JetBrains IDEs because of it.
Vs Claude Code: I like the option to change the models, as I often prefer ChatGPT or Composer to Opus. I have a slight preference towards TUI, but not so strong to drop the models.
Vs JetBrains. I really love JetBrains but the tab complete just works so well for me.
vorticalbox 4 hours ago [-]
its not just the models, their auto complete is actually really good. when you make a change it will give you "tab to next" which makes refactors super easy.
composer 2.5 is also a very decent model, it go 90% of my AI tasks using it now.
iterateoften 4 hours ago [-]
So 60B dollars and your primary reason it’s worth that is “tab to next” autocomplete?
ambicapter 3 hours ago [-]
Scaled to every developer in the world? Yeah, that's productivity.
bilekas 3 hours ago [-]
I'm not sure it's worth the price tag for developers though, I mean resharper promised similar, delivered half, bought by millions and still don't think Jetbrains, even with its other good tool suit is valued 60B.
Johnny_Bonk 3 hours ago [-]
I just laughed out loud reading this
vachina 3 hours ago [-]
Hyperfocused edit assist is awesome. I’m the magician the assist is the magic wand.
carlosjobim 3 hours ago [-]
Investing in companies is not about what they are delivering right now, it is about what you think they can deliver in the future.
It is not like purchasing soap in the supermarket.
raverbashing 3 hours ago [-]
Maybe the real Mythos secret is that it found out it could fit on a GPT2 size model
stephc_int13 3 hours ago [-]
I tried it a few times and was not convinced by the autocomplete.
I found it less effective than free copilot autocomplete on vanilla VSCode.
stefan_ 4 hours ago [-]
Yes, that's why Cursor was very popular when actually reading model output paragraph by paragraph was still the way you used them. That's no longer the case, their use has cratered, and in fact they have been disintermediated by their model vendors, leaving an empty shell.
pavlov 3 hours ago [-]
I guess that fits into the Musk empire because "empty shell" increasingly describes his companies.
Tesla is a car company that doesn't want to make cars. And xAI is an AI foundation model company that actually is a data center REIT...
dakolli 3 hours ago [-]
composer 2.5 is literally just a fine-tuned kimi model, and the autocomplete is exteremly meh.
The only kind of AI I want in my editor is an autocomplete, but this isn't very magical to non-programmers (their TAM) or all that valuable (you can't charge thousands), they bought Supermaven and basically killed it, I'm not sure how you think tab is really good, I've not been impressed when I played around with it.
infecto 2 hours ago [-]
What tab is better?
infecto 2 hours ago [-]
Could not say on the valuation front. The one thing that is obvious is the trash talkers love to point out how horrible it is but I have yet to find a compelling replacement. Obviously Claude Code works but at least for me I never got along with the CLI workflow very well and sure I could use vs code with the extension for Claude but then I lose tab autocompletes which I actually like. I have yet to see anyone build a derivative model like composer 2 that is quick, cheap and has higher reliability on tool call use. Again I don’t know on valuation but it’s pretty impressive how far they have come. I look at Jetbrains and at least from an AI perspective they have been left in the dust.
3 hours ago [-]
ubercore 3 hours ago [-]
Cursor, from my companies perspective at least, seems to be handling charming leadership to get enterprise AI contracts in place, compared to the alternatives. That's feeling like the moat from my first-hand experience. Easy single contract that covers a lot of AI cases that management wants to say they have in place.
josh-sematic 1 hours ago [-]
In terms of whether they’re overvalued: probably. But any valuation should also take into account the value they have to x.ai (also under SpaceX) as a source of training data for coding models.
internet101010 3 hours ago [-]
Cursor's moat is that it is a virus that infects organizations through shared skills, hooks, agents, etc.. Once one person uses it and infects the repo everyone else starts using it.
swader999 3 hours ago [-]
Maybe, but migration from/to anything is so much easier now with Agents.
basisword 3 hours ago [-]
Know a few companies that have moved from it fully to Claude. It’s still early so the moving cost is low and Claude Cowork is something non-tech employees can make use of much easier than Cursor. I really don’t see what Curor’s value is longer term. Why pay a middle man?
sscarduzio 3 hours ago [-]
I don't. Cursor being a man in the middle between coders and other people models for so long, has so much more training data than anyone else in the world.
tipiirai 4 hours ago [-]
Yes. I think Cursor is overvalued, but not to the extent of SpaceX
mohamedkoubaa 3 hours ago [-]
Maybe it's just the US dollar that is overvalued
CuriouslyC 2 hours ago [-]
That would explain the top tier of meme stocks, but counterpoint: what about our salaries?
aprentic 2 hours ago [-]
I like Cursor but that valuation is a hard sell.
Their valuation should be very closely tied to how how many tokens it takes to get from Void to Cursor.
If those values diverge by much, something is rotten in the state of Denmark.
swader999 3 hours ago [-]
I do think this has had its day. From what I remember, Cursor was useful back in the day when you coded in an IDE and wanted to read code while you baby stepped through incremental changes with an AI. I'm tempted to put /sarc around this but not really...
arend321 3 hours ago [-]
Cursor was nice when I was still meticulously hand coding my stack, fantastic autocomplete. With today's top models, I barely write code myself, just review commits. Cursor eats Opus credits like there is no tomorrow. Composer has been a net negative in my experience. All in on Codex with GPT 5.5 on high using /fast.
agluszak 3 hours ago [-]
IMO composer 2.5 is pretty good, and the $20 Cursor plan gives you _way_ more tokens than Codex/Claude code/Antigravity
nerdsniper 3 hours ago [-]
I seem to get a lot more tokens for my $ with the $200 plan from Anthropic or OpenAI than I do from the $200 plan from Cursor.
Lately I use Cursor with DeepSeek API, and OpenAI subscription through their Codex App.
arend321 3 hours ago [-]
Not my experience. Maybe an hour of top model use on the $20 plan, then Composer 2.5 which needs constant hand holding.
Der_Einzige 3 hours ago [-]
Only cursor employees could continue to spread this idea that composer 2.5 isn’t total garbage.
mindwok 4 hours ago [-]
They have a surprising amount of enterprise revenue and mindshare, of which xAI has literally none.
generalpf 3 hours ago [-]
Cursor Remote Agents are important to our AI orchestration layer. It's possible that Claude can do this directly but Cursor Remote Agents made this laughably easy.
manojlds 4 hours ago [-]
Composer is very good, and these days after heavily using CC, Pi and Open code I am back with Cursor. "No moat or IP" is underrating it a lot.
m00dy 3 hours ago [-]
CC on Deepseek is a moat.
ArneCode 3 hours ago [-]
they propably have a lot of training data from their users, which might be useful for SpaceX which has a lot of compute
newaccountman2 4 hours ago [-]
It's not true it has zero moat or IP (they have their own LLM and it is useful), but it is indeed way over-valued.
petesergeant 2 hours ago [-]
There's a plausible synergy in it for xAI though. Access to reams of training data for a company whose marginal cost of compute is very very low, and that they can use as a channel to push Grok. I don't think it's worth anywhere near this much to anyone else, but to xAI it's at least possible.
oulipo2 2 hours ago [-]
I guess they're getting bought because they had access to a lot of codebases from a lot of companies, and perhaps there's something to mine in those logs...
whatever1 3 hours ago [-]
Every single one?
sixothree 3 hours ago [-]
They have the conversation history of every person that has used their product. That's worth something.
dist-epoch 3 hours ago [-]
Sounds like what people here said 20 years ago about Google buying YouTube, or 10 years ago about Facebook buying Instagram - companies with no moats and huge infrastructure costs.
To paraphrase, the biggest trick the devil pulled is convincing founders they need a moat.
formvoltron 3 hours ago [-]
None of that really matters.
What matters is that this has enough "future story value" to keep the few investors invested... allowing for the planned index funds to buy into the overvalued stock & allowing for the largest heist in the history of money.
It's become pure hype and drama on the global stock market stage.
lotsofpulp 3 hours ago [-]
Transactions that happen out in the open, with the consent of all parties are not a heist.
amanaplanacanal 3 hours ago [-]
Scam maybe.
4 hours ago [-]
philipwhiuk 4 hours ago [-]
Grok needs a coding environment play to match Claude Code - that's what this is.
And AI companies are not short of capital.
ulfw 4 hours ago [-]
So is 'Space'X. They fit perfectly
sanex 3 hours ago [-]
My whole team was on cursor for a few months. I enjoyed using it and thought it was the most complete of the agentic coding tools I tried. The thing that got me was the cost. I was switching between Opus and GPT 5.x and was spending anywhere between $500-1000/month. I was using a relatively normal workflow, paste in ticket, plan, execute with dumb sub agents, have the ai test and competing model to validate. The business got uncomfortable with the cost when everyone started doing the same so they switched us to Claude code since it has better cost controls. So far it looks like we won't even touch the $100/month plan and some people would be ok on the $20 plan. Anthropics usage limits is a consistent source of complaint on here but I've found them to be moderately generous in comparison to cursor. Cursor also charges a $.25Mtok premium for 'routing' no matter what model you choose. 5% increase for frontier models but when you're using haiku on sub agents that's a 50% cost increase. Composer is solid but if you don't have deep pockets it's the only feasible model on their platform because of how they bill it. Being an all in one editor/agent is nice but if you're in a language like c# or Java you're already swapping back and forth with a real IDE anyway.
frays 4 hours ago [-]
Is anyone on HN still actually using Cursor in 2026?
Everyone I've spoken with is now using either Claude Code or Codex (or Copilot because their companies force them to).
joefourier 3 hours ago [-]
I stopped using Cursor because of how terribly optimised it is (worse than VSCode despite being a fork). It would routinely take up 50% of the CPU resources on my MacBook M4 and gigabytes of RAM for absolutely no reason.
I switched to Zed, and I'm never going back to Electron/non-native IDEs.
frangonf 2 hours ago [-]
I was on Claude Code the past year, now I use chinese models, but I've used Cursor and they have an ok pricing offering today because of their mix of sota models with usage based pricing along with their Kimi based Composer model with generous limits. I think it makes a lot of sense for the enterprise market, which is the real moat, and not the capabilities/features of the forked ide or app/tui/github bot anyone can come up with today.
jjice 3 hours ago [-]
It's my primary. Claude Code for personal stuff on the weekends. I really just prefer the GUI of having the changes easily highlighted. If I can get something to apply that with Claude Code or Codex or OpenCode or whatever, I'd swap over without thinking.
nerdsniper 3 hours ago [-]
Same here - their UI/UX seems to serve my workflows/habits the best. And it's strange that no one else seems to be delivering a compatible experience for me. I'd prefer to move away from Cursor after this acquisition.
eranation 2 hours ago [-]
Still do. Composer 2.5 is a beast. But even with Opus (and Fable for a few days) their harness is many times faster. The main reason for me to use CC is the $200 subsidized pro max plan.
Also their computer use in the cloud agents (when it works) is a game changer. No need to keep your laptop open / get a Mac mini if it runs in the cloud.
justAnotherHero 2 hours ago [-]
I'm still on their old 500 requests/month plan and the value is simply unbeatable for $20. I've been able to use agents without worrying about usage for my job and personal projects paired with the $20 codex sub and I dread the day when they finally get rid of the requests plan.
kilroy123 2 hours ago [-]
I switched back to VSCode with Codex and Claude extensions. Just more stable.
joaofs 2 hours ago [-]
Development is moving away from the IDE to agentic long running workers. I've been using their SDK in this mode - which then forces you to use cursor as model provider. I use a mix of harnesses for different types of agentic tasks and Cursor gets the best results.
3 hours ago [-]
petterroea 4 hours ago [-]
to be fair "nobody" is using grok either
hasteg 3 hours ago [-]
Earlier this year I had used it because I would rather have a IDE-like exp and be able to actually look at the code. However, recently switched to using claude code VS code extension and it's basically the same thing (plus at Amazon we can only use Claude Code)
redorb 3 hours ago [-]
I use Cursor, but funny enough it's 98% just using the codex plugin - I kept cursor around on the grand fathered $20 / 500 requests plan, if they un-grandfather me or things change too much I'll zip over to vscode.
drunkan 2 hours ago [-]
Zed with Claude code is the best of both worlds
prodtorok 3 hours ago [-]
I used their agent view yesterday and the file tree does not update when you add new files.
ing33k 3 hours ago [-]
Yes. Do the heavy lifting in Claude code , Codex.
Basic tasks in cursor. It's decent and damn fast.
All my team members also use it.
iddan 3 hours ago [-]
Yes, unlike Claude it has excellent response rate and i can leverage their speedy models
manojlds 3 hours ago [-]
Fully on Cursor at work and I love it over CC, OpenCode and Pi that I use for personal work.
ramraj07 3 hours ago [-]
We use the bugbot. Best code review agent we've seen.
ArneCode 3 hours ago [-]
I use it because their pro plan is free for students
scottcorgan 3 hours ago [-]
if you use hn you probably don't speak to actual people tho
linuxftw 3 hours ago [-]
I use Cursor for coding. I like to review the changes via the UI. Plan mode is also really strong in Cursor. It bugs me less about needing to search through files and basic coding tasks. I find it also saves the company a ton of money compared to Claude, Claude burns through tokens with no regard.
I typically use Claude for interacting with MCPs and skills to operate on live systems.
theli0nheart 3 hours ago [-]
I use Cursor every day.
alephnerd 3 hours ago [-]
Plenty of enterprises are still using Cursor, though they are facing plenty of pressure because Anthropic and OpenAI bundle Claude Code and Codex which can make it hard to justify an additional license for a third-party harness (why spend that money there when you can buy the underlying tokens instead).
robeym 2 hours ago [-]
Cursor was my first hands-on experience with AI. I didn't know much about getting set up with specific providers via API, and Cursor made it easy to pick any model, ask a question about some code, and get a clear suggested answer easily viewable in the IDE with an 'accept' or 'reject' button. I think they answered this question well: "How do normal developers want to interact with AI?"
I moved away from Cursor when I noticed the responses from specific models were not as clean or accurate as when I'd prompt the models directly, which was something I didn't know how to do early on. I hypothesized that they had some boilerplate prompt sitting atop of my own, causing less precise or desirable results.
I would assume Cursor is still one of the best options for normal developers to get started with AI, but with Copilot forcing their foot in the door at many companies, I wasn't sure how well it would fare on its own. Being acquired by SpaceX should help, and I'll be interested to follow along and see how things develop.
cj 2 hours ago [-]
> Being acquired by SpaceX should help
Why? (Genuinely curious, I would have assumed the opposite)
robeym 2 hours ago [-]
My opinion is that the publicity can only help Cursor. I don't necessarily think SpaceX would make Cursor better. Copilot (which I view as a direct competitor to Cursor) has a huge structural advantage. I have several friends in various American companies where Microsoft products are all they are allowed to use. They get "free" Copilot access as a part of their Microsoft plans. Developers aren't having Cursor placed right in front of them in the same way Copilot is, and from my experience, when developers have the choice to pick one, they pick Cursor. So, I just feel the SpaceX/xAI publicity could help Cursor get more visibility in these general American software companies more so than they could on their own.
16 minutes ago [-]
yanis_t 4 hours ago [-]
Those Mars bases are getting closer and closer.
ozgrakkurt 3 hours ago [-]
Optimus robots are very close. Gradeschool vibes all around
utopiah 4 hours ago [-]
Full self-living autonomous Mars base next year. Musk™ /s
aqme28 3 hours ago [-]
Well, when your stock is massively overpriced it's a smart time to buy stuff with it.
suzukivenom 4 hours ago [-]
paying 60bn for a dev team that wrapped vs is insane.
StrLght 4 hours ago [-]
How about paying 60 billion for a bunch of enterprise contracts?
wat10000 3 hours ago [-]
Or paying ~300 million virtual slips of paper that the market says are currently worth $60 billion.
bluescrn 2 hours ago [-]
About 4x what they've spent on Starship development so far.
They're not a space company any more. They're just part of the AI bubble.
giancarlostoro 4 hours ago [-]
I wonder where they will take this, if they'll use the Cursor team to help make Grok Build (which is not just a tool like Claude Code, but an actual Grok model too) more refined for programming? Would make sense to me, and in turn also provide Cursor with more compute they can use.
Maxious 3 hours ago [-]
> For the past few months, SpaceXAI has been jointly training a model with Cursor, which will be released in Cursor and Grok Build soon.
They'll likely just take all the various enterprise contracts to help inflate SpaceX earnings, that's the only reason why you'd buy this if you were Musk. Need to help keep the lie going as long as you're still alive.
alephnerd 4 hours ago [-]
It also provides xAI with a pre-existing enterprise distribution channel. At the end of the day, distribution is equally as important as the underlying product itself and in some cases is even more critical.
giancarlostoro 3 hours ago [-]
I think that's another thing, while I would like to test Grok more, the Grok AI plans are very generic and not tailored specifically for programming, which is frustrating because I get maybe 8 hours out of Grok for $40 for an entire month, I do wonder if they offered a "Grok Build only plan" if it would actually give me access to more compute. Maybe they intend on making it through Cursor.
I do hope that Cursor doesn't remove any of its current model offerings, and just offers Grok Build in addition to what they already offer, in my opinion unless most of their clients "switch" to Grok (like metrics show they're mostly using Grok vs other models), it would make more sense.
bigbluedots 4 hours ago [-]
No company that uses Cursor now is going to be ok with using xAI models.
alephnerd 4 hours ago [-]
Not necessarily.
Enterprise AI adoption has reached a point now where FinOps matter, and a harness platform story with a discounted underlying model can be enticing for a number of organizations.
I've seen Gemini land well in a F100 well known for their AI hardware story for that reason, and Alibaba's leadership canned the OSS minded Qwen team in order to build a similar commercial minded approach as well.
At least in cybersecurity, we're also reaching a point where the harness is starting to matter more than the underlying foundation models, and building a harness/bedrock style story while discounting a specific model can play well in upper market deals.
Leonard_of_Q 3 hours ago [-]
What makes you think so? Is it only because you dont like Musk or do you have some insight into all companies using Cursor you want to share with us? Even if you dont like Musk you should realise that others may not share your sentiments and/or may have similar feelings regarding SamA, DarioA or any of the other CEOs in this field.
bigbluedots 3 hours ago [-]
Enterprise customers care about things like guardrails and data safety. xAI has always been anti guardrails, and who knows if you can trust them with your data.
alephnerd 3 hours ago [-]
At least in the F1000 RFPs I've seen and the decisionmakers I've chatted with, when they talk about AI guardrails what they mean is generic API (eg. can we rate limit, block connections, RBAC/ABAC capabilities, etc) and Data Security (eg. ZDR, encryption at rest/transit, controlled access) controls.
There is a recognition that foundation models and tools leveraging them will introduce some degree of nondeterminism, so the best way to solve that is to leverage preexisting best practice that is used to reduce lateral movement risk by humans (who are similarly nondeterministic in nature).
conductr 2 hours ago [-]
My company’s security team is very much “no proprietary data or information can be used to train a model”, I just don’t know how you can validate or trust that they aren’t doing just that.
alephnerd 45 minutes ago [-]
ZDRs, spot audits, and the fact that salespeople can be held personally liable both financially and even criminally for fraud if they sold a contract with a ZDR that was not honored.
__alexs 4 hours ago [-]
I like Cursor as a product but the add on cost of $0.25/M tokens is just too expensive on top of the models.
dakolli 3 hours ago [-]
Yeah, I don't understand how this business model continues to produce revenue.
cryptonym 3 hours ago [-]
Revenue? In that industry?
hootz 4 hours ago [-]
Ugh, I'm already tired of seeing ads everywhere for Cursor about how you can build EVERYTHING and solve all problems using their agentic IDE, so now I have even more reasons to dislike SpaceX too.
fnoef 4 hours ago [-]
This entire industry looks like one big scam
amunozo 3 hours ago [-]
Not the entire industry, only the American part. Chinese companies seem healthier.
kykat 3 hours ago [-]
You can only say that because you know nothing about the Chinese ones
nwhnwh 2 hours ago [-]
Yup
sidewndr46 4 hours ago [-]
When does the Tesla acquisition get announced?
baggachipz 3 hours ago [-]
Within the month. They'll probably try to do it sooner while the stock is at a high.
claw-el 3 hours ago [-]
Or do it when the prices are starting to show weakness
sibellavia 2 hours ago [-]
Related:
> For the past few months, SpaceXAI has been jointly training a model with Cursor, which will be released in Cursor and Grok Build soon.
Cursor's value add as a developer seems much slimmer than the 60bn price tag justifies, but I guess they have a lot of data from the non private usage which bumps the value up?
The product itself is practically a vscode wrapper with Agent implementation and K2.5 forked model (composer).
Beannation 1 hours ago [-]
I really hope Musk doesn't ruin the product itself. I am not a fan of how he changed X at all. Id really like to see them stay on the current path, which has been brilliant so far
Tiktaalik 2 hours ago [-]
You generally see this sort of thing in the games industry when a publisher gives a developer a bunch of money to make a game but then the developer screws up and runs out of money. Publisher buys them to try to recoup their investment.
Is Cursor dying?
whatsakandr 4 hours ago [-]
I wonder how much zed industries is being valued at.
verzali 4 hours ago [-]
So that accounts for about three quarters of the money SpaceX just raised then?
mym1990 3 hours ago [-]
Not totally, because the deal is in stock. The cash SpaceX got is actual cash that can be deployed today. The stock will be in a lockout period and could be worth nothing or something whenever the lockout ends.
podgorniy 3 hours ago [-]
> about three quarters of the money SpaceX just raised then?
While rest is paid to the debters...
Most probably it will be mix of stock/cash
mcintyre1994 2 hours ago [-]
It's all stock
podgorniy 3 hours ago [-]
For about 10 billions over the twitter price (inflation adjusted)
Mesmerizing....
throwaw12 4 hours ago [-]
this is financial engineering to increase ARR temporarily, feels like next year Elon will dump lots of stocks
amelius 2 hours ago [-]
"Houston, we have a problem"
"One minute, let me ask my AI agent"
dwa3592 2 hours ago [-]
They're doing what anyone would do in their position. I won't be surprised if they bought more companies while the stock price is that high.
bastawhiz 2 hours ago [-]
Oh well, time to cancel my Cursor subscription. What a shame.
electriclove 4 hours ago [-]
Good timing because they are paying with SpaceX shares which are at a crazy high valuation right now (compared to just a few days ago)
peterspath 2 hours ago [-]
Good hopefully Grok Build gets better and they start to innovate in this area.
Claude Code and ChatGPT need some competition. So that they also innovate more.
bilekas 3 hours ago [-]
> The biggest focus of its business is the manufacture and launch of rockets with reusable parts.
Is it though ? Their TAM in their filing lists 85% as AI. $18.7 billion in REVENUE 2025 yet are spending more than 3x that for Cursor, and AI company.
dmoreno 3 hours ago [-]
Just cancelled my subscription.
I've been using the Pi agent with Deepseek for some days.. and I'm more than happy with that.
Besides now paying 60 billion for a fork of VSCode, it seems SpaceX meme stock style money raised from the IPO, is all gone in one week :-)
IPO proceeds after greenshoe: $85.7B
Major disclosed cash / debt-related commitments:
- Take out Bridge loan tied to X/xAI debt repayment: $20.0B
- Take out EchoStar debt payoff / cash component: up to $8.5B
- Take out EchoStar debt-service funding: up to $3.0B
- Take out AI infrastructure lease commitments: $20.2B
Subtotal of major disclosed commitments: $51.7B
Rough remaining cash before other costs :-)): $34.0B
Lets now talk about buying Tesla, doing Quantum and building a Dyson Sphere and do another round?
returnInfinity 54 minutes ago [-]
They are paying for the installed based. The users mainly. And also the team.
farco12 4 hours ago [-]
What an incredible outcome for the Cursor team. Hopefully the Cursor + xAI teams working together can produce a competitive frontier model.
resters 4 hours ago [-]
Cursor was simply able to get early access to openai models and get an early lead doing things that are now obvious and done better by many others. Does anyone really want to use a crippled "enhanced" vscode to interact with a crippled version of codex or claude code?
manojlds 3 hours ago [-]
This comment reeks of someone who has not used Cursor, at least in 2026.
resters 2 hours ago [-]
Please point to a video or example of some way that Cursor is remotely state of the art at anything...
conductr 2 hours ago [-]
So they innovated, created a product and found users? Sorry to break it to you but that’s how software companies are built.
resters 2 hours ago [-]
I tried it and it was extremely broken and dramatically overhyped. Which I guess is what Elon finds appealing about it, as that seems to be his preferred type of business.
farco12 3 hours ago [-]
It's a great thing for consumers and businesses to have another competitive, American coding harness + frontier coding model duo. No one wants a crippled version of codex or claude code and surely SpaceX isn't paying $60 billion for that outcome.
resters 2 hours ago [-]
> another competitive, American coding harness
Isn't the Cursor founder British?
senordevnyc 39 minutes ago [-]
Do you think people are using Cursor to interact with Claude Code? What?
MJ093 3 hours ago [-]
I think we should get used to it because that's what's going to keep happening again and again. First Twitter, then Cursor. When someone falls behind in the race for innovation, they usually buy the best product available and use it to get ahead of the competition.
snigacookie 3 hours ago [-]
Can someone help me understand what this means to tesla and Grok?
GenerWork 3 hours ago [-]
I wouldn't be surprised to see Grok become some sort of agent that calls Composer/whatever the joint Cursor & X.ai model might be called.
Anoian 3 hours ago [-]
[dead]
kilpikaarna 4 hours ago [-]
I once again fear for my grandfathered-in free SuperMaven.
shafiemoji 3 hours ago [-]
I honestly don't get why they feel the need to buy Cursor or why OpenAI wanted Windsurf.
If it's data you're after, wouldn't it be so much more cheaper to just hire a dedicated team to fork VS code and integrate your own model and give it to the public for free with unlimited usage for a couple of months?
2 hours ago [-]
jfdi 3 hours ago [-]
Grok’s capabilities on Cursor’s data should be a step function there. Go X! Congrats Cursor, what a ride!
Fotis-Karmpas 4 hours ago [-]
i thought they already did that!
ryzvonusef 4 hours ago [-]
they had the option, but hadn't executed on it... now it seems they have.
the_real_cher 2 hours ago [-]
Vibe coded space shuttles baby! Lets GO!
LysergicLlama 4 hours ago [-]
It's been fun, bye
nwhnwh 2 hours ago [-]
Take me with you
NewsaHackO 3 hours ago [-]
Why after thier IPO?
GHanku 3 hours ago [-]
[dead]
pulkas 3 hours ago [-]
waiting for the anouncement: cursor for grok heavy users.
FL33TW00D 2 hours ago [-]
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)_/¯
tinyhouse 2 hours ago [-]
Cursor is great but they're all going to cash out and leave SpaceX as soon as they can.
techpression 4 hours ago [-]
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.
fluoridation 3 hours ago [-]
All I know is, it's going to be fun when everyone wakes up sober and hungover realizing they've been sleeping on piles of tulips.
farfatched 3 hours ago [-]
There's a lot of investment in AI for its potential.
An AI editor company might never make 60B itself, but it might help another AI company grow faster (relative to its competitors, who might also want to buy the AI editor company).
What else can an AI giant do with all that money?
Build in-house: they do, and there's only so fast they can hire/build.
Save? Yes, still do, but if they save it all, and let competitors buy Cursor, they lose.
Invest in other fields? Sure, but if they lose the AI race, that's all they'll be left with.
Tesla's IPO is a bet that if Musk has the right opportunity, he will do well. So he's given a big bucket of money, and needs a team that can deliver. So he buys Cursor.
The winners are Cursor. The losers are whoever is funding the AI companies that get outcompeted.
(Full disclosure: I don't know anything about Cursor, nor much about Tesla or its IPO.)
techpression 3 hours ago [-]
But surely 60B could buy you something better if you want to spend money on AI. The number seems completely arbitrary, would Cursor say no to 40B?
I really don’t see Cursor as bringing them anything of actual value, it’s more of a bragging thing, but I can be very wrong.
baggachipz 3 hours ago [-]
> How are these numbers even working out
You must be new here.
blondie9x 3 hours ago [-]
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.
grzracz 3 hours ago [-]
I think it's difficult to compete in this space because right now to build the "full IDE" you have to build an extremely capable harness (very hard) and a very good IDE (very hard). I plan to continue using Claude Code and built myself a small tool to verify what the agents actually do + move around the codebase quickly but it's a far cry from a full IDE: https://cotect.dev
drunkan 3 hours ago [-]
Zed…
4 hours ago [-]
piokoch 4 hours ago [-]
Interesting, Grok, for a flagship AI contender was rather poorly performing. I mean, not bad, but visibly less capable.
datadrivenangel 3 hours ago [-]
The grok fast models for coding were pretty adequate. Not good, but fast and good enough to be usable.
baq 3 hours ago [-]
meanwhile Mistral:
mrcwinn 2 hours ago [-]
This was a fantastically smart deal for both sides.
api 3 hours ago [-]
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.
BigTTYGothGF 3 hours ago [-]
Elon Musk has exactly one talent, and it's being the greatest master of financial chicanery the world has ever seen.
api 3 hours ago [-]
To be honest and objective, I think he at least knows enough about engineering to hire people who know what they're doing, which is how he got here. It's not all chicanery.
Over time, though, I think he's drifted away from his original "make real things in the real world" focus and more toward "play money games" and "play political games."
It's sad. One common comic book supervillain arc is to start as a hero and become what you despise.
breakpointalpha 3 hours ago [-]
Good reminder for me to cancel my Cursor subscription. I don't support Elmo.
llm_nerd 4 hours ago [-]
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.
vorticalbox 4 hours ago [-]
Anthropic are already paying $15 b to space X for compute.
CodesInChaos 3 hours ago [-]
Buying depreciating nvidia hardware and renting it out to competitors isn't why SpaceX has a trillion dollar valuation.
vorticalbox 3 hours ago [-]
true, can't hurt though.
flanked-evergl 3 hours ago [-]
> zero rational basis
Do you really think so? Like everyone who risks their and their clients' money here is just being irrational? Is this really a coherent view? Could it not be that someone knows something you don't, or does not have the biases you have?
amanaplanacanal 3 hours ago [-]
Everything was in the S1 filing. There is no "secret knowledge".
The rational basis is entirely "I can sell the stock to somebody else for more money". Where in normal stock it would be "this company can make a profit that gives a return on this investment." This is a purely speculative play.
flanked-evergl 2 hours ago [-]
Why is it purely speculative for SpaceX and for nobody else? Is Musk just that good a con man, even though literally everyone hates him?
llm_nerd 2 hours ago [-]
Why is something true for a company where it is true and not true for companies where it is not true?
SpaceX is worth more than Amazon.
Amazon has $750B of revenue and an enormous unfathomable moat across many fields, across most of the planet. It had a profit of $77B last year. And people consider Amazon overvalued, and a symptom of a serious bubble.
SpaceX has $18B revenue, and a consolidated loss of $4.9B. It has basically zero path to real profit, and it turns out that space launch actually isn't a lucrative industry, so much so that SpaceX had to create its own customer.
I mean, the biggest news about SpaceX has been the utter failure that xAI has been, reducing it to renting out all of the GPUs that Musk forced his other road-to-failure company, Tesla, to hand over to the failure that was xAI, that failed so badly it got hidden inside SpaceX. Good god. Somewhere in there the failure that was SolarCity got packaged in the giant scam.
Like seriously, the biggest win of the company is that it absorbed the husk of xAI that had a massive surplus of GPUs from when Elon tried to buy himself credibility in AI, and the market happened to make them worth more so that's their big win. Their biggest success is basically scalping GPUs.
>even though literally everyone hates him?'
Guy basically runs the US government, which has been reduced to a banana republic plutocracy. People invest in him because they know the system is so catastrophically corrupt that he'll always come up a winner, regardless of how enormous of failures he keeps generating.
I mean, this is such a transparent shell game scam that they're immediately talking about packaging up even more of Elon's scam businesses together. Just amazing stuff.
Don't worry, those super robots are coming any day now!
Yes, the US market is in the end games of a massive spiral -- a circle jerk of trillions of fake dollars moving in a rapidly accelerating circle -- and it will not turn out well. SpaceX is the moment when it is laid bare.
flanked-evergl 14 minutes ago [-]
> Guy basically runs the US government, which has been reduced to a banana republic plutocracy.
Do you have any evidence of this? As far as I know, he basically never gets what he wants. He was against Trump's Big Beautiful Bill, it passed anyway. He wanted DOGE, it fizzled. He wants more Solar/Electric car related subsidies, Trump does not give a darn. He wants more H1Bs, Trump has been doing everything to frustrate H1Bs.
The one thing which Musk seems to have gotten was Jared Isaacman, but that was really difficult for him to get, and it took way longer than it should have.
Really difficult to see evidence that he runs the US government.
drakythe 3 hours ago [-]
Point us at a rational verbalized or written argument for SpaceX's current valuation (and increasing)? Everything I've read says the valuation is too high and here is why, with x, y, and z reasons. Everyone I read who encourages buying seems to be ignoring arguments entirely and going on vibes.
flanked-evergl 2 hours ago [-]
I trust people who are investing their money more than analysts who get paid for writing what everyone wants to hear.
jmyeet 2 hours ago [-]
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
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.
stogot 3 hours ago [-]
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
Maxious 3 hours ago [-]
> With the option agreement, we have the right, but not obligation, to acquire Cursor at a predetermined price or pay a fee
> The consideration for the acquisition of Cursor, if any, after the closing of this offering would consist of shares of our Class A common stock based on an implied equity value of Cursor of $60.0 billion
Intuitively, it seems to me that there must necessarily be some kind of upper limit, but I'm not convincing myself. These speculative assets are only attractive as long as the price keeps inflating. But that can only happen if there is more and more demand. So it's basically a bet that there is an average amount of retail investors (I assume it's mostly retail investors but I could be wrong) that consistently put a percentage of their income into these speculative assets. Can this be maintained forever?
In short, the answer to your literal question is "no" because nothing remains forever in this world. The practical answer is "yes" because the TSLA stock has been irrational for years already and it shows no sign of stopping.
The real question is, when does that run out of steam? When do we wake up to the charade that has built up around us? That's a much bigger thing than just Elon and his businesses. Like someone else said, when the next crisis/downturn/depression hits the house of cards will fall. Unfortunately it will hit all of us not just people in the meme stocks
Let me append the saying a bit: The US government can remain irrational longer than you can stay solvent.
Stocks can start paying dividends in the future: MSFT did not in the past, and does now. AAPL did, stopped in the 1990s, and started doing so again.
You should be indifferent to the company's dividend scheme since it's the underlying business activity that drives total returns, and not its distribution policy. There is all sorts of magical thinking when it comes to dividends:
* https://canadiancouchpotato.com/2011/01/18/debunking-dividen...
* https://pwlcapital.com/the-irrelevance-of-dividends-still-a-...
A pyramid scheme can run out of people to keep it going: the stock market is in a sense a 'savings scheme' for future consumption. Younger people work and turn their cash into savings, older people take their savings and turn it back into cash: as long as young people need to think about the future, and older people / retirees need to pay bills, there's a mechanism to maintain this cycle.
And then you describe how the secondary stock market requires 'fresh blood' to whom to sell stock to cash-out.
It's precisely a legalised pyramid scheme that always needs someone to come in at the bottom hold the bag to let someone else cash-out. In turn they need someone to come in 30 years later. That's exactly how a pyramid scheme works.
That's exactly the question, though, since a lot of stocks seem priced disproportionately to their business activities.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_beauty_contest
Plenty of folks may think these companies are garbage but are 'playing along' because it's not necessarily what they themselves think that is important, but what others think. You can make money in a bubble, even when it eventually pops. What we're seeing now is hardly new, either:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_Revolutions_and_...
This is why I stick with index funds, as I don't really can't be bothered playing the game:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Random_Walk_Down_Wall_Street
I generally check my portfolio once a year, in January, when I top things up when new contribution room becomes available with the new year. It's 'fun' to follow along with the gyrations and drama as things happen, but I don't sleep over it. If you're reasonably diversified you can generally weather storms and come out okay on the other side:
* https://awealthofcommonsense.com/2014/02/worlds-worst-market...
* https://www.forbes.com/sites/advisor/2010/09/13/its-not-real...
No shit. That's why, even if it's an exaggeration to call the entire stock market a pyramid scheme, you can't justify the claim that it's entirely "underlying business activity that drives total returns". That's the real question (from which dividends are, yes, a distraction).
There's basically two stock markets: things valued on fundamentals and things valued on vibes.
And I don't think there's ever going to be a unified theory of value that can span both, because the former is quantitative and the latter is psychology.
A decade ago it was under $1000 and has never been that low since. It's peak price is only about 2x the current price.
And being higher over 10 years has little to do with it if acts counter cyclical to stocks and other assets.
BTC has been called many things at many different times. It was originally a payment system:
> A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution.
* https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
And it can still be used for that, however the transaction throughput is tiny, and so it became a store of value in essence: but it's kind of hard to be that when the value swings up and won so much. While "fiat" currency inflation is annoying, it is, generally, fairly predictable in most cases (<4%) and so you can plan ahead with regards to future value and purchase. The same is hardly true of BTC.
Even companies have some value after a crash and you could make a case that at some arbitrary point it was worth $x and since the crash didn't cause the company to crater to below $x it has not "crashed". Even companies filing for bankruptcy have some residual value above what they might have been founded on - it doesn't mean the company hasn't gone bankrupt.
They're making money on telecoms, and may have just started making a profit on renting out the data centres they originally built for the AI that it turned out hardly anyone wanted to actually use.
Here, “technicals” means technical analysis signals rather than the company’s business fundamentals. In other words, Burry is saying the stock could rise because of chart-based trading, momentum, and market behavior—not because investors think SpaceX is truly worth that much based on revenue, profits, or other fundamentals.
How long can the hype be maintained? TSLA is still maintaining its hype, judging by its P/E ratio.
Exactly, but there are people out there who buy stocks based on technical analysis. It can have an effect if enough people act on it's "signals".
Current US national debt is approximately $39.22 trillion. As we achieve a zombie movie, level of collective madness, lets take all this into the last degree.
Nationalize SpaceX, and with this bright obvious future described on the prospect lets pay US debt :-) Pay US retirement benefits pensions in token credits, pensioners can resell, make an options market for tokens. I am sure Robinhood will open you a margin account for that?
Lets open a futures markets for food goods grown up on SpaceX Asteroids, as they will have free solar energy. They can grow them three times faster than on Earth...
To quote Ron Baron yesterday on CNBC, we are all going to earn hundreds of billions....
While this would be conceivable if some future AI gets good enough to actually replace 100% of global paid labour currently done by using a computer, the reference class I have here is that Wikipedia is definitely not valued at [number of people online] * [peak cost of Encyclopaedia Britannica].
Economic displacement on that scale breaks the valuation.
For perspective - that’s 12.5 years of Tesla FSD subscriptions. I think there are probably about that much cars out there.
I think you are spot on. The problem comes if SpaceX goes out of fashion, not its fundamentals.
People comment on gold and Bitcoin, but don't realize the same principles apply to US dollars and bonds.
Currencies are a little different, since they are required to pay taxes; and payment of taxes is enforced (to varying degrees) by state violence.
Hence if you believe you will be taxed ("death and taxes" being the only certainties in life, etc.) then the currency associated with that tax has value, in that it avoids imprisonment, etc.
Cryptocurrency, such as Bitcoin, is undoubtedly a meme. If given a choice, one would prefer to possess any of the rare metals, rare earths, or any other elements that can be obtained in sufficient quantities, whether on land or in the ocean. Bitcoin or cryptocurrency is beneficial only to insiders and not to the general public. In essence, they are akin to modern tulips with a cherry on top, and like Tesla in 2030, one should avoid being caught with the bag.
The "value" of something can be a bit of a meta-game:
> A Keynesian beauty contest is a metaphorical beauty contest in which judges are rewarded for selecting the most popular choices among all judges, rather than those they may personally find the most attractive. This idea is often applied in financial markets, whereby investors could profit more by buying whichever stocks they think other investors will buy, rather than the stocks that have fundamentally the best value, because when other people buy a stock, they bid up the price, allowing an earlier investor to cash out with a profit, regardless of whether the price increases are supported by its fundamentals and theoretical arguments.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_beauty_contest
Plenty of folks may think these companies are garbage but are 'playing along' because it's not necessarily what they themselves think that is important, but what others think.
This idea was put forward by Keynes in his General Thoery publish in 1936, so human nature has hardly changed since then.
It's a different kind of hype than Nvidia has, which is showing very high and fast growing revenues (which may not continue, but they're real now). Jensen I think is not as critical to the AI hype as Elon is to his companies.
All these major tech companies eventually get leadership changes. Apple, Google, Amazon, have all done well because they're real companies and go beyond their original leadership. Tesla and SpaceX I think would surely go down the moment Musk is no longer in leadership.
https://www.natesilver.net/p/elon-musk-polls-popularity-nate...
majority view him unfavorably.
Indeed, but for general stock market purposes it's one dollar one vote, not one person one vote.
Possibly even worse. Short-sellers got burned on Tesla (and perhaps now also SpaceX), which may mean the marginal buyer and seller consists only of people who already buy into the hyper and by trading are sharing price info with each other rather than with a single person who doubts the man.
I sold my Tesla stocks a while back; the people who kept them don't care what people like me think.
Obviously not. It’s all about timing your bail so you don’t get left holding the bag.
This is not true.
BTC is way more sane than SpaceX as can be seen by it's history so far.
I think SpaceX is definitely overpriced but saying that BTC is more sane is completely delusional.
Also, everything on level 2 needs to be ultimately balanced on level 1; BTC doesn't have enough throughput to balance all the banks in the world, and lo Lightning appears to be consolidating into fewer nodes.
Also also, everything level 2 (including Lightning) necessarily takes away at least one of the selling points used for BTC, and replaces them with something functionally equivalent to 50% of a bank but worse.
The market has long shifted to "buy Litecoin with cash, swap it to Monero" for these kinds of activities.
...it is also propped up in value by a frankly insane demand for it from other countries...on its fundamentals it would be worth much less
The point being: BTC is a an abstract good, of no practical use except that of being transacted. Has whatever value the people are willing to pay for it, and has had a value in the tens of thousands for long enough that buying one with the intent of keeping it for a while is not such a stupid idea. I don't currently own any but there is a price at which I would buy one, and that price is many thousands of dollars... For an alphanumeric code in a distributed ledger.
It costs the same amount of money to literally go there by plane and bring it as cash. This is not fair obviously. So traditional finance is a scam itself.
It takes 10 seconds and no fees to make the same transfer via blockchain.
I am pretty sure you know basically nothing about those crimes or the people that do crimes or how they actually transfer money. Just doing casual newspaper intellectualism while talking about things you never interacted with
Yes. Unfortunately the traditional financial system is governed by a country which has been behaving increasingly erratically, threatening its long-term allies with invasions and committing obvious war crimes. This is not a "good guys vs bad guys" scenario.
Someone on HN: "BTC is valueable solely through the power of memes".
And yes, btc does store value, it is doing that for me now. I stored some of my value in it and it has held better value than fiat.
There were two individuals who each bought $1B: Ron Baron and Gina Rinehart.
While they are individuals, they executed these billion-dollar investments through their massive corporate entities and investment firms, rather than personal brokerage accounts.
A retain investor is an individual, non-professional investor who buys and sells securities through brokerages using personal funds.
And given the financial statements in the SpaceX IPO, to the extent X still has any value at all, it is almost all just influence of one kind or another, not actual money.
On the other hand, the fact that BTC has absolutely no intrinsic value can be an advantage over a real company, as it makes it more insulated from reality. Supply chain shock? No problem. Competition? Same. New technologies, political change? Neither.
The main reason humanity hasn't meaningfully started expanding into space is because it used to cost $54,000 to get a liter of water into space. SpaceX brought that down to about $5000, and then further down to near $1400. That's a massive reduction in price, but you're still left with the problem that it costs $1400 to get a liter of water to space, which is why we still can't have nice things, yet.
Starship has the promise of bringing that down a couple of more orders of magnitude where the goal is to get it within the $10-$20 range. If they succeed, then you've just opened the doors to an entire new frontier of expansion and growth for humanity which is practically infinite. And right now there's no real reason to think that they won't succeed. And more importantly than this is that nobody seems to be able to compete on their level, or even remotely close. Their closest competitor is probably China who remains technologically well behind. And so SpaceX today is akin to being able to get a piece of some sort of super-ship making monopoly, just prior to the Age of Sail. The downside risk is basically zero since they're still making rapid progress - the only question is how rapid. And upside potential is basically infinite.
[1] - https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/11/spacex-cuts-retail-ipo-alloc...
Am I naive in thinking that we haven't expanded into space because we don't need to? What's the benefit?
For why we'd want to go at all: there's a lot of resources up there, and pollution is much less of a concern for factories made up there. Also some material processes may be much easier in zero-gee.
But that doesn't mean it's actually worth the effort.
Access to resources. A sense of adventure. Learning.
Some people are suggesting making high quality fibre optics and pharmaceuticals in LEO already with Falcon prices:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Forge
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varda_Space_Industries
While I am *extremely* skeptical, I've heard people talk about space-based solar. I mention this only so nobody adds an "and also" for that.
Ditto anyone talking about lunar He-3. This is a bad idea, "why" is long enough to be worthy of a blog post.
But if you were committed to expansionism for whatever reason, then you'd want some way to get industrial quantities of steel from mines already in space, to make the factories themselves cheaper. Possibly megastructures like an orbital ring, too.
Since you are right. All of these things are available on Earth for far cheaper, with better ROI and with far less risk of dying or getting early cancer from cosmic rays.
The real benefit is a commanding lead over geopolitical rivals in the domain of satellites and satellite platforms for hosting devices in orbit, thus securing an insurmountable national security advantage.
The second reason is that the notion of economics becomes kind of odd when you start introducing space. Space has practically infinite resources of every type imaginable. For instance one single asteroid, Psyche 16, is thought to have orders of magnitude more gold than has ever been extracted in human history. But I mean, what does this even mean economically? Obviously if you start bringing back hundreds of thousands of tons of gold, the price is going plummet. And even the viable possibility of this happening would probably send the price of gold plummeting. So... it's weird. We're in uncharted waters.
And then on top of this access to space will mean we will start expanding outward - colonies, vastly larger stations stations, and so on. And these expansions will develop their own parallel economies with their own needs/production/etc. This is all kind of like trying to predict the economics of the internet before the first cable had been laid.
But the current claustrophobic nature of the ISS was, again, not the destination. There was a grand scheme of in-orbit refueling, fuel depots, and much larger scale space architecture. Something of the ISS scale was intended as a short jumping-off point, a workers' tent analog. But our progress stalled out and the workers' tent is what we were left with.
The point I'm making here is that space in the era we're stepping into is very unlikely to look much like the one we're leaving. This is even more true as the price drops because private industry will be able to play a major role. There will be no Nixon to just cancel everything out of concerns for his political career.
Even with cheap rockets, Musk was talking about 6-digit-dollars for becoming a Martian, I don't see more than a few million people wanting to spend that much for that outcome.
If we get self-replicating robots or whatever, big space stations aren't that expensive, but also Earth is huge and you can extract minerals from seawater electrolytically and PV is already cheap, so perhaps we'd just get a load of seasteads instead: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seasteading
Really hard to say. Everyone who does space stuff talks with the same level of optimism as Musk but historically they deliver less.
But for what it's worth, I don't think Musk's going to reach Mars except in an urn, baring some surprise development in anti-aging medicine. Even though their progress is rapid by the standards of the industry, they are still slow in terms of natural human lifespan and his age.
> Have you sketched out the net present value calculation for an investment in spacex today based on that?
IMO, their market cap should be around $200bn at the moment. That's mostly Starlink, so if there's a Kessler cascade *or* if China makes a competitor that goes down to about $80-100bn
The long-term stuff about Mars or turning the moon into a factory for modular data centres is too far into the future to be worth considering.
There is no backup plan.
The big revolution with SpaceX was meaningful reuse (I can get into the comparison with Space Shuttle if you're unfamiliar there). Landing and reusing rockets is something that Boeing et al thought was impossible from an economic point of view, and actually taunted SpaceX in their early years over it along the lines of 'Oh you're going for reuse. Yeah we researched and trialed that out a decade ago. The economics don't work. Cute to see you trying though.'
Their success there is what helped bring the costs way down. But there's still plenty that's not reused - in particular they currently only reuse the first stage (the big rocket that gets things off the ground initially) while discarding the second stage - the space-optimized payload delivery rocket. With Starship they're going for 100% rapid reuse. So you're looking at this absolutely massive 2 stage system where both parts will be able to be repeatedly and rapidly reused.
Or take the early sea voyages. Not only were there endless worries about things that were ultimately nonissues like sea monsters or falling off the edges of the Earth, but there were endless very real dangers awaiting which we had no clue about or how to deal with - scurvy, rogue waves, and much more. In the aforementioned Age of Sail, it was just expected that a significant chunk of your crew would die. Yet somehow we pushed onward and outward.
And the infinite possibilities of space are going to absolutely dwarf all previous frontiers in terms of interest and potential.
Like everything else in finance...
Saying this is not to defend all sorts of crypto-bros. The economy, especially one overly focused on publicly traded companies like the Western, and especially the US economy, is a meme economy.
Coffee, flats, healthcare, military spending, etc., of comparable quality in the abstract East, cost multiples less than in the EU/USA because they and their currencies are weak on memes.
Of course it can collapse before that, but if it gets to that point it is guaranteed to collapse.
I mentioned this in other thread(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48514481), we are at runaway intelligence already.
Mostly because we are looping AI to fix problems, and then the same data is used to improve AI. There is no upper limit to this.
Taken to its logical conclusion, this process needs a hardware scale that might even look laughably huge at this point. Its fairly obvious space is going to play a big role in the coming times.
I could be wrong, and I humbly accept it when Im proven wrong. But it does feel like a lot of people in top places know we are going to need all the energy and resources space has to offer to run this runaway intelligence.
I'm an AI booster, but this really doesn't follow. There's absolutely no guarantee that the marginal improvement from this continues to hold.
Validated data coming out of LLM(Itself generated from a recursive/loop process, used to incrementally arrive at solutions) being using to improve the very LLM is a very powerful loop. And there is no real upper limit to this, at least not in the near future.
Like most exponential processes, the start is slow, but it gets fast very rapidly.
This is also what Anthropic has said, the ones training these models today(i.e 2025 - 2027) will be impossible to catch up with, let alone beat.
So we are at a kind of runaway AI already today.
> there is no real upper limit to this
This is what you need to cite for your argument to hold together.
Companies like this become bigger than their founders.
And I'm sure many on the Left would argue that Tesla and SpaceX would be healthier companies without Elon Musk.
Although I tend to differ on that, having owned $TSLA for a long time. Never bet against Elon!
This is not really a diss on SpaceX either because a lot of IPOs go through an immediate pop and then 1-2 years of doldrums as lockouts expire and promises aren't quite delivered.
Nobody knows what 60 billion in SpaceX stock today will be worth when Cursor insiders finally get to sell (at least a year from now, after other SpaceX insiders have started selling).
Investors in certrtain rounds (or sizes) tend to have no lockup, whereas later stages have a six month. Alternatively, I've reviewed agreements where the lockup is based on minimum market cap, but I've only seen that a couple of times.
> Holding Period. Before you may sell any restricted securities in the marketplace, you must hold them for a certain period of time. If the company that issued the securities is a “reporting company” in that it is subject to the reporting requirements of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, then you must hold the securities for at least six months
You might be referring to staff members who have shares ? Their shares are not restricted securities as far as I know, but their internal company policy might affect those, but I'm not 100% certain on that.
It's hard to say that they footed the bill here, but they basically gave SpaceX a number to say "well our stock went IPO and it's at this price, so here's 60B at this price"
A good tactic from SpaceX as after the inital surge of a big IPO, the stock price usually comes down and finds it's correct balance, which is usually always lower. So if they had of waited the 'cooling off' period of a year for example, and the stock price went down to it's 'correct' valuation, then they would have had to issue a higher number of stocks.. At least that's my thinking, but I'm terrible with money.
Composer 2.5 was a huge leap with minimal compute from xAI.
They can compete with OpenAI and anthropic with xAI scale compute. They have a top notch model team and incredible training data and huge enterprise costumer contracts.
while we had it i used cursor for probably eight months as my main ide (i did really like the interface for embedding code in prompts!) but had no problems switching to claude code. i asked around, and i truly don’t know a single coworker who misses cursor even a little bit.
I was fully in on Cursor for a good chunk of last year, using Composer + Gemini Pro (via Copilot / GH integration). I really enjoyed Cursor's tab completion capabilities, but when Sonnet and Opus started getting particularly good for me (think for me it was around 4.5), I swapped over to Zed + claude code in the integrated terminal. I've found that after a bit, I haven't ended up missing the tab completion. I've been perfectly fine with just LSP + claude always open. I don't miss Cursor. All my colleagues are on claude code with half of us also using Zed.
For someone who is new to agentic code or is generally somewhat junior, Cursor is very easy to get started with and is generally fairly frustration-free.
I use a cheap $20 subscription mostly for occasional use of Opus and Composer.
SpaceX made a smart move here. Someone else should have really seen the opportunity and bought them.
IDE improvements are not a zero sum game.
Vs Claude Code: I like the option to change the models, as I often prefer ChatGPT or Composer to Opus. I have a slight preference towards TUI, but not so strong to drop the models.
Vs JetBrains. I really love JetBrains but the tab complete just works so well for me.
composer 2.5 is also a very decent model, it go 90% of my AI tasks using it now.
It is not like purchasing soap in the supermarket.
I found it less effective than free copilot autocomplete on vanilla VSCode.
Tesla is a car company that doesn't want to make cars. And xAI is an AI foundation model company that actually is a data center REIT...
The only kind of AI I want in my editor is an autocomplete, but this isn't very magical to non-programmers (their TAM) or all that valuable (you can't charge thousands), they bought Supermaven and basically killed it, I'm not sure how you think tab is really good, I've not been impressed when I played around with it.
Their valuation should be very closely tied to how how many tokens it takes to get from Void to Cursor.
If those values diverge by much, something is rotten in the state of Denmark.
Lately I use Cursor with DeepSeek API, and OpenAI subscription through their Codex App.
To paraphrase, the biggest trick the devil pulled is convincing founders they need a moat.
What matters is that this has enough "future story value" to keep the few investors invested... allowing for the planned index funds to buy into the overvalued stock & allowing for the largest heist in the history of money.
It's become pure hype and drama on the global stock market stage.
And AI companies are not short of capital.
Everyone I've spoken with is now using either Claude Code or Codex (or Copilot because their companies force them to).
I switched to Zed, and I'm never going back to Electron/non-native IDEs.
Also their computer use in the cloud agents (when it works) is a game changer. No need to keep your laptop open / get a Mac mini if it runs in the cloud.
Basic tasks in cursor. It's decent and damn fast.
All my team members also use it.
I typically use Claude for interacting with MCPs and skills to operate on live systems.
I moved away from Cursor when I noticed the responses from specific models were not as clean or accurate as when I'd prompt the models directly, which was something I didn't know how to do early on. I hypothesized that they had some boilerplate prompt sitting atop of my own, causing less precise or desirable results.
I would assume Cursor is still one of the best options for normal developers to get started with AI, but with Copilot forcing their foot in the door at many companies, I wasn't sure how well it would fare on its own. Being acquired by SpaceX should help, and I'll be interested to follow along and see how things develop.
Why? (Genuinely curious, I would have assumed the opposite)
They're not a space company any more. They're just part of the AI bubble.
https://x.com/SpaceX/status/2066873915717136548
I do hope that Cursor doesn't remove any of its current model offerings, and just offers Grok Build in addition to what they already offer, in my opinion unless most of their clients "switch" to Grok (like metrics show they're mostly using Grok vs other models), it would make more sense.
Enterprise AI adoption has reached a point now where FinOps matter, and a harness platform story with a discounted underlying model can be enticing for a number of organizations.
I've seen Gemini land well in a F100 well known for their AI hardware story for that reason, and Alibaba's leadership canned the OSS minded Qwen team in order to build a similar commercial minded approach as well.
At least in cybersecurity, we're also reaching a point where the harness is starting to matter more than the underlying foundation models, and building a harness/bedrock style story while discounting a specific model can play well in upper market deals.
There is a recognition that foundation models and tools leveraging them will introduce some degree of nondeterminism, so the best way to solve that is to leverage preexisting best practice that is used to reduce lateral movement risk by humans (who are similarly nondeterministic in nature).
> For the past few months, SpaceXAI has been jointly training a model with Cursor, which will be released in Cursor and Grok Build soon.
https://x.com/SpaceX/status/2066873915717136548
The product itself is practically a vscode wrapper with Agent implementation and K2.5 forked model (composer).
Is Cursor dying?
Most probably it will be mix of stock/cash
Mesmerizing....
"One minute, let me ask my AI agent"
Claude Code and ChatGPT need some competition. So that they also innovate more.
Is it though ? Their TAM in their filing lists 85% as AI. $18.7 billion in REVENUE 2025 yet are spending more than 3x that for Cursor, and AI company.
I've been using the Pi agent with Deepseek for some days.. and I'm more than happy with that.
IPO proceeds after greenshoe: $85.7B
Major disclosed cash / debt-related commitments:
- Take out Bridge loan tied to X/xAI debt repayment: $20.0B
- Take out EchoStar debt payoff / cash component: up to $8.5B
- Take out EchoStar debt-service funding: up to $3.0B
- Take out AI infrastructure lease commitments: $20.2B
Subtotal of major disclosed commitments: $51.7B
Rough remaining cash before other costs :-)): $34.0B
Lets now talk about buying Tesla, doing Quantum and building a Dyson Sphere and do another round?
Isn't the Cursor founder British?
Google paid 2.5B to bring Noam back into the fold in 2024 ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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.
An AI editor company might never make 60B itself, but it might help another AI company grow faster (relative to its competitors, who might also want to buy the AI editor company).
What else can an AI giant do with all that money?
Build in-house: they do, and there's only so fast they can hire/build.
Save? Yes, still do, but if they save it all, and let competitors buy Cursor, they lose.
Invest in other fields? Sure, but if they lose the AI race, that's all they'll be left with.
Tesla's IPO is a bet that if Musk has the right opportunity, he will do well. So he's given a big bucket of money, and needs a team that can deliver. So he buys Cursor.
The winners are Cursor. The losers are whoever is funding the AI companies that get outcompeted.
(Full disclosure: I don't know anything about Cursor, nor much about Tesla or its IPO.)
You must be new here.
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.
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.
Over time, though, I think he's drifted away from his original "make real things in the real world" focus and more toward "play money games" and "play political games."
It's sad. One common comic book supervillain arc is to start as a hero and become what you despise.
Next up, Anthropic.
Do you really think so? Like everyone who risks their and their clients' money here is just being irrational? Is this really a coherent view? Could it not be that someone knows something you don't, or does not have the biases you have?
The rational basis is entirely "I can sell the stock to somebody else for more money". Where in normal stock it would be "this company can make a profit that gives a return on this investment." This is a purely speculative play.
SpaceX is worth more than Amazon.
Amazon has $750B of revenue and an enormous unfathomable moat across many fields, across most of the planet. It had a profit of $77B last year. And people consider Amazon overvalued, and a symptom of a serious bubble.
SpaceX has $18B revenue, and a consolidated loss of $4.9B. It has basically zero path to real profit, and it turns out that space launch actually isn't a lucrative industry, so much so that SpaceX had to create its own customer.
I mean, the biggest news about SpaceX has been the utter failure that xAI has been, reducing it to renting out all of the GPUs that Musk forced his other road-to-failure company, Tesla, to hand over to the failure that was xAI, that failed so badly it got hidden inside SpaceX. Good god. Somewhere in there the failure that was SolarCity got packaged in the giant scam.
Like seriously, the biggest win of the company is that it absorbed the husk of xAI that had a massive surplus of GPUs from when Elon tried to buy himself credibility in AI, and the market happened to make them worth more so that's their big win. Their biggest success is basically scalping GPUs.
>even though literally everyone hates him?'
Guy basically runs the US government, which has been reduced to a banana republic plutocracy. People invest in him because they know the system is so catastrophically corrupt that he'll always come up a winner, regardless of how enormous of failures he keeps generating.
I mean, this is such a transparent shell game scam that they're immediately talking about packaging up even more of Elon's scam businesses together. Just amazing stuff.
Don't worry, those super robots are coming any day now!
Yes, the US market is in the end games of a massive spiral -- a circle jerk of trillions of fake dollars moving in a rapidly accelerating circle -- and it will not turn out well. SpaceX is the moment when it is laid bare.
Do you have any evidence of this? As far as I know, he basically never gets what he wants. He was against Trump's Big Beautiful Bill, it passed anyway. He wanted DOGE, it fizzled. He wants more Solar/Electric car related subsidies, Trump does not give a darn. He wants more H1Bs, Trump has been doing everything to frustrate H1Bs.
The one thing which Musk seems to have gotten was Jared Isaacman, but that was really difficult for him to get, and it took way longer than it should have.
Really difficult to see evidence that he runs the US government.
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.
Edit: I see SpaceX did disclose
> The consideration for the acquisition of Cursor, if any, after the closing of this offering would consist of shares of our Class A common stock based on an implied equity value of Cursor of $60.0 billion
"Collaboration with Cursor" page 12 of the SpaceX S-1 https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1181412/000162828026...
$60B cash? Too much.
$60B SPCX stock? Why so low.