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Wow. Tech CEOs and investors have completely lost touch with what money really is worth. How is a VSCode fork and a open weight LLM fine-tune worth $60B? One
by dminik 6mo ago
Wow. Tech CEOs and investors have completely lost touch with what money really is worth.
How is a VSCode fork and a open weight LLM fine-tune worth $60B?
One would think Elon would learn his lesson after overpaying for Twitter and then having to merge his failures together to stay afloat. But no, more cash into the burning pile.
- scottcorgan 6mo agobranding ... mindshare
- PurpleRamen 6mo agoI don't think it's about worth any more at this point; it seems more about money laundry and manipulating the market. They are shifting power between each other and create an illusion of a healthy economy, not carrying about the damage they create for everyone else.
- thegreatpeter 6mo ago[flagged]
- throwatdem12311 6mo agoPeople that think a crappy vscode fork is worth 60 billion dollars are the ones that need to touch grass.
- ToValueFunfetti 6mo agoAnd not also the people who think that acquisitions are being made primarily because colluding CEOs have some interest in creating the illusion of a healthy economy?
- marxisttemp 6mo agoclankerlover
- andsoitis 6mo ago> How is a VSCode fork and a open weight LLM fine-tune worth $60B? Ignoring future business ideas, Cursor reported reached $2 billion+ annualized revenue run rate in 2026, doubling from 2025. Recent financing rounds reached high-end valuation between $30 billion and $50 billion.
- throwaw12 6mo agoa lot of companies I know are cancelling Cursor in favor of Claude Code or Codex because they already have VSCode or IntelliJ for edits
- DalasNoin 6mo agoI mean the best argument I see for cursor is that you can easily switch between AIs, which is convenient since they seem to run at 80-90% up time (with those 10-20% clustered at West coast working hours). But the big AI companies are likely to keep an edge over Open-source fine-tunes and they are able to subsidize the coding agents in a way Cursor can't.
- robkop 6mo agoA lot of enterprises were doing that but now they hit the 150 user limit on Claude and are paying seat+api rates. Codex is still going strong but it’s hard to imagine they won’t do similar eventually. So now im honestly hearing a lot more folk stick it out with cursor while waiting for the dust to settle.
- anthonybsd 6mo ago>A lot of enterprises were doing that but now they hit the 150 user limit on Claude and are paying seat+api rates. A lot of enterprises use Github Copilot which has per-request pricing model which effectively means unlimited tokens which eliminates this issue.
- arbol 6mo agoThis isn't true anymore.. GitHub are rate limiting people on pro and pro+ pretty hard
- muyuu 6mo agohe doesn't act like he regrets buying Twitter/X/Xitter maybe he's getting value from this? (also the deal was essentially secured with Tesla stock, so who knows what did he actually pay)
- simgt 6mo agoYes, and Whatsapp was just a messaging app with a stupid Erlang backend. These deals are not about the tech, they buy the business, that includes the brand and the user base. Whether we think it's worth that amount is indeed up for discussion.
- sschueller 6mo agoWhatsapp was much much more at that point. It also had a huge userbase at a time when getting such a number of people was incredibly difficult. Many were also paying the $1 per year fee. Switching from Cursor to Kilo etc. takes nothing. There are no "friends" you need to convince to switch.
- manveerc 6mo agoWhatsApp had real network effects built in, and network was the moat. Don’t think Cursor has any real moat.
- oceansky 6mo agoWhatsapp was already the de-facto communication standard for a lot countries in America and Europe when Meta bought it.
- mghackerlady 6mo agoI wonder if meta will ever buy the (non-chinese) asian equivalent, Line
- RestlessMind 6mo ago(non-chinese) asian equivalent of whatsapp is still whatsapp, it completely dominates in some of the biggest asian countries like india, indonesia or pakistan along with a bunch of other smaller places
- dminik 6mo agoYes. But unlike cursor, Whatsapp had the following advantages: 1. It's cheap to run. 2. It has clear advantages over existing technology (SMS). 3. My mom uses it. She's never going to use cursor. Whatsapp had a huge userbase in Europe. Basically everyone I know uses it. And it was "only" ~$20 billion. Inflation can't be this high.
- acdha 6mo agoBuying Twitter played a key part in getting Trump re-elected, so I think Musk figures he got what he wanted in terms of deregulation, dropped prosecution, and damage to his political opponents. This deal is different: SpaceX is heading for an IPO which is now complicated by xAI becoming a subsidiary. Cursor is actually popular and I’m sure this is all stock-based so as long as investors believe that those users stick to xAI it’ll juice the entire SpaceX IPO. I am skeptical but these days the market seems to be driven by a country-club full of guys in Connecticut who are constantly hyperventilating on X so maybe from that angle it’s just another way he’s getting what he wanted from Twitter.
- oceansky 6mo agoQuoting a viral tweet: “Elon is such a dumbass, he spent $44 billion on Twitter and all he got was control of all 3 branches of the federal government.”
- dminik 6mo agoI mean, that still feels overpriced. Biden won in 2020 with just ~$2 billion. Though he didn't get all the branches. Neither did Obama, who won two terms for <$2 billion. Are the house and courts really so expensive?
- maweaver 6mo agoHe bought his way into politics, came in with a chainsaw (almost literally), realized he didn't want to be in politics after all and rage quit. It may not make him a dumbass, but it certainly makes him some sort of ass.
- cnd78A 6mo agoBuying Twitter played a key part in getting Trump re-elected Some would say it was simply caused by the mediocrity of Bidden and more globally of the democrats. You don't need to brainwash people for this.
- myvoiceismypass 6mo ago
- sam_goody 6mo agoLet's face it - Grok is not nearly as popular among programmers as Claude or Codex, and that means that xAI is not able to vacuum all the data that his competitors have access to. Cursor is installed on a LOT of computers. Once Grok becomes the default engine, it will raise adoption. More importantly, if you have Cursor installed all your data may be sent to their labs whether you use it or not (unfortunately - this is par for the course for all the LLMs, a la Microsoft). That's worth a lot - especially considering that Cursor might also grow with the shift to more powerful local models and the fact that it has a respectable income stream.
- afavour 6mo ago> How is a VSCode fork and an open weight LLM fine-tune worth $60B? Corporate contracts. A lot of companies have signed onto Cursor. xAI has a pretty toxic brand with Elon and the nonconsensual sexual images scandal. xAI has a ton of compute and few corporate customers. Now they have a ton. > One would think Elon would learn his lesson after overpaying for Twitter I think he took over Twitter to control what people using it see and promote right wing viewpoints. To that end it’s been a wild success.
- garciasn 6mo ago> xAI has a ton of compute and few corporate customers. Now they have a ton. For now, perhaps. I work with numerous companies who refuse to do business with his brands.
- afavour 6mo agoYes, I think getting value for money here relies on a lot of corporate inertia. Which, to be honest, is usually a good bet.
- romanovcode 6mo agoEver heard of concept called acqui-user/acqui-hire?
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- jraines 6mo agoYou have to look at it now like cryptocurrency “market cap” numbers. It’s more of a marketing tool than anything. This is just another honking whirlygig to bolt onto the SpaceX IPO to try and generate exit liquidity
- Zigurd 6mo ago> How is a VSCode fork and a open weight LLM fine-tune worth $60B? The same way a rocket company that counts short-lived as satellites as an asset is worth 1.7 trillion. Congratulations to the Cursor folks, they are the only winners in this. This is also part of the AI bubble delusion: agent assisted coding works, at least for some people, for some purposes. This deal perpetuates the illusion that AI will find high value use cases. The reality may be that software development has unique characteristics you won't find in law or medicine or other domains.
- taffydavid 6mo agoI would also ask why is a rocket company buying a VSCode fork? Why not grok or xAI or x or Tesla or any of his other companies?
- mghackerlady 6mo agoxAI would have at least made sense
- gen220 6mo agoX is a subsidiary of xAI (responsible for Grok) is a subsidiary of SpaceX. Tesla is the only major Elon business that’s independent of SpaceX at this point
- taffydavid 6mo agoThat's such a weird structure
- miki123211 6mo agoIt's not the codebase they're purchasing, it's the customer list, R&D talent, and most importantly, data corpus. X AI is weak on coding and most of their founding researchers have departed for greener pastures. Musk has a great datacenter, but no researchers or data to use it with. This acquisition makes sense in that context. See also ($, Stratechery) https://stratechery.com/2026/john-ternus-and-apples-hardware-defined-future-spacexai-and-cursor/ https://stratechery.com/2026/john-ternus-and-apples-hardware...
- cmrdporcupine 6mo agoIt's purely about control, not profit. He bought Twitter to grab a megaphone to propagate his ego/agenda. Grok was built for similar reasons. He's buying Cursor to have a tool to push Grok on the world, and to have something of his own under his own ideological control to compete with SamA and Dario.
- MisterTea 6mo ago> Wow. Tech CEOs and investors have completely lost touch with what money really is worth. Remember those stories of lottery winners who win millions then wind up broke AF, even homeless, in only a year or two because they have no impulse control and blew through it? Same people.