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).
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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).
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm honestly not up to date on all the FIM autocomplete at the moment. However, autocomplete getting good is something I look forward too. I believe its mostly a problem of latency. You needs <200ms (and accurate) for it to not feel annoying, which is hard to do and use a larger more capable model.
Unfortunately it doesn't seem like this is a problem companies are looking to tackle because it doesn't really make you any money or impress investors. Inceptionlabs.ai seems to be making attempts, but I haven't tried. They are apparently in the Zed editor, something else I haven't used.
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.
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.
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.
Using Cursor with Jetbrains via ACP isn't that different than using within the Cursor IDE. You still get Agent/Plan/Ask modes with model selectors.
I'd recommend installing the Cursor IDE, then using it to install Cursor CLI (it's easier to keep things up to date this way), then setting up your Jetbrains IDE to point to the Cursor CLI via ACP integration.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Money is neither created nor destroyed in the markets. It's exchanged.
If Musk is worth a trillion while not generating a trillion of value, then it's a heist.
heist: "an elaborate, meticulously planned theft, typically targeting highly valuable items, large sums of money, or financial institutions like banks or museums"
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...
Moat is whatever thing is stopping the next guy from simply drinking your milkshake. People conflate "I could smash this out in a weekend" with "and therefore could also build a multi-billion dollar revenue stream in [counted in months]".
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.
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.
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.
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...
