No. He is making it an AI company. The prospectus makes that clear. Everything is in service of training and deploying AI. Twitter is data, distribution and marketing, space x is distribution with data centers and internet in space. Cursor is training data and hostile distillation.

What would it mean if SpaceX buys Tesla though? Does the combined market cap count? That would be wrong. Tesla buying SpaceX just for hist bonus and then rebranding to X would be classic Musk.

It's a game for him, but so ridiculous. While Tesla was pushing electrification and SpaceX pushing rapid rocket re-use I kind of tolerated Elon's antics, but since he got involved in politics and DOGE I can't bear it anymore.

I agree with this, but it seems so crazy to me. How can money be a motivator when you're that rich. I'm not even "rich" but I'm already at a point where money is far from my #1 motivator.

I LOVE puppies, but if I had a trillion of them the last thing I'd want is another puppy.

> it's pretty transparent that he's just trying to ball-of-mud together everything he can to hit that target and grab the bag.

I agree, and most people do too, yet he'll get away with it. We're in the kleptocracy phase of the fall.

That’s not how it works. There’s provisions to adjust the targets if there’s M&A.

His award is also tied to numbers of vehicles and robots sold.

So just increasing market cap won’t do it alone.

Even if he merged them, they still have to produce WAY more than they are now.

Musk is a genius creating really exciting ideas. No doubt about that.

But as they say,"the devil is in the details"

- Can Starship transport people from London to Sydney safely economically, compared to Boom, which is working on a supersonic passenger aircraft ?

-Why can the boring machine dig tunnel at much lower cost than it's competitors? Maybe it's because the everyone else tries to dig tunnels for trains, which have a much larger diameter than Musk's boring machine, which only fits his "Teslas at a tunnel" concept? And it might be a good idea. Worth a try. But be honest about it.

-Sure, data centers in space probably have some great uses, and I'm happy he's trying, but will they ever be more economical than deploying servers on the ocean? On countries with very cool climate?, powered by new energy technologies?

Which hasn't yet been proven to be either technically or economically viable, even on paper. It's a pipe dream.

The cynical viewpoint is that this is Elon capitalizing on current datacenter hype to inflate SpaceX's valuation based on theoretically overcoming tremendous amounts of hard physics problems, over the next 5-10 years. As he did with FSD, Boring Company / Hyperloop, Twitter, etc.

I still have no idea how that would work. Imagine launching an entire data center building into space, and then imagine also launching a solar array to power it, and then also launching a gigantic radiator to cool it... and the radiator is full of some kind of liquid that can never leak even though it's in a vacuum.

Like, sure, but also, that seems like a lot of work, a lot of extra cost, and a lot of risk, all just to avoid building it in Kansas.

It's much more likely SpaceX will continue building more ground data centers and using their sat relays to make global connection faster than ground connections can allow.

Do they, really? Because putting data centers in space would mean multiplying the infrastructure cost by a few orders of magnitude, while being far, far away from cheap energy - photovoltaics would work, certainly, but it will take a lot of it, and it's not like you can just slap panels on the roof - easy cooling, and people.

It's a ridiculous idea, and I don't believe it's what they are really pursuing.

xAI could tie in just fine without Cursor in the picture.

A great business for the rocket logistics company since radiators are a thing.

A less good business for the data center company.

yes musk said that, but that's retarded, a statement made to fill as many bingo spaces as possible

[dead]

Buying Tesla is just buying SpaceX. When they roll up Tesla, it will be in a stock deal not real money. None of this is real money and I would argue that Musk is not the world's first trillionaire because there is no reality in which he could get that money out of SpaceX

I mean, if he wanted to sell tomorrow, who COULD spend $2-3 Trillion to buy it, and who WOULD? Anyone with that kind of money to spend today knows what a scam it is

Cursor also has a large customer base including most of the Fortune 500, talent, and their own coding model and training infrastructure using their data. You wouldn't get those automatically by subsidizing Claude, and the many months or even years it would take to ramp up your own IDE/coding hardness from scratch and acquire customers to match Cursor would put you way behind in a field where the SOTA climbs every month. It's also not clear that Anthropic would let you undercut everyone else using their API; they could cut you off at any time. That would be a very precarious position.

> was pushing the envelope of "interplanetary" travel/species

I don't think they were. All the Mars stuff is just dressed up version of The Boring Company - a distraction by Elon to better position his other interests.

There's no money in going to Mars and there's no reason to, from a financial perspective, and Elon doesn't care about anything beyond wealth and power.

> SpaceX was pushing the envelope of "interplanetary" travel/species

We already have a perfectly usable planet. It just need to be taken care of.

There's some companies (Snap being one of them) where certain classes of shares have NO voting rights. If you think SpaceX is lopsided, look at Snap's shares. They have A, B, and C class. The founders of Snap own 95% of the voting through their Class C shares... literally only pre-IPO folks have any voting rights.

Most large companies do that these days: GOOG, META all have different share classes. Even the small startup I worked for had that.

Musk didn’t invent the idea of using multiple share classes to ensure the founder(s) retain control of the company, see Rupert Murdoch, Google, Facebook, etc

From the regulators’ perspective: it is a risk, but you disclosed that risk in the prospectus that buyers are assumed to have read (what percentage ever actually do?), hence it is fine

Well, when you buy into an IPO, they make you sign to say you read it. So either you did, or you made a false statement on a legal document

Who has the gold makes the rules

If he was smart it'd be to a very limited extent.

If you have this much wealth in something as unpredictable as the stock market I think the very wise move is to start converting it into stock backed loans[1] that you leverage to buy real assets - buy islands and small countries, buy other successful large companies and just let them keep trending slowly upwards, pick up that New Zealand bunker... just try and get your money diversified and into things that would survive a stock price collapse. Even if Elon did this with 1% or 10% of his wealth and kept the vast majority of his assets invested in this one clump of companies and they went to zero he'd still be sitting on an insane pile of cash.

1. Lets all pour out a drink to the bankers who authorize such insane loan agreements.

In the same sense that chrome is just a safari fork I suppose

See here https://cursor.com/blog/composer-2-5

85% of the compute for the final model is from them, and not the base Kimi model.

Dumping github into a model is not post training, thats pre training. And every base model already has all of github.

Composer post training is clearly very good, only second to Anthropic and OpenAI.

It does irk me a bit that they try to hide the fact that it's based on a chinese pretrained model though.

Replied on the other comment about this, but putting it here:

> See here https://cursor.com/blog/composer-2-5

> 85% of the compute for the final model is from them, and not the base Kimi model.

Of course they could be lying, but it seems feasible that they are adding a lot on top of this

Except businesses tend be focused on core competencies and not sprawling in a lot of unrelated directions.

yes, whataboutism at its finest

> caters mainly to neophytes

Perhaps that's where the money and strategy is. (a) stronger need; (b) if you can build systems without real expertise, you don't have to stomach their salaries or politics.

Umm. It’s real development work in real settings with real model output. That is a high quality dataset. The fact that it isn’t good code from elite engineers is confusing what good means in the context of coding agents. First is how to respond to a range of prompts. For that you need diverse real world conversations. Second is the ability to respond with good code. That is about labeling or other data curation after the fact or other training methods. So it’s a downstream consideration

Plus user-funded model distillation lol.

The key point I think you're missing is Cursor's "moat" isn't around their product or brand, it's around the gigantic corpus of usage data they've almost certainly collected.

It is simply not feasible train an LLM to be as good as these frontier models are without a TON of high-quality examples of what "good" looks like. Every time a Cursor user (who didn't opt out of analytics) does/doesn't hit a "retry" button, or rejects/accepts an LLMs output, it allows Cursor to log record of a specific LLMs output and a binary signal of that output's quality.

Given they've been at this since 2022, and for most of that time sat comfortably at #1 in market share among comparable AI coding tools (only recently getting topped by Claude code), Cursor likely has the largest, highest-quality, SWE-specific dataset in the industry by a sizable margin.

Grok being so late to the party could only train on twitter data in combination with whatever they could source publicly or purchase privately, and likely hasn't had anywhere near the usage they'd need to build up their own competitive dataset from scratch anytime soon.

If you believe (as SpaceX seems to) that the AI's total addressable market is over $26T, and acquiring proprietary, high-quality training data is the difference between capturing ~1-2% of that market and ~10-20%, then $60B starts to look like a bargain.

That’s the real response. It’s all financial engineering

Will a midterm pummeling change the regulatory departments that oversee mergers and anti-trust?

Ah to have such hope.

Even if I was this optimistic, the executive with a stuffed supreme court is not going to care what congress thinks.

We'll sooner declare market manipulation a form of speech.

Even if Congress may reverse things in the future, there are many opportunistic things happening right now, and it seems like the spacex situation is one of them. The emerging picture feels like a 'flood the zone' strategy (not by coordination, but by practical effect).

While other commenters have pointed out lots of details that point towards the favorable structural environment going forward, another idea that roots my thoughts towards this is that by creating facts on the ground, they are defining the new starting point.

Ultimately, reversing all of the different 'wrongs' or irregularities will be costly to both the opposition's political and attentional capital.

Going to do my best to respond to this while still following the HN guidelines:

> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.

RIMR says:

> nobody will ever challenge this, given the current political direction of the United States

It's obviously hyperbole to say that NOBODY will EVER challenge this, but I'd say it's directionally correct:

1. The Supreme Court is controlled by a conservative, pro-big-business majority that makes it very difficult for any legal attempts to challenge Elon's actions to survive litigation.

2. The United States Senate has a conservative, pro-big-business bias due its over-representation of rural voters and its internal norms (filibuster)

3. The United States House has a conservative, pro-big-business bias due to the gerrymandering efforts of Republican-controlled state legislatures across the country (which the Democrats have tried to counter and failed, see Virginia)

4. The conservative, pro-big-business Supreme Court has ensured that elections in the United States overall have a conservative, pro-big-business bias due to the unfettered spending allowed after Citizens United.

So yes, the winds seems to be against Republicans and Trump in the mid-terms, but the structural biases of the government are still very much pro-big-business, pro-capital, and anti-regulation.

It will take much more than a single mid-term cycle to reverse that trend.

> the current political direction points squarely to Republicans getting absolutely pummelled in the midterms

Even if so, are the Democrats really going to do the house cleaning required to fix this? Their recent history implies that they'll try to pretend things are running normally, until it all explodes in their face (again). Maybe I'm wrong, and they'll actually fight for the country, but... I'm not surprised that companies (and markets) are expecting them to just... not.