Short answer: Sam Nadler says SpaceX can buy Cursor by year end for $60 billion or pay a $10 billion breakup fee. Jordan Metzner says SpaceX offers excess compute to Cursor, about 30x Cursor's roughly $2 billion run rate.
Watch this answer from Episode 40 (starts at 10:58) · Episode 40 notes and transcript
From Episode 40: Claude Design Changes Everything (Figma in Trouble?), starting at 10:58.
Sam Nadler [10:57]: I don't know the exact deal terms, but I think, SpaceX and Cursor SpaceX has the option to buy Cursor, I believe, by the end of the year for 60,000,000,000 or breakup fee of 10,000,000,000. Obviously, SpaceX has the compute and Cursor is is the coding agent, but a pretty interesting auction that Elon drove here.
Jordan Metzner [11:20]: Yeah. So let's let's jump into a little bit. So, I think, like, before the news was announced, I think everybody pretty much believed that the coding race was being led and won by Anthropic. I think most people believe that OpenAI was kind of in second place to Anthropic, especially in enterprise, especially considering how much Anthropic has grown over the last few months. And, know, we've seen some of the drama between Sam and shareholders and board members. We saw the Ronan Farrow article came out on OpenAI. And, we've got, in kind of third and fourth place, we've got Google with Gemini and their Gemini CLI and some of the other Gemini tools they've built. And probably in, third or fourth place, depending on how you wanna rank them, you had Grok with, their tools. They've got image generation. They've got a real time API. Obviously, Elon's models are a little more risque and, telling dirty jokes and things like that as he's kind of been pushing for. But, I think he'd been mentioning over the past few months that he's fully aware that Grok is behind in the enterprise, like, coding space and that, he was working really hard to improve that. I think at the same time, what's interesting is that, Elon had just set up one of the largest GPU data centers with NVIDIA just, a few months back. And, Jensen was talking about how it was one of the largest data center builds from scratch of all time. And if you read this article and you drive through it, what you see is that xAI or SpaceX, now they've kind of been merged, is offering excess compute downstream to Cursor, but also with this, like, option to buy.
Jordan Metzner [12:48]: And I've seen a few people talk about this, that this is actually gives SpaceX some interesting optionality because they're able to kind of understand and define whether the next level up for Cursor is really about inference or about, like, kind of, generating a new model that can then compete with the Claude Codes and the Codexes of the world. But, obviously, a $60,000,000,000 incredible price point. I think the public data says Cursor was running at about $2,000,000,000 run rate, so this is 30 x on revenue. I know that, like, the most advanced teams, like, if you think about our, like, really advanced AI teams have kinda, like, moved on from Cursor, as we mentioned, gotten out of Claude Code and Codex. But, we're still seeing lots of enterprises just starting to adopt Cursor. I know Cursor is really well embedded inside of universities and other enterprises where it takes a lot longer to adopt new coding tools. They launched their own model that the Composer two model, I think, that was, a wrapper on top of the open source models a few months ago. If you recall a few weeks ago, maybe that was. But, yeah, I think, maybe many people thought Cursor was left to dry or, was kind of gonna slowly dwindle, but I don't know. I think what this deal means that, it kinda puts SpaceX and Grok and Cursor back into maybe that number three slot against Google.
Jordan Metzner [13:53]: And I think it just makes the market more interesting, probably makes prices more competitive as far as kind of token prices. And, as you know, Elon plays the long game, so, you can't bet against him. I don't know. What are your thoughts?
Sam Nadler [14:04]: Yeah. For sure. I mean, it just feels like we're still in the first inning of a very long game. No. I'm excited.
