> the market for AI is 2.5 larger than all the food sold on this planet.
It just shows how much the automation has impacted agriculture and the food industry. Sure, there're rural farms that apply 200 yo technology. But e.g. the grain production and farming are incredibly efficient at scale. So, it's not that costly for as a humanity to feed 8 billion people (at a varying level, of course).
I don't think anyone is claiming AI and food have the same elasticity of demand, which is what this really talks to, but, after a claim the AI market is 26 trillion dollars... I wouldn't be surprised if someone did.
We could remove 100% of world AI supply and humanity would not be worse off. It is still additive and in areas of generally indeterminate value except in hype.
Reasoning and RAG is amazing already and is a productivity gain but I'm yet to be convinced GenAI is anything but a slop machine.
Food is worth a lot more than that. If the alternative was starvation, we would pay approximately all the money for food. By that metric food is worth more than $100T. The difference between $100T and $10T is called the consumer surplus, one of the largest benefits of a free market economy.
AI might eventually provide $26T worth of value, but if it captures anywhere close to that amount of revenue that'll indicate a failure of the free market economy. Competition and open source will have failed and the oligarchy has won.
(Either that, or inflation will have made $26T a relatively smaller number).
Always fun to remember when calculating TAM - something like 85 - 90% of the world earns less than $1000 usd per month.
The math don’t math here, there literally aren’t enough people to afford this and businesses will go under the more people are displaced for gainful employment.
Back in the early days of Heroku (when I worked there), we were all fairly deep into the Ruby community. Ruby has never had a great reputation for performance, but... it seemed like almost a running joke that any time you went down a rabbit-hole trying to understand some weird performance issue you'd eventually discover that @tmm1 had already identified the same issue months earlier, patched it in core, and given an hour long talk about it somewhere. Despite his ability and willingness talk publicly about quite deep technical topics Aman always came across as an incredibly quiet and humble in person. Every Ruby developer has benefited from his attention to finding and fixing performance issues. I'm sure the same can probably said for every GitHub user (where he worked for years).
Congrats to the entire Cursor team! I don't know all of their stories, but I do like to smile and celebrate a little when I see people who are often hidden in the shadows quietly making things x% better for all of millions of us every day for many years getting reward for that effort.
Sure - why use cash when you can use bits of paper instead?
I'd expect more of the same to come - good way to lock in some of this crazy SpaceX valuation by converting it into something with a bit more inherent worth.
It's a crazy number especially since Cursor feels kinda dead. Few thoughts from the other side:
- xAI needs the coding related data to compete with Claude Code and Codex
- Recent progress with Composer 2.5 seems promising given the size
- The may get a comeback on the smaller than Enterprise battle field now that the other two got so expensive
- The way that Elon set up this entire process was quite genius. They locked in this option before, and now after the gains through the IPO, it feels almost like a discount, lol
The idea is to make it fully autonomous so it is not really something that is meant to be constantly prompted and it is unlikely to fit most workflows but the idea is to make something that fits the future - not the present.
Happy pi.dev user here, give it a try! I would say that's kind of the "vim experience" but for harnesses: has the minimum, if you want something more you extend it :)
$60B is a huge price, but buying Cursor gives Musk something xAI has struggled to build: a popular coding product with real developer and enterprise adoption. It may be the fastest way to catch up in AI coding. The real question is whether SpaceX ownership improves Cursor or drives its users away.
But they (SpaceX) could have backed out of the deal at any given time as they had the option to (and be required to pay the 10B break up fee). Nobody knew what would happen at the time.
This announcement is a definitive agreement of the acquisition at that $60B valuation.
CC is mostly my default for large tasks / features (ex. Plan > execute plan ) Biggest gripe with Claude Code is that it is painfully slow relative to the other two.
Cursor for small stuff like bug fixes since it has a lot of models to choose from. I love the review/ diff / checkpoint features. It's planning feature is on par with CC. I'd probably use Cursor as primary driver if it had better cost efficiency. Next version or two of Composer may fill that gap in cost/quality/speed.
Codex isn't allowed at my work, but I use it for personal projects. It has the best balance of quality / cost / speed even if it's planner is poor and quite frankly the codex harness needs to catch up with the other two.
CC for quality / cost. Cursor for quality / speed. Codex for balance of the 3.
composer is competitive with around opus 4.5 in feeling?
largely lags behind opus4.7/gpt5.4, but is respectable, and generally outperforms the glm/qwen equivalents anecdotally despite benchmarks.
fails to follow instructions more often, and is less code critical, but performs okay if you can decompose the task to smaller problem spaces. i.e. only do manual review, only do typechecking, only do specific component. etc
I agree, Composer 2.5 is really good. I use it for all kinds of small tasks, and really for any kind of first pass at debugging, answering questions about the codebase, pulling data for reports, etc. It’s fast, pretty accurate, and basically free.
Yes, it’s my daily driver for building the saas I run full-time. I’m not happy about this news.
I like the ability to switch between any models, Composer 2.5 is really solid, I like having my agents coworking in the IDE with me, the plan mode is great, Cloud Agents are great, especially with slack, linear, web, etc integrations. I routinely tag an error report in slack and Cursor fires up a Composer 2.5 cloud agent that has readonly db access, access to error reporting, etc, and it can triage the issue, issue a PR, and tag me in slack.
The only thing I’ve felt like I’m missing out on is the subsidies of the CC/Codex subscriptions, but it seems like that is rapidly eroding anyway.
Pieter is so dumb. All he seems to do is post comparisons between the wonderful U.S. and dying EU that are completely wrong. If Elon is listening to Pieter, pray for Elon.
Congrats to the founders, arguably the first true AI-wrapper billionaires? 0 to multigenerational wealth in 4 years is impressive. It is crazy how much more wealth per user that can be created in the AI-space, compared to other products.
Surprising how tech people on a tech forum are some of the biggest Luddites. Maybe it’s because the creative destruction is coming to your industry this time?
This is unhinged.
So according to SpaceX, the market for AI is 2.5 larger than all the food sold on this planet.
They're also saying that the AI market is worth roughly 10% of all global real estate.
It just shows how much the automation has impacted agriculture and the food industry. Sure, there're rural farms that apply 200 yo technology. But e.g. the grain production and farming are incredibly efficient at scale. So, it's not that costly for as a humanity to feed 8 billion people (at a varying level, of course).
Remove 20% of food supply, and watch prices explode, global unrest, and famine take place.
Reasoning and RAG is amazing already and is a productivity gain but I'm yet to be convinced GenAI is anything but a slop machine.
#startflamingmenow
AI might eventually provide $26T worth of value, but if it captures anywhere close to that amount of revenue that'll indicate a failure of the free market economy. Competition and open source will have failed and the oligarchy has won.
(Either that, or inflation will have made $26T a relatively smaller number).
The math don’t math here, there literally aren’t enough people to afford this and businesses will go under the more people are displaced for gainful employment.
I can’t see it in the article when reading on my phone?
Just like the investors :D
Well if you start adding AI powered to "everything" then it is possible.
Soon you'll have AI face cream and AI donuts.
Congrats to the entire Cursor team! I don't know all of their stories, but I do like to smile and celebrate a little when I see people who are often hidden in the shadows quietly making things x% better for all of millions of us every day for many years getting reward for that effort.
I very much can imagine a future documentary in a few years. With the host asking the audience: "Where were the signs?"
https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/16/spacex-to-acquire-cursor-f...
I'd expect more of the same to come - good way to lock in some of this crazy SpaceX valuation by converting it into something with a bit more inherent worth.
Tesla next?
Cursor is an extension for VS Code, a harness and a bunch of prompts.
They have their own model (Composer 2) which is based Kimi K2.5, but I don't think SpaceX would be interested in it.
If they need a harness for grok, they could fork PI.
What are they after for here? Customer base? Talent?
- xAI needs the coding related data to compete with Claude Code and Codex
- Recent progress with Composer 2.5 seems promising given the size
- The may get a comeback on the smaller than Enterprise battle field now that the other two got so expensive
- The way that Elon set up this entire process was quite genius. They locked in this option before, and now after the gains through the IPO, it feels almost like a discount, lol
https://zot.im
The idea is to make it fully autonomous so it is not really something that is meant to be constantly prompted and it is unlikely to fit most workflows but the idea is to make something that fits the future - not the present.
edit: From first glance, it doesn't look like it. But I basically don't trust any tech company that takes to Tolkien naming conventions.
Sounds like it is not related
Between the codex app, cli, and vscode extension there are options for most ways of working
Announcement of Cursor acquisition to SpaceX
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1181412/000162828026...
Details of Acquisition
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1181412/000162828026...
“Have you figured out what you're going to say to your board when they realize you paid me thirty million more than others were offering?”
In the span of <20 years we’re talking about a sale price 3 orders of magnitude larger than a minor plot point of a hollywood movie.
If this acquisition goes through the only winner here is Cursor, especially since CC and Codex are chipping away at Cursor very hard!
Initial announcement back in April
This announcement is a definitive agreement of the acquisition at that $60B valuation.
CC is mostly my default for large tasks / features (ex. Plan > execute plan ) Biggest gripe with Claude Code is that it is painfully slow relative to the other two.
Cursor for small stuff like bug fixes since it has a lot of models to choose from. I love the review/ diff / checkpoint features. It's planning feature is on par with CC. I'd probably use Cursor as primary driver if it had better cost efficiency. Next version or two of Composer may fill that gap in cost/quality/speed.
Codex isn't allowed at my work, but I use it for personal projects. It has the best balance of quality / cost / speed even if it's planner is poor and quite frankly the codex harness needs to catch up with the other two.
CC for quality / cost. Cursor for quality / speed. Codex for balance of the 3.
largely lags behind opus4.7/gpt5.4, but is respectable, and generally outperforms the glm/qwen equivalents anecdotally despite benchmarks.
fails to follow instructions more often, and is less code critical, but performs okay if you can decompose the task to smaller problem spaces. i.e. only do manual review, only do typechecking, only do specific component. etc
https://artificialanalysis.ai/agents/coding-agents?coding-ag...
I think my relationship with cursor was the shortest of all.
Claude Code is like... I dunno, something better than magic because it actually exists.
I like the ability to switch between any models, Composer 2.5 is really solid, I like having my agents coworking in the IDE with me, the plan mode is great, Cloud Agents are great, especially with slack, linear, web, etc integrations. I routinely tag an error report in slack and Cursor fires up a Composer 2.5 cloud agent that has readonly db access, access to error reporting, etc, and it can triage the issue, issue a PR, and tag me in slack.
The only thing I’ve felt like I’m missing out on is the subsidies of the CC/Codex subscriptions, but it seems like that is rapidly eroding anyway.
Congrats to the Cursor team though... One of the most crazy exit stories ever – 4 years to a $60b buyout. Damn.