AI Summary
5 min readSpaceX announced plans to acquire Cursor, the AI coding IDE company, in a deal valued at roughly $60 billion. Cursor’s revenue had surged to a $4 billion run rate, giving the acquisition a 15x multiple. On the latest episode of This Week in Startups, host Jason Calacanis called the price “incredibly cheap” and asked whether SpaceX “got away with murder.” The panel argued that Cursor was in a vulnerable position: it had been built on Anthropic’s Claude, and when Anthropic launched its own internal coding product (Claude Code), Cursor lost access to its foundation model and compute. SpaceX, which had built massive compute infrastructure called Colossus and was running a lagging LLM in Grok, offered a natural rescue. “Peanut butter chocolate,” Calacanis said of the combination. Cursor gets unlimited compute; SpaceX gets control of the IDE where developers work. Ben Ling of Bling Capital agreed, calling it an “incredible acquisition” that changes SpaceX’s narrative into an AI-native platform. The deal closed immediately after SpaceX went public, and the panel expects Elon Musk to go on a buying spree, with Uber named as a likely target.
The Cursor Precedent: Platforms Eat Their Tenants
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What you'll learn
- 1 (02:39) **SpaceX Acquires Cursor** - Deal announced post-SpaceX public listing at $60B with Cursor at $4B run rate
- 2 (03:03) **Cursor's Anthropic Betrayal** - Foundation model partner undercut Cursor by launching competing internal tool
- 3 (05:44) **Elon's Future Acquisition Plans** - Potential spree including Uber for global Tesla robotaxi footprint
- 4 (06:24) **Deal Valuation Breakdown** - 50% premium over Cursor's $40B rumored raise seen as favorable
- 5 (07:19) **YouTube Acquisition Parallel** - Negative margin businesses can become massive with platform backing
- 6 (09:00) **Developer Tool Usage Split** - Cursor retains strong enterprise share despite Claude Code and Codex growth
- 7 (12:03) **Platform Token Risks** - Warning against accepting free credits from OpenAI or Anthropic
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Show Notes
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Today’s show:
Anthropic stabbed Cursor in the back. Then SpaceX swooped in with $60 billion. Today, TWiST connects the dots on the biggest deal in AI since the Microsoft-OpenAI partnership, and why it's a warning sign for every startup building on top of a frontier model. Jason is joined by Bling Capital’s Ben Ling, Banana Capital’s Turner Novak, and co-host Alex to go deep on the future of coding models, the current golden age of venture liquidity, OpenAI’s financials, and the ‘Four Ds’ of venture investing. The show closes with a tribute to Josh Baer, the founder of Capital Factory.
Guest Links:
Ben Ling https://x.com/bling0?lang=en
Bling Capital https://www.blingcap.com/
Turner Novak https://x.com/TurnerNovak
Banana Capital https://www.bananacapital.vc/
Show Links:
Hanover Park https://www.hanoverpark.com/
SpaceX buys Cursor https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/16/spacex-spcx-cursor-acquisition-ipo.html
Cursor Composer 2.5 https://cursor.com/blog/composer-2-5
OpenAI financials source https://www.wheresyoured.at/exclusive-openai-financials/
AMD’s new deskside data center https://www.amd.com/en/products/processors/desktops/ryzen/ryzen-ai-halo.html
Perplexity Model Council https://www.perplexity.ai/hub/blog/introducing-model-council
Timestamps:
0:00 Guest introductions
1:15 Guest introductions
2:43 SpaceX acquires Cursor for $60B
6:13 The golden era of M&A
9:13 Northwest Registered Agent: Get more when you start your business with Northwest. In 10 clicks and 10 minutes, you can form your company and walk away with a real business identity — Learn more at https://northwestregisteredagent.com/twist
12:04 Cursor's negative gross margins & the compute problem
13:22 Plaud: If your work depends on conversations — interviews, meetings, calls — you need
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