Ignoring future business ideas, Cursor reported reached $2 billion+ annualized revenue run rate in 2026, doubling from 2025. Recent financing rounds reached high-end valuation between $30 billion and $50 billion.
If you give me a billion, I can do an annualized revenue run rate of ~$12 billion just by selling a dollar for 99 cents.
because they already have VSCode or IntelliJ for edits
Codex is still going strong but it’s hard to imagine they won’t do similar eventually.
So now im honestly hearing a lot more folk stick it out with cursor while waiting for the dust to settle.
A lot of enterprises use Github Copilot which has per-request pricing model which effectively means unlimited tokens which eliminates this issue.
1. It's cheap to run. 2. It has clear advantages over existing technology (SMS). 3. My mom uses it. She's never use cursor. Whatsapp had a huge username in Europe. Basically everyone I know uses it.
And it was "only" ~$20 billion. Inflation can't be this high.
Corporate contracts. A lot of companies have signed onto Cursor. xAI has a pretty toxic brand with Elon and the nonconsensual sexual images scandal. xAI has a ton of compute and few corporate customers. Now they have a ton.
> One would think Elon would learn his lesson after overpaying for Twitter
I think he took over Twitter to control what people using it see and promote right wing viewpoints. To that end it’s been a wild success.
For now, perhaps. I work with numerous companies who refuse to do business with his brands.
The same way a rocket company that counts short-lived as satellites as an asset is worth 1.7 trillion. Congratulations to the Cursor folks, they are the only winners in this.
This is also part of the AI bubble delusion: agent assisted coding works, at least for some people, for some purposes. This deal perpetuates the illusion that AI will find high value use cases. The reality may be that software development has unique characteristics you won't find in law or medicine or other domains.
This deal is different: SpaceX is heading for an IPO which is now complicated by xAI becoming a subsidiary. Cursor is actually popular and I’m sure this is all stock-based so as long as investors believe that those users stick to xAI it’ll juice the entire SpaceX IPO. I am skeptical but these days the market seems to be driven by a country-club full of guys in Connecticut who are constantly hyperventilating on X so maybe from that angle it’s just another way he’s getting what he wanted from Twitter.
Cursor is installed on a LOT of computers.
Once Grok becomes the default engine, it will raise adoption.
More importantly, if you have Cursor installed all your data may be sent to their labs whether you use it or not (unfortunately - this is par for the course for all the LLMs, a la Microsoft).
That's worth a lot - especially considering that Cursor might also grow with the shift to more powerful local models and the fact that it has a respectable income stream.
maybe he's getting value from this? (also the deal was essentially secured with Tesla stock, so who knows what did he actually pay)