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Cursor is now a part of SpaceX

(cursor.com)

78 points

by billy_jones_755 hours ago |
70 comments
upvoteby GMoromisato43 minutes ago|
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I'm skeptical of this deal. Cursor led the way on agentic coding, but Claude Code and Codex have replaced it. [I use Codex for everything now.]

Still, I'm hearing that Grok 4.6 is almost as good at coding as Codex, but lots cheaper. [My network is also down on Claude--Opus 5 seems like a regression.]

The optimistic scenario would be Grok being a fast-follower with cheaper rates, and staying ahead of open source models. If they can pull that off, and convince enough developers, then maybe they've got a chance.

But $60B seems insane to me. What's Cursor's market share relative to Codex and Claude Code? If it's not meaningful, then it's $60B for an acquihire.

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upvoteby interactivecode7 minutes ago|
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60B in all stock. So basically “free” assuming cursor leadership believes Elons feverdreams.

I wonder how long until Elon makes everyone believe he founded Cursor.

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upvoteby _menelaus27 minutes ago|
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Its 60B for a huge amount of RL coding data to become competitive in the space.
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upvoteby GMoromisato24 minutes ago|
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That would make more sense to me.
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upvoteby 4lasGa20 minutes ago|
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Joshua Kushner, brother of Jared, had the foresight to participate in a $2.5B round last year:

https://techcrunch.com/2025/11/13/coding-assistant-cursor-ra...

Maybe this is horse trading: SpaceX pays an insane price in stock for a vibe coding app, Trump will help Terafab and Starlink in any way possible. There are probably other Cursor investors among the Trump clan.

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upvoteby dgellow21 minutes ago|
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Have you read SpaceX IPO prospectus? Their AI plans are completely nonsensical. I don’t believe there is an actual strategy here other than trying to surf on (and contribute to) the AI bubble
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upvoteby GMoromisato7 minutes ago|
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SpaceX is betting that the world will be compute/energy constrained by 2030 and that orbital datacenters will become cost-effective for inference. If they are right about that, they will be the largest company in the solar system. If they are wrong, they will still be one of the largest telecom companies.

To me this is a classic case of low-downside, very-high-upside.

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upvoteby kridsdale120 minutes ago|
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SpaceX has a monopoly on The Universe. Therefore the TAM for selling tokens to all possible alien species is what justifies the valuation.
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upvoteby 35 minutes ago|
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upvoteby imagent2 hours ago|
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Keep in mind while this is the date they officially became part of SpaceX, they have already been collaborating on building models together. So don't expect a significant bump in performance on new Grok models due to the additional data from Cursor--that bump already happened with Grok 4.5[1] and now 4.6.

[1] https://cursor.com/blog/grok-4-5

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upvoteby q3qahg1 hours ago|
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Elon is still all in on replacing programmers. He listens to always the same stupid booster accounts (XFreeze etc.).

Good that there is now an administration that creates jobs, does not engage in foreign wars and has ended the Ukraine war in 24 hours.

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upvoteby hardwaregeek34 minutes ago|
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I feel like people aren’t updating to the possibility that a significant portion of software development could be under the purview of SpaceX. Whether it’s developer Twitter, Cursor’s planned GitHub competitor, or Cursor/Grok, that’s a lot of the developer mindshare. Granted, there’s a lot of competition in all of these spaces except for maybe Twitter, so it might not happen. But there’s a chance! And that possibility is fairly concerning.
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upvoteby bilalq24 minutes ago|
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I'm really hoping for Linear to expand and build their own Git-hosting+stacked-PR offering.
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upvoteby AnEro1 hours ago|
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Subscription is gone the second I feel like their not running the inference at a loss
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upvoteby cedws1 hours ago|
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Isn't it SpaceXAI now? I lost track.
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upvoteby r14c1 hours ago|
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X, the everything app, formerly known as Twitter, now SpaceXAI XCursor X.
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upvoteby pennomi33 minutes ago|
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Time to rebrand to CurXor?
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upvoteby echelon1 hours ago|
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That's like a popular 2000's era username.

xXxSpaceXAixX

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upvoteby InsideOutSanta1 hours ago|
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xXxSpaceXAIxX: Return of Xander Cage
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upvoteby Apocryphon56 minutes ago|
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Musk pulls a Howard Hughes and goes into Hollywood producing just to bring back that franchise, just just for the letter X.
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upvoteby goolz57 minutes ago|
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Very on-brand for a Halo 2 lobby circa 2005.
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upvoteby ubercore1 hours ago|
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Don't give him any ideas.
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upvoteby steveBK1231 hours ago|
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AI by xAI, a SpaceX subsidiary fka as Twitter, special collab with Cursor
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upvoteby Apocryphon1 hours ago|
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SpaceX, the everything company
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upvoteby stronglikedan1 hours ago|
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SpaceXtra
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upvoteby SketchySeaBeast1 hours ago|
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How long until he names a company "E" just so he can giggle about the name?
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upvoteby stldev21 minutes ago|
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Is this solely to prop up SPCX?

Besides its following, does Cursor have any sort of moat? It's VS Code with a harness right?

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upvoteby hparadiz21 minutes ago|
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Cursor is a subscription. You can use the tui harness called agent without the ide.
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upvoteby james_pm29 minutes ago|
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Will they rebrand as codeX or Xcode? Trouble either way.
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upvoteby deburo45 minutes ago|
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I'm hoping Cursor becomes the third biggest (American) AI model company, replacing Google. Elon works best with top talent, and I think Cursor most kept its team together; were there any big departure from there recently?
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upvoteby dcrazy42 minutes ago|
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What proprietary models does Cursor offer? Do they have any of the infrastructure to develop, train, and refine a frontier model?
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upvoteby minraws39 minutes ago|
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Now they do have SpaceX's GPUs and Grok models...

I mean I get that we can all dislike this move but it might the best way to get into the race to become one of the top labs. Ofc Grok 4.6 is not there yet, I have seen people claim it's quite good and it is but it's a marginal improvement over the mid tier models from the top 2.

And it's certainly worse than the recent GLM 5.3 (especially once we get the weights for it).

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upvoteby hparadiz29 minutes ago|
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All the models are good enough for almost all normal tech job work. If all you are doing is building a react app there's functionally no difference. You'd only want a frontier model to work on something extra complex but even that will be baked into the basic models within six months.
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upvoteby 14u2c17 minutes ago|
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Maybe if you’re building something from scratch every time, but otherwise the difference becomes noticeable fast. Just today 5.6 Terra tried to silently import half my backend into the frontend bundle. After switching to Sol it quickly found and fixed that.
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upvoteby hparadiz4 minutes ago|
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Try getting karpathy guidelines skill. Tends to help with that. I use it universally with all models and all harness.

Sol xhigh is my default rn.

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upvoteby stackghost43 minutes ago|
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Conversely, I'm hoping all Elon's companies go bankrupt. Elon works best with top talent because he is nothing but a grifter good at taking credit for the hard work of others (see: Tesla), and failing upwards.

Concentrating so much wealth in one unstable Nazi[0] like Elon is objectively bad for society.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2bbb-6Clhs

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upvoteby sajithdilshan16 minutes ago|
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Cry me a river
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upvoteby someluccc20 minutes ago|
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Touch grass bud
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upvoteby 11 minutes ago|
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deleted
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upvoteby andsoitis58 minutes ago|
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Congrats to everyone at Cursor!
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upvoteby 25 minutes ago|
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deleted
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upvoteby vegancap41 minutes ago|
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Cooool, won't be using that again
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upvoteby ChrisArchitect1 hours ago|
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Previously in June:

SpaceX to buy Cursor for $60B

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48553224

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upvoteby ravenstine1 hours ago|
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I get it and yet I don't. On one hand, my experience with Cursor (albeit limited) tells me that it's a perfect fit with Elon's other ventures. Then again, I don't see how there's anything so special about it that SpaceXAI would want to acquire it for either the software itself or the talent behind it. It seems more likely that acquiring Cursor is a way to get more users for Grok, seeing as how it still has a very small share of the market.
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upvoteby freedomben1 hours ago|
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I've never seen the appeal of cursor either, but then I'm a decades-long vim (now neovim) guy and don't use IDEs in general. But for me claude/codex TUIs are a great way to fit agents into my workflow.

My suspicion is that it's a way to break into more developer workflows for Grok, even if the market share is relatively small. I've never used grok and don't plan to at this point, but I have highly respected friends who say it is pretty damn good, and some of them even started using Cursor because of this pairing, so anecdatally at least it does seem to be working.

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upvoteby melodyogonna33 minutes ago|
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Grok has started competing with frontier models on coding thanks to Cursor's data, with SpaceX's massive compute they can undercut competition on price, which makes the offering real appealing.

I've now switched to Grok 4.6, I was previously using Opus 4.8 but Grok is good enough now, and way cheaper which is the important part.

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upvoteby hparadiz24 minutes ago|
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The $20 / month isn't as good as Codex or Claude. Codex reset twice this week while I'm sitting waiting for the entire month to role around with Cursor. I have all three so can have a pulse on everything.
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upvoteby stronglikedan1 hours ago|
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So they can play the game that the other big AI companies are playing, where they invest in one another to make each one look bigger on the books, even though it's all the same money, likely.
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upvoteby modeless1 hours ago|
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The data is special. Data of programmers using coding agents in the real world is invaluable for AI training. And their customer base is useful to deploy new models into.
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upvoteby 1 hours ago|
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upvoteby porphyra51 minutes ago|
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Hopefully they can unify the harnesses now. Weird how there's both grok build and cursor-agent at the same time.
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upvoteby sidcool2 hours ago|
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They were not joking
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upvoteby mock-possum1 hours ago|
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Shame.
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upvoteby stronglikedan1 hours ago|
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Why? The product isn't likely to change
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upvoteby maximilianburke42 minutes ago|
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But the people collecting the money have.
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upvoteby midnitewarrior1 hours ago|
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...and I won't be revisiting Cursor again.
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upvoteby stronglikedan1 hours ago|
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Why not? The product isn't likely to change
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upvoteby sudonem53 minutes ago|
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Some people perhaps just don’t want to give money to literal Bond villains. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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upvoteby sajithdilshan1 hours ago|
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…and the world kept spinning
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upvoteby thecrumb5 hours ago|
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Eeeewww. Grok. Off to look at Zed.
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upvoteby jjtheblunt1 hours ago|
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Zed's very handy, I find, and i'm not saying so because i'm driven to it by aversion to alternatives: it's just very useful.
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upvoteby nxc181 hours ago|
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Why not just use VS Code which cursor (and antigravity and the one Amazon is pushing) is a fork of? It will be much closer in functionality and has been loaded up with agent features nonstop for the last 18 months.
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upvoteby hparadiz22 minutes ago|
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When I say "I use cursor" I mean the subscription. In reality I use the cli tui literally called "agent" and the cursor ide isn't installed at all.
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upvoteby spottedmarley5 hours ago|
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...to the moon?
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upvoteby oniony2 hours ago|
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Think the aim is Mars.
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upvoteby tshaddox1 hours ago|
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Earlier this year they literally publicized changing their immediate goal from Mars to the Moon.
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upvoteby Ekaros2 hours ago|
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Perfect tool for rocket control systems and in general control and life support systems of Mars colonies.
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upvoteby aanet1 hours ago|
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Vibe codin' away the colonization of Mars
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upvoteby actualwitch21 minutes ago|
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They may aim at Mars, but what they actually hit is the Moon. [0]

[0] https://edition.cnn.com/2026/08/04/science/spacex-rocket-moo...

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upvoteby an0malous1 hours ago|
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It’s been enshittified to the Moon now
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upvoteby kykat1 hours ago|
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I swear I actually laughed out loud with this, is this a joke?
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upvoteby stronglikedan1 hours ago|
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Companies buy other companies all the time, so I'm not sure why anyone is surprised.
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upvoteby marcosdumay38 minutes ago|
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If somebody missed that one news, one can easily get to the conclusion that SpaceX tried to manipulate index funds to buy their shares, and sold into an incredibly high valuation to keep the money. Not to reinvest it into the business.
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upvoteby rvz1 hours ago|
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No.
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