Buying Cursor could be SpaceX’s Instagram moment

{"text":[[{"start":4.15,"text":"What could be more audacious than a company making a $60bn acquisition mere days after a hyped-to-the-eyeballs $1.8tn initial public offering? This sort of brazenness looks like classic Elon Musk. Except it isn’t. Silicon Valley has seen this playbook before, or something like it — and Musk should hope it goes as well for him as it did for his predecessors."}],[{"start":28.049999999999997,"text":"SpaceX said on Tuesday that it would buy coding aid Cursor, paying with $60bn worth of its hot-off-the-press shares. The combination was floated by Musk a few weeks earlier, when the company was still getting ready for last Friday’s public offering. Cursor’s backers will get twice the valuation it achieved in a fundraising in November, according to PitchBook data."}],[{"start":49.5,"text":"What other chief executive could so boldly walk and chew gum at the same time? Mark Zuckerberg, for one. The Facebook boss circumvented his board to strike a $1bn deal with photo-sharing app Instagram in 2012, weeks before his company’s market debut. The price was roughly 1 per cent of Facebook’s valuation. While the dollar cost of Cursor is far bigger, Musk is spending just over 2 per cent of SpaceX’s current market capitalisation."}],[{"start":78.15,"text":"It is not the only parallel between the two deals. Instagram’s founders, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, sold to Big Tech because they realised they needed better access to expensive resources such as engineers and servers. Cursor’s chief Michael Truell faces supply constraints too: in particular, access to data centres, or “compute”. SpaceX, with its Colossus supercomputer, has plenty of that."}],[{"start":null,"text":"

"}],[{"start":105.65,"text":"Facebook — now Meta Platforms — made out handsomely from its edgily timed acquisition. Instagram brought the younger customers Zuckerberg sorely needed, and ultimately secured prime real estate on more than a billion smartphones. The deal also turned a competitive threat into an asset."}],[{"start":124.30000000000001,"text":"Musk has a different goal in mind. Cursor, as a kind of sophisticated auto-correct used by more than 50,000 businesses, would take SpaceX further into the market for selling software and AI to companies. There is some urgency to that. Musk says there is a $22.7tn market for “enterprise applications”, but his revenue from such things today is negligible."}],[{"start":148.45000000000002,"text":"Cursor will test whether Musk can learn from Zuckerberg in another way: by refraining from too much meddling. Instagram was run independently from Facebook, at least for a while. At Cursor, users are free to route tasks through AI models from Anthropic, OpenAI, DeepSeek and others. If Musk insists on prioritising his own, customers may not stick around."}],[{"start":171.10000000000002,"text":"Zuckerberg isn’t the only tech whizz to turn a little deal into a big one. Google purchased YouTube in 2006 for $1.7bn, at the time just 1.3 per cent of its market capitalisation; the video platform now contributes about 15 per cent of parent Alphabet’s $400bn-plus annual revenue. Musk loves to conjure with big numbers but, in Silicon Valley, relatively small ones are worth watching too."}],[{"start":206.4,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1781697761_3613.mp3"}