Cursor's edit data is invaluable to anyone who wants to train a coding model. Probably the best data available outside Anthropic and OpenAI. Coding models are seen by the leaders in AI as both the biggest current revenue opportunity and the best way to accelerate the progress of AI and bring about recursive self-improvement that will create superintelligence. So yeah, it's easy to see how SpaceX could see it as in their interest to purchase Cursor with 2% of their equity.
Mars was never going to happen without revenue. Starlink is providing revenue but probably not enough to build a whole city on Mars within our lifetimes. SpaceX needs more and AI is the only near-term way.
> Cursor's edit data is invaluable to anyone who wants to train a coding model.
Ok. So what prevents a company from offering a Claude Code/ Cursor equivalent, with 100% subsidised Claude (= 100% free), capturing the exact same data that Cursor does? If the data is worth in the tens of billions, the cost of subsidising the usage is negligible.
Cursor also has a large customer base including most of the Fortune 500, talent, and their own coding model and training infrastructure using their data. You wouldn't get those automatically by subsidizing Claude, and the many months or even years it would take to ramp up your own IDE/coding hardness from scratch and acquire customers to match Cursor would put you way behind in a field where the SOTA climbs every month. It's also not clear that Anthropic would let you undercut everyone else using their API; they could cut you off at any time. That would be a very precarious position.