Why SpaceX Buying Cursor Changes Everything

**Alex** (0:00)
SpaceX is going to buy Cursor. Cursor's revenue soared to $4 billion on a run rate basis, giving it a 15x multiple. It feels incredibly cheap. Did SpaceX get away with murder here?

**Jason Calacanis** (0:10)
They have essentially unlimited compute.

**Ben Ling** (0:11)
Being able to control the IDE where all the developers are developing is an incredible slot to be.

**Jason Calacanis** (0:16)
We are living in the age of M&A. Venture capital's back because M&A is back on the menu.

**Alex** (0:23)
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Hello and welcome back to Twist. My name is Alex. It is Wednesday, June 17th, 2026 And that means it's time for yet another Venture Capital Roundtable. We grab this brightest lights in the world of venture, bring them on down and ask them a thousand questions. It's always a good time. This week is a little bit special though, because we have Turner Novak with us. You may know him from Banana Capital or the Peel Pod. Turner is an investor in companies including Bun, T-Reel, Chain Guard and his absolute favorite, Hanover Park. Turner, welcome back to the show.

**Turner Novak** (1:31)
Thanks for having me.

**Alex** (1:31)
We also have Ben Ling from Bling Capital here. His fund for is worth $270 million split between seed and growth. He's put money into Gusto, Palantir, Lyft, Airtable, Ripley and Spellbook, which means I'm sure Ben, you have a lot of thoughts about California's 5% billionaire tax. Welcome back to the show.

**Ben Ling** (1:49)
Hey guys, good to see you again.

**Alex** (1:50)
And then of course we have Jason Calacanis. You may have heard of him. He's an investor in a company called Uber, Robinhood, Micro One, Thumbtack, Athena, calm.com. Jason, welcome back to your own show.

**Jason Calacanis** (1:59)
Oh, thank you for having me. It's great to see Ben and Turner. And I've been on the PL pod. I think a couple of our clips went viral. Yeah, Turner?

**Turner Novak** (2:07)
Yeah, they did really well. We had one that I think got a million views. I think that's the only one I've ever had that got a million, which is pretty good.

**Jason Calacanis** (2:12)
I don't know what I said, but I don't know. Maybe you revealed I was the third or fourth investor in Uber. I think it was like a breaking news story.

**Turner Novak** (2:18)
It might have been. It was huge news on the timeline.

**Jason Calacanis** (2:21)
Nobody knows.

**Alex** (2:22)
One of the better kept secrets in Silicon Valley investing lore.
Okay, look, we're not going to go back over the whole Anthropic fable thing because there's nothing new in the last two days. So if you're here for that, we're going to talk about everything else that's going on in tech. Just want to say that in front in case that's what you're hoping for you out there in the audience. We're going to start with the news that SpaceX is going to buy Cursor. Now, if you recall, this was a deal that was put together before SpaceX went public. Everyone thought they were going to pull the trigger and buy Cursor for $60 billion.
They did, immediately after going public. Cursor's revenue soared to $4 billion on a run rate basis, giving it a 15x multiple. Jason, I'm confused by this deal. It feels incredibly cheap. Did SpaceX get away with murder here?

**Jason Calacanis** (3:03)
I think Cursor is a fantastic company. They had a couple of challenges. If you look at the history of the firm, they were built off of Claude. Claude and Anthropic then built an internal coding project, probably because they saw Cursor's token use. Some large percentage of Anthropic's usage was coming from Cursor. They told their partner, Cursor, hey, we're going to just use this internally. Of course, that's not true. They then released Claude code.
They found themselves as Cursor, now having no compute, having no foundation model, and having their platform that enabled them, essentially shivving them, like in the middle of the night, stabbing them in the back.
This happens in the history of Silicon Valley very consistently. Microsoft did it to Lotus 123, right? Microsoft would have Lotus 123 and Mitch Kapoor at their events, and then eventually they launched Excel. It is all fair in love and war. The platforms steal the application layer if they see enough there. So Cursor then had a problem. They called a red alert, a code red, and started building their own models, but they didn't have compute. Somehow Elon and Cursor got together, Elon being a little bit behind with his LLM being in third or fourth place, and they decided, hey, we have all this colossus sitting here, peanut butter, chocolate. They were going to raise, I heard, on the street at 40 billion. So I think Elon gave them a 50% premium. So Cursor was at the time, I think, when they did this deal at 2 billion run rate. Now that they have colossus behind them and they have essentially unlimited compute, and when compute goes to space, they'll have extra unlimited compute.