[buzzcut_]

This is a stupid comparison, but Mojang/Minecraft was acquired for 2.5 billion in 2014.

Arguably the most popular video game of all time, which has brought joy to hundreds of millions of people for years and years, was valued at 1/20th of an AI startup that will soon disappear into irrelevance.

While Minecraft is just a game, I'd argue it has more societal value than Cursor. The way things are valued is nonsensical to me.

[jayd16]

Will Jack Black star in the Cursor movie? Only time will tell.

[Eji1700]

> While Minecraft is just a game, I'd argue it has more societal value than Cursor. The way things are valued is nonsensical to me.

Well it's because societal value is not profitability. Only question that matters is if Cursor can wind up worth more than 60b. Not even in raw revenue so much as ability to keep shilling the same story.

[mirekrusin]

For comparison couple of months ago I acquired zed, pi, opencode etc. for $0.

[kjsingh]

I think they eye the models more than the agent or IDE

[TechSquidTV]

The models are the least valuable part of all of this.

[adonese]

I'm not sure whether Elon's interests are in the model. Maybe the existing distribution channel which is cursor's users? The whole ai business models seems tough to comprehend. Huge amounts being passed from one player to the other.

[grim_io]

If Elon is smart about it, he will use the still relevant enterprise-friendly brand "Cursor" to get a foot in the door.

If he is dumb about it, like he was with Twitter, he will just rename it "X" and delete any value the acquisition had.

[themafia]

> While Minecraft is just a game

It's more than just a game. It's a bespoke social network. It's a merchandise generator. It produced an entire hollywood movie. It's become a cultural reference.

[y2244]

Do kids grow out of it by a certain age though?

[xp84]

It's been around for about 17 years, and if anything is more popular now than ever. So even if lots of kids grow out of it, there are new ones being born every minute.

[sneak]

Minecraft erases productivity. AI coding vastly increases it.

The economic value of a tool is in the economic value it can produce. The economic value that Minecraft can produce is limited to how much money 8 year olds can wheedle out of mom and dad. The economic value that Cursor can produce is probably in the trillions, if they play their cards right.

You're also forgetting that money is worth a lot less today than it was in 2014. $60B today is $42B in 2014 money. Still 17x that of Mojang, but not the 24x that it appears at first glance.

[rimliu]

AI coding vastly increases the amount of code produced. It does almost nothing for productivity.

[gexla]

I imagine at least part of the reason this doesn't make sense to you is because you're not a decision maker working at that scale. It made sense to someone at a high level. The calculations that person is doing is likely different than yours.

This is also why it's difficult to make money selling to consumers. They run different calculations than enterprise buyers.

[gmm1990]

There’s quite a few historical cases of mergers acquisitions being poorly valued aol time warner for example. So maybe v the calculus is different from the execs perspective but it’s not necessarily any better.

[andriy_koval]

Elon has all his datacenters idling, and his xai failed. What else would you buy to still stay in the race?

[xp84]

Idling? Where do you get your news? He's leased a ton of capacity to everybody else. Makes little difference to Musk whether Grok is using them or someone else is paying him to use them. We all know from AWS's profitability that renting servers to other people is great business. You get a check every month (often from other people's VC money) as opposed to having to figure out how to monetize.

[grim_io]

Reselling raw GPU power means your competitors are able to extract more value out of it than you can.

If that is not a failure for an AI lab, then I don't know what is.

[xp84]

I see it more like McDonald's can't produce burgers fast enough because of a meat shortage, but Burger King has their own supply chain that allows them to supply extra meat. McDonalds now needs to buy patties, possibly at a higher price than they usually pay, from BK just to be able to meet their burger demand.

Is BK in a bad position? They get to run their beef plant at 100% utilization regardless of how good they're doing at marketing hamburgers, and they can use that money to keep improving their hamburger quality or marketing.

[grim_io]

That's a weird analogy and also not fitting at all.

Let's stay in the similar space and talk what it's really about:

Imagine google builds 2 data centers and sells the raw compute(not services!) to AWS so that AWS can sell their service on top.

What an embarrassement that would be.

[sixo]

things which help other people make money are overvalued relative tothings which are valued intrisically

[smath]

Right, value != price. Now, is this a bug or a feature? Discuss (serious question)

[buzzcut_]

My wonder is if anybody would buy anything if value == price.

The value of water to a person dying from dehydration is infinite compared to someone who's adequately hydrated. By that logic, this bottle of water is worth every possession, good thing, in the present and in perpetuity because that is the opportunity cost. Nobody would choose $50 million in cash to reject the water because the money only has value if you take the water.

But hypothetically, if the value and the price could be finitely defined, a "fair trade": let's say 10 apples and 1 watermelon are each worth 10 utility units. Price still can't equal the value. We don't eat utility units. The watermelon inherently provides a different value than the apples. An apple isn't a substitute for a watermelon.

I think this is my long winded way to conclude that trying to compare everything is apples and oranges, but somehow we still try to give it a dollar amount.

[pastel8739]

> The value of water to a person dying from dehydration is infinite compared to someone who's adequately hydrated.

But most people are adequately hydrated in steady state, and to them the value of water is not that high. Since today it is necessary to sell an item for the same price to everyone, selling water for infinite money would lose nearly all customers.

(Not to mention that it’s possible to acquire water from natural sources, for free)

[8note]

minecraft is the actual metaverse.

how much did facebook spend trying to recreate it?

[mey]

Somewhere between ~15-75+ billion USD. Higher end if you want to include the hardware R&D/etc, which is arguably core to their metaverse concept. I love the idea that they don't even have a product _called_ metaverse. Most of the VR content developer acquisitions costs by Occulus Labs are undisclosed.

https://www.fool.com/investing/2024/04/01/meta-platforms-has... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_Labs#Acquisition_by_Fa... ~1.6 billion

[emadabdulrahim]

World of Warcraft is the closest thing to the metaverse. But I'm biased since it's my favorite game (TBC, WoTLK, etc)

[itemize123]

u cant compare productivity to games on the metric of bring joy - ofc productivity tool isn't bring joy like a game does.

[buzzcut_]

Happy and fulfilled people are generally more productive, indirectly.

[buryat]

Minecraft is just limited for additional value creation, i.e. it's not a tool for creating more value