You could probably research the company but from my direct experience
- Cursor is one of the stronger contenders for coding - bringing a variety of models to tools where coders are.
- Cursor switched to pay per use, significantly increasing costs and didn’t lose customers
- cursor charged more for higher end models and didn’t lose customers
- grok is not currently there, or at least not what I can see, so is a huge gap from an xAI perspective
- it seems good enough business model to business people to be worth a huge purchase
Once grok is added to Cursor, I will just have it, along with a variety of other models, and can simply choose it based on cost and effectiveness. It may even be chosen for me since I usually leave it in automatic, and my company is a paying customer where each engineer spends a budget
Also it’s more like a subscription. Software companies love a subscription model with regular income, rather than selling something you pay for once