Sixty billion dollars

Marcus has been in the Slack channel for forty minutes. Not typing. Just present. The little green dot, the dot that tells you someone is in the building, watching, formulating. I have learned to treat it like a weather warning.

At some point this morning he read that SpaceX is buying Cursor for sixty billion dollars. This has done something to him.

Sixty billion. The number is not the issue — he has shown equanimity in the face of large numbers before. The issue is that in week five of this column, sorry, in week five of the year, the CTO heard the word "Cursor" mentioned in a meeting and concluded that we were "already doing the agents thing." Marcus was in that meeting. He nodded. Something was written on a whiteboard and then not erased for three weeks.

The green dot blinked out. I assumed this meant he'd left or made coffee.

It did not mean that.

He had gone to find Lewis.

Lewis is our new starter — 11 days in, if you're counting, which I am — and he has this gift of asking foundational questions without knowing they're foundational. "What are we actually building?" sorts of questions. Questions that reveal, gently, that the answer varies depending on who you ask and when.

I found out Marcus had got to him because Lewis appeared at my desk about an hour later with a look I recognised. The look of someone who has received a vision. "Marcus says we could position Cursor as a competitor," Lewis said. "Since it's going to be inside SpaceX now, which means, you know—" and here he made a gesture I can only describe as approximately circular.

I looked at him for a moment.

"The AI Actions metric," I said. "What did your number say this week?"

"Fourteen," he said. "I don't know what the unit is."

I told him I didn't either. That Priya's number had been the same three weeks running. That Marcus's number had somehow reached 112 last Tuesday.

Lewis looked at the gesture he'd just made with his own hand, like he was meeting it for the first time.

Priya, without turning from her screen: "It closed three backlog tickets. The image thing. We built it in week 17. It's done."

Lewis said: "Oh."

Priya said: "Mm."

The SpaceX deal closes in Q3, apparently, or they pay a termination fee somewhere between four and 10 billion dollars. I find this figure genuinely soothing. Somewhere in the world there is a number that represents walking away. It is large. It is written down. Everyone knows what it is before the meeting starts.

We don't have that number. We have the circular gesture and Lewis, who is 11 days in and already doing it with his hands.