The $60 Billion Question Nobody Can Stop Asking
Everywhere Amjad Masad goes these days, someone asks the same thing: with Cursor reportedly in talks to be acquired by SpaceX for a staggering $60 billion valuation, is Replit next on the M&A block?
At TechCrunch's sold-out StrictlyVC event in San Francisco last Thursday, Masad answered it plainly — he'd rather not sell.
"We're building something for the long term," Masad told the crowd, pushing back against the narrative that every successful AI developer tool is ultimately destined to be absorbed by a larger tech empire. "The goal isn't to exit — it's to win."
Replit vs. Cursor: A Tale of Two Approaches
The comparison between Replit and Cursor has become a fixture of the AI coding conversation. Cursor, which builds on top of VS Code and is primarily aimed at professional software engineers, has ridden a wave of enterprise interest to eye-popping valuations. Replit, by contrast, has positioned itself as the platform that makes coding accessible to everyone — from students and hobbyists to startup founders who've never written a line of code.
Masad sees that distinction as a competitive moat, not a weakness. Where Cursor serves developers who already know how to code, Replit is trying to grow the total number of people who can build software in the first place. That's a dramatically larger market, and one that Masad believes big acquirers would actually shrink rather than grow.
"If you're inside a big company, you're optimizing for the existing business," he said. "We don't want that constraint."
Fighting Apple — and Winning Some Ground
Beyond the acquisition chatter, Masad also addressed Replit's ongoing friction with Apple over App Store policies — a battle that has particular resonance in a moment when regulators worldwide are scrutinizing Apple's platform control.
Replit, which offers a mobile coding environment, has butted up against App Store review policies that Masad characterizes as arbitrary and anti-competitive. He framed it as part of a broader fight that benefits developers and users alike, and suggested the regulatory winds — particularly in the EU — are finally starting to shift in the industry's favour.
Why the Cursor Deal Changes the Conversation
Whether or not the SpaceX-Cursor deal closes, it has fundamentally altered how investors and founders think about the AI tooling space. A $60 billion price tag for a coding assistant would rank among the most significant tech acquisitions in history, signalling that whoever controls the AI-powered development layer controls a critical piece of the future software stack.
For Masad, the lesson isn't that Replit should rush to find its own buyer. It's that the category is real, the demand is enormous, and staying independent long enough to define it on your own terms is worth the risk.
"We've been doing this for years while everyone else was sceptical," he said. "Now suddenly everyone believes. We'd like to keep building while we have the advantage."
Whether Replit can hold that line — in a market suddenly flush with acquisition capital and mega-deals — remains the industry's most interesting open question.
Source: TechCrunch StrictlyVC event coverage, May 1, 2026
