SpaceX to buy Cursor for $60B

https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/spacex-buy-anysphere-60-billion-2026-06-16/

by itsmarcelg • 1 month ago

1151 1671 1 month ago

reuters.com

mDyJzDPmBdG• 1 month ago

Wasn't that already announced few weeks ago, only with deal going through depending on Cursor future stock price?

dockerd• 1 month ago

That was future option, now they are purchasing it.

xiphias2• 1 month ago

They needed to raise money for the purchase, they just did it (raising from public market)

itsmarcelg• 1 month ago

These are the SEC filings that confirms the merger:

Announcement of Cursor acquisition to SpaceX

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1181412/000162828026...

Details of Acquisition

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1181412/000162828026...

roxolotl• 1 month ago

Wow they are using 80% of what they raised 4 days ago to buy an IDE. Absolutely incredible.

irjustin• 1 month ago

Unsure if you're serious, but if you are, they wouldn't buy with cash, at least not the vast majority of it.

blitzar2• 1 month ago

Its an all stonks deal.

kingstnap• 1 month ago

Cursor is massively overvalued. But so is SpaceX so it all evens out in the end.

each share of Cursor’s common stock and each share of Cursor’s preferred stock outstanding immediately prior to the Effective Time of the Merger will be automatically converted into the right to receive shares of the Company’s Class A common stock based on an implied equity value of Cursor of $60.0 billion and the price of the Company’s Class A common stock equal to the volume-weighted average closing price thereof over the seven consecutive trading days

Current market cap is 2.66T which is pretty bonkers. Thats about intel, amd, and micron put together.

aenis4• 1 month ago

Nope. They pay with the monopoly money, dilluting the shareholders.

bsenftner• 1 month ago

Money laundry

HarHarVeryFunny3• 1 month ago

It's $60B in SPCX stock, not in cash.

https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/16/spacex-to-acquire-cursor-f...

rchaud• 1 month ago

Guess Musk figured out that paying all cash to acquire something was a bad idea.

ActionHank2• 1 month ago

Not even an IDE. A workflow built on top of an opensource editor.

kjksf2• 1 month ago

Per latest reporting, Cursor's current annual revenue rate is $4 billion.

So SpaceX is buying 15 years of future cashflows, assuming no change in revenue. Which is bad assumption given past growth was gigantic.

They are also buying 300-400 employees with proven record of training good coding models.

Their expertise will be used to improve Grok Build coding agent.

Also, they're using stock, not cash, so effectively they doubled the amount of money raised.

ubertaco• 1 month ago

Their expertise will be used to improve Grok Build coding agent.

Is Grok not a toxic enough brand (by association with Musk) that people who would use Cursor wouldn't avoid Grok?

Like, the assumption seems to be that all the goodwill that Cursor users have towards Cursor will now apply automatically to Grok, which seems like a pretty significant leap.

chris_money2022• 1 month ago

"training good coding models" many would say that is a highly debatable statement, and some would say that is just flat out not true. Cursor has not trained a frontier model from scratch, what they did was take an already made (non-frontier) model and further trained it on their user data about coding outcomes from its coding agent. So, a form of distillation and RL.

funnym0nk3y2• 1 month ago

But revenue is not really the informative quantity. If you sell gold you will have a huge revenue, but very little profit. I can be a trillion dollar company too if we exchange dollar bills for face value.

esskay5• 1 month ago

They are also buying 300-400 employees with proven record of training good coding models.

Are they? Their Composer 2.5 models is based on Kimi K2.5, it's not a bespoke model.

dmurvihill• 1 month ago

ARR is best month times twelve, not revenue per year.

flakeoil• 1 month ago

Revenue is not the same as cashflow.

TrackerFF7• 1 month ago

Tbh I don't know if we can use traditional DCF calculations for things like this.

The main challenge is: If models get better, why would humans need a tool like cursor, when they have AI agents doing the coding for them?

afavour2• 1 month ago

So SpaceX is buying 15 years of future cashflows, assuming no change in revenue. Which is bad assumption given past growth was gigantic.

I'd argue it's a bad assumption in the opposite direction. There's no moat. People can and will switch tooling and Cursor could easily be left with a steep decline in users.

vanuatu2• 1 month ago

its for the distribution, talent, proprietary data. spacex has the compute, and elon wants to win in AI.

PUSH_AX• 1 month ago

In related news, I'm open to suggestions for coding agent harnesses.

mackenney• 1 month ago

Happy pi.dev user here, give it a try! I would say that's kind of the "vim experience" but for harnesses: has the minimum, if you want something more you extend it :)

mkj• 1 month ago

I'm wondering who's going to buy pi!

(Edit sorry forgetting names, I mean who's going to buy Earendil). Good luck to Armin, he's done some good stuff.

iamsaitam• 1 month ago

Saying it gives "the minimum" is generous, it's pretty much useless out of the box. And did I say slow as well? I think pi is great if you're into spending your time managing your harness rather than using it. In that regard, it's more like neovim.

_pdp_• 1 month ago

Since you've asked, I am working on one but it is super early days so I am just posting it here for feedback.

https://zot.im

The idea is to make it fully autonomous so it is not really something that is meant to be constantly prompted and it is unlikely to fit most workflows but the idea is to make something that fits the future - not the present.

syngrog662• 1 month ago

vim

oneshtein• 1 month ago

https://github.com/can1357/oh-my-pi

Klathmon• 1 month ago

I've been pretty damn happy with codex and vscode.

Between the codex app, cli, and vscode extension there are options for most ways of working

jofzar• 1 month ago

Been very impressed by the codex app tbh

heisgone• 1 month ago

Codex UI is great. It just make sense for an AI tool.

dizhn• 1 month ago

Paseo with opencode backing.

agentcooper• 1 month ago

At Poolside we have pool (https://github.com/poolsideai/pool), it runs in a terminal and you can use it with any Agent Client Protocol compatible agent (https://agentclientprotocol.com/get-started/agents).

higginsniggins• 1 month ago

Theres several open source options you can use.

The highest github stars one is called `zed` another one i've heard about is `Cline`

theirs also a few that yc backed ones:

`Void`

`Continue`

`PearAI`

For what its worth the non yc ones have way more github stars but im sure the yc ones are good too. I think `Continue` is the biggest yc one.

rcleveng3• 1 month ago

and PearAI was just a fork of Continue with not much changed other than the license and removing the words continue.

Also OpenCode and Kilo seem popular as well.

samtp2• 1 month ago

I've used Cline for a year now and very happy with it. Fits my workflow really well

cornhole• 1 month ago

continue is eol after being acquired by cursor/spacex https://www.continue.dev/

deadbabe2• 1 month ago

pi is for real engineers

skybrian• 1 month ago

If you're open to using remote Linux VM's and a web-based interface, I quite like exe.dev and Shelley.

yoyohello136• 1 month ago

Nvim + Claude code. Or zed. Honestly basically every ide is adding agent harness features as their primary focus right now. Just throw a rock and you’ll hit something that will work for you. You can even just use emacs and have ai build harness features for you.

jacobgold2• 1 month ago

I'm very curious what coding agent interfaces other HN users are using.

I run a bunch of Claude / Codex TUIs + vim in terminal tabs on i3 workspaces on Linux whch I know isn't the most common.

DesiLurker• 1 month ago

I am seriously thinking about adapting Kate with a fully opensource ai harness. it should be good enough for mac and linux for most devs. it already supports lsp server & has a established plugin infra so it should not really be any blockers. anybody wanna collab?

this class of spyware pretending to be ide makes me sick.

tomwphillips• 1 month ago

Definitely not a bubble.

wmeredith2• 1 month ago

"SpaceX told investors during the IPO process that it sees an addressable market for AI products worth $26 trillion, roughly equivalent to U.S. GDP."

This is unhinged.

re-thc• 1 month ago

sees an addressable market for AI products

Well if you start adding AI powered to "everything" then it is possible.

Soon you'll have AI face cream and AI donuts.

emsign• 1 month ago

Marks believe anything the con tells them as long as it's promising big money ROI.

Aeolun2• 1 month ago

This is unhinged.

Just like the investors :D

TrackerFF7• 1 month ago

I know it has become a meme by now, but IIRC the market for all foods (agriculture, processed food, etc.) on earth is around $10 trillion.

So according to SpaceX, the market for AI is 2.5 larger than all the food sold on this planet.

They're also saying that the AI market is worth roughly 10% of all global real estate.

f6v• 1 month ago

the market for AI is 2.5 larger than all the food sold on this planet.

It just shows how much the automation has impacted agriculture and the food industry. Sure, there're rural farms that apply 200 yo technology. But e.g. the grain production and farming are incredibly efficient at scale. So, it's not that costly for as a humanity to feed 8 billion people (at a varying level, of course).

darkerside• 1 month ago

I'm sure the finance market is much larger as well

bryanlarsen• 1 month ago

Food is worth a lot more than that. If the alternative was starvation, we would pay approximately all the money for food. By that metric food is worth more than $100T. The difference between $100T and $10T is called the consumer surplus, one of the largest benefits of a free market economy.

AI might eventually provide $26T worth of value, but if it captures anywhere close to that amount of revenue that'll indicate a failure of the free market economy. Competition and open source will have failed and the oligarchy has won.

(Either that, or inflation will have made $26T a relatively smaller number).

bcrl• 1 month ago

What precisely is the moat surrounding AI that SpaceX is using to justify this kind of spending spree? I don't how SpaceX and other AI companies will be able to keep the weights of their AI models private in the face of interest by virtually everyone in the world. It would be absolutely trivial for a nation state to walk into a data center using a state issued security certificate to seize a few of the physical servers running the cloud services of OpenAI / Grok / Claude. Copying the weights is trivial. Infiltrating a company with spies as new hire coders to gain access to source code is also trivial.

This is really starting to feel like the pets.com era again.

lumost2• 1 month ago

This is true if you take the ai market as equal to the market for labor discounted to 5-10% penetration.

It’s not a totally unreasonable assertion, it’s the implication of the assertion that we are uncomfortable with. There is no reason for the models to stop their improvements in the near future.

ai-x• 1 month ago

I'm sure people laughed in 2023 if someone said AI will reach $100B in revenue in 3 years. Yet here we are

ralfd• 1 month ago

To be fair, food is the smallest bucket of my monthly expenses. And there are many people here on hacker news who pay more for their AI tokens than for their food.

How does argrar industry and tech industry compare as share of gdp in the US?

imron• 1 month ago

They're also saying that the AI market is worth roughly 10% of all global real estate.

Why limit yourself to one planet? Space is infinite ;-)

firecall• 1 month ago

Where is that quote from?

I can’t see it in the article when reading on my phone?

thinkingtoilet2• 1 month ago

In a sensible world, this would be considered lying to investors and be prosecuted.

ActionHank2• 1 month ago

Always fun to remember when calculating TAM - something like 85 - 90% of the world earns less than $1000 usd per month.

The math don’t math here, there literally aren’t enough people to afford this and businesses will go under the more people are displaced for gainful employment.

DebtDeflation• 1 month ago

There have been a few recent stories about businesses finding themselves spending more on tokens than they were spending on the workers these AI Agents were supposed to have replaced.

prennert• 1 month ago

I call it forward thinking: they assume massive inflation due to income taxes breaking away.

remix2000• 1 month ago

Dunno the actual number, but one thing I'm certain is that it must be closer to $0 than $26 trillion on a number scale.

boothby• 1 month ago

> AI products worth $26 trillion, roughly equivalent to U.S. GDP."
This is unhinged.

The only way for Musk to become a quadrillionaire is hyperinflation. And a week later, we'll be quadrillionaires too!

TrainedMonkey• 1 month ago

Be honest now, it would take at least a few months for the rest of us.

rustystump2• 1 month ago

They are pricing in inflation along with the inevitable money printing that will happen.

chimpanzee2• 1 month ago

yea, totally nuts.

clearly it's more like $540.2 quintillion at this point

fredophile• 1 month ago

I also saw a quote from Musk saying that he expects SpaceX to hit $1 trillion in revenue by 2031. Given his track record of predicting performance I think it's safe to ignore such future looking statements from him or companies he controls.

jmalicki4• 1 month ago

Another way of putting this: global GDP is ~$132Trillion from what I gather.

So this is saying AI products will increase global GDP by about 20%.

The Federal Reserve says AI is contributing about 1% GDP growth per year to the US [0].

So maybe you can get to $13 trillion over a decade just from that. If you assume some acceleration, 20% isn't out of the question.

It is an extremely rosy projection, but if AI can replicate large fractions of the workforce, leaving those humans with the ability to work on other things, it doesn't seem unhinged when you think of it through this lens, just very optimistic - not Elon Musk level optimistic, just "everything goes according to plan and a bunch of things in the causal chain are all slightly on the higher end."

[0] https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2026/jan/tracking-...

marcosdumay4• 1 month ago

So this is saying AI products will increase global GDP by about 20%.

No business gets to capture 100% of the value it produces without physical coercion.

For infrastructure that requires high investment, it usually captures something around 5% of it. People tend to work really hard to replace or reduce any kind of infrastructure that gets near 10%. So we are talking about AIs increasing the global GDP by 200% at minimum, 400% more realistically.

Or in other words, bullshit number is bullshit.

slashdev2• 1 month ago

Over what period of time?

By 2030? No way

By 2050? Maybe?

Obviously during an IPO you’re trying to make the bull case (unhinged or not). What does it look like in the best case scenario.

rayiner• 1 month ago

You need to understand the definition of “total addressable market.” It’s a maximum theoretical number for the size of the market (not your company’s revenue) under ideal assumptions. A $26 trillion TAM is high but it’s not “unhinged.” For example, the logistics and transportation market is over $10 trillion and expected to double by 2035. Under ideal assumptions, if AI replaces everything from coders to lawyers, why is that “unhinged?”

yks• 1 month ago

With SPCX shares never going down in price, SpaceX can acquire all companies in the US in exchange for its stock, so SpaceX itself is worth at least as much as the US GDP! (/s)

aenis4• 1 month ago

Out of curiosity, anyone here still using cursor?

AndreyK1984• 1 month ago

good enough for simple tasks.

blitzar2• 1 month ago

Co-Pilot -> Cursor -> Claude Code.

I think my relationship with cursor was the shortest of all.

Aeolun2• 1 month ago

Cursor was really good for like 2-3 months. It felt like magic compared to Copilot.

Claude Code is like... I dunno, something better than magic because it actually exists.

aabdi• 1 month ago

composer is competitive with around opus 4.5 in feeling?

largely lags behind opus4.7/gpt5.4, but is respectable, and generally outperforms the glm/qwen equivalents anecdotally despite benchmarks.

fails to follow instructions more often, and is less code critical, but performs okay if you can decompose the task to smaller problem spaces. i.e. only do manual review, only do typechecking, only do specific component. etc

https://artificialanalysis.ai/agents/coding-agents?coding-ag...

senordevnyc8• 1 month ago

I agree, Composer 2.5 is really good. I use it for all kinds of small tasks, and really for any kind of first pass at debugging, answering questions about the codebase, pulling data for reports, etc. It’s fast, pretty accurate, and basically free.

warmedcookie• 1 month ago

I use CC/Codex/Cursor.

CC is mostly my default for large tasks / features (ex. Plan > execute plan ) Biggest gripe with Claude Code is that it is painfully slow relative to the other two.

Cursor for small stuff like bug fixes since it has a lot of models to choose from. I love the review/ diff / checkpoint features. It's planning feature is on par with CC. I'd probably use Cursor as primary driver if it had better cost efficiency. Next version or two of Composer may fill that gap in cost/quality/speed.

Codex isn't allowed at my work, but I use it for personal projects. It has the best balance of quality / cost / speed even if it's planner is poor and quite frankly the codex harness needs to catch up with the other two.

CC for quality / cost. Cursor for quality / speed. Codex for balance of the 3.

yanis_t3• 1 month ago

Never did. Having been using Github Copilot since its launch (as autocomplete, they have a Vim plugin) and claude code for agentic coding.

senordevnyc8• 1 month ago

Yes, it’s my daily driver for building the saas I run full-time. I’m not happy about this news.

I like the ability to switch between any models, Composer 2.5 is really solid, I like having my agents coworking in the IDE with me, the plan mode is great, Cloud Agents are great, especially with slack, linear, web, etc integrations. I routinely tag an error report in slack and Cursor fires up a Composer 2.5 cloud agent that has readonly db access, access to error reporting, etc, and it can triage the issue, issue a PR, and tag me in slack.

The only thing I’ve felt like I’m missing out on is the subsidies of the CC/Codex subscriptions, but it seems like that is rapidly eroding anyway.

electriclove2• 1 month ago

Why are you not happy about this news? Didn’t their collaboration make Composer 2.5 possible?

buntp3• 1 month ago

Curious, what does your SaaS do? even the general area is fine

veber-alex• 1 month ago

Yes it's my main AI thing.

It has access to all top models, great IDE integration and their AI based autocomplete is still unbeaten.

I have no desire to use a TUI, feels like a downgrade to me.

tchock23• 1 month ago

I was until today.

esafak• 1 month ago

I intend to try it for design mode with Composer 2.5

sfblah2• 1 month ago

I switched over to Claude Code. The products are essentially identical. This whole space has been commoditized. Paying $60B for this is idiotic.

travisgriggs2• 1 month ago

Paying $60B for this is idiotic.

Isn't that kind of Elon's thing?

rcleveng3• 1 month ago

Yes, I still use it, although less than I would otherwise.

Good: - Composer 2.5 is pretty decent for the quality / price ratio. - Easy to assign an issue to it in Linear (I know Linear just added this natively for linear agent, but it seems rubbish compared to Cursor) - Bugbot actually finds some useful issues (things Claude and Codex will miss) - Using @cursor in github usually works well, and better than @copilot. - Working with Python Monorepos with UV in their IDE. VSCode and Cursor work well here (Antigravity managed to screw it up somehow).

The Bad: - Usage/billing dashboards - These are are opaque and you can't attribute what actions map to what spend. - cursor won't follow PRs well like Claude Codes does. - Setting up environments is less good than Claude Code - Their IDE fork is woefully out of date, it'd be nice if it had more of the codeium fixes.

The Ugly: - Settings - Try to turn off bugbot, there's multiple places you have to do it. Good luck figuring them all out. - Support - they are polite, but gas light you and tell you it's your fault their product's settings are awful.

tommoor• 1 month ago

Linear employee here - if you have any specific feedback on our Claude/Codex integration, happy to hear it. Definitely a v1 so expect a number of fast follows up with some of the missing functionality like env customization, secrets, and code signing.

Cheers!

dolkycape• 1 month ago

That's a lot of money for a buggy product that is at best slightly better than its competitors.

transitKnox• 1 month ago

Well that's a lot of money. They must see this as a distribution pipeline for Grok?

tippa1232• 1 month ago

Not sure how this closes the gap to Anthropic and OpenAI for xAI. Is there a play that I am overlooking?

If this acquisition goes through the only winner here is Cursor, especially since CC and Codex are chipping away at Cursor very hard!

tptacek2• 1 month ago

For what it's worth, this was effectively announced months ago, and at this valuation.

rvz2• 1 month ago

But they (SpaceX) could have backed out of the deal at any given time as they had the option to (and be required to pay the 10B break up fee). Nobody knew what would happen at the time.

This announcement is a definitive agreement of the acquisition at that $60B valuation.

tptacek2• 1 month ago

Sure, not saying there's no news hook here.

Sammi3• 1 month ago

Yes, that's what was said basically. The pedantry is not adding anything to the conversation.

TrackerFF7• 1 month ago

Congrats to the founders, arguably the first true AI-wrapper billionaires? 0 to multigenerational wealth in 4 years is impressive. It is crazy how much more wealth per user that can be created in the AI-space, compared to other products.

Hendrikto• 1 month ago

It is crazy how much more wealth per user that can be created in the tulip space, compared to other products.

4er_transform• 1 month ago

Surprising how tech people on a tech forum are some of the biggest Luddites. Maybe it’s because the creative destruction is coming to your industry this time?

barredo• 1 month ago

> SpaceX told investors during the IPO process that it sees an addressable market for AI products worth $26 trillion, roughly equivalent to U.S. GDP.

I very much can imagine a future documentary in a few years. With the host asking the audience: "Where were the signs?"

csours• 1 month ago

Signal and noise. Lots of noise. SO much noise.

To be clear, I don't know which part is signal and which part is noise any better than anyone else.

javier22• 1 month ago

I know this is just nonsense wish thinking, but apparently the investors disagree and I have zero clue when they will also stop giving Musk their money.

caconym_• 1 month ago

I think the bump since IPO can be explained at least partially by low float not meeting demand. I've seen a lot of accounts from retail investors who entered the lotteries saying they only got a small fraction of what they wanted, hence demand is kept artificially high. Probably intentionally, since it essentially allows the optimists to dictate the price.

(edit: This is not at all unique to spacex, of course, but given the nature of Musk's companies and their "fans" it's logical that they would employ this strategy. They are also doing a staggered unlock to avoid upsetting the market when insiders start dumping their shares.)

danpalmer2• 1 month ago

"investors" really over-sells who these people are. They're people with gambling apps on their phones who think SpaceX is great because of Musk's politics.

fred_is_fred2• 1 month ago

Maybe they can monetize and trade AI tokens like Enron was going to trade bandwidth?

Joel_Mckay• 1 month ago

Enron was never audacious enough betting every US man, woman, and child will spend $28k/year on their generally nonprofitable business with one exception -- Starlink.

Patrick Boyle covered the SPCX trajectory fairly well... =3

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKXgeNwNRJ4

dgellow3• 1 month ago

Market maker for AI tokens. Now that’s an original idea!

thisisit3• 1 month ago

That's the number AI boosters are spreading too "The TAM for AI is all of humanity - this includes every person and every company. So, imagine this huge pile of future revenue." I agree that TAM is likely huge but is SpaceX most suitable to capture that TAM? Unlikely. But for now everyone wants in on the AI hype train and FOMO of losing out one any company in the AI space.

In the long term most markets are duopoly with small competitors. And personally I see OpenAI and Anthropic duking it out rather than SpaceX.

supertroop• 1 month ago

Well the TAM can match GDP if GDP evaporates!

swalsh• 1 month ago

Imagine the East India Trading company advertising the TAM of the new emerging markets in the early 1600's. I bet the numbers compared to the old world would be enormous, and equally unbelievable.

IF, and yeah it's a gigantic really big IF... the future plays out the way people are envisioning it. It's future shock. Astroid mining, gigafabs, star ships launching hourly making space exploration cheap, satellite intelligence, physical AI. The world is going to be a completely different place IF SpaceX and the AI labs are successful. That TAM might be real. It's a literal moonshot, the stuff they're talking about sounds SciFi, but that's why the valuations sound SciFi.

That said, I would not invest anything into SpaceX that I wouldn't be willing to lose, and i personally would not invest until the lockups are free. Moonshots aren't in my risk profile.

IndeanCondor2• 1 month ago

This is such terrible history. Please Google things before making analogies.

The East India Companies (Dutch and English) didn't invent or discover the spice trade. They were created to leverage private capital to wrest control of the trade from the Iberian Union, an entity both Company's sovereigns were at war with.

The "TAM of the emerging markets" had already emerged both because of the Silk Route from Pax Mongolica and in the 1500s from the Portuguese Empire's Cartaz trade license monopolies enforced by their naval posts (feitorias) throughout Asia.

The TAM was incredibly apparent, Anglo-Dutch privateering during the war had seized multiple cargo laden ships along with trade route information.

icfly2• 1 month ago

The TAM that spacex quotes has nothing to do with Space. It is all AI. As in grok. This is a joke, and people that believe it are just providing exit liquidity.

danpalmer2• 1 month ago

AI hype is full of bad total addressable market hypotheses. There just isn't $26T of money to buy this stuff.

Patrick Mackenzie, at the time at Stripe, about 10 years ago, talked about how Stripe's growth depended on growing the actual internet. Not just growing their market share within it.

Google, Meta, etc, have projects dedicated to getting more people online, because when you have 2bn users, you kinda have to make more users.

Ray202• 1 month ago

There just isn't $26T of money to buy this stuff.

But there is. Like, it is less then GDP of US only

slashdev2• 1 month ago

If that were to become reality, and I won’t guess at the odds of that, is because it grew the world economic pie. Thinking about it in terms of the size of the pie today is treating it like a zero sum game. It’s a different game.

Rapzid2• 1 month ago

The valuation bubble on AI is threatening the entire global economy at this point.

pseudosavant2• 1 month ago

Based on the disclosed financials by SpaceX, they have made $48B in revenue since 2023 with a cumulative loss of -$41.3B.

And yet, based on stock price and market cap, they are worth about as much as Microsoft. Microsoft generated $80B of revenue and $31B in profits...per quarter last year. SpaceX will never, ever, generate $124B+ in annual profits.

kridsdale1• 1 month ago

What all the SpaceX naysayers don’t understand is that they effectively have a monopoly on selling drugs to aliens. Think about it, man.

burnerRhodov310• 1 month ago

What about the compute deals? $3.1B a month for half their compute? Elon built $6B of rev in 122 days. What can he do now that he's got a $85B war chest of cash?

jojobas• 1 month ago

What do you mean, of course everyone in the first world, including babies and the elderly, is eager to pay Elon some $20k/year.

sneak4• 1 month ago

The GDP of the entire world is $126T. Each and every year. And, thanks to USD inflation, that figure is increasing rapidly.

thm• 1 month ago

That’s two zeros too many.

tippa1232• 1 month ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47855293

Initial announcement back in April

kypro• 1 month ago

$60b is genuinely insane. Very high from a P/S ratio perspective, and for a product with arguably no defensible moat.

Congrats to the Cursor team though... One of the most crazy exit stories ever – 4 years to a $60b buyout. Damn.

yanis_t3• 1 month ago

$60b is crazy.

Cursor is an extension for VS Code, a harness and a bunch of prompts.

They have their own model (Composer 2) which is based Kimi K2.5, but I don't think SpaceX would be interested in it.

If they need a harness for grok, they could fork PI.

What are they after for here? Customer base? Talent?

pietz• 1 month ago

It's a crazy number especially since Cursor feels kinda dead. Few thoughts from the other side:

- xAI needs the coding related data to compete with Claude Code and Codex

- Recent progress with Composer 2.5 seems promising given the size

- The may get a comeback on the smaller than Enterprise battle field now that the other two got so expensive

- The way that Elon set up this entire process was quite genius. They locked in this option before, and now after the gains through the IPO, it feels almost like a discount, lol

ArtificlObstcl• 1 month ago

Usage data.

chris_money2022• 1 month ago

Exactly that is the current value, although not sure if its worth 60B

BoumTAC• 1 month ago

Compose 2.5 is the default model in Grok Build. And it's quite incredible. It's comparable to Opus 4.7 but faster and incredibly cheaper .

dubeye• 1 month ago

shocked that an engineer would not mention user numbers or revenue growth in their analysis

hagbarth• 1 month ago

Well. $60b in bloated stock is probably much better than the $10b cash penalty for not going through with the deal.

turtlesdown113• 1 month ago

... you could just sell $10b in the bloated stock, and still have $50b of bloated stock to sell

827a• 1 month ago

You clearly have not used Cursor lately. It’s substantially more than all that. It’s not a VSCode extension anymore.

kjksf2• 1 month ago

Cursor has $4 billion annual revenue rate so $60b is 15 years of future cashflows.

That's not crazy because if past predicts the future, that revenue will grow quickly. At $8 billion/year it's just 7.5 years, which is a reasonable investment.

potatototoo99• 1 month ago

Not annual, annualized. Let's see if people stick to it knowing it belongs to Musk now.

acc_297• 1 month ago

This is a linear regression relying on a couple years of data to predict 15 years in the future and I don't believe that the valuation is made on this basis.

It may be that spaceX is buying an operation that would realistically take 5 months and 100 million to copy in-house for 60B because the worry is that waiting 5 months might cost that much in some sort of lost opportunity. It also might be that in any negotiation SpaceX is viewed as incredibly cash-rich and so anything can be sold to them for inflated prices.

I really don't understand these companies valuations it seems like boardrooms everywhere are in a constant state of panic that they'll lose it all if they aren't growing a breakneck pace constantly.

funnym0nk3y2• 1 month ago

If past predicts the future people will drop it once it is in Musks hands. And as a token reseller that revenue is not that impressive.

mdavid626• 1 month ago

Is that profits or revenue? :-)

bean469• 1 month ago

Cursor has $4 billion annual revenue rate so $60b is 15 years of future cashflows.

This assumes that Cursor's annual revenue will be the same or higher for over a decade. It's not really like they don't have competitors

turtlesdown113• 1 month ago

revenue ≠ future cashflows

winter_blue2• 1 month ago

That revenue number is almost meaningless, since they give out tokens at a loss. Especially with Composer 2.5 tokens are sold at a steep loss. They could certainly grow to $8 billion/year, with this negative revenue / heavily subsidized subs, but what will happen if Cursor decide to be profitable, or maybe to even just break even?

12700180802• 1 month ago

Hasn't cursor's revenue declined? I think they already peaked.

datsci_est_2015• 1 month ago

I could see it being a talent / first mover acquisition. I’m bullish on harnesses, but I think there’s still a very long road to get to something that is stable and relatively optimal - harness user experience is pretty trash tier right now imo.

My hot take is that it will probably be like the OS landscape:

  - Some established enterprise option (Windows)
  - Quality secondary option for professionals (OS X)
  - Super users / nerds / tinkerers (Unix flavors)

wayeq• 1 month ago

What are they after for here? Customer base? Talent?

users

game_the0ry• 1 month ago

And IP

zander_jiang• 1 month ago

I wonder what happens to fireworks ai, who provided the infra to train and serve composer 2, cursor was their largest customer, and they're probably loosing it.

justinai62• 1 month ago

It’s the coding, prompting, training data aligned w harness and ultimately usage of the user base.

chinathrow2• 1 month ago

Is this Elon listening to Pieter Levels?

manwithopinions• 1 month ago

Pieter is so dumb. All he seems to do is post comparisons between the wonderful U.S. and dying EU that are completely wrong. If Elon is listening to Pieter, pray for Elon.

simianwords• 1 month ago

You do know Elon already believes those things?

greenoracle9• 1 month ago

$60B is a huge price, but buying Cursor gives Musk something xAI has struggled to build: a popular coding product with real developer and enterprise adoption. It may be the fastest way to catch up in AI coding. The real question is whether SpaceX ownership improves Cursor or drives its users away.

Sammi3• 1 month ago

My sense is that enterprises are extremely cautious. They like everything that is already common and hr friendly. They abhor anything that might be seen as divisive and controversial. That's why they're currently going with Anthropic and not Openai or Xai or anything Chinese. It's the smaller actors that are using everything but Anthropic. Anthropic got that safe enterprise bland vibe. The only pr trouble Anthropic is in is with saying no to the military, which just makes them even more enterprise safe. Meanwhile Sam Altman and Elon are out there freaking out the enterprises almost every day it seems like.

dixie_land• 1 month ago

Fable got halted by US make it a moot point but none enterprise is happy about the forced (and unannounced) 30-day data rentention

doom2• 1 month ago

I think it'd be an enormous endorsement of Cursor/xAI and proof of improvement if SpaceX started using it to code the mission critical software running on Falcon 9. Which other AI company can say their models powered a rocket launch?

(mostly /s but I know I'd give it another look if it was that good)

thinkingtoilet2• 1 month ago

Which other AI company can say their models powered a rocket launch?

Honestly, probably all of them. I imagine those coders are using all the tools they have available and are using Claude and ChatGPT as well as internal tools.

stryakr• 1 month ago

I can't imagine that any of the cautious companies or ones with their ear to the ground are going to want to cozy up to cursor with this acquisition; I'd suspect we'd see some exodus as well given the relationship to Musk.

esskay5• 1 month ago

The real question is whether SpaceX ownership improves Cursor or drives its users away.

I can't speak for anyone else but I wont be renewing my sub. Funding anything Musk related isn't exactly high up on my list of desires, and theres ample alternatives out there.

y1n02• 1 month ago

Yeah, he’s so damn successful at building companies that elevate civilization. Wtf would anyone want to go with that.

afavour2• 1 month ago

The real question is whether SpaceX ownership improves Cursor or drives its users away.

I know I'll sound hyperbolic but I'm deeply skeptical of the way anything Musk-owned is going to treat private data. I think he wouldn't hesitate to dig into it if it were to his benefit, even if there was an agreement against it. For that reason alone it makes Cursor look worse to me.

jacobgorm• 1 month ago

I just uninstalled it FWIW.

greenpizza13• 1 month ago

There's no way I will continue to use Cursor if it's Elon-owned. His actions at DOGE literally caused the deaths of thousands. We should all boycott.

MaxHoppersGhost• 1 month ago

Citation needed.

segmondy• 1 month ago

hundreds of thousands

UltraSane3• 1 month ago

Musk's completely pointless destruction of USAID will kill millions of people.

htx80nerd• 1 month ago

His actions at DOGE literally caused the deaths of thousands.

you mean that part where the US spends billions of dollars helping other countries and they hate us for our troubles?

winfredJa• 1 month ago

i’m not interested in supporting a trillionaire with my money. i’ll be moving to vscode since the cost of switching is basically zero.

pbkompasz• 1 month ago

Tesla was popular before Musk's ketamine fueled schizo-fascist phase. People will probably boycott Cursor as soon as he buys it...

aagha• 1 month ago

IDK if you understand how much $60B is.

polnurfer• 1 month ago

That is very hinged

glenngillen• 1 month ago

Back in the early days of Heroku (when I worked there), we were all fairly deep into the Ruby community. Ruby has never had a great reputation for performance, but... it seemed like almost a running joke that any time you went down a rabbit-hole trying to understand some weird performance issue you'd eventually discover that @tmm1 had already identified the same issue months earlier, patched it in core, and given an hour long talk about it somewhere. Despite his ability and willingness talk publicly about quite deep technical topics Aman always came across as an incredibly quiet and humble in person. Every Ruby developer has benefited from his attention to finding and fixing performance issues. I'm sure the same can probably said for every GitHub user (where he worked for years).

Congrats to the entire Cursor team! I don't know all of their stories, but I do like to smile and celebrate a little when I see people who are often hidden in the shadows quietly making things x% better for all of millions of us every day for many years getting reward for that effort.

ryanisnan• 1 month ago

Early Heroku was fabulous. Thank you for your effort!

warpech• 1 month ago

Yes, it seemed from another word at the time. Now is table stakes. Thanks for showing the way!

killingtime743• 1 month ago

Congrats? Usually after acquisition comes layoffs. Especially with Elon at the helm

missedthecue3• 1 month ago

Especially with Elon? It happened one time (twitter) and if you think twitter was appropriately staffed at 8k employees you need your head read. Cursor operates with a very small team, and practically all have equity, so a $60B exit means congrats are in order.

avarun• 1 month ago

Every single employee who joined prior to this year will make 8 figures+ off this exit.

chvid• 1 month ago

Not bad for a VS Code fork and a Chinese LLM fine tune.

Fotis-Karmpas• 1 month ago

i thought they already did that!

ryzvonusef• 1 month ago

they had the option, but hadn't executed on it... now it seems they have.

sidewndr46• 1 month ago

When does the Tesla acquisition get announced?

baggachipz2• 1 month ago

Within the month. They'll probably try to do it sooner while the stock is at a high.

claw-el• 1 month ago

Or do it when the prices are starting to show weakness

kilpikaarna• 1 month ago

I once again fear for my grandfathered-in free SuperMaven.

farco122• 1 month ago

What an incredible outcome for the Cursor team. Hopefully the Cursor + xAI teams working together can produce a competitive frontier model.

resters4• 1 month ago

Cursor was simply able to get early access to openai models and get an early lead doing things that are now obvious and done better by many others. Does anyone really want to use a crippled "enhanced" vscode to interact with a crippled version of codex or claude code?

manojlds3• 1 month ago

This comment reeks of someone who has not used Cursor, at least in 2026.

farco122• 1 month ago

It's a great thing for consumers and businesses to have another competitive, American coding harness + frontier coding model duo. No one wants a crippled version of codex or claude code and surely SpaceX isn't paying $60 billion for that outcome.

conductr2• 1 month ago

So they innovated, created a product and found users? Sorry to break it to you but that’s how software companies are built.

senordevnyc8• 1 month ago

Do you think people are using Cursor to interact with Claude Code? What?

giancarlostoro4• 1 month ago

I wonder where they will take this, if they'll use the Cursor team to help make Grok Build (which is not just a tool like Claude Code, but an actual Grok model too) more refined for programming? Would make sense to me, and in turn also provide Cursor with more compute they can use.

alephnerd5• 1 month ago

It also provides xAI with a pre-existing enterprise distribution channel. At the end of the day, distribution is equally as important as the underlying product itself and in some cases is even more critical.

bigbluedots2• 1 month ago

No company that uses Cursor now is going to be ok with using xAI models.

giancarlostoro4• 1 month ago

I think that's another thing, while I would like to test Grok more, the Grok AI plans are very generic and not tailored specifically for programming, which is frustrating because I get maybe 8 hours out of Grok for $40 for an entire month, I do wonder if they offered a "Grok Build only plan" if it would actually give me access to more compute. Maybe they intend on making it through Cursor.

I do hope that Cursor doesn't remove any of its current model offerings, and just offers Grok Build in addition to what they already offer, in my opinion unless most of their clients "switch" to Grok (like metrics show they're mostly using Grok vs other models), it would make more sense.

Maxious2• 1 month ago

For the past few months, SpaceXAI has been jointly training a model with Cursor, which will be released in Cursor and Grok Build soon.

https://x.com/SpaceX/status/2066873915717136548

shimman• 1 month ago

They'll likely just take all the various enterprise contracts to help inflate SpaceX earnings, that's the only reason why you'd buy this if you were Musk. Need to help keep the lie going as long as you're still alive.

yanis_t3• 1 month ago

Those Mars bases are getting closer and closer.

utopiah• 1 month ago

Full self-living autonomous Mars base next year. Musk™ /s

ozgrakkurt5• 1 month ago

Optimus robots are very close. Gradeschool vibes all around

hootz• 1 month ago

Ugh, I'm already tired of seeing ads everywhere for Cursor about how you can build EVERYTHING and solve all problems using their agentic IDE, so now I have even more reasons to dislike SpaceX too.

guidedlight• 1 month ago

Does anyone here think Cursor is overvalued? It's just packaging up what already exists, it has no moat or IP.

tipiirai• 1 month ago

Yes. I think Cursor is overvalued, but not to the extent of SpaceX

mohamedkoubaa3• 1 month ago

Maybe it's just the US dollar that is overvalued

ulfw• 1 month ago

So is 'Space'X. They fit perfectly

pavlov2• 1 month ago

They're getting paid in extremely overvalued stock, so maybe it balances out.

This is not really a diss on SpaceX either because a lot of IPOs go through an immediate pop and then 1-2 years of doldrums as lockouts expire and promises aren't quite delivered.

Nobody knows what 60 billion in SpaceX stock today will be worth when Cursor insiders finally get to sell (at least a year from now, after other SpaceX insiders have started selling).

bix67• 1 month ago

Source on the lockup for Cursor insiders?

sigmoid10• 1 month ago

Well, the people who bought the SpaceX IPO essentially footed the entire bill here. And they might still make money on it, depending on how the stock goes from here on. I don't see anyone who could lose here, even if the bubble bursts, apart from the Cursor people. And they are likely still going to make a huge amount of money.

philipwhiuk• 1 month ago

Grok needs a coding environment play to match Claude Code - that's what this is.

And AI companies are not short of capital.

lmedinas3• 1 month ago

Thats grok build, which is pretty nice and has compatibility with Claude Code. They just need better models, that will be released soon.

vorticalbox4• 1 month ago

its not just the models, their auto complete is actually really good. when you make a change it will give you "tab to next" which makes refactors super easy.

composer 2.5 is also a very decent model, it go 90% of my AI tasks using it now.

stefan_• 1 month ago

Yes, that's why Cursor was very popular when actually reading model output paragraph by paragraph was still the way you used them. That's no longer the case, their use has cratered, and in fact they have been disintermediated by their model vendors, leaving an empty shell.

iterateoften• 1 month ago

So 60B dollars and your primary reason it’s worth that is “tab to next” autocomplete?

dakolli6• 1 month ago

composer 2.5 is literally just a fine-tuned kimi model, and the autocomplete is exteremly meh.

The only kind of AI I want in my editor is an autocomplete, but this isn't very magical to non-programmers (their TAM) or all that valuable (you can't charge thousands), they bought Supermaven and basically killed it, I'm not sure how you think tab is really good, I've not been impressed when I played around with it.

stephc_int132• 1 month ago

I tried it a few times and was not convinced by the autocomplete.

I found it less effective than free copilot autocomplete on vanilla VSCode.

mindwok• 1 month ago

They have a surprising amount of enterprise revenue and mindshare, of which xAI has literally none.

newaccountman2• 1 month ago

It's not true it has zero moat or IP (they have their own LLM and it is useful), but it is indeed way over-valued.

manojlds3• 1 month ago

Composer is very good, and these days after heavily using CC, Pi and Open code I am back with Cursor. "No moat or IP" is underrating it a lot.

m00dy• 1 month ago

CC on Deepseek is a moat.

formvoltron2• 1 month ago

None of that really matters.

What matters is that this has enough "future story value" to keep the few investors invested... allowing for the planned index funds to buy into the overvalued stock & allowing for the largest heist in the history of money.

It's become pure hype and drama on the global stock market stage.

lotsofpulp• 1 month ago

Transactions that happen out in the open, with the consent of all parties are not a heist.

nbardy• 1 month ago

No, look a Composoer 2, it stands out starkly on its own in the pareto frontier on low cast and fast models.

Composer 2.5 was a huge leap with minimal compute from xAI.

They can compete with OpenAI and anthropic with xAI scale compute. They have a top notch model team and incredible training data and huge enterprise costumer contracts.

trial3• 1 month ago

my employer (one of those huge contracts) dropped cursor in favor of claude and i don’t think this is true at all

while we had it i used cursor for probably eight months as my main ide (i did really like the interface for embedding code in prompts!) but had no problems switching to claude code. i asked around, and i truly don’t know a single coworker who misses cursor even a little bit.

malfist• 1 month ago

How the hell is an IDE a "pareto frontier"? Even if, say composer 2.5 is a huge leap forward, that doesn't mean IntelliJ or Vim or Emacs or Codex got worse.

IDE improvements are not a zero sum game.

trollbridge• 1 month ago

Composer 2.5 Fast is particularly good.

For someone who is new to agentic code or is generally somewhat junior, Cursor is very easy to get started with and is generally fairly frustration-free.

I use a cheap $20 subscription mostly for occasional use of Opus and Composer.

SpaceX made a smart move here. Someone else should have really seen the opportunity and bought them.

Der_Einzige2• 1 month ago

This is delusional. Composer 2.5 is trash compared even to haiku let alone opus.

whywhywhywhy• 1 month ago

Composer 2.5 is just a repackaged chinese model, Kimi IIRC

whatever1• 1 month ago

Every single one?

ArneCode2• 1 month ago

they propably have a lot of training data from their users, which might be useful for SpaceX which has a lot of compute

ubercore• 1 month ago

Cursor, from my companies perspective at least, seems to be handling charming leadership to get enterprise AI contracts in place, compared to the alternatives. That's feeling like the moat from my first-hand experience. Easy single contract that covers a lot of AI cases that management wants to say they have in place.

arend3212• 1 month ago

Cursor was nice when I was still meticulously hand coding my stack, fantastic autocomplete. With today's top models, I barely write code myself, just review commits. Cursor eats Opus credits like there is no tomorrow. Composer has been a net negative in my experience. All in on Codex with GPT 5.5 on high using /fast.

agluszak2• 1 month ago

IMO composer 2.5 is pretty good, and the $20 Cursor plan gives you _way_ more tokens than Codex/Claude code/Antigravity

dist-epoch2• 1 month ago

Sounds like what people here said 20 years ago about Google buying YouTube, or 10 years ago about Facebook buying Instagram - companies with no moats and huge infrastructure costs.

To paraphrase, the biggest trick the devil pulled is convincing founders they need a moat.

generalpf• 1 month ago

Cursor Remote Agents are important to our AI orchestration layer. It's possible that Claude can do this directly but Cursor Remote Agents made this laughably easy.

sixothree• 1 month ago

They have the conversation history of every person that has used their product. That's worth something.

internet101010• 1 month ago

Cursor's moat is that it is a virus that infects organizations through shared skills, hooks, agents, etc.. Once one person uses it and infects the repo everyone else starts using it.

basisword• 1 month ago

Know a few companies that have moved from it fully to Claude. It’s still early so the moving cost is low and Claude Cowork is something non-tech employees can make use of much easier than Cursor. I really don’t see what Curor’s value is longer term. Why pay a middle man?

swader9992• 1 month ago

Maybe, but migration from/to anything is so much easier now with Agents.

sscarduzio• 1 month ago

I don't. Cursor being a man in the middle between coders and other people models for so long, has so much more training data than anyone else in the world.

boroboro4• 1 month ago

There is obvious proxy to the amount of training data - revenue. And I think anthropic is way ahead of them.

swader9992• 1 month ago

I do think this has had its day. From what I remember, Cursor was useful back in the day when you coded in an IDE and wanted to read code while you baby stepped through incremental changes with an AI. I'm tempted to put /sarc around this but not really...

puszczyk• 1 month ago

It doesn’t tell anything about the valuation, but I prefer it over Claude Code, and I even stopped using JetBrains IDEs because of it.

Vs Claude Code: I like the option to change the models, as I often prefer ChatGPT or Composer to Opus. I have a slight preference towards TUI, but not so strong to drop the models.

Vs JetBrains. I really love JetBrains but the tab complete just works so well for me.

firemelt3• 1 month ago

why u prefer cursor over claude code?

oulipo2• 1 month ago

I guess they're getting bought because they had access to a lot of codebases from a lot of companies, and perhaps there's something to mine in those logs...

infecto13• 1 month ago

Could not say on the valuation front. The one thing that is obvious is the trash talkers love to point out how horrible it is but I have yet to find a compelling replacement. Obviously Claude Code works but at least for me I never got along with the CLI workflow very well and sure I could use vs code with the extension for Claude but then I lose tab autocompletes which I actually like. I have yet to see anyone build a derivative model like composer 2 that is quick, cheap and has higher reliability on tool call use. Again I don’t know on valuation but it’s pretty impressive how far they have come. I look at Jetbrains and at least from an AI perspective they have been left in the dust.

debug-desperado• 1 month ago

Using Cursor with Jetbrains via ACP isn't that different than using within the Cursor IDE. You still get Agent/Plan/Ask modes with model selectors.

I'd recommend installing the Cursor IDE, then using it to install Cursor CLI (it's easier to keep things up to date this way), then setting up your Jetbrains IDE to point to the Cursor CLI via ACP integration.

aprentic• 1 month ago

I like Cursor but that valuation is a hard sell.

Their valuation should be very closely tied to how how many tokens it takes to get from Void to Cursor.

If those values diverge by much, something is rotten in the state of Denmark.

petesergeant4• 1 month ago

There's a plausible synergy in it for xAI though. Access to reams of training data for a company whose marginal cost of compute is very very low, and that they can use as a channel to push Grok. I don't think it's worth anywhere near this much to anyone else, but to xAI it's at least possible.

josh-sematic• 1 month ago

In terms of whether they’re overvalued: probably. But any valuation should also take into account the value they have to x.ai (also under SpaceX) as a source of training data for coding models.

firemelt3• 1 month ago

obivously is overvalued

popcorncowboy• 1 month ago

Moat is whatever thing is stopping the next guy from simply drinking your milkshake. People conflate "I could smash this out in a weekend" with "and therefore could also build a multi-billion dollar revenue stream in [counted in months]".

whatsakandr• 1 month ago

I wonder how much zed industries is being valued at.

suzukivenom• 1 month ago

paying 60bn for a dev team that wrapped vs is insane.

StrLght• 1 month ago

How about paying 60 billion for a bunch of enterprise contracts?

wat10000• 1 month ago

Or paying ~300 million virtual slips of paper that the market says are currently worth $60 billion.

everforward• 1 month ago

I suspect these won't be as sticky as the contracts you're thinking of. Oracle and Microsoft can run on that because their products aren't compatible with anything else so migrating is a huge pain.

Cursor doesn't really have that. We've got it at $DAYJOB but it's not even the only one, I can also use Zed or Codex or Claude or probably a half dozen other things I don't even know about.

I suspect a lot of companies have that right now because the market for AI is so volatile, and in the near future will trim that down to a couple of tools and Cursor doesn't have much to keep them at the top of the list imo.

I also wouldn't pay 60 billion for a bunch of enterprise contracts that have to compete against Microsoft. No one is dropping Microsoft as a vendor, and they have the ability to up the prices for stuff people need like Office and use that to make Copilot free. If times get tough and companies need to cut costs, it's a lot easier to part ways with Cursor than Microsoft.

bluescrn• 1 month ago

About 4x what they've spent on Starship development so far.

They're not a space company any more. They're just part of the AI bubble.

piokoch• 1 month ago

Interesting, Grok, for a flagship AI contender was rather poorly performing. I mean, not bad, but visibly less capable.

datadrivenangel• 1 month ago

The grok fast models for coding were pretty adequate. Not good, but fast and good enough to be usable.

llm_nerd2• 1 month ago

SpaceX should rush to acquire as many companies as they can with stock. The market cap is absolute insanity (I know people keep saying this about new high scores in unrelated-to-reality valuations, but this one might just be the pinnacle), with zero rational basis, and they should try to make it real as rapidly as they can.

Next up, Anthropic.

vorticalbox4• 1 month ago

Anthropic are already paying $15 b to space X for compute.

CodesInChaos• 1 month ago

Buying depreciating nvidia hardware and renting it out to competitors isn't why SpaceX has a trillion dollar valuation.

flanked-evergl4• 1 month ago

zero rational basis

Do you really think so? Like everyone who risks their and their clients' money here is just being irrational? Is this really a coherent view? Could it not be that someone knows something you don't, or does not have the biases you have?

amanaplanacanal2• 1 month ago

Everything was in the S1 filing. There is no "secret knowledge".

The rational basis is entirely "I can sell the stock to somebody else for more money". Where in normal stock it would be "this company can make a profit that gives a return on this investment." This is a purely speculative play.

drakythe2• 1 month ago

Point us at a rational verbalized or written argument for SpaceX's current valuation (and increasing)? Everything I've read says the valuation is too high and here is why, with x, y, and z reasons. Everyone I read who encourages buying seems to be ignoring arguments entirely and going on vibes.

AtNightWeCode• 1 month ago

$60B. Wow. Congrats to Anysphere. But $60B. That is just a ludicrous price.

throwaw12• 1 month ago

this is financial engineering to increase ARR temporarily, feels like next year Elon will dump lots of stocks

missedthecue3• 1 month ago

SpaceX valuation isn't based on ARR so juicing it isn't really relevant. And if he wanted to buy ARR for financial engineering reasons, he could buy a lot more than $4B with $60B

welhoilija• 1 month ago

Cursor's value add as a developer seems much slimmer than the 60bn price tag justifies, but I guess they have a lot of data from the non private usage which bumps the value up?

The product itself is practically a vscode wrapper with Agent implementation and K2.5 forked model (composer).

electriclove2• 1 month ago

Good timing because they are paying with SpaceX shares which are at a crazy high valuation right now (compared to just a few days ago)

vicentwu• 1 month ago

It's absurd. let's mark it down.

LysergicLlama• 1 month ago

It's been fun, bye

nwhnwh2• 1 month ago

Take me with you

techpression2• 1 month ago

How are these numbers even working out, I get free markets and all that, but Microsoft paid 2.5B for Minecraft, which was printing money at the time (seems they still lost on that deal). Now a rocket company is buying an editor company for 60B and everyone seems to think that makes sense.

I’m happy to be old man yelling at clouds here because I can’t for the life of me figure out these valuations and purchases.

baggachipz2• 1 month ago

How are these numbers even working out

You must be new here.

farfatched• 1 month ago

There's a lot of investment in AI for its potential.

An AI editor company might never make 60B itself, but it might help another AI company grow faster (relative to its competitors, who might also want to buy the AI editor company).

What else can an AI giant do with all that money?

Build in-house: they do, and there's only so fast they can hire/build.

Save? Yes, still do, but if they save it all, and let competitors buy Cursor, they lose.

Invest in other fields? Sure, but if they lose the AI race, that's all they'll be left with.

Tesla's IPO is a bet that if Musk has the right opportunity, he will do well. So he's given a big bucket of money, and needs a team that can deliver. So he buys Cursor.

The winners are Cursor. The losers are whoever is funding the AI companies that get outcompeted.

(Full disclosure: I don't know anything about Cursor, nor much about Tesla or its IPO.)

techpression2• 1 month ago

But surely 60B could buy you something better if you want to spend money on AI. The number seems completely arbitrary, would Cursor say no to 40B? I really don’t see Cursor as bringing them anything of actual value, it’s more of a bragging thing, but I can be very wrong.

fluoridation4• 1 month ago

All I know is, it's going to be fun when everyone wakes up sober and hungover realizing they've been sleeping on piles of tulips.

frays• 1 month ago

Is anyone on HN still actually using Cursor in 2026?

Everyone I've spoken with is now using either Claude Code or Codex (or Copilot because their companies force them to).

petterroea2• 1 month ago

to be fair "nobody" is using grok either

CSMastermind2• 1 month ago

I use grok every day as my go to search engine replacement.

manojlds3• 1 month ago

Fully on Cursor at work and I love it over CC, OpenCode and Pi that I use for personal work.

ArneCode2• 1 month ago

I use it because their pro plan is free for students

ing33k• 1 month ago

Yes. Do the heavy lifting in Claude code , Codex.

Basic tasks in cursor. It's decent and damn fast.

All my team members also use it.

alephnerd5• 1 month ago

Plenty of enterprises are still using Cursor, though they are facing plenty of pressure because Anthropic and OpenAI bundle Claude Code and Codex which can make it hard to justify an additional license for a third-party harness (why spend that money there when you can buy the underlying tokens instead).

hasteg• 1 month ago

Earlier this year I had used it because I would rather have a IDE-like exp and be able to actually look at the code. However, recently switched to using claude code VS code extension and it's basically the same thing (plus at Amazon we can only use Claude Code)

iddan• 1 month ago

Yes, unlike Claude it has excellent response rate and i can leverage their speedy models

joefourier• 1 month ago

I stopped using Cursor because of how terribly optimised it is (worse than VSCode despite being a fork). It would routinely take up 50% of the CPU resources on my MacBook M4 and gigabytes of RAM for absolutely no reason.

I switched to Zed, and I'm never going back to Electron/non-native IDEs.

linuxftw• 1 month ago

I use Cursor for coding. I like to review the changes via the UI. Plan mode is also really strong in Cursor. It bugs me less about needing to search through files and basic coding tasks. I find it also saves the company a ton of money compared to Claude, Claude burns through tokens with no regard.

I typically use Claude for interacting with MCPs and skills to operate on live systems.

theli0nheart• 1 month ago

I use Cursor every day.

redorb• 1 month ago

I use Cursor, but funny enough it's 98% just using the codex plugin - I kept cursor around on the grand fathered $20 / 500 requests plan, if they un-grandfather me or things change too much I'll zip over to vscode.

jjice• 1 month ago

It's my primary. Claude Code for personal stuff on the weekends. I really just prefer the GUI of having the changes easily highlighted. If I can get something to apply that with Claude Code or Codex or OpenCode or whatever, I'd swap over without thinking.

nerdsniper2• 1 month ago

Same here - their UI/UX seems to serve my workflows/habits the best. And it's strange that no one else seems to be delivering a compatible experience for me. I'd prefer to move away from Cursor after this acquisition.

asteroidburger• 1 month ago

Wouldn’t Kiro fit the bill?

renjimen2• 1 month ago

The Claude Code extension in VSCode is similar enough. I used to use Cursor, but now I use VSCode+CC to take advantage of the better pricing CC offers for always-on frontier. I found Cursor's affordable "Auto" option unreliable, often wasting my time with dumb models.

fantasizr• 1 month ago

with cursor it still feels like coding, all the others are diff checks it seems like.

946789987649• 1 month ago

As in the changes its made? You can do that on Claude Code but by having it do it on a worktree and just checking out that worktree. Then you can see the change file(s) in your preferred IDE

ramraj07• 1 month ago

We use the bugbot. Best code review agent we've seen.

prodtorok• 1 month ago

I used their agent view yesterday and the file tree does not update when you add new files.

scottcorgan• 1 month ago

if you use hn you probably don't speak to actual people tho

frangonf• 1 month ago

I was on Claude Code the past year, now I use chinese models, but I've used Cursor and they have an ok pricing offering today because of their mix of sota models with usage based pricing along with their Kimi based Composer model with generous limits. I think it makes a lot of sense for the enterprise market, which is the real moat, and not the capabilities/features of the forked ide or app/tui/github bot anyone can come up with today.

drunkan2• 1 month ago

Zed with Claude code is the best of both worlds

microtonal• 1 month ago

My biggest worry is that Zed gets acquired.

justAnotherHero• 1 month ago

I'm still on their old 500 requests/month plan and the value is simply unbeatable for $20. I've been able to use agents without worrying about usage for my job and personal projects paired with the $20 codex sub and I dread the day when they finally get rid of the requests plan.

kilroy123• 1 month ago

I switched back to VSCode with Codex and Claude extensions. Just more stable.

joaofs• 1 month ago

Development is moving away from the IDE to agentic long running workers. I've been using their SDK in this mode - which then forces you to use cursor as model provider. I use a mix of harnesses for different types of agentic tasks and Cursor gets the best results.

dmix5• 1 month ago

I don’t see how Cursor differs in that regard. They have an agent management system since Cursor 3 and some feature that offloads agents to the background or cloud which I haven’t used yet. I always just keep chat windows open if it’s running because I’m always watching that stuff closely.

Seems more like an advanced/niche feature for people who go really hard into LLMs IMO

eranation• 1 month ago

Still do. Composer 2.5 is a beast. But even with Opus (and Fable for a few days) their harness is many times faster. The main reason for me to use CC is the $200 subsidized pro max plan.

Also their computer use in the cloud agents (when it works) is a game changer. No need to keep your laptop open / get a Mac mini if it runs in the cloud.

laurels-marts• 1 month ago

My company gave me cursor license after I had already been using Codex CLI for months and VS Code for a decade.

I had absolutely no interest in their VS Code fork. The Agent Window was okay but buggy (eg wouldn’t load branches on Ubuntu via WSL2).

Overall used it a couple of times but still use Codex CLI as my main driver. Might try CC in the future esp. if they unban Fable.

estetlinus• 1 month ago

I have seen a few codebases lately with AI-bullish teams. Code produced by Cursor reeks of low quality. I’ve tried it but never got hooked.

AFAIK their market is pseudo-technical people who haven’t found the terminal yet.

namuol2• 1 month ago

I use Cursor and it’s been fine. I write a lot of code manually too, so I liked the tight integration with VSCode, my daily driver for about a decade. I used to use Vim, so I’ve “discovered the terminal” a long time ago.

The people steering the agents are the ones producing low quality code. I see little correlation outside of that.

s4i• 1 month ago

I don’t understand this take. In my company a lot of the Claude Coders seem to be very uninterested or unaware of the code they are producing, while I in Cursor usually click ”Keep”/”Undo” on specific code blocks (with little edits) or sometimes the whole file at once if it’s a low risk part of the codebase. I fail to see how this workflow produces inferior code vs shooting in the blind and maybe skimming a huge diff in one go.

anon70002• 1 month ago

I’m running Opus through Cursor like I would in Claude code, so make sure you’re not comparing different models.

But the core difference for me is I can easily see the code changing in cursor, but not in Claude code. Bigger tasks, I’ll have to drop into other tools to see what Claude is doing along the way. I don’t like that. I like everything being in the same spot

aquarious_• 1 month ago

I use Cursor for work, but claude code for personal development. I think Cursor is still useful but the most value really is access to latest models

joshgachnang• 1 month ago

Just setup my team with Cursor. They actually got back to me on an enterprise plan (Claude keeps ignoring me). Cloud Agents have been great for keeping multiple streams going at the same time. Adding in computer use has been great for actually testing out features and showing they work for PRs. Bugbot so far has been the best AI reviewer I've tested. Composer 2.5 is great, though still using Opus for planning.

I can do most of this with Claude Code, but there's definitely a cost in maintaining it for the whole team.

pants2• 1 month ago

Yeah, I've tried many scanners and Cursor Bugbot is easily the best

12700180802• 1 month ago

Cursor became obsolete pretty quickly as Claude has improved. Good on them to find an out before they collapsed. $60 billion is a huge overpay.

darklinear• 1 month ago

It's still my primary at work (data engineering/platform engineering), running a mix of GPT-5.5 and Composer 2.5. We also have Claude Code subscriptions. I find myself preferring Cursor for most tasks.

70% of the time I use AI agents on a pretty tight leash. I often reject edits and ask it to change things. The IDE integration is really efficient for this workflow compared to Claude (yes, I've tried the Claude extensions).

Autocomplete is still the best available (I've tried both Copilot and Zed); though admittedly it's not as important as it was circa last year.

For the 30% simpler or very well-specced tasks their cloud agents are last I compared way better than Claude Code's/Codex's version of the concept. @cursor for quick fixes in Slack works quite well. Don't get me wrong, it's still quite under-documented, but the others are worse. The integrations with linear, Slack and github are well executed

Composer 2.5 is really fast in their harness at code search/explanation/Q&A tasks (much faster than Sonnet/Opus). It's also really good at debugging, very proactive compared to other models in the same size/prices class IMO. Just due to the speed I actually prefer it to almost any other model for these tasks. I suspect at least some of this may be due to the harness and good codebase indexing.

I don't know why people are down on the Cursor harness. It's good. The main advantage of Claude Code/Codex are the token subsidies; but according to their dashboard I am costing my employer between $100-200/month on Cursor, so the overall price is comparable and only narrowing now that Anthropic is switching many enterprises to API usage.

I also don't understand the people complaining about VSCode bloat and in the same sentence praising Claude Code. Claude Code often uses MORE RAM than Cursor, has a super unstable UI (on my home machine there is input lag when typing ANYTHING in Claude Code) and the desktop app version of CC barely works. The Codex TUI is genuinely nice and snappy, on the other hand.

mohamedkoubaa3• 1 month ago

It's my daily

ergocoder3• 1 month ago

Is anyone on HN still actually using Cursor in 2026?

Most people on HN wouldn't be satisfied using anything. Therefore, probably no

whimsicalism4• 1 month ago

i use literally all of them, they're all pretty good. codex is the lightest on my machine which is nice but less featureful - the others are all pretty at parity (minus a few CC-only bells & whistles)

x3n0ph3n3• 1 month ago

I much prefer Cursor to Claude Code. Claude Code hides too much of what it's doing from me (can't monitor the thinking output, can't see output from in-progress commands being run.

I don't even use the IDE -- just the Agent Window interface. I also really like Composer 2.5.

mjrbrennan2• 1 month ago

Yes, I use it as my daily driver at Discourse, the Cursor Tab autocompletion is still the best AI-based editor autocomplete I have used. I switched to nvim earlier in the year because there was no real great AI integrations that didn't feel cumbersome, Cursor in vim mode is a much nicer experience, I like adding lines of code to agent context and so on. All of the extensions from VSCode, LSP integration, and so on are really nice.

That being said I do a lot of work in Codex or Claude now (they all feel pretty much the same to me), and use Claude for manual code writing and tweaks that I feel would be unnecessary for agents to do, or just when I am writing code that I enjoy writing, typically when exploring a new problem I'm interested in, not everything needs to be done at 1000% speed by a robot.

Though I will likely reconsider this now that Elon will own it, either moving to VSCode or to Zed long-term.

mjrbrennan2• 25 days ago

Update to this comment — I switched to VSCode and the only thing I miss is cursor tab. The vscode implementation just isn’t as good :(

dmix5• 1 month ago

I use Cursor with the Claude code plugin because Cursors autocomplete is really good and I like the way Cursor is set up. But it’s definitely a UX downgrade using a plugin instead of the builtin Cursor agent stuff which I do miss. Claude with Max are just a safer bet economically these days than a cursor plan.

I except that model and pricing gap to narrow over time though

swordsith• 1 month ago

I can only stand to use the cursor CLI at this point, but it's usable I like to be able to switch models when one gets stupid or guard-railed, on the pro plan you get so much usage in the composer 2.5 pool you could just use that your whole sub if you wanted.

wmeredith2• 1 month ago

Both teams I run use Cursor as their daily drivers. It's fantastic. I am annoyed with this acquisition.

macco• 1 month ago

Yes, let the enshittification begin.

AbstractH245• 1 month ago

Is anyone on HN still actually using Cursor in 2026?

Which makes this a godsend for Cursor.

Even if SpaceX stock plummets 90% before the lockup ends, I assume everyone will make out better than any other exit that could have occurred.

Who would buy them that would seem rational?

timoxley• 1 month ago

I've recently switched off those to Cursor. More flexible tool, better interface.

verzali2• 1 month ago

So that accounts for about three quarters of the money SpaceX just raised then?

podgorniy2• 1 month ago

about three quarters of the money SpaceX just raised then? While rest is paid to the debters...

Most probably it will be mix of stock/cash

mcintyre19942• 1 month ago

It's all stock

mym1990• 1 month ago

Not totally, because the deal is in stock. The cash SpaceX got is actual cash that can be deployed today. The stock will be in a lockout period and could be worth nothing or something whenever the lockout ends.

__alexs• 1 month ago

I like Cursor as a product but the add on cost of $0.25/M tokens is just too expensive on top of the models.

dakolli6• 1 month ago

Yeah, I don't understand how this business model continues to produce revenue.

cryptonym• 1 month ago

Revenue? In that industry?

throw109202• 1 month ago

Charging a percentage (like OpenRouter) would be much more fair IMO as smart-planner-cheap-subagents becomes more common.

LgWoodenBadger• 1 month ago

Nonsense like this reminds me of the following quote from the 1999 Thomas Crown Affair movie:

“Have you figured out what you're going to say to your board when they realize you paid me thirty million more than others were offering?”

In the span of <20 years we’re talking about a sale price 3 orders of magnitude larger than a minor plot point of a hollywood movie.

fnoef• 1 month ago

[flagged]

amunozo• 1 month ago

Not the entire industry, only the American part. Chinese companies seem healthier.

kykat• 1 month ago

You can only say that because you know nothing about the Chinese ones

nwhnwh2• 1 month ago

Yup

dang• 1 month ago

Ok, but please don't post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News.

pulkas• 1 month ago

waiting for the anouncement: cursor for grok heavy users.

api2• 1 month ago

I realized a while back that Elon Musk isn't Iron Man. His superhero (or supervillain depending on your view) persona is ZIRP Man, the master of riding successive credit expansion and speculative waves. It's sort of ironic that he at least pays lip service to some Austrian-style quasi-libertarian economic ideas, because the Federal Reserve created him.

Now he's surfing the AI wave. We are no longer technically in ZIRP but the delayed inflationary wave is now traveling through the economy and pumping everything. He knows the best way to soak up cheap money right now is slap AI on it.

I also had the thought the other day that him hitting $1T technical net worth might actually be a harbinger of a lot more future inflation. Inflation of this type hits assets before it hits things like prices and wages, and it hits assets with fast market cycles like stocks before it hits things like Real Estate. The blast wave starts at the top and moves down and out. So maybe Elon hitting $1T really means that in 20 years that'll be more like $100B inflation adjusted. Meanwhile a loaf of bread will be $20 and a starter home $4M.

But the fact that monetary inflation starts top-down is why low interest rates exacerbate inequality. The very richest and most leveraged can use the arbitrage gap to buy everything else before the inflation wave propagates. We've been in a low interest rate environment for about two decades, and you can see during that time how the super-rich with access to cheap money have fully detached from the rest of the economy.

In other words: the reaction to the 2008 financial crisis was to inject huge liquidity at the top, which created the new Gilded Age.

Ultimately it may be somewhat intentional. One way out of a sovereign debt crisis when you also have a sovereign currency is to inflate your way out, which basically is a huge tax on every non-domestic entity that owns your debt.

BigTTYGothGF• 1 month ago

Elon Musk has exactly one talent, and it's being the greatest master of financial chicanery the world has ever seen.

api2• 1 month ago

To be honest and objective, I think he at least knows enough about engineering to hire people who know what they're doing, which is how he got here. It's not all chicanery.

Over time, though, I think he's drifted away from his original "make real things in the real world" focus and more toward "play money games" and "play political games."

It's sad. One common comic book supervillain arc is to start as a hero and become what you despise.

bilekas9• 1 month ago

The biggest focus of its business is the manufacture and launch of rockets with reusable parts.

Is it though ? Their TAM in their filing lists 85% as AI. $18.7 billion in REVENUE 2025 yet are spending more than 3x that for Cursor, and AI company.

sanex2• 1 month ago

My whole team was on cursor for a few months. I enjoyed using it and thought it was the most complete of the agentic coding tools I tried. The thing that got me was the cost. I was switching between Opus and GPT 5.x and was spending anywhere between $500-1000/month. I was using a relatively normal workflow, paste in ticket, plan, execute with dumb sub agents, have the ai test and competing model to validate. The business got uncomfortable with the cost when everyone started doing the same so they switched us to Claude code since it has better cost controls. So far it looks like we won't even touch the $100/month plan and some people would be ok on the $20 plan. Anthropics usage limits is a consistent source of complaint on here but I've found them to be moderately generous in comparison to cursor. Cursor also charges a $.25Mtok premium for 'routing' no matter what model you choose. 5% increase for frontier models but when you're using haiku on sub agents that's a 50% cost increase. Composer is solid but if you don't have deep pockets it's the only feasible model on their platform because of how they bill it. Being an all in one editor/agent is nice but if you're in a language like c# or Java you're already swapping back and forth with a real IDE anyway.

bazzargh• 1 month ago

Our experience has been the direct opposite. The way to get the most out of cursor was to leave it on auto - we saw it average around 3.9 cents per request under the old contract (per-seat pricing) and more like 39 cents per request under the new (single pooled cost for everyone). Composer came in a little higher, more like 50c/r, while the claude models were up into the dollars. Meanwhile, if you use Claude-the-app, there is _no_ cheap model and the default switched to Opus in April, resulting in increased costs across the board.

We have both Claude and Cursor here, as well as agents running GPT, things in AWS Bedrock, etc and its my team handle the bills...when people use Cursor on auto, costs are under control, but there's always a dozen or so whale users who'll switch models manually and blow through the budget like it's not there.

Another thing: "better cost controls". There was for example no way for us to disable Fable in Claude, but we could in Cursor. Again, the opposite experience.

satvikpendem• 1 month ago

Well, auto can produce garbage code. I'd rather be able to select the model manually myself and so far it's much more economical to give people Claude Code and Codex subscriptions as those are subsidized per seat plans.

renjimen2• 1 month ago

For the kind of ML work I do Cursor's "Auto" was too unreliable. It would frequently try to solve relatively difficult tasks using Composer, when it should have been routing to a true frontier model. Annoyingly, doesn't tell you what model it's decided your task deserves, so I often wasted time working through a problem with it, only to realise I was on a dumb model. Then I revert all the work, switch to an expensive frontier model and pay expensive API prices to actually solve the task.

All that is to say, model selection is the main control we have over quality. Giving it up in the name of cost saving will bite you in the long run, especially when Claude Code still has such good plan pricing.

hatsix• 1 month ago

The price you're objecting to is the heavily subsidized cost, it'll be 4x that in 12 months

throwawaythekey• 1 month ago

More precisely -> the competitors heavily subsidize which causes cursor to feel expensive.

Recently, we purchased one of each Anthropic/OpenAI subscription plan and randomly ran long horizon coding tasks until we exhausted the weekly limit. It's widely believed that a $200/month plan maxes out at ~$2000/month worth of tokens (assuming API pricing). However, we found that the subscriptions are actually far more generous. (2/4)

https://x.com/SemiAnalysis_/status/2064815044085318040/

CSMastermind2• 1 month ago

I was switching between Opus and GPT 5.x and was spending anywhere between $500-1000/month.

I switched to Codex because Cursor was costing me $10k / month. If the price goes up by 4x I'm not sure the value will be there for a lot of people.

dmix5• 1 month ago

Same I’d pay for Cursor again if they get more price competitive with Claude max

blondie9x2• 1 month ago

What are the best open source IDE alternatives to Cursor? There was Continue for a bit but Cursor bought it. Is Visual Code by itself the only open source IDE atm? My main gripe with Visual Code is it doesn't make it easy to use open weight models or non Copilot model APIs. Continue helped but its now part of Cursor.

As for coding in the terminal, we have Opencode, Claude Code, and Codex etc. They are all open source but only Opencode can route to open weight models. But non of these are really an IDE like Visual Code or Cursor.

Are we missing a really good open source IDE to use open weight models? It seems like we are.

drunkan2• 1 month ago

Zed…

grzracz• 1 month ago

I think it's difficult to compete in this space because right now to build the "full IDE" you have to build an extremely capable harness (very hard) and a very good IDE (very hard). I plan to continue using Claude Code and built myself a small tool to verify what the agents actually do + move around the codebase quickly but it's a far cry from a full IDE: https://cotect.dev

shafiemoji• 1 month ago

I honestly don't get why they feel the need to buy Cursor or why OpenAI wanted Windsurf. If it's data you're after, wouldn't it be so much more cheaper to just hire a dedicated team to fork VS code and integrate your own model and give it to the public for free with unlimited usage for a couple of months?

NewsaHackO• 1 month ago

Why after thier IPO?

geremiiah• 1 month ago

Here's a shower thought. BTC essential is worth $70k solely through the power of memes. Can TSLA and SPCX remain overvalued (relative to the revenue of their respective underlying assets) forever through the power of memes?

Intuitively, it seems to me that there must necessarily be some kind of upper limit, but I'm not convincing myself. These speculative assets are only attractive as long as the price keeps inflating. But that can only happen if there is more and more demand. So it's basically a bet that there is an average amount of retail investors (I assume it's mostly retail investors but I could be wrong) that consistently put a percentage of their income into these speculative assets. Can this be maintained forever?

dist-epoch2• 1 month ago

When you invest in TSLA and SPCX, you don't invest in a car and a rocket company, you invest in Elon Musk. So revenue, assets, are irrelevant.

fofoz• 1 month ago

You basically buy an asset whose risk is tied to a man's life.

rapind• 1 month ago

Can this be maintained forever?

Obviously not. It’s all about timing your bail so you don’t get left holding the bag.

jtbayly• 1 month ago

I saw that one wealthy individual had purchased $1 billion of SpaceX at the IPO. Does that count as a retail investor?

andsoitis2• 1 month ago

I saw that one wealthy individual had purchased $1 billion of SpaceX at the IPO. Does that count as a retail investor?

There were two individuals who each bought $1B: Ron Baron and Gina Rinehart.

While they are individuals, they executed these billion-dollar investments through their massive corporate entities and investment firms, rather than personal brokerage accounts.

A retain investor is an individual, non-professional investor who buys and sells securities through brokerages using personal funds.

stetrain• 1 month ago

The current market cap of SPCX and TSLA combined (~$3.8T) is about 3 times the total value of all BTC (~$1.3T).

jld• 1 month ago

While gold has industrial uses, isn't most of its value based on the fact that people like it and believe that it has value?

interstice• 1 month ago

I'm not sure if this means gold isn't powered by memes or whether it's just one of the most long lived memes of all time. Aside from other nice properties like lasting a long time, being pretty, and not requiring electricity to exist.

jimnotgym4• 1 month ago

I was once told bitcoin was a 'pet rock'. Thing is people pay a lot of money for rocks when they have no planned industrial activity for them. Diamonds, for instance.

I think you are spot on. The problem comes if SpaceX goes out of fashion, not its fundamentals.

jpadkins3• 1 month ago

What you are describing applies to all forms of money. It has value because people believe other people will use it as money. If that belief drops, the value drops.

People comment on gold and Bitcoin, but don't realize the same principles apply to US dollars and bonds.

ozgrakkurt5• 1 month ago

BTC essential is worth $70k solely through the power of memes

This is not true.

BTC is way more sane than SpaceX as can be seen by it's history so far.

misiti37805• 1 month ago

neither of them are sane. BTC is useless, unless your trying to buy child porn, buy illicit drugs on the internet, or someone who bought it before the value exploded. eventually, the world will come around and it will go to zero, if quantum doesnt kill it first. im looking forward to that day.

rebolek• 1 month ago

SpaceX is successfully building reusable rockets. BTC can process few transactions every ten or so minutes at enormous price.

I think SpaceX is definitely overpriced but saying that BTC is more sane is completely delusional.

throw3108225• 1 month ago

As long as there is someone around who is very good at keeping the price inflated (and that in turn also because he did actually deliver extraordinary things, it's not just smoke and mirrors).

On the other hand, the fact that BTC has absolutely no intrinsic value can be an advantage over a real company, as it makes it more insulated from reality. Supply chain shock? No problem. Competition? Same. New technologies, political change? Neither.

jimnotgym4• 1 month ago

USD has no intrinsic value either

DanielHB• 1 month ago

The limits are when companies and institutions start to default on their loans. Or, in the case of governments, trigger hyperinflation by printing money to pay off the debt.

Of course it can collapse before that, but if it gets to that point it is guaranteed to collapse.

jimnotgym4• 1 month ago

But that won't happen while the share price keeps going up no matter what. Borrow more, secured against the massive unissued equity, or issue more shares.

petilon• 1 month ago

Michael Burry, a hedge fund investor featured in the book “The Big Short” for his predictions on the 2008 financial crisis, said in a Substack discussion last month that any increase in SpaceX’s stock after its I.P.O. would “be on hype and technicals.”

Here, “technicals” means technical analysis signals rather than the company’s business fundamentals. In other words, Burry is saying the stock could rise because of chart-based trading, momentum, and market behavior—not because investors think SpaceX is truly worth that much based on revenue, profits, or other fundamentals.

How long can the hype be maintained? TSLA is still maintaining its hype, judging by its P/E ratio.

darth_avocado3• 1 month ago

Technicals are the star signs of stock market.

rob742• 1 month ago

The hype already starts with the SpaceX SEC filing. According to it, its addressable market is $28.5 trillion, of which $26.5 trillion are AI. This means that every human being who owns a computer on this planet (1.75 billion) would need to spend (on average) over $15.000 on xAI products.

TaupeRanger• 1 month ago

Technical Analysis is Astrology, and Burry has predicted 17 of last the last 2 stock market crashes.

Danox3• 1 month ago

Tesla definitely is floating down slowly worldwide with hype when it finally crashes just don’t be left holding the bag. 2026 will be another year downward.

drakythe2• 1 month ago

The saying "The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent" exists for a reason.

In short, the answer to your literal question is "no" because nothing remains forever in this world. The practical answer is "yes" because the TSLA stock has been irrational for years already and it shows no sign of stopping.

runarberg2• 1 month ago

That saying assumes a rational market, and while there is some evidence that the average human behavior trends towards the rational there are plenty of evidence against individual behavior being rational (see homo economicus).

As more and more wealth get distrubuted to fewer and fewer hands, and as fewer and fewer extremely rich individuals control more and more of the market, My gut feeling is that if the market was ever rational (which btw. I am not entirely convinced of) that very much no longer holds true.

georgeecollins• 1 month ago

Or the way I would think about it is (I think this was a Krushchev quote): You don't convince people there is no imaginary river, you convince people that you built an imaginary bridge across the imaginary river.

So you are never going to convince people that Tesla won't make a fortune on humanoid robots or SpaceX won't colonize Mars. The fever will break when people decide flying robots (or whatever) are a bigger business then humanoid robots or some other company than Space X will colonize the ocean before Mars. You aren't going to convince people to price these things reasonably but eventually the heat will wear off.

w10-12• 1 month ago

exists for a reason

The reason is that people keep making the same mistake, because people are not very good at assessing high-risk, high-reward projects.

Only a real deadline/delivery failure can wake people up, and only if they haven't pivoted their dream to something else, and only if you don't have other people knowing it's a scam, but willing to prop up the stock price because they are highly invested.

Scams, like cancer, are real; they survive, grow and defend themselves using the same mechanisms (laws, advisors, promotors) as ordinary investments/tissue, until they kill the patient -- so the best scams target the largest unkillable patients and enlist the broadest and deepest range of self-interested insiders as their defense.

It's beautiful, if you really think about it, as a tragic example of the worst of capitalism.

jesse_dot_id2• 1 month ago

If there is ever another depression, which seems highly probable at this point, the meme stocks will be the first ones down the toilet.

mixdup7• 1 month ago

The thing is fundamentals really don't matter. TSLA and SPCX aren't paying dividends so there's no real performance they have to hit, no one is going to miss a dividend payment and dump the stock. The Elong vibes can carry it as long as people keep smoking what he's selling

The real question is, when does that run out of steam? When do we wake up to the charade that has built up around us? That's a much bigger thing than just Elon and his businesses. Like someone else said, when the next crisis/downturn/depression hits the house of cards will fall. Unfortunately it will hit all of us not just people in the meme stocks

criddell3• 1 month ago

Would you say the same thing about Bitcoin? Will that house of cards all fall in the next crisis/downturn/depression?

lossolo• 1 month ago

If you exclude dividend paying stocks, then the entire stock market starts to look like a giant pyramid scheme casino.

ahcharades• 1 month ago

Yes when will everyone wake up for the charade of having a monopoly on space launches? Of putting over 90% of all mass into space, of your closest competitor being the nation state of China, and they are years away from where you are right now. Ah yes, that charade, when will people learn am I right? Total genius.

philistine2• 1 month ago

I'm extremely cynical about the way the US government would react to any sort of financial crisis. I do not believe that they would not completely cave and bail out the AI companies and the monopolists if there is a downturn. And it's not that I don't trust the Republicans specifically. The whole political sphere is completely convinced that AI is a national security prerogative, and the cynical political atmosphere will equate national security with investor protection.

Let me append the saying a bit: The US government can remain irrational longer than you can stay solvent.

somenameforme10• 1 month ago

The overwhelming majority of SpaceX holders are institutional. They had planned to allocate 30% to retail, but it ended up in the 20% range as a result of institutional demand. [1] No clue what's going on right now as their stock is going to the Moon. But in any case, I think the people that don't understand why it's doing well are mostly those who are unfamiliar with the space industry. SpaceX has already revolutionized space by dropping the cost to orbit by multiple orders of magnitude relative to the Space Shuttle, which it replaced. And it looks set to do that again with the Starship.

The main reason humanity hasn't meaningfully started expanding into space is because it used to cost $54,000 to get a liter of water into space. SpaceX brought that down to about $5000, and then further down to near $1400. That's a massive reduction in price, but you're still left with the problem that it costs $1400 to get a liter of water to space, which is why we still can't have nice things, yet.

Starship has the promise of bringing that down a couple of more orders of magnitude where the goal is to get it within the $10-$20 range. If they succeed, then you've just opened the doors to an entire new frontier of expansion and growth for humanity which is practically infinite. And right now there's no real reason to think that they won't succeed. And more importantly than this is that nobody seems to be able to compete on their level, or even remotely close. Their closest competitor is probably China who remains technologically well behind. And so SpaceX today is akin to being able to get a piece of some sort of super-ship making monopoly, just prior to the Age of Sail. The downside risk is basically zero since they're still making rapid progress - the only question is how rapid. And upside potential is basically infinite.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/11/spacex-cuts-retail-ipo-alloc...

cjrp• 1 month ago

The main reason humanity hasn't meaningfully started expanding into space is because it used to cost $54,000 to get a liter of water into space.

Am I naive in thinking that we haven't expanded into space because we don't need to? What's the benefit?

threetonesun2• 1 month ago

You really think cost is the main reason humanity hasn't expanded into space? I'm all for space exploration and learning from space but actual humans are quite squishy, like gravity, dislike radiation, and would need to take a lot of water with them just to visit a rock very indifferent to their existence.

CuriouslyC4• 1 month ago

So, your argument for SpaceX is that they'll take physical systems that they've already tried to squeeze down, and squeeze them down nearly two orders of magnitude? What fundamental scientific discovery do you think is going to enable this? Or do you think that AI is magically going to do it for them?

yousif_1231232• 1 month ago

At least as long as Musk is the CEO, perhaps. I don't think it's easy to find another charismatic figure to keep it going.

It's a different kind of hype than Nvidia has, which is showing very high and fast growing revenues (which may not continue, but they're real now). Jensen I think is not as critical to the AI hype as Elon is to his companies.

All these major tech companies eventually get leadership changes. Apple, Google, Amazon, have all done well because they're real companies and go beyond their original leadership. Tesla and SpaceX I think would surely go down the moment Musk is no longer in leadership.

functionmouse2• 1 month ago

you think Musk is charismatic?

https://www.natesilver.net/p/elon-musk-polls-popularity-nate...

majority view him unfavorably.

kamaal2• 1 month ago

>Intuitively, it seems to me that there must necessarily be some kind of upper limit

I mentioned this in other thread(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48514481), we are at runaway intelligence already.

Mostly because we are looping AI to fix problems, and then the same data is used to improve AI. There is no upper limit to this.

Taken to its logical conclusion, this process needs a hardware scale that might even look laughably huge at this point. Its fairly obvious space is going to play a big role in the coming times.

I could be wrong, and I humbly accept it when Im proven wrong. But it does feel like a lot of people in top places know we are going to need all the energy and resources space has to offer to run this runaway intelligence.

petesergeant4• 1 month ago

we are at runaway intelligence already. Mostly because we are looping AI to fix problems, and then the same data is used to improve AI. There is no upper limit to this.

I'm an AI booster, but this really doesn't follow. There's absolutely no guarantee that the marginal improvement from this continues to hold.

instalabsai• 1 month ago

This is why I think Elon buying Twitter was one of the most strategic decisions he ever made: he quite literally bought the meme machine that upholds the valuations of his companies.

ceejayoz• 1 month ago

And the government that helps fund and regulate (or not) them.

ben_w15• 1 month ago

I still don't think it was strategic on his part, he did try to back out after all; my guess is that having bought it, he tried to maximise the value it produced.

And given the financial statements in the SpaceX IPO, to the extent X still has any value at all, it is almost all just influence of one kind or another, not actual money.

Grombobulous• 1 month ago

Bitcoin isn’t valuable solely through memes, it’s also deflationary by design.

tim3332• 1 month ago

It's down to the balance between buyers and sellers. If you've got more selling than buying it'll go down but Musk has been remarkably good at keeping the buyers there.

_DeadFred_2• 1 month ago

Don't forget the amount of shares released to the market. That impacts the price dramatically as can be seen be all the 'stock buyback' manipulation of stock prices.

pjc50• 1 month ago

Notably, it looks like the meme power is gradually being redirected from BTC and cryptocurrency in general towards AI and SpaceX in general. Now that people have found a means of consuming vast amounts of computing power that occasionally emits useful output, rather than just a hash and a colossal waste.

alpineman2• 1 month ago

Sure until retail are forced to sell in an correction. Wealth destruction can happen very fast

bilsbie• 1 month ago

Everything is ultimately valued by memes.

jpadkins3• 1 month ago

money is just an idea that spreads (a meme).

otterley2• 1 month ago

On what grounds do you believe the value of BTC is meme-driven? Another (and arguably more plausible) explanation is that the price reflects the vast amount of criminally-obtained wealth stored in it. It’s a far better store than burying cash in mountain caches.

Stevvo• 1 month ago

BTC is a terrible place to put criminally-obtained wealth. Public ledger and all that makes it very difficult to hide anything.

observationist• 1 month ago

All money is meme driven. Money is fundamentally a meme itself. Seeing lots of people who seem to be making some sort of implicit distinction between bitcoin and USD and so on, but they are no different. They serve the function they serve because of what people believe about them, like any other social, cultural, or economic abstraction. Bitcoin has the feature of a verifiable ledger, but its value and function are in our heads, just like the USD or GBP.

brachkow• 1 month ago

BTC essential is worth $70k solely through the power of memes

Like everything else in finance...

Saying this is not to defend all sorts of crypto-bros. The economy, especially one overly focused on publicly traded companies like the Western, and especially the US economy, is a meme economy.

Coffee, flats, healthcare, military spending, etc., of comparable quality in the abstract East, cost multiples less than in the EU/USA because they and their currencies are weak on memes.

teekert3• 1 month ago

Someone invents something that is digital, but can't be copied. Quite brilliant as it is the first digital asset that can store value without centralization and trust, based on market demand.

Someone on HN: "BTC is valueable solely through the power of memes".

throwaway8943454• 1 month ago

Bitcoin doesn't "store value", it has the value that society assigns it, which is what the parent means when s/he says "BTC is valuable solely through the power of memes". It's not a fiat currency, nor does it have any intrinsic utilitarian value.

throw0101c8• 1 month ago

Here's a shower thought. BTC essential is worth $70k solely through the power of memes. Can TSLA and SPCX remain overvalued (relative to the revenue of their respective underlying assets) forever through the power of memes?

The "value" of something can be a bit of a meta-game:

A Keynesian beauty contest is a metaphorical beauty contest in which judges are rewarded for selecting the most popular choices among all judges, rather than those they may personally find the most attractive. This idea is often applied in financial markets, whereby investors could profit more by buying whichever stocks they think other investors will buy, rather than the stocks that have fundamentally the best value, because when other people buy a stock, they bid up the price, allowing an earlier investor to cash out with a profit, regardless of whether the price increases are supported by its fundamentals and theoretical arguments.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_beauty_contest

Plenty of folks may think these companies are garbage but are 'playing along' because it's not necessarily what they themselves think that is important, but what others think.

This idea was put forward by Keynes in his General Thoery publish in 1936, so human nature has hardly changed since then.

throwaway8943454• 1 month ago

At least some of TSLA and SPCX value is derived from Musk's ability to purchase politicians to ensure the tax dollars keep flowing to them. Essentially, these ticker symbols are backed by the US government's ability to force us to give Musk's companies our money.

grey-area2• 1 month ago

It seems like that during a bubble (things can never go down!) but the market eventually does correct, even if it can take years or even decades to do so, and usually overcorrects when it does.

_DeadFred_2• 1 month ago

SPCX only floated a small amount of shares, and made the stock exchanges compete so that it would get to rig the system in a way. If funds have to buy SPCX + small share amount, it's going up. This is the reason stock buyback used to be illegal. It's purely market manipulation of share count, not market based on actual value.

jayd163• 1 month ago

Pump and dump only has to meme hard enough for the pump part.

stogot• 1 month ago

the IPO raised $85B and they just spent $60B on Cursor. If this was the intention it should have been in a disclosure

Edit: I see SpaceX did disclose

semessier• 1 month ago

this is an all-stock transaction. No cash spent.

dude250711• 1 month ago

SPCX is exactly the "currency" that LLM companies should be valued in.

$60B cash? Too much.

$60B SPCX stock? Why so low.

Maxious2• 1 month ago

With the option agreement, we have the right, but not obligation, to acquire Cursor at a predetermined price or pay a fee
The consideration for the acquisition of Cursor, if any, after the closing of this offering would consist of shares of our Class A common stock based on an implied equity value of Cursor of $60.0 billion

"Collaboration with Cursor" page 12 of the SpaceX S-1 https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1181412/000162828026...

blondie9x2• 1 month ago

Are we missing a really good open source IDE to use open weight models? It seems like we are.

podgorniy2• 1 month ago

For about 10 billions over the twitter price (inflation adjusted)

Mesmerizing....

jfdi• 1 month ago

Grok’s capabilities on Cursor’s data should be a step function there. Go X! Congrats Cursor, what a ride!

tcp_handshaker4• 1 month ago

Besides now paying 60 billion for a fork of VSCode, it seems SpaceX meme stock style money raised from the IPO, is all gone in one week :-)

IPO proceeds after greenshoe: $85.7B

Major disclosed cash / debt-related commitments:

- Take out Bridge loan tied to X/xAI debt repayment: $20.0B

- Take out EchoStar debt payoff / cash component: up to $8.5B

- Take out EchoStar debt-service funding: up to $3.0B

- Take out AI infrastructure lease commitments: $20.2B

Subtotal of major disclosed commitments: $51.7B

Rough remaining cash before other costs :-)): $34.0B

Lets now talk about buying Tesla, doing Quantum and building a Dyson Sphere and do another round?

returnInfinity• 1 month ago

They are paying for the installed based. The users mainly. And also the team.

tcp_handshaker4• 1 month ago

Looking at the comments on this thread, those users/installed base will be gone by the afternoon...

baq3• 1 month ago

meanwhile Mistral:

MJ093• 1 month ago

I think we should get used to it because that's what's going to keep happening again and again. First Twitter, then Cursor. When someone falls behind in the race for innovation, they usually buy the best product available and use it to get ahead of the competition.

snigacookie• 1 month ago

Can someone help me understand what this means to tesla and Grok?

GenerWork• 1 month ago

I wouldn't be surprised to see Grok become some sort of agent that calls Composer/whatever the joint Cursor & X.ai model might be called.

LearnYouALisp2• 1 month ago

The Infraggable Krunk

breakpointalpha2• 1 month ago

Good reminder for me to cancel my Cursor subscription. I don't support Elmo.

breakpointalpha2• 1 month ago

Ah thanks for reminding me to cancel my subscription.

dmoreno• 1 month ago

Just cancelled my subscription.

I've been using the Pi agent with Deepseek for some days.. and I'm more than happy with that.

aqme28• 1 month ago

Well, when your stock is massively overpriced it's a smart time to buy stuff with it.

tinyhouse• 1 month ago

Cursor is great but they're all going to cash out and leave SpaceX as soon as they can.

jmyeet• 1 month ago

I believe that OpenAI (I'll get to SpaceX in a second) has a huge valuation risk because:

1. It's a bet that OpenAI will "win" AI and have a significant moat; and

2. Future hardware improvements won't massively devalue OpenAI.

I believe open source models will win here, mainly because China won't allow otherwise. I also think that nobody is really talking about the hardware decpreciations coming in the next few years, which is going to be really important from a performance-per-Watt perspective. B100s aren't going to suck. But a theoretical T100 will get 30-80% more performance for the same energy input.

So, SpaceX. I've previously said that SpaceX would've been a significantly better company without xAI. SpaceX was used to rescue Elon and other "investros" from the financially disastrous Twitter purchase. Starlink, Starship (which is a risky program) and the Falcon 9 are a solid business. They're just not a $2 trillion business.

So I believe that the AI bubble contributes at least half of SpaceX's valuation and when and if that bubble bursts, at least half of SpaceX's value is at risk.

Google announced they're throwing billions to rent GPUs from SpaceX. That might sound good. It solves a short-term cash issue. But as another commenter put it, it makes SpaceX seem more like a Commercial REIT. After all, renting out your GPUs is literally the lowest-value thing you can do with them. You're not building a business. You're taking rent so someone else can build a business.

So buying Cursor and I'm sure any number of other AI startups in the coming year or two, seems aimed at kicking that AI can down the street.

So I view the Google-SpaceX as a red flag in the short-to-medium term. SpaceX simply can't seem to do anything valuable with all the compute they have. And I also have way more confidence in Anthropic (in particular), OpenAI and Gemini than I do in Grok.

cactusplant7374• 1 month ago

2. Future hardware improvements won't massively devalue OpenAI.

I don't understand your point here. OpenAI rents all of its compute. It doesn't own datacenters. Any advances in hardware or optical computing benefit them because they can serve more customers. There is huge demand for GPT 5.5.

mrcwinn• 1 month ago

This was a fantastically smart deal for both sides.

FL33TW00D• 1 month ago

Some of the talent at Cursor is second to none. E.g Less Wright, Sasha Rush, Stuart Sul.

Google paid 2.5B to bring Noam back into the fold in 2024 ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

bastawhiz2• 1 month ago

Oh well, time to cancel my Cursor subscription. What a shame.

robeym2• 1 month ago

Cursor was my first hands-on experience with AI. I didn't know much about getting set up with specific providers via API, and Cursor made it easy to pick any model, ask a question about some code, and get a clear suggested answer easily viewable in the IDE with an 'accept' or 'reject' button. I think they answered this question well: "How do normal developers want to interact with AI?"

I moved away from Cursor when I noticed the responses from specific models were not as clean or accurate as when I'd prompt the models directly, which was something I didn't know how to do early on. I hypothesized that they had some boilerplate prompt sitting atop of my own, causing less precise or desirable results.

I would assume Cursor is still one of the best options for normal developers to get started with AI, but with Copilot forcing their foot in the door at many companies, I wasn't sure how well it would fare on its own. Being acquired by SpaceX should help, and I'll be interested to follow along and see how things develop.

cj• 1 month ago

Being acquired by SpaceX should help

Why? (Genuinely curious, I would have assumed the opposite)

robeym2• 1 month ago

My opinion is that the publicity can only help Cursor. I don't necessarily think SpaceX would make Cursor better. Copilot (which I view as a direct competitor to Cursor) has a huge structural advantage. I have several friends in various American companies where Microsoft products are all they are allowed to use. They get "free" Copilot access as a part of their Microsoft plans. Developers aren't having Cursor placed right in front of them in the same way Copilot is, and from my experience, when developers have the choice to pick one, they pick Cursor. So, I just feel the SpaceX/xAI publicity could help Cursor get more visibility in these general American software companies more so than they could on their own.

peterspath2• 1 month ago

Good hopefully Grok Build gets better and they start to innovate in this area.

Claude Code and ChatGPT need some competition. So that they also innovate more.

Traster3• 1 month ago

I'm still waiting for the real news to drop- in the next 6 months we're going to start hearing some big moves from Space X AI. Early this year they lost pretty much all their leadership, it's very clear they failed to keep up with the frontier models and Musk has essentially given up for now - renting out their compute to Anthropic and Google. But that's not sustainable, everything they say about their IPO is that AI is the core value driver. So at some point Musk is going to have some decisions to make about who he brings in to drive that. I imagine once they get that person in and start building a team around them the deals with Anthropic and Google will be ended.

I guess the cursor guys will be happy because they got their pay day, but I'd be very aware if I were them that their future is at the whim of whoever Musk appoints and it's difficult to tell who that would be right now.

I guess now is the time to take bets, so I'm going to bet an early OpenAI employee like Sutskever gets the job and they acquihire him in. Here's a bit of a laugh - at this stock price Musk could probably tempt Demis to come over, that would be wild.

ekjhgkejhgk• 1 month ago

Why is it not sustainable? Right now it appears to be a better business than selling access to models.

Traster3• 1 month ago

It's a good business. Maybe even a great business. But it's not going to justify a valuation like Space X. In the same way that Tesla has slowly become less competitive in automotive, I don't think it's sensible to assume Space X will have some durable edge in building data centres, especially when basically everything going into those data centres are commodities. And if it is just a neo cloud, then you have to contend with the pro-cyclical nature of that. It's also just clearly not their plan, they're not promising to be a neo cloud. They're promising to own the full stack.

the_real_cher• 1 month ago

Vibe coded space shuttles baby! Lets GO!

amelius• 1 month ago

"Houston, we have a problem"

"One minute, let me ask my AI agent"

1970-01-01• 1 month ago

How does this get a Starship to land on Mars or coast-to-coast full self driving? $60,000,000,000 towards one of those goals would have checked-off one of those boxes.

shaewest2• 1 month ago

It's an all stock purchase, so closer to a merger than spending $60B

sibellavia• 1 month ago

For the past few months, SpaceXAI has been jointly training a model with Cursor, which will be released in Cursor and Grok Build soon.

https://x.com/SpaceX/status/2066873915717136548

dwa3592• 1 month ago

They're doing what anyone would do in their position. I won't be surprised if they bought more companies while the stock price is that high.

Tiktaalik• 1 month ago

You generally see this sort of thing in the games industry when a publisher gives a developer a bunch of money to make a game but then the developer screws up and runs out of money. Publisher buys them to try to recoup their investment.

Is Cursor dying?

Beannation• 1 month ago

I really hope Musk doesn't ruin the product itself. I am not a fan of how he changed X at all. Id really like to see them stay on the current path, which has been brilliant so far

Haunt1000• 1 month ago

That's interesting I was using Windsurf before and I really enjoyed it. Then it became part of Devon. I was less thrilled about that so I was looking at Cursor, but now it's also getting bought out. Any suggestions on what else is left? : )

daniban• 1 month ago

I'm genuinely excited for Cursor Composer 3. A Cursor model with Grok resources could compete with OpenAI and Anthropic.

RemingtonDavies• 1 month ago

Why don't they just make their own in-house development environment? Cursor's codebase is maybe 5,000-50,000$ worth of actual code, even just $10M (compared to the $60B) could knock Cursor out of the park with a completely custom code editor, and even with a smaller budget they could fork VSCode. Maybe for the social value? I feel like a $10B advertising budget for a bespoke AI development environment is more than enough to become an actual competitor.

frankfrank13• 1 month ago

Distribution. Cursor has enterprise contracts, SpaceX/XAi want them.

verytrivial• 1 month ago

Ai is great. The bubble will burst. We will keep Ai just like we kept "the internet" after the dot-com bubble, but we still won't buy our pets online. I mean London has pretty good train connections and stations because a bunch of companies repeatedly tried to get rich. Most eventually failed, but we kept the rails. I just hope we get our computers back after this round of gambling.

ungovernableCat• 1 month ago

I’m worried some of the people leading this race will try to entangle the institutional financial giants or even the government to ensure some sort of too big to fail scenario.

There’s an unprecedented amount of money at stake. And the admin has never been so openly and blatantly for sale.

d--b• 1 month ago

It seems that each time there's a new tech cycle, another zero gets appended to all financial transactions.

mhl47• 1 month ago

Everybody remember when Zuckerberg told in an Interview in 2024 that human data does not matter that much or more specifically "individual creators or publishers tend to overestimate the value of their specific content". Something along the line RL-Loops are more important.

Hard to square this with that acquisition which seems to be focused on Cursors vast amount of User Data.

At least for now.

pizzafeelsright• 1 month ago

Zuck is correct because the barrier to a large user base is not skill but market share which requires substantial effort, luck, timing, and patience.

Nobody can put a dent into Coca Cola because of their market. Better products exist but there is really no way to compete against $5 billion in marketing allowing them to maintain $50 billion.

Cursor is ~1MM users a day. $60k/per user is high but considering this is a stock buy, Space X "made" $300BN in the first day that is ~20% or one day of positive movement.

For Musk (with his baggage) to create or steer that user base would require a significant investment and time. Why not just slap some coupons from an initial bump to acquire the user base, user experience, and IP?

wxw• 1 month ago

Hm, surprised at all the Cursor hate here. Tab complete, at the quality they delivered, was a game changer back in the day.

And their current work on Composer is great. Composer is super fast and quality is decent. More competition in the model space always welcome.

infecto13• 1 month ago

HN is a hellhole of either AI hate or hype. The fringes on either side are the loudest.

valarauko• 1 month ago

"Back in the day" is the key idea here. It's the valuation that doesn't make sense in today's market. What does Cursor offer to be valued at $60 BILLION? Its models are alright but nowhere near SOTA, and pretty much superseded by open source local models at this point.

zpeti• 1 month ago

Composer 2.5 worked just as well for me as opus 4.6, and was faster and actually worked better for quick bugfixes and reporting back to support. And is much cheaper.

I'm not saying HN should be super supportive of everything, but the level of hate and complete loss of reality for a lot of people is quite sad to see, for a community of supposedly intelligent people.

johnsimer• 1 month ago

I don't know if it's just me, but the thoughtfulness of of the average HN comment has seemed to decrease in the last few years. Feels more populist/Reddity the last couple years.

themeiguoren• 1 month ago

"Back in the day" was... a year ago

bottlepalm• 1 month ago

Can't remember the last time I used AI tab complete; back in the day indeed.

ZeroGravitas• 1 month ago

Is he bailing out an investor he's connected to?

yalogin• 1 month ago

What does cursor have? An ide and coding orchestration? They are using Claude or codex for llms, so they get acquired for their user base and tooling? Feels like a lot of money for that given Claude has the majority mindshare.

infecto13• 1 month ago

People keep saying this but I have yet to find an integrated system that has good tab completion, cheap coding models and works well in an IDE. There are a number of options out there, none of them have captured much market share.

suncemoje5• 1 month ago

Isn't tab completion long dead?

giancarlostoro4• 1 month ago

Zed seems to always suggest decent single-line comments for me, but I don't really use Zed for that that often.

rustystump2• 1 month ago

I dont think so. I strongly prefer cursor over claude code and the composer model is basically unlimited and free also being super fast.

Of all the ai companies out there, anthropic and cursor are the two id invest in.

notarobot123• 1 month ago

What does cursor have?

users

esskay5• 1 month ago

They technically have their own models as well, but they are based on other peoples models.

Most of this is just customers + staff/tech rather than models being acquired. Cursors actually got so much better in the last year. Their composer 2 model (a tweaked version of Kimi K2.5) is decent for day to day mundane tasks and the app can auto switch to more capable models when needed.

connicpu2• 1 month ago

They have a giant pile of data from every customer that didn't disable data retention

theturtletalks• 1 month ago

I keep hearing this but they’ve been bleeding users since Claude Code came out so a bulk of their data is pre-Sonnet 4 and I’m not sure how the data from users prompting weaker models will help them now?

They did use that data to make Composer 2.5 which was decent but still a step back from GPT 5.5 and Opus 4.8. Though it’s really good at UI.

jacobgold2• 1 month ago

Musk bought Cursor for its users (lots of devs still use it), as part of yet another attempt at catching up after building Grok and buying OpenAI failed.

Likely, Cursor becomes Grok Desktop or whatever, and eventually uses xAI's coding model if they can make a competitive one.

pseudosavant2• 1 month ago

The have customers actually willing to use and pay for their service.

In a world where even Microsoft is needing to use AWS for capacity beyond Azure, xAI's utilization of their data centers has been so low that they are renting them out to competitors instead.

Nobody wants Grok. If you aren't using GPT-5 or Claude, you are probably using an open Chinese model like Qwen hosted by some provider.

I would expect Cursor to be forced to use the Grok Code models in short order. We'll see how people feel about "Mecha Hitler" writing their code.

ma2kx• 1 month ago

Look at it the other way: What did Musk get last Friday? $75B from the SpaceX IPO.

It's almost like giving a toddler $100 in the toy department and seeing what happens next.

jstummbillig• 1 month ago

Customers, talent, training data, an increasingly competitive coding model and now a fuckton of compute.

So, you know. Couple of things.

Specially given that coding turns out to not be all that complicated, in the grand scheme of AI things: I don't think it's going take much more advances at the frontier before code writing will be as good as it need to be. At that point Composer (their model) catches up, what, 6 month later and they good.

wernerb• 1 month ago

They have millions of conversations with code prompts and diffs and the user telling them the model is taking a wrong turn. This is quite valuable data that is probably already used to tweak Kimi code (composer 2). Moreover they have quite the enterprise client base that I suspect at least a portion of which will jump ship with the acquisition.

osigurdson• 1 month ago

Are people still using Cursor? I haven't in at least a year but perhaps I'm in the minority.

maerF0x0• 1 month ago

Yes. I like it for small fixes, specifying exact code ranges i want touched, and for asking questions because it links me to the code so I can read it.

I use Claude more for greenfield feature building where I dont need to surgically dig in and view existing code specifics.

esskay5• 1 month ago

Yup still got it due to paying for a year up front, its still very decent, especially the newer composer 2.5 model, it's cheap and has a ton of usage included so works well as a general day to day tool.

nilirl• 1 month ago

Does that mean all of the co-founders would become billionaires? And they're, what, like 20 year olds?

And I'm here trying to get something to make a $1000 per month. What a world.

peterspath2• 1 month ago

Good hopefully Grok Build gets better and they start to innovate in this area. Claude Code and ChatGPT need more competition. So that they also innovate more.

tim-tday• 1 month ago

Anyone recommend an alternatives? For no particular reason I’m canceling my cursor subscription today.

jjcm• 1 month ago

If you want something price-competitive with composer 2.5, deepseek pro is very cost-effective. Just rig it up in opencode via openrouter.

behnamoh• 1 month ago

Don't use OpenRouter, the company is a shitty middle man. Use DeepSeek API directly.

winter_blue2• 1 month ago

Composer 2.5 is very heavily discounted with a Cursor subscription. You effectively pay 2% of the API price of Composer 2.5 Fast with a subscription.

Does Deepseek offer any discounted tokens subscription like that?

iconicBark• 1 month ago

Completely valid way to sign out!

samtp2• 1 month ago

I've been really liking the Cline extension in VS Code

anderber• 1 month ago

Opencode with an Opencode Go subscription is a great deal.

verdverm• 1 month ago

Second this

yoyohello136• 1 month ago

Check out zed

SwellJoe• 1 month ago

Everyone I work with who used Cursor stopped using Cursor when Claude Code came along. They're back to their regular IDE when the need to read code, or they just review it at PR time. I never used Cursor, but Zed is my favorite editor with an agent. It can use Claude Code, among other CLIs, via ACP, so you can use rolling subscription tokens, or it can use OpenRouter or others if you want a broad spectrum of models. And it's crazy fast. It used to be that Copilot Pro was the best deal on agentic coding with several models from several vendors available, but they've really nerfed it, with uselessly restrictive token budgets and only older models are now available from the major labs. These days, might as well just have a Claude or Codex subscription and use the CLI with ACP in whatever editor you prefer.

bilalq• 1 month ago

What are the alternatives to Graphite these days? Github's stacked PR support is still immature, AFAIK. I would love to see Linear move into this space and start offering both git hosting and stacked PR management.

atombender• 1 month ago

My team uses git-spice [1], which is client-side only and works just as well as Graphite.

Aviator [2] is also good, and they have a hosted UI with merge queue support as well.

[1] https://github.com/abhinav/git-spice

[2] https://github.com/aviator-co/av

Rapzid2• 1 month ago

Nothing is a fantastic alternative. Graphite is an incredible amount of "extra" for a team that just communicates and knows how to use git..

0110001110• 1 month ago

I stopped using Cursor when I started getting comfortable with Codex/Claude. Cursor is just annoying with the constant popups and it's just not as good. Now my workflow is to use my normal editor, add a todo describing what I want, and then ask Codex+gpt-5.5 to implement it. It absolutely nails it. Using codex is so much more like working with a partner vs the noise and annoyance of Cursor.

That said, I think we're in a narrow window of time right now where any of this matters. Prompt "engineering" and working around your tools will be over in a year or so.

Fwiw I am a c/c++ systems engineer. I think anyone mentioning anecdotal experience like this should clarify. Maybe frontend JavaScript folks have a totally different take and that's expected.

infecto13• 1 month ago

I like your take and think the key takeaway is that there is no single answer for everyone. It’s like eMacs vs vim.

My one question is what popups exist in cursor? It is my daily driver and I cannot recall any popups.

ryukoposting• 1 month ago

I like cursor, but I'm assuming they're talking about how it hijacks your tab key. It's amazing when it works, and infuriating when I just want to insert a damn tab!

0110001110• 1 month ago

The code suggestions. It's highly distracting and pulls me out of my flow. I know how to code and I don't mind typing. I don't need AI making trivial suggestions. I want it to do exactly what I tell it to do.

tombert• 1 month ago

Same.

When I first used Cursor, I hadn't used any of the "Vibe Code" tools out there, so it was pretty neat to have an assistant directly tied to the editor.

Once I learned how to use Codex, I just used a tmux split with NeoVim and have the effect I wanted. I haven't felt compelled to use Cursor at work since.

devin2• 1 month ago

What are you saying is going to be over in a year or so?

jw1224• 1 month ago

Not OP, but I generally agree. Models are powerful enough now to reliably instruct other models. They don’t need fancy tools or IDEs, just the command line.

With deterministic workflows, type-safe languages and test suites, agentic loops pretty much “can’t fail”. They will continue until the types resolve, the tests pass, and the project requirements are deterministically met.

By that point it’s literally just a case of typing a prompt in to a text field, and waiting.

0110001110• 1 month ago

Right now I think there is an edge to how you construct prompts and config files. There is a large difference between "modify f() to do..." and "modify f() to do... Review the current variables and make sure they are still used consistent with their naming. Look for unreachable and dead code. Examine callers and called functions for side effects from the introduced changes...".

I don't think that will make much difference in a year.

whstl3• 1 month ago

Cursor also seems to be doing something with the Claude models that makes it way slower and less efficient as times goes by.

Or it could be just Claude CLI doing something very well.

FlamingMoe• 1 month ago

My experience exactly... minus c++

Fiahil• 1 month ago

Oh, you should try OpenSpec !

mrnaught• 1 month ago

> Fwiw I am a c/c++ systems engineer. I think anyone mentioning anecdotal experience like this should clarify. Maybe frontend JavaScript folks have a totally different take and that's expected.

Similar experience, having transitioned from full-stack to a dedicated C/C++ stack, learned/experienced firsthand that there is no one-size-fits-all tool.

sergiotapia• 1 month ago

On the flipside, I enjoy Cursor now and came back to it after leaving it over a year ago. The 2.5 model is fast as hell and very good. And whatever harness they have it's terrific, great results. I also really enjoy the fact that I can open my website in the Cursor in-app browser and just click and reference stuff. It's a really cracked workflow. The models can only get better for them.

chasd002• 1 month ago

I can open my website in the Cursor in-app browser and just click and reference stuff.

I’ve never used cursor and have only seen it in a couple work lunch and learn demos. I’ve never seen that feature. I have a lot of use cases where I’m asking cc to move a widget down a little bit or make a data table full width etc. Being able to reference the actual UI would be useful.

jr35923• 1 month ago

I would also add that Cursor's "Debug" harness is incredible. Hit "Tab" in the AI editor to Tab through the options (Plan, Multitask, Ask, etc.)

If you do any kind of on-device work, it will spin up a local HTTP log server, and pipe logs from your real device (phone, hardware, etc.) to the server and do realtime debugging.

Claude will mostly guess, have you copy + paste logs, etc.

zzleeper• 1 month ago

Same path as you. Went from $60 cursor plan (often exceeding it which costed more in API) to a limitless $100 codex plan where I basically say "read the markdown and implement the instructions". Deepseek also works quite well, surprisingly!

(FWIW Im mostly using python for OCR, LLM calls, data analysis..)

ieie3366• 1 month ago

Yep in my experience the weakest engs in my org are the ones still using Cursor. not a good outlook IMO

Jcampuzano24• 1 month ago

I know this is not always true. But the same people who like cursor still are the same people who are less familiar with the terminal.

And I don't know what it is but it feels the less familiar you are with a terminal, the less skilled you tend to be.

Definitely not a 100% case. But has been common in my experience

jwilber• 1 month ago

I don’t think mapping tooling to ability makes sense here, particularly when the “advanced” tools here just abstract more away, though I agree that Cursor is terrible. So many useless windows.

mrits• 1 month ago

I hate to be the one to break it to you but the weakest engineers are going to be producing just as much value

digitaltrees17• 1 month ago

Opposite. The weakest engineers trust CC or codex, stopped reviewing the code and push slop PRs. Those still acting in the loop move faster with better architecture and coding patterns and aren't losing their skills.

interestpiqued3• 1 month ago

You must be a joy to work with.

hparadiz• 1 month ago

I recently made an npm package with a small C helper that runs in the background. The JS/TS code is 99.9% unit test covered and for sure "cleaner" code. Just my opinion though.

baq3• 1 month ago

the reason to use cursor nowadays isn't the IDE (though it's helpful perhaps once a week), but how it makes running models from multiple providers trivial out of the box. I don't have to juggle keys or drop to a shell tool call, it supports calling out to e.g. gemini in a subagent natively. I have multiple models cross-reviewing plans and diffs as a matter of course.

claude code was seriously annoying with the flickering, maybe it's fixed now, I don't know.

cursor also has a (bad) cli if you need it, it seems it's mostly used to setup remote agents, but it does the job in a pinch.

stavros2• 1 month ago

OpenCode and Pi do those things as well, and without a whole annoying IDE bundled in.

loufe• 1 month ago

For what it's worth, flickering in CC has been fixed since around the beginning of the year.

redox992• 1 month ago

I also work with C++, and I use Codex (desktop) which writes 99.99% of my code, plus Visual Studio, which is nice for reading and navigating code. For webdev I do VSCode + Codex.

I started with Cursor back in the day, but switched to Claude Code and then Codex when Cursor got too expensive.

If price wasn't an issue, maybe I'd prefer Cursor only because I can easily switch between models. But that's it. I always disliked the "accept/reject" workflow in cursor, but that's probably optional nowadays I guess?

digitaltrees17• 1 month ago

I love the accept reject flow because I still constantly have to stop AI models from writing awful architecture or reimplementing code we already wrote elsewhere

echelon• 1 month ago

Fable makes any IDE AI integration almost entirely unnecessary. Claude one shots pretty much everything, and fixing any small errors is easier when just talking to Claude again.

Anthropic is going to offer better pricing using their agentic harness. Why pay more for less?

An IDE at this point is best as a tool for code review. They need to start building better code review tools.

risyachka2• 1 month ago

Cursors target users are not developers but casual vibe coders.

simondotau6• 1 month ago

Literally the opposite is true. Being a text editor at its core, and by spending a lot of effort refining the human-AI pair programming experience, Cursor makes sense for someone who wants to lead code development with AI being a speed multiplier and a team member.

Tools like CC are best suited to vibe coding.

jmuguy• 1 month ago

I think I'm late to the party with cursor but I don't use it as an editor at all, I keep VS Code open on another screen for that. All I do in there is agent sessions. I would be open to something else but all the comparisons I see are out of date and talk about the IDE a lot.

sanderjd6• 1 month ago

The comparison is with Claude Code and codex (and open harnesses like opencode and Pi). IMO they are both better, if you aren't interested in the IDE functionality.

ghshephard11• 1 month ago

I use cursor 8+ hours/day at work, and have full (and effectively unlimited) access to Claude Code and Codex - tools which I also use personally. I suspect that your "constant popups" were when you were using the editor - a mode that I'll confess I haven't touched in 3+ months.

Workflow in Cursor is actually awesome - I'm a little outdated in how I use it - I still establish goals/objectives, rather than managing the loop which does so - but if you can think broadly enough - I find it's pretty efficient.

Key things I like about Cursor (and I recognize I'm dating myself a bit here): - Plan Mode is really solid - I shift-tab, have it go create the plan using whatever insanely expensive SOTA model is available - I will usually spend 5-10 minutes on the Plan - review it, maybe even tweak it a little. (though 90% of the time it's fine out of the gate)

  - Ability to select any model for every task - I'll switch between Opus 4.8 High/xHigh/...  I'll even switch to 1M context for the planning phase upfront.   

  - It does an *excellent* job managing permissions and looping the agents and spinning up sub-agents for you - you set the goal, run the plan mode - and then let it churn for however long is required - pretty common to have a 30-45 minute run and come back to a fully created/tested product.

The nice thing about Cursor (and honestly Claude Code, Codex) - there isn't really any "prompt engineering" involved. You just say, "Go Build me x - it should have y,z features - and build it in golang for me" - and that's it - the 3-4 page Plan comes back - usually pretty credible - and then you click "build.".

UncleOxidant4• 1 month ago

But what's the $60B differentiator here? There are so many similar tools out there. I generally use Opencode, but also Claude code, antigravity and sometimes Kilo code on VS Studio. How can cursor be worth even 10% of 60B?

flyingcircus3• 1 month ago

There is most certainly still prompt engineering involved. How there can be both the responsivity to different cues like "plan this", "write this", "analyze this", "defend this", "poke holes in this", but not responsivity to the various terminology you provide in your explanations of "this", where to get information about specs/standards/requirements, what details I care about, and therefore can't compromise on, vs what details I'm willing to accept whatever the top reddit post from 4 years ago recommends.

I don't see how these systems can have the ability to be effectively expressive about all of the minutia, and not have all of the various different possible expressions lead to vastly different outcomes.

embedding-shape• 1 month ago

there isn't really any "prompt engineering" involved

You should make an experiment; take someone who never used any LLMs or agents, and tell them to use it for the first time in front of you, and tell them to build something like a calculator program or whatnot. Bonus points if they're ICs or at least not-managers.

I think there is a lot us engineers take for granted, when it comes to communicating via text, how to state things clearly and what we think/reason when we read things. A lot of people don't have those "skills" innate, and the first time they use LLMs, they basically don't know how to interact with them, until they realize what they're able to do and not. Then they also learn what to say to steer the model into the right way, this is quite literally a "prompt engineering" skill they're now learning.

davedx• 1 month ago

But that sounds like the same workflow as Codex or Claude, except Cursor is only a harness without its own model? (Or do they have their own model?)

0110001110• 1 month ago

Yes, I tried to use Cursor as an editor. Terrible idea in hindsight.

So your workflow now looks like mine except I prefer a different editor and only use the latest and greatest model so Cursor basically offers nothing over Codex.

I disagree about prompt engineering, but it's one of those things that probably varies because of what language you use, what problems you solve, and the degree to which you care about the output. Unless I'm writing tests, I keep AI on a very short leash because I'm writing critical code used by a very large number of users. I have noticed big differences in output quality depending on how I steer AI. Without steering, it will happily leave in dead code, change the use of variables so they need to be renamed, assume or fail to assume invariants, etc. As I said in another comment, I think we won't need to do that for very much longer, but right now it seems essential.

gigatexal3• 1 month ago

I think I do this with Claude every day. I don’t see why I need to pay for cursor to get this too.

kopirgan• 1 month ago

Not trying to be funny but seriously, if these tools can produce a tested 'product' in 45m, shouldn't we be seeing millions of them out there? I mean how far are we from a fully AI built Oracle ERP or even a notepad or helix?

sramam• 1 month ago

Key things I like about Cursor (and I recognize I'm dating myself a bit here)

What a world we live in - "dating oneself" is measured in weeks/months! :)

hackermanai3• 1 month ago

You just say, "Go Build me x - it should have y,z features - and build it in golang for me" - and that's it - the 3-4 page Plan comes back - usually pretty credible - and then you click "build.".

What you're describing seems like a workflow for building toys only. There's currently no reality in which someone would actually know what the y,z features are before making them. A plan generated in 5min would likely suggest a suboptimal solution compared to what a good solution would look like (which might take a year or two to figure out, for a human, so still a week or so for SOTA models if at all possible). Building something in golang is cute, but hard to be convinced until more novel applications are being generated from prompts.

The data submitted by Cursor's users tho, that seems to be very valuable.

storus• 1 month ago

Dunno, Cursor's agents are now more-less equal to Claude Code, just the workflow is slightly different. I like the IDE integration for some projects, allowing me to quickly inspect/review/change/search code, while running Claude Code/Codex/OpenCode/Pi/Hermes on different projects often with local models and it's mostly a question about your personal development style instead of inherent tool capabilities.

templar_snow• 1 month ago

Same.

kensai• 1 month ago

"Prompt "engineering" and working around your tools will be over in a year or so."

What do you mean by that? What is happening in just over a year or so?

arglebarnacle• 1 month ago

The models are getting better at agentic coding, so over time using complicated harnesses and precise prompt engineering to attempt to squeeze out an extra X% performance will become irrelevant as the models approach expert-level performance. The bitter lesson in miniature.

aenis4• 1 month ago

I think Fable gave a bit of a sneak peek into the future.

My objective KPI: for the few days I was using Fable (18hr a day), it would frequently push back against my design ideas and propose alternatives -- and they almost always felt better to me. Back to Opus now, still 18hr days - and I dont think it disagreed with me meaningfully even once since Saturdy. I consider myself and old hand -- and i think Fable really didn't need me to be very specific in my prompts, it would have done a good job regardless, or even despite my prompting.

Of course whether this is the future is anyone's guess. Maybe we will experience a butlerian jihad and there won't be any prompting whatsoever for completely different reasons :-)

rob742• 1 month ago

It is possible to use Cursor via ACP, so you can use it in any editor that supports ACP (notably the JetBrains IDEs). Our company went all in with Cursor and at the same time centrally disabled the AI functionality of JetBrains IDEs, but a pretty large group of developers (me included) were so vocal about wanting to continue to use our "old" IDEs that IT eventually relented and enabled the plugins needed to support Cursor.

ozim5• 1 month ago

You know you can open the same project in cursor so agent does its own stuff and then opens JetBrains IDE to do your code navigation etc. ?

I am pissed off by people calling Cursor an IDE … Cursor is text editor with AI agents bolted on. I still like what agents do and how the context is managed in Cursor but it is far far away from proper IDE.

sanp• 1 month ago

Could you clarify what you mean by “…will be over in a year or so”. Genuine question. Is it that models will be so good that none of this matters or we will need to go back to older ways?

nurumaik• 1 month ago

Also C++ engineer, but from my perspective, for large tasks, agentic coding is still lacking no matter how well I describe desired output. So in that cases I fall back to manual coding and cursor tab helps a lot with boring parts

0110001110• 1 month ago

Define "large tasks".

I actually don't let AI take on large tasks beyond test writing and refactoring helper scripts/utils. I keep it on a very short leash for driver/middleware code since the quality bar needs to be extremely high for our codebase. Up until recently I didn't even trust it for that, but some experiments show it's fairly good and even detected issues outside of the refactored functions which I did let it touch. This is with a good amount of 'thought engineering' though where I try to think hard about how to emphasize certain factors and define the problem as best I can.

mikestorrent3• 1 month ago

Companies with large C/C++ codebases should sell AI companies the right to train on their code for $$.

marcuschong• 1 month ago

It's curious that the person claiming LLMs will soon skip code entirely and go straight to binary is willing to spend $60bn on Cursor.

zs234465234165• 1 month ago

I’m sure he has a good reason

mintflow• 1 month ago

As previously C system programmer, I barely use IDE, cli agent for coding and desktop codex for various non coding tasks. Nowadays settled to codex/gpt5.5 and it does really good job

tejohnso• 1 month ago

Also using codex as a full time partner these days. What do you think happens in a year or so that changes the way it works around the tools? It becomes the only tool we interact with, and it assumes control over the others?

matsemann• 1 month ago

Cursor is mostly no longer an editor. By default it now opens an agent window only, you have to click a few buttons to actually edit files yourself.

yieldcrv2• 1 month ago

multiple organizations I contract with have killed their cursor enterprise plans over the past several weeks

to me, this seems like the perfect time for Cursor to exit and even "Q3 completion" is too late. Deal just needs to close. Fortunately Q3 completion could mean July 1st too

port112• 1 month ago

Composer is fairly decent. Many people aren’t in the market for an IDE — and a subpar one at that —, but they could sell API access to Composer itself.

presentation• 1 month ago

I primarily use Cursor, compared against Claude and haven't used Codex before - to me the benefits:

- Composer 2.5 is cheap, fast, and very effective; I don't even use other models that much anymore, as it's usually marginally better for way more cost, though sometimes I do for specific things like making better translations for our app than a coding-specific model could normally output

- It makes setting up and maintaining Cloud Agents super easy, the agent can basically set up itself and if anything changes that makes it not update properly, then it tells you and can fix itself easily

- Easy to move agents from remotely in the cloud to local and vice versa

- Easy to work with agents via either comments on GitHub, or via the web app on my phone (though it is relatively constrained relative to the actual desktop UI, which is a bummer)

- Code reviews with Bugbot is surprisingly good now vs when it first came out, as is the Security Agent, while being an order of magnitude cheaper than stuff like Claude reviews

- Automations are easy to configure and manage - crons, in response to repo events, etc. For example I don't use Renovate or Dependabot much anymore since LLMs can update deps and investigate subtle breaking changes much better than a dumb version bump script can

- Limits are obvious rather than Anthropic's mysterious quota amount that they don't explain at all

- Queueing up messages rather than the agent taking in new messages mid-work and then trying to mesh them together somehow - I find queueing much more predictable and easier to work with

- Plan mode is good too, but not particularly different than any other agent

- Easy to jump into the Editor view and actually go in and manually code things or interactively code with the LLM when you need to, since sometimes LLMs just suck at doing certain things autonomously. I'm not in the "stop coding bro" camp, I still like to take the wheel fairly often.

jemmyw• 1 month ago

I didn't like cursor when it first came about but now I use it for my personal projects. The plan is good value for accessing different sota models occasionally for planning. Composer is actually really good, and fast.

I'm not sure if it's because my personal projects are small enough I know them inside out and my work project is huge, but I prefer terminal code agents for day work over ide integration.

pdantix• 1 month ago

i moved all my AI coding over to claude code when claude 4 came out, but kept cursor for the tab complete. since opus 4.5 i haven't really needed the tab complete so i canceled my cursor sub 6 months ago.

switched back to vscode so i'm not exposed to the potential mess that is openvsx too. trying to get used to zed but i'm just so used to vscode

anshumankmr• 1 month ago

That said, I think we're in a narrow window of time right now where any of this matters. Prompt "engineering" and working around your tools will be over in a year or so.

How so?

Alifatisk• 1 month ago

A space company is buying an IDE for roughly the cost to build 150 of world's most expensive modern hospitals [1]. How is this in SpaceX's interest? Isn't it kinda bizarre that Elon is pivoting SpaceX to something else?

1. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/16/spacex-spcx-cursor-acquisiti...

RIMR2• 1 month ago

Elon is consolidating all of his property into one single megacorporation because he is confident that nobody will ever challenge this, given the current political direction of the United States.

dvt2• 1 month ago

the current political direction of the United States

These kinds of comments reek echo-chamber parroting and zero substantive research. As someone that very much enjoys and carefully follows politics, the current political direction points squarely to Republicans getting absolutely pummelled in the midterms, effectively turning Trump's administration into a 2-year lame duck. What are you even talking about?

tgma• 1 month ago

I mean, the answer is obvious if you do not deliberately try to put a message in the worst light possible:

- "Space company" has a major LLM+datacenter business called X.ai.

- LLM for coding is a big business, as you can see from trillion dollar valuations of Anthropic.

- Cursor is popular and gives you a headstart on the business.

- Instagram was bought for the price of many many hospitals. Uber is more valuable than companies owning the cars. Different business models, entirely different valuation models. Not sure what that comparison entails. You know it. I know it.

Whether it is a good purchase or not, we may not know, but we know your characterization is just outright dismissal without much rationale behind it.

yieldcrv2• 1 month ago

SpaceX’s interest is being an Enterprise AI corporation, they identified it as a $24 trillion addressable market, in comparison to their quarter trillion rocket related one

It’s all disclosed in the S-1, you read it right?

In America all you have to do is tell potential investors what you’re doing, its up to the people to use their discretion afterwards

jmintz• 1 month ago

is spacex a space company? I thought they were an internet provider that wants to use their strategic advantages to get into AI including AI infra like data centers.

munk-a6• 1 month ago

SpaceX and everything Elon are stock companies - they're Microstrategy but with a veneer of a real business slapped on top.

two_handfuls2• 1 month ago

SpaceX since the IPO is an AI company with two side projects: social networks and space.

I say this based on their filing which says that the vast majority of predicted profits will come from their AI company, citing a $36.5T total addressable market.

mikeryan• 1 month ago

It’s all in a stock that may very well be near its zenith when this closes (or maybe not. This is so far past fundamentals it’s impossible to tell).

They’re spending Monopoly money.

It also seems like SpaceX is poised to Hoover up all of Elons companies so it’s might not be “just a space company” for long.

munk-a6• 1 month ago

Elon's award is tied to growing Tesla's market cap - it's pretty transparent that he's just trying to ball-of-mud together everything he can to hit that target and grab the bag.

0xffff2• 1 month ago

The company that just IPOed is already overwhelmingly "X AI" financially, regardless of the fact that it says "Space X" in the marketing. Whether SpaceX also buys Tesla is hardly even going to move the needle.

cryptos2• 1 month ago

Everything will be folded in "X" eventually, anyway.

joering2• 1 month ago

It’s all in a stock that may very well be near its zenith when this closes

No, it is not. This is not legal or financial advice, but I believe the stock could easily rise 2.5x - not because of its current or future financial condition, but because it is run by what may be the most skilled fraudster our planet has ever breed. Charles Ponzi himself couldn't have pulled this off. While most CEOs are careful about what they publicly say or "predict," Musk's companies are fueled by increasingly fantastical projections. The consequences have amounted to some $1.5 million in SEC fines that, relative to the value created, were negligible - and that was under the previous administration. The current one won't be any more aggressive. The closest comparison I can think of is Trevor Milton and his famous "electric" truck that was filmed rolling downhill under its own momentum. He went to prison for that, although he was later pardoned by Trump. Many people have lost fortunes betting against Tesla based on fundamentals. SpaceX's shareholder list includes so many influential and powerful names, including people closely connected to the current administration, that I find it hard to imagine the stock being allowed to fail in any meaningful percentage. Obviously I'm exaggerating when I say the government would send agents door-to-door to collect valuables from American households to plug any hole in the balance sheet before allowing the stock to fall significantly. But that's honestly closer to how protected I think the company is than what traditional financial analysis would suggest. I'm nobody special, just someone with about $1.8 million in a stock portfolio. Yet this thing called SpaceX stock gives ordinary investors like me a chance to ride alongside the biggest players on their way to even larger fortunes. They are guaranteed not to lose money, and to me its not personal.

madaxe_again• 1 month ago

Yup - given that it’s $60bn of stock, now is an excellent time to do it, as the current valuation isn’t even irrational. And I say that as someone who believes they have great long term prospects.

HerbManic2• 1 month ago

Yep, bundle it all together, rename the whole company X (for added confusion), get a few final pay outs in the hundred of billions if not trillions and then Elon flees to Argentina as the whole house of cards crumbles.

locknitpicker• 1 month ago

They’re spending Monopoly money.

They also seem to be desperate to buy their way into a monopoly, even though the company itself has a long track record of failing to deliver anything noteworthy.

AbstractH245• 1 month ago

Stock that may very well be near its zenith when this closes (or maybe not. This is so far past fundamentals it’s impossible to tell).

Nah, not in a bubble or anything at all.

frde_me4• 1 month ago

Calling it an IDE is under-representing cursor

They have in-house models, and the data to train even more powerful ones. The cursor team is a proper AI lab.

tomrod• 1 month ago

Meh. On an outcomes analysis, I've found Cursor's delivery to be exceptionally weak.

Good luck to the alt-economy of SpaceTesla though, may all our 401ks survive.

airstrike3• 1 month ago

Isn't their in-house model just Kimi?

oompydoompy74• 1 month ago

Their “in house models” are reportedly basically just Kimi.

CamperBob2• 1 month ago

They use Kimi and post-train it on the same stuff that anyone with a Github dump can feed it. They aren't doing anything that you can't do yourself.

stymaar3• 1 month ago

Calling it an IDE is under-representing cursor

On the contrary, it's over selling it: it's a not even a stand-alone IDE (like Zed, for instance) it's a mere fork of VSCode.

tanseydavid• 1 month ago

This Cold Fusion vid covers the "pivot" nicely.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPIGu0anfAE

The video explains that it is spelled out in the prospectus that SpaceX is counting 70%-80% of their total addressable market to be AI related and only about 7%-8% to be space-related.

andruby7• 1 month ago

I saw that too, and it's so depressing. SpaceX was pushing the envelope of "interplanetary" travel/species, and to see it being reduced to a 7-8% "side-quest" :-(

swatcoder• 1 month ago

With its IPO, SpaceX secured its role as the vehicle for consolidating Musk's vanity businesses into one closely held public organization that can more easily convert publicity into investment and internally reallocate funds and debts based on his personal whims.

So yes, SpaceX is pivoting, but it's to no one's surprise.

chrisgd• 1 month ago

So buy $TSLA is your recommendation

ctdinjeu7• 1 month ago

Didn’t you see Moon? They need a Gerdy

modeless2• 1 month ago

Cursor's edit data is invaluable to anyone who wants to train a coding model. Probably the best data available outside Anthropic and OpenAI. Coding models are seen by the leaders in AI as both the biggest current revenue opportunity and the best way to accelerate the progress of AI and bring about recursive self-improvement that will create superintelligence. So yeah, it's easy to see how SpaceX could see it as in their interest to purchase Cursor with 2% of their equity.

Mars was never going to happen without revenue. Starlink is providing revenue but probably not enough to build a whole city on Mars within our lifetimes. SpaceX needs more and AI is the only near-term way.

throw3108225• 1 month ago

Cursor's edit data is invaluable to anyone who wants to train a coding model.

Ok. So what prevents a company from offering a Claude Code/ Cursor equivalent, with 100% subsidised Claude (= 100% free), capturing the exact same data that Cursor does? If the data is worth in the tens of billions, the cost of subsidising the usage is negligible.

devops000• 1 month ago

They are buying it with overvalued stocks, so it isn't real money. Probably the Cursor team will be able to sell it when the SpaceX stocks will be already crashed.

munk-a6• 1 month ago

If only the shareholders had any kind of voice - if only it was illegal to issue a fake IPO where you sell an overwhelming number of shares stripped of their voting power - if only the market responded rationally to this boondoggle.

If we're going to right the ship in turn of common sense a bunch of people need to lose a bunch of money, I just hope it doesn't mostly hit passive investors and instead lands mostly on Elon-stans.

verzali2• 1 month ago

I suppose they kind of do, they could sell the stock and drive the price down. That wouldn't force Musk to change direction, but it would hurt his wealth.

over_bridge• 1 month ago

How is it legal to have different share classes? You could make 100 shares that can vote and then sell 99.9% of the company while maintaining full control. Seems strongly against the spirit of a publicly traded company

CrimsonRain• 1 month ago

If only you there were companies who could choose which type of shares they'd like to offer...and if only people could buy the types they want from the company that aligns with their ideas...

Passive "investors" can go and invest in ETF or whatever else that does not include company shares without voting rights.

drewda• 1 month ago

The total addressable market (TAM) for SpaceX is finite. There are only so many nation-states and large corporations that want to launch payloads into orbit.

And even if their internet service provider is uniquely capable for now, it only fills a strategic need for certain customers.

So instead, Musk and Co. need to find bubbling market trends that look like they will have huge gigantic TAMs to justify the potential growth of this company.

joshuastuden• 1 month ago

SpaceX also wants to put data centers in space. That's the big market for SpaceX and how it ties into AI.

bg24• 1 month ago

Space Opportunities + Robots (Tesla merger when it happens) + Software factory (Cursor).

It is a umbrella enterprise.

dotwaffle4• 1 month ago

All markets are finite. But you're thinking too finitely -- remember that there was a proposal to use Starship (BFS?) as a point-to-point method of people transport too (London to Sydney in under 50 minutes I seem to remember).

You also have other services: Starlink is an obvious one they're pursuing now, but there's many other things that they could branch into with no effective competition right now, from harvesting resources such as Helium-3 to Rare Earths (ironic name), to... (thinks for several minutes) banishing people to the Phantom Zone?

But you get what I mean, it's not just about rockets, it's about the things cheap and reliable rocketry enables.

TiredOfLife• 1 month ago

Last week a 13 year old video of ceo of Ariane Airspace got popular on twitter. When asked about spacex and reusable rockets he said: "there are only 25 satellites launched a year, every year, and that’s not going to change"

Currently a single Starlink launch is 25 satellites. And there are 100 such launches a year.

a34729t2• 1 month ago

Musk would argue infinite. They literally want to create offworld colonies, with everything that entails. Obviously it's crazy, but it beats the pants off more adtech.

I'm bullish on DC in space with laser links. The whole sentient sun/railgun on the moon... hey, go big or go home. I would have probably just asked MBS for money on that one, and renamed the railgun "the line (of ketamine)".

ransom1538• 1 month ago

A global centralized internet provider? I mean, just that, might be a trillion dollar company. Let alone build out datacenters? Those are not easy or cheap here on earth. You can build out datacenters at scale with minimal need for power or cooling. I think the current rate for a data center (not gpu) is 120million. Datacenters are super hip now too.

chatmasta• 1 month ago

Is the TAM for airlines finite? They ship an indefinitely growing volume of cargo and people. Reusable rockets will be no different. Cargo into space, people in point-to-point orbital flights and to Mars.

alooPotato• 1 month ago

Not a sound argument because you would have said the same thing before they did Starlink. "The TAM for launch services is finite. There are only so many countries/companies that want to launch satellites."

ignoramous• 1 month ago

bizarre that Elon is pivoting SpaceX to something else

  SPACx designs, manufactures, and launches the world's most advanced ponzis on pyramids. The company will be re-founded every year by Xlon Tusk to revolutionize capitalism, with the ultimate goal of making market multilevel. 

  spacX has gained VC attention for a series of web3 milestones: It is the only AI company ever to run a 1000B-A3000-Thinkkking on low-Cost toasters, which it first accomplished in May 1945. Grokipedia made history again when its ClosedAI attached to Moonshot Kimi, exchanged token payloads, and returned Alignment to money — a deeply challenging feat previously accomplished only by Cursor 60B. Since then it has distilled cargo to and from Moonshot multiple times, providing regular RL missions for Goog.

sharts• 1 month ago

Gotta pump that stock price with constant news buzz

outside12342• 1 month ago

SpaceX is just a vibe company. Nothing they are doing makes sense on a valuation basis, which their investors are eventually going to painfully figure out.

smileson22• 1 month ago

I’m worried all this crap will distract and damage the things they are great at (rockets) similar to what happened to Tesla where outside the stock price it’s pretty dismal

y22444• 1 month ago

Like Tesla the stock is held by many powerful and rich people.

Elon is smart and doesn't buy things alone, he brings in many people so they all have a interest to protect their investment.

red-iron-pine• 1 month ago

yeah but someone -- no one has explained who -- still thinks this is a good idea

toephu2• 1 month ago

Why are you comparing it to building expensive modern hospitals? Why don't you compare every other tech acquisition to that? because that's not a relevant comparison, and building expensive modern hospitals has nothing to do with the goal of for-profit corporations.

SpaceX has 3 major businesses: Space, Starlink, and AI.

This acquisition helps with the 3rd one.

grokcodec2• 1 month ago

They compared the acquisition to hospitals because "think of the children!"

hadlock• 1 month ago

This is the same straw man argument of "country Z has N homeless/unhoused people, why are they building a space/military/education widget for $Y price, when they haven't found homes for N unhoused people yet?"

petre• 1 month ago

How is buying a company sending messages on the Internet for $45b in the owner's interest when Westinghouse, who built nuclear reactors sold for under $10b? The market is irrational.

throwaway152321• 1 month ago

It might not be irrational if there is more revenue in people who are willing to spend money on internet messages than there are on those willing to spend for nuclear reactors.

Ray202• 1 month ago

I think it has something to do with the fact that the first company is better at spreading messages on the Internet than the other at building reactors.

risyachka2• 1 month ago

Smart move as they will pay in stock, and if stock is overvalued by 2x this means you get 50% discount

FuriouslyAdrift• 1 month ago

xAI is a subsidiary of SpaceX and runs several of the worlds largest compute datacenters.

tencentshill• 1 month ago

Tesla isn't a car company anymore either.

chasd002• 1 month ago

It’s not real money, there’s no check being written for that amount and then deposited into someone’s bank account.

sva_• 1 month ago

all-stock deal

It's not like they could easily cash out all of those $60B. I always find it troublesome that we generally conflate cash with stonks, market caps, and such.

stymaar3• 1 month ago

It's not like they could easily cash out all of those $60B.

They probably have a vesting period of some sort (as they would with cash as well) but beyond that they will definitely be able to cash out all of their money as soon as they are allowed to.

$60B is 3% of SpaceX at today's valuation, Musk had no issue selling this amount of Tesla shares to buy Twitter. The idea that stocks are somehow not liquid is an nonsensical urban legend.

slashdave• 1 month ago

Might be a play for talent. Recruiting in this space is hard... and expensive

cromka• 1 month ago

50 billion worth of talent?

iamtheworstdev• 1 month ago

when you see the list of major investors in Cursor that will never break even if it stays independent, and compare it to the investors in SpaceX, it all makes sense.

grim_io4• 1 month ago

It is crazy that a company like SpaceX was allowed to exist.

The whole big tech industry needs Microsoft/MSN style breakups again.

digitaltrees17• 1 month ago

Because cursor gets some of the highest quality training data from the world's programmers and responses from the full ecosystem of model vendors and access to active code bases. XAI wants the data.

anukin• 1 month ago

Highest is extremely subjective in case of cursor. It’s not exactly used by the experienced programmers and caters mainly to neophytes

bdamm• 1 month ago

Ah hah, this is it. I was also confused - the tool isn't the thing. It's the behavior analysis capability.

wuliwong• 1 month ago

XAi is part of SpaceX.

scotty792• 1 month ago

Please don't let Musk know that his money can be used for the real world, mundane stuff.

Because he will buy 150 hospitals and drive them to ruin, private equity style.

We are way better off when he pays abstract amounts of it for abstract stuff to some random nerds and grifters.

His money is not a resource that could be put to any good use. It's a liability for all of us.

MangoCoffee2• 1 month ago

One of the things that makes @SpaceX so valuable is how valuable it is. The Cursor acquisition costs materially less in dilution because of SpaceX’s high valuation.

https://x.com/BillAckman/status/2066866144154161555?s=20

gwbas1c• 1 month ago

Space exploration requires significant software development.

Take a look at the Apollo 11 movie: There was quite significant computing power for the 1960s putting a person on the moon.

ursuscamp• 1 month ago

SpaceX is planning to do data centers in orbit. Engineering issues aside, that might dovetail with Cursor nicely if timings work out.

dgellow3• 1 month ago

I cannot believe full grown adult are taking that seriously

WheatMillington• 1 month ago

Why do you think it's a space company? SpaceX didn't even define ITSELF as a space company in its IPO filing.

scottyah12• 1 month ago

Weak. Would Yamaha list itself as just a musical instrument company?

manquer• 1 month ago

it is called SpaceX .

Hardly the fault of anyone is it for not reading a 100+page document meant for investors when it literally in the name .

If they don’t want us to think of them as a Space company they could have taken the xAI name (like how grammarly did with superhuman) or called it Musk Inc or whatever else.

h14h3• 1 month ago

SpaceX isn't a space company anymore, it's an AI company. In their IPO filing, of their projected $28T total addressable market, only $370B (~1-2%) of that is from space [1]. The rest is primarily AI, with a sprinkling of Telecom revenue from Starlink.

Given xAI's Grok is way behind ChatGPT & Claude on coding capabilities, whereas Cursor was able to get in spitting distance of them w/ Composer 2.5 by simply running post-training on Kimi K2.5, I'm not sure Elon could dream up a more perfect strategic fit.

Cursor likely has the largest, highest quality dataset of any private firm for training new coding models, which would compete SpaceX's trifecta of becoming a viable competitor in the AI race:

1. Access to compute (they have so much that they're renting capacity to Anthropic & Google)

2. Liquidity for R&D+M&A (largest IPO in history)

3. High quality training data (this Cursor acquisition)

Isn't it kinda bizarre that Elon is pivoting SpaceX to something else?

In a vacuum, absolutely yes. But in the bizarre context of the AI economics, chaotically scrambling to bring everything you need to compete in-house makes perfect sense.

Arguably, when compared with either OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google, SpaceX/xAI now own the most compute, are the most financially liquid, and (assuming the Cursor acquisition goes through) have the largest corpus of high quality training data.

We may very well be a couple of months away from a Grok release that goes toe-to-toe w/ other American frontier models, IMHO.

So when you look at this as a $60B play to capture an additional 10-20% of an estimated $26T total addressable market, it makes a lot more sense. Now, whether that projected TAM is even remotely close to reality (or even just enough to make Cursor worth $60B) is another question entirely.

[1] https://www.satellitetoday.com/finance/2026/05/20/spacexs-ip...

* edited to add source for IPO numbers & tweak grammar/formatting

CobrastanJorji• 1 month ago

No, it really still makes no sense. Where's the moat around what Cursor provides? If Cursor is really that great, surely something equally great could be developed for a measly $1 billion or so? Is it brand recognition? An established customer base? Surely they don't have $60 billion worth of either.

VirusNewbie• 1 month ago

they have so much that they're renting capacity to Anthropic & Google

they could not make use of it! That's why they're renting, they don't have access to good distributed training software, so the heterogenous cluster they made was bad for training and they don't have enough demand for inference.

Arguably, when compared with either OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google, SpaceX/xAI now own the most compute,

lol wut. You think they have more compute than Google?

are the most financially liquid,

You think they have the most cashflow?

the largest corpus of high quality training data.

What? You think they have higher quality training data than Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI?

We may very well be a couple of months away from a Grok release that goes toe-to-toe w/ other American frontier models, IMHO.

Training on what? They rented both of their data centers away!!!

ornornor• 1 month ago

I wish we’d stopped calling him Elon like he’s a family uncle or something. I chuckled at Heilon Musk, but I’d settle for just Musk.

legulere• 1 month ago

Part of Elon Musks strategy seems to sell some kind of hype that does not materialise or at least won't for long (Mars, autonomous Cars) The vast amounts of money collected are then used to develop products that are still a significant progress in its market. Now AI is where all the hype is. It's difficult to sell some hype without AI currently.

smrtinsert• 1 month ago

Giving retail traders a reason to turn their life savings into exit liquidity

toss1• 1 month ago

Since Cursor is kind of a Select-Your-Model front end for various AI coding systems, how much of it could be to just make sure Grok gets to the top or default choice of that Select-Your-Model list?

fhsm• 1 month ago

150 of world’s most expensive modern hospitals

https://sfyimby.com/2024/06/construction-underway-for-4-3-bi...

Probably not the most expensive , just first I thought of … so maybe it’s more like 10-15 typical urban hospitals.

sgjohnson• 1 month ago

Evidently, at some point money just stops being real. Also, it's not even $60b. It's a 100% stock deal.

The markets have quite literally given Elon a carte blanche. Can it last forever? I doubt it.

mnehring• 1 month ago

I bought a small amount (4 shares) of SpaceX stock on IPO day for $160/share. This Cursor purchase does not upset me as a very minor shareholder. Elon Musk seems to have a unique ability to help grow companies that lead to shareholder value. In particular, it seems that xAI overbuilt data centers because their model fell behind. SpaceX could lease data center capacity to Google or other big players (which they're doing), or they can use it internally. Buying Cursor lets them do it internally.

My employer recently switched us all from Cursor to Claude Code. Aside from my personal preference for having a chat window inside VSCode, Claude Code is painfully slow compared to Cursor for my workloads. I think part of this is due to Claude's massive bump in popularity without a similarly rapid build-out of compute. So, the low-hanging fruit for Cursor is to have a massive speed advantage over Claude Code and regain popularity that way. (My current paid AI subscriptions are ChatGPT, Gemini and Cursor. I do not personally pay for Claude.)

And as far as the pivot goes, there seems to be speculation that Elon Musk wishes to roll up all his companies into one big company. So, it doesn't really matter if the AI company lives inside SpaceX or Tesla, since it'll all be one big thing in the future.

port112• 1 month ago

Back-of-the-napkin math tells me Google’s top 20 acquisitions combined are cheaper than Cursor.

philkuz• 1 month ago

Composer-2.5 is a good model, grok-4 is not.

Its that simple.

guluarte• 1 month ago

I would agree but in this case they are buying the talent and the data.

AbstractH245• 1 month ago

Prediction -- SpaceX rebrands within a decade like Meta or Alphabet. And they turn out to be a AI company not a space company.

jazzpush2• 1 month ago

I can't stand Cursor. Every time I open it up I have 3 popups I don't use, that I then need to figure out how to close. Using it for notes is impossible, since the autocomplete just tries to fill in bullshit.

Awful what VC money did to it. Hope to never use it again, now that work stopped mandating it.

macwhisperer• 1 month ago

ai is like the first technology with a conversational service manual inside it..

you should be foaming at the mouth to use claude or codex to make a custom harness, just for your own personal use with local models...

noncoml2• 1 month ago

Musk found a perfect market hack, buy a company at 10x their revenue and sell it in the stock market at 100x

bobkb• 1 month ago

Will cursor launch a CLI tool like Claude/codex/opencode/pi ?

thisisit3• 1 month ago

Grok has its own CLI tool called Grok Build: https://x.ai/news/grok-build-cli

agluszak2• 1 month ago

They already have. https://cursor.com/cli

mattnewton3• 1 month ago

they have had one for a while now. https://cursor.com/cli

dana321• 1 month ago

The writing was on the wall for cursor, this is a good deal for them to get bailed out and continue business.

yoyohello136• 1 month ago

I don’t really understand what the value prop of cursor is, it must be the data and models. These days programmable editors like neovim and emacs have a huge advantage. I’ve had ai create several custom plugins to have my editor do whatever I can think of. Just ask Claude code, hey I want to do x, y, z, it spits out some lua and I have a new capability. I don’t know why anyone would want to be limited by an extension interface at this point.

WhatIsDukkha• 1 month ago

I don’t really understand what the value prop of cursor is, it must be the data and models.

The simpler answer is that there is almost no value outside of buying some customers.

As you've proven to yourself the engineering work is doable on your own.

I've made my own agent and wired it to emacs via ACP... 60 billion in value, ok... sure...

https://agentclientprotocol.com/get-started/clients

srameshc• 1 month ago

At this point, money and rationality does not make sense to me, rather beyond my ability to understand. But I feel it is all about accounting and writing off eventually and a few profiting from it, not the retail investors for sure. Again I am just saying what I think and there could be no rational to my thought process.

sreekanth850• 1 month ago

I had high hopes in Antigravity and Gemini, but they royally screwed up everything to such a level that the only worth plan is to use free plan for creating docs.

lucasacosta_• 1 month ago

I run Claude Code in cmux with Soonpatch and that's it. I tried looking at Cursor but honestly it wasn't providing any value and I prefer being 100% up to date with CC updates/interface

outside12342• 1 month ago

Github Copilot is so much better than Cursor and a worldwide sales team. This acquisition has no chance.

mattnewton3• 1 month ago

Congrats to the Cursor team!

When I first saw the company built on top of vscode in such a crowded field way back at the end of 2022, I thought "forget having a moat, they are renting their castle from the invaders!" - I couldn't see how see how a single team could execute well enough to effectively muscle their way in between Microsoft and OpenAI, who at that point looked destined to control the developer ecosystem between GitHub, VsCode and the then-best coding models. I think it's easy to forget how insane this seemed even just a few years ago.

But every year since then they managed to simply ship a better product on the axis that mattered to the most users. And now they are sitting between a huge user base and a massive stream of valuable tokens, they can sell to SpaceX. Incredibly impressive.

eecks• 1 month ago

I am out of the loop with Cursor. Did they make their own LLM model or do you mean they just capture what is being sent to other models and that is valuable?

mattnewton3• 1 month ago

They have a few in models that powered the app, including one that applied edits. Recently they also started fine tuning Kimi models under the “composer” brand, and Composer 2.5 is a very cost effective coding model. But I suspect that the real value is in the distribution they have, which is what I primarily meant.

henry20233• 1 month ago

they probably just stole all private codebases cursor ever saw. That + the ARR more than justifies the valuation even without any internal model.

ojr• 1 month ago

This truly shows how king making in venture capital is done, kids have the MIT pedigree but sometimes this is not enough for certain demographics, give them a ton of money to explore ideas and pivot, product is a vscode fork that sells subsidized AI, only possible with venture capital. Providing inference at unsustainable rate deemed as "product market fit". Product loses money until they exit.

VCs that say "I always knew the team was special", give me a break.

hintymad• 1 month ago

I wonder why IDEA didn't catch up with its own agent support and even their own models. It's not like agent harness is that hard to build, right? Or maybe they did, it's just that they haven't won the hearts and minds of the developers like Cursor did?

alex1138• 1 month ago

Our Beautiful Journey

firemelt3• 1 month ago

I really dont get the point of cursor, I always find it subpar product too, but damn they are all got acquired congrats

MinimalAction• 1 month ago

Interesting that they disclose this right after IPO.

turadg• 1 month ago

Funny that “GitHub should really support stacked diffs” led the Graphite team to a space colonization co.

2020: Leave Meta and start a company.

2020–2021: Spend ~18 months looking for PMF.

2021–2025: Build Graphite around stacked PRs, code review, and merge queues.

2025: Get acquired by Cursor because AI makes code review the bottleneck.

2026: Cursor gets acquired by SpaceX because Elon.

Not a startup arc I would have predicted from `gt stack submit`.

da-x• 1 month ago

Ah, it's somewhat like how Jeri Ryan's divorce caused Obama to get elected.

Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/startrek/comments/187ghq/star_trek_...

draxil• 1 month ago

rip off.

jonator4• 1 month ago

90% of my dev workflows have moved to Devin cloud agents.

I don’t miss the days of fumbling around with my local repos across my multiple agent work trees or clones.

I just throw a task at Devin and I get a PR a few moments later.

Then it monitors the PR for any failing CI or review comments without me in the loop.

Now I can have 10+ Devin’s running at any given moment as I walk home from the coffee shop.

jatora2• 1 month ago

I cant believe people still use Devin. This is just filling the niche of vibe PR'ing? Not even vibe coding? Another level removed from the codebase than even claude code/codex are?

jonator4• 1 month ago

Yep, but the code is still reviewed/tested/validated before merging (so -vibe)

conradludgate• 1 month ago

Glad I've jumped ship to Zed+ACP. I liked the idea of the new agent window view, but it's obviously slop and hasn't had a any polish or care put behind it given the number of bugs I keep seeing.

Zed is so much more stable and sleek and the agent view (threads) actually integrates nicely in a real editor. The side editor in the agent window was so much worse than the vscode base I expected, I have no idea how they dropped the ball so hard here.

zuzululu• 1 month ago

Interesting. I've not used Cursor in almost a year after using Codex/Claude.

Won't be surprised if Elon paid another hefty premium.

I just realized this whole game is just getting rich from other people's money and there might not be people left to buy those people's shares when the music stops.

It's literally a ponzi scheme.

perarneng2• 1 month ago

Who is this Cursor person you speak of?

perarneng2• 1 month ago

Nothing wrong with Cursor but $60B, wow. How many of these deals in 2025, 2026 will be worth nothing in 5 years? Seems like everything is just desperation and less like long term strategy.

pentacrypt• 1 month ago

When FB bought Instagram for $1B it seemed crazy too.

smileson22• 1 month ago

Yeah People thought the same about Microsoft buying Nokia which is more similar to this

Company flagging in one area trying to jump start its business there

psychoslave• 1 month ago

Yep, at that level one could end hunger in the world by 2030. But what does that worth compared to hold the destiny if the last shiny IDE.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK599618/

TrisMcC• 1 month ago

I use cursor (through a work subscription), only the cli (https://cursor.com/cli), and mostly using Composer 2.5, but I freely change the model when the need arises.

Most comments here seem to think there is no command line client? I have never used the editor.

For my personal projects, I use a heavily modified pi. I also have access to a claude code account through work (bedrock), but I don't use it much. It always seems to be down.

The cursor cli (`agent`) is fine.

forgot-my-pw• 1 month ago

I find when working with just a single model (Codex / Claude Code), it tends to have more blind spots. So it's nicer to have different models review each others.

Also with Cursor you can make plans with more expensive models and execute using cheaper ones like Composer 2.5.

ZiiS• 1 month ago

If it takes $60B to respond to the prompt 'clone Cursor' I am not convinced it is worth $60B.

graphememes• 1 month ago

Most of the comments here have never used cursor before and it really shows

jesse_dot_id2• 1 month ago

Local inference seems to be catching up and Pi seems to be leading the pack for open weight harnesses. Bold move, SpaceX. I truly hope it doesn't work out for you.

mikeweiss• 1 month ago

Well that didn't take long.....

mikaeluman• 1 month ago

"In its IPO filing, the company had said Cursor's access to developers' data, including coding requests and design decisions, could help improve its AI models such as Grok."

This seems to be the key.. Data is expensive

gpt5• 1 month ago

They should rename it to XCode. Oh wait…

They should rename it to CodeX. Oh wait…

travisgriggs2• 1 month ago

SpaGrox

digitaltrees17• 1 month ago

I love cursor. It's so frustrating that large companies are allowed to buy everything. Think of a world where github was still independent, cursor remained independent, heroku wasn't part of Salesforce. All great products that get eroded by the neglect of big tech.

silentsea90• 1 month ago

tbf, irobot being independent killed them. Sometimes it works well for these companies that would otherwise die. I strongly doubt cursor would survive against anthropic in 5-10 years.

digitaltrees17• 1 month ago

I don’t think iRobot died because they were independent. I think it’s more a symptom of them stopping R&D investment because they were pushed to distribute cash.

henry20233• 1 month ago

The good thing is that cursor has no network effects. you could make your own (barely usable) cursor on top of vs in a weekend with the features you want.

digitaltrees17• 1 month ago

I actually did that. Not on top of vs code because I wanted it on my phone. But now I have my own mobile IDE. It’s amazing

croes• 1 month ago

They can’t build something like Cursor with AI for less than $60B?

goolz• 1 month ago

Good for them. I stopped using it abruptly once I joined the claude cli + vim train but I am sure they will be happy to cash out. I think a lot of other devs stopped using it too so good timing.

timwis• 1 month ago

I've tried most of the tools out there but have used cursor most consistently. Sure, some of the UI quirks get in the way sometimes, but I've found its auto complete predictions to be unparalleled. More importantly, these days I mainly use its Ask mode, Plan mode, and Agent mode. I like that I can use Opus via subscription pricing without Claude Code's wild and buggy harness. And I find cursor's plan mode to perform better than Claude's, but that may just be my personal preferences. I know cursor stopped being the cool thing a few months back, but I genuinely feel most effective with it!

But I'll stop using it now, for the same reason I wouldn't buy a Tesla, or support that maniac in any other way. And I'm sad about that :(

neilpointer• 1 month ago

Zed is pretty good these days. With a claude subscription, you get close to the same experience as Cursor, but with an editor that's much snappier.

calmworm• 1 month ago

Signed up for Zed upon seeing this, signed in with GitHub, it failed instantly. Emailed support, they asked me to prove my ID because I was flagged as a bot. I immediately revoked access.

Fairly certain the support reply was from a bot, too. Meh.

artdigital• 1 month ago

You can’t use a Claude subscription in Zed. Codex and Copilot are supported

/edit: occurred to me that OP meant Claude via ACP, not directly

faeyanpiraat• 1 month ago

I used Cursor for a couple of months like a year ago, and I found it to be good, but I preferred the CLI experience and switched to Claude Code. "Claude Code's wild and buggy harness": not sure when you tried it, but I've been using it daily for the last couple of months, and okay there were some quirks here and there, but its stable and very usable.

vadepaysa• 1 month ago

They sold at the top. My entire TEAM was weaned off cursor in the last year. New setup - 50% of them do (Codex Desktop, Claude Desktop) + Zed for IDE and the other 50% use (claude code + codex cli) on cmux -- a ghostty based terminal that adds some bells and whistles, literally for notifications when claude is done.

IMHO, the codex desktop app is very powerful for development + testing given it can easily control the computer.

submeta• 1 month ago

Congrats to the Cursor team. Unbelievable success. Can’t imagine how their live suddenly will change.

bovermyer• 1 month ago

Aaaand now I'm using OpenCode instead, and trying out OpenCode Go.

fortran77• 1 month ago

Just like Allbirds, they're pivioting to AI.

dexterlagan• 1 month ago

For those who aren't aware, Cursor sports one of the best LLM harnesses for coding. The app itself is annoying to use compared to their CLI counterparts, but the harness is widely recognized as the best in the business, or very close. Buying that harness makes a lot of sense considering the cash Musk invested in Grok. He's clearly trying to play with the big boys and grab a chunk of the LLM-assisted dev market.

zouhair• 1 month ago

Oh, forgot I have it installed

yay -R cursor-bin

And gone

jgm22• 1 month ago

Damn. i see myself using Zed and CLI for codex and claude. But kudos to the team.

MangoCoffee2• 1 month ago

It’s the best exit for Cursor. There’s not much of a path for Cursor besides getting acquired. Cursor is a fork of VSCode. How much improvement can you really make? Cursor’s own model is based on a Chinese model. OpenAI and Claude are SOTA for coding. The only selling point for Cursor’s model is that it’s cheap.

This is the best outcome for Cursor.

causal• 1 month ago

Absolutely. Imagine forking VSCode and then selling it for $60 BILLION in a few years. And right as you lose your competitive advantage to foundation providers. Amazing.

nicce• 1 month ago

I don't understand. What SpaceX gets if they stop developing the product - as your comment sounds like it is a dead end? There would be then zero sense to buy it?

holistio• 1 month ago

So there's yet another $10B+ company swallowed by the $T+ company.

rkagerer• 1 month ago

Will the $60B be newly minted SPCX shares? Does this effectively dilute investors by about 2-3% (minus some fraction representing the fair value of Cursor)?

scotty792• 1 month ago

Spcx is so overvalued that its value for the investors is whatever they wish it to be. If they wish it causes no dilution their wish becomes true. They already wished about 90% of the whole share price into existence.

ubermonkey• 1 month ago

Cursor's stockholders better cash out quick.

PowerElectronix• 1 month ago

They didn't wait a full week before dumping shit in the investors.

Why would spaceX want to double down on AI after the pain xAI is giving them with no good models and no use for the hardware?

ergocoder3• 1 month ago

As I understand, the AI part makes $2B a month now (from Anthropic and Google).

The AI/compute revenue is higher than what the space department makes.

mortarion• 1 month ago

SpaceX is 90% xAI and 10% space. It's no longer a space exploration company, it's an AI company (with a sub-par product). Insane (and dumb) valuation, kind of like Tesla.

intrepidsoldier• 1 month ago

Use cash to buy GPUs and stock to buy companies.

I_am_tiberius• 1 month ago

If you've ever used Cursor, login, make sure privacy setting is on and contact them to say you want all your data deleted if there is some stored. Then delete your account.

redlewel• 1 month ago

If you are able to leverage claude code, neovim, and tmux effectively cursor is no longer needed in the mix, but to each his own

burnte2• 1 month ago

There's no way in hell Cursor has $60bn of value This is insane.

dlahoda• 1 month ago

i hope they will integrate roblox for future generations of robot makers to be pre trained on games

UncleOxidant4• 1 month ago

I mean, I guess SpaceX has a lot of money to throw around. I just don't see how Cursor is worth even 10% of this number. There are so many similar tools out there - many plugins to VS Code (Kilo, Cline, Roo, etc), many CLI tools (claude code, opencode, plus everybody and his brother is putting out their own...).

start123• 1 month ago

incredible 60 B!

davebren11• 1 month ago

"In its IPO filing, the company had said Cursor's access to developers' data, including coding requests and design decisions, could help improve its AI models such as Grok."

They're all stealing your IP and selling it back to your competitors in the form of tokens.

not_a_bot_4sho• 1 month ago

No one is stealing anything here.

Cursor users are willfully providing it by using their product. Not unlike uploading a personal photo or video to social media -- that's not yours anymore. You gave all rights away when you put it on their servers.

hk__2• 1 month ago

Not unlike uploading a personal photo or video to social media -- that's not yours anymore. You gave all rights away when you put it on their servers.

99% of users are unaware of that, so it’s false to say they "are willfully providing it".

davebren11• 1 month ago

Do you think that everyone using it and their employers are aware that they are giving their competition the ability to copy straight from their codebase when they ask it to replicate their product?

themafia2• 1 month ago

Not unlike uploading a personal photo or video to social media

I've granted them a limited license to use it.

that's not yours anymore.

Not by any definition in the contract or in law is this true.

You gave all rights away when you put it on their servers.

I gave away some rights. I also got something in return. Attention. And at the end of the day I'm completely entitled to turn around and sell copies of this work for profit. The only thing I can't do is sell an /exclusive/ license because that is no longer available.

None of this provides any implication for people who upload code to their own websites. Which these rapacious LLMs bots happily index, sometimes to the extent they actually crush the site, or create unusual costs for the owner.

Finally none of these LLM companies tell you where the source came from. Whether it is copyrighted, whether ownership rights are retained, or whether the code can be used publicly or not, and if so, which license it's covered by.

You're using the lens of social media contracts to understand something far larger and more important. It's lead you to some bizarre conclusions and huge oversites.

What if someone steals my work and then uploads it to facebook and claims it as their own? Do the rights no longer exist because it got uploaded to Meta?

Rover2223• 1 month ago

Quit posting trashing. This isn't theft.

davebren11• 1 month ago

It's not theft in the same way a con artist convinces you to give him all your money. The people using it or their employers just don't realize any competitor will be able to ask the LLM to replicate their product and it will copy the codebase they uploaded to them.

fastball5• 1 month ago

Yes, that is in fact how models get better at coding.

Such a ridiculous stance: "I want LLMs to code for me, but I want them to be trained on other people's code, not mine, duh".

arcticfox• 1 month ago

I mean, AlphaZero et Al start from zero. I learned writing my own code except for documentation and some textbooks.

ThouYS• 1 month ago

This is the correct take

davebren11• 1 month ago

Who are you quoting?

raincole• 1 month ago

"I want LLMs to code for me, but I want them to be trained on other people's code, not mine, duh".

Who ever said that? Have you actually heard that from your fellow programmers in real life?

If the code I wrote actually made even the slightest discernible difference in LLMs I'd be so honored. But it won't happen, as it's just 0.00001% of all the training data.

ergocoder3• 1 month ago

Ok, now that you mentioned it, I actually want that.

oefrha• 1 month ago

Sounds good? They can pay for code they want to train on. There are plenty of companies sending me offers to code training materials for them for $50-100/hr. Don’t expect to charge me an arm and a leg for inference and then also train on my code.

timeon2• 1 month ago

How about: "I do not want it to code for me or anyone if it steals from someone."

esalman2• 1 month ago

I work at a 20k-employee company with footprint in tech. A couple of weeks ago a decision was made to not renew Cursor license. This week it was made public and has been greeted with groans. Some employees have been publicly saying how ineffective and unproductive they are going to become due to this decision- which actually strikes me as really naive.

Personally I like to use a stable IDE. I used Cursor for a couple of days and then went back to VS Code, largely due to Cursor pushing agentic first approach with V3 update.

Ritewut3• 1 month ago

Most people are not good at their jobs and IDEs like Cursor let bad SWEs feel more productive because they are committing more code.

preisschild• 1 month ago

They're all stealing your IP and selling it back to your competitors in the form of tokens.

The users of those tools are stealing too. The model is trained on free software licensed under specific terms and the output of a prompt will strip those licenses and their terms.

nxtfari• 1 month ago

My honest read is that, having everything — the data centers, the compute, the models (however misaligned they might be), the only thing xAI is missing is users. They don’t have any users because the only people who use Grok are essentially Elon’s fanboy club, and all they pretty much do with it is ask it to generate arguments to win their Twitter threads or nonconsensually unclothe people. Cursor gives xAI a captive audience of users; most sophisticated users don’t use it anymore, so anyone left is unlikely to be opinionated when models are shifted to Grok. Marriage made in heaven.

lmedinas3• 1 month ago

the only people who use Grok are essentially Elon’s fanboy club

that's not true, Grok compelling feature is it's capabilities, performance and price. You only get comparable prices with GPT-5.4 mini or Gemini Flash. Also Grok Voice and images are pretty good.

I think at this point they don't want to be at the same level as Opus or GPT, they found their niche.

anonyfox• 1 month ago

cursor feels so 2025 to me guys. these days zed is just way better for my macbook battery and with acp can talk literally to my installed claude code and codex CLI tools, plus their own and custom providers ontop. I was kind of a decade of a vscode user and always just stayed through the evolutions until cursor, but at some point I just need a lean fast editor+lsp combo, git included and a chat pane next to it that uses my real subs underneath easily. (also: codex-cli can spawn and manage subagents and _resume_ them, acting like a real manager).

could be only me though, but longer interactions over days makes my codex gui app grind to a crawl and cursor was not only expensive with opus via api costs but also heating my room a lot. now I have a dozen zed instances open all crunching along with LLMs barely noticeable on system load (except the occasianal testuite runs but thats expected).

aczerepinski• 1 month ago

My honest suspicion is that Musk will focus more and more on AI (and less on space) because he sees it as a path towards his immortality. I expect AI models trained on him combined with millions or billions spent lobbying to allow an AI to own and direct a company. I know this sounds like poorly written sci-fi but I will be only disappointed - not surprised - if post death AI Elon is the richest entity on earth.

cryptos2• 1 month ago

Maybe Peter Thiel and Elon Musk will meet again cryogenically preserved ;-) https://fortune.com/2023/05/04/peter-thiel-cryonics-cryogeni...

scottyah12• 1 month ago

AI + Optimus + desire to explore the universe is such a cool concept. I think he'd love to send his consciousness out after all this bickering on earth.

Honestly, the more that we get humans away from squabbling over the same patch of desert the better off we'd probably be. Everyone seems to think they can spend money better than everyone else.

esikich• 1 month ago

Absolutely unhinged take. Most people just want healthcare, affordable groceries, and a vacation dude. I think Musk has a better chance of being guillotined in the next 20 years than he does sending his consciousness into space.

insane_dreamer• 1 month ago

most likely it's for Cursor's data, not the IDE itself

I personally use CC and Zed -- works great. No need for a VSCode-based IDE. I've even dropped JetBrains (and I was a long-time user).

woadwarrior01• 1 month ago

I think it's wild that Kimi is only valued at half as much - $30B.

squibonpig• 1 month ago

God fucking dammit I like cursor

Rover2223• 1 month ago

Well the posts here will be rational and well-informed, I'm sure.

navee4• 1 month ago

Another grab, I wonder there has to be something that someone pays $60B for, but my question is: I often struggle to understand why someone needs it. Is it extra plumbing and easement around code development or paying base?

taffydavid• 1 month ago

Further evidence that SpaceX is no longer a space company but a elaborate con to make Elon richer

zero0529• 1 month ago

Didn’t they do that 2 months ago or are the re-announcing it because of the IPO

conradkay• 1 month ago

They reserved the option to buy it at this price, and are now exercising it

buzzcut_3• 1 month ago

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.

jayd163• 1 month ago

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

mirekrusin• 1 month ago

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

kjsingh• 1 month ago

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

Eji1700• 1 month ago

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.

8note2• 1 month ago

minecraft is the actual metaverse.

how much did facebook spend trying to recreate it?

emadabdulrahim• 1 month ago

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

mey• 1 month ago

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

smath• 1 month ago

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

buzzcut_3• 1 month ago

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.

themafia2• 1 month ago

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.

y22444• 1 month ago

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

andriy_koval• 1 month ago

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

xp847• 1 month ago

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.

itemize123• 1 month ago

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

buzzcut_3• 1 month ago

Happy and fulfilled people are generally more productive, indirectly.

buryat• 1 month ago

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

sneak4• 1 month ago

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.

rimliu3• 1 month ago

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

sixo• 1 month ago

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

gexla• 1 month ago

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• 1 month ago

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.

NuclearPM2• 1 month ago

A fucking text editor?

smcleod• 1 month ago

Cursor is one of the lower performing agentic coding tools these days. Seems weird to buy a VSCode fork.

gehsty• 1 month ago

Curser is the only possible play to make Grok AI some how useful to enterprise, where the vast majority of spend is / will be? Feels like it could only possibly worth this much to Musk. For me Anthropic are too far ahead - this will likely all be for zero shareholder value when Anthropic continues to pull ahead. Will be interesting to see if Musk switches off Collosus to impede Anthropic at some point.

danielrmay• 1 month ago

This should be an indication of how valuably xAI sees the training data that Cursor has accumulated, especially with its work on Composer 2.5. Last month, SpaceX and Cursor announced that they had been working on training a new model from scratch. Interested to see if this will put Cursor back into the zeitgeist.

ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7• 1 month ago

Whelp, I hope cursor was honest about not storing my data.

henry20233• 1 month ago

Not a chance

uberex• 1 month ago

Ponzi buys bubble for how much?

pigeons• 1 month ago

Why would you accept payment in astronomically (pun?) overpriced stock? Maybe you have doubts about the true value of your own company.

fbrncci• 1 month ago

I am still trying to find a replacement for cursor. But in the past 30D my automations and my own coding has consumed well above 10 billion tokens for less than 300$ with auto and composer 2.5; while building a fairly stable product with 20-30 daily active users. It feels like it’s too good to be true, because I’ve tried with Claude and codex and it just feels so much more expensive.

bastawhiz2• 1 month ago

I'm excited to test out Zed's offering. I'm also going to look at some of the open source agent harnesses, even though I'll have to give up a fixed cost subscription. I suppose now is probably also a great time to kick the tires on self hosted models.

charlie0• 1 month ago

I wonder how much the founders are making here. They just started this a few years ago and now it has sold for 60B.

revengerwizard• 1 month ago

I don't know what's more bizarre, either it's SpaceX buying what is essentially a clone of VSCode with AI tools on top, or a VSCode fork being valued billions of dollars.

mdavidn• 1 month ago

The value of code is approaching zero. SpaceX is buying training data and customer relationships.

gigatexal3• 1 month ago

Props to Elon: he IPOs a space based telecom company wrapped in a bunch of garbage companies (xAI et al) as a meme stock and then uses those Elon bucks to go and buy a company to make his struggling ai ambitions relevant.

The formula is: create paper wealth, use that paper wealth to buy something else, and rinse and repeat.

The rich just live in a different part of the multiverse than the rest of us.

UltraSane3• 1 month ago

Money seems more imaginary than ever now.

usaphp• 1 month ago

I love cursor. The inspect tool in cursor is a game changer for UI work imo.

gagabity• 1 month ago

Their Composer model (trained Kimi) is kinda amazing.

smcl• 1 month ago

Just adding another "this is fucking stupid" comment for when this all burns down

emp_• 1 month ago

I was (until this announcement/today) an annual subscriber just for the early days of Autocomplete goodness that I do not use anymore but would stick around and check from time to time their progress and always hoped we would eventually have a good UI for LLMs outside the terminal.

an IDE to look at one file at a time is not interface for LLMs - it was made for people, and while I guess you can sit in the Agents mode all day, to me thats a completely different byproduct and just "Terminal is yuck" kinda users, maybe someday we'll have a proper dedicated LLM UI but we are not there yet.

bmitc• 1 month ago

We're in bizarro world.

poisonta• 1 month ago

but, why?

sailfast• 1 month ago

Sure why not. The points don’t matter and the game is made up at this point.

RevEng3• 1 month ago

I quite liked Cursor. I even tried Claude Code and found myself wanting to go back to Cursor. Unfortunately, this completely kills it for me. I will not support Elon Musk or any of his shenanigans. He is already far richer than any person should be, but he also constantly tries to manipulate the government to benefit himself to the detriment of everyone else, whether that's DOGE, or the fast track to begging added to indexes on the stock market, or burying all the investigations into Tesla. I cannot in good conscious pay for a product when I know that he is profiting from it. So long Cursor, it was a good ride while it lasted.

theultdev• 1 month ago

On the flipside, this makes me MORE confident in Cursor.

But I already use Cursor w/ Starlink in the Cybertruck, so easy choice.

I also don't fall for propaganda so makes it easy to make practical, not emotional, decisions.

He's not evil, just a man with a vision, hopefully you realize that one day.

RevEng3• 1 month ago

I don't care for his vision. I'm basing that on his words and actions, not based on anybody else's propaganda.

treexs• 1 month ago

Wow everyone on HN seems very out of touch with Cursor.

Their UX on their agents only window is quite good and on par if not better than Codex and Claude desktop apps and it still has quite a good bit of subsidization especially with Composer 2.5 being on par with Sonnet at the very least. They're also growing tremendously this year to 4B ARR recently on track to go higher before EOY.

maxicch• 1 month ago

Exactly. People here still think that Cursor is just a vscode fork while it has positioned itself as agent orchestration console that happens to have an editor you can switch to.

halfmatthalfcat• 1 month ago

Claude Code has captured so much mind share, it doesn’t even matter. Cursor is absolutely cooked.

sudo_cowsay• 1 month ago

Cursor has a very cluttered UI. Very unintuitive.

drivebyhooting• 1 month ago

I’ve heard of space based microwave energy weapons. I haven’t looked at the physics personally but I talked to someone who did.

Something like a 10MW phased array to create a 1 cubic meter ball of plasma in the atmosphere. I wonder about the transmission losses… but what a weapon that would be!

NothingAboutAny• 1 month ago

I dont understand if AI is so good at code why are people buying software? couldn't musk just generate his own IDE with the spacex brand behind it?

y1n02• 1 month ago

I think they are buying data and customers.

flyingshelf• 1 month ago

AI is good at code but it can't one-shot whole platforms. I don’t think we'll be in the "give me a new Windows XP but Unix core" range anytime soon. You still need time and guidance/ideas.

nasreddin• 1 month ago

not totally true anymore. check out https://programbench.com/

new models like Fable were scoring 30%. wouldnt be suprised if very soon we eclipse 50%

syngrog662• 1 month ago

meanwhile all I need is a cursor (lowercase) and I can program and do all the actual software engineering I need. been true for many decades and likely will for many more

Topology1• 1 month ago

"In its IPO filing, the company had said Cursor's access to developers' data, including coding requests and design decisions, could help improve its AI models such as Grok."

There it is.

anonnona8878• 1 month ago

Cursor is dogshit.

abofh• 1 month ago

Cursor which is just a ux on other people's models and only has value as a UI that can be replaced by those models...

Jesus Christ, where do i buy cat bonds?

zftnb666• 1 month ago

SpaceX buys Cursor, and I just want autocomplete to stop suggesting closing braces I don't need.

waldrews• 1 month ago

Back in my day, a software company of national importance would be considered a big success if acquired for 60 million... Of course, at that point it would have to be profitable, and actually own its key IP...

amritanshuamar2• 1 month ago

Been building a safety-first IDE alternative for 7 months, the acquisition makes the local/privacy angle even more relevant

amritanshuamar2• 1 month ago

cursor acquisition and anthropic fable models banned from export by US government cant be coincidence. to keep powerful ai tools and model brains onside country

dabedee• 1 month ago

Great! Just deleted my account.

ChicagoDave• 1 month ago

This is the most undeserved startup buyout in history. Literally anyone with a fork of VS Code could replicate Cursor in a very short period of time.

justinai62• 1 month ago

This will ultimately be good adding another competitor into the mix with a very strong coding dataset + enough compute to make aggressively top tier models.

This is the card spaceX needs to play to be able to get composer / grok to complete w gpt and Claude

This will be a net positive for our entire ecosystem from a progress and options perspective.

Expensive price but great for cursor shareholders and plenty of demand of spaceX stock at this crazy high valuation.

I don't own spaceX stock at this price

I think Starlink will vastly out perform projection I think datacenters will under perform I wonder how many nvidia chips spaceX locked in for next 2 years and I think that numbers is actually the most important number

Cheers

rishikeshs• 1 month ago

Yes it’s a VSC fork, but it has an ARR of around 4bn

donkeylazy456• 1 month ago

i don't see any point with SpaceX acquiring AI coding tool. it seems that they are just spending overflowing IPO money. am i missing something?

himata4113• 1 month ago

Is this one of the situations where one of the engineers at SpaceX showed elon musk cursor and said "this is the future of programming" and that has been stuck in his head ever since? Otherwise (unless someone can prove me wrong) I don't quite follow buying out a company at the peak of their evaluation.

harrouet• 1 month ago

Fits right in: overvalued, over-promising, pure bubble hype.

jackzhuo• 1 month ago

I had stopped using Cursor since July 2025, because of its mess pricing policy.

Now I use codex & claude code & antigravity, and can not return to using Cursor.

blog_rahul• 1 month ago

I fail to understand, cursuor is bad at C++, really Bad. In fact of all tools and LLMs, cursor is worst, the best is kimi as per me. It know how to spot segfaults in long lines of code. Why would anyone pay for this hallucinating garbage, especially from a company which does mission critical C++

And, No It;s not a skill Issue. And No, my goal is not to make another vibe code music wrapper around ffmpeg, and No My goal is not make a program around some tcp wrapper. My goal is to fix and write new features in decade old code bases running across millions of devices.

AgentMasterRace4• 1 month ago

Sadly, grok will always be shitty.

AgentMasterRace4• 1 month ago

Secure a cheap Cursor sub now before Elon jacks up the price. Supergroks ridiculous price is foreshadowing.

sajithdilshan• 1 month ago

This is the best outcome for Cursuor. However, not sure if it's a good investment on SpaceX side though. I remember using Cursuor in early 2025, but after switching to claude code, I hardly used cursuor or even their agent cli tool. The competition is getting quite tough for all the AI tooling and I'm very curious to see how SpaceX is going to do with Cursuor

1337shadow• 1 month ago

Well, grok build is an excellent product already IMHO

lebed2045• 1 month ago

I’m happy for the Cursor team, but I sincerely don’t understand the valuation.

Most people I know who figured out how to use Claude Code or Codex directly get much more compute and a much better power-user experience. The difference is not even funny. And it’s not an IDE vs terminal because both claude and codex work just fine in vscode.

What annoyed me most was my own experience: last November I paid $20 for Cursor, burned through the quota in one day after just a few prompts, and didn’t find any clear way to even see quota, so i contacted support. Somehow they claimed I had used around $70 of compute and implied I should be grateful. But they calc price of all input tokens as if they were cashmiss tokens, which is obviously more expensive than real API usage and this was extremely dishonest on their part.

So from my perspective, Cursor or similar solutions often look like a middleman between the user and model provider. In theory, that should be hard to defend against using the frontier labs directly.

That is why it is mystery for me why so many people still pay for it over orders of magnitude cheaper claude/codex

alper• 1 month ago

So that answers the question as to who's buying SpaceX stock…

ozgung• 1 month ago

I’d rather buy 60 “overpriced” Instagrams in 2012, or 3 overpriced WhatsApps in 2014 or 1.5 overpriced Twitters in 2022. I can’t tell what’s a bubble and how money works anymore.

iyia• 1 month ago

didnt know about this

AbstractH245• 1 month ago

Till the minute I clicked on this I couldn't decide if it was satire or not.

But also, for a few weeks periodicly I've been wondering what's going on with Cursor. Haven't thought about them at all, let alone used them, in quite some time.

They were a pretty big AI-native player. Seems clear we're well into the consolidation phase of this economic cycle.

clearstack• 1 month ago

SpaceX is paying $60B in stock priced at 200x revenue. whether that's real money depends entirely on whether you think the stock is.

bentt• 1 month ago

Composer 2 is actually good. I don’t mind when I run out of tokens on the mainstream models.

mlamare• 1 month ago

They will now own the whole pipeline, from computing to models and now the harness.

SpaceX to buy Cursor for $60B

Related Stories