16 ms·

SpaceX says it has agreement to acquire Cursor for $60B

• tim-tday 6mo ago
  Fuck. This is a problem.
  • danny_codes 6mo ago
    Are there not a bunch of cursor clones? Seems like a really simple product to build
    • SV_BubbleTime 6mo ago
      The moat is money. And now they’ll have access to plenty of it.
• LogicFailsMe 6mo ago
  Time to cancel my subscription.
• boznz 6mo ago
  Looking forward to seeing where this goes, both companies have a reputation for engineering excellence.
  • boznz 6mo ago
    Seriously DONT CHANGE THE FUCKING POST TITLE AFTER SOMEONE HAS COMMENTED
• babelfish 6mo ago
  Good on them to get $10B breakup terms, after the Twitter shitshow
• AirMax98 6mo ago
  https://archive.is/gbdJ8 https://archive.is/gbdJ8
• argsnd 6mo ago
  $50bn for a harness makes no sense, what am I missing?
  • riffraff 6mo ago
    My 2c: they need to pump xAI usage (which nobody is using) to be able to keep the hype alive pre-ipo.
  • girvo 6mo ago
    I assume someone knows someone, backroom deal perhaps? I'm not sure either, when Cursor has a lot of risk and not that much moat.
  • xqcgrek2 6mo ago
    money laundering and tax avoidance
    • xnx 6mo ago
      How would this be money laundering?
      • dogscatstrees 6mo ago
        Value shifting. Search for SolarCity and cousin Lyndon Rive.
        • inemesitaffia 6mo ago
          That isn't laundering
      • bmitc 6mo ago
        Musk passing around his debt from purchasing Twitter.
        • deleted 6mo ago
          [deleted]
• atlbeer 6mo ago
  Is this Cursor the product? Or AnySphere the company?
• dantihanyi 6mo ago
  Bloomberg reporting its an agreement to either acquire for $60B later this year or pay $10B to work together https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-04-21/spacex-says-has-agreement-to-acquire-cursor-for-60-billion https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-04-21/spacex-sa...
  • mlindner 6mo ago
    Can you change the title?
    • dantihanyi 6mo ago
      NYTimes has updated the title "SpaceX Strikes Deal With Cursor for $60 Billion"
      • deleted 6mo ago
        [deleted]
      • Jtsummers 6mo ago
        @dang does nothing, he is unlikely to see it. If you actually want to reach the mods, email them. There's a Contact link at the bottom of almost every page here on HN. EDIT: Parent commenter edited out the @dang from their comment making mine appear to be responding to something not in their comment.
        • dantihanyi 6mo ago
          Thanks for the info! I removed the callout
    • markthethomas 6mo ago
      yup - updated
  • deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
  • 6mo ago
• AirMax98 6mo ago
  What are we even doing here. I have no idea what this has to do with aerospace, but I know a bit about software and this does not look great. Cursor is obviously on a serious decline and has little to no moat in the area they are building in (IDE), which we kinda now know is maybe not even the right area (CLI). I feel like this is just a bad move?
  • kevin_thibedeau 6mo ago
    He's offloading the loss from buying Twitter. This is the smoke and mirrors phase.
    • JumpCrisscross 6mo ago
      > He's offloading the loss from buying Twitter That already happened with xAI-X merged with SpaceX.
  • infinitewars 6mo ago
    Trying to posture for Golden Dome, but politically he is likely locked out of the contract.
  • JumpCrisscross 6mo ago
    > no idea what this has to do with aerospace SpaceX is no longer SpaceX per se, but SpaceX-xAI. My TL; DR (and this is mine, personally) is its mission has pivoted from colonising Mars to building a Dyson sphere. Space-based datacentres are a demand excuse for putting lots of solar panels in space. Going one level down, more Cursor use is a demand excuse for putting lots of datacentres anywhere.
    • deleted 6mo ago
      [deleted]
    • riffraff 6mo ago
      This is like me, a couch potato, pivoting from "I'm going to run a half marathon" to "I'm going to do a marathon in under ten minutes"
• cj 6mo ago
  Rockets, satellites, social media, AI - the only thing missing from the SpaceX hype portfolio is a certain coworking company. That would really set them up for an exciting IPO.
  • chrisweekly 6mo ago
    what about blockchain? /s
• break_the_bank 6mo ago
  really happy for the Cursor team but at the same time disappointed that the biggest non-lab AI company couldn't exist on their own. shows how intense the power laws are around ai and how much of a capital game it is.
• cdrnsf 6mo ago
  That's an expensive VS Code fork.
  • muyuu 6mo ago
    They moved on from that code base iirc. Still insane, mind.
    • YmiYugy 6mo ago
      Do you mean the new desktop app? The Cursor IDE/editor or whatever you want to call it is still based VSCode, right?
      • muyuu 6mo ago
        I haven't been using it, but that's what I heard - see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSuS-zXMVwE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSuS-zXMVwE
• zzleeper 6mo ago
  I'm sworn off from Musk-related products, and this will prob make cursor worse (switch to X's LLM for instance). So, any suggestions for switching? Codex; Claude Code? (I like my IDE and I like the freedom to choose a model, which is why I stuck with Cursor even when it felt more expensive)
  • lemonish97 6mo ago
    OpenCode and Github copilot are still options if you want the freedom to choose different models.
  • acjohnson55 6mo ago
    I use VSCode and Conductor right now.
  • solenoid0937 6mo ago
    If you are very cost constrained, Codex. Otherwise, Claude Code.
    • bonzini 6mo ago
      If you only use AI casually, the $20/month subscription to Claude can be enough.
  • boc 6mo ago
    Zed is snappy as an IDE, and ghostty for your CLI. I've done like 99% of my work in the past month just in ghostty + CC.
  • YmiYugy 6mo ago
    I really doubt they'll swap in Grok. Grok seems pretty dead. Probably more likely they'll reuse the hardware for composer. If value is a concern, Codex. It's pretty hard to beat those subsidies. If you really want model freedom, Copilot is surprisingly decent value and as of right now let's you use your sub in other harnesses like OpenCode.
    • 6mo ago
• lemonish97 6mo ago
  What's Cursor's moat here? I'm a bit surprised that xAI/SpaceX needs to buy them rather than building their own VScode forked IDE or an agentic UI/CLI.
  • babelfish 6mo ago
    It's data. Nobody is using Grok for SWE work, but they are using Cursor.
    • andreygrehov 6mo ago
      Could be contracts.
  • deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
• alyxya 6mo ago
  This is the right partnership to happen. SpaceX has all the compute but is missing the talent for training LLMs, especially on the RL side. Cursor has the talent and RL stack, but doesn't have their own pretrained base model or own their compute. Both will be on a bad trajectory without cooperating because Claude Code and Codex have gained so much momentum already.
• deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
• arlattimore 6mo ago
  SpaceX, xAI, Collosus data centers, next space compute, X, Starlink and soon Cursor to join 2, 3 & 4 together?
• woeirua 6mo ago
  This feels like another Twitter moment... unless he's absolutely desperate for engineers who can train LLMs. In that case it's basically an acquihire. Otherwise, this makes absolutely zero sense.
  • lacunary 6mo ago
    did cursor do model training? I thought it used models built by other companies
    • taskylizard 6mo ago
      Yes, https://cursor.com/docs/models/cursor-composer-2 https://cursor.com/docs/models/cursor-composer-2
      • lossolo 6mo ago
        It's fine tuned Kimi, they didn't train it from scratch.
        • YmiYugy 6mo ago
          Sure, but so what? It seems that model size and RL are the determining factors these days.
      • deleted 6mo ago
        [deleted]
• seatac76 6mo ago
  60 Billion for an IDE? I guess back to Jetbrains it is.
• kelsey98765431 6mo ago
  Time to download windsurf
• bmitc 6mo ago
  Government subsidized purchase of a private company. Fantastic. All funded by the taxpayer to send rockets to a dead planet and to burn up all the energy on our alive but suffering planet.
  • NetMageSCW 6mo ago
    Point to any government subsidies for SpaceX - or do you think your salary is a subsidy and everything you do at work is worthless to your employer? SpaceX has paid for contracts to deliver services to the government and those services have saved the government billions of dollars compared to the alternative.
    • bmitc 6mo ago
      You're claiming that SpaceX has not received governmnent subsidies, grants, and contracts? > those services have saved the government billions of dollars compared to the alternative Source? All I can find is some guy saying it. And it doesn't really matter what they've saved. It doesn't excuse conflicts of interest.
      • inemesitaffia 6mo ago
        A top government employee in the previous regime. Not some guy. You yourself can check and see that launch pricing for the government is cheaper from everyone apart from Boeing these days. Turns out capping costs help. (See SLS) (See Europa Clipper) Contracts aren't subsidies and you know that. It's straight up dishonesty to mix them up. McDonald's and Burger King are government contractors
        • bmitc 6mo ago
          I said "government subsidized" and then later expanded out to subsidies, grants, and contracts. You know what I meant. There isn't dishonesty remotely anywhere. And the point of conflict of interest still stands and is unargued while we still argue the meaning of "government subsidized".
• don_neufeld 6mo ago
  If Twitter was when Musk jumped the shark this is definitely him sticking the landing.
• 5129ah 6mo ago
  See also: https://www.reuters.com/technology/spacex-says-it-has-option-acquire-startup-cursor-60-billion-2026-04-21/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/spacex-says-it-has-option... Personally, I have been granted the option to buy Tesla for $30 trillion by the end of this year or pay $500 billion for a partnership. It'll all happen, I swear.
• albertwang 6mo ago
  SpaceX’s announcement (non paywalled): https://x.com/spacex/status/2046713419978453374 https://x.com/spacex/status/2046713419978453374
  • stingrae 6mo ago
    "SpaceXAI and @cursor_ai are now working closely together to create the world’s best coding and knowledge work AI. The combination of Cursor’s leading product and distribution to expert software engineers with SpaceX’s million H100 equivalent Colossus training supercomputer will allow us to build the world’s most useful models. Cursor has also given SpaceX the right to acquire Cursor later this year for $60 billion or pay $10 billion for our work together."
• seatac76 6mo ago
  Ohh it’s not an acquisition, it’s right to buy later for $60B or we a work together for $10B. Huh?
• AJRF 6mo ago
  I am part of a discord group with about 1000+ devs. I polled them in Jan to see if they had dropped cursor for claude code. 80% of those responded (250ish in the group had). Bit of selection bias there from the question - but my impression was Cursor is very much dying to competition from the labs.
• jmyeet 6mo ago
  I really don't know what Elon is thinking here because SpaceX's IPO is already precarious, for several reasons: 1. It was used to rescue himself and key investors from overpaying for Twitter, which was first rescued through xAI (and I don't know why anyone thought investing in xAI was a good idea but here we are). If our regulators weren't defanged, this deal would've gotten alot more scrutiny (IMHO). Whatever the case, this is all diluting the SpaceX business for overpriced AI vaporware; 2. From what I can find, SpaceX's revenue in 2025 was ~$18B with a $5B loss. That doesn't sound like a $1.5T+ company to me; 3. The markets are being rigged to make the IPO a success by changing the rules to force passive funds to buy into it with a tiny float (5% instead of the normal 25%); and 4. Here's the big one. I think Starship is a badly designed program that's going to take many billions more to complete and commercialize. There's not really a market for bigger payloads (evidence: ~1 Falcony Heavy launch per year) and STarship will effectively have to compete with Falcon 9 at a time when reusable alternatives (eg from the Chinese as well as Blue Origin) are coming to market.
  • NetMageSCW 6mo ago
    Starship won’t compete with F9, or BO because it is fully reusable and cost less than either. The Chinese are not a player in the global launch services market at all so don’t count. Starship isn’t comparable to Falcon Heavy because it has vastly more volume, which will make it the cheapest way to launch Starlinks, which will be a lot of launches to begin with.
    • mandevil 6mo ago
      There is a lot resting on Starlink, 11 gigadollars in direct revenue that accounts for fully 60% of SpaceX's total revenue of 18 gigadollars. It's hard to see how that level of revenue can sustain a 1 terradollar valuation. Like, TSLA had 94 gigadollars in revenue last year, and it's a 1.2 terradollar company, and most outside analysts are frankly skeptical of that multiple. SpaceX is trying to get a similar valuation on a fifth of that revenue.
    • metabagel 6mo ago
      > Starship won’t compete with F9, or BO because it is fully reusable and cost less than either. Currently, this is not the case. Not fully reusable, and not costing less than F9 or BO.
• int32_64 6mo ago
  >acquire Cursor later this year for $60 billion or pay $10 billion for our work together. This seems like an elaborate Elon rug pull. A Windsurf situation 2.0
• sippeangelo 6mo ago
  That's a hefty payday for a model that barely functions! Every time I run out of API credits and get kicked back to Composer 2 I feel like I'm better off just packing up for the rest of the month. I feel like we're finally at a point where you don't have to constantly argue with and constantly babysit coding models, which makes it even more frustrating when you're suddenly forced to deal with one that ignores your instructions and gets stuck in thinking loops again. I suspect it's the vast troves of training data rather than any tech that Cursor possesses that SpaceX is after...
  • bastawhiz 6mo ago
    I doubt they're buying it for Composer, I imagine they're buying it for the agent harness. It's arguably the best non-Anthropic agentic coding harness, and you get _all the models_ for one subscription price.
    • cyberax 6mo ago
      JetBrains is crying in the corner...
      • mikert89 6mo ago
        Jetbrains has gone so far downhill
      • ellisv 6mo ago
        I honestly can’t believe how poorly JetBrains has done. I used to love PyCharm but now it’s so far behind. I still use DataGrip but it is absolute dogshit when it comes to agentic coding.
        • jasonjmcghee 6mo ago
          I was a massive jetbrains fan - still believe it's the best IDE even with it's massive performance issues. But I just... barely use an IDE anymore. I think I have the lowest possible subscription price for "all products" you can have (at least as an outsider) and I think I'm going to cancel this year. I've been paying for a decade+
• Rover222 6mo ago
  Misleading title on the post - SpaceX has the OPTION to buy them for $60B later this year, or pay $10B for their work together.
• deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
• focusgroup0 6mo ago
  The other day my colleague asked Grok: "Please estimate Elon's IQ based on his timeline" It estimated 115-130. A decision like this points to the lower end.
• evanwolf 6mo ago
  Is X political ideology extending to cursor?
  • leptons 6mo ago
    I don't know but I won't touch anything Elon owns with a 10,000 foot pole.
• throwaway613746 6mo ago
  [dead]
• jMyles 6mo ago
  I imagine none of us had this on our bingo cards. If this is an acquihire, it doesn't compute for me (though I can't say I understand how things work in the world of the 60B level). LLMs are new enough that nobody has a big enough headstart to warrant a 60B personnel change. The IPO angle also doesn't make sense. Musk cultists were gonna buy anyway; this doesn't change that. And for everyone else, who wants to pay down debt on an acquisition whose effect will almost certainly not be palpable in mainstream circles, if at all? I don't fully understand the influence that comes with SpaceX subsidies and government contracts, but I gotta believe that rounding up non-lab AI chops are on that agenda? The exact options - 60B for acquisition (obviously not a cash deal, right?) or 10B for unspecified services rendered... also don't make sense for either of the first two. Is this just a way of the government securing contractors by proxy that wouldn't pass muster if done through the normal channels?
• vardump 6mo ago
  60B. That's a completely crazy price. Great for Cursor, I guess. If it happens, that is.
  • muyuu 6mo ago
    Great for the shareholders at least.
  • laughing_man 6mo ago
    That price may not get paid. The only thing SpaceX has committed to so far is $10 billion for their shared work.
• r3451 6mo ago
  Elon doesn't know what to do. Ani failed, no one apart from his alt accounts is interested in Grok pictures. Since the firing of several Grok founders, Grok has decreased in capabilities. It is illogical and insults users when called out. So he does what everyone does. Write more dev tools, slap a price on it and hope retail investors will be impressed in the IPO. The $60 billion is of course optional and will just be used in the IPO to inflate the valuation.
  • taurath 6mo ago
    Why $60b and not $20b? Why not $10b or $500m?
• Me1000 6mo ago
  Cursor's statement on the deal (which does not mention the option at all): https://cursor.com/blog/spacex-model-training https://cursor.com/blog/spacex-model-training
  • trollbridge 6mo ago
    It sort of implies the $10B is going to be paid with compute credits. So this could very well be xAI simply compensating Cursor by giving them $10 billion worth of tokens. (What’s a token worth in dollars these days?)
    • TeeWEE 6mo ago
      That’s indeed the trick. Spacex “invests” in Cursor, looks good on their balance sheet. And xAI now gets 10B of more revenue on their income statement. Perfect financial statement boosting for the IPO which in turn will pay back these costs. At least that’s the bet.
      • YmiYugy 6mo ago
        Can they really put $10B worth of options under "investment"? If so that would seem like the most plausible take on why this is happening.
      • hn1986 6mo ago
        that seems incredibly shady
        • rcxdude 6mo ago
          AI seems to be full of these kinds of circular deals. It's one reason to be wary of the financials of the business.
      • RevEng 6mo ago
        It's exactly what Nvidia is doing with everyone these days. They invest in a company with money that is earmarked to buy Nvidia GPUs. Nvidia's books show lots of investments and lots of sales - win win! Of course, it's just buying it's own products.
• cranberryturkey 6mo ago
  [dead]
• nikcub 6mo ago
  knee-jerk is that it's weird, but makes sense: * X will have a total of ~2GW of GPU sometime this year largely not doing much outside of 'grok is this true' * despite no longer being in vogue with consumer devs Cursor still has a lot of developer data that can assist in building a model * Cursor have decent enterprise relationships (while for xAI it is ~zero) and that's where the real revenue for llms + agents is * Cursor are paying retail for tokens and competing against the frontier model co's who are also their suppliers. Not sustainable (hence their in-house composer model). * Cursor the product covers the gamut from lovable-style prompt-to-app, an IDE, cli and bugbot * X are using "x bucks" to pay for a potential later acquisition which are arguably overvalued based on the space x IPO hype Option there to give X a window to make it work, otherwise walk away with a $10B breakup fee for access to it's data
  • martinald 6mo ago
    Yes I think you're right. Reinforcement learning is extremely compute heavy, which cursor doesn't have. And X.ai doesn't have the coding agent data anthropic/OpenAI has, but does have the compute. However, one thing in AI is that while the usage goes up extremely quickly, it tends to go down just as fast. I know a lot of companies that are in the process of switching from Cursor to Claude Code, so in 6-12 months I'm not entirely sure of the data quality/quantity. Also I think it is telling that they are calling them SpaceX not X. The X brand is absolutely toxic, especially in enterprise.
    • attentive 6mo ago
      > Also I think it is telling that they are calling them SpaceX not X. The X brand is absolutely toxic, especially in enterprise. it might not help all that much once it turns into "grok" harness or otherwise associated with elon
  • cubefox 6mo ago
    You forgot to consider whether all this is worth $60B.
    • 6mo ago
• jeffbee 6mo ago
  Only 1.5 Twitters. Sort of pathetic!
• throwaway85825 6mo ago
  We have reached peak stupid.
  • sethops1 6mo ago
    I thought the same during the NFT craze and the blockchain craze before that.
  • andrekandre 6mo ago
    its definitely the worst case of money poisoning i've ever seen
  • Der_Einzige 6mo ago
    Snowflake bought streamlit (a python frontend that’s not even better than gradio, it’s main competitor) for 800 million in 2022. We are nowhere near mt stupid. ZIRP was the peak of mt stupid.
• Tyrubias 6mo ago
  I’m no fan of Elon Musk, but even from a neutral perspective I’m bewildered by the merger between X, X.ai, and SpaceX and now this acquisition of Cursor. What’s the endgame? How does this help with the whole vision of “we all live in space and mine resources from the Moon and have data centers on Mars”?
  • JumpCrisscross 6mo ago
    > What’s the endgame? How does this help with the whole vision of “we all live in space and mine resources from the Moon and have data centers on Mars”? I put this in the other thread, but my personal working hypothesis is the SpaceX/Musk mission has pivoted from colonising Mars to building a Dyson sphere. Space-based datacenters are a demand excuse for putting solar panels (and eventually, solar-panel fabrication) in space. Cursor is a demand excuse for building more datacenters (and eventaully, learning to fabricate chips). If I'm correct, the next acquisition will be in some chip or solar-panel fabrication bottleneck. To be clear, I'm not advocating for this mission. (Though I do think the space-based datacenter pitch has gotten more scepticism than it deserves. For realistic interest-rate and terrestrial-delay values, assuming ongoing AI demand, it breaks even for surprisingly-proximate radiator-mass values. Obviously more problems beyond my toy model to solve. But I expected the math to say fuck you out the gate.) I'm saying this is a good working theory for explaining–and predicting–Musk and SpaceX's actions. Mars explains why SpaceX's engines burn methane. Dyson sphere explains why xAI is building massive datacenters and now finding acquisition targets to fill them with.
    • taurath 6mo ago
      > building a Dyson sphere So they are trying to take everyone’s money in bigger and bigger chunks until there is no economy left but hype. Folks, if we spent 1/10th of the time and money we spend on this bullshit on taking care of people’s basic needs and education we would be far closer to the sci-fi future everyone seems so motivated to get to. Covid and the Trump cult seem to have broken almost everyone’s brains and we’re all gonna pay for the hubris.
  • fontain 6mo ago
• kristopolous 6mo ago
  Wish I played that interview game better. I saw the success coming from a mile away (2022) but I can't vibe with people in the hire game right. It's like eye contact, smiling, facial expressions, stuff like that. I guess there's a bunch of tools to not suck at this. Anyone had success here? The AI tools say I'm great because they can't pick up the kind of problems I'm talking about.
  • taurath 6mo ago
    Pretend to and/or be motivated by things other than money, that’s the strongest thing interviewers drop people from, even though they’re motivated by money to be there.
    • kristopolous 6mo ago
      Interesting. I genuinely do not care about money. The motivation of money is literally zero to me. Maybe that's a problem as well: they want people who Are motivated by money acting like they aren't? I wanted in because I saw them doing exciting impactful things That's literally it. I dunno. I've been struggling with this for decades
      • airstrike 6mo ago
        Just act hard for the duration of the interview season.
        • kristopolous 6mo ago
          That's the key really. It's all kayfabe. I saw Kilo as a win too from the product announcement. I told myself about ten years ago that I need to move when I see things I get that intuition on. But I haven't figured out how to get in the door yet.
  • nubg 6mo ago
    What exactly did you predict in 2022?
• yungbeto 6mo ago
  Why would Elon do this if he knows full well the names X-Code and Codex are already taken?
  • jacobedawson 6mo ago
    Best I can do is CurXr
    • pixelpoet 6mo ago
      The whole thing is Curxed
    • prawn 6mo ago
      Xursor?
      • martythemaniak 6mo ago
        Quick! Both the .com and .AI are available!
    • speed_spread 6mo ago
      Cuxed
    • foota 6mo ago
      That's curxed
    • llbbdd 6mo ago
      I'm putting it all on HaXor
  • martythemaniak 6mo ago
    Because Xurxor is free! If that's not a winning brand, I don't know what is.
    • floatrock 6mo ago
      Honestly, just shorten it to Xor. That's actually not half-bad dev branding.
• electrondood 6mo ago
  xAI is working on virtualizing white collar workers. I'm guessing this is part of that. See also: companies buying up the Slack and email archives of defunct startups, for training data.
• mininao 6mo ago
  Dammit, I liked cursor
  • apsurd 6mo ago
    same. i finally tried Claude Code and i just shrugged. Cursor definitely has a clunky UI with an identity crisis, but it pioneered plan mode, and auto / composer chugs along without rate limits for the most part. Opus, I watch my allotment creep up every turn…
• throwatdem12311 6mo ago
  Cursor better take the $60B because a VS Code fork with a crappy fine tune of Kimi is not worth that much.
• theahura 6mo ago
  Lots of people in the comments talking about how this is about training data, but surely this is actually about hiring competent people after the mass exodus/firing at xAI?
  • jeffgreco 6mo ago
    60b?
    • mirekrusin 6mo ago
      10b active it seems
  • raw_anon_1111 6mo ago
    Are cursor developers “competent” in creating frontier models? Aren’t they just using other company’s models?
    • theahura 6mo ago
      Training any large model at scale is hard, and Cursor has trained several including agentic ones. https://cursor.com/blog/composer https://cursor.com/blog/composer
    • YmiYugy 6mo ago
      I think composer has currently by far the best price to performance ratio for coding (not counting subsidized subscription cost by OpenAI and Anthropic). It's based on Kimi K2, but I think it's fair to say, that their RL really sets it apart from the other open weight models.
  • bensyverson 6mo ago
    That's quite a pricey acquihire
  • airstrike 6mo ago
    Whoever thinks the talent pool is this limited that it requires offering Cursor of all places $60B is pattern-matching so hard they might as well be a quilt.
• syntaxing 6mo ago
  60B for Composer 2…that is built from Kimi K2… what ever happened to “Grok being the best”?
  • apsurd 6mo ago
    Am I the only one that thinks Composer is really good, when you factor in the speed and the cost?
    • vachina 6mo ago
      Composer is clearly dumber than the rest but then I only ask it dumb questions and it answers them really quickly.
    • syntaxing 6mo ago
      I don’t doubt it is. End of the day, it’s a fine tuned Kimi. They tried to hide it and making their work sound more impressive than it is. It’s easy to have stuff be cheap when you don’t have to train your own model from scratch.
    • Marciplan 6mo ago
      yes, you are
• Rapzid 6mo ago
  Wow, we are seeing the dark underbelly of the beast here. Nobody talks about cursor anymore for a reason. Look, I'm not saying it's not useful and discounting anyone getting value out of it... But it's clearly not worth 60B dollars in April 2026.
  • manquer 6mo ago
    It is not cash though. SpaceX does not have $60B liquid cash instruments. More accurately it is 3.4% of SpaceX at the last rumored valuation of $1.75T.
    • throwaway85825 6mo ago
      There's not going to be $60B of exit liquidity if/when spacex IPOs. Maybe the suckers will be banks lending against the bubble valuation.
    • cuuupid 6mo ago
      No longer rumored as they filed for IPO! This is actually an amazing sweetheart deal for Cursor. Many times with these high profile acquisitions, most stock is tied to LPA's and employment at the company, and also earnout provisions. The company then finds a way to parachute them out early, which both voids the earnout and their employment, thus they never vest most of the units and the few units they do vest get bought out at 409A valuations which are typically much, much lower. In the case of Cursor this is an amazing boon as SpaceX listed at an almost 100x multiple which is absolutely staggering. Had SpaceX stayed private they could have 409a'd Cursor and got it for effectively ~100M$ cash.
      • manquer 6mo ago
        Until there is public S-1 and a price range which very much could change during the roadshow, there is no known valuation or range.
  • squidsoup 6mo ago
    The only reason I haven't switched back to VS Code is pure laziness, not using any AI features in Cursor other than resolving diffs these days.
• SwellJoe 6mo ago
  lol. Top business genius being a genius again, I see.
• tailscaler2026 6mo ago
  cursor was interesting about a year ago
• nickvec 6mo ago
  I'm out of the loop - what moat does Cursor even have now, and why is it worth $60B?
  • squidsoup 6mo ago
    Why did a shoe company get $50 million in funding for their AI pivot?
    • nickvec 6mo ago
      Because VCs are braindead... I see your point.
• anonymid 6mo ago
  I guess the hope is that combining two sub-par coding models (xAI's grok + cursor's composer) and combining the data they have access to, they can build something that can compete with OpenAI / Anthropic in the coding space... I guess I kinda see it... it makes sense from both points of view (xAI needs data + places to run their models, cursor needs to not be reliant on Anthropic/OpenAI). I think I don't see it working out... I just don't see an Elon company sustaining a culture that leads to a high-quality AI lab, even with the data + compute.
  • wwnnmmppaa1Q 6mo ago
    [flagged]
  • plombe 6mo ago
    Wasn’t composer trained on Kimi? Has anyone had a chance to compare the latest Kimi model to composer?
    • zuzululu 6mo ago
      I'm going to be brutally honest but I have not found Kimi to be useful at all. It simply cannot compete with what closed models from Codex and Claude offers. I don't want to risk using a model outside the ecosystem and introduce variables as most of my workflow is baked into two to three large company models.
      • iot_devs 6mo ago
        On the other hand, I found MiniMax M2.7 a reasonable model that I could trust. I guess really depends on tastes
      • deleted 6mo ago
        [deleted]
      • nekitamo 6mo ago
        That's interesting, Kimi K2.5 used through KimiCode was comparable to Sonnet in my tests, and is an excellent alternative to Anthropic models That being said, I noticed that Kimi being served through Openrouter providers was trash. Whatever they do on the backend to optimize for throughput really compromised the intelligence of the model. You have to work with Kimi directly if you want the best results, and that's also probably why they released a test suite to verify the intelligence of their new models.
• tombert 6mo ago
  I was required to use Cursor for my job when I first started, but once I figured out how to use the command line version of Codex, I kind of stopped seeing the point. It just kind of seemed like a bloated, overpriced wrapper around what I could do with the included ChatGPT membership I already had for work. Maybe I was missing something, but I do not understand how it is worth sixty billion dollars.
  • jjordan 6mo ago
    It's not. It's a glorified code editor with no moat. Those are (massive) bubble prices.
    • zacyungblut 6mo ago
      Glad I’m not the only one who feels this way. Even though I personally use Cursor, there’s no way it’s even a fraction of $60B
      • tombert 6mo ago
        Why do you use it? Genuine question, I want to know what I'm missing. I guess I don't really understand what it buys you over just running vanilla VS Code and Codex.
        • mleo 6mo ago
          I use the cursor cli, not the IDE. Why? Someone else is paying for it.
        • mmkos 6mo ago
          The anti-Cursor sentiment here is baffling to me given how useful it is to me. I use it interactively and actively review everything it produces. I like how I can plan a feature and refine the plan before instructing the agent to implement it. Last I checked, vscode had none of those features. Do (seemingly most) people prefer Codex because it gives a greater degree of autonomy to the agents?
• andreygrehov 6mo ago
  I wonder if they are actually 'acquiring' some of the existing contracts between Cursor and X/Y/Z rather than the product itself.
• fantasizr 6mo ago
  reading this thread, I seem to be the only cursor user on earth on the free tier using tab-completes.
• Marciplan 6mo ago
  immediately unsubscribed from Cursor. Hello OpenCode!
  • winfredJa 6mo ago
    same. moving to zed
• benjx88 6mo ago
  but What exactly is SpaceX doing in the AI Space (Pun Intended) and Why? these are weird times...
• jesse_dot_id 6mo ago
  Every time Musk does anything these days, it further reveals the shell game he's playing with his companies. This is going to be an Enron type of story eventually. I truly wish I had a choice to pull my tax money out of this particular subsidy.
  • taspeotis 6mo ago
    Matt Levine writes a bit about this - the Elon Musk Mars Conglomerate. And really if you're investing into e.g. SpaceX you're not investing into SpaceX you're investing into the Elon Musk Mars Conglomerate. And most people seem to want that. Tesla's the odd one out: it's public but it's still in there, although Musk would probably prefer it to be private too.
    • fnordpiglet 6mo ago
      Tesla is the free cashflow play that is probably the most important for mars as there is no distilled fermented dinosaur juice on mars, but considerably more by ratio of lithium / oil than the Earth. Our flintstone fire mobiles won’t work so well there, and battery / solar will be important there for everything, including mobility and armies of slave robots.
      • monocasa 6mo ago
        Mars gets less sunlight on a good day for solar power; the inverse cube law really hits you harder than you'd think. And that's before accounting for the planet wide dust storms that can last for months. We're probably looking at nuclear fission generators to get started, then converting to geothermal at any appreciable (and maybe fusion, inshallah).
        • fnordpiglet 6mo ago
          Regardless, fission, geo, fusion don’t fit well on a rover. The boring company makes the tunnels, Tesla makes the vehicles and robots, and batteries. Likely we will still use solar despite poor relative performance for bootstrap.
• jhack 6mo ago
  RIP Cursor.
• Lonestar1440 6mo ago
  So SpaceX bought a $60B Option on Cursor, plus a bunch of services, for $10B. If strike date comes and Cursor is in fact worth less than $60B... they can move to acquire it for that price. Or just let it "expire". And if it's worth more, they get a savage good deal. If the services were worth $8B anyway, it's hard to lose. It seems less crazy to me through this lens. A straight acquisition, today, at $60B would in fact be crazy.
  • gpm 6mo ago
    Paying $10B for the option is also crazy though. Paying $10B for the thing outright and not just an option would be absurdly high.
    • muyuu 6mo ago
      Is that so or would those 10B be discounted from the purchase? not that it isn't wild regardless
      • gpm 6mo ago
        I'm not sure what you're referring to by "that" but I think you're right that it's 10B to not purchase or 60B to purchase, so as an option posting $10B for an option with a $50 strike price.
        • muyuu 6mo ago
          have concrete terms been published or is that an educated guess of the contract?
          • gpm 6mo ago
            It's a statement based on the contents of the articles linked at the top of this comments section.
    • Lonestar1440 6mo ago
      But they also get a whole bunch of AI Services from Cursor. Other comments have noted that xAI has fallen on bad times (idk one way or the other) so perhaps they were going to spend $5B on getting these services elsewhere, anyway. SpaceX spending $1B a month on various AI services seems ~plausible (EDIT - Or maybe it's an IP transfer, or maybe it's over a longer time horizon. Idk but SpaceX clearly expects value from 'our work together' even if they don't exercise.)
• mellosouls 6mo ago
  Guardian Link: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/apr/21/spacex-cursor-ai-startup https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/apr/21/spacex-cu...
• qzw 6mo ago
  I just want to make the observation that this whole SpaceX IPO is turning out entirely unlike the CDOs that led to the 2008 financial crisis. There's no mixing of AAA level assets with a bunch of subprime stuff and then getting someone to buy it all as AAA. Not at all similar. Completely different. Will turn out just fine this time.
  • genxy 6mo ago
    We are better now that we learned from the first time.
    • anonymars 6mo ago
      Learned how to get the general public to directly put their money into it this time with the ETF shenanigans
      • ignoramous 6mo ago
        Institutional investors (ex: pension funds) matter more for such mega IPOs than general public, and those probably like SPAC-like supercorps?
    • gorgoiler 6mo ago
      Ug wants to borrow ten of my best sticks in exchange for future options to buy berries from his friend Og. Og has a watertight deal with Oog to invest the sticks in a five year mammoth hunting expedition but Oog first needs berries to exchange for sticks to cover his exposure on berry-puts he’s take out against Urrrg’s remortgaged stick pile. Well, I said no. Not getting burned that way again!
  • curuinor 6mo ago
    It is adversely selected, but it's not debt, it's equity, so price action can go real fast and nobody will be burned except folks who soberly-or-not opted into this. Everyone _knows_ Elon is the way he is, so nobody will be _surprised_ at things. No surprise, no crisis.
• mercurialsolo 6mo ago
  every wrapper either gets acquired or stays long enough to be a zombie startup
• wavemode 6mo ago
  It looks like this is just an "option" to acquire Cursor at that price? Implying they only plan to exercise the option under certain conditions (such as, one might presume, Cursor actually being worth that much. As right now it definitely isn't.)
• NuclearPM 6mo ago
  A text editor?
• kommunicate 6mo ago
  Hard to know whether development will remain an activity that lives on a local machine for much longer. This could be a lot of money to spend to acquire users that may not be sticky.
• digitaltrees 6mo ago
  Well I am glad I built my own IDE now so I can switch off of cursor and don’t have to participate in training the model of an aspiring monopoly. DM me if you want an invite. I am keeping it to a small on purpose.
• oliyoung 6mo ago
  Cursor ($60b) being valued the same as Twitter ($51b inflation adjusted) is _willlld_
• vemv 6mo ago
  Musk must be chronically surrounded by yes-men.
• deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
• coalstartprob 6mo ago
  [dead]
• toomanyrichies 6mo ago
  https://xcancel.com/trq212/status/2046713419978453374 https://xcancel.com/trq212/status/2046713419978453374
• sheepscreek 6mo ago
  Anyone saying this is an aquahire has it backwards. SpaceX is acquiring Cursor’s customers, all those enterprises including NVIDIA itself. I believe Jenson Huang is on the record about the engineers using Cursor everyday. As far as I know, xAI’s enterprise market share is non-existent. This is their way to get some much needed customers.
  • zacyungblut 6mo ago
    NVIDIA has 42,000 employees. Even still, when their deal with Cursor comes to an end do we really expect them to stay loyal? And further, sign on with xAI? When they could instead sign with the new hottest enterprise coding IDE (Claude, Codex, etc who are way more popular now). Maybe if it’s an acquihire, it’s the GTM/Sales that xAI is after?
    • blitzar 6mo ago
      at 42,000 employees and their own (infinite) compute on hand, there has to be at least one plucky junior internally who is suggesting using the open source equivalents, internal / open models and saving a big pile of money.
    • sheepscreek 6mo ago
      They might. Elon will probably use his SpaceX/xAI spend (future SpaceX space datacenter dollars) as leverage. NVIDIA is so used to doing such deals by now, they’ll probably take it.
      • mghackerlady 6mo ago
        Space datacenters are such a dumb idea. We already have problems keeping spacecraft cool, and unless they send people up there with the datacenters who the heck is going to do maintenance? GPUs need upgrading and hard drives fail
        • sheepscreek 6mo ago
          > unless they send people up there with the datacenters who the heck is going to do maintenance A fleet of special ships for orbital commute and future generation Optimus, no doubt. OR - they follow the same approach as the current fleet of Starlink satellites. Probably have some redundancy baked in (eg 10 operational GPUs with 3 backup). They have rich data around hardware expectancy in space. Can’t hurt to have that for simulations.
• charles_f 6mo ago
  I guess it makes more sense than shoe brands pivoting to GPU provider. Spacex already owns Twitter and xai, trying to post-rationalize with justification like they have servers doesn't make a whole lot of sense. It's all accounting at this point.
• _bypa 6mo ago
  Guess I'll be looking for a replacement for Cursor now... Anyone have recommendations? I like the plan/agent mode and the fact that it's an IDE, so I can use it in the traditional way as well as by yapping with a bunch of agents. Also the Cursor rules I've curated and they do their job well.
  • esalman 6mo ago
    I briefly used Cursor but stopped and went back to VSCode after the 3.0 rewrite when they ditched it.
    • dalmo3 6mo ago
      The new UI is literally opt-in. Nothing changed for me.
  • wek 6mo ago
    Consider Nimbalyst, its a free visual workspace for Claude Code and Codex that has visual editing of markdown, mockups, diagrams, code with your agents with WYSYWIG diffs as well as task management and kanban session management tied into your agents. Its got a files/plan/editing mode and an agent/sessions mode.
    • _bypa 6mo ago
      I had never heard of it but it looks pretty slick: https://nimbalyst.com/ https://nimbalyst.com/ Thanks!
      • wek 5mo ago
        And as of today Nimbalyst is open source!
  • tristanb 6mo ago
    any IDE you like and Claude code - i have no idea why you'd want to use something like Cursor, it's time came and went.
• dev1ycan 6mo ago
  I am so actually beyond sad that I ever trusted Musk, all the signs were there, from the lies with Tesla to the nonesensical point to point "tourist" lies, to the Mars lies, to the fact that the spaceship they are developing right now requires an actual elevator to get astronauts down, it was never meant for humans, it was meant to deploy sats in space even cheaper, outcompete the competition and basically kill human spaceflight as a result... because less profitable human rated spacecraft won't be viable. Oh yeah, did I mention how Starlink is literally already in the close to Kessler Syndrome territory? all it would need is for a strong enough solar storm to hit their sats.
  • inemesitaffia 6mo ago
    The elevator was there when it was originally announced. There's no Kessler Syndrome where Starlink is. You'd know this if you read Kessler's first paper. It's online. i.e if every single Starlink satellite crashes into another you won't get Kessler Syndrome. And the same it true for the planned Kuiper.
    • dev1ycan 6mo ago
      First of all, yes I know about the elevator hence why I mentioned it, you know, first of all it's not that safe to be going down an elevator from what is basically a multiple stories high building while in space (#1) and (#2) why would you add complexity/failure points on purpose if your mission was being multiplanetary? The spacecraft wasn't designed with humans in mind first. And second: This is a paper by Kessler himself: https://conference.sdo.esoc.esa.int/proceedings/sdc9/paper/305/SDC9-paper305.pdf https://conference.sdo.esoc.esa.int/proceedings/sdc9/paper/3...
      • inemesitaffia 5mo ago
        Elevator already approved by NASA. They think it's fine. Haven't changed their minds. Figure 1 on the graph should have shamed you enough into not posting.
• OutOfHere 6mo ago
  Complete waste of $60B. It's just a prompt+tools. This is how you destroy SpaceX from the inside.
• MangoCoffee 6mo ago
  This is a classic Elon move. He bundled up his company that is, shall we say, crap, into his most valuable company, then tried to hype it up as much as he could. Like when he promised Tesla cars would self drive in X years but it never happened, then pivoted to AI/robots, then re-routed Tesla’s GPUs to xAI, etc. Cursor might not be the new hotness, but if we believe that agentic coding is the next wave and we’ve gone from asking chatbots to actually using agents for coding, then yes, this move makes sense for Elon to hype up a SpaceX IPO.
• wek 6mo ago
  What are the implications of this for Cursor being model agnostic?
• zacyungblut 6mo ago
  I feel Cursor isnt’t even worth $6B. What is the moat, the value, the sauce here? The “apply” model to turn LLM output into code changes? I like SpaceX a lot but this really doesn’t make sense at $60B
• goldenshale 6mo ago
  You sour pusses are wrong. This is a smart move. Cursor has a brilliant, capable team with serious model chops who will be able to boost the odds of AGI success. They also come with a revenue generating machine.
• Bloating 6mo ago
  My Hair's on Fire! OMG, Republicans Capitalist OMG Pigs! OMG!
• goldenshale 6mo ago
  You sour pusses are wrong. This is a smart move that amplifies a brilliant team from cursor with serious compute, raising the odds Elon can get to the frontier, which is worth so much these numbers will all look like a drop in the bucket.
• topherPedersen 6mo ago
  $60 billion with a B???
• mlmonkey 6mo ago
  0 to $60B in less than 4 years ... impressive!
• i_love_retros 6mo ago
  The real question is how the fuck is cursor worth $60B
• aldielshala 6mo ago
  $60B for a VSCode fork with AI integration... It may show the value of the gap between vanilla LLM output and production-ready applications.
• sourcegrift 6mo ago
  ITT: The same geniuses that predicted with certainty X will fail are also predicting, with much less certainty, that "Oh God, let this be the end of Musk"
• october8140 6mo ago
  SpaceX is going to have an AI coding "oops" in space.
• mandeepj 6mo ago
  some plausible analysis here on motivations https://x.com/0xrwu/status/2046721359263285478 https://x.com/0xrwu/status/2046721359263285478
• OldGreenYodaGPT 6mo ago
  Dude, cursor's not even worth a billion.
• sroussey 6mo ago
  If I stop paying for Cursor, will they threaten to sue like Twitter does?
• imagetic 6mo ago
  Another one bites the dust.
• inemesitaffia 6mo ago
  Don't see how this works out financially.
• darksaints 6mo ago
  Okay, now how do I cancel/refund the remaining portion of my pre-paid year subscription? No way in hell I will support a company owned by Elon Musk.
• moaning 6mo ago
  I really don't think Cursor is going to be acquired for $60 billion. That price is absolutely absurd. I agree their harness is excellent, but it's hard to argue they have an overwhelming competitive advantage over rivals like Claude Code and Codex, or open-source alternatives like OpenCode. What's left then is Cursor's data, talent, and user base — but even accounting for all of that, the price is still ridiculous. I've personally watched a lot of developers around me (myself included) who were enthusiastic Cursor users when it first launched gradually migrate over to Claude Code and Codex. And I don't think this is just happening in my bubble. My guess is this is some kind of strategic play ahead of SpaceX's upcoming IPO — an attempt to get a higher valuation stamped on the company. But I'll say it again: $60 billion is absolutely absurd.
• supernetworks_ 6mo ago
  “ Cursor has also given SpaceX the right to acquire Cursor later this year for $60 billion” That isn’t an agreement to buy
• zuzululu 6mo ago
  Is anybody using Grok or Cursor still? I've not used Cursor since the summer of 2025 and I've never bothered with Grok for coding. Hell, I've used Windsurf briefly for a few months. I know a ton of people that use Codex, Claude, OpenCode but can't name a single person that uses Cursor or Grok that is knee deep into agentic coding.
  • princevegeta89 6mo ago
    There are entire companies that bought into Cursor to adopt across all of their engineering orgs.
  • fy20 6mo ago
    Our company (~25 engineers) uses it across the entire engineering and product orgs, and yes we are quite deep into agentic coding. We use their cloud agents for a lot of things, e.g. automated investigations of alarms, handling most customer support issues that end up hitting engineering, pre-processsing linear tickets before humans triage them, bugbot for PR reviewed with learned knowledge. Although recently they have felt like they are pulling the rug out on our legacy plan, so we may end up switching.
  • YmiYugy 6mo ago
    I don't know of Grok but we use Cursor (2000+ people, probably like 1000 devs)
  • jppope 6mo ago
    I have claude and cursor. I enjoy cursor. It has shortcomings but its a strong product.
  • polski-g 6mo ago
    I use grok for various subagent tasks. It's super cheap and 100tps. Never for actual thinking though.
  • y-c-o-m-b 6mo ago
    I'm on the legacy pricing annual pro plan (equates to $16/mo). I just use Opus 4.6 and have never hit more than 400 requests, so my pricing remains very cheap. That + the tab complete is what keeps me using it. This news is very off-putting though. I will definitely not be renewing. I don't want to be associated with Musk in any way.
• ycui1986 6mo ago
  another 60 billion to save a failed AI endeavor.
• maxnevermind 6mo ago
  Galactic Empire has agreed to acquire a local lemonade stand in exchange for 10 death stars.
• andy_ppp 6mo ago
  So I won’t use stuff by Elon Musk, what is the next best alternative please
• kdavis 6mo ago
  Time to switch
• resters 6mo ago
  Makes sense. Cursor is extremely overhyped as well.
• d1egoaz 6mo ago
  Last day for me using Cursor at work, I prefer to move to Codex and Claude Code that touch anything related to Elon.
• alphabettsy 6mo ago
  That’s unfortunate. I’m not interested in using Musk associated products anymore than I have to.
• ulfw 6mo ago
  Can't wait for this idiotic bullshit bubble to burst. A rocket company buying a so so overvalued coding AI company is a joke even worse than the 2000s internet pet food companies were
• peterspath 6mo ago
  I think this is great and helps x.ai building Grok Code and Grok Computer. It is good to have more competition in this area. So there aren’t just 2 big players which also have their ideological flaws.
• hedayet 6mo ago
  I'd be interested in this breakdown - what % of that is cursor's product(tech x customer) vs future tokens
• mrcwinn 6mo ago
  You can hate Elon or just be misguided about deals in general. This is brilliant. He’s buying revenue and, on the thesis of scaling agentic knowledge work replacement, a user of his GPU clusters and ultimately GPUs in space. A $60B option is a premium on their revenue - but it may look cheap if he accelerates their coding models. For Cursor, they get what’s nearly impossible to come by - real capacity guarantees and de-risking their reliance on Anthropic or OpenAI. Laugh all you want. He may have the last laugh on this one.
• digitaltrees 6mo ago
  Gross. We need more anti trust enforcement. Large incumbents killing all competition will make us weaker over time.
• gcr 6mo ago
  Why SpaceX and not xAI?
  • Skunkleton 6mo ago
    Because spacex already bought xai.
• tehlike 6mo ago
  Never bet against Elon.
• zero0529 6mo ago
  A vscode fork with a modified Kimi model under the hood for 60 billion feels absolutely insane to me.
  • poulpy123 6mo ago
    Especially for a rocket company
• alpineman 6mo ago
  Time to delete Cursor then. I refuse to support someone that is doing so much active damage to democracy and cut funding for some of the poorest people on the planet.
• ozy 6mo ago
  So I have to switch away from cursor? Any recommendations?
• landsman 6mo ago
  these valuations are total madness
• waynevdm 6mo ago
  This looks like SpaceX playing catchup to Claude and OpenAI that already provide coding solutions.
• saos 6mo ago
  Elon is determined to take down Altman
• mohsen1 6mo ago
  I know Cursor is getting economically not so viable compared to OpenAI and Anthropic offerings but with a deal like this they could also offer $200/mo plans that are attractive. Obviously _if_ their models are good. We have to see!
• gigatexal 6mo ago
  Welp this just removes them if they get bought (and likely also if they coordinate even more with an Elon company) from my list of tools I’ll use. Crazy a fork of vscode is worth 60B. What’s vscode worth to Microsoft? 200B?
• globalnode 6mo ago
  is this just to drive up the buy price for others while having no intention of buying it themselves?
• chromadon 6mo ago
  It never occurred to me that LLMs would be used in the development of something like rockets and space-going vehicles.. A sobering thought.
  • TeMPOraL 6mo ago
    Yeah, maybe it'll sober some people up to stop pretending they can't see how useful LLMs are in pretty much everything. A sharp tool to wield, easy to cut yourself with, but also extremely useful. Honestly, it felt much stranger to me to learn, a few years ago, that they're 3D-printing rocket engines. With my experience limited to building my own PLA/ABS 3D printer out of salvaged motors and parts printed on another printer, it was hard to imagine how this is anywhere near safe and precise enough. But turns out, FDM-ing some plastic blobs is not the same as fusing Inconel powder with lasers. Same with using LLMs for software engineering (whether in aerospace culture or otherwise), it's just not the same as asking ChatGPT "please make me an app to do something idk how i cannot code send halp".
  • asJqiz 6mo ago
    xAI also owns Twitter, which is even less useful for SpaceX. They need xAI as a reason for the narrative that data centers will be in space, so SpaceX can project far more growth before the IPO. After the IPO they'll find out that data centers in space are too expensive and overheat.
• thih9 6mo ago
  Good, I needed a reason to cancel my Cursor subscription. I associate Musk with being user hostile, unreliable, meme oriented and disruptive in the worst sense; I’d like my work tools without that please.
• xer 6mo ago
  Our of $60B, what does that make VSCode priced at?
• clauderx 6mo ago
  I don't know how they are going to justify the xAI acquisition with this...
• deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
• lofaszvanitt 6mo ago
  Ridiculous, this is some shady deal. Cursor's worth is around 150k :D.
• utopiah 6mo ago
  Surely you mean xAI right, surely it's a typo? Right...? The same "mistake" that SpaceX bought 10% of Tesla CyberTruck? Wait are they all Musk's companies? Is it a pattern? /s obviously
  • MikeNotThePope 6mo ago
    Both statements would be correct. SpaceX bought xAI a couple months ago. Some random article on the topic: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cq6vnrye06po https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cq6vnrye06po
    • utopiah 6mo ago
      Damn, I somehow managed to miss that. Not sure if that's more ridiculous or not but thanks for the clarification!
• srivmo 6mo ago
  At 50 employees, that is $1.2B an employee
• neonstatic 6mo ago
  Question for Musk hating people - I understand why you hate Musk, but why is doing business with Altman or Microslop any better?
  • tomgp 6mo ago
    Not much better but at least they're not speaking at far right rallys and lending support to fascist parties across Europe.
    • neonstatic 6mo ago
      What really puzzles me is how years of woke insanity are forgotten / forgiven, but a nazi salute is not. Remember how Microslop employees used to start their presentations with a list of Native American tribes who owned the land their office was at? Maybe people don't read Orwell anymore... that stuff was straight out of 1984. I see being downvoted on my question already - can people who hate Musk not see the difference between asking and supporting?
      • tomgp 6mo ago
        What microsoft employees do in the privacy of their own meeting rooms has basically no effect on me. When Elon Musk appears along side Tommy Robinson in my city, espousing racist "great replacement" to a crowd of drunken thugs and suggesting my neighbours and friends are problem to be expunged from society, well frankly he can fuck right off.
        • neonstatic 6mo ago
          https://youtu.be/PraEcNDGSqY?t=310 https://youtu.be/PraEcNDGSqY?t=310 privacy of their own meeting rooms? Let's not forget about her stating for the audience her race, sex, and skin color. Those are very important things in the context of a programming conference :) There is no baked in reverse racism here at all. Only those awful right wingers do racism.
• guff_se 6mo ago
  That’s it. After 2 years with Cursor, I’m switching to Claude only. Fuck Elon.
• flowdesktech 6mo ago
  [dead]
• mixxit 6mo ago
  Is this to force cursor to use xAI
• deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
• zeptonix 6mo ago
  Absolutely retarded and absurdly overpriced for a tool that's basically fallen out of use. They're just trying to do anything they can to justify a crazy IPO valuation so they can keep pumping money into xAI.
• tw1984 6mo ago
  anyone still using cursor?
• dgellow 6mo ago
  Nobody mentioning how weird SpaceX is becoming? When it IPO it won’t be a space company anymore, but a weird whatever Elon latest ventures craziness conglomerate of some sort, plus “financial engineering” (euphemistic) shenanigans
• GuB-42 6mo ago
  Is is me or the world of finance is going crazy. Or maybe it has always been. SpaceX, a rocket company owned by Elon Musk bought xAI, an AI company also owned by Elon Musk for... reasons. Don't give me the datacenters in space narrative, we all know it is bullshit. It is then buying the option to buy a company for which the only contribution is a glorified VSCode plugin and the reselling of other companies LLM services at an absurd price. I understand that it is more complicated than that but 60 fucking billions, that's the GDP of a small country! And now, Elon Musk intends to IPO SpaceX, which means he expect people to buy into all this bullshit. And considering that unlike me and judging by his wealth, he seems to be really good at understanding the market, so he is likely to be right.
• dminik 6mo ago
  Wow. Tech CEOs and investors have completely lost touch with what money really is worth. How is a VSCode fork and a open weight LLM fine-tune worth $60B? One would think Elon would learn his lesson after overpaying for Twitter and then having to merge his failures together to stay afloat. But no, more cash into the burning pile.
  • scottcorgan 6mo ago
    branding ... mindshare
  • PurpleRamen 6mo ago
    I don't think it's about worth any more at this point; it seems more about money laundry and manipulating the market. They are shifting power between each other and create an illusion of a healthy economy, not carrying about the damage they create for everyone else.
    • thegreatpeter 6mo ago
      [flagged]
      • throwatdem12311 6mo ago
        People that think a crappy vscode fork is worth 60 billion dollars are the ones that need to touch grass.
        • ToValueFunfetti 6mo ago
          And not also the people who think that acquisitions are being made primarily because colluding CEOs have some interest in creating the illusion of a healthy economy?
      • marxisttemp 6mo ago
        clankerlover
  • 6mo ago
• nurettin 6mo ago
  shoe company goes AI, rocket company goes AI, it is market signaling.
  • sjsdaiuasgdia 6mo ago
    That would make more sense if SpaceX hadn't absorbed xAi just 2 months ago. The rocket company already went AI. The signal was sent already. This is just a bad business decision.
• classified 6mo ago
  Does that mean code that astronauts' lives depend on will be vibe-coded slop? Nothing is too insane any more these days.
• dboreham 6mo ago
  Random data point: as a long time VSCode user when I first heard the hoopla about Cursor I rushed to try it. Didn't work (at all). So I added my name to the open bug report, waited a few months. Tried again. Still didn't work. Became a Claude Code user and never looked back.
• I_am_tiberius 6mo ago
  Clearly the intention behind this is to get access to user data (user code).
• xingyi_dev 6mo ago
  [flagged]
  • brazukadev 6mo ago
    And you created this account just to say that? Edit: wow, it seems to be a bot doing some PR ops for Vercel.
• glass1122 6mo ago
  [dead]
• notTheLastMan 6mo ago
  wat wat Wait... dude just use openclaw. Like, 3 months ago: ok maybe.... But dear... just use openclaw.
• shafyy 6mo ago
  I don't understand why a space company should buy a glorified IDE?
• Insanity 6mo ago
  Of all Musk’s “companies” this makes least sense to me. xAI is at least in the AI space, X.com is a true tech company and Tesla is also closer to AI than SpaceX. Guess SpaceX is the only one with the money “available”.
  • zipy124 6mo ago
    I think perhaps you missed the previous news that SpaceX acquired xAI. Thus this is basically just xAI buying Cursor.
    • Insanity 6mo ago
      Ahh, yeah I did miss that.
  • SilverBirch 6mo ago
    You're forgetting that xAI and X.com have both already been folded into SpaceX (First xAI acquired X.com, then xAI got acquired by SpaceX, both mergers were all-stock acquisitions so they were done with funny money). So when people say "SpaceX" now that does encompass both xAI and X.com as well. The reason Tesla wouldn't do this is because Tesla is a public company so it's more difficult for them to do insane shit without being sued.
• hequmania 6mo ago
  If SpaceX grabs cursor and then gets its models into use for a huge amount of companies and developers, this might actually be a very wise move. So I don't think SpaceX would only pay for the harness, but to access to a mass of potential users.
• jimnotgym 6mo ago
  Space rocket company acquires a text editor and tuned llm? Because......
• bossyTeacher 6mo ago
  I remember using Cursor earlier this year and it was so unoptimised for average machines. An LLM provider extension on VS Code is so much better. I don't get why is Cursor still around. Is it because it was first to market?
• jonplackett 6mo ago
  Every now and then I feel like I got a handle on AI and it makes sense. Then something like this happens and either my whole concept of it is wrong, or this makes no sense and is insane.
• allenrb 6mo ago
  [dead]
• angoragoats 6mo ago
  Could a mod please consider changing the story link to one of the actual articles shared in the post? I don’t think we should be giving the white nationalist, non-consensual-porn-generating social media site any free traffic.
• gverrilla 6mo ago
  [flagged]
• oliveiracwb 6mo ago
  [dead]
• prewett 6mo ago
  This seems like diworsification to me. Cursor has nothing to do with rocket launching, so it will be a distraction for management.
• gadflyinyoureye 6mo ago
  I thought the world was agentic vibe coding. No idea needed. If this world materialized, then there would be no need for an IDE.
• torcete 6mo ago
  So Cursor to the moon?
• DrokAI 6mo ago
  [dead]
• rblion 6mo ago
  I'm still loyal to Anthropic. Not perfect but I trust them. End of story.
• goofy_lemur 6mo ago
  I think cursor is worth literally $0. It is a complete rip off of someone else’s work vs code and is literally no better than copilot. Makes me mad it’s even allowed to be a commercial company ripping off vs code. It is a completely idiotic purchase. Literally one person could recreate the entire IDE themselves… like it’s so easy to make. And there’s no brand loyalty to it because people want the best llm they don’t care about the little plugin so no moat
• vrighter 6mo ago
  why dmes spacex need an ide?