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

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.

What's crazy is that a company that sells an IDE (that's not even a particularly good one compared to competitors like JetBrains) integrating some AI plugins could be worth more than $60B...

In terms of IDE yeah it is not that great.

I do have Copilot in VSCode and Cursor.

I thought both should be equal in solving problems - turns out Cursor with the same model selected somehow was able to solve tasks that Copilot would get stuck or run in loops.

They have some tricks on managing file access that others don’t.

Cynics on HN easily dismiss AI service wrappers (and many of them are in fact overblown and not worth their own code). But writing a genuinely good harness with lots of context engineering and solid tool integration is in fact not that easy. The biggest issue is that model providers also see what the community likes and often move on with their own offerings that are tailored to their own models, potentially at the training stage. So even if you have the best harness for something today, unless you are also a frontier LLM provider, there's zero guarantee you will still be relevant in the future. More like the opposite.

Sure, but is it worth 60 billion?

They are now a Codex clone and without the subscription pricing. You have to spend thousands to get what you get from a $200 Codex subscription. How do they compete with this except from users who haven't caught on yet, or businesses that are unbothered to spend thousands a month per dev and wouldn't consider just subscribing to 1-3 $200 subscriptions instead?

And their price is so high because it's markup on API rates. API rates, even without markup, are just insanely irresponsible for anyone to be spending on full-time daily usage.

> users who haven't caught on yet

They are catching up fast!

https://www.businessinsider.com/chamath-palihapitiya-ai-cost...

> users who haven't caught on yet

If you think this of users who use cursor then I don’t think you’ve used cursor much at all.

What do you mean?

Only the foundation model companies offer cheap/subsidized compute.

If you're an app layer company, you're offering a 10x worse deal to your customers.

Foundation model companies are willing to lose money to win loyalty. Remains to be seen if it'll work.

If you’re more worried about cost than you are being productive and getting good results then sure, stick with foundational model company apps.

“Being productive” without taking inputs/costs into consideration is an oxymoron.

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API rates are the real rates. Subscription costs are the "first hit is free" subsidized pricing.

* MicroSoft is shaking in the corner lol

MS is doing just fine I'm sure

Paying $10B for the option is also crazy though. Paying $10B for the thing outright and not just an option would be absurdly high.

Is this cash or compute? Elon has one of the world's biggest compute clusters spun up, and little inference demand to speak of.

Trading billions worth of idle compute, in exchange for a high-strike call option on the #3 player in the most-promising-vertical for AI, plus (presmuably) some access to their data, starts to sound like not a bad trade. Especially if you're pre-committed to betting your entire rocket company on winning in AI, and you're currently in sixth or seventh place.

If it's not in an 8K filing it isn't real.

I heard he made a deal with a company to use his clusters. Is there good data on demand for Grok? Seems like relatively little chatter at least, in spite of tremendous investment.

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Am I the outlier here who thinks such images should be allowed, because there is no real victim in ANY sense! Also, if the CSAM market is flooded with fake images, it might lead to less real CSAM images from being circulated, leading to FEWER victims. Just like how some conservators flooded the Chinese Rhino horn market with fake Rhino horns.

Has the availability of deepfake porn generation reduced the demand for deepfake porn featuring real people? When deepfake generators are capable of creating convincing imagery of flawless ideal fake humans, why do you suppose there’s so many real humans who report being non-consensual subjects of deepfake porn?

> Has the availability of deepfake porn generation reduced the demand for deepfake porn featuring real people?

yes

> When deepfake generators are capable of creating convincing imagery of flawless ideal fake humans, why do you suppose there’s so many real humans who report being non-consensual subjects of deepfake porn?

?

One obvious argument is what it was trained on.

Doesn't have to be. You can train it on normal pictures of children and nude images of adults.

Please stop spreading misinformation.

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I hate Trump as much as the next guy, but what is that evidence, again?

https://www.thedailybeast.com/new-evidence-corroborates-clai...

He had a very close, decades long friendship with the most notorious sex-trafficker-of-children-to-rich-creeps in modern history for decades. And when imprisoned, that infamous pedophile died while in a federal prison under Trump's control, with a strange gap in the CCTV video footage. And Trump's handling of the entire Epstein Files saga makes it clear that Trump is described extensively in those files and he desperately wants to conceal it. What could be in there that he would use the entire justice department to try and redact? Trump is shameless about things that are legal even if they're salacious (like sleeping with porn star Stormy Daniels), so you have to wonder, what could Jeffery Epstein's good friend be trying to conceal?

Also, he owned the Miss Universe org (including Miss USA and Miss Teen USA) for decades, and he was known to walk into the dressing rooms of teen contestants as young as 15 while they were undressed. [0]

Also, he bragged about molesting women, and a court of law found that he sexually assaulted E Jean Carroll.

I haven't proven the case that Trump had sex with a minor, but there's way more than enough probable cause to believe it's more likely than not.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20200111171647/https://www.rolli...

Obviously this looks very bad but you don't seriously think it constitutes evidence?

So you don’t have any evidence. Many of us hate trump. But at least we aren’t spreading conspiracy theories that haven’t amounted to nothing.

This isn't court. The evidence, such as it is, is all of the smoke which commonly motivates people to look for fire. The strongest and most comprehensive that I've seen is the argument that if Trump was not implicated in the Epstein files, he would be publishing them in free book form himself and forcing every media outlet to advertise it. Slight exaggeration, but I think truly only slight.

Not really relevant to the thread, but there are simple answers to the "eViDeNcE??" question. You may have already known this.

Again, circumstantial and speculative.

Clearly you don’t and that disingenuousness is frowned upon in discussions here.

So, where’s the evidence?

https://www.thedailybeast.com/new-evidence-corroborates-clai...

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> you're pre-committed to betting your entire rocket company on winning in AI

SpaceX has invested a small amount as a share of its value in XAI, and could survive the loss of its investment.

Problem is basically, that if the option works out (Cursor truly has the talent to train a frontier model on SpaceX's infrastructure, and were simply lacking the infra before) the fair price would be way way more than $60B.

OpenAI tried to acquire Windsurf last year for $3B and couldn't.

Seems like Elon's move is two fold

1) A gamble based on cursor's compute constraint 2) if 1) plays out, he can purchase cursor via shares of spaceX over valued shares, at a fixed price should the valuation increase.

It reportedly has a $2B ARR, and a 5x multiplier doesn't seem insane to me, but who knows, honestly

But it's paying a 5x ARR multiplier for the right to buy at a 30x multiplier.

They have 2B ARR because their business model is about selling models cheaper than they cost.

The main frenzy with Cursor started when you could access Anthropic models practically for free.

Otherwise it is just VS Code.

> Otherwise it is just VS Code.

This is a bit simplistic. It's the VS Code that everyone used before cc came to town. Real devs, on real projects. All that data they collected is worth a lot more than "just vscode". Their composer2 is better than kimi2.5 and it's just a finetune on that data.

xAI had a decent model in grok4 (it was even sota on a bunch of benchmarks for a few weeks), but they didn't have great coding models (code-fast was ok-ish but nothing to write home about, certainly nowhere near SotA). Now that they've been banned from using claude, they'll get their expertise + data to build a coding model on top of whatever grok5 will be + their cluster for compute.

It doesn't sound like a bad plan to me, financial shenanigans or not.

What data? Their commercial terms promised they wouldn’t keep any for training.

There's a lengthy discussion to be had here, and there's enough lawyerspeak in every provider's data retention policy to wiggle out of anything. A few notes from their current data use page:

> If you enable “Privacy Mode” in Cursor’s settings: zero data retention will be enabled for our model providers. Cursor may store some code data to provide extra features. None of your code will ever be trained on by us or any third-party.

Note the "may store some code data" and "none of your code will ever be trained on". In general you never want to include actual customer code in training the data, because of leaks that you may not want. Say someone has a hash somewhere, and your model autocompletes that hash. Bad. But that's not to say you couldn't train a reward model on pairs of prompts + completions. You have "some code data" (which could be acceptance rate) and use that. You just need to store the acceptance rate. And later, when you train new models, you check against that reward model. Does my new model reply close enough to score higher? If so, you're going in the right direction.

> If you choose to turn off “Privacy Mode”: we may use and store codebase data, prompts, editor actions, code snippets, and other code data and actions to improve our AI features and train our models.

Self explainatory.

> Even if you use your API key, your requests will still go through our backend!

They are collecting data even if you BYOK.

> If you choose to index your codebase, Cursor will upload your codebase in small chunks to our server to compute embeddings, but all plaintext code for computing embeddings ceases to exist after the life of the request. The embeddings and metadata about your codebase (hashes, file names) may be stored in our database.

They don't store (nor need to store) plain text, but they may store embeddings and metadata. Again, you can use those to train other things, not necessarily models. You can use metadata to check if you're going in the right direction.

At 60B they might do it anyway and then pay 200M in fines when the court rules against them.

xAI needs a dev tool to compete with Codex and Claude Code.

Cursor needs their own 1st party backend model.

Sounds like a match made in heaven.

Not quite first party, but composer 2 is far superior to grok for coding. Unless you're eluding to them using SpaceX infra to train their own model vs. using grok

2B ARR at what cost base?

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.)

$1B per month on AI services does not seem remotely plausible to me... Engineers don't consume that many tokens...

And on the AI development side they're the ones providing compute in the form of a "million H100 equivalent Colossus training supercomputer"... On top of the cash.

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Cursor has no AI services, they do not develop their own frontier models. I see no reason to understand why $10bn for Cursor's services is an advantage xAI versus say a $10bn deal with Anthropic, OpenAI or Google.

It's true that Cursor doesn't have their own frontier models, but they are training their own models. They just aren't at frontier level yet. The $60B/$10B deal looks like a bet that this is a capital/GPU constraint rather than a capability one.

Those other companies wouldn't also toss in a purchase option.

But I agree that it's hard to articulate what Cursor services you could blow this much money on.

Maybe it is all just an option! Or maybe they get a bunch of IP either way?

Plausible how? Explain please.

Tokens. Tokens spawning sub agents using more tokens. Maybe some training too.

I didn't say it was Wise.

I said it seems within possibility for this, very particular, corporation.

Not only is it almost certainly compute (“services”) it’s likely priced at Anthropic rack-rate, or at least what Cursor’s been paying Anthropic.

The cluster’s already paid for, so likely in the $2B range for operating cash needs. Not more than $5.

If I imagine bringing in Cursor’s team to build a frontier model, ideally combined with Grok, which has one of the few truly proprietary data feeds available to it, and with a much larger custom model Cursor can solidify a place, and I get to do a stock swap to buy it, this sounds like a bet worth making.

Upshot - I bet there’s an MS/oAI deal on IP on the back of this; meanwhile the cluster goes brrr.

This valuation is absurd. Perhaps a year ago- sure, but there have been so many iterations of this “kind of editor” since then, not to mention countless alternatives.

So for me it’s more of a data deal - Elon buying himself some insight into codebases and real dev usage patterns? Oh finally someone to use his dirty data centres

Cursor is still the best I’ve used are there others I should try?

I've been using Kilo Code (VS Code Plugin) for the last few days, and it does most of what I liked in Cursor without tying me to their particular subscription.

That said, people are increasingly migrating to CLI tools (Claude Code if you like the Claude models, Pi Agent if you want something that's highly customizable, Crush if you want something fun), or GUI tools that are less code-first (Codex GUI).

People keep saying this and they don't understand how businesses work.

Cursor has 1B in enterprise revenue. It doesn't matter if people can clone their product, those deals don't move slowly

Put 1B into a better product and 10B into marketing. If you can’t beat their 1B in revenue, the market for making your money back on the Cursor acquisition also isn’t there.

What services could SpaceX possibly be buying from Cursor that would cost $8bn?

Despite their impressive ARR, Cursor faces existential threat from not only BigLabs (Claude Code, Open AI Codex) but also BigTech (AWS Kiro, Google Antigravity, MS VSCode). I am sure the usual suspects would have lined up to purchase Cursor, and the deal from xAI was probably the best of the lot. Marks an end to a remarkable sprint for a 3yo company, and an admirable exit (considering the recent discombobulation of Windsurf's), just as investor money and/or hype is going belly up.

Having tried most (all?) of the commercially available + open source options, and even tangential competitors like CC, Conductor, Antimetal, etc. I haven't found anything that's close to the experience of Cursor. The harness they've built is incredible.

I'd even go so far as to say that any competitors that are direct (windsurf, kiro, etc.) aren't even in the same universe. Cursor is just so much better, faster, has better features (plan and debug mode), and squeezes much better results/code out of the same models. They absolutely have some secrete sauce that the other options just don't have.

Cursor is my favorite of the VS forks. Agree that it delivers better plans than others. I prefer using Claude in Cursor over CC CLI when I am heads down going through bugs. I am disappointed in how "little value" in token use Cursor provides compared to others.

Do you have examples? I'm curious.

It has shown surprising stickiness. Occupying some middle ground between full adoption and still ~in the code.

I am starting to see some potential in moving back away from pure terminal, a mixed modality with AI. But it is not in the direction of IDE in any traditional sense.

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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

> largely not doing much outside of 'grok is this true'

Hey now, don't forget about it's super important other use, taking innocent photos of people and regenerating them in less clothing and compromising positions.

I'm sad that I even know that.

They changed that recently, you need to be paying €10/mo for that now. The free plan and/or access for the basic Twitter plan are gone.

That doesn't make it better! It did somehow slow down the regulatory response because politicians are dumb, though.

It means X can identify users at least, so they are probably quite a bit less likely to do that.

What difference does that make?

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You've literally got tools like opencode that are MIT licensed. Most of those points X could do on their own or are things that make this attractive for cursor not X.

e.g. Need developer data? Use some of that spare GPU compute, hand out free top end model coding access for a bit and you'll very rapidly have developer data

>decent enterprise relationships

I guess. 60B worth of "relationships" though?

> hand out free top end model coding access for a bit and you'll very rapidly have developer data

They tried this - grok was free on openrouter for a while

Marketing push was there too, everyone was saying Grok had jumped Claude and Codex, yet I never got that when using all 3.

Turns out that benchmaxxing doesn't help if it's not very good when people actually try it.

But imagine if they handed out free access to Kimi or GLM-5. Actually, I still wouldn't use it, because I avoid APIs that say they hold on to data.

And presumably they got data from it...

and then released a model that didn't really leave a mark with code performance

But if the developers are to presumably use the model you give out, what data are you going to get from them thats useful?

I wouldn't be surprised if those enterprise relationships evaporate after this acquisition. There's a reason why xAI has zero enterprise customers.

> There's a reason why xAI has zero enterprise customers

I’m curious where you pull these stats from

I've had hundreds of AI-powered vendor tools come across my desk as part of my job, and I have yet to see a single one that uses Grok. I'm also not aware of any publicly announced customers for Grok's enterprise offering. The Grok Enterprise website doesn't list any customers.

lol a slop peddler

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.

> 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

> despite no longer being in vogue with consumer devs Cursor still has a lot of developer data that can assist in building a model

care to share more about this?

I think you're right. Other providers can offer coding subscriptions that use in-house models, and this sets the stage for a Grok coding plan that's built in to Cursor.

$60 billion seems expensive, but it gives them a much better chance at competing in the market than if they started their own harness from scratch.

Absolutely no enterprise - I work in enterprise cloud consulting - absolutely no company would trust Grok with their IP compared to Anthropic or OpenAI with Musk’s reputation on how he runs his businesses.

Anthropic just tolerates the money losing developers who pay $20/$200 for subscriptions.

Maybe the play here is a way to sneak sneak Grok into enterprise by calling it Cursor. Or they'll just give up on it and run Cursor's fine-tuned Kimi on Colossus.

They'll sign a contract, and the contract will be very clear about whether using user prompts as training data is allowed or not. They're not going to care much about reputation; they'll care about the terms they sign with.

I don't get the sense that Elon's companies care much for the contracts they sign.

e.g. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/12/twitter-stiffs-s...

I wouldn't trust a contract from one of Elon's companies unless they were willing to put in escrow an amount that would make me whole in case of a breach on their side. (And that amount would be quite large in the case of a potential breach involving using prompt data for training.)

> Cursor still has a lot of developer data that can assist in building a model

Their composer model is seriously good. I’ve been eyeing a cursor sub just to use it in OpenCode. They have a nice moat here.

> Cursor have decent enterprise relationships (while for xAI it is ~zero)

That has a reason. Those enterprise relationships are almost certainly going to sour at least a bit, if not for Musk‘s toxic image then for his erratic behavior.

Just to point it out, Cursor has not made any good models themselves. Composer 2 is Kimi K2.5, and they tried to pass it as their own until people noticed that the api specified it as Kimi.

Kimi is the base, but they've done tons of finetuning on top to produce a really good completions model.

Even if it wasn't for Musk, are these relationships really worth so much? There is a certain value in being on the approved vendor list, but it seems to me that there really isn't a lot of vendor lock-in. I think most people could switch to opencode, claude code or codex pretty easily. Maybe these relationships would be worth a lot if companies signed long-term contracts, but I doubt many did.

Yeah, Composer 2 is legitimately so impressive. It is my daily driver right now both on professional and personal projects. I only find myself reaching for 5.3 Codex/GPT 5.4 when exploring a lot of technical documentation or code and for Sonnet/Opus when working on UI. Everything else is Composer.

Forgot that claude is burning good will from it's own capacity constraints, leading to periods of 'dumbness'. It's a catalyst to cause me and others to switch back to cursor if they can get their act together

I think it also represents a bet that in some sense Cursor's model capabilities are resource limited rather than talent limited. If that's true, $60B will end up being a bargain. If not true, well it's an expensive lesson but that's the nature of things.

You forgot to consider whether all this is worth $60B.

> forgot to consider whether all this is worth $60B

I see two possibilities:

(1) SpaceX is paying with stock; and

(2) the $60bn pay-out is (a) conditional or (b) never going to be exercised—it was a stalking horse for negotiating the $10bn terms, which gives SpaceX everything it actually wants.

I think both a) and b) can both be true. We dont know what the contingency is - could be something absurd.

Also one would definitely offer to pay in stock if they believe it is massively over-valued lmao.

$1B to $2B ARR in a few months with projection of $6B ARR by years end. If xAi wants to have it's own tools just like OpenAI and Anthropic, then it's not an unusual move.

Extrapolating from a few months to a full year and calling it Annual Recurring Revenue is one of modern startup valuation gimmicks that I cannot not laugh at.

Sometimes it helps to go back to the basics to understand company performance: money in, money out?

it's not dollars it's X bucks

> despite no longer being in vogue with consumer devs

Is it in vogue with enterprise devs?

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hn is this true

British?

“Cursor have” and “Cursor are” is awkward to read.

Now you know what it feels like to be British reading practically any other English source on the Internet.

That's not British, that's just old people

apparently it is a British thing. https://editorsmanual.com/articles/collective-nouns-singular...

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Why would Elon do this if he knows full well the names X-Code and Codex are already taken?

> Why would Elon do this if he knows full well the names X-Code and Codex are already taken?

Steal their Twitter usernames anyway, just like he did mine.

Story time please lol

My @valentine got changed to @valentine_ without my consent.

https://web.archive.org/web/20150822195811/twitter.com/valen...

https://twitter.com/valentine_

(If any lawyers read this and feel up for taking this on contingency, I don't think I'm difficult to contact.)

> lawyers

Best I can do is pretend to be a lawyer and forward all of ur stuff to ChatGPT Free. U down?

Wow and it's not even used. I guess they took it to resell on their handle marketplace?

He probably had plans to use it for some sort of Ender's Game crap but then realized that grok wasn't smart enough to do it.

More likely is that they took a bunch of good usernames to sell - if you pay for their most expensive subscription one of the features is that you can rent a better username now.

The word Grok comes from the novel Stranger in a Strange Land where the main character is Valentine.

It's extremely unlikely Musk was personally involved in any way in the decision on the username.

Did you actually own it though, per their TOS? What title was granted, if so? Also, and no offense intended truly, I think your having a grand total of 2 followers after 19 years was apart of their risk calculus in this seizure.

> Also, and no offense intended truly, I think your having a grand total of 2 followers after 19 years was apart of their risk calculus in this seizure.

My account was hijacked via domain/DNS takeover around the time it was acquired by fElon (due to both Crazy Domains and Twitter support's incompetence — both parties removed 2FA from my accounts, even despite me telling Crazy Domains specifically never to do so). I managed to recover both accounts after kicking up a fuss, but the hijacker was midway through an 3rd party account wiping script, and I'd lost all my followers because of that.

I had 33,300+ tweets in 2015, and a lot of that was private interaction with friends.

couldn't your name have been changed by your hijacker and sold?

Turns out that when you are using some oligarch's platform, you don't own jack.

This is digital feudalism, and the billionaires have seized the means of communication.

Billionaires have always owned the means of communication (just look at the Salzbergers, Murdochs, etc).

Digital decentralized protocols (smtp, http, etc) were the first time this wasn’t true. But you [we] voluntarily moved your communication off of open internet protocols onto private ad-based platforms.

Of course you don’t own anything there, you never did. The billionaires didn’t “seize” anything. You happily sold yourself out for a few clicks of less friction and an easier shot at digital fame by going “viral” on social media company land.

If this isn’t a much bigger indictment of the collective (who after decades still could not agree on a non-elitist, human understandable protocol that didn’t require a CS degree to use) than it is of the entrepreneurs who solved all the problems the collective refused to, I don’t know how else to get though to you.

Laughed very hard at this. Well done. Feel like you must have made this observation a while ago and just waited for your moment.

Best I can do is CurXr

The whole thing is Curxed

Xursor?

Quick! Both the .com and .AI are available!

I'm putting it all on HaXor

Cuxed

That's curxed

XCursor (Linux nerds know)

Oh man, not sure if it's a good or bad memory... but that was the first linux bug I experienced as a newbie. Not so much a bug, but an unknown config I had to change so my first monitor would stop turning off when I moved the cursor to the second monitor.

Circa 2003

Because Xurxor is free! If that's not a winning brand, I don't know what is.

Honestly, just shorten it to Xor. That's actually not half-bad dev branding.

I don’t know about you, but do you want Xenu and Zurvan’s love child in charge of your development?

Musk might still miss his 1999 startup, 'x.com'.

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.

Have to call out that comment about grok code being sub par. I used it exclusively when it was free in Cursor and have nothing bad to say about it. And that was months ago. I imagine it’s a lot better now.

Can s.o. please explain, does the Cursor EULA really allow it to train on my code, as I really don't expect Claude Code or CODEX to do it either?

They will because there is no way to prove they didnt

Wasn’t composer trained on Kimi? Has anyone had a chance to compare the latest Kimi model to composer?

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.

On the other hand, I found MiniMax M2.7 a reasonable model that I could trust.

I guess really depends on tastes

[deleted]

[flagged]

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.

It's not. It's a glorified code editor with no moat. Those are (massive) bubble prices.

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

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.

I use the cursor cli, not the IDE. Why? Someone else is paying for it.

It's 100% a fraction of $60B. That's not debatable it's just simply fact.

The question is what's the denominator.

I dunno it seems pretty irrational to me.

[deleted]

and I'm being completely neutral and objective in saying this: Elon Musk has been a horrible capital allocator but great at financial engineering. X is still struggling to win back advertisers (they will never come back) and still in the red. I have little reason to believe this is also another careful and shrewd financial decision.

Let’s buyback my friends who invested in that thing and they will help pump my IPO

He spun that story into "he was saving democracy" so it sounds like he paid for that reason. He will do the same here, he never does a wrong move you just can't see the 76D chess.

I mean, technically they also re-sell AI tokens. Unsure if that’s with a markup or a discount.

I do think the Codex harness is a bit better than others. Doesn't make a ton of difference with OpenAI models, but with Google and Anthropic models the difference is quite noticeable I think.

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.

Yep this was the moment to finally remember to cancel my cursor subscription. I find it unconscionable to do business with someone who would do business with Elon.

Until yesterday I would have recommended VSCode + Copilot. They had the best pricing of any option. However the pricing was unsustainable and is therefor finished.

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.

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.

I had never heard of it but it looks pretty slick: https://nimbalyst.com/

Thanks!

Zed

I briefly used Cursor but stopped and went back to VSCode after the 3.0 rewrite when they ditched it.

The new UI is literally opt-in. Nothing changed for me.

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)

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.

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.

OpenCode and Github copilot are still options if you want the freedom to choose different models.

If you are very cost constrained, Codex. Otherwise, Claude Code.

If you only use AI casually, the $20/month subscription to Claude can be enough.

I use VSCode and Conductor right now.

A vscode fork with a modified Kimi model under the hood for 60 billion feels absolutely insane to me.

Especially for a rocket company

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.

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.

I have claude and cursor. I enjoy cursor. It has shortcomings but its a strong product.

There are entire companies that bought into Cursor to adopt across all of their engineering orgs.

I don't know of Grok but we use Cursor (2000+ people, probably like 1000 devs)

I use grok for various subagent tasks. It's super cheap and 100tps. Never for actual thinking though.

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?

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.

hi, im the quilt.

Note that Meta paid ~16b for Alexandr Wang, and Google paid ~3b for the windsurf executive team. You are making a category error -- the talent pool isn't "ML researcher" it's "competent leader"

No, it's "I'm a more important person if I ok deals with big numbers" that always happens in a bubble.

They could offer $20 million dollar signing bonuses to every Cursor employee if they wanted to hire them away and it would be much cheaper.

They’re buying the customers and the brand.

A brand he’ll promptly burn to the ground by renaming it some garbage with an X in it.

Buying the customers seems though, when it looks like they migrate to whomever offers the steepest subsidies.

That's quite a pricey acquihire

$60 billion worth of competent people?

60b?

10b active it seems

Are cursor developers “competent” in creating frontier models? Aren’t they just using other company’s models?

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.

Training any large model at scale is hard, and Cursor has trained several including agentic ones. https://cursor.com/blog/composer

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.

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?

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.

The assets weren’t AAA, you’re mixing it up a bond concepts. The deal had bonds that were AAA. And if you’re talking about CDOs then the assets were bonds which were usually BBB or similarly cuspy bonds.

You should learn about securitizations. It’s actually interesting. But people talk about it colloquially and so incorrectly that it’s mind dumbing.

Here’s a simplified example of how you can take something and turn it into a safe investment:

Suppose you have 10 loans and each has a 50% chance of default. Ignore coupon, and say they are $10 each. Expected value is $50

If you were to put this in a deal and cut it up into tranches, say the first tranche gets the first $10, this would be your AAA bond because odds of getting paid out you $10 would be > 99.9%. The equity (bottom tranches) would pay a lot less. For instance the expected value of the bottom half would be considerably less than $50 that is being promised. So there’s upside since you’ll be paying cents on the dollar and even though in the median scenario you’re making nothing, you have to weight the expected values of each scenario to figure out how to price it.

The problem w this model is that it only works if assets are relatively uncorrelated which wasn’t true (it was true in the past but ignored systematic risk and adverse selection in originations).

What this has to do w musk or spacex I’m still not sure

Just to well actually your well actually...

What you've described is how the base level mortgage-backed securities (MBSs) work. The tranches work because there actually exist mortgages that are at lower default risk (high home equity, well qualified borrowers, etc.), and the senior tranches are effective in capturing their underlying safety. What CDOs did was to take the lower, riskier tranches of MBSs from various sources and repackage them and divided them into tranches again. Then they got the ratings agencies to rate the top tranches of the CDOs as AAA as well. It's as if a teacher graded several classes and then took everyone that got a C or below from all the classes and then graded them on a curve again. And suddenly a lot of the C students became A students. It was outright financial insanity. Well, mixing a rocket/satellite company with a couple of also-ran AI outfits and the walking corpse of Twitter, and then calling the whole thing SpaceX and valued at $1.75T is a similarly level of financial insanity to me.

> this would be your AAA bond because odds of not getting paid out you $10 would be > 99.9%

I think you meant "the chances of getting paid", not of not getting paid.

Thanks. Updated

> The problem w this model is that it only works if assets are relatively uncorrelated (it was true in the past but ignored systematic risk and adverse selection in originations). What this has to do w musk or spacex I’m still not sure

What this has to do with with SpaceX is that there's the same blatant disregard for sound financial analysis by the very institutions that were/are supposed to know better. The NASDAQ 100 fast track decision is a similar level of financial malpractice as the ratings agencies slapping AAA on things that they knew were little better than junk. The abuses of the subprime mortgage originators were well known long before the actual meltdown. As were those systemic risks you spoke of. They were ignored by those whose entire job it was to not ignore them, and they sold out their credibility for a quick buck. If you can't see the similarities to the present situation then I can only wish you luck.

Are you familiar with how crypto tumblers work?

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.

They're going to force a S&P500 index listing on IPO day so we're all going to be forced to baghold this regardless of if we want to or not unless you've got $0 in any major retirement fund.

So far only Nasdaq has changed its rules and will allow fast entry in 15 trading days. S&P has not changed its rules, not yet at least. Total indexed capital of Nasdaq is 1.4T vs 16T in the S&P500. Stated reason for fast tracking is that the indices are supposed to be a broad representation of the market, and leaving a 2T company out would be a significant tracking error.

I do agree that the optics of this aren’t great, and it’s rather easy to be cynical about motives.

I did a bit of research on this some time ago and it's not as bad as I originally thought. Index funds would need to count only liquid float of the company. So if Space X total valuation is 2 trillion, but float is 5%, then they need to count it as 100 billion for the purposes of index weight. Still more than I want, but not catastrophic.

Oh yes, thanks for reminding me. I’m going to cash out the 401(k).

You’ll pay massive penalties on that, another option is options (heh) but I’m not finance-literate enough to know how to pull it off.

Only penalties if you withdraw from 401k. Most 401k plans have some kind of moneymarket, bond fund, or similar

I’ve made my peace with the “massive penalties”. I benefited from employer match in the past. I want the money now, not when I retire.

You gotta do what you think is best, but I hope for future you's sake you decide to not pull the money out. Or if you do you have other retirement plans.

I'm trying to help my parents now their at retirement age and am seeing first hand what not planning for your future looks like. They hit retirement with nothing but a small social security check every month. Not even enough to cover rent in most places.

I don't know how much you have in your 401k, but it will be worth literally hundreds of thousands more if you pull it out when you retire. You aren't just paying the penalties now, you're paying for potentially decades of compounding.

Retirement plan is rappelling accident before dotage.

Well can't argue with that lol

But if by some tragedy you don't die young, your older self is gonna be pissed at younger you for costing him hundreds of thousands of dollars.

You can just reallocate away from an index fund.

You could just buy deep out of money SP500 puts expiring in 1+ year. That way you would be "insured" against the bubble popping.

The thing is, every dollar you spend on insurance is a dollar (and its interest) you lose. Furthermore, we don't know when it will pop. 1 year? 5 years?

The more reasonable solution is probably gradually reduce exposure to US markets by selling SP500 shares and turning to Europe and emerging markets ETFs. No need to cash out 401k.

You should backtest this strategy over the last 20 years before you make serious decisions off of the vibe from internet comments

20 years is not enough.

If you just look at the past 20 years, the US has had exceptional returns compared to the rest of the world.

The thing is, historically, high PE ratios like what we're seeing in the US do not correlate with short term returns that are as high. Expected future returns decrease as the PE ratios go up in a pretty linear fashion.

https://am.jpmorgan.com/us/en/asset-management/institutional...

Why 20 years? Just because we know, post hoc, the usa outperformed other places in the last 20 years, in no way means the next 20 years will be the same.

If you want a different point to backtest from, try Japan in the 80s and early 90s

What's the point of backtesting? Does backtesting say anything about the future?

The point of backtesting is to allow you to do what you want to do with a veneer of being data driven.

What are you basing this on?

I'm not an expert but it looks to my like 80% of my allocation won't be tracking spacex, because it's mid cap or small cap etc, and the 20% that's in the vanguard growth index might? I assume whoever sets the rules for the fund could change the rules to say companies must be listed for X months if they want to avoid this, right?

And I can change my allocation.

edit: Actually wait, isn't it only nasdaq 100 that's tracking it early, after 15 days rather than 3 months of trading? So 0% of my 401k is exposed to buying it quickly after IPO already, I think.

So far they're only getting fastracked into Nasdaq 100, not S&P 500.

The question is, is everyone integrating a special SpaceX correction in their algorithmic trading? Because if a dip in the index due to SpaceX causes old algorithms to think it’s a more structural issue (well, more than it is), and sell on that indicator, will that cause a cascade?

obviously no. if algos work in china, it will work with spacex

If your retirement fund is an IRA you can invest it in any stock you want. For a 401k you probably have some fund options that are not exposed to the S&P500, like emerging markets or fixed income

Maybe this already exists, but it would be great if one of the major index ETFs omitted all the firms with problematic board governance like there is at Tesla, SpaceX.

S&P500 had a rule from 2017 to 2023 that prevented companies with dual classes of shares (the sort that allow them to maintain founder control- like what GOOG and META did) that went public after the rule was instituted from ever being in the index. To be clear, META and GOOG were both in the index, but it was to prevent new companies from coming along and doing it. (I think it was related to SNAP going public?)

They removed it largely because investors wanted higher returns, and the tech companies that had such dual classes (1) were doing really well, and the S&P ended up caving on that rule.

1: Perennial hot button around here Palantir did this in a more extreme fashion than most. The three founders F class shares will always be at 49.9999% of the votes and the early investors B class shares have 10 votes each as compared to the publicly traded A class shares 1 votes.

My money's all in Bitcoin pats himself on the back

Kinda shocked SpaceX hasn't bailed out the DOGE-holders at this point..

the power of yet

401k rollovers into IRA aren't that hard these days and you could always use that IRA to have a more customized strategy, more specifically direct indexing of a major fund minus key ticker symbols you don't want exposure to. Of course, that all presumes that you won't regret excluding this long term.

Friendly reminder that SpaceX is going straight to the index—Elon agitated for it. The 401k of everybody in America is serving as a bailout fund for X and now cursor, and whatever other trash he hovers up

They are going straight to the Nasdaq. Most index investors are invested in the S&P 500

Nasdaq is an exchange. S&P 500 is an index.

S&P 500 includes companies from multiple exchanges. Like Nvidia, which lists on Nasdaq.

Nasdaq 100…

https://www.morningstar.com/funds/spacex-ipo-how-index-funds...

> Nasdaq was the first to consider a rule change that would grant mega IPOs like SpaceX early admission to its flagship Nasdaq-100 index. The exchange and index provider began a consultation period in February to assess the viability of and industry response to a proposed “fast entry” rule. The change was approved on March 30 and will be effective on May 1.

It’s also worth noting that Musk helped successfully lobby the NASDAQ to implement a “fast entry” rule which takes effect at the beginning of May, suspiciously convenient timing for a SpaceX IPO, so much so that I believe it has been derisively called the “SpaceX Rule”. It allows mega-cap IPOs like SpaceX to join the Nasdaq-100 index in just 15 trading days.

Now why is this bad? Well, if you invest in a fund that is based off of the indices, you’re going to be investing in SpaceX whether you want to or not and I certainly don’t think 15 days is enough time to sus out whether this is a stable investment worthy of being in the index, but it’ll be great…until it drags a million retirement funds down with it.

We are better now that we learned from the first time.

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!

Learned how to get the general public to directly put their money into it this time with the ETF shenanigans

Institutional investors (ex: pension funds) matter more for such mega IPOs than general public, and those probably like SPAC-like supercorps?

it's just codex and anthropic rapidly improved their AI when they opened themselves to Developer workflows.

Google and others were sitting at the corner, laughing that they gonna burn their money for no reason! they turned out to be wrong.

Turns out offering discounted/subsized tokens to developers massively improves your AI compared to just being a talking parrot for normal user workflow where you do not get "instant feedback" on if it worked or not.

make the point directly - you are just avoiding further justification

[dead]

Well, there are some very important differences. 1) It’s super well known what’s going on with SpaceX. Every investor should know that there’s a lot of good stuff along with some steaming hot garbage. 2) SpaceX isn’t systemic to the economy. If SpaceX and all its subsidiaries shut down and its investors got nothing back, it wouldn’t be that big of a deal.

This type of bundling is just what conglomerates do. Is it a good thing? Not really. Many investors also hate this kind of stuff and avoid investing in these types of companies.

On point #2, they are trying to do that right now. If spacex is fast tracked into the indices, passive investors via index funds will be forced into buying.

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!

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...

Cursor is still the best coding environment and hardness. It's actually not really close. They are so good that they actually made Gemini usable.

The problem is they can't compete with Anthropic and OpenAI because they can't sell Opus and GPT at a discount to subscribers like OpenAI and Anthropic do with their subscriptions.

So they either need to build a competing model or slowly die.

I personally disagree on the first point. Claude code in a terminal with vim is much nicer. I just don’t see the need for the bloat of an IDE when the CLI versions work so damn well now.

They have Cursor CLI.

Cursor is essentially all the Claude Code products but without the horrible bugs of Claude Code products.

You can transfer from CLI to web and it actually works.

And Claude can use CLI too. It's the perfect environment for coding agents.

They seemed to be doing fine with Kimi distillation. Not speaking from experience though, I prefer to use my editor.

> They are so good that they actually made Gemini usable

I think Gemini is best model out there, and it's not Cursor who you should praise. I use it with jetbrains junie. Vastly cheaper than claude, faster, produces better quality code, actually listens to your instructions, more accurate. I'm sure claude code cli has some cli magic that I'm missing out on, but having everything just work in a nice IDE (and llm to actually understand your symbol table) is like magic.

Are you using Gemini 3.1 Pro? Subscription or paying for the tokens?

Tried 3.1 pro preview today a little bit, definitely blowing thru credits quicker, not sure about being better quality, but achieved all tasks perfectly.

IDK how Junie does it, but I spend less than $50 USD per month and I'm on it 30 hours per week.

Bet they will become tied to grok pretty soon.

[deleted]

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.

Maybe vertical integration is the main business case.

A controlled environment to determine effort and token usage, and to get plenty of exclusive training on code.

It could end up making sense. Idk if they needed to offer 60B though.

I'm not willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. I think this is purely Elon trying to take a pot shot at Anthropic.

JetBrains is crying in the corner...

I've subscribed to Jetbrains all product for years. If the agent coding is going to be the next wave. Jetbrains is really behind. Even Microsoft offer better agent coding with VScode and Github copilot cli.

They’re definitely playing catch up, but the IDE integration makes interactive development really nice. Claude is good for one-shotting things, but I find JetBrains AI integration really useful for working with large codebases where I may be unfamiliar with things.

I think they’ve been caught in a bad spot. They’re a profitable company, but nowhere on the scale of Microsoft. And they don’t have billions of VC to effectively price dump. Other tools that can focus on one thing and burn cash are advancing quickly and some of them don’t really need an IDE at all.

The semi-recent introduction of ACP integration in the JetBrains IDEs has been a nice bridge. But now it’s confusing how everything comes together. I really hope they can survive.

Jetbrains has gone so far downhill

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.

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+

I am subscribed to their all you can eat plan and use their Junie coding agent which is included with subscription with some free tokens. I then pay for extra tokens on on-need basis and all works like a charm. So far I pay (well my clients do as I bill separately for that) about $100 a month to cover my current coding needs. All works as a charm. I mostly use their CLion, Webstorm and PyCharm IDE's for development, sometimes other as well. All in all dev experience is excellent and far exceeds that of Cursor I was trying to use for a while.

Not sure what problems people here have with JetBrains offerings

Once you work somewhere that gives you unlimited opus 4.6 and learn how to use it properly, your perspective of what you should be doing day to day shifts.

Honestly unlimited codex with 5.4 high has a similar effect.

SOTA models + harnesses used together is very different than it was 6 months ago. People that have significant software engineering experience can get so much done it's scary.

I keep hearing this, but I have yet to see “so much getting done” anywhere. I’d sure like to but things seem to be pretty much be business as normal.

I have what you call "significant engineering experience", decades of it to be precise and have designed and developed many complex products successfully used in various industries.

I do not need to "shift my perspective" since I do use agents to the degree that I need and it helps help me very much. I am way more productive with them.

Generated code is still not perfect disregarding of any particular model (I have access to all). I have to watch and fix, sometimes by supplying more precise specs, sometimes asking to rewrite piece of code in such and such manner using this and that structures.

[deleted]

Unless you do Jakarta EE development, where Cursor with their simple LSP support is far, far behind. Cool for generating a bean, but when you got to debugging deployment descriptors you wish you were in IntelliJ.

Yeah, and it seems to be completely self-inflicted. I created a small personal skillset that explains to the agent how to use the JetBrains MCP tools for refactorings/find-usage/navigation, and it improved its performance by a lot.

Yet JetBrains tried to do everything themselves and failed :(

I use JetBrain's all you can eat subscription that comes with their Junie coding agent which includes some free tokens to cover my coding needs. I then top up tokens on on-need basis. Costs me about $100 / month in AI tokens (well I bill my clients for that separately so do not really care bout the price). All works as a charm. I mostly use their CLion, Webstorm and PyCharm IDE's for development, sometimes other as well. All in all dev experience is excellent and far exceeds that of Cursor I was trying to use for a while.

Not sure what problems people here have with JetBrains offerings

IntelliJ is a bit dated, and its plugins are too. I use IntelliJ all the time, in its various incarnations, but vscode is really up there now.

I use both (not IntelliJ but other IDEs) and quite frankly I fund VS Code and derivatives very much inferior. For C++ development for example CLion vs VS Code (needed plugins installed) is night and day and not to the benefit of VS Code.

I know JetBrain product could be sluggish on "normal" computers however all 4 of my development machines run on 16 cores AMD with 128GB RAM. It flies in environments like that

Cursor is great. I was using it up until recently. Then I switched oh my pi, and honestly I haven't looked back. I've also heard great things about open code.

I actually really like Composer 2. For my use case, between the planning tool, and getting it to ask a lot of clarifying questions, I regularly get very good results. I'm not doing anything complex though; mostly staying in the lane of very common web app type code.

Composer 2 is really good for me too.

Is Composer 2 a bad model because Cursor are bad at training models, or because they are compute constrained? This deal will provide the answer to that question.

They still just bought access to all the code you've ever fed into the model...

Cursor very reasonably had a “no retention” checkbox available to everyone, including those on free plans.

I'm sure those work as well as the "don't collect my data" checkboxes too.

I don’t think this is the case. With “accidentally” collecting an individual’s data, the company’s risk is that somebody cares enough to sue them based on vague and poorly defined damages. With “accidentally” collecting source code, you’ve not only violated your contract with 98% of your enterprise customers (many of which have dedicated legal departments) providing a very real and obvious path to lawsuits, you’ve also gained a strong reputation as a vendor never to be trusted. My employer uses cursor, and I strongly suspect we would cut ties and blacklist them at the first sign of them inappropriately retaining data.

[flagged]

Cursor's statement on the deal (which does not mention the option at all): https://cursor.com/blog/spacex-model-training

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?)

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.

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.

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.

Yep. there's absolutely no way that Cursor is worth that much.

for contrast, Elon paid $44b for twitter back in 2022. When you adjust for inflation, Twitter was acquired for $49b in 2026 money. Cursor getting bought for 1.22x more is just insanity.

Elon seems unwilling to shake off the image that he has basically no idea what he's doing.

I certainly wouldn't mind having that image if it meant being the wealthiest man in the world.

I think X paid for itself, so it worked our for him.

  > Nikita Bier @nikitabier
  >  
  > If you’re seeing a bunch of Japanese posts, here are some fun facts:
  > Japan has more daily active users and more time spent on X than any other country in the world.
  > Over two thirds of the country is monthly active on X. 
  > X in Japan has one of the highest penetration rates of any social network in history.

I wouldn't be so sure when "any other country except US" usually apply to everything on the Internet, except Twitter after the power transfer

1: https://twitter.com/nikitabier/status/2037764895064867061

I'm pretty sure that claim about Japanese Twitter activity was true for most of the site's history pre acquisition

No. JP activity was always second to US, only the biggest "out there". Same is true for all Twitter-like social media, such as Mastodon and Bluesky. Even VRChat doesn't have a majority Japanese userbase. Japan actually becoming the top majority anywhere is an anomaly and a major reversal of power balance.

Still blows me away that Google had complete dominance in Brazil and then just threw it all away and shut it down a few years later.

Google Plus? I wouldn't be sure if that was a strategic blunder or if they were seeing something us in the public didn't. I remember it was more popular among not-so-tech savvy male of parental to retirement ages, which are still masses but not the sweet spot in terms of demographics. Besides they have YouTube and its comment section full of kids, which is the sweet spot.

Orkut, which nobody now remembers.

Orkut

Source?

It paid in influence, not dollars. Billionaires don't buy newspapers or social media platforms because they think they are good businesses.

Elon Musk, the richest person on the planet, with multiple industry-changing companies built under his leadership, clearly has no idea what he's doing.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A crazy and lucky bailout for Cursor + investors.

Forget bailout, this is a massive payday for them

Elon got snowed…

Which includes OpenAI, btw.

Not just OpenAI, but OpenAI and OpenAI[1].

1: https://cursor.com/blog/series-a

They bought options.

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.

Just because it's not discussed much on HN does not imply it is not relevant in the broader space. Cursor is still very much prevalent there with 1 mil DAU.

I’m curious if that 1 million DAU still holds as of today. I think it was reported last year some time aka before December when Claude code exploded. A quick google didn’t turn up any results that actually contained sources for the number.

It makes you wonder how much of this is essentially money laundering.

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60B. That's a completely crazy price. Great for Cursor, I guess. If it happens, that is.

That price may not get paid. The only thing SpaceX has committed to so far is $10 billion for their shared work.

Great for the shareholders at least.

Galactic Empire has agreed to acquire a local lemonade stand in exchange for 10 death stars.

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-sa...

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Here’s the spaceX announcement (non-paywalled): https://x.com/spacex/status/2046713419978453374

Can you change the title?

NYTimes has updated the title "SpaceX Strikes Deal With Cursor for $60 Billion"

@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.

Thanks for the info! I removed the callout

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yup - updated

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.

what about blockchain? /s

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.

did cursor do model training? I thought it used models built by other companies

Yes, https://cursor.com/docs/models/cursor-composer-2

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It's fine tuned Kimi, they didn't train it from scratch.

Sure, but so what? It seems that model size and RL are the determining factors these days.

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.

Enron was absolute peanuts compared to the financial fraud Musk has been executing (with the apparent blessing of the SEC). At its peak Enron had a roughly $70B market cap, TSLA is currently sitting at $1.74T. We can expect similar numbers from the SpaceX IPO.

It's hard to compare these numbers directly since valuations have increased quite a bit since a quarter century ago. As a proportion of the S&P 500, Tesla (2.3%) is about 4x of Enron at that $70b (0.6%).

Tesla is profitable, as a matter of public record. And SpaceX is, by all accounts, extremely profitable.

SpaceX is _not_ profitable by most reasonable measurements of accounting. If you discount rocket depreciation costs and R&D, then yeah its profitable from starlink revenue.

They haven't released a 10k yet so we don't know, but from what I understand SpaceX+X.ai is not GAAP profitable.

SpaceX was, but SpaceTwitter is not. xAI is hoovering all the money out of SpaceX.

SpaceX reuses its boosters 20+ times. Surely the depreciation is tiny when compared to the revenue of 60M+ per launch?

The entire space launch market is about $20B with multiple competitors in 2025. And by the most generous estimates it is going to be $80B by 2035. They can reuse the rockets as much as they like, the company isn’t worth $1.7T.

3x growth in ten years is the “most generous” estimate?

Yes because outside Starlink and govt contracts, there isn’t that massive of a demand growth in the sector. There a limit to how many satellites can be in orbit at a time and land based telecom infrastructure makes it so that satellite based infra isn’t necessary unless you’re in remote areas.

Starlink is already most of the revenue.

What's the point of the except?

The main problem is the AI stuff.

How can you say “The company isn’t worth X”? Isn’t the company worth exactly as much as people are willing to pay for its shares?

I don’t personally think Google is worth $4T but the share price says otherwise.

You’re comparing a publicly traded company where the supply demand economics have established a price to a company whose financials are not public, and is valuing itself at $1.7T and forcing everyone’s 401Ks and pension funds to fund it. Not the same thing.

>forcing everyone’s 401Ks and pension funds to fund it.

Source?

https://theconversation.com/musks-spacex-is-shaping-up-as-th...

The source links in that website (which looks like clickbait) do not support your claim.

https://www.morningstar.com/funds/spacex-ipo-how-index-funds...

> S&P is reportedly considering a fast entry rule change to its flagship index, though it has not yet been approved, and details are scant.

> FTSE Russell is also considering a fast entry rule for its suite of US market indexes and is in a consultation period as of early April 2026.

Only Nasdaq 100 has changed its rules, but Nasdaq 100 is not (and should not be) in most retirement funds.

If 1/3 having changed rules and 2/3 considering changing the rules isn’t evidence enough then not really much to discuss here.

When someone says that it usually means they believe the price is bound to drop.

> Isn’t the company worth exactly as much as people are willing to pay for its shares?

Really? We're still making claims like this in the year of our Lord 2026? People in the markets today are not predicting the real value of a company, they're gambling that the various political and financial machinations from people like Elon Musk will increase the share price enough that they can sell at a profit. The value of shares like Tesla are utterly disconnected from the value of the underlying business.

They also have to replace 20%+ of their satellite network every year.

why is that ?

They are low earth orbit satellites. Generally, the lower the orbit, the faster they decay. You could also argue that this is a benefit in that they gain updated technology with each replacement.

> You could also argue that this is a benefit in that they gain updated technology with each replacement.

No, having the option to replace technology at your leisure would be a benefit. Being forced to replace your technology because it's destined to become aerosolized aluminum in less than five years is a detriment.

Planned obsolescence really only works well if someone else is paying.

The operational lifetime of their satellites is about 5 years.

Because they fall back to the ground…

No, the burn up in the atmosphere. Burning metals being added to the oxygen you breathe.

low earth orbit

because of gravity

More because of drag

What about the R&D costs of blowing up vehicle after vehicle?

They have over 300 falcon 9 launches in a row now, just in case you’re not caught up on the latest

C'mon, you know they're talking about Starship.

It's less than the yearly cost of ground stations (just under 1 million/year per installation)

5 million over 5 years capex+opex. Mostly opex

It's also a troll post

Depreciation isn't the only thing that matters. R&D, manufacturing, maintenance, fuel, launch, support staff, and I'm sure there are countless others.

I'm not saying they aren't profitable. I don't know, but it's definitely not a given.

They did report FCF before xai and also invested at least $1B before they merged xai

Given that it's one Musk company giving a mountain of money to another, and the only numbers floating around regarding SpaceX seem like marketing fluff, I don't think any meaningful conclusions can be reached until we get some real numbers giving a full look at the finances.

Between launches alone, Starlink and Starshield, SpaceX will likely be a money printing machine for a long time.

They had like $16B in revenue last year, half from Starlink.

That’s just money in the door and the underwriters seem to think the business is worth $1.75T.

If underwriters think it’s worth $1.7T with a $16B revenue (not profit), they’re doing the same thing as the credit agencies did in 2008 by giving underwater mortgage backed securities a AAA rating.

Do you have any evidence or analysis to back that up? How are those similar?

It's not the same at all. Do you know how an IPO roadshow works at all or are you just spouting bullshit?

If roadshows guaranteed accurate valuations, pets.com wouldn’t liquidate within a year of IPO.

Again, not debating that SpaceX isn’t a legit company or that it’s profitable. But underwriters agreeing with high valuations to stocks that collapse once they go public isn’t unheard of.

Edit: and I will concede that I should’ve phrased my initial thoughts better. Credit rating agencies and underwriters do very separate things, just like IPOs and MBS are two very separate things.

You said: "underwriters ... doing the same thing as the credit agencies did in 2008 by giving underwater mortgage backed securities a AAA rating"

That isn't what is happening at all.

In an IPO the underwriters and the company collaborate to set the price based on approximate demand and what they want the quality of the holders to look like.

In the roadshow, the company is very constrained as to what they can say or disclose outside of the scope of the S-1. They can't include MNPI, forward looking financial projections, etc. Underwriters are also prohibited from sharing MNPI, or publishing marketing disguised as research.

So I guess if you're saying the SpaceX S-1 is completely full of shit and there's hidden risk in it, than it could be similar to 2008, but in this case nobody is manufacturing a rating, and those material misrepresentations would constitute securities fraud. Investment banks and ratings agencies aren't the same thing at all, and the buyers of marginally profitable IPO stocks are (hopefully) different than those of AAA MBS.

Yes. I updated my earlier comment and I concede I should’ve worded my earlier comment better.

I agree underwriters and credit agencies are very different just like IPOs and MBS are very different. I don’t think SpaceX is committing fraud.

> That’s just money in the door and the underwriters that seem to think the business is worth $1.75T.

I was responding to this particular comment.

In 2008, the credit rating agencies weren’t necessarily found to be guilty of wrongdoing, but a variety of reasons let them roll with AAA ratings on junk MBS anyway. Similarly the underwriters are not going to be committing crimes to facilitate IPOs. They are after all taking the risk of guaranteeing the sale for the company. However, if a company wants to roll with a high valuation, even if the fundamentals aren’t matching the valuation, if there are buyers, the underwriters will set the price supporting that high valuation. They are not incentivized to accurately measure a company’s worth like the comment I was responding to suggests.

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They are decades ahead of their nearest competition, in multiple verticals, and their barrier to entry is a literal gravity well.

All the money they are burning is for grok. And it is not decades ahead.

BO has entered the chat New Glenn and are arguably equal to Super Heavy given they've also recovered and reused their heavy booster.

I think you're going to be surprised at the level of competition BO provides SpaceX in the Artemis program.

About those underwriters - to quote the venerable Charlie Munger "they will sell 'shit' as long as 'shit' can be sold".

the ability to mine the moon or asteroid belt seems extremely lucrative, the logistics of transporting materials to earth costs less than shipping them across the ocean, an astounding level of value creation.

This can’t a serious comment.

Did you notice the size of the Artemis rocket and the size of the payload it sends to the moon and back?

Do you expect there to be diamonds just laying these on the moon surface, no mining required.

There is no other mode of transportation cheaper than shipping across the ocean.

That one is subsidized by externalizing costs to our lungs.

Shipping on water has been, by far, the cheapest mode of long-distance shipping since the moment boats were invented. That is to say, since thousands of years before boats were ever powered by the shit that destroys our lungs.

So is pace travel. Then rockets are not green!

It is valuable if they can find the right rocks and bring them back. A platinum group metal asteroid would be of immense value, at least the first one anyways. After that who knows, they might super saturate the global market for decades.

It is less about profitability and more about dilution of ownership. He seems to have a pattern of diluting the ownership of his profitable companies by folding in his less profitable/failed companies. You still own a share of a profitable company, but a smaller share, to his benefit.

Im also profitable as an individual. I made a $100 this week, which makes me worth at least $30M.

SpaceX was profitable before the xAI thing happened. Now I imagine they're way in the red.

As was Enron

Have you looked at their latest report?

They are only profitable because of subsidies. Pretty much 1:1.

Pretty decent video released today by Wall Street Millennial that looks at the profitability of SpaceX (as part of looking at 'Terafab') :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSJi1oQFQzs

SpaceX was surely more profitable before it was used to bail out Elon's xAI which was used to bailout his purchase of Twitter.

just because a bunch of rockets went up without blowing up, does not mean they are profitable. it cost money to shot rocket, and it is very expensive, reusable or not. most launches are internal launch without external paying customers.

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How much of that profit was due to public subsidies of the sort that he killed for other companies but not for himself during his tenure as a special government employee?

Genuine question, how do you know that without a 10K? Have the filed any document that shows their finances?

Tesla’s profits and market share has been declining for the past few years and it’s basically an overpriced meme stock.

Their market share of EVs in the US went from 40.9% in Q3 2025 to 58.9% in Q4 2025.

You may not have noticed because positive Musk related news doesn't seem to make headlines anymore.

> Their market share of EVs in the US went from 40.9% in Q3 2025 to 58.9% in Q4 2025.

You’re not wrong factually, but it doesn’t mean what you’re suggesting it means. Their share went up because EVs aren’t selling as much anymore. All companies including Tesla are selling fewer EVs. They just have a bigger share of the smaller pie, which isn’t exactly a success when you only sell EVs, but your competitors also sell non EVs.

I'm aware of the reason. Their market share is, nonetheless, up. That's still good for Tesla, their sales remained constant while people stopped buying other EVs.

Edit: Constant is the wrong word. Resilient or consistent is what I was trying to say.

Competitors leaving the market means less competition which is a good thing for Tesla. If the market for EVs returns in the future (if, say, the next administration reimplements the incentives), Tesla will be there to reap the benefits.

> their sales remained constant while people stopped buying other EVs.

Their sales did not remain constant.

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Tesla has a P/E ratio of 364.981. It's blatant fraud.

Nobody is forced to buy shares of any company. Even automatic 401k investment plans let you specify what to buy if you so choose. Perhaps you could make the argument Elon makes false promises to boost the stock price, but at the end of the day, individual investors must decide what they believe in no matter the CEO's antics.

I'm not sure I follow, here. What about this makes you think this is a shell game?

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.

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.

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).

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.

> Elon Musk Mars Conglomerate

That’s SpaceX’s version of Tesla’s self driving car pipe dream

Edit - I use self-driving car and Autopilot interchangeably

It's so pipe-dreamy that I used it for an hour today through SF rush hour traffic. Clearly never going to work though, right? right???

Did you follow Tesla's published instructions on how to use it (https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/modely/en_us/GUID-2CB6080...)? You're explicitly forbidden, for example, from assuming that it's going to make the right decision at intersections; you must manually inspect each intersection and evaluate whether it's "safe and/or appropriate" to continue. You're also not allowed to look away from the road or use your phone. YMMV, but to me that level of required attention doesn't match the term "self-driving".

What I see a lot of people do, unfortunately, is reconcile this contradiction by not following the published limitations of the "Full Self-Driving (Supervised)" product. They assume that Elon Musk wouldn't call it that if it couldn't be trusted to do what they expect. Then they get into fatal crashes, and someone sues, and Tesla argues that they can't be held accountable for bad drivers who don't follow the rules.

Your claim was that the product doesn't work, and I'm telling you it works without intervention consistently and in complicated traffic situations.

Any argument about how people don't pay enough attention since it isn't yet certified as a L4 system is irrelevant and tangential to the point.

Your definition of Tesla's self-driving product is very different than what Tesla itself promised, and that's what the person you are replying to...is telling you as well.

Anyone who thinks it is pipe dream given how it works today + rate of change is clueless, and that is putting it kindly.

I don't think L4 autonomy is a pipe dream. Indeed, it exists today and is widely available in the same city you drove your Tesla in. I think it's a pipe dream for Tesla specifically to achieve it, because for bizarre and idiosyncratic reasons Elon Musk won't let them use LiDAR or mount a roof sensor. They've been stuck at L2 for a decade now, and I don't see much reason to think that making that system incrementally more reliable will ever "unlock" L4.

In practice, Tesla on HW4 drives indistinguishably different from Waymo.

It does! A system which drives indistinguishably different from Waymo 99.999% of the time is L2. You might very well never experience that unlucky 1 mile in 100,000, but if there's 1M Teslas on the road driving a daily average of 33 miles, it's going to happen hundreds of times each day. An L4 system must guarantee that it can come safely to a stop before human intervention is required, and I don't think you can achieve that guarantee by pushing the nines on an L2 system.

I've been in Waymos that have needed teleop rescue multiple times in the last year so by that metric it's not a L4 system either.

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Isn't Tesla FSD good enough and trending in the right direction to be called a "pipe dream"?

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Words do mean something, and you could have taken 5 minutes of research to make a reasonable counterclaim

Tesla has an insane PE ratio because it’s a casino stock (~350x). As a comparison, NVIDIA IS 40x. SpaceX Is projected to be 300-500x. These are fantasy, completely unrealizable valuations. Similar to Enron, and Enron was over 70x. Enron wasn’t some surprise either.

Typically when PE gets out of whack, market analyzers dig into what is happening because it’s usually chicanery. No longer. Everyone is along for the ride.

PE has literally nothing to do with what Enron did which was accounting fraud + cashflow problems because they actually didnt make any money, in fact they lost tons of money and used future earnings in current reporting

Having a high pe is not fraud. There are even companies that are losing money, and they're still worth something.

When people say something is like enron, they dont mean it has a high PE. Its like saying someone is like Hitler and meaning they are a failed art student

> How are any of these companies at all related to Enron?

There's a lot of parallels:

* Circular transactions between companies under the same control

* Using SPVs to keep debt off the books

* The supplier funding its own customer through investment to inflate revenue on both ends

* Valuations driven by a hyped up narrative and decoupled from actual fundamentals

SpaceX bought nearly 20% of Cyber Trucks sold in Q4. That makes me question the level of real profitability.

He shut down investigations into him for a reason.

Tesla isn't that profitable, but SpaceX is likely generating boatloads of cash. From what I can tell Starlink alone has a free positive cash flow of about $2 billion. I'm not sure what the launch business is worth, but it's likely a lot given the absence of domestic competition.

I have a suspicion the reason Musk wanted to combine SpaceX and X.ai is the latter gives him losses to write off against all that cash from the former plus a chance for a big AI payoff.

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In 2024 Gwynne Shotwell said Starlink had a $600 million positive free cash flow based on $8.2 billion in revenue. Last year revenue estimates from both SpaceX and from outside people adding up new military contracts came out to about $11.8 billion. Their fixed costs haven't gone up much, so the big unknown is development costs for military contracts. I think $2 billion is a reasonable, conservative estimate.

How much of that are they sinking into Starship?

Probably some, but $2 billion a year? That seems like too much.

Hopefully all of it. If Starship succeeds, and that seems incredibly likely given the tests thus far, it will create an entire industry.

People underestimate how much ships changed the world. It will happen again, the only question is when.

There's a few ways

They're prepping for an IPO and there have been some anonymous insider reports of the figures in the press

There are industry estimates

Much of their income comes from public contracts

pointers?

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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?

SpaceX is just going to be the Musk Company minus Tesla. X Corp, the X parent, is a subsidiary of xAI which is a subsidiary of SpaceX. This seems back to front, but I suppose SpaceX has the better reputation for investors whereas if X owned SpaceX the IPO would be devalued by the association with Twitter.

AFAIK cursor is basically the only player right now not subsidizing tokens out the ass, and has been seeing solid growth across individual and enterprise with almost every model performing best in their harness. Not sure how that’s a serious decline.

On the contrary, anecdotally, myself and every engineer I know have switched fully from cursor to claude code since the start of the year. I now use zed with cc. I personally could not stand the buggy mess and constant UI changes of cursor. It’s also not good value in terms of claude tokens compared to claude code.

What sold you on Zed?

It’s fast, looks nice and since i really just review agent output these days, that’s good enough. They don’t move everything around and it moves at a nice pace.

I recently switched as well. Being able to work in a large monorepo without the editor freezing and taking 15+GB of RAM was a strong selling point :)

Wouldn’t Cursor agreeing to such a deal be almost ironclad proof they are subsidizing tokens/inference out the ass? There’s wide speculation all the large revenue growing companies right now are selling inference at break even or a loss.

No one wants an IDE, anymore. They're building a better horse.

In my opinion, the IDE interface still has not been beaten if you are working on a serious codebase where you are reviewing each diff.

I agree with you and I personally use Cursor. Just don’t see how there’s a moat that makes it worth $60b.

A team could build an AI IDE in a week, this could be a race to the bottom

Decent analogy in 2nd sentence BUT the 1st doesn't hold water. TIMTOWTDI, statements about "everyone" or "no one" are highly suspect, and the trend of code-assist -> agentic -> delegated / orchestration is just that (a trend), not a universal law. Even in a full-on maximalist yolo paperclip future, many experts will likely ALWAYS want access to a decent IDE. (Note I'm not saying Cursor is necessarily that IDE, and I'm not commenting on the valuation.)

cursors internal model efforts have not been able to meaningfully exceed the performance of the frontier models.

Claude/chatGPT are not subsidizing tokens via the API and are profitable for most enterprise consumption. This meme that they lose money on every query has zero evidence and is wrong outside of the 20/200$ a month plans.

I would like to know where you’re seeing this, because my strong impression is exactly the opposite: a year ago, everyone was talking about Cursor, but I haven’t heard anything about it in months. It’s all Claude Code and Codex now. In terms of mindshare they seem dead already.

wait a few months, been using claude code since beta, there are issues but it takes time to realise what they are. people who have been using claude since 2024 began moving away before Anthropic's marketing blitz at the end of last year.

Cursor's token utilization is significantly better than Claude Code. Composer's latest model, for coding, is very competitive on quality given price and was clearly well-optmiized (in two months, you will hear almost nothing else than how expensive Anthropic is...this is before they try to release the really expensive models). so many very obvious things like this if you have been using this tech every day for multiple years.

unfortunately, the competition in this space is very weak because of how dominant cursor has been (Kilo/Roo/Cline all have major implementation issues with token utilization, everyone else is trying to go all in on agentic). don't see this getting better until things get much worse because of anthropic/agentic. from the decisions that anthropic is making, it seems they are busily digging their own grave. growth will come after this.

Cursor seems to be pivoting to a Codex like desktop app. The real product though is probably their decently tuned harness and their composer models. I agree that their popularity has waned. I would attribute that mostly to customers chasing the most subsidized tokens and Cursor not having the pockets to keep up. Anthropic is already following suit and it seems unclear how long OpenAI is willing to continue. I think in a case of a market correction that forces model makers to adopt more reasonable growth targets, that Cursor is decently positioned.

IDE is a moat with people who can code.

How much is Cursor really beyond a VSCode fork? Like, do we really think no one else could figure that out?

Trying to posture for Golden Dome, but politically he is likely locked out of the contract.

ai trends seem to mirror general coding/software trends but compressed. People used to edit programs with sed, but the ide proved to be more powerful from every perspective. cli tools always have their place for "power-users" and other specialized intermediate usecases like tui's, but in general the ide has overtaken every aspect of cli use and many devs hardly ever use the terminal. I suspect a similar thing will happen with ai.

While surely someone has done human-driven editing with sed, that's not what it's for. Remember that ed is the standard editor.

Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google are all investing heavily in their desktop type apps, I think the TUI phase is coming to an end.

Isn’t it obvious? Musk bailed out his Twitter investors with xAI. Then he bailed out xAI with SpaceX. Now he realizes that no one thinks xAI is worth the hundreds of billions he claimed it was in that potentially fraudulent transaction, and is trying to make Grok and xAI relevant by getting access to customers in the AI coding space. But in the end, it’s SpaceX share holders who are being made fools of and soon, especially with the Nasdaq fast track changes to incorporate SpaceX forcefully into everyone’s passive investments, the public will be the one who is made poorer. But Musk will become a trillionaire.

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> 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.

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"

If we're talking Dyson spheres, this is like going from a half-marathon to running the distance from Earth to Betelgeuse. It's just not a realistic endeavor.

And in handstanding walk because you're better at hands than legs. All their advantages are in domains to be obsoleted by technologies required for such things.

Be it the Dyson shell thing or Lunar or Mars colonies, there's no way it'll be done relying on transports from Earth surface. It could only work if we could make them from asteroid pieces. Which makes most items on their tech tree from Starship forward obsolete. And they're already all-in on those techs. It makes so little sense in so many levels.

More like "I'm going to run every possible marathon route on the Earth's road network."

It's a mission, not a business plan. Colonising Mars was always a moonshot as well. But it aligned the company's priorities.

My point is regardless of what you think of a Dyson sphere, this theory seems to predict what the company does better than assuming everything's a ketamine fever dream.

Mars was a moonshot, pivot to the actual moon. ;)

> this theory seems to predict what the company does better than assuming everything's a ketamine fever dream.

I think Musk being a ketamine addict explains a lot and this is very aligned. Given that he can't build a self-driving car, he would have to be under the influence of very strong drugs to think he could build a Dyson sphere of all things.

That being said, some sort of financial fraud is even more on brand.

Dumb question, do the cybercab thingies not drive themselves? Having a safety driver doesn’t disqualify them if for the vast majority of the time they’re autonomous. It just means they’re earlier into chasing 9’s than Waymo.

The characterisation of “level 5” autonomy as the car handling any conceivable circumstance (not that you explicitly made this claim here) is just silly. Humans can’t handle any conceivable circumstance either.

Arguably more accurate is that it pivoted from colonising Mars to Elon's personal piggy bank to bail out his other failing bets.

Plot twist: Build the Dyson sphere around Earth and charge for sunlight…

"Have You Ever Seen the Sun Set at 3pm?"

https://youtu.be/hjdMYyjnmks?si=iyoVV-oZAPmQtp1B

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SpaceXXX

> its mission has pivoted from colonising Mars to building a Dyson sphere

Obligatory mention: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLzEX1TPBFM

She put it in the same category as AI or human-shaped robots. Those are two things Musk is working on. I stand by my theory.

this is Elon's desperate move to fix his weak coding problem. He recently stated he feels he is far behind in agentic coding, and that apparently that's what matters.

> He recently stated he feels he is far behind in agentic coding, and that apparently that's what matters

Sure. My question was why. And my loose interrogation of the question, together with some unique domain expertise, suggests he found an excuse to work towards a Dyson sphere.

He's offloading the loss from buying Twitter. This is the smoke and mirrors phase.

> He's offloading the loss from buying Twitter

That already happened with xAI-X merged with SpaceX.

This looks like SpaceX playing catchup to Claude and OpenAI that already provide coding solutions.

We have reached peak stupid.

I thought the same during the NFT craze and the blockchain craze before that.

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.

its definitely the worst case of money poisoning i've ever seen

is this just to drive up the buy price for others while having no intention of buying it themselves?

That's an expensive VS Code fork.

They moved on from that code base iirc. Still insane, mind.

Do you mean the new desktop app? The Cursor IDE/editor or whatever you want to call it is still based VSCode, right?

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.

$50bn for a harness makes no sense, what am I missing?

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.

My 2c: they need to pump xAI usage (which nobody is using) to be able to keep the hype alive pre-ipo.

I thought Cursor has started making their own models. Did I confuse them with someone else?

Their Composer 2 model is Kimi (an open model) with additional RL fine-tuning, for whatever that information is worth to you: https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/22/cursor-admits-its-new-codi...

Oh, I see.

Though, in fairness, that's probably the important part. Like a base model plus "coding smarts" is probably perfect for the situation.

But maybe not as much value as I was thinking.

They have a 'proprietary' model which is just an open source (kimi?) fine tune

For a successful IPO and attract more capital you need a very good story/narrative. That what is being crafted here. Business fundamentals matter less with elon!

Cursor has a significant enterprise userbase, that has to be worth something

1. Pay them with shares of SpaceX

2. Make SpaceX valuation even higher before IPO

3. Boost XAI/usage of Grok.

money laundering and tax avoidance

How would this be money laundering?

Value shifting. Search for SolarCity and cousin Lyndon Rive.

That isn't laundering

Musk passing around his debt from purchasing Twitter.

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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.

It's data. Nobody is using Grok for SWE work, but they are using Cursor.

Could be contracts.

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Dammit, I liked cursor

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…

“ Cursor has also given SpaceX the right to acquire Cursor later this year for $60 billion”

That isn’t an agreement to buy

Elon is determined to take down Altman

So I have to switch away from cursor? Any recommendations?

Cursor ($60b) being valued the same as Twitter ($51b inflation adjusted) is _willlld_

I'm out of the loop - what moat does Cursor even have now, and why is it worth $60B?

Why did a shoe company get $50 million in funding for their AI pivot?

Because VCs are braindead... I see your point.

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.

Why $60b and not $20b? Why not $10b or $500m?

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.

That’s unfortunate. I’m not interested in using Musk associated products anymore than I have to.

Cursor better take the $60B because a VS Code fork with a crappy fine tune of Kimi is not worth that much.

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?

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

https://xcancel.com/trq212/status/2046713419978453374

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.

$60B for a VSCode fork with AI integration... It may show the value of the gap between vanilla LLM output and production-ready applications.

Gross. We need more anti trust enforcement. Large incumbents killing all competition will make us weaker over time.

I'd be interested in this breakdown - what % of that is cursor's product(tech x customer) vs future tokens

Never bet against Elon.

Good on them to get $10B breakup terms, after the Twitter shitshow

Last day for me using Cursor at work, I prefer to move to Codex and Claude Code that touch anything related to Elon.

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.

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.

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

Just act hard for the duration of the interview season.

What exactly did you predict in 2022?

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.

>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

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.

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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.)

SpaceX is going to have an AI coding "oops" in space.

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”?

The endgame is to game the index funds by bribing or otherwise.. convincing the big stock exchanges to forgo their index inclusion rules so SpaceX will get included in Nasdaq 100 within 10 days or something stupid like that. SpaceX will initially float a tiny fraction of shares at a wildly inflated value and use a combination of artificial scarcity and Elon Stans (retail) to keep the stock from crashing until it gets included in the indexes. Then, your 401k will auto-buy SpaceX, letting insiders exit at their ludicrous valuation.

Eventually, stock prices will correct hard, and retail/passive investors will be left with the bag.

The idea that merging these companies has some business purpose is hilarious. It’s purely financial engineering. Unfortunately, our existing system has little consumer protection against this kind of fraud, so Elon will probably get away with it, at least in the short term

> endgame is to game the index funds

Buying Cursor does nothing for this.

It gives them some amount of paying customer base using AI. That is some magic voodoo you need to sprinkle onto the public sale to get the highest possible price point.

X doesnt yet have a paying customer base using AI?

idk but feels like this might be a new literal kind of acquihire, to bulk purchase workers in cash

The Elon Musk Company does what Elon Musk wants. Tesla is dying, X is a disaster, so he bundled everything into the one company that had a bright future, SpaceX. There is no grand vision or endgame beyond do as Elon Musk wants. Going to Mars or the Moon or whatever was never a vision or mission, just a story to tell.

Model Y is still the best selling car in the world (and still the best-selling car in China), but yeah Tesla is *dying.

> 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.

> 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.

Guardian Link:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/apr/21/spacex-cu...

https://archive.is/gbdJ8

0 to $60B in less than 4 years ... impressive!

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.

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.

Why SpaceX and not xAI?

Because spacex already bought xai.

I wonder if they are actually 'acquiring' some of the existing contracts between Cursor and X/Y/Z rather than the product itself.

some plausible analysis here on motivations https://x.com/0xrwu/status/2046721359263285478

Makes sense. Cursor is extremely overhyped as well.

If I stop paying for Cursor, will they threaten to sue like Twitter does?

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.

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.

What are the implications of this for Cursor being model agnostic?

SpaceX, xAI, Collosus data centers, next space compute, X, Starlink and soon Cursor to join 2, 3 & 4 together?

60B for Composer 2…that is built from Kimi K2… what ever happened to “Grok being the best”?

Am I the only one that thinks Composer is really good, when you factor in the speed and the cost?

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.

Composer is clearly dumber than the rest but then I only ask it dumb questions and it answers them really quickly.

yes, you are

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.

every wrapper either gets acquired or stays long enough to be a zombie startup

Don't see how this works out financially.

my only gripe rn is grok is still a shitty model to use. yeh it scores nearby openai and anthropic on benchmarks, but my personal experience has been underwhelming

If Twitter was when Musk jumped the shark this is definitely him sticking the landing.

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.

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"

Is this Cursor the product? Or AnySphere the company?

cursor was interesting about a year ago

reading this thread, I seem to be the only cursor user on earth on the free tier using tab-completes.

Time to switch

$60 billion with a B???

SpaceX’s announcement (non paywalled):

https://x.com/spacex/status/2046713419978453374

"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."

RIP Cursor.

but What exactly is SpaceX doing in the AI Space (Pun Intended) and Why?

these are weird times...

Looking forward to seeing where this goes, both companies have a reputation for engineering excellence.

Seriously DONT CHANGE THE FUCKING POST TITLE AFTER SOMEONE HAS COMMENTED

Misleading title on the post - SpaceX has the OPTION to buy them for $60B later this year, or pay $10B for their work together.

these valuations are total madness

Complete waste of $60B. It's just a prompt+tools. This is how you destroy SpaceX from the inside.

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.

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.

So I won’t use stuff by Elon Musk, what is the next best alternative please

A text editor?

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.