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

519 points by dmarcos 9 hours ago

https://www.reuters.com/technology/spacex-says-it-has-option...

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/21/business/spacex-cursor-de... (https://archive.ph/c2Tac)

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-04-21/spacex-sa...

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.

rob74 - an hour ago

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...
- ozim - 37 minutes ago
  
  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.
  - sigmoid10 - 21 minutes ago
    
    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.
  - Cthulhu_ - 4 minutes ago
    
    Sure, but is it worth 60 billion?
- wahnfrieden - an hour ago
  
  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.
  - mandeepj - an hour ago
    
    > users who haven't caught on yet
    They are catching up fast!
    https://www.businessinsider.com/chamath-palihapitiya-ai-cost...
  - sighthrowaway - 28 minutes ago
    
    > 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.
    
    echelon - 21 minutes ago
    
    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.
    
    sighthrowaway - 13 minutes ago
    
    If you’re more worried about cost than you are being productive and getting good results then sure, stick with foundational model company apps.
    
    paganel - a minute ago
    
    “Being productive” without taking inputs/costs into consideration is an oxymoron.
  - - an hour ago
    
    [deleted]
  - otabdeveloper4 - 36 minutes ago
    
    API rates are the real rates. Subscription costs are the "first hit is free" subsidized pricing.
- villgax - 18 minutes ago
  
  * MicroSoft is shaking in the corner lol
  - Cthulhu_ - 3 minutes ago
    
    MS is doing just fine I'm sure
gpm - 7 hours ago

Paying $10B for the option is also crazy though. Paying $10B for the thing outright and not just an option would be absurdly high.
- mlinsey - 4 hours ago
  
  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.
  - jacques_chester - 2 hours ago
    
    If it's not in an 8K filing it isn't real.
  - Barbing - 3 hours ago
    
    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.
    
    throwanem - 3 hours ago
    
    [flagged]
    
    whatsupdog - an hour ago
    
    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.
    
    danso - an hour ago
    
    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?
    
    numpad0 - 30 minutes ago
    
    > 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?
    ?
    
    eCa - an hour ago
    
    One obvious argument is what it was trained on.
    
    whatsupdog - 18 minutes ago
    
    Doesn't have to be. You can train it on normal pictures of children and nude images of adults.
    
    sighthrowaway - 32 minutes ago
    
    Please stop spreading misinformation.
    
    the-peter - 2 hours ago
    
    [flagged]
    
    estomagordo - 2 hours ago
    
    I hate Trump as much as the next guy, but what is that evidence, again?
    
    kennywinker - 36 minutes ago
    
    https://www.thedailybeast.com/new-evidence-corroborates-clai...
    
    modriano - an hour ago
    
    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...
    
    estomagordo - an hour ago
    
    Obviously this looks very bad but you don't seriously think it constitutes evidence?
    
    sighthrowaway - 30 minutes ago
    
    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.
    
    rhizome - an hour ago
    
    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.
    
    estomagordo - an hour ago
    
    Again, circumstantial and speculative.
    
    pyvpx - 2 hours ago
    
    Clearly you don’t and that disingenuousness is frowned upon in discussions here.
    
    walletdrainer - an hour ago
    
    So, where’s the evidence?