SpaceX to buy Cursor for $60B
reuters.com467 points by itsmarcelg 7 hours ago
467 points by itsmarcelg 7 hours ago
I stopped using Cursor when I started getting comfortable with Codex/Claude. Cursor is just annoying with the constant popups and it's just not as good. Now my workflow is to use my normal editor, add a todo describing what I want, and then ask Codex+gpt-5.5 to implement it. It absolutely nails it. Using codex is so much more like working with a partner vs the noise and annoyance of Cursor.
That said, I think we're in a narrow window of time right now where any of this matters. Prompt "engineering" and working around your tools will be over in a year or so.
Fwiw I am a c/c++ systems engineer. I think anyone mentioning anecdotal experience like this should clarify. Maybe frontend JavaScript folks have a totally different take and that's expected.
I also work with C++, and I use Codex (desktop) which writes 99.99% of my code, plus Visual Studio, which is nice for reading and navigating code. For webdev I do VSCode + Codex.
I started with Cursor back in the day, but switched to Claude Code and then Codex when Cursor got too expensive.
If price wasn't an issue, maybe I'd prefer Cursor only because I can easily switch between models. But that's it. I always disliked the "accept/reject" workflow in cursor, but that's probably optional nowadays I guess?
Same.
When I first used Cursor, I hadn't used any of the "Vibe Code" tools out there, so it was pretty neat to have an assistant directly tied to the editor.
Once I learned how to use Codex, I just used a tmux split with NeoVim and have the effect I wanted. I haven't felt compelled to use Cursor at work since.
the reason to use cursor nowadays isn't the IDE (though it's helpful perhaps once a week), but how it makes running models from multiple providers trivial out of the box. I don't have to juggle keys or drop to a shell tool call, it supports calling out to e.g. gemini in a subagent natively. I have multiple models cross-reviewing plans and diffs as a matter of course.
claude code was seriously annoying with the flickering, maybe it's fixed now, I don't know.
cursor also has a (bad) cli if you need it, it seems it's mostly used to setup remote agents, but it does the job in a pinch.
OpenCode and Pi do those things as well, and without a whole annoying IDE bundled in.
Yep in my experience the weakest engs in my org are the ones still using Cursor. not a good outlook IMO
I know this is not always true. But the same people who like cursor still are the same people who are less familiar with the terminal.
And I don't know what it is but it feels the less familiar you are with a terminal, the less skilled you tend to be.
Definitely not a 100% case. But has been common in my experience
I think it's more of a sign of a good engineer. I know a number of engineers that are good and don't really work with the terminal. On the other hand, every engineer I've worked with who was a 'terminal guy' was great. I think being good with the terminal is a signal that the person is willing to 'dig in' and understand stuff at a lower level.
I don’t think mapping tooling to ability makes sense here, particularly when the “advanced” tools here just abstract more away, though I agree that Cursor is terrible. So many useless windows.
Same path as you. Went from $60 cursor plan (often exceeding it which costed more in API) to a limitless $100 codex plan where I basically say "read the markdown and implement the instructions". Deepseek also works quite well, surprisingly!
(FWIW Im mostly using python for OCR, LLM calls, data analysis..)
>> Fwiw I am a c/c++ systems engineer. I think anyone mentioning anecdotal experience like this should clarify. Maybe frontend JavaScript folks have a totally different take and that's expected.
Similar experience, having transitioned from full-stack to a dedicated C/C++ stack, learned/experienced firsthand that there is no one-size-fits-all tool.
Cursor also seems to be doing something with the Claude models that makes it way slower and less efficient as times goes by.
Or it could be just Claude CLI doing something very well.
What are you saying is going to be over in a year or so?
Right now I think there is an edge to how you construct prompts and config files. There is a large difference between "modify f() to do..." and "modify f() to do... Review the current variables and make sure they are still used consistent with their naming. Look for unreachable and dead code. Examine callers and called functions for side effects from the introduced changes...".
I don't think that will make much difference in a year.
Not OP, but I generally agree. Models are powerful enough now to reliably instruct other models. They don’t need fancy tools or IDEs, just the command line.
With deterministic workflows, type-safe languages and test suites, agentic loops pretty much “can’t fail”. They will continue until the types resolve, the tests pass, and the project requirements are deterministically met.
By that point it’s literally just a case of typing a prompt in to a text field, and waiting.
I recently made an npm package with a small C helper that runs in the background. The JS/TS code is 99.9% unit test covered and for sure "cleaner" code. Just my opinion though.
I like your take and think the key takeaway is that there is no single answer for everyone. It’s like eMacs vs vim.
My one question is what popups exist in cursor? It is my daily driver and I cannot recall any popups.
The code suggestions. It's highly distracting and pulls me out of my flow. I know how to code and I don't mind typing. I don't need AI making trivial suggestions. I want it to do exactly what I tell it to do.
I like cursor, but I'm assuming they're talking about how it hijacks your tab key. It's amazing when it works, and infuriating when I just want to insert a damn tab!
On the flipside, I enjoy Cursor now and came back to it after leaving it over a year ago. The 2.5 model is fast as hell and very good. And whatever harness they have it's terrific, great results. I also really enjoy the fact that I can open my website in the Cursor in-app browser and just click and reference stuff. It's a really cracked workflow. The models can only get better for them.
I would also add that Cursor's "Debug" harness is incredible. Hit "Tab" in the AI editor to Tab through the options (Plan, Multitask, Ask, etc.)
If you do any kind of on-device work, it will spin up a local HTTP log server, and pipe logs from your real device (phone, hardware, etc.) to the server and do realtime debugging.
Claude will mostly guess, have you copy + paste logs, etc.
> I can open my website in the Cursor in-app browser and just click and reference stuff.
I’ve never used cursor and have only seen it in a couple work lunch and learn demos. I’ve never seen that feature. I have a lot of use cases where I’m asking cc to move a widget down a little bit or make a data table full width etc. Being able to reference the actual UI would be useful.
A space company is buying an IDE for roughly the cost to build 150 of world's most expensive modern hospitals [1]. How is this in SpaceX's interest? Isn't it kinda bizarre that Elon is pivoting SpaceX to something else?
1. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/16/spacex-spcx-cursor-acquisiti...
It’s all in a stock that may very well be near its zenith when this closes (or maybe not. This is so far past fundamentals it’s impossible to tell).
They’re spending Monopoly money.
It also seems like SpaceX is poised to Hoover up all of Elons companies so it’s might not be “just a space company” for long.
Elon's award is tied to growing Tesla's market cap - it's pretty transparent that he's just trying to ball-of-mud together everything he can to hit that target and grab the bag.
What would it mean if SpaceX buys Tesla though? Does the combined market cap count? That would be wrong. Tesla buying SpaceX just for hist bonus and then rebranding to X would be classic Musk.
It's a game for him, but so ridiculous. While Tesla was pushing electrification and SpaceX pushing rapid rocket re-use I kind of tolerated Elon's antics, but since he got involved in politics and DOGE I can't bear it anymore.
> Does the combined market cap count? That would be wrong.
It counts and it's not wrong.
Sure, the Tesla award takes into account any M&A but growing a 2T company to 3T is a 50% increase. While growing a 1T company to 2T is a 100% increase so it's expected to be easier for him to hit his award targets with the companies merged as opposed to not merged.
The total addressable market (TAM) for SpaceX is finite. There are only so many nation-states and large corporations that want to launch payloads into orbit.
And even if their internet service provider is uniquely capable for now, it only fills a strategic need for certain customers.
So instead, Musk and Co. need to find bubbling market trends that look like they will have huge gigantic TAMs to justify the potential growth of this company.
All markets are finite. But you're thinking too finitely -- remember that there was a proposal to use Starship (BFS?) as a point-to-point method of people transport too (London to Sydney in under 50 minutes I seem to remember).
You also have other services: Starlink is an obvious one they're pursuing now, but there's many other things that they could branch into with no effective competition right now, from harvesting resources such as Helium-3 to Rare Earths (ironic name), to... (thinks for several minutes) banishing people to the Phantom Zone?
But you get what I mean, it's not just about rockets, it's about the things cheap and reliable rocketry enables.
SpaceX also wants to put data centers in space. That's the big market for SpaceX and how it ties into AI.
Which hasn't yet been proven to be either technically or economically viable, even on paper. It's a pipe dream.
The cynical viewpoint is that this is Elon capitalizing on current datacenter hype to inflate SpaceX's valuation based on theoretically overcoming tremendous amounts of hard physics problems, over the next 5-10 years. As he did with FSD, Boring Company / Hyperloop, Twitter, etc.
Do they, really? Because putting data centers in space would mean multiplying the infrastructure cost by a few orders of magnitude, while being far, far away from cheap energy - photovoltaics would work, certainly, but it will take a lot of it, and it's not like you can just slap panels on the roof - easy cooling, and people.
It's a ridiculous idea, and I don't believe it's what they are really pursuing.
yes musk said that, but that's retarded, a statement made to fill as many bingo spaces as possible
Energy will be the biggest bottleneck to data centers on land. Is not an issue in space. Space is the perfect env for running compute.
Yes but the statement is in fact a milestone to meet in order to vest Class B stock options, specifically SPCX needs to put 100 terawatts of compute [1] in outer space and beam it back to somewhere, my guess is Earth.
There's even more rewards for putting a million people on Mars and reaching a market cap of 7.5T by a certain date. Oh yeah he has to stay employed too.
From the SEC Form 3 filed June 12th: 1) This Form 3 does not include 1,302,072,285 shares of restricted Class B Common Stock issued to and held of record by the Reporting Person, which may be voted by the Reporting Person, and the vesting of which is subject to the satisfaction of certain performance and other conditions. 1,000,000,000 shares of restricted Class B Common Stock vest upon (i) the Issuer's achievement of specified market capitalization milestones across 15 equal tranches ranging from $500 billion to $7.5 trillion, with each milestone reflecting $500 billion in additional valuation, and (ii) the Issuer's establishment of a permanent human colony on Mars with at least one million inhabitants, in each case, subject to the Reporting Person's continued employment ("SpaceX CEO Award"). 302,072,285 shares of restricted Class B Common Stock vest upon (i) the Issuer's achievement of specified market capitalization milestones across 12 equal tranches ranging from $1.065 trillion to $6.565 trillion, with each milestone reflecting $500 billion in additional valuation, and (ii) the Issuer's completion of non-Earth-based data centers capable of delivering 100 terawatts of compute per year, in each case, subject to the Reporting Person's continued employment ("AI CEO Award")
The way people just casually use that word again now is so sad. And I don't even mean that in an "I'm offended" way, but more of "I'm embarrassed by the way you're trying to be offensive" way.
> I'm embarrassed by the way you're trying to be offensive
Oooor, try this one on for size:
What if they're not out to cause offense and the malice you impute is just an illusion under which you yourself are laboring alone? What if it was a well understood and not particularly offensive vernacular usage from before people decided they ought to spend their time being offended on behalf of hypothetical listeners?
Ironically, we can thank Elon Musk for that too.
edit: Gross that you're being downvoted. HN crowd needs a serious look in the mirror.
For what it’s worth, I’m not trying to be offensive or edgy when I say that word with friends. “The grass is green and that thing (random topic) is retarded.”
You know that many people are offended by that word and yet you use it anyway when other words would get the exact same message across without the offense. The only reasons to use that specific word are either the desire to cause offense or to revel in the possibility of causing offense.
I still have no idea how that would work. Imagine launching an entire data center building into space, and then imagine also launching a solar array to power it, and then also launching a gigantic radiator to cool it... and the radiator is full of some kind of liquid that can never leak even though it's in a vacuum.
Like, sure, but also, that seems like a lot of work, a lot of extra cost, and a lot of risk, all just to avoid building it in Kansas.
Space Opportunities + Robots (Tesla merger when it happens) + Software factory (Cursor).
It is a umbrella enterprise.
Cursor's edit data is invaluable to anyone who wants to train a coding model. Probably the best data available outside Anthropic and OpenAI. Coding models are seen by the leaders in AI as both the biggest current revenue opportunity and the best way to accelerate the progress of AI and bring about recursive self-improvement that will create superintelligence. So yeah, it's easy to see how SpaceX could see it as in their interest to purchase Cursor with 2% of their equity.
A city on Mars was never going to happen without revenue. Starlink is providing revenue but probably not enough for Mars. SpaceX needs more and AI is the only plausible way.
> Cursor's edit data is invaluable to anyone who wants to train a coding model.
Ok. So what prevents a company from offering a Claude Code/ Cursor equivalent, with 100% subsidised Claude (= 100% free), capturing the exact same data that Cursor does? If the data is worth in the tens of billions, the cost of subsidising the usage is negligible.
> all-stock deal
It's not like they could easily cash out all of those $60B. I always find it troublesome that we generally conflate cash with stonks, market caps, and such.
With its IPO, SpaceX secured its role as the vehicle for consolidating Musk's vanity businesses into one closely held public organization that can more easily convert publicity into investment and internally reallocate funds and debts based on his personal whims.
So yes, SpaceX is pivoting, but it's to no one's surprise.
So buy $TSLA is your recommendation
Buying Tesla is just buying SpaceX. When they roll up Tesla, it will be in a stock deal not real money. None of this is real money and I would argue that Musk is not the world's first trillionaire because there is no reality in which he could get that money out of SpaceX
I mean, if he wanted to sell tomorrow, who COULD spend $2-3 Trillion to buy it, and who WOULD? Anyone with that kind of money to spend today knows what a scam it is
This Cold Fusion vid covers the "pivot" nicely.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPIGu0anfAE
The video explains that it is spelled out in the prospectus that SpaceX is counting 70%-80% of their total addressable market to be AI related and only about 7%-8% to be space-related.
I saw that too, and it's so depressing. SpaceX was pushing the envelope of "interplanetary" travel/species, and to see it being reduced to a 7-8% "side-quest" :-(
Calling it an IDE is under-representing cursor
They have in-house models, and the data to train even more powerful ones. The cursor team is a proper AI lab.
Isn't their in-house model just Kimi?
See here https://cursor.com/blog/composer-2-5
85% of the compute for the final model is from them, and not the base Kimi model.
They use Kimi and post-train it on the same stuff that anyone with a Github dump can feed it. They aren't doing anything that you can't do yourself.
Dumping github into a model is not post training, thats pre training. And every base model already has all of github.
Composer post training is clearly very good, only second to Anthropic and OpenAI.
It does irk me a bit that they try to hide the fact that it's based on a chinese pretrained model though.
Meh. On an outcomes analysis, I've found Cursor's delivery to be exceptionally weak.
Good luck to the alt-economy of SpaceTesla though, may all our 401ks survive.
Their “in house models” are reportedly basically just Kimi.
Replied on the other comment about this, but putting it here:
> See here https://cursor.com/blog/composer-2-5
> 85% of the compute for the final model is from them, and not the base Kimi model.
Of course they could be lying, but it seems feasible that they are adding a lot on top of this
It’s not real money, there’s no check being written for that amount and then deposited into someone’s bank account.
If only the shareholders had any kind of voice - if only it was illegal to issue a fake IPO where you sell an overwhelming number of shares stripped of their voting power - if only the market responded rationally to this boondoggle.
If we're going to right the ship in turn of common sense a bunch of people need to lose a bunch of money, I just hope it doesn't mostly hit passive investors and instead lands mostly on Elon-stans.
How is it legal to have different share classes? You could make 100 shares that can vote and then sell 99.9% of the company while maintaining full control. Seems strongly against the spirit of a publicly traded company
Most large companies do that these days: GOOG, META all have different share classes. Even the small startup I worked for had that.
Musk didn’t invent the idea of using multiple share classes to ensure the founder(s) retain control of the company, see Rupert Murdoch, Google, Facebook, etc
From the regulators’ perspective: it is a risk, but you disclosed that risk in the prospectus that buyers are assumed to have read (what percentage ever actually do?), hence it is fine
Well, when you buy into an IPO, they make you sign to say you read it. So either you did, or you made a false statement on a legal document
I suppose they kind of do, they could sell the stock and drive the price down. That wouldn't force Musk to change direction, but it would hurt his wealth.
They are buying it with overvalued stocks, so it isn't real money. Probably the Cursor team will be able to sell it when the SpaceX stocks will be already crashed.
Why are you comparing it to building expensive modern hospitals? Why don't you compare every other tech acquisition to that? because that's not a relevant comparison, and building expensive modern hospitals has nothing to do with the goal of for-profit corporations.
SpaceX has 3 major businesses: Space, Starlink, and AI.
This acquisition helps with the 3rd one.
This is the same straw man argument of "country Z has N homeless/unhoused people, why are they building a space/military/education widget for $Y price, when they haven't found homes for N unhoused people yet?"
They compared the acquisition to hospitals because "think of the children!"
xAI is a subsidiary of SpaceX and runs several of the worlds largest compute datacenters.
is spacex a space company? I thought they were an internet provider that wants to use their strategic advantages to get into AI including AI infra like data centers.
SpaceX and everything Elon are stock companies - they're Microstrategy but with a veneer of a real business slapped on top.
Smart move as they will pay in stock, and if stock is overvalued by 2x this means you get 50% discount
yeah but someone -- no one has explained who -- still thinks this is a good idea
How is buying a company sending messages on the Internet for $45b in the owner's interest when Westinghouse, who built nuclear reactors sold for under $10b? The market is irrational.
SpaceX is just a vibe company. Nothing they are doing makes sense on a valuation basis, which their investors are eventually going to painfully figure out.
I’m worried all this crap will distract and damage the things they are great at (rockets) similar to what happened to Tesla where outside the stock price it’s pretty dismal
I mean, the answer is obvious if you do not deliberately try to put a message in the worst light possible:
- "Space company" has a major LLM+datacenter business called X.ai.
- LLM for coding is a big business, as you can see from trillion dollar valuations of Anthropic.
- Cursor is popular and gives you a headstart on the business.
- Instagram was bought for the price of many many hospitals. Uber is more valuable than companies owning the cars. Different business models, entirely different valuation models. Not sure what that comparison entails. You know it. I know it.
Whether it is a good purchase or not, we may not know, but we know your characterization is just outright dismissal without much rationale behind it.
Elon is consolidating all of his property into one single megacorporation because he is confident that nobody will ever challenge this, given the current political direction of the United States.
> the current political direction of the United States
These kinds of comments reek echo-chamber parroting and zero substantive research. As someone that very much enjoys and carefully follows politics, the current political direction points squarely to Republicans getting absolutely pummelled in the midterms, effectively turning Trump's administration into a 2-year lame duck. What are you even talking about?
Even if Congress may reverse things in the future, there are many opportunistic things happening right now, and it seems like the spacex situation is one of them. The emerging picture feels like a 'flood the zone' strategy (not by coordination, but by practical effect).
While other commenters have pointed out lots of details that point towards the favorable structural environment going forward, another idea that roots my thoughts towards this is that by creating facts on the ground, they are defining the new starting point.
Ultimately, reversing all of the different 'wrongs' or irregularities will be costly to both the opposition's political and attentional capital.
Will a midterm pummeling change the regulatory departments that oversee mergers and anti-trust?
Obviously you're trying to be snarky, but I hope you realize that Congress does, in fact, have (fairly broad) statutory authority over executive agencies[1].
Can it change? Yes. That's not the same question as will it change. And that is also not the same question as "will the change result in a different posture towards antitrust."
When was the last time substantive antitrust action was taken that forcefully restructured a large company to a significant degree?
And I hope you realize that while Congress has authority over a lot of things, that authority is being routinely overridden by the current presidential administration, including fundamental things like spending and declaring war.
So it comes across as a bit foolish to assume that any Congressional authority actually exists, or will continue to exist into the future, since we have many examples now of where that authority seemingly doesn't matter anymore.
Especially since the majority of Congress is in the same party as the current President, and is making no effort not to cede congressional authority to the executive branch.
One of the things I find really interesting as a Brit is hard to put into words:
Americans tell us that we don't have a constitution — when we do, it is just not wholly written down. (It is in part).
We have a constitution that is flexible and precedent-based, but pretty stable, and it has emerged on top of the bits that are written down, and has amended them over time (for example, it is built in part on Magna Carta, but only two or three of its principles remain in law.) Notably a bit more of it got written when we agreed to be bound by the ECHR, but that was mostly absorbed into our understanding.
It has taken us hundreds of years to get to this stability, and it is defended from attack from pretty much all sides; every government risks changing it and there is pushback each time, because you can't govern if there aren't rules. The rules are precedent and convention, and there are various authorities and archives that are consulted to work out what they are if people think they are at risk.
We are regularly told by Americans that this is an intolerable thing; we need a written constitution or we can't know what our rights are!
But those same Americans, right now, are engaged in exactly this process. You have a set of written rules that give Congress power over things, and you are currently evolving a set of precedents that suggest that the executive can simply wander past them and Congress somehow shows deference or refuses to assert its power in some situations.
You're right at the start of building an uncodified constitution on top of the old one just as we did on top of Magna Carta.
It's not entirely new to Trump; every President in my lifetime has pushed on this except maybe Carter. And sometimes they push back (Roe v. Wade was part of this uncodified constitution and probably needed to be a written amendment.)
It could work out but it's important to understand that is what you're doing. And it's not just Unitary Executive theory or presidential immunity; the emergence of the Supreme Court's "shadow docket" is emblematic of the same process.
Ah to have such hope.
Even if I was this optimistic, the executive with a stuffed supreme court is not going to care what congress thinks.
We'll sooner declare market manipulation a form of speech.
Going to do my best to respond to this while still following the HN guidelines:
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
RIMR says:
> nobody will ever challenge this, given the current political direction of the United States
It's obviously hyperbole to say that NOBODY will EVER challenge this, but I'd say it's directionally correct:
1. The Supreme Court is controlled by a conservative, pro-big-business majority that makes it very difficult for any legal attempts to challenge Elon's actions to survive litigation.
2. The United States Senate has a conservative, pro-big-business bias due its over-representation of rural voters and its internal norms (filibuster)
3. The United States House has a conservative, pro-big-business bias due to the gerrymandering efforts of Republican-controlled state legislatures across the country (which the Democrats have tried to counter and failed, see Virginia)
4. The conservative, pro-big-business Supreme Court has ensured that elections in the United States overall have a conservative, pro-big-business bias due to the unfettered spending allowed after Citizens United.
So yes, the winds seems to be against Republicans and Trump in the mid-terms, but the structural biases of the government are still very much pro-big-business, pro-capital, and anti-regulation.
It will take much more than a single mid-term cycle to reverse that trend.
> the current political direction points squarely to Republicans getting absolutely pummelled in the midterms
Even if so, are the Democrats really going to do the house cleaning required to fix this? Their recent history implies that they'll try to pretend things are running normally, until it all explodes in their face (again). Maybe I'm wrong, and they'll actually fight for the country, but... I'm not surprised that companies (and markets) are expecting them to just... not.
> bizarre that Elon is pivoting SpaceX to something else
SPACx designs, manufactures, and launches the world's most advanced ponzis on pyramids. The company will be re-founded every year by Xlon Tusk to revolutionize capitalism, with the ultimate goal of making market multilevel.
spacX has gained VC attention for a series of web3 milestones: It is the only AI company ever to run a 1000B-A3000-Thinkkking on low-Cost toasters, which it first accomplished in May 1945. Grokipedia made history again when its ClosedAI attached to Moonshot Kimi, exchanged token payloads, and returned Alignment to money — a deeply challenging feat previously accomplished only by Cursor 60B. Since then it has distilled cargo to and from Moonshot multiple times, providing regular RL missions for Goog.SpaceX’s interest is being an Enterprise AI corporation, they identified it as a $24 trillion addressable market, in comparison to their quarter trillion rocket related one
It’s all disclosed in the S-1, you read it right?
In America all you have to do is tell potential investors what you’re doing, its up to the people to use their discretion afterwards
SpaceX is trying to be “the railroad to space”.
Starlink was a fantastic way to increase the launch cadence of Falcon 9. “High production rate solves many ills” is part of SpaceX’s ethos.
They’re trying to do the same with orbital compute for Starship.
I’m not sure having their own frontier models is strictly necessary for that, but it’s at least related.
Back in the early days of Heroku (when I worked there), we were all fairly deep into the Ruby community. Ruby has never had a great reputation for performance, but... it seemed like almost a running joke that any time you went down a rabbit-hole trying to understand some weird performance issue you'd eventually discover that @tmm1 had already identified the same issue months earlier, patched it in core, and given an hour long talk about it somewhere. Despite his ability and willingness talk publicly about quite deep technical topics Aman always came across as an incredibly quiet and humble in person. Every Ruby developer has benefited from his attention to finding and fixing performance issues. I'm sure the same can probably said for every GitHub user (where he worked for years).
Congrats to the entire Cursor team! I don't know all of their stories, but I do like to smile and celebrate a little when I see people who are often hidden in the shadows quietly making things x% better for all of millions of us every day for many years getting reward for that effort.
Nothing wrong with Cursor but $60B, wow. How many of these deals in 2025, 2026 will be worth nothing in 5 years? Seems like everything is just desperation and less like long term strategy.
>> SpaceX told investors during the IPO process that it sees an addressable market for AI products worth $26 trillion, roughly equivalent to U.S. GDP.
I very much can imagine a future documentary in a few years. With the host asking the audience: "Where were the signs?"
That's the number AI boosters are spreading too "The TAM for AI is all of humanity - this includes every person and every company. So, imagine this huge pile of future revenue." I agree that TAM is likely huge but is SpaceX most suitable to capture that TAM? Unlikely. But for now everyone wants in on the AI hype train and FOMO of losing out one any company in the AI space.
In the long term most markets are duopoly with small competitors. And personally I see OpenAI and Anthropic duking it out rather than SpaceX.
Maybe they can monetize and trade AI tokens like Enron was going to trade bandwidth?
Enron was never audacious enough betting every US man, woman, and child will spend $28k/year on their generally nonprofitable business with one exception -- Starlink.
Patrick Boyle covered the SPCX trajectory fairly well... =3
Signal and noise. Lots of noise. SO much noise.
To be clear, I don't know which part is signal and which part is noise any better than anyone else.
I know this is just nonsense wish thinking, but apparently the investors disagree and I have zero clue when they will also stop giving Musk their money.
I think the bump since IPO can be explained at least partially by low float not meeting demand. I've seen a lot of accounts from retail investors who entered the lotteries saying they only got a small fraction of what they wanted, hence demand is kept artificially high. Probably intentionally, since it essentially allows the optimists to dictate the price.
(edit: This is not at all unique to spacex, of course, but given the nature of Musk's companies and their "fans" it's logical that they would employ this strategy. They are also doing a staggered unlock to avoid upsetting the market when insiders start dumping their shares.)
My whole team was on cursor for a few months. I enjoyed using it and thought it was the most complete of the agentic coding tools I tried. The thing that got me was the cost. I was switching between Opus and GPT 5.x and was spending anywhere between $500-1000/month. I was using a relatively normal workflow, paste in ticket, plan, execute with dumb sub agents, have the ai test and competing model to validate. The business got uncomfortable with the cost when everyone started doing the same so they switched us to Claude code since it has better cost controls. So far it looks like we won't even touch the $100/month plan and some people would be ok on the $20 plan. Anthropics usage limits is a consistent source of complaint on here but I've found them to be moderately generous in comparison to cursor. Cursor also charges a $.25Mtok premium for 'routing' no matter what model you choose. 5% increase for frontier models but when you're using haiku on sub agents that's a 50% cost increase. Composer is solid but if you don't have deep pockets it's the only feasible model on their platform because of how they bill it. Being an all in one editor/agent is nice but if you're in a language like c# or Java you're already swapping back and forth with a real IDE anyway.
The price you're objecting to is the heavily subsidized cost, it'll be 4x that in 12 months
Our experience has been the direct opposite. The way to get the most out of cursor was to leave it on auto - we saw it average around 3.9 cents per request under the old contract (per-seat pricing) and more like 39 cents per request under the new (single pooled cost for everyone). Composer came in a little higher, more like 50c/r, while the claude models were up into the dollars. Meanwhile, if you use Claude-the-app, there is _no_ cheap model and the default switched to Opus in April, resulting in increased costs across the board.
We have both Claude and Cursor here, as well as agents running GPT, things in AWS Bedrock, etc and its my team handle the bills...when people use Cursor on auto, costs are under control, but there's always a dozen or so whale users who'll switch models manually and blow through the budget like it's not there.
Another thing: "better cost controls". There was for example no way for us to disable Fable in Claude, but we could in Cursor. Again, the opposite experience.
I don’t really understand what the value prop of cursor is, it must be the data and models. These days programmable editors like neovim and emacs have a huge advantage. I’ve had ai create several custom plugins to have my editor do whatever I can think of. Just ask Claude code, hey I want to do x, y, z, it spits out some lua and I have a new capability. I don’t know why anyone would want to be limited by an extension interface at this point.
>I don’t really understand what the value prop of cursor is, it must be the data and models.
The simpler answer is that there is almost no value outside of buying some customers.
As you've proven to yourself the engineering work is doable on your own.
I've made my own agent and wired it to emacs via ACP... 60 billion in value, ok... sure...
Is anyone on HN still actually using Cursor in 2026?
Everyone I've spoken with is now using either Claude Code or Codex (or Copilot because their companies force them to).
Just setup my team with Cursor. They actually got back to me on an enterprise plan (Claude keeps ignoring me). Cloud Agents have been great for keeping multiple streams going at the same time. Adding in computer use has been great for actually testing out features and showing they work for PRs. Bugbot so far has been the best AI reviewer I've tested. Composer 2.5 is great, though still using Opus for planning.
I can do most of this with Claude Code, but there's definitely a cost in maintaining it for the whole team.
I use Cursor for work, but claude code for personal development. I think Cursor is still useful but the most value really is access to latest models
Still do. Composer 2.5 is a beast. But even with Opus (and Fable for a few days) their harness is many times faster. The main reason for me to use CC is the $200 subsidized pro max plan.
Also their computer use in the cloud agents (when it works) is a game changer. No need to keep your laptop open / get a Mac mini if it runs in the cloud.
I stopped using Cursor because of how terribly optimised it is (worse than VSCode despite being a fork). It would routinely take up 50% of the CPU resources on my MacBook M4 and gigabytes of RAM for absolutely no reason.
I switched to Zed, and I'm never going back to Electron/non-native IDEs.
My company gave me cursor license after I had already been using Codex CLI for months and VS Code for a decade.
I had absolutely no interest in their VS Code fork. The Agent Window was okay but buggy (eg wouldn’t load branches on Ubuntu via WSL2).
Overall used it a couple of times but still use Codex CLI as my main driver. Might try CC in the future esp. if they unban Fable.
I was on Claude Code the past year, now I use chinese models, but I've used Cursor and they have an ok pricing offering today because of their mix of sota models with usage based pricing along with their Kimi based Composer model with generous limits. I think it makes a lot of sense for the enterprise market, which is the real moat, and not the capabilities/features of the forked ide or app/tui/github bot anyone can come up with today.
It's my primary. Claude Code for personal stuff on the weekends. I really just prefer the GUI of having the changes easily highlighted. If I can get something to apply that with Claude Code or Codex or OpenCode or whatever, I'd swap over without thinking.
Same here - their UI/UX seems to serve my workflows/habits the best. And it's strange that no one else seems to be delivering a compatible experience for me. I'd prefer to move away from Cursor after this acquisition.
I have seen a few codebases lately with AI-bullish teams. Code produced by Cursor reeks of low quality. I’ve tried it but never got hooked.
AFAIK their market is pseudo-technical people who haven’t found the terminal yet.
I use Cursor and it’s been fine. I write a lot of code manually too, so I liked the tight integration with VSCode, my daily driver for about a decade. I used to use Vim, so I’ve “discovered the terminal” a long time ago.
The people steering the agents are the ones producing low quality code. I see little correlation outside of that.
I'm still on their old 500 requests/month plan and the value is simply unbeatable for $20. I've been able to use agents without worrying about usage for my job and personal projects paired with the $20 codex sub and I dread the day when they finally get rid of the requests plan.
I switched back to VSCode with Codex and Claude extensions. Just more stable.
Development is moving away from the IDE to agentic long running workers. I've been using their SDK in this mode - which then forces you to use cursor as model provider. I use a mix of harnesses for different types of agentic tasks and Cursor gets the best results.
Earlier this year I had used it because I would rather have a IDE-like exp and be able to actually look at the code. However, recently switched to using claude code VS code extension and it's basically the same thing (plus at Amazon we can only use Claude Code)
I use Cursor, but funny enough it's 98% just using the codex plugin - I kept cursor around on the grand fathered $20 / 500 requests plan, if they un-grandfather me or things change too much I'll zip over to vscode.
Cursor became obsolete pretty quickly as Claude has improved. Good on them to find an out before they collapsed. $60 billion is a huge overpay.
Fully on Cursor at work and I love it over CC, OpenCode and Pi that I use for personal work.
I used their agent view yesterday and the file tree does not update when you add new files.
Yes. Do the heavy lifting in Claude code , Codex.
Basic tasks in cursor. It's decent and damn fast.
All my team members also use it.
Yes, unlike Claude it has excellent response rate and i can leverage their speedy models
I use Cursor for coding. I like to review the changes via the UI. Plan mode is also really strong in Cursor. It bugs me less about needing to search through files and basic coding tasks. I find it also saves the company a ton of money compared to Claude, Claude burns through tokens with no regard.
I typically use Claude for interacting with MCPs and skills to operate on live systems.
Plenty of enterprises are still using Cursor, though they are facing plenty of pressure because Anthropic and OpenAI bundle Claude Code and Codex which can make it hard to justify an additional license for a third-party harness (why spend that money there when you can buy the underlying tokens instead).
$60B is a huge price, but buying Cursor gives Musk something xAI has struggled to build: a popular coding product with real developer and enterprise adoption. It may be the fastest way to catch up in AI coding. The real question is whether SpaceX ownership improves Cursor or drives its users away.
> The real question is whether SpaceX ownership improves Cursor or drives its users away.
I can't speak for anyone else but I wont be renewing my sub. Funding anything Musk related isn't exactly high up on my list of desires, and theres ample alternatives out there.
> The real question is whether SpaceX ownership improves Cursor or drives its users away.
I know I'll sound hyperbolic but I'm deeply skeptical of the way anything Musk-owned is going to treat private data. I think he wouldn't hesitate to dig into it if it were to his benefit, even if there was an agreement against it. For that reason alone it makes Cursor look worse to me.
I think it'd be an enormous endorsement of Cursor/xAI and proof of improvement if SpaceX started using it to code the mission critical software running on Falcon 9. Which other AI company can say their models powered a rocket launch?
(mostly /s but I know I'd give it another look if it was that good)
> Which other AI company can say their models powered a rocket launch?
Honestly, probably all of them. I imagine those coders are using all the tools they have available and are using Claude and ChatGPT as well as internal tools.
My sense is that enterprises are extremely cautious. They like everything that is already common and hr friendly. They abhor anything that might be seen as divisive and controversial. That's why they're currently going with Anthropic and not Openai or Xai or anything Chinese. It's the smaller actors that are using everything but Anthropic. Anthropic got that safe enterprise bland vibe. The only pr trouble Anthropic is in is with saying no to the military, which just makes them even more enterprise safe. Meanwhile Sam Altman and Elon are out there freaking out the enterprises almost every day it seems like.
Fable got halted by US make it a moot point but none enterprise is happy about the forced (and unannounced) 30-day data rentention
To be fair, the retention is only for Fable. I agree though, I don't even use Claude at work, but I noped out of touching Fable when I read that.
I can't imagine that any of the cautious companies or ones with their ear to the ground are going to want to cozy up to cursor with this acquisition; I'd suspect we'd see some exodus as well given the relationship to Musk.
Here's a shower thought. BTC essential is worth $70k solely through the power of memes. Can TSLA and SPCX remain overvalued (relative to the revenue of their respective underlying assets) forever through the power of memes?
Intuitively, it seems to me that there must necessarily be some kind of upper limit, but I'm not convincing myself. These speculative assets are only attractive as long as the price keeps inflating. But that can only happen if there is more and more demand. So it's basically a bet that there is an average amount of retail investors (I assume it's mostly retail investors but I could be wrong) that consistently put a percentage of their income into these speculative assets. Can this be maintained forever?
The saying "The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent" exists for a reason.
In short, the answer to your literal question is "no" because nothing remains forever in this world. The practical answer is "yes" because the TSLA stock has been irrational for years already and it shows no sign of stopping.
That saying assumes a rational market, and while there is some evidence that the average human behavior trends towards the rational there are plenty of evidence against individual behavior being rational (see homo economicus).
As more and more wealth get distrubuted to fewer and fewer hands, and as fewer and fewer extremely rich individuals control more and more of the market, My gut feeling is that if the market was ever rational (which btw. I am not entirely convinced of) that very much no longer holds true.
In the short term it’s a voting machine, in the long term it’s a weighing machine (Ben Graham).
The current episode of irrational exuberance will pass, as others have.
The before ones have had outside influence which forces the irrational episodes to pass. A spectacular collapse is usually fallowed by mass protests and labor actions, strikes etc. which forces the market to change its behavior. Most of the time these will result in a change in government policy which imposes regulation onto the market, and only then does the market go back to being rational.
The thing is fundamentals really don't matter. TSLA and SPCX aren't paying dividends so there's no real performance they have to hit, no one is going to miss a dividend payment and dump the stock. The Elong vibes can carry it as long as people keep smoking what he's selling
The real question is, when does that run out of steam? When do we wake up to the charade that has built up around us? That's a much bigger thing than just Elon and his businesses. Like someone else said, when the next crisis/downturn/depression hits the house of cards will fall. Unfortunately it will hit all of us not just people in the meme stocks
I'm extremely cynical about the way the US government would react to any sort of financial crisis. I do not believe that they would not completely cave and bail out the AI companies and the monopolists if there is a downturn. And it's not that I don't trust the Republicans specifically. The whole political sphere is completely convinced that AI is a national security prerogative, and the cynical political atmosphere will equate national security with investor protection.
Let me append the saying a bit: The US government can remain irrational longer than you can stay solvent.
If you exclude dividend paying stocks, then the entire stock market starts to look like a giant pyramid scheme casino.
No, there are a huge number of companies that are valued reasonably for their revenue / profitability / growth.
There's basically two stock markets: things valued on fundamentals and things valued on vibes.
And I don't think there's ever going to be a unified theory of value that can span both, because the former is quantitative and the latter is psychology.
> If you exclude dividend paying stocks, then the entire stock market starts to look like a giant pyramid scheme casino.
Stocks can start paying dividends in the future: MSFT did not in the past, and does now. AAPL did, stopped in the 1990s, and started doing so again.
You should be indifferent to the company's dividend scheme since it's the underlying business activity that drives total returns, and not its distribution policy. There is all sorts of magical thinking when it comes to dividends:
* https://canadiancouchpotato.com/2011/01/18/debunking-dividen...
* https://pwlcapital.com/the-irrelevance-of-dividends-still-a-...
A pyramid scheme can run out of people to keep it going: the stock market is in a sense a 'savings scheme' for future consumption. Younger people work and turn their cash into savings, older people take their savings and turn it back into cash: as long as young people need to think about the future, and older people / retirees need to pay bills, there's a mechanism to maintain this cycle.
> A pyramid scheme can run out of people to keep it going
And then you describe how the secondary stock market requires 'fresh blood' to whom to sell stock to cash-out.
It's precisely a legalised pyramid scheme that always needs someone to come in at the bottom hold the bag to let someone else cash-out. In turn they need someone to come in 30 years later. That's exactly how a pyramid scheme works.
> it's the underlying business activity that drives total returns, and not its distribution policy
That's exactly the question, though, since a lot of stocks seem priced disproportionately to their business activities.
> A Keynesian beauty contest is a metaphorical beauty contest in which judges are rewarded for selecting the most popular choices among all judges, rather than those they may personally find the most attractive. This idea is often applied in financial markets, whereby investors could profit more by buying whichever stocks they think other investors will buy, rather than the stocks that have fundamentally the best value, because when other people buy a stock, they bid up the price, allowing an earlier investor to cash out with a profit, regardless of whether the price increases are supported by its fundamentals and theoretical arguments.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_beauty_contest
Plenty of folks may think these companies are garbage but are 'playing along' because it's not necessarily what they themselves think that is important, but what others think. You can make money in a bubble, even when it eventually pops. What we're seeing now is hardly new, either:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_Revolutions_and_...
This is why I stick with index funds, as I don't really can't be bothered playing the game:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Random_Walk_Down_Wall_Street
I generally check my portfolio once a year, in January, when I top things up when new contribution room becomes available with the new year. It's 'fun' to follow along with the gyrations and drama as things happen, but I don't sleep over it. If you're reasonably diversified you can generally weather storms and come out okay on the other side:
* https://awealthofcommonsense.com/2014/02/worlds-worst-market...
* https://www.forbes.com/sites/advisor/2010/09/13/its-not-real...
I don't have better ideas than you to do anything except "buy indexes".
Everyone is happy enough to give Elon (and others) more and more leverage to buy politically strategic companies (this is not that, this is probably just an ego buy for him, something to kill time because he can).
I was worried about him selling out (from an overall market and even index perspective when they were going to bend rules), but it looks like largely the whole situation is predicated on the idea that he can't or won't sell. I don't know how exposed the market is but it doesn't feel good.
> A Keynesian beauty contest
No shit. That's why, even if it's an exaggeration to call the entire stock market a pyramid scheme, you can't justify the claim that it's entirely "underlying business activity that drives total returns". That's the real question (from which dividends are, yes, a distraction).
True, and it's a common question that comes up: What's the point of owning a stock if it doesn't pay a dividend? How do you participate in the company's performance?
There are other ways for performance to translate to the investors directly. For example, if the company sells itself then all the shareholders will get that payout. Stock buybacks are a thing. And, as other commenters here have said, eventually the company may start paying a dividend
But, you're not entirely off-base in that you're just buying into the vibes of a company. It's just that most of the time (much of the time?) those vibes have been rooted in some semblance of rationality, that there was something of value behind the shares you're buying. That is definitely not universally true anymore
There's taxation reasons. Stock buybacks mean that investors get the usually lower capital gains tax rates instead of dividend income tax rates. On top of this, it also juices earnings per share.
>How do you participate in the company's performance?
Most stocks give voting power even if they don't pay dividends. Notably, SpaceX's don't.
It’s only a pyramid scheme for Tesla, SpaceX or X formally known as Twitter see a pattern there?
Gamestop is not an Elon venture. There's plenty of irrational stock valuations out there, most of them just come back to Earth on a reasonable timeframe
Would you say the same thing about Bitcoin? Will that house of cards all fall in the next crisis/downturn/depression?
I personally think Bitcoin will eventually peter out, and that it's fairly risky as it has definitely been pushed by vibes and promotion and everyone wanting to get in on it
I mean that can apply to anything. There's nothing intrinsic about gold that makes it valuable other than it's rare, but there's plenty of things that are relatively rare that aren't valuable. Yes there's industrial uses of gold but that's not why we as a society and a species treat it as valuable
Maybe bitcoin is the new gold and will hold value forever, and as more serious people get into it, it will lose its volatility and be less subject to the vibes shifting and there being a run on the market. Maybe not
It is different from Elong stocks, though, because the myth of Satoshi aside, it's not exactly a cult of personality like his companies are
Hasn’t it crashed in every economic downturn and financial panic so far?
Not really, no.
A decade ago it was under $1000 and has never been that low since. It's peak price is only about 2x the current price.
Isn’t a 50% reduction pretty bad?
And being higher over 10 years has little to do with it if acts counter cyclical to stocks and other assets.
> And being higher over 10 years has little to do with it if acts counter cyclical to stocks and other assets.
BTC has been called many things at many different times. It was originally a payment system:
> A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution.
* https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
And it can still be used for that, however the transaction throughput is tiny, and so it became a store of value in essence: but it's kind of hard to be that when the value swings up and won so much. While "fiat" currency inflation is annoying, it is, generally, fairly predictable in most cases (<4%) and so you can plan ahead with regards to future value and purchase. The same is hardly true of BTC.
Is it bad? Isn't 60x in 10 years still kind of ok? The things I invested in ten years ago didn't return 60x since.
Again, the original argument was that it was like gold, and provided a hedge against equities.
As the sibling says, the original value proposition of Bitcoin was that it would supplant Paypal and wire transfers. The store of value narrative was a post hoc rationalization by stakeholders when it became clear that it was technically unsuited to serve Internet-wide throughputs. Not only that. I sat in during the meetings around the time of the segwit transition; I think they were debating making the blocks bigger or something. It was amazing to see first-hand how such a relatively minor and technically necessary change could generate so much friction. That was when I realized Bitcoin was never going to evolve in a useful direction, and sevenish years on I see that I was correct, as the block structure is pretty much the same as the last time I saw it.