SpaceX Says It Has Agreement to Acquire Cursor for $60B (opens in new tab)

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 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.

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.

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

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.

> 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.

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?

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.

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.

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

hn is this true

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

That's quite a pricey acquhire

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

60b?

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

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

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?)

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…

Great for the shareholders at least.

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

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

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.

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

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.

> 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.

I don't know but I won't touch anything Elon owns with a 10,000 foot pole.

"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."

Are there not a bunch of cursor clones? Seems like a really simple product to build