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.
curuinor 31 minutes ago [-]
It is adversely selected, but it's not debt, it's equity, so price action can go real fast and nobody will be burned except folks who soberly-or-not opted into this. Everyone _knows_ Elon is the way he is, so nobody will be _surprised_ at things. No surprise, no crisis.
robertjpayne 29 minutes ago [-]
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.
drivebyhooting 20 minutes ago [-]
Oh yes, thanks for reminding me. I’m going to cash out the 401(k).
ambicapter 16 minutes ago [-]
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.
aaronblohowiak 2 minutes ago [-]
Only penalties if you withdraw from 401k. Most 401k plans have some kind of moneymarket, bond fund, or similar
abtinf 4 minutes ago [-]
You can just reallocate away from an index fund.
Ifkaluva 20 minutes ago [-]
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
raw_anon_1111 14 minutes ago [-]
They are going straight to the Nasdaq. Most index investors are invested in the S&P 500
abtinf 5 minutes ago [-]
Nasdaq is an exchange. S&P 500 is an index.
S&P 500 includes companies from multiple exchanges. Like Nvidia, which lists on Nasdaq.
genxy 38 minutes ago [-]
We are better now that we learned from the first time.
anonymars 29 minutes ago [-]
Learned how to get the general public to directly put their money into it this time with the ETF shenanigans
ignoramous 6 minutes ago [-]
Institutional investors (ex: pension funds) matter more for such mega IPOs than general public, and those probably like SPAC-like supercorps?
baron816 23 minutes ago [-]
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.
robbies 19 minutes ago [-]
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.
huflungdung 13 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
jesse_dot_id 51 minutes ago [-]
Every time Musk does anything these days, it further reveals the shell game he's playing with his companies. This is going to be an Enron type of story eventually. I truly wish I had a choice to pull my tax money out of this particular subsidy.
kakapo5672 21 minutes ago [-]
Tesla is profitable, as a matter of public record. And SpaceX is, by all accounts, extremely profitable.
bragr 15 minutes ago [-]
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.
boshalfoshal 17 minutes ago [-]
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.
geertj 11 minutes ago [-]
SpaceX reuses its boosters 20+ times. Surely the depreciation is tiny when compared to the revenue of 60M+ per launch?
computerex 7 minutes ago [-]
What about the R&D costs of blowing up vehicle after vehicle?
fraggleysun 5 minutes ago [-]
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.
solarkraft 14 minutes ago [-]
As was Enron
3 minutes ago [-]
raw_anon_1111 13 minutes ago [-]
Tesla’s profits and market share has been declining for the past few years and it’s basically an overpriced meme stock.
laughing_man 31 minutes ago [-]
I'm not sure I follow, here. What about this makes you think this is a shell game?
bko 28 minutes ago [-]
I'm pretty sure Tesla and SpaceX are profitable and generate tens of billions in revenue. Words mean something, saying [thing i don't like] is [bad thing] is pretty lazy. How are any of these companies at all related to Enron? Or are you just anti-conglomerate where you have some parts of the business supporting others (nothing to do w/ Enron and pretty normal, how could all business arms be equally profitable?)
robbies 12 minutes ago [-]
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.
laughing_man 21 minutes ago [-]
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.
kube-system 12 minutes ago [-]
> 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
ScoobleDoodle 19 minutes ago [-]
SpaceX bought nearly 20% of Cyber Trucks sold in Q4. That makes me question the level of real profitability.
taspeotis 48 minutes ago [-]
Matt Levine writes a bit about this - the Elon Musk Mars Conglomerate. And really if you're investing into e.g. SpaceX you're not investing into SpaceX you're investing into the Elon Musk Mars Conglomerate. And most people seem to want that.
Tesla's the odd one out: it's public but it's still in there, although Musk would probably prefer it to be private too.
mandeepj 8 minutes ago [-]
> Elon Musk Mars Conglomerate
That’s SpaceX’s version of Tesla’s self driving car pipe dream.
ignoramous 4 minutes ago [-]
Isn't Tesla FSD good enough and trending in the right direction to be called a "pipe dream"?
fnordpiglet 35 minutes ago [-]
Tesla is the free cashflow play that is probably the most important for mars as there is no distilled fermented dinosaur juice on mars, but considerably more by ratio of lithium / oil than the Earth. Our flintstone fire mobiles won’t work so well there, and battery / solar will be important there for everything, including mobility and armies of slave robots.
Lonestar1440 48 minutes ago [-]
So SpaceX bought a $60B Option on Cursor, plus a bunch of services, for $10B.
If strike date comes and Cursor is in fact worth less than $60B... they can move to acquire it for that price. Or just let it "expire". And if it's worth more, they get a savage good deal. If the services were worth $8B anyway, it's hard to lose.
It seems less crazy to me through this lens. A straight acquisition, today, at $60B would in fact be crazy.
ignoramous 1 minutes ago [-]
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). The deal from xAI is probably the best they could have managed. Either way, remarkable run to make it this far for a 5yo company, considering the recent sale of Windsurf.
gpm 42 minutes 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.
MPSimmons 24 minutes ago [-]
It reportedly has a $2B ARR, and a 5x multiplier doesn't seem insane to me, but who knows, honestly
Unit327 7 minutes ago [-]
2B ARR at what cost base?
danpalmer 16 minutes ago [-]
But it's paying a 5x ARR multiplier for the right to buy at a 30x multiplier.
Lonestar1440 39 minutes ago [-]
But they also get a whole bunch of AI Services from Cursor. Other comments have noted that xAI has fallen on bad times (idk one way or the other) so perhaps they were going to spend $5B on getting these services elsewhere, anyway.
SpaceX spending $1B a month on various AI services seems ~plausible
gpm 32 minutes ago [-]
$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.
13 minutes ago [-]
robertjpayne 27 minutes ago [-]
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.
Lonestar1440 10 minutes ago [-]
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?
NuclearPM 31 minutes ago [-]
Plausible how? Explain please.
Lonestar1440 28 minutes ago [-]
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.
nikcub 2 hours ago [-]
knee-jerk is that it's weird, but makes sense:
* X will have a total of ~2GW of GPU sometime this year largely not doing much outside of 'grok is this true'
* despite no longer being in vogue with consumer devs Cursor still has a lot of developer data that can assist in building a model
* Cursor have decent enterprise relationships (while for xAI it is ~zero) and that's where the real revenue for llms + agents is
* Cursor are paying retail for tokens and competing against the frontier model co's who are also their suppliers. Not sustainable (hence their in-house composer model).
* Cursor the product covers the gamut from lovable-style prompt-to-app, an IDE, cli and bugbot
* X are using "x bucks" to pay for a potential later acquisition which are arguably overvalued based on the space x IPO hype
Option there to give X a window to make it work, otherwise walk away with a $10B breakup fee for access to it's data
silisili 1 hours ago [-]
> 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.
57 minutes ago [-]
1 hours ago [-]
Havoc 54 minutes ago [-]
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?
nikcub 52 minutes ago [-]
> 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
MarsIronPI 15 minutes ago [-]
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.
theturtletalks 39 minutes ago [-]
Marketing push was there too, everyone was saying Grok had jumped Claude and Codex, yet I never got that when using all 3.
Havoc 36 minutes ago [-]
And presumably they got data from it...
noelsusman 30 minutes ago [-]
I wouldn't be surprised if those enterprise relationships evaporate after this acquisition. There's a reason why xAI has zero enterprise customers.
grepfru_it 12 minutes ago [-]
> There's a reason why xAI has zero enterprise customers
I’m curious where you pull these stats from
Reubend 1 hours ago [-]
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.
JustExAWS 7 minutes ago [-]
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.
martinald 1 hours ago [-]
Yes I think you're right. Reinforcement learning is extremely compute heavy, which cursor doesn't have. And X.ai doesn't have the coding agent data anthropic/OpenAI has, but does have the compute.
However, one thing in AI is that while the usage goes up extremely quickly, it tends to go down just as fast. I know a lot of companies that are in the process of switching from Cursor to Claude Code, so in 6-12 months I'm not entirely sure of the data quality/quantity.
Also I think it is telling that they are calling them SpaceX not X. The X brand is absolutely toxic, especially in enterprise.
cubefox 1 hours ago [-]
You forgot to consider whether all this is worth $60B.
JumpCrisscross 1 hours ago [-]
> 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.
goosejuice 55 minutes ago [-]
$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.
nikcub 52 minutes ago [-]
it's not dollars it's X bucks
armanj 57 minutes ago [-]
hn is this true
1 hours ago [-]
NuclearPM 29 minutes ago [-]
British?
“Cursor have” and “Cursor are” is awkward to read.
vehemenz 16 minutes ago [-]
Now you know what it feels like to be British reading practically any other English source on the Internet.
1 hours ago [-]
yungbeto 1 hours ago [-]
Why would Elon do this if he knows full well the names X-Code and Codex are already taken?
ValentineC 43 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
Forgeties79 34 minutes ago [-]
Story time please lol
ValentineC 19 minutes ago [-]
My @valentine got changed to @valentine_ without my consent.
(If any lawyers read this and feel up for taking this on contingency, I don't think I'm difficult to contact.)
alasano 15 minutes ago [-]
Wow and it's not even used. I guess they took it to resell on their handle marketplace?
mayowaxcvi 51 minutes ago [-]
Laughed very hard at this. Well done.
Feel like you must have made this observation a while ago and just waited for your moment.
hackernudes 8 minutes ago [-]
XCursor (Linux nerds know)
jacobedawson 1 hours ago [-]
Best I can do is CurXr
pixelpoet 1 hours ago [-]
The whole thing is Curxed
foota 17 minutes ago [-]
That's curxed
speed_spread 30 minutes ago [-]
Cuxed
prawn 60 minutes ago [-]
Xursor?
martythemaniak 7 minutes ago [-]
Quick! Both the .com and .AI are available!
martythemaniak 58 minutes ago [-]
Because Xurxor is free! If that's not a winning brand, I don't know what is.
floatrock 31 minutes ago [-]
Honestly, just shorten it to Xor. That's actually not half-bad dev branding.
selimthegrim 4 minutes ago [-]
I don’t know about you, but do you want Xenu and Zurvan’s love child in charge of your development?
anonymid 1 hours ago [-]
I guess the hope is that combining two sub-par coding models (xAI's grok + cursor's composer) and combining the data they have access to, they can build something that can compete with OpenAI / Anthropic in the coding space...
I guess I kinda see it... it makes sense from both points of view (xAI needs data + places to run their models, cursor needs to not be reliant on Anthropic/OpenAI).
I think I don't see it working out... I just don't see an Elon company sustaining a culture that leads to a high-quality AI lab, even with the data + compute.
I was required to use Cursor for my job when I first started, but once I figured out how to use the command line version of Codex, I kind of stopped seeing the point. It just kind of seemed like a bloated, overpriced wrapper around what I could do with the included ChatGPT membership I already had for work.
Maybe I was missing something, but I do not understand how it is worth sixty billion dollars.
jjordan 2 minutes ago [-]
It's not. It's a glorified code editor with no moat. Those are (massive) bubble prices.
theahura 1 hours ago [-]
Lots of people in the comments talking about how this is about training data, but surely this is actually about hiring competent people after the mass exodus/firing at xAI?
airstrike 40 minutes ago [-]
Whoever thinks the talent pool is this limited that it requires offering Cursor of all places $60B is pattern-matching so hard they might as well be a quilt.
bensyverson 52 minutes ago [-]
That's quite a pricey acquihire
noelsusman 28 minutes ago [-]
$60 billion worth of competent people?
raw_anon_1111 1 hours ago [-]
Are cursor developers “competent” in creating frontier models? Aren’t they just using other company’s models?
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.
miffy900 59 minutes ago [-]
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.
laughing_man 28 minutes ago [-]
I certainly wouldn't mind having that image if it meant being the wealthiest man in the world.
websap 45 minutes ago [-]
I think X paid for itself, so it worked our for him.
numpad0 35 minutes ago [-]
> 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
I'm pretty sure that claim about Japanese Twitter activity was true for most of the site's history pre acquisition
bix6 36 minutes ago [-]
Source?
vkou 32 minutes ago [-]
It paid in influence, not dollars. Billionaires don't buy newspapers or social media platforms because they think they are good businesses.
manquer 1 hours ago [-]
It is not cash though. SpaceX does not have $60B liquid cash instruments.
More accurately it is 3.4% of Space at the last rumored valuation of $1.75T of SpaceX.
throwaway85825 50 minutes ago [-]
There's not going to be $60B of exit liquidity if/when spacex IPOs. Maybe the suckers will be banks lending against the bubble valuation.
cuuupid 40 minutes ago [-]
No longer rumored as they filed for IPO!
This is actually an amazing sweetheart deal for Cursor. Many times with these high profile acquisitions, most stock is tied to LPA's and employment at the company, and also earnout provisions. The company then finds a way to parachute them out early, which both voids the earnout and their employment, thus they never vest most of the units and the few units they do vest get bought out at 409A valuations which are typically much, much lower.
In the case of Cursor this is an amazing boon as SpaceX listed at an almost 100x multiple which is absolutely staggering. Had SpaceX stayed private they could have 409a'd Cursor and got it for effectively ~100M$ cash.
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.
cleaning 41 minutes ago [-]
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.
therobots927 47 minutes ago [-]
It makes you wonder how much of this is essentially money laundering.
60B. That's a completely crazy price. Great for Cursor, I guess. If it happens, that is.
laughing_man 25 minutes ago [-]
That price may not get paid. The only thing SpaceX has committed to so far is $10 billion for their shared work.
muyuu 59 minutes ago [-]
Great for the shareholders at least.
sippeangelo 2 hours ago [-]
That's a hefty payday for a model that barely functions! Every time I run out of API credits and get kicked back to Composer 2 I feel like I'm better off just packing up for the rest of the month.
I feel like we're finally at a point where you don't have to constantly argue with and constantly babysit coding models, which makes it even more frustrating when you're suddenly forced to deal with one that ignores your instructions and gets stuck in thinking loops again.
I suspect it's the vast troves of training data rather than any tech that Cursor possesses that SpaceX is after...
impulser_ 2 hours ago [-]
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.
goolz 46 minutes ago [-]
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.
impulser_ 9 minutes ago [-]
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.
bakies 32 minutes ago [-]
And Claude can use CLI too. It's the perfect environment for coding agents.
muyuu 1 hours ago [-]
They seemed to be doing fine with Kimi distillation. Not speaking from experience though, I prefer to use my editor.
tootie 2 hours ago [-]
Bet they will become tied to grok pretty soon.
1 hours ago [-]
bastawhiz 2 hours ago [-]
I doubt they're buying it for Composer, I imagine they're buying it for the agent harness. It's arguably the best non-Anthropic agentic coding harness, and you get _all the models_ for one subscription price.
muyuu 49 minutes ago [-]
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.
cyberax 2 hours ago [-]
JetBrains is crying in the corner...
mikert89 2 hours ago [-]
Jetbrains has gone so far downhill
ellisv 2 hours ago [-]
I honestly can’t believe how poorly JetBrains has done. I used to love PyCharm but now it’s so far behind. I still use DataGrip but it is absolute dogshit when it comes to agentic coding.
jasonjmcghee 1 hours ago [-]
I was a massive jetbrains fan - still believe it's the best IDE even with it's massive performance issues.
But I just... barely use an IDE anymore. I think I have the lowest possible subscription price for "all products" you can have (at least as an outsider) and I think I'm going to cancel this year. I've been paying for a decade+
1 hours ago [-]
FpUser 1 hours ago [-]
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
FpUser 1 hours ago [-]
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
sheeshkebab 56 minutes ago [-]
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.
soco 1 hours ago [-]
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.
richardlblair 41 minutes ago [-]
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.
boplicity 2 hours ago [-]
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.
DosUser88 1 hours ago [-]
Composer 2 is really good for me too.
beambot 1 hours ago [-]
They still just bought access to all the code you've ever fed into the model...
542458 1 hours ago [-]
Cursor very reasonably had a “no retention” checkbox available to everyone, including those on free plans.
shimman 37 minutes ago [-]
I'm sure those work as well as the "don't collect my data" checkboxes too.
542458 6 minutes ago [-]
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.
NYTimes has updated the title "SpaceX Strikes Deal With Cursor for $60 Billion"
Jtsummers 2 hours ago [-]
@dang does nothing, he is unlikely to see it. If you actually want to reach the mods, email them. There's a Contact link at the bottom of almost every page here on HN.
EDIT: Parent commenter edited out the @dang from their comment making mine appear to be responding to something not in their comment.
dantihanyi 2 hours ago [-]
Thanks for the info! I removed the callout
3 hours ago [-]
markthethomas 2 hours ago [-]
yup - updated
AirMax98 3 hours ago [-]
What are we even doing here.
I have no idea what this has to do with aerospace, but I know a bit about software and this does not look great. Cursor is obviously on a serious decline and has little to no moat in the area they are building in (IDE), which we kinda now know is maybe not even the right area (CLI). I feel like this is just a bad move?
joegibbs 56 minutes ago [-]
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.
Lermatroid 2 hours ago [-]
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.
calmoo 2 hours ago [-]
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.
brightball 49 minutes ago [-]
What sold you on Zed?
SwellJoe 1 hours ago [-]
No one wants an IDE, anymore. They're building a better horse.
chrisweekly 23 minutes ago [-]
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.)
cleaning 38 minutes ago [-]
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.
Analemma_ 2 hours ago [-]
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.
skippyboxedhero 33 minutes ago [-]
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.
htrp 2 hours ago [-]
cursors internal model efforts have not been able to meaningfully exceed the performance of the frontier models.
skippyboxedhero 41 minutes ago [-]
IDE is a moat with people who can code.
scottyah 56 minutes ago [-]
Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google are all investing heavily in their desktop type apps, I think the TUI phase is coming to an end.
wrqvrwvq 2 hours ago [-]
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.
ajross 2 hours ago [-]
While surely someone has done human-driven editing with sed, that's not what it's for. Remember that ed is the standard editor.
infinitewars 3 hours ago [-]
Trying to posture for Golden Dome, but politically he is likely locked out of the contract.
SilverElfin 2 hours ago [-]
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.
cindyllm 2 hours ago [-]
[dead]
JumpCrisscross 3 hours ago [-]
> no idea what this has to do with aerospace
SpaceX is no longer SpaceX per se, but SpaceX-xAI.
My TL; DR (and this is mine, personally) is its mission has pivoted from colonising Mars to building a Dyson sphere. Space-based datacentres are a demand excuse for putting lots of solar panels in space. Going one level down, more Cursor use is a demand excuse for putting lots of datacentres anywhere.
riffraff 2 hours ago [-]
This is like me, a couch potato, pivoting from "I'm going to run a half marathon" to "I'm going to do a marathon in under ten minutes"
tadfisher 2 hours ago [-]
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.
sobellian 2 hours ago [-]
More like "I'm going to run every possible marathon route on the Earth's road network."
JumpCrisscross 2 hours ago [-]
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.
cramsession 37 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
BobbyTables2 2 hours ago [-]
Plot twist: Build the Dyson sphere around Earth and charge for sunlight…
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.
codingusuir 2 hours ago [-]
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.
JumpCrisscross 2 hours ago [-]
> 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.
kevin_thibedeau 3 hours ago [-]
He's offloading the loss from buying Twitter. This is the smoke and mirrors phase.
JumpCrisscross 2 hours ago [-]
> He's offloading the loss from buying Twitter
That already happened with xAI-X merged with SpaceX.
alyxya 2 hours ago [-]
This is the right partnership to happen. SpaceX has all the compute but is missing the talent for training LLMs, especially on the RL side. Cursor has the talent and RL stack, but doesn't have their own pretrained base model or own their compute. Both will be on a bad trajectory without cooperating because Claude Code and Codex have gained so much momentum already.
oliyoung 18 minutes ago [-]
Cursor ($60b) being valued the same as Twitter ($51b inflation adjusted) is _willlld_
cj 3 hours ago [-]
Rockets, satellites, social media, AI - the only thing missing from the SpaceX hype portfolio is a certain coworking company. That would really set them up for an exciting IPO.
chrisweekly 19 minutes ago [-]
what about blockchain?
/s
zzleeper 3 hours ago [-]
I'm sworn off from Musk-related products, and this will prob make cursor worse (switch to X's LLM for instance). So, any suggestions for switching? Codex; Claude Code? (I like my IDE and I like the freedom to choose a model, which is why I stuck with Cursor even when it felt more expensive)
lemonish97 2 hours ago [-]
OpenCode and Github copilot are still options if you want the freedom to choose different models.
mininao 1 hours ago [-]
Dammit, I liked cursor
apsurd 60 minutes ago [-]
same. i finally tried Claude Code and i just shrugged. Cursor definitely has a clunky UI with an identity crisis, but it pioneered plan mode, and auto / composer chugs along without rate limits for the most part.
Opus, I watch my allotment creep up every turn…
woeirua 2 hours ago [-]
This feels like another Twitter moment... unless he's absolutely desperate for engineers who can train LLMs. In that case it's basically an acquihire. Otherwise, this makes absolutely zero sense.
lacunary 2 hours ago [-]
did cursor do model training? I thought it used models built by other companies
It's fine tuned Kimi, they didn't train it from scratch.
cdrnsf 3 hours ago [-]
That's an expensive VS Code fork.
muyuu 57 minutes ago [-]
They moved on from that code base iirc. Still insane, mind.
throwaway85825 2 hours ago [-]
We have reached peak stupid.
sethops1 1 hours ago [-]
I thought the same during the NFT craze and the blockchain craze before that.
andrekandre 48 minutes ago [-]
its definitely the worst case of money poisoning i've ever seen
nickvec 1 hours ago [-]
I'm out of the loop - what moat does Cursor even have now, and why is it worth $60B?
squidsoup 1 hours ago [-]
Why did a shoe company get $50 million in funding for their AI pivot?
nickvec 44 minutes ago [-]
Because VCs are braindead... I see your point.
coalstartprob 12 minutes ago [-]
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
wavemode 36 minutes ago [-]
It looks like this is just an "option" to acquire Cursor at that price? Implying they only plan to exercise the option under certain conditions (such as, one might presume, Cursor actually being worth that much. As right now it definitely isn't.)
argsnd 3 hours ago [-]
$50bn for a harness makes no sense, what am I missing?
kube-system 6 minutes ago [-]
Cursor has a significant enterprise userbase, that has to be worth something
girvo 3 hours ago [-]
I assume someone knows someone, backroom deal perhaps? I'm not sure either, when Cursor has a lot of risk and not that much moat.
riffraff 2 hours ago [-]
My 2c: they need to pump xAI usage (which nobody is using) to be able to keep the hype alive pre-ipo.
timmg 2 hours ago [-]
I thought Cursor has started making their own models. Did I confuse them with someone else?
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.
_--__--__ 2 hours ago [-]
They have a 'proprietary' model which is just an open source (kimi?) fine tune
gip 2 hours ago [-]
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!
lossolo 2 hours ago [-]
1. Pay them with shares of SpaceX
2. Make SpaceX valuation even higher before IPO
3. Boost XAI/usage of Grok.
xqcgrek2 3 hours ago [-]
money laundering and tax avoidance
xnx 3 hours ago [-]
How would this be money laundering?
dogscatstrees 2 hours ago [-]
Value shifting. Search for SolarCity and cousin Lyndon Rive.
bmitc 2 hours ago [-]
Musk passing around his debt from purchasing Twitter.
2 hours ago [-]
kommunicate 33 minutes ago [-]
Hard to know whether development will remain an activity that lives on a local machine for much longer.
This could be a lot of money to spend to acquire users that may not be sticky.
lemonish97 3 hours ago [-]
What's Cursor's moat here? I'm a bit surprised that xAI/SpaceX needs to buy them rather than building their own VScode forked IDE or an agentic UI/CLI.
babelfish 2 hours ago [-]
It's data. Nobody is using Grok for SWE work, but they are using Cursor.
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.
kristopolous 2 hours ago [-]
Wish I played that interview game better. I saw the success coming from a mile away (2022) but I can't vibe with people in the hire game right. It's like eye contact, smiling, facial expressions, stuff like that.
I guess there's a bunch of tools to not suck at this. Anyone had success here? The AI tools say I'm great because they can't pick up the kind of problems I'm talking about.
taurath 1 hours ago [-]
Pretend to and/or be motivated by things other than money, that’s the strongest thing interviewers drop people from, even though they’re motivated by money to be there.
kristopolous 1 hours ago [-]
Interesting. I genuinely do not care about money.
The motivation of money is literally zero to me. Maybe that's a problem as well: they want people who Are motivated by money acting like they aren't?
I wanted in because I saw them doing exciting impactful things
That's literally it.
I dunno. I've been struggling with this for decades
airstrike 42 minutes ago [-]
Just act hard for the duration of the interview season.
don_neufeld 2 hours ago [-]
If Twitter was when Musk jumped the shark this is definitely him sticking the landing.
throwatdem12311 1 hours ago [-]
Cursor better take the $60B because a VS Code fork with a crappy fine tune of Kimi is not worth that much.
r3451 2 hours ago [-]
Elon doesn't know what to do. Ani failed, no one apart from his alt accounts is interested in Grok pictures.
Since the firing of several Grok founders, Grok has decreased in capabilities. It is illogical and insults users when called out.
So he does what everyone does. Write more dev tools, slap a price on it and hope retail investors will be impressed in the IPO. The $60 billion is of course optional and will just be used in the IPO to inflate the valuation.
taurath 1 hours ago [-]
Why $60b and not $20b? Why not $10b or $500m?
babelfish 3 hours ago [-]
Good on them to get $10B breakup terms, after the Twitter shitshow
digitaltrees 27 minutes ago [-]
Well I am glad I built my own IDE now so I can switch off of cursor and don’t have to participate in training the model of an aspiring monopoly.
DM me if you want an invite. I am keeping it to a small on purpose.
andreygrehov 57 minutes ago [-]
I wonder if they are actually 'acquiring' some of the existing contracts between Cursor and X/Y/Z rather than the product itself.
int32_64 2 hours ago [-]
>acquire Cursor later this year for $60 billion or pay $10 billion for our work together.
This seems like an elaborate Elon rug pull. A Windsurf situation 2.0
Tyrubias 2 hours ago [-]
I’m no fan of Elon Musk, but even from a neutral perspective I’m bewildered by the merger between X, X.ai, and SpaceX and now this acquisition of Cursor. What’s the endgame? How does this help with the whole vision of “we all live in space and mine resources from the Moon and have data centers on Mars”?
danny_codes 1 hours ago [-]
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
JumpCrisscross 1 hours ago [-]
> endgame is to game the index funds
Buying Cursor does nothing for this.
3eb7988a1663 54 minutes ago [-]
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.
CGMthrowaway 30 minutes ago [-]
X doesnt yet have a paying customer base using AI?
numpad0 1 hours ago [-]
idk but feels like this might be a new literal kind of acquihire, to bulk purchase workers in cash
fontain 1 hours ago [-]
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.
Rover222 1 hours ago [-]
Model Y is still the best selling car in the world (and still the best-selling car in China), but yeah Tesla is *dying.
JumpCrisscross 1 hours ago [-]
> What’s the endgame? How does this help with the whole vision of “we all live in space and mine resources from the Moon and have data centers on Mars”?
I put this in the other thread, but my personal working hypothesis is the SpaceX/Musk mission has pivoted from colonising Mars to building a Dyson sphere.
Space-based datacenters are a demand excuse for putting solar panels (and eventually, solar-panel fabrication) in space. Cursor is a demand excuse for building more datacenters (and eventaully, learning to fabricate chips). If I'm correct, the next acquisition will be in some chip or solar-panel fabrication bottleneck.
To be clear, I'm not advocating for this mission. (Though I do think the space-based datacenter pitch has gotten more scepticism than it deserves. For realistic interest-rate and terrestrial-delay values, assuming ongoing AI demand, it breaks even for surprisingly-proximate radiator-mass values. Obviously more problems beyond my toy model to solve. But I expected the math to say fuck you out the gate.)
I'm saying this is a good working theory for explaining–and predicting–Musk and SpaceX's actions. Mars explains why SpaceX's engines burn methane. Dyson sphere explains why xAI is building massive datacenters and now finding acquisition targets to fill them with.
taurath 1 hours ago [-]
> building a Dyson sphere
So they are trying to take everyone’s money in bigger and bigger chunks until there is no economy left but hype.
Folks, if we spent 1/10th of the time and money we spend on this bullshit on taking care of people’s basic needs and education we would be far closer to the sci-fi future everyone seems so motivated to get to. Covid and the Trump cult seem to have broken almost everyone’s brains and we’re all gonna pay for the hubris.
60B for Composer 2…that is built from Kimi K2… what ever happened to “Grok being the best”?
apsurd 1 hours ago [-]
Am I the only one that thinks Composer is really good, when you factor in the speed and the cost?
vachina 11 minutes ago [-]
Composer is clearly dumber than the rest but then I only ask it dumb questions and it answers them really quickly.
syntaxing 54 minutes ago [-]
I don’t doubt it is. End of the day, it’s a fine tuned Kimi. They tried to hide it and making their work sound more impressive than it is. It’s easy to have stuff be cheap when you don’t have to train your own model from scratch.
Marciplan 50 minutes ago [-]
yes, you are
NuclearPM 34 minutes ago [-]
A text editor?
mercurialsolo 36 minutes ago [-]
every wrapper either gets acquired or stays long enough to be a zombie startup
fantasizr 55 minutes ago [-]
reading this thread, I seem to be the only cursor user on earth on the free tier using tab-completes.
tailscaler2026 1 hours ago [-]
cursor was interesting about a year ago
benjx88 53 minutes ago [-]
but What exactly is SpaceX doing in the AI Space (Pun Intended) and Why?
these are weird times...
arlattimore 2 hours ago [-]
SpaceX, xAI, Collosus data centers, next space compute, X, Starlink and soon Cursor to join 2, 3 & 4 together?
vemv 14 minutes ago [-]
Musk must be chronically surrounded by yes-men.
jhack 51 minutes ago [-]
RIP Cursor.
atlbeer 3 hours ago [-]
Is this Cursor the product? Or AnySphere the company?
"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."
boznz 3 hours ago [-]
Looking forward to seeing where this goes, both companies have a reputation for engineering excellence.
Rover222 2 hours ago [-]
Misleading title on the post - SpaceX has the OPTION to buy them for $60B later this year, or pay $10B for their work together.
jmyeet 2 hours ago [-]
I really don't know what Elon is thinking here because SpaceX's IPO is already precarious, for several reasons:
1. It was used to rescue himself and key investors from overpaying for Twitter, which was first rescued through xAI (and I don't know why anyone thought investing in xAI was a good idea but here we are). If our regulators weren't defanged, this deal would've gotten alot more scrutiny (IMHO). Whatever the case, this is all diluting the SpaceX business for overpriced AI vaporware;
2. From what I can find, SpaceX's revenue in 2025 was ~$18B with a $5B loss. That doesn't sound like a $1.5T+ company to me;
3. The markets are being rigged to make the IPO a success by changing the rules to force passive funds to buy into it with a tiny float (5% instead of the normal 25%); and
4. Here's the big one. I think Starship is a badly designed program that's going to take many billions more to complete and commercialize. There's not really a market for bigger payloads (evidence: ~1 Falcony Heavy launch per year) and STarship will effectively have to compete with Falcon 9 at a time when reusable alternatives (eg from the Chinese as well as Blue Origin) are coming to market.
NetMageSCW 2 hours ago [-]
Starship won’t compete with F9, or BO because it is fully reusable and cost less than either. The Chinese are not a player in the global launch services market at all so don’t count.
Starship isn’t comparable to Falcon Heavy because it has vastly more volume, which will make it the cheapest way to launch Starlinks, which will be a lot of launches to begin with.
mandevil 1 hours ago [-]
There is a lot resting on Starlink, 11 gigadollars in direct revenue that accounts for fully 60% of SpaceX's total revenue of 18 gigadollars. It's hard to see how that level of revenue can sustain a 1 terradollar valuation.
Like, TSLA had 94 gigadollars in revenue last year, and it's a 1.2 terradollar company, and most outside analysts are frankly skeptical of that multiple. SpaceX is trying to get a similar valuation on a fifth of that revenue.
electrondood 1 hours ago [-]
xAI is working on virtualizing white collar workers. I'm guessing this is part of that.
See also: companies buying up the Slack and email archives of defunct startups, for training data.
evanwolf 2 hours ago [-]
Is X political ideology extending to cursor?
leptons 2 hours ago [-]
I don't know but I won't touch anything Elon owns with a 10,000 foot pole.
Marciplan 54 minutes ago [-]
immediately unsubscribed from Cursor. Hello OpenCode!
Personally, I have been granted the option to buy Tesla for $30 trillion by the end of this year or pay $500 billion for a partnership. It'll all happen, I swear.
bmitc 2 hours ago [-]
Government subsidized purchase of a private company. Fantastic. All funded by the taxpayer to send rockets to a dead planet and to burn up all the energy on our alive but suffering planet.
NetMageSCW 2 hours ago [-]
Point to any government subsidies for SpaceX - or do you think your salary is a subsidy and everything you do at work is worthless to your employer?
SpaceX has paid for contracts to deliver services to the government and those services have saved the government billions of dollars compared to the alternative.
bmitc 29 minutes ago [-]
You're claiming that SpaceX has not received governmnent subsidies, grants, and contracts?
> those services have saved the government billions of dollars compared to the alternative
Source? All I can find is some guy saying it.
And it doesn't really matter what they've saved. It doesn't excuse conflicts of interest.
seatac76 2 hours ago [-]
Ohh it’s not an acquisition, it’s right to buy later for $60B or we a work together for $10B. Huh?
2 hours ago [-]
break_the_bank 3 hours ago [-]
really happy for the Cursor team but at the same time disappointed that the biggest non-lab AI company couldn't exist on their own.
shows how intense the power laws are around ai and how much of a capital game it is.
SwellJoe 1 hours ago [-]
lol. Top business genius being a genius again, I see.
tim-tday 2 hours ago [-]
Fuck. This is a problem.
danny_codes 1 hours ago [-]
Are there not a bunch of cursor clones? Seems like a really simple product to build
jeffbee 2 hours ago [-]
Only 1.5 Twitters. Sort of pathetic!
jMyles 2 hours ago [-]
I imagine none of us had this on our bingo cards.
If this is an acquihire, it doesn't compute for me (though I can't say I understand how things work in the world of the 60B level). LLMs are new enough that nobody has a big enough headstart to warrant a 60B personnel change.
The IPO angle also doesn't make sense. Musk cultists were gonna buy anyway; this doesn't change that. And for everyone else, who wants to pay down debt on an acquisition whose effect will almost certainly not be palpable in mainstream circles, if at all?
I don't fully understand the influence that comes with SpaceX subsidies and government contracts, but I gotta believe that rounding up non-lab AI chops are on that agenda?
The exact options - 60B for acquisition (obviously not a cash deal, right?) or 10B for unspecified services rendered... also don't make sense for either of the first two.
Is this just a way of the government securing contractors by proxy that wouldn't pass muster if done through the normal channels?
throwaway613746 2 hours ago [-]
[dead]
cranberryturkey 2 hours ago [-]
[dead]
kelsey98765431 2 hours ago [-]
Time to download windsurf
seatac76 2 hours ago [-]
60 Billion for an IDE?
I guess back to Jetbrains it is.
2 hours ago [-]
focusgroup0 2 hours ago [-]
The other day my colleague asked Grok:
"Please estimate Elon's IQ based on his timeline"
It estimated 115-130. A decision like this points to the lower end.
Rendered at 01:15:14 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
S&P 500 includes companies from multiple exchanges. Like Nvidia, which lists on Nasdaq.
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.
That’s just money in the door and the underwriters seem to think the business is worth $1.75T.
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.
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.
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
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.
That’s SpaceX’s version of Tesla’s self driving car pipe dream.
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.
SpaceX spending $1B a month on various AI services seems ~plausible
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.
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?
I didn't say it was Wise.
I said it seems within possibility for this, very particular, corporation.
* 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
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.
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?
They tried this - grok was free on openrouter for a while
I’m curious where you pull these stats from
$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.
Anthropic just tolerates the money losing developers who pay $20/$200 for subscriptions.
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 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.
“Cursor have” and “Cursor are” is awkward to read.
Steal their Twitter usernames anyway, just like he did mine.
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.)
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.
Maybe I was missing something, but I do not understand how it is worth sixty billion dollars.
But it's clearly not worth 60B dollars in April 2026.
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.
1: https://twitter.com/nikitabier/status/2037764895064867061
More accurately it is 3.4% of Space at the last rumored valuation of $1.75T of SpaceX.
This is actually an amazing sweetheart deal for Cursor. Many times with these high profile acquisitions, most stock is tied to LPA's and employment at the company, and also earnout provisions. The company then finds a way to parachute them out early, which both voids the earnout and their employment, thus they never vest most of the units and the few units they do vest get bought out at 409A valuations which are typically much, much lower.
In the case of Cursor this is an amazing boon as SpaceX listed at an almost 100x multiple which is absolutely staggering. Had SpaceX stayed private they could have 409a'd Cursor and got it for effectively ~100M$ cash.
Not just OpenAI, but OpenAI and OpenAI[1].
1: https://cursor.com/blog/series-a
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...
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.
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.
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.
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+
Not sure what problems people here have with JetBrains offerings
Not sure what problems people here have with JetBrains offerings
anybody remember this post from a couple weeks ago, where people got all offended about putting cursor on the "risk index"?
EDIT: Parent commenter edited out the @dang from their comment making mine appear to be responding to something not in their comment.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://youtu.be/hjdMYyjnmks?si=iyoVV-oZAPmQtp1B
Obligatory mention: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLzEX1TPBFM
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.
That already happened with xAI-X merged with SpaceX.
Opus, I watch my allotment creep up every turn…
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.
2. Make SpaceX valuation even higher before IPO
3. Boost XAI/usage of Grok.
This could be a lot of money to spend to acquire users that may not be sticky.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/apr/21/spacex-cu...
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.
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.
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
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.
DM me if you want an invite. I am keeping it to a small on purpose.
This seems like an elaborate Elon rug pull. A Windsurf situation 2.0
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
Buying Cursor does nothing for this.
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.
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.
these are weird times...
https://x.com/spacex/status/2046713419978453374
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."
1. It was used to rescue himself and key investors from overpaying for Twitter, which was first rescued through xAI (and I don't know why anyone thought investing in xAI was a good idea but here we are). If our regulators weren't defanged, this deal would've gotten alot more scrutiny (IMHO). Whatever the case, this is all diluting the SpaceX business for overpriced AI vaporware;
2. From what I can find, SpaceX's revenue in 2025 was ~$18B with a $5B loss. That doesn't sound like a $1.5T+ company to me;
3. The markets are being rigged to make the IPO a success by changing the rules to force passive funds to buy into it with a tiny float (5% instead of the normal 25%); and
4. Here's the big one. I think Starship is a badly designed program that's going to take many billions more to complete and commercialize. There's not really a market for bigger payloads (evidence: ~1 Falcony Heavy launch per year) and STarship will effectively have to compete with Falcon 9 at a time when reusable alternatives (eg from the Chinese as well as Blue Origin) are coming to market.
Starship isn’t comparable to Falcon Heavy because it has vastly more volume, which will make it the cheapest way to launch Starlinks, which will be a lot of launches to begin with.
Like, TSLA had 94 gigadollars in revenue last year, and it's a 1.2 terradollar company, and most outside analysts are frankly skeptical of that multiple. SpaceX is trying to get a similar valuation on a fifth of that revenue.
See also: companies buying up the Slack and email archives of defunct startups, for training data.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/spacex-says-it-has-option...
Personally, I have been granted the option to buy Tesla for $30 trillion by the end of this year or pay $500 billion for a partnership. It'll all happen, I swear.
SpaceX has paid for contracts to deliver services to the government and those services have saved the government billions of dollars compared to the alternative.
> those services have saved the government billions of dollars compared to the alternative
Source? All I can find is some guy saying it.
And it doesn't really matter what they've saved. It doesn't excuse conflicts of interest.
shows how intense the power laws are around ai and how much of a capital game it is.
If this is an acquihire, it doesn't compute for me (though I can't say I understand how things work in the world of the 60B level). LLMs are new enough that nobody has a big enough headstart to warrant a 60B personnel change.
The IPO angle also doesn't make sense. Musk cultists were gonna buy anyway; this doesn't change that. And for everyone else, who wants to pay down debt on an acquisition whose effect will almost certainly not be palpable in mainstream circles, if at all?
I don't fully understand the influence that comes with SpaceX subsidies and government contracts, but I gotta believe that rounding up non-lab AI chops are on that agenda?
The exact options - 60B for acquisition (obviously not a cash deal, right?) or 10B for unspecified services rendered... also don't make sense for either of the first two.
Is this just a way of the government securing contractors by proxy that wouldn't pass muster if done through the normal channels?
I guess back to Jetbrains it is.
"Please estimate Elon's IQ based on his timeline"
It estimated 115-130. A decision like this points to the lower end.