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Cursor is now a part of SpaceX

75 points - today at 1:10 PM

Source
  • GMoromisato

    today at 5:43 PM

    I'm skeptical of this deal. Cursor led the way on agentic coding, but Claude Code and Codex have replaced it. [I use Codex for everything now.]

    Still, I'm hearing that Grok 4.6 is almost as good at coding as Codex, but lots cheaper. [My network is also down on Claude--Opus 5 seems like a regression.]

    The optimistic scenario would be Grok being a fast-follower with cheaper rates, and staying ahead of open source models. If they can pull that off, and convince enough developers, then maybe they've got a chance.

    But $60B seems insane to me. What's Cursor's market share relative to Codex and Claude Code? If it's not meaningful, then it's $60B for an acquihire.

      • _menelaus

        today at 6:00 PM

        Its 60B for a huge amount of RL coding data to become competitive in the space.

          • GMoromisato

            today at 6:02 PM

            That would make more sense to me.

        • 4lasGa

          today at 6:06 PM

          Joshua Kushner, brother of Jared, had the foresight to participate in a $2.5B round last year:

          https://techcrunch.com/2025/11/13/coding-assistant-cursor-ra...

          Maybe this is horse trading: SpaceX pays an insane price in stock for a vibe coding app, Trump will help Terafab and Starlink in any way possible. There are probably other Cursor investors among the Trump clan.

          • dgellow

            today at 6:05 PM

            Have you read SpaceX IPO prospectus? Their AI plans are completely nonsensical. I don’t believe there is an actual strategy here other than trying to surf on (and contribute to) the AI bubble

              • kridsdale1

                today at 6:06 PM

                SpaceX has a monopoly on The Universe. Therefore the TAM for selling tokens to all possible alien species is what justifies the valuation.

            • today at 5:51 PM

          • stldev

            today at 6:05 PM

            Is this solely to prop up SPCX?

            Besides its following, does Cursor have any sort of moat? It's VS Code with a harness right?

              • hparadiz

                today at 6:06 PM

                Cursor is a subscription. You can use the tui harness called agent without the ide.

            • imagent

              today at 4:10 PM

              Keep in mind while this is the date they officially became part of SpaceX, they have already been collaborating on building models together. So don't expect a significant bump in performance on new Grok models due to the additional data from Cursor--that bump already happened with Grok 4.5[1] and now 4.6.

              [1] https://cursor.com/blog/grok-4-5

              • q3qahg

                today at 5:17 PM

                Elon is still all in on replacing programmers. He listens to always the same stupid booster accounts (XFreeze etc.).

                Good that there is now an administration that creates jobs, does not engage in foreign wars and has ended the Ukraine war in 24 hours.

                • hardwaregeek

                  today at 5:52 PM

                  I feel like people aren’t updating to the possibility that a significant portion of software development could be under the purview of SpaceX. Whether it’s developer Twitter, Cursor’s planned GitHub competitor, or Cursor/Grok, that’s a lot of the developer mindshare. Granted, there’s a lot of competition in all of these spaces except for maybe Twitter, so it might not happen. But there’s a chance! And that possibility is fairly concerning.

                    • bilalq

                      today at 6:02 PM

                      I'm really hoping for Linear to expand and build their own Git-hosting+stacked-PR offering.

                  • james_pm

                    today at 5:58 PM

                    Will they rebrand as codeX or Xcode? Trouble either way.

                    • cedws

                      today at 4:53 PM

                      Isn't it SpaceXAI now? I lost track.

                        • r14c

                          today at 5:02 PM

                          X, the everything app, formerly known as Twitter, now SpaceXAI XCursor X.

                            • pennomi

                              today at 5:54 PM

                              Time to rebrand to CurXor?

                              • echelon

                                today at 5:11 PM

                                That's like a popular 2000's era username.

                                xXxSpaceXAixX

                                  • InsideOutSanta

                                    today at 5:20 PM

                                    xXxSpaceXAIxX: Return of Xander Cage

                                      • Apocryphon

                                        today at 5:30 PM

                                        Musk pulls a Howard Hughes and goes into Hollywood producing just to bring back that franchise, just just for the letter X.

                                    • goolz

                                      today at 5:30 PM

                                      Very on-brand for a Halo 2 lobby circa 2005.

                                      • ubercore

                                        today at 5:19 PM

                                        Don't give him any ideas.

                                    • steveBK123

                                      today at 5:27 PM

                                      AI by xAI, a SpaceX subsidiary fka as Twitter, special collab with Cursor

                                      • Apocryphon

                                        today at 5:04 PM

                                        SpaceX, the everything company

                                          • stronglikedan

                                            today at 5:20 PM

                                            SpaceXtra

                                    • SketchySeaBeast

                                      today at 5:23 PM

                                      How long until he names a company "E" just so he can giggle about the name?

                                  • AnEro

                                    today at 5:26 PM

                                    Subscription is gone the second I feel like their not running the inference at a loss

                                    • deburo

                                      today at 5:41 PM

                                      I'm hoping Cursor becomes the third biggest (American) AI model company, replacing Google. Elon works best with top talent, and I think Cursor most kept its team together; were there any big departure from there recently?

                                        • dcrazy

                                          today at 5:44 PM

                                          What proprietary models does Cursor offer? Do they have any of the infrastructure to develop, train, and refine a frontier model?

                                            • minraws

                                              today at 5:47 PM

                                              Now they do have SpaceX's GPUs and Grok models...

                                              I mean I get that we can all dislike this move but it might the best way to get into the race to become one of the top labs. Ofc Grok 4.6 is not there yet, I have seen people claim it's quite good and it is but it's a marginal improvement over the mid tier models from the top 2.

                                              And it's certainly worse than the recent GLM 5.3 (especially once we get the weights for it).

                                                • hparadiz

                                                  today at 5:58 PM

                                                  All the models are good enough for almost all normal tech job work. If all you are doing is building a react app there's functionally no difference. You'd only want a frontier model to work on something extra complex but even that will be baked into the basic models within six months.

                                          • stackghost

                                            today at 5:44 PM

                                            Conversely, I'm hoping all Elon's companies go bankrupt. Elon works best with top talent because he is nothing but a grifter good at taking credit for the hard work of others (see: Tesla), and failing upwards.

                                            Concentrating so much wealth in one unstable Nazi[0] like Elon is objectively bad for society.

                                            [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2bbb-6Clhs

                                              • someluccc

                                                today at 6:07 PM

                                                Touch grass bud

                                        • vegancap

                                          today at 5:45 PM

                                          Cooool, won't be using that again

                                          • andsoitis

                                            today at 5:28 PM

                                            Congrats to everyone at Cursor!

                                              • today at 6:02 PM

                                            • ChrisArchitect

                                              today at 5:18 PM

                                              Previously in June:

                                              SpaceX to buy Cursor for $60B

                                              https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48553224

                                              • porphyra

                                                today at 5:35 PM

                                                Hopefully they can unify the harnesses now. Weird how there's both grok build and cursor-agent at the same time.

                                                • ravenstine

                                                  today at 4:59 PM

                                                  I get it and yet I don't. On one hand, my experience with Cursor (albeit limited) tells me that it's a perfect fit with Elon's other ventures. Then again, I don't see how there's anything so special about it that SpaceXAI would want to acquire it for either the software itself or the talent behind it. It seems more likely that acquiring Cursor is a way to get more users for Grok, seeing as how it still has a very small share of the market.

                                                    • melodyogonna

                                                      today at 5:53 PM

                                                      Grok has started competing with frontier models on coding thanks to Cursor's data, with SpaceX's massive compute they can undercut competition on price, which makes the offering real appealing.

                                                      I've now switched to Grok 4.6, I was previously using Opus 4.8 but Grok is good enough now, and way cheaper which is the important part.

                                                        • hparadiz

                                                          today at 6:02 PM

                                                          The $20 / month isn't as good as Codex or Claude. Codex reset twice this week while I'm sitting waiting for the entire month to role around with Cursor. I have all three so can have a pulse on everything.

                                                      • freedomben

                                                        today at 5:14 PM

                                                        I've never seen the appeal of cursor either, but then I'm a decades-long vim (now neovim) guy and don't use IDEs in general. But for me claude/codex TUIs are a great way to fit agents into my workflow.

                                                        My suspicion is that it's a way to break into more developer workflows for Grok, even if the market share is relatively small. I've never used grok and don't plan to at this point, but I have highly respected friends who say it is pretty damn good, and some of them even started using Cursor because of this pairing, so anecdatally at least it does seem to be working.

                                                        • stronglikedan

                                                          today at 5:24 PM

                                                          So they can play the game that the other big AI companies are playing, where they invest in one another to make each one look bigger on the books, even though it's all the same money, likely.

                                                          • modeless

                                                            today at 5:02 PM

                                                            The data is special. Data of programmers using coding agents in the real world is invaluable for AI training. And their customer base is useful to deploy new models into.

                                                              • today at 5:14 PM

                                                        • sidcool

                                                          today at 4:23 PM

                                                          They were not joking

                                                          • mock-possum

                                                            today at 4:41 PM

                                                            Shame.

                                                              • stronglikedan

                                                                today at 5:20 PM

                                                                Why? The product isn't likely to change

                                                                  • maximilianburke

                                                                    today at 5:45 PM

                                                                    But the people collecting the money have.

                                                            • midnitewarrior

                                                              today at 4:43 PM

                                                              ...and I won't be revisiting Cursor again.

                                                                • stronglikedan

                                                                  today at 5:21 PM

                                                                  Why not? The product isn't likely to change

                                                                    • sudonem

                                                                      today at 5:33 PM

                                                                      Some people perhaps just don’t want to give money to literal Bond villains. ĀÆ\_(惄)_/ĀÆ

                                                                  • sajithdilshan

                                                                    today at 4:58 PM

                                                                    …and the world kept spinning

                                                                • thecrumb

                                                                  today at 1:21 PM

                                                                  Eeeewww. Grok. Off to look at Zed.

                                                                    • jjtheblunt

                                                                      today at 5:15 PM

                                                                      Zed's very handy, I find, and i'm not saying so because i'm driven to it by aversion to alternatives: it's just very useful.

                                                                      • nxc18

                                                                        today at 5:27 PM

                                                                        Why not just use VS Code which cursor (and antigravity and the one Amazon is pushing) is a fork of? It will be much closer in functionality and has been loaded up with agent features nonstop for the last 18 months.

                                                                          • hparadiz

                                                                            today at 6:04 PM

                                                                            When I say "I use cursor" I mean the subscription. In reality I use the cli tui literally called "agent" and the cursor ide isn't installed at all.

                                                                    • spottedmarley

                                                                      today at 1:17 PM

                                                                      ...to the moon?

                                                                        • oniony

                                                                          today at 4:16 PM

                                                                          Think the aim is Mars.

                                                                            • tshaddox

                                                                              today at 4:37 PM

                                                                              Earlier this year they literally publicized changing their immediate goal from Mars to the Moon.

                                                                              • actualwitch

                                                                                today at 6:05 PM

                                                                                They may aim at Mars, but what they actually hit is the Moon. [0]

                                                                                [0] https://edition.cnn.com/2026/08/04/science/spacex-rocket-moo...

                                                                                • Ekaros

                                                                                  today at 4:19 PM

                                                                                  Perfect tool for rocket control systems and in general control and life support systems of Mars colonies.

                                                                                    • aanet

                                                                                      today at 4:27 PM

                                                                                      Vibe codin' away the colonization of Mars

                                                                                  • an0malous

                                                                                    today at 4:50 PM

                                                                                    It’s been enshittified to the Moon now

                                                                            • kykat

                                                                              today at 4:49 PM

                                                                              I swear I actually laughed out loud with this, is this a joke?

                                                                                • stronglikedan

                                                                                  today at 5:22 PM

                                                                                  Companies buy other companies all the time, so I'm not sure why anyone is surprised.

                                                                                    • marcosdumay

                                                                                      today at 5:48 PM

                                                                                      If somebody missed that one news, one can easily get to the conclusion that SpaceX tried to manipulate index funds to buy their shares, and sold into an incredibly high valuation to keep the money. Not to reinvest it into the business.

                                                                                  • rvz

                                                                                    today at 4:54 PM

                                                                                    No.