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

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

#541

Post by larodi »

anonymid wrote: post #153

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 worki…

Can s.o. please explain, does the Cursor EULA really allow it to train on my code, as I really don't expect Claude Code or CODEX to do it either?

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

#542

Post by YmiYugy »

TeeWEE wrote: post #481
trollbridge wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sort of implies the $10B is going to be paid with compute credits. So this could very well be xAI simply compensating Cursor by giving them $10 billion worth of tokens. (What’s a token worth in dollars these days?)

That’s indeed the trick. Spacex “invests” in Cursor, looks good on their balance sheet. And xAI now gets 10B of more revenue on their income statement. Perfect financial statement boosting for the IPO which in turn will pay back these costs. At least that’s the bet.

Can they really put $10B worth of options under "investment"?

If so that would seem like the most plausible take on why this is happening.

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

#543

Post by mrcwinn »

You can hate Elon or just be misguided about deals in general. This is brilliant. He’s buying revenue and, on the thesis of scaling agentic knowledge work replacement, a user of his GPU clusters and ultimately GPUs in space. A $60B option is a premium on their revenue - but it may look cheap if he accelerates their coding models. For Cursor, they get what’s nearly impossible to come by - real capacity guarantees and de-risking their reliance on Anthropic or OpenAI.

Laugh all you want. He may have the last laugh on this one.

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

#544

Post by the-peter »

throwanem wrote: post #522
Barbing wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I heard he made a deal with a company to use his clusters. Is there good data on demand for Grok? Seems like relatively little chatter at least, in spite of tremendous investment.

[flagged]

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

#545

Post by nbardy »

isodev wrote: post #534
Lonestar1440 wrote: post #195

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 fa…

This valuation is absurd. Perhaps a year ago- sure, but there have been so many iterations of this “kind of editor” since then, not to mention countless alternatives. So for me it’s more of a data deal - Elon buying himself some insight into codebases and real dev usage patterns? Oh finally someone to use his dirty data centres

People keep saying this and they don't understand how businesses work.

Cursor has 1B in enterprise revenue. It doesn't matter if people can clone their product, those deals don't move slowly

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

#546

Post by polski-g »

zuzululu wrote: post #474

Is anybody using Grok or Cursor still? I've not used Cursor since the summer of 2025 and I've never bothered with Grok for coding. Hell, I've used Windsurf briefly for a few months. I know a ton of people that use Codex, Claude, OpenCode but can't name a single person that uses Cursor or Grok that is knee deep into agentic coding.

I use grok for various subagent tasks. It's super cheap and 100tps. Never for actual thinking though.

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

#547

Post by whattheheckheck »

larodi wrote: post #541
anonymid wrote: post #153

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 worki…

Can s.o. please explain, does the Cursor EULA really allow it to train on my code, as I really don't expect Claude Code or CODEX to do it either?

They will because there is no way to prove they didnt

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

#548

Post by ryanSrich »

bottlepalm wrote: post #540
rvnx wrote: post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have 2B ARR because their business model is about selling models cheaper than they cost. The main frenzy with Cursor started when you could access Anthropic models practically for free. Otherwise it is just VS Code.

xAI needs a dev tool to compete with Codex and Claude Code. Cursor needs their own 1st party backend model. Sounds like a match made in heaven.

Not quite first party, but composer 2 is far superior to grok for coding. Unless you're eluding to them using SpaceX infra to train their own model vs. using grok

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

#549

Post by ryanSrich »

ignoramous wrote: post #306
Lonestar1440 wrote: post #195

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 fa…

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). I am sure the usual suspects would have lined up to purchase Cursor, and the deal from xAI was probably the best of the lot. Marks an end to a remarkable sprint for a 3yo company, and an admirable exit (considering the recent discombobulation of W…

Having tried most (all?) of the commercially available + open source options, and even tangential competitors like CC, Conductor, Antimetal, etc. I haven't found anything that's close to the experience of Cursor. The harness they've built is incredible.

I'd even go so far as to say that any competitors that are direct (windsurf, kiro, etc.) aren't even in the same universe. Cursor is just so much better, faster, has better features (plan and debug mode), and squeezes much better results/code out of the same models. They absolutely have some secrete sauce that the other options just don't have.

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

#550

Post by YmiYugy »

AirMax98 wrote: post #10

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?

Cursor seems to be pivoting to a Codex like desktop app. The real product though is probably their decently tuned harness and their composer models. I agree that their popularity has waned. I would attribute that mostly to customers chasing the most subsidized tokens and Cursor not having the pockets to keep up. Anthropic is already following suit and it seems unclear how long OpenAI is willing to continue. I think in a case of a market correction that forces model makers to adopt more reasonable growth targets, that Cursor is decently positioned.
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