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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

#621

Post by pembrook »

4gotunameagain wrote: post #586
ValentineC wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My @valentine got changed to @valentine_ without my consent. 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.)

Turns out that when you are using some oligarch's platform, you don't own jack. This is digital feudalism, and the billionaires have seized the means of communication.

Billionaires have always owned the means of communication (just look at the Salzbergers, Murdochs, etc).

Digital decentralized protocols (smtp, http, etc) were the first time this wasn’t true. But you [we] voluntarily moved your communication off of open internet protocols onto private ad-based platforms.

Of course you don’t own anything there, you never did. The billionaires didn’t “seize” anything. You happily sold yourself out for a few clicks of less friction and an easier shot at digital fame by going “viral” on social media company land.

If this isn’t a much bigger indictment of the collective (who after decades still could not agree on a non-elitist, human understandable protocol that didn’t require a CS degree to use) than it is of the entrepreneurs who solved all the problems the collective refused to, I don’t know how else to get though to you.

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

#624

Post by sighthrowaway »

wahnfrieden wrote: post #587
rob74 wrote: post #583

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's crazy is that a company that sells an IDE (that's not even a particularly good one compared to competitors like JetBrains) integrating some AI plugins could be worth more than $60B...

They are now a Codex clone and without the subscription pricing. You have to spend thousands to get what you get from a $200 Codex subscription. How do they compete with this except from users who haven't caught on yet, or businesses that are unbothered to spend thousands a month per dev and wouldn't consider just subscribing to 1-3 $200 subscriptions instead? And their price is so high because it's markup on API rat…

> users who haven't caught on yet

If you think this of users who use cursor then I don’t think you’ve used cursor much at all.

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

#625

Post by ascorbic »

theturtletalks wrote: post #214
nikcub wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Marketing push was there too, everyone was saying Grok had jumped Claude and Codex, yet I never got that when using all 3.

Turns out that benchmaxxing doesn't help if it's not very good when people actually try it.

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

#626

Post by kennywinker »

Aurornis wrote: post #334
theahura wrote: post #123

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?

They could offer $20 million dollar signing bonuses to every Cursor employee if they wanted to hire them away and it would be much cheaper. They’re buying the customers and the brand.

A brand he’ll promptly burn to the ground by renaming it some garbage with an X in it.

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

#627

Post by ascorbic »

JustExAWS wrote: post #292
Reubend wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Maybe the play here is a way to sneak sneak Grok into enterprise by calling it Cursor. Or they'll just give up on it and run Cursor's fine-tuned Kimi on Colossus.

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

#629

Post by echelon »

sighthrowaway wrote: post #624
wahnfrieden wrote: post #587

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are now a Codex clone and without the subscription pricing. You have to spend thousands to get what you get from a $200 Codex subscription. How do they compete with this except from users who haven't caught on yet, or businesses that are unbothered to spend thousands a month per dev and wouldn't consider just subscribing to 1-3 $200 subscriptions instead? And their price is so high because it's markup on API rat…

> users who haven't caught on yet If you think this of users who use cursor then I don’t think you’ve used cursor much at all.

What do you mean?

Only the foundation model companies offer cheap/subsidized compute.

If you're an app layer company, you're offering a 10x worse deal to your customers.

Foundation model companies are willing to lose money to win loyalty. Remains to be seen if it'll work.

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

#630

Post by sigmoid10 »

ozim wrote: post #610
rob74 wrote: post #583

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's crazy is that a company that sells an IDE (that's not even a particularly good one compared to competitors like JetBrains) integrating some AI plugins could be worth more than $60B...

In terms of IDE yeah it is not that great. I do have Copilot in VSCode and Cursor. I thought both should be equal in solving problems - turns out Cursor with the same model selected somehow was able to solve tasks that Copilot would get stuck or run in loops. They have some tricks on managing file access that others don’t.

Cynics on HN easily dismiss AI service wrappers (and many of them are in fact overblown and not worth their own code). But writing a genuinely good harness with lots of context engineering and solid tool integration is in fact not that easy. The biggest issue is that model providers also see what the community likes and often move on with their own offerings that are tailored to their own models, potentially at the training stage. So even if you have the best harness for something today, unless you are also a frontier LLM provider, there's zero guarantee you will still be relevant in the future. More like the opposite.
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