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SpaceX to buy Cursor for $60B

reuters.com

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Re: SpaceX to buy Cursor for $60B

#701

Post by CobrastanJorji »

h14h wrote: post #692
Alifatisk wrote: post #422

A space company is buying an IDE for roughly the cost to build 150 of world's most expensive modern hospitals [1]. How is this in SpaceX's interest? Isn't it kinda bizarre that Elon is pivoting SpaceX to something else? 1. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/16/spacex-spcx-cursor-acquisiti...

SpaceX isn't a space company anymore, it's an AI company. In their IPO filing, of their projected $28T total addressable market, only $370B (~1-2%) of that is from space [1]. The rest is primarily AI, with a sprinkling of Telecom revenue from Starlink. Given xAI's Grok is way behind ChatGPT & Claude on coding capabilities, whereas Cursor was able to get in spitting distance of them w/ Composer 2.5 by simply running p…

No, it really still makes no sense. Where's the moat around what Cursor provides? If Cursor is really that great, surely something equally great could be developed for a measly $1 billion or so? Is it brand recognition? An established customer base? Surely they don't have $60 billion worth of either.

Re: SpaceX to buy Cursor for $60B

#702

Post by scottyah »

WheatMillington wrote: post #691
Alifatisk wrote: post #422

A space company is buying an IDE for roughly the cost to build 150 of world's most expensive modern hospitals [1]. How is this in SpaceX's interest? Isn't it kinda bizarre that Elon is pivoting SpaceX to something else? 1. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/16/spacex-spcx-cursor-acquisiti...

Why do you think it's a space company? SpaceX didn't even define ITSELF as a space company in its IPO filing.

Weak. Would Yamaha list itself as just a musical instrument company?

Re: SpaceX to buy Cursor for $60B

#703

Post by ghshephard »

UncleOxidant wrote: post #675
ghshephard wrote: post #626

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use cursor 8+ hours/day at work, and have full (and effectively unlimited) access to Claude Code and Codex - tools which I also use personally. I suspect that your "constant popups" were when you were using the editor - a mode that I'll confess I haven't touched in 3+ months. Workflow in Cursor is actually awesome - I'm a little outdated in how I use it - I still establish goals/objectives, rather than managing the…

But what's the $60B differentiator here? There are so many similar tools out there. I generally use Opencode, but also Claude code, antigravity and sometimes Kilo code on VS Studio. How can cursor be worth even 10% of 60B?

I think the argument for Cursor is that it's the dominant tool that enterprises are using for coding, so the theory is Cursor wins that as the "model agnostic", it has a phenomenal Enterprise Sales Team.

From a valuation model - $4B ARR with rapid growth, and the ability to shift traffic to internal models (honestly, massive amount of the time "composer" - their internal model is fine, and obviously going to get better). Say 17x Multiple which isn't unheard for a rapidly growing Startup with solid future structural profit elements (moving to internal model) - that gets you to $68B.

Re: SpaceX to buy Cursor for $60B

#704

Post by arcanemachiner »

UncleOxidant wrote: post #675
ghshephard wrote: post #626

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use cursor 8+ hours/day at work, and have full (and effectively unlimited) access to Claude Code and Codex - tools which I also use personally. I suspect that your "constant popups" were when you were using the editor - a mode that I'll confess I haven't touched in 3+ months. Workflow in Cursor is actually awesome - I'm a little outdated in how I use it - I still establish goals/objectives, rather than managing the…

But what's the $60B differentiator here? There are so many similar tools out there. I generally use Opencode, but also Claude code, antigravity and sometimes Kilo code on VS Studio. How can cursor be worth even 10% of 60B?

I believe they have some very good training data because of all the data generated by people using the service.

This is the same data they used to finetune Kimi K2.5 to make their newer Composer models, which benchmark substantially better than Kimi K2.5.

I've heard they also want to build their own base models, which will also benefit from their large amount of high-quality training data. Which will solve Grok's model quality problem.

This is all unsourced conjecture of course. But it's what I've heard.

Re: SpaceX to buy Cursor for $60B

#705

Post by discreteevent »

Jcampuzano2 wrote: post #548
ieie3366 wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep in my experience the weakest engs in my org are the ones still using Cursor. not a good outlook IMO

I know this is not always true. But the same people who like cursor still are the same people who are less familiar with the terminal. And I don't know what it is but it feels the less familiar you are with a terminal, the less skilled you tend to be. Definitely not a 100% case. But has been common in my experience

Someone instructing AI through the terminal is a bit like an office worker with a tool belt. I don't think you can say anything about their coding ability until they are coding without AI. Even if thats in notepad.

Re: SpaceX to buy Cursor for $60B

#706

Post by zander_jiang »

yanis_t wrote: post #42

$60b is crazy. Cursor is an extension for VS Code, a harness and a bunch of prompts. They have their own model (Composer 2) which is based Kimi K2.5, but I don't think SpaceX would be interested in it. If they need a harness for grok, they could fork PI. What are they after for here? Customer base? Talent?

I wonder what happens to fireworks ai, who provided the infra to train and serve composer 2, cursor was their largest customer, and they're probably loosing it.

Re: SpaceX to buy Cursor for $60B

#707

Post by nicce »

MangoCoffee wrote: post #645

It’s the best exit for Cursor. There’s not much of a path for Cursor besides getting acquired. Cursor is a fork of VSCode. How much improvement can you really make? Cursor’s own model is based on a Chinese model. OpenAI and Claude are SOTA for coding. The only selling point for Cursor’s model is that it’s cheap. This is the best outcome for Cursor.

I don't understand. What SpaceX gets if they stop developing the product - as your comment sounds like it is a dead end? There would be then zero sense to buy it?

Re: SpaceX to buy Cursor for $60B

#708

Post by ryanjshaw »

UncleOxidant wrote: post #675
ghshephard wrote: post #626

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use cursor 8+ hours/day at work, and have full (and effectively unlimited) access to Claude Code and Codex - tools which I also use personally. I suspect that your "constant popups" were when you were using the editor - a mode that I'll confess I haven't touched in 3+ months. Workflow in Cursor is actually awesome - I'm a little outdated in how I use it - I still establish goals/objectives, rather than managing the…

But what's the $60B differentiator here? There are so many similar tools out there. I generally use Opencode, but also Claude code, antigravity and sometimes Kilo code on VS Studio. How can cursor be worth even 10% of 60B?

Where else are you going to get access to a real-time fresh high quality stream of human intelligence to grow your baby AGI? You can’t buy Codex, Claude, Copilot, so what’s left?

Re: SpaceX to buy Cursor for $60B

#709

Post by Romario77 »

UncleOxidant wrote: post #675
ghshephard wrote: post #626

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use cursor 8+ hours/day at work, and have full (and effectively unlimited) access to Claude Code and Codex - tools which I also use personally. I suspect that your "constant popups" were when you were using the editor - a mode that I'll confess I haven't touched in 3+ months. Workflow in Cursor is actually awesome - I'm a little outdated in how I use it - I still establish goals/objectives, rather than managing the…

But what's the $60B differentiator here? There are so many similar tools out there. I generally use Opencode, but also Claude code, antigravity and sometimes Kilo code on VS Studio. How can cursor be worth even 10% of 60B?

they are paying for marketshare/customer base. Cursor has a good chunk of it.

xAI overbuilt their data centers - they can't find paying customers for them, that's the reason they made deals with other companies like Google to use their own datacenters.

Cursor has the opposite problem of not having enough capacity. So this works well for them together.

Weather it's worth it - if you beleive that AI will solve every problem then having a piece of the pie early on might be worth it.

Remember how when google bought youtube for 1.65 billions people thought they are crazy? Or when facebook bought instagram.

60B is a crazy number but might be worth it for someone fighting for world dominance :)

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