I think it's wild that Kimi is only valued at half as much - $30B.
SpaceX to buy Cursor for $60B
711–720 of 1001 posts
Re: SpaceX to buy Cursor for $60B
#712My honest suspicion is that Musk will focus more and more on AI (and less on space) because he sees it as a path towards his immortality. I expect AI models trained on him combined with millions or billions spent lobbying to allow an AI to own and direct a company. I know this sounds like poorly written sci-fi but I will be only disappointed - not surprised - if post death AI Elon is the richest entity on earth.
AI + Optimus + desire to explore the universe is such a cool concept. I think he'd love to send his consciousness out after all this bickering on earth.
Honestly, the more that we get humans away from squabbling over the same patch of desert the better off we'd probably be. Everyone seems to think they can spend money better than everyone else.
Re: SpaceX to buy Cursor for $60B
#713I stopped using Cursor when I started getting comfortable with Codex/Claude. Cursor is just annoying with the constant popups and it's just not as good. Now my workflow is to use my normal editor, add a todo describing what I want, and then ask Codex+gpt-5.5 to implement it. It absolutely nails it. Using codex is so much more like working with a partner vs the noise and annoyance of Cursor. That said, I think we're i…
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 Workflow in Cursor is actually awesome - I'm a little outdated in how I use it - I still establish goals/objectives, rather than managing the…
> there isn't really any "prompt engineering" involved
You should make an experiment; take someone who never used any LLMs or agents, and tell them to use it for the first time in front of you, and tell them to build something like a calculator program or whatnot. Bonus points if they're ICs or at least not-managers.
I think there is a lot us engineers take for granted, when it comes to communicating via text, how to state things clearly and what we think/reason when we read things. A lot of people don't have those "skills" innate, and the first time they use LLMs, they basically don't know how to interact with them, until they realize what they're able to do and not. Then they also learn what to say to steer the model into the right way, this is quite literally a "prompt engineering" skill they're now learning.
Re: SpaceX to buy Cursor for $60B
#714Earlier 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
I taught myself assembly language from a book on a 286, I cracked games with SoftICE as a teenager, tried out every Linux distribution in the 90s, and have been developing software professionally for 2 decades. I prefer Cursor.
Am I an outlier or do you just judge people for weird reasons? I’ve never seen an IDE person judge a terminal person, it’s always the other way around - what’s up with that?
Re: SpaceX to buy Cursor for $60B
#715Earlier quoted context omitted.
I also work with C++, and I use Codex (desktop) which writes 99.99% of my code, plus Visual Studio, which is nice for reading and navigating code. For webdev I do VSCode + Codex. I started with Cursor back in the day, but switched to Claude Code and then Codex when Cursor got too expensive. If price wasn't an issue, maybe I'd prefer Cursor only because I can easily switch between models. But that's it. I always disli…
I love the accept reject flow because I still constantly have to stop AI models from writing awful architecture or reimplementing code we already wrote elsewhere
Yeah, I have found the same. A lot of times it does get things right, but if it deviates man it can just drift hard.
For example, sometimes Claude just obsessively reads files and goes on massive tangents. Then when I stop it and ask, "why are you doing that?", it kindly apologizes and admits it shouldn't have gone on a tangent.
The token burn if I don't stop it would be quite high.
Granted, this might be because I'm not giving it optimal prompt/negative-prompt instructions though.
Re: SpaceX to buy Cursor for $60B
#716$60B is a huge price, but buying Cursor gives Musk something xAI has struggled to build: a popular coding product with real developer and enterprise adoption. It may be the fastest way to catch up in AI coding. The real question is whether SpaceX ownership improves Cursor or drives its users away.
There's no way I will continue to use Cursor if it's Elon-owned. His actions at DOGE literally caused the deaths of thousands. We should all boycott.
hundreds of thousands
Re: SpaceX to buy Cursor for $60B
#717$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?
> What are they after for here? Customer base? Talent? users
And IP
Re: SpaceX to buy Cursor for $60B
#718I stopped using Cursor when I started getting comfortable with Codex/Claude. Cursor is just annoying with the constant popups and it's just not as good. Now my workflow is to use my normal editor, add a todo describing what I want, and then ask Codex+gpt-5.5 to implement it. It absolutely nails it. Using codex is so much more like working with a partner vs the noise and annoyance of Cursor. That said, I think we're i…
"Prompt "engineering" and working around your tools will be over in a year or so."
What do you mean by that? What is happening in just over a year or so?
Re: SpaceX to buy Cursor for $60B
#719Earlier 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 don't know what cursors market share is but it feels like 20-25% to me. That is not worth nothing. Then;
1) The data they have flowing through the system that enabled them to build composer (which is much better than stock kimi 2.5) and is presumably allowing the training of a new model on space Xs compute.
2) Cursors new 'github' replacement.
3) Enterprise sales/traction
If you look at all of these together, it's not implausible that they end up mostly 'owning' coding in 5 years time. If they replace GitHub with something more compatible with agentic coding and bring it into their whole ecosystem providing cloud and local agents, PR review and own frontier coding model.
It's specialised vs 'borg' isn't it. One way of thinking is that the world is owned by Anthropic/OpenAI and coding is just one of many things their model and software does. Another view is we have a 'coding with LLMs' company that specialises in this field of endeavour. Hard to say which wins, but I think they have a shot.
Personally my only objection to cursor is that it's more expensive. That's it, otherwise it is great to be able to choose say GPT-5.5 when I want to work on backend and Opus when I want to work on front end. Great to have PR review built in. If they were able to get composer 3 to as good as GPT5.5 / fable at the price of composer 2.5 they'd be winning on price again.
Re: SpaceX to buy Cursor for $60B
#720A 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...
I wish we’d stopped calling him Elon like he’s a family uncle or something. I chuckled at Heilon Musk, but I’d settle for just Musk.