SpaceX to buy Cursor for $60B • Hacker News Board

Re: SpaceX to buy Cursor for $60B

#401

Post by marcosdumay » Tue, Jun 16, 2026, 4:16 PM UTC

jmalicki wrote: post #392

wmeredith wrote: post #12

"SpaceX told investors during the IPO process that it sees an addressable market for AI products worth $26 trillion, roughly equivalent to U.S. GDP." This is unhinged.

Another way of putting this: global GDP is ~$132Trillion from what I gather. So this is saying AI products will increase global GDP by about 20%. The Federal Reserve says AI is contributing about 1% GDP growth per year to the US [0]. So maybe you can get to $13 trillion over a decade just from that. If you assume some acceleration, 20% isn't out of the question. It is an extremely rosy projection, but if AI can repli…

> So this is saying AI products will increase global GDP by about 20%.

No business gets to capture 100% of the value it produces without physical coercion.

For infrastructure that requires high investment, it usually captures something around 5% of it. People tend to work really hard to replace or reduce any kind of infrastructure that gets near 10%. So we are talking about AIs increasing the global GDP by 200% at minimum, 400% more realistically.

Or in other words, bullshit number is bullshit.

Re: SpaceX to buy Cursor for $60B

#402

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Jun 16, 2026, 4:19 PM UTC

kjksf wrote: post #138

roxolotl wrote: post #6

Wow they are using 80% of what they raised 4 days ago to buy an IDE. Absolutely incredible.

Per latest reporting, Cursor's current annual revenue rate is $4 billion. So SpaceX is buying 15 years of future cashflows, assuming no change in revenue. Which is bad assumption given past growth was gigantic. They are also buying 300-400 employees with proven record of training good coding models. Their expertise will be used to improve Grok Build coding agent. Also, they're using stock, not cash, so effectively th…

[deleted]

Re: SpaceX to buy Cursor for $60B

#403

Post by wayeq » Tue, Jun 16, 2026, 4:20 PM UTC

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?

> What are they after for here? Customer base? Talent?

users

Re: SpaceX to buy Cursor for $60B

#404

Post by zpeti » Tue, Jun 16, 2026, 4:23 PM UTC

wxw wrote: post #358

Hm, surprised at all the Cursor hate here. Tab complete, at the quality they delivered, was a game changer back in the day. And their current work on Composer is great. Composer is super fast and quality is decent. More competition in the model space always welcome.

Composer 2.5 worked just as well for me as opus 4.6, and was faster and actually worked better for quick bugfixes and reporting back to support. And is much cheaper.

I'm not saying HN should be super supportive of everything, but the level of hate and complete loss of reality for a lot of people is quite sad to see, for a community of supposedly intelligent people.

Re: SpaceX to buy Cursor for $60B

#405

Post by csours » Tue, Jun 16, 2026, 4:23 PM UTC

barredo wrote: post #25

>> SpaceX told investors during the IPO process that it sees an addressable market for AI products worth $26 trillion, roughly equivalent to U.S. GDP. I very much can imagine a future documentary in a few years. With the host asking the audience: "Where were the signs?"

Signal and noise. Lots of noise. SO much noise.

To be clear, I don't know which part is signal and which part is noise any better than anyone else.

Re: SpaceX to buy Cursor for $60B

#406

Post by afavour » Tue, Jun 16, 2026, 4:23 PM UTC

greenoracle9 wrote: post #46

$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.

> The real question is whether SpaceX ownership improves Cursor or drives its users away.

I know I'll sound hyperbolic but I'm deeply skeptical of the way anything Musk-owned is going to treat private data. I think he wouldn't hesitate to dig into it if it were to his benefit, even if there was an agreement against it. For that reason alone it makes Cursor look worse to me.

Re: SpaceX to buy Cursor for $60B

#407

Post by yks » Tue, Jun 16, 2026, 4:23 PM UTC

wmeredith wrote: post #12

"SpaceX told investors during the IPO process that it sees an addressable market for AI products worth $26 trillion, roughly equivalent to U.S. GDP." This is unhinged.

With SPCX shares never going down in price, SpaceX can acquire all companies in the US in exchange for its stock, so SpaceX itself is worth at least as much as the US GDP! (/s)

Re: SpaceX to buy Cursor for $60B

#408

Post by sfblah » Tue, Jun 16, 2026, 4:24 PM UTC

aenis wrote: post #13

Out of curiosity, anyone here still using cursor?

I switched over to Claude Code. The products are essentially identical. This whole space has been commoditized. Paying $60B for this is idiotic.

Re: SpaceX to buy Cursor for $60B

#409

Post by afavour » Tue, Jun 16, 2026, 4:25 PM UTC

kjksf wrote: post #138

roxolotl wrote: post #6

Wow they are using 80% of what they raised 4 days ago to buy an IDE. Absolutely incredible.

Per latest reporting, Cursor's current annual revenue rate is $4 billion. So SpaceX is buying 15 years of future cashflows, assuming no change in revenue. Which is bad assumption given past growth was gigantic. They are also buying 300-400 employees with proven record of training good coding models. Their expertise will be used to improve Grok Build coding agent. Also, they're using stock, not cash, so effectively th…

> So SpaceX is buying 15 years of future cashflows, assuming no change in revenue. Which is bad assumption given past growth was gigantic.

I'd argue it's a bad assumption in the opposite direction. There's no moat. People can and will switch tooling and Cursor could easily be left with a steep decline in users.

Re: SpaceX to buy Cursor for $60B

#410

Post by theturtletalks » Tue, Jun 16, 2026, 4:25 PM UTC

connicpu wrote: post #379

yalogin wrote: post #362

What does cursor have? An ide and coding orchestration? They are using Claude or codex for llms, so they get acquired for their user base and tooling? Feels like a lot of money for that given Claude has the majority mindshare.

They have a giant pile of data from every customer that didn't disable data retention

I keep hearing this but they’ve been bleeding users since Claude Code came out so a bulk of their data is pre-Sonnet 4 and I’m not sure how the data from users prompting weaker models will help them now?

They did use that data to make Composer 2.5 which was decent but still a step back from GPT 5.5 and Opus 4.8. Though it’s really good at UI.