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SpaceX to buy Cursor for $60B

reuters.com

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Re: SpaceX to buy Cursor for $60B

#951

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s all in a stock that may very well be near its zenith when this closes (or maybe not. This is so far past fundamentals it’s impossible to tell). They’re spending Monopoly money. It also seems like SpaceX is poised to Hoover up all of Elons companies so it’s might not be “just a space company” for long.

> They’re spending Monopoly money. They also seem to be desperate to buy their way into a monopoly, even though the company itself has a long track record of failing to deliver anything noteworthy.

FOMO; Apple grew to one of the biggest companies over time and people were like "h*ck I should've bought it years ago". Tesla then seemed somewhat similar - also 5 years ahead of the curve for EVs, even if they reinvented things that didn't need to and their construction was substandard, so one group of investors bought and boosted the stock to impossible heights. Now SpaceX is the next one, and people want to get on board.

I don't think anybody actually believes SpaceX will be worth it. I think some still believed Tesla would be, but their competition has caught up. Everybody is just there to ride the wave of mass hype and FOMO, thinking everybody else is an idiot.

This has been coming in a few waves over the years in Tesla, cryptocurrencies, the Everything Bubble, etc.

Re: SpaceX to buy Cursor for $60B

#952

Earlier 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

I hate the accept reject flow, because I want a conventional code review workflow where I can write comments on specific lines of code and maybe edit the code myself.

If I reject, then the AI will struggle to modify just the parts I disagree with, if I accept, the AI will tend towards adding code rather than updating the bad code.

At that point copy paste without agentic coding tends to work much better.

Re: SpaceX to buy Cursor for $60B

#953

I 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 didn't like cursor when it first came about but now I use it for my personal projects. The plan is good value for accessing different sota models occasionally for planning. Composer is actually really good, and fast.

I'm not sure if it's because my personal projects are small enough I know them inside out and my work project is huge, but I prefer terminal code agents for day work over ide integration.

Re: SpaceX to buy Cursor for $60B

#955

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…

> 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…

By that same logic (and I’m agreeing with you as of now), engineers shouldn’t get too comfortable treating “being good at text communication” as a lasting edge. With how quickly agentic coding is evolving, it’s worth considering the possibility that many of the prompting and steering skills we view as valuable today could become far less important in a matter of weeks or months.

Re: SpaceX to buy Cursor for $60B

#956

$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.

Tesla was popular before Musk's ketamine fueled schizo-fascist phase. People will probably boycott Cursor as soon as he buys it...

Re: SpaceX to buy Cursor for $60B

#957
I’m happy for the Cursor team, but I sincerely don’t understand the valuation.

Most people I know who figured out how to use Claude Code or Codex directly get much more compute and a much better power-user experience. The difference is not even funny. And it’s not an IDE vs terminal because both claude and codex work just fine in vscode.

What annoyed me most was my own experience: last November I paid $20 for Cursor, burned through the quota in one day after just a few prompts, and didn’t find any clear way to even see quota, so i contacted support. Somehow they claimed I had used around $70 of compute and implied I should be grateful. But they calc price of all input tokens as if they were cashmiss tokens, which is obviously more expensive than real API usage and this was extremely dishonest on their part.

So from my perspective, Cursor or similar solutions often look like a middleman between the user and model provider. In theory, that should be hard to defend against using the frontier labs directly.

That is why it is mystery for me why so many people still pay for it over orders of magnitude cheaper claude/codex

Re: SpaceX to buy Cursor for $60B

#958

This is a stupid comparison, but Mojang/Minecraft was acquired for 2.5 billion in 2014. Arguably the most popular video game of all time, which has brought joy to hundreds of millions of people for years and years, was valued at 1/20th of an AI startup that will soon disappear into irrelevance. While Minecraft is just a game, I'd argue it has more societal value than Cursor. The way things are valued is nonsensical t…

I imagine at least part of the reason this doesn't make sense to you is because you're not a decision maker working at that scale. It made sense to someone at a high level. The calculations that person is doing is likely different than yours.

This is also why it's difficult to make money selling to consumers. They run different calculations than enterprise buyers.

Re: SpaceX to buy Cursor for $60B

#959

I 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 moved all my AI coding over to claude code when claude 4 came out, but kept cursor for the tab complete. since opus 4.5 i haven't really needed the tab complete so i canceled my cursor sub 6 months ago.

switched back to vscode so i'm not exposed to the potential mess that is openvsx too. trying to get used to zed but i'm just so used to vscode

Re: SpaceX to buy Cursor for $60B

#960
post #958

This is a stupid comparison, but Mojang/Minecraft was acquired for 2.5 billion in 2014. Arguably the most popular video game of all time, which has brought joy to hundreds of millions of people for years and years, was valued at 1/20th of an AI startup that will soon disappear into irrelevance. While Minecraft is just a game, I'd argue it has more societal value than Cursor. The way things are valued is nonsensical t…

I imagine at least part of the reason this doesn't make sense to you is because you're not a decision maker working at that scale. It made sense to someone at a high level. The calculations that person is doing is likely different than yours. This is also why it's difficult to make money selling to consumers. They run different calculations than enterprise buyers.

There’s quite a few historical cases of mergers acquisitions being poorly valued aol time warner for example. So maybe v the calculus is different from the execs perspective but it’s not necessarily any better.
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