SpaceX to buy Cursor for $60B

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 in a narrow window of time right now where any of this matters. Prompt "engineering" and working around your tools will be over in a year or so.

Fwiw I am a c/c++ systems engineer. I think anyone mentioning anecdotal experience like this should clarify. Maybe frontend JavaScript folks have a totally different take and that's expected.

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...

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 to me.

Back in the early days of Heroku (when I worked there), we were all fairly deep into the Ruby community. Ruby has never had a great reputation for performance, but... it seemed like almost a running joke that any time you went down a rabbit-hole trying to understand some weird performance issue you'd eventually discover that @tmm1 had already identified the same issue months earlier, patched it in core, and given an hour long talk about it somewhere. Despite his ability and willingness talk publicly about quite deep technical topics Aman always came across as an incredibly quiet and humble in person. Every Ruby developer has benefited from his attention to finding and fixing performance issues. I'm sure the same can probably said for every GitHub user (where he worked for years).

Congrats to the entire Cursor team! I don't know all of their stories, but I do like to smile and celebrate a little when I see people who are often hidden in the shadows quietly making things x% better for all of millions of us every day for many years getting reward for that effort.

>> 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?"

> "In its IPO filing, the company had said Cursor's access to developers' data, including coding requests and design decisions, could help improve its AI models such as Grok."

They're all stealing your IP and selling it back to your competitors in the form of tokens.

I've tried most of the tools out there but have used cursor most consistently. Sure, some of the UI quirks get in the way sometimes, but I've found its auto complete predictions to be unparalleled. More importantly, these days I mainly use its Ask mode, Plan mode, and Agent mode. I like that I can use Opus via subscription pricing without Claude Code's wild and buggy harness. And I find cursor's plan mode to perform better than Claude's, but that may just be my personal preferences. I know cursor stopped being the cool thing a few months back, but I genuinely feel most effective with it!

But I'll stop using it now, for the same reason I wouldn't buy a Tesla, or support that maniac in any other way. And I'm sad about that :(

My whole team was on cursor for a few months. I enjoyed using it and thought it was the most complete of the agentic coding tools I tried. The thing that got me was the cost. I was switching between Opus and GPT 5.x and was spending anywhere between $500-1000/month. I was using a relatively normal workflow, paste in ticket, plan, execute with dumb sub agents, have the ai test and competing model to validate. The business got uncomfortable with the cost when everyone started doing the same so they switched us to Claude code since it has better cost controls. So far it looks like we won't even touch the $100/month plan and some people would be ok on the $20 plan. Anthropics usage limits is a consistent source of complaint on here but I've found them to be moderately generous in comparison to cursor. Cursor also charges a $.25Mtok premium for 'routing' no matter what model you choose. 5% increase for frontier models but when you're using haiku on sub agents that's a 50% cost increase. Composer is solid but if you don't have deep pockets it's the only feasible model on their platform because of how they bill it. Being an all in one editor/agent is nice but if you're in a language like c# or Java you're already swapping back and forth with a real IDE anyway.

Is anyone on HN still actually using Cursor in 2026?

Everyone I've spoken with is now using either Claude Code or Codex (or Copilot because their companies force them to).

$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.

Congrats to the Cursor team!

When I first saw the company built on top of vscode in such a crowded field way back at the end of 2022, I thought "forget having a moat, they are renting their castle from the invaders!" - I couldn't see how see how a single team could execute well enough to effectively muscle their way in between Microsoft and OpenAI, who at that point looked destined to control the developer ecosystem between GitHub, VsCode and the then-best coding models. I think it's easy to forget how insane this seemed even just a few years ago.

But every year since then they managed to simply ship a better product on the axis that mattered to the most users. And now they are sitting between a huge user base and a massive stream of valuable tokens, they can sell to SpaceX. Incredibly impressive.

Whelp, I hope cursor was honest about not storing my data.

Nothing wrong with Cursor but $60B, wow. How many of these deals in 2025, 2026 will be worth nothing in 5 years? Seems like everything is just desperation and less like long term strategy.

Here's a shower thought. BTC essential is worth $70k solely through the power of memes. Can TSLA and SPCX remain overvalued (relative to the revenue of their respective underlying assets) forever through the power of memes?

Intuitively, it seems to me that there must necessarily be some kind of upper limit, but I'm not convincing myself. These speculative assets are only attractive as long as the price keeps inflating. But that can only happen if there is more and more demand. So it's basically a bet that there is an average amount of retail investors (I assume it's mostly retail investors but I could be wrong) that consistently put a percentage of their income into these speculative assets. Can this be maintained forever?

Cursor was my first hands-on experience with AI. I didn't know much about getting set up with specific providers via API, and Cursor made it easy to pick any model, ask a question about some code, and get a clear suggested answer easily viewable in the IDE with an 'accept' or 'reject' button. I think they answered this question well: "How do normal developers want to interact with AI?"

I moved away from Cursor when I noticed the responses from specific models were not as clean or accurate as when I'd prompt the models directly, which was something I didn't know how to do early on. I hypothesized that they had some boilerplate prompt sitting atop of my own, causing less precise or desirable results.

I would assume Cursor is still one of the best options for normal developers to get started with AI, but with Copilot forcing their foot in the door at many companies, I wasn't sure how well it would fare on its own. Being acquired by SpaceX should help, and I'll be interested to follow along and see how things develop.

$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 don’t really understand what the value prop of cursor is, it must be the data and models. These days programmable editors like neovim and emacs have a huge advantage. I’ve had ai create several custom plugins to have my editor do whatever I can think of. Just ask Claude code, hey I want to do x, y, z, it spits out some lua and I have a new capability. I don’t know why anyone would want to be limited by an extension interface at this point.

Funny that “GitHub should really support stacked diffs” led the Graphite team to a space colonization co.

2020: Leave Meta and start a company.

2020–2021: Spend ~18 months looking for PMF.

2021–2025: Build Graphite around stacked PRs, code review, and merge queues.

2025: Get acquired by Cursor because AI makes code review the bottleneck.

2026: Cursor gets acquired by SpaceX because Elon.

Not a startup arc I would have predicted from `gt stack submit`.

This should be an indication of how valuably xAI sees the training data that Cursor has accumulated, especially with its work on Composer 2.5. Last month, SpaceX and Cursor announced that they had been working on training a new model from scratch. Interested to see if this will put Cursor back into the zeitgeist.

In related news, I'm open to suggestions for coding agent harnesses.

Curser is the only possible play to make Grok AI some how useful to enterprise, where the vast majority of spend is / will be? Feels like it could only possibly worth this much to Musk. For me Anthropic are too far ahead - this will likely all be for zero shareholder value when Anthropic continues to pull ahead. Will be interesting to see if Musk switches off Collosus to impede Anthropic at some point.

cursor feels so 2025 to me guys. these days zed is just way better for my macbook battery and with acp can talk literally to my installed claude code and codex CLI tools, plus their own and custom providers ontop. I was kind of a decade of a vscode user and always just stayed through the evolutions until cursor, but at some point I just need a lean fast editor+lsp combo, git included and a chat pane next to it that uses my real subs underneath easily. (also: codex-cli can spawn and manage subagents and _resume_ them, acting like a real manager).

could be only me though, but longer interactions over days makes my codex gui app grind to a crawl and cursor was not only expensive with opus via api costs but also heating my room a lot. now I have a dozen zed instances open all crunching along with LLMs barely noticeable on system load (except the occasianal testuite runs but thats expected).

They sold at the top. My entire TEAM was weaned off cursor in the last year. New setup - 50% of them do (Codex Desktop, Claude Desktop) + Zed for IDE and the other 50% use (claude code + codex cli) on cmux -- a ghostty based terminal that adds some bells and whistles, literally for notifications when claude is done.

IMHO, the codex desktop app is very powerful for development + testing given it can easily control the computer.

If you've ever used Cursor, login, make sure privacy setting is on and contact them to say you want all your data deleted if there is some stored. Then delete your account.

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.

These are the SEC filings that confirms the merger:

Announcement of Cursor acquisition to SpaceX

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1181412/000162828026...

Details of Acquisition

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1181412/000162828026...

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.

For what it's worth, this was effectively announced months ago, and at this valuation.

Does anyone here think Cursor is overvalued? It's just packaging up what already exists, it has no moat or IP.

My 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.

They didn't wait a full week before dumping shit in the investors.

Why would spaceX want to double down on AI after the pain xAI is giving them with no good models and no use for the hardware?

Are people still using Cursor? I haven't in at least a year but perhaps I'm in the minority.

That's a lot of money for a buggy product that is at best slightly better than its competitors.

For those who aren't aware, Cursor sports one of the best LLM harnesses for coding. The app itself is annoying to use compared to their CLI counterparts, but the harness is widely recognized as the best in the business, or very close. Buying that harness makes a lot of sense considering the cash Musk invested in Grok. He's clearly trying to play with the big boys and grab a chunk of the LLM-assisted dev market.

Well, when your stock is massively overpriced it's a smart time to buy stuff with it.

paying 60bn for a dev team that wrapped vs is insane.

Anyone recommend an alternatives? For no particular reason I’m canceling my cursor subscription today.

Not bad for a VS Code fork and a Chinese LLM fine tune.

I love cursor. It's so frustrating that large companies are allowed to buy everything. Think of a world where github was still independent, cursor remained independent, heroku wasn't part of Salesforce. All great products that get eroded by the neglect of big tech.

I wonder where they will take this, if they'll use the Cursor team to help make Grok Build (which is not just a tool like Claude Code, but an actual Grok model too) more refined for programming? Would make sense to me, and in turn also provide Cursor with more compute they can use.

"In its IPO filing, the company had said Cursor's access to developers' data, including coding requests and design decisions, could help improve its AI models such as Grok."

This seems to be the key.. Data is expensive

Cursor is one of the lower performing agentic coding tools these days. Seems weird to buy a VSCode fork.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47855293

Initial announcement back in April

How does this get a Starship to land on Mars or coast-to-coast full self driving? $60,000,000,000 towards one of those goals would have checked-off one of those boxes.

I use cursor (through a work subscription), only the cli (https://cursor.com/cli), and mostly using Composer 2.5, but I freely change the model when the need arises.

Most comments here seem to think there is no command line client? I have never used the editor.

For my personal projects, I use a heavily modified pi. I also have access to a claude code account through work (bedrock), but I don't use it much. It always seems to be down.

The cursor cli (`agent`) is fine.

I'm still waiting for the real news to drop- in the next 6 months we're going to start hearing some big moves from Space X AI. Early this year they lost pretty much all their leadership, it's very clear they failed to keep up with the frontier models and Musk has essentially given up for now - renting out their compute to Anthropic and Google. But that's not sustainable, everything they say about their IPO is that AI is the core value driver. So at some point Musk is going to have some decisions to make about who he brings in to drive that. I imagine once they get that person in and start building a team around them the deals with Anthropic and Google will be ended.

I guess the cursor guys will be happy because they got their pay day, but I'd be very aware if I were them that their future is at the whim of whoever Musk appoints and it's difficult to tell who that would be right now.

I guess now is the time to take bets, so I'm going to bet an early OpenAI employee like Sutskever gets the job and they acquihire him in. Here's a bit of a laugh - at this stock price Musk could probably tempt Demis to come over, that would be wild.

I like Cursor as a product but the add on cost of $0.25/M tokens is just too expensive on top of the models.

Local inference seems to be catching up and Pi seems to be leading the pack for open weight harnesses. Bold move, SpaceX. I truly hope it doesn't work out for you.

Ugh, I'm already tired of seeing ads everywhere for Cursor about how you can build EVERYTHING and solve all problems using their agentic IDE, so now I have even more reasons to dislike SpaceX too.

I wonder how much zed industries is being valued at.