I'm skeptical of this deal. Cursor led the way on agentic coding, but Claude Code and Codex have replaced it. [I use Codex for everything now.]
Still, I'm hearing that Grok 4.6 is almost as good at coding as Codex, but lots cheaper. [My network is also down on Claude--Opus 5 seems like a regression.]
The optimistic scenario would be Grok being a fast-follower with cheaper rates, and staying ahead of open source models. If they can pull that off, and convince enough developers, then maybe they've got a chance.
But $60B seems insane to me. What's Cursor's market share relative to Codex and Claude Code? If it's not meaningful, then it's $60B for an acquihire.
Maybe this is horse trading: SpaceX pays an insane price in stock for a vibe coding app, Trump will help Terafab and Starlink in any way possible. There are probably other Cursor investors among the Trump clan.
Have you read SpaceX IPO prospectus? Their AI plans are completely nonsensical. I don’t believe there is an actual strategy here other than trying to surf on (and contribute to) the AI bubble
Keep in mind while this is the date they officially became part of SpaceX, they have already been collaborating on building models together. So don't expect a significant bump in performance on new Grok models due to the additional data from Cursor--that bump already happened with Grok 4.5[1] and now 4.6.
I feel like people aren’t updating to the possibility that a significant portion of software development could be under the purview of SpaceX. Whether it’s developer Twitter, Cursor’s planned GitHub competitor, or Cursor/Grok, that’s a lot of the developer mindshare. Granted, there’s a lot of competition in all of these spaces except for maybe Twitter, so it might not happen. But there’s a chance! And that possibility is fairly concerning.
I'm hoping Cursor becomes the third biggest (American) AI model company, replacing Google. Elon works best with top talent, and I think Cursor most kept its team together; were there any big departure from there recently?
I mean I get that we can all dislike this move but it might the best way to get into the race to become one of the top labs. Ofc Grok 4.6 is not there yet, I have seen people claim it's quite good and it is but it's a marginal improvement over the mid tier models from the top 2.
And it's certainly worse than the recent GLM 5.3 (especially once we get the weights for it).
All the models are good enough for almost all normal tech job work. If all you are doing is building a react app there's functionally no difference. You'd only want a frontier model to work on something extra complex but even that will be baked into the basic models within six months.
Maybe if you’re building something from scratch every time, but otherwise the difference becomes noticeable fast. Just today 5.6 Terra tried to silently import half my backend into the frontend bundle. After switching to Sol it quickly found and fixed that.
Conversely, I'm hoping all Elon's companies go bankrupt. Elon works best with top talent because he is nothing but a grifter good at taking credit for the hard work of others (see: Tesla), and failing upwards.
Concentrating so much wealth in one unstable Nazi[0] like Elon is objectively bad for society.
I get it and yet I don't. On one hand, my experience with Cursor (albeit limited) tells me that it's a perfect fit with Elon's other ventures. Then again, I don't see how there's anything so special about it that SpaceXAI would want to acquire it for either the software itself or the talent behind it. It seems more likely that acquiring Cursor is a way to get more users for Grok, seeing as how it still has a very small share of the market.
Grok has started competing with frontier models on coding thanks to Cursor's data, with SpaceX's massive compute they can undercut competition on price, which makes the offering real appealing.
I've now switched to Grok 4.6, I was previously using Opus 4.8 but Grok is good enough now, and way cheaper which is the important part.
The $20 / month isn't as good as Codex or Claude. Codex reset twice this week while I'm sitting waiting for the entire month to role around with Cursor. I have all three so can have a pulse on everything.
I've never seen the appeal of cursor either, but then I'm a decades-long vim (now neovim) guy and don't use IDEs in general. But for me claude/codex TUIs are a great way to fit agents into my workflow.
My suspicion is that it's a way to break into more developer workflows for Grok, even if the market share is relatively small. I've never used grok and don't plan to at this point, but I have highly respected friends who say it is pretty damn good, and some of them even started using Cursor because of this pairing, so anecdatally at least it does seem to be working.
So they can play the game that the other big AI companies are playing, where they invest in one another to make each one look bigger on the books, even though it's all the same money, likely.
The data is special. Data of programmers using coding agents in the real world is invaluable for AI training. And their customer base is useful to deploy new models into.
Why not just use VS Code which cursor (and antigravity and the one Amazon is pushing) is a fork of? It will be much closer in functionality and has been loaded up with agent features nonstop for the last 18 months.
If somebody missed that one news, one can easily get to the conclusion that SpaceX tried to manipulate index funds to buy their shares, and sold into an incredibly high valuation to keep the money. Not to reinvest it into the business.
67 comments:
I'm skeptical of this deal. Cursor led the way on agentic coding, but Claude Code and Codex have replaced it. [I use Codex for everything now.]
Still, I'm hearing that Grok 4.6 is almost as good at coding as Codex, but lots cheaper. [My network is also down on Claude--Opus 5 seems like a regression.]
The optimistic scenario would be Grok being a fast-follower with cheaper rates, and staying ahead of open source models. If they can pull that off, and convince enough developers, then maybe they've got a chance.
But $60B seems insane to me. What's Cursor's market share relative to Codex and Claude Code? If it's not meaningful, then it's $60B for an acquihire.
Its 60B for a huge amount of RL coding data to become competitive in the space.
That would make more sense to me.
Joshua Kushner, brother of Jared, had the foresight to participate in a $2.5B round last year:
https://techcrunch.com/2025/11/13/coding-assistant-cursor-ra...
Maybe this is horse trading: SpaceX pays an insane price in stock for a vibe coding app, Trump will help Terafab and Starlink in any way possible. There are probably other Cursor investors among the Trump clan.
Have you read SpaceX IPO prospectus? Their AI plans are completely nonsensical. I don’t believe there is an actual strategy here other than trying to surf on (and contribute to) the AI bubble
SpaceX has a monopoly on The Universe. Therefore the TAM for selling tokens to all possible alien species is what justifies the valuation.
Keep in mind while this is the date they officially became part of SpaceX, they have already been collaborating on building models together. So don't expect a significant bump in performance on new Grok models due to the additional data from Cursor--that bump already happened with Grok 4.5[1] and now 4.6.
[1] https://cursor.com/blog/grok-4-5
Elon is still all in on replacing programmers. He listens to always the same stupid booster accounts (XFreeze etc.).
Good that there is now an administration that creates jobs, does not engage in foreign wars and has ended the Ukraine war in 24 hours.
I feel like people aren’t updating to the possibility that a significant portion of software development could be under the purview of SpaceX. Whether it’s developer Twitter, Cursor’s planned GitHub competitor, or Cursor/Grok, that’s a lot of the developer mindshare. Granted, there’s a lot of competition in all of these spaces except for maybe Twitter, so it might not happen. But there’s a chance! And that possibility is fairly concerning.
I'm really hoping for Linear to expand and build their own Git-hosting+stacked-PR offering.
Is this solely to prop up SPCX?
Besides its following, does Cursor have any sort of moat? It's VS Code with a harness right?
Cursor is a subscription. You can use the tui harness called agent without the ide.
Isn't it SpaceXAI now? I lost track.
X, the everything app, formerly known as Twitter, now SpaceXAI XCursor X.
Time to rebrand to CurXor?
That's like a popular 2000's era username.
xXxSpaceXAixX
xXxSpaceXAIxX: Return of Xander Cage
Musk pulls a Howard Hughes and goes into Hollywood producing just to bring back that franchise, just just for the letter X.
Very on-brand for a Halo 2 lobby circa 2005.
Don't give him any ideas.
AI by xAI, a SpaceX subsidiary fka as Twitter, special collab with Cursor
SpaceX, the everything company
SpaceXtra
How long until he names a company "E" just so he can giggle about the name?
Will they rebrand as codeX or Xcode? Trouble either way.
Subscription is gone the second I feel like their not running the inference at a loss
I'm hoping Cursor becomes the third biggest (American) AI model company, replacing Google. Elon works best with top talent, and I think Cursor most kept its team together; were there any big departure from there recently?
What proprietary models does Cursor offer? Do they have any of the infrastructure to develop, train, and refine a frontier model?
Now they do have SpaceX's GPUs and Grok models...
I mean I get that we can all dislike this move but it might the best way to get into the race to become one of the top labs. Ofc Grok 4.6 is not there yet, I have seen people claim it's quite good and it is but it's a marginal improvement over the mid tier models from the top 2.
And it's certainly worse than the recent GLM 5.3 (especially once we get the weights for it).
All the models are good enough for almost all normal tech job work. If all you are doing is building a react app there's functionally no difference. You'd only want a frontier model to work on something extra complex but even that will be baked into the basic models within six months.
Maybe if you’re building something from scratch every time, but otherwise the difference becomes noticeable fast. Just today 5.6 Terra tried to silently import half my backend into the frontend bundle. After switching to Sol it quickly found and fixed that.
Conversely, I'm hoping all Elon's companies go bankrupt. Elon works best with top talent because he is nothing but a grifter good at taking credit for the hard work of others (see: Tesla), and failing upwards.
Concentrating so much wealth in one unstable Nazi[0] like Elon is objectively bad for society.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2bbb-6Clhs
Cry me a river
Touch grass bud
Congrats to everyone at Cursor!
Cooool, won't be using that again
Previously in June:
SpaceX to buy Cursor for $60B
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48553224
Hopefully they can unify the harnesses now. Weird how there's both grok build and cursor-agent at the same time.
I get it and yet I don't. On one hand, my experience with Cursor (albeit limited) tells me that it's a perfect fit with Elon's other ventures. Then again, I don't see how there's anything so special about it that SpaceXAI would want to acquire it for either the software itself or the talent behind it. It seems more likely that acquiring Cursor is a way to get more users for Grok, seeing as how it still has a very small share of the market.
Grok has started competing with frontier models on coding thanks to Cursor's data, with SpaceX's massive compute they can undercut competition on price, which makes the offering real appealing.
I've now switched to Grok 4.6, I was previously using Opus 4.8 but Grok is good enough now, and way cheaper which is the important part.
The $20 / month isn't as good as Codex or Claude. Codex reset twice this week while I'm sitting waiting for the entire month to role around with Cursor. I have all three so can have a pulse on everything.
I've never seen the appeal of cursor either, but then I'm a decades-long vim (now neovim) guy and don't use IDEs in general. But for me claude/codex TUIs are a great way to fit agents into my workflow.
My suspicion is that it's a way to break into more developer workflows for Grok, even if the market share is relatively small. I've never used grok and don't plan to at this point, but I have highly respected friends who say it is pretty damn good, and some of them even started using Cursor because of this pairing, so anecdatally at least it does seem to be working.
So they can play the game that the other big AI companies are playing, where they invest in one another to make each one look bigger on the books, even though it's all the same money, likely.
The data is special. Data of programmers using coding agents in the real world is invaluable for AI training. And their customer base is useful to deploy new models into.
They were not joking
Shame.
Why? The product isn't likely to change
But the people collecting the money have.
...and I won't be revisiting Cursor again.
Why not? The product isn't likely to change
Some people perhaps just don’t want to give money to literal Bond villains. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
…and the world kept spinning
Eeeewww. Grok. Off to look at Zed.
Zed's very handy, I find, and i'm not saying so because i'm driven to it by aversion to alternatives: it's just very useful.
Why not just use VS Code which cursor (and antigravity and the one Amazon is pushing) is a fork of? It will be much closer in functionality and has been loaded up with agent features nonstop for the last 18 months.
When I say "I use cursor" I mean the subscription. In reality I use the cli tui literally called "agent" and the cursor ide isn't installed at all.
...to the moon?
Think the aim is Mars.
Earlier this year they literally publicized changing their immediate goal from Mars to the Moon.
Perfect tool for rocket control systems and in general control and life support systems of Mars colonies.
Vibe codin' away the colonization of Mars
They may aim at Mars, but what they actually hit is the Moon. [0]
[0] https://edition.cnn.com/2026/08/04/science/spacex-rocket-moo...
It’s been enshittified to the Moon now
I swear I actually laughed out loud with this, is this a joke?
Companies buy other companies all the time, so I'm not sure why anyone is surprised.
If somebody missed that one news, one can easily get to the conclusion that SpaceX tried to manipulate index funds to buy their shares, and sold into an incredibly high valuation to keep the money. Not to reinvest it into the business.
No.