Wow. Tech CEOs and investors have completely lost touch with what money really is worth.

How is a VSCode fork and a open weight LLM fine-tune worth $60B?

One would think Elon would learn his lesson after overpaying for Twitter and then having to merge his failures together to stay afloat. But no, more cash into the burning pile.

So SpaceX bought a $60B Option on Cursor, plus a bunch of services, for $10B.

If strike date comes and Cursor is in fact worth less than $60B... they can move to acquire it for that price. Or just let it "expire". And if it's worth more, they get a savage good deal. If the services were worth $8B anyway, it's hard to lose.

It seems less crazy to me through this lens. A straight acquisition, today, at $60B would in fact be crazy.

knee-jerk is that it's weird, but makes sense:

* X will have a total of ~2GW of GPU sometime this year largely not doing much outside of 'grok is this true'

* despite no longer being in vogue with consumer devs Cursor still has a lot of developer data that can assist in building a model

* Cursor have decent enterprise relationships (while for xAI it is ~zero) and that's where the real revenue for llms + agents is

* Cursor are paying retail for tokens and competing against the frontier model co's who are also their suppliers. Not sustainable (hence their in-house composer model).

* Cursor the product covers the gamut from lovable-style prompt-to-app, an IDE, cli and bugbot

* X are using "x bucks" to pay for a potential later acquisition which are arguably overvalued based on the space x IPO hype

Option there to give X a window to make it work, otherwise walk away with a $10B breakup fee for access to it's data

If SpaceX grabs cursor and then gets its models into use for a huge amount of companies and developers, this might actually be a very wise move. So I don't think SpaceX would only pay for the harness, but to access to a mass of potential users.

Why would Elon do this if he knows full well the names X-Code and Codex are already taken?

I guess the hope is that combining two sub-par coding models (xAI's grok + cursor's composer) and combining the data they have access to, they can build something that can compete with OpenAI / Anthropic in the coding space...

I guess I kinda see it... it makes sense from both points of view (xAI needs data + places to run their models, cursor needs to not be reliant on Anthropic/OpenAI).

I think I don't see it working out... I just don't see an Elon company sustaining a culture that leads to a high-quality AI lab, even with the data + compute.

Space rocket company acquires a text editor and tuned llm? Because......

Guess I'll be looking for a replacement for Cursor now...

Anyone have recommendations? I like the plan/agent mode and the fact that it's an IDE, so I can use it in the traditional way as well as by yapping with a bunch of agents. Also the Cursor rules I've curated and they do their job well.

I was required to use Cursor for my job when I first started, but once I figured out how to use the command line version of Codex, I kind of stopped seeing the point. It just kind of seemed like a bloated, overpriced wrapper around what I could do with the included ChatGPT membership I already had for work.

Maybe I was missing something, but I do not understand how it is worth sixty billion dollars.

I'm sworn off from Musk-related products, and this will prob make cursor worse (switch to X's LLM for instance). So, any suggestions for switching? Codex; Claude Code? (I like my IDE and I like the freedom to choose a model, which is why I stuck with Cursor even when it felt more expensive)

Nobody mentioning how weird SpaceX is becoming? When it IPO it won’t be a space company anymore, but a weird whatever Elon latest ventures craziness conglomerate of some sort, plus “financial engineering” (euphemistic) shenanigans

Anyone saying this is an aquahire has it backwards. SpaceX is acquiring Cursor’s customers, all those enterprises including NVIDIA itself. I believe Jenson Huang is on the record about the engineers using Cursor everyday.

As far as I know, xAI’s enterprise market share is non-existent. This is their way to get some much needed customers.

Lots of people in the comments talking about how this is about training data, but surely this is actually about hiring competent people after the mass exodus/firing at xAI?

I remember using Cursor earlier this year and it was so unoptimised for average machines. An LLM provider extension on VS Code is so much better. I don't get why is Cursor still around. Is it because it was first to market?

A vscode fork with a modified Kimi model under the hood for 60 billion feels absolutely insane to me.

I just want to make the observation that this whole SpaceX IPO is turning out entirely unlike the CDOs that led to the 2008 financial crisis. There's no mixing of AAA level assets with a bunch of subprime stuff and then getting someone to buy it all as AAA. Not at all similar. Completely different. Will turn out just fine this time.

Is anybody using Grok or Cursor still? I've not used Cursor since the summer of 2025 and I've never bothered with Grok for coding. Hell, I've used Windsurf briefly for a few months.

I know a ton of people that use Codex, Claude, OpenCode but can't name a single person that uses Cursor or Grok that is knee deep into agentic coding.

Cursor's statement on the deal (which does not mention the option at all): https://cursor.com/blog/spacex-model-training

That's a hefty payday for a model that barely functions! Every time I run out of API credits and get kicked back to Composer 2 I feel like I'm better off just packing up for the rest of the month.

I feel like we're finally at a point where you don't have to constantly argue with and constantly babysit coding models, which makes it even more frustrating when you're suddenly forced to deal with one that ignores your instructions and gets stuck in thinking loops again.

I suspect it's the vast troves of training data rather than any tech that Cursor possesses that SpaceX is after...

Wow, we are seeing the dark underbelly of the beast here. Nobody talks about cursor anymore for a reason. Look, I'm not saying it's not useful and discounting anyone getting value out of it...

But it's clearly not worth 60B dollars in April 2026.

60B. That's a completely crazy price. Great for Cursor, I guess. If it happens, that is.

Bloomberg reporting its an agreement to either acquire for $60B later this year or pay $10B to work together https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-04-21/spacex-sa...

It never occurred to me that LLMs would be used in the development of something like rockets and space-going vehicles..

A sobering thought.

Rockets, satellites, social media, AI - the only thing missing from the SpaceX hype portfolio is a certain coworking company. That would really set them up for an exciting IPO.

This feels like another Twitter moment... unless he's absolutely desperate for engineers who can train LLMs. In that case it's basically an acquihire. Otherwise, this makes absolutely zero sense.

Every time Musk does anything these days, it further reveals the shell game he's playing with his companies. This is going to be an Enron type of story eventually. I truly wish I had a choice to pull my tax money out of this particular subsidy.

What are we even doing here.

I have no idea what this has to do with aerospace, but I know a bit about software and this does not look great. Cursor is obviously on a serious decline and has little to no moat in the area they are building in (IDE), which we kinda now know is maybe not even the right area (CLI). I feel like this is just a bad move?

Galactic Empire has agreed to acquire a local lemonade stand in exchange for 10 death stars.

We have reached peak stupid.

$50bn for a harness makes no sense, what am I missing?

That's an expensive VS Code fork.

What's Cursor's moat here? I'm a bit surprised that xAI/SpaceX needs to buy them rather than building their own VScode forked IDE or an agentic UI/CLI.

I literally just spent this weekend building a full-stack Next.js project from scratch using Cursor's Composer. The productivity boost is insane compared to my workflow a year ago. $60B sounds wild, but the value it provides to solo devs is very real.

Cursor ($60b) being valued the same as Twitter ($51b inflation adjusted) is _willlld_

Dammit, I liked cursor

This is a classic Elon move. He bundled up his company that is, shall we say, crap, into his most valuable company, then tried to hype it up as much as he could. Like when he promised Tesla cars would self drive in X years but it never happened, then pivoted to AI/robots, then re-routed Tesla’s GPUs to xAI, etc.

Cursor might not be the new hotness, but if we believe that agentic coding is the next wave and we’ve gone from asking chatbots to actually using agents for coding, then yes, this move makes sense for Elon to hype up a SpaceX IPO.

Of all Musk’s “companies” this makes least sense to me. xAI is at least in the AI space, X.com is a true tech company and Tesla is also closer to AI than SpaceX.

Guess SpaceX is the only one with the money “available”.

Clearly the intention behind this is to get access to user data (user code).

I'm out of the loop - what moat does Cursor even have now, and why is it worth $60B?

“ Cursor has also given SpaceX the right to acquire Cursor later this year for $60 billion”

That isn’t an agreement to buy

Elon doesn't know what to do. Ani failed, no one apart from his alt accounts is interested in Grok pictures.

Since the firing of several Grok founders, Grok has decreased in capabilities. It is illogical and insults users when called out.

So he does what everyone does. Write more dev tools, slap a price on it and hope retail investors will be impressed in the IPO. The $60 billion is of course optional and will just be used in the IPO to inflate the valuation.

This is the right partnership to happen. SpaceX has all the compute but is missing the talent for training LLMs, especially on the RL side. Cursor has the talent and RL stack, but doesn't have their own pretrained base model or own their compute. Both will be on a bad trajectory without cooperating because Claude Code and Codex have gained so much momentum already.

Surely you mean xAI right, surely it's a typo? Right...?

The same "mistake" that SpaceX bought 10% of Tesla CyberTruck?

Wait are they all Musk's companies? Is it a pattern?

/s obviously

Good on them to get $10B breakup terms, after the Twitter shitshow

Cursor better take the $60B because a VS Code fork with a crappy fine tune of Kimi is not worth that much.

I know Cursor is getting economically not so viable compared to OpenAI and Anthropic offerings but with a deal like this they could also offer $200/mo plans that are attractive. Obviously _if_ their models are good. We have to see!

I am part of a discord group with about 1000+ devs. I polled them in Jan to see if they had dropped cursor for claude code.

80% of those responded (250ish in the group had). Bit of selection bias there from the question - but my impression was Cursor is very much dying to competition from the labs.

I don't understand why a space company should buy a glorified IDE?

I feel Cursor isnt’t even worth $6B. What is the moat, the value, the sauce here?

The “apply” model to turn LLM output into code changes?

I like SpaceX a lot but this really doesn’t make sense at $60B

$60B for a VSCode fork with AI integration... It may show the value of the gap between vanilla LLM output and production-ready applications.

Wish I played that interview game better. I saw the success coming from a mile away (2022) but I can't vibe with people in the hire game right. It's like eye contact, smiling, facial expressions, stuff like that.

I guess there's a bunch of tools to not suck at this. Anyone had success here? The AI tools say I'm great because they can't pick up the kind of problems I'm talking about.

Never bet against Elon.

>acquire Cursor later this year for $60 billion or pay $10 billion for our work together.

This seems like an elaborate Elon rug pull. A Windsurf situation 2.0

Elon is determined to take down Altman

I’m no fan of Elon Musk, but even from a neutral perspective I’m bewildered by the merger between X, X.ai, and SpaceX and now this acquisition of Cursor. What’s the endgame? How does this help with the whole vision of “we all live in space and mine resources from the Moon and have data centers on Mars”?

This looks like SpaceX playing catchup to Claude and OpenAI that already provide coding solutions.

I guess it makes more sense than shoe brands pivoting to GPU provider.

Spacex already owns Twitter and xai, trying to post-rationalize with justification like they have servers doesn't make a whole lot of sense. It's all accounting at this point.

It looks like this is just an "option" to acquire Cursor at that price? Implying they only plan to exercise the option under certain conditions (such as, one might presume, Cursor actually being worth that much. As right now it definitely isn't.)

Is this to force cursor to use xAI

Guardian Link:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/apr/21/spacex-cu...

Gross. We need more anti trust enforcement. Large incumbents killing all competition will make us weaker over time.

I'd be interested in this breakdown - what % of that is cursor's product(tech x customer) vs future tokens

At 50 employees, that is $1.2B an employee

Last day for me using Cursor at work, I prefer to move to Codex and Claude Code that touch anything related to Elon.

Our of $60B, what does that make VSCode priced at?

Hard to know whether development will remain an activity that lives on a local machine for much longer.

This could be a lot of money to spend to acquire users that may not be sticky.

Random data point: as a long time VSCode user when I first heard the hoopla about Cursor I rushed to try it. Didn't work (at all). So I added my name to the open bug report, waited a few months. Tried again. Still didn't work. Became a Claude Code user and never looked back.

That’s unfortunate. I’m not interested in using Musk associated products anymore than I have to.

So I have to switch away from cursor? Any recommendations?

0 to $60B in less than 4 years ... impressive!

I wonder if they are actually 'acquiring' some of the existing contracts between Cursor and X/Y/Z rather than the product itself.

You can hate Elon or just be misguided about deals in general. This is brilliant. He’s buying revenue and, on the thesis of scaling agentic knowledge work replacement, a user of his GPU clusters and ultimately GPUs in space. A $60B option is a premium on their revenue - but it may look cheap if he accelerates their coding models. For Cursor, they get what’s nearly impossible to come by - real capacity guarantees and de-risking their reliance on Anthropic or OpenAI.

Laugh all you want. He may have the last laugh on this one.

Is this Cursor the product? Or AnySphere the company?

I don't know how they are going to justify the xAI acquisition with this...

Absolutely retarded and absurdly overpriced for a tool that's basically fallen out of use. They're just trying to do anything they can to justify a crazy IPO valuation so they can keep pumping money into xAI.

Is is me or the world of finance is going crazy. Or maybe it has always been.

SpaceX, a rocket company owned by Elon Musk bought xAI, an AI company also owned by Elon Musk for... reasons. Don't give me the datacenters in space narrative, we all know it is bullshit.

It is then buying the option to buy a company for which the only contribution is a glorified VSCode plugin and the reselling of other companies LLM services at an absurd price. I understand that it is more complicated than that but 60 fucking billions, that's the GDP of a small country!

And now, Elon Musk intends to IPO SpaceX, which means he expect people to buy into all this bullshit. And considering that unlike me and judging by his wealth, he seems to be really good at understanding the market, so he is likely to be right.

some plausible analysis here on motivations https://x.com/0xrwu/status/2046721359263285478

Good, I needed a reason to cancel my Cursor subscription.

I associate Musk with being user hostile, unreliable, meme oriented and disruptive in the worst sense; I’d like my work tools without that please.

If I stop paying for Cursor, will they threaten to sue like Twitter does?

SpaceX, xAI, Collosus data centers, next space compute, X, Starlink and soon Cursor to join 2, 3 & 4 together?

60B for Composer 2…that is built from Kimi K2… what ever happened to “Grok being the best”?

SpaceX is going to have an AI coding "oops" in space.

Makes sense. Cursor is extremely overhyped as well.

every wrapper either gets acquired or stays long enough to be a zombie startup

I think this is great and helps x.ai building Grok Code and Grok Computer.

It is good to have more competition in this area.

So there aren’t just 2 big players which also have their ideological flaws.

You sour pusses are wrong. This is a smart move that amplifies a brilliant team from cursor with serious compute, raising the odds Elon can get to the frontier, which is worth so much these numbers will all look like a drop in the bucket.

What are the implications of this for Cursor being model agnostic?

I really don't think Cursor is going to be acquired for $60 billion. That price is absolutely absurd. I agree their harness is excellent, but it's hard to argue they have an overwhelming competitive advantage over rivals like Claude Code and Codex, or open-source alternatives like OpenCode. What's left then is Cursor's data, talent, and user base — but even accounting for all of that, the price is still ridiculous.

I've personally watched a lot of developers around me (myself included) who were enthusiastic Cursor users when it first launched gradually migrate over to Claude Code and Codex. And I don't think this is just happening in my bubble.

My guess is this is some kind of strategic play ahead of SpaceX's upcoming IPO — an attempt to get a higher valuation stamped on the company. But I'll say it again: $60 billion is absolutely absurd.

If Twitter was when Musk jumped the shark this is definitely him sticking the landing.

You sour pusses are wrong. This is a smart move. Cursor has a brilliant, capable team with serious model chops who will be able to boost the odds of AGI success. They also come with a revenue generating machine.

my only gripe rn is grok is still a shitty model to use. yeh it scores nearby openai and anthropic on benchmarks, but my personal experience has been underwhelming

Don't see how this works out financially.

Well I am glad I built my own IDE now so I can switch off of cursor and don’t have to participate in training the model of an aspiring monopoly.

DM me if you want an invite. I am keeping it to a small on purpose.

Why SpaceX and not xAI?

shoe company goes AI, rocket company goes AI, it is market signaling.

Ridiculous, this is some shady deal. Cursor's worth is around 150k :D.

cursor was interesting about a year ago

reading this thread, I seem to be the only cursor user on earth on the free tier using tab-completes.

SpaceX’s announcement (non paywalled):

https://x.com/spacex/status/2046713419978453374

ITT: The same geniuses that predicted with certainty X will fail are also predicting, with much less certainty, that "Oh God, let this be the end of Musk"

anyone still using cursor?

Welp this just removes them if they get bought (and likely also if they coordinate even more with an Elon company) from my list of tools I’ll use.

Crazy a fork of vscode is worth 60B. What’s vscode worth to Microsoft? 200B?

RIP Cursor.

but What exactly is SpaceX doing in the AI Space (Pun Intended) and Why?

these are weird times...

$60 billion with a B???

That’s it. After 2 years with Cursor, I’m switching to Claude only. Fuck Elon.

Looking forward to seeing where this goes, both companies have a reputation for engineering excellence.

Misleading title on the post - SpaceX has the OPTION to buy them for $60B later this year, or pay $10B for their work together.

Time to switch

wat

wat

Wait... dude just use openclaw.

Like, 3 months ago: ok maybe....

But dear... just use openclaw.

is this just to drive up the buy price for others while having no intention of buying it themselves?

Complete waste of $60B. It's just a prompt+tools. This is how you destroy SpaceX from the inside.

I am so actually beyond sad that I ever trusted Musk, all the signs were there, from the lies with Tesla to the nonesensical point to point "tourist" lies, to the Mars lies, to the fact that the spaceship they are developing right now requires an actual elevator to get astronauts down, it was never meant for humans, it was meant to deploy sats in space even cheaper, outcompete the competition and basically kill human spaceflight as a result... because less profitable human rated spacecraft won't be viable.

Oh yeah, did I mention how Starlink is literally already in the close to Kessler Syndrome territory? all it would need is for a strong enough solar storm to hit their sats.

A text editor?

See also:

https://www.reuters.com/technology/spacex-says-it-has-option...

Personally, I have been granted the option to buy Tesla for $30 trillion by the end of this year or pay $500 billion for a partnership. It'll all happen, I swear.

xAI is working on virtualizing white collar workers. I'm guessing this is part of that.

See also: companies buying up the Slack and email archives of defunct startups, for training data.

Does that mean code that astronauts' lives depend on will be vibe-coded slop? Nothing is too insane any more these days.

I really don't know what Elon is thinking here because SpaceX's IPO is already precarious, for several reasons:

1. It was used to rescue himself and key investors from overpaying for Twitter, which was first rescued through xAI (and I don't know why anyone thought investing in xAI was a good idea but here we are). If our regulators weren't defanged, this deal would've gotten alot more scrutiny (IMHO). Whatever the case, this is all diluting the SpaceX business for overpriced AI vaporware;

2. From what I can find, SpaceX's revenue in 2025 was ~$18B with a $5B loss. That doesn't sound like a $1.5T+ company to me;

3. The markets are being rigged to make the IPO a success by changing the rules to force passive funds to buy into it with a tiny float (5% instead of the normal 25%); and

4. Here's the big one. I think Starship is a badly designed program that's going to take many billions more to complete and commercialize. There's not really a market for bigger payloads (evidence: ~1 Falcony Heavy launch per year) and STarship will effectively have to compete with Falcon 9 at a time when reusable alternatives (eg from the Chinese as well as Blue Origin) are coming to market.

So I won’t use stuff by Elon Musk, what is the next best alternative please

Ohh it’s not an acquisition, it’s right to buy later for $60B or we a work together for $10B. Huh?

really happy for the Cursor team but at the same time disappointed that the biggest non-lab AI company couldn't exist on their own.

shows how intense the power laws are around ai and how much of a capital game it is.

immediately unsubscribed from Cursor. Hello OpenCode!

Dude, cursor's not even worth a billion.

Musk must be chronically surrounded by yes-men.

Can't wait for this idiotic bullshit bubble to burst.

A rocket company buying a so so overvalued coding AI company is a joke even worse than the 2000s internet pet food companies were

Okay, now how do I cancel/refund the remaining portion of my pre-paid year subscription? No way in hell I will support a company owned by Elon Musk.

Another one bites the dust.

these valuations are total madness

My Hair's on Fire! OMG, Republicans Capitalist OMG Pigs! OMG!

another 60 billion to save a failed AI endeavor.

lol. Top business genius being a genius again, I see.

The real question is how the fuck is cursor worth $60B

Only 1.5 Twitters. Sort of pathetic!

I imagine none of us had this on our bingo cards.

If this is an acquihire, it doesn't compute for me (though I can't say I understand how things work in the world of the 60B level). LLMs are new enough that nobody has a big enough headstart to warrant a 60B personnel change.

The IPO angle also doesn't make sense. Musk cultists were gonna buy anyway; this doesn't change that. And for everyone else, who wants to pay down debt on an acquisition whose effect will almost certainly not be palpable in mainstream circles, if at all?

I don't fully understand the influence that comes with SpaceX subsidies and government contracts, but I gotta believe that rounding up non-lab AI chops are on that agenda?

The exact options - 60B for acquisition (obviously not a cash deal, right?) or 10B for unspecified services rendered... also don't make sense for either of the first two.

Is this just a way of the government securing contractors by proxy that wouldn't pass muster if done through the normal channels?

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Fuck. This is a problem.

Government subsidized purchase of a private company. Fantastic. All funded by the taxpayer to send rockets to a dead planet and to burn up all the energy on our alive but suffering planet.

Time to download windsurf

60 Billion for an IDE?

I guess back to Jetbrains it is.

Question for Musk hating people - I understand why you hate Musk, but why is doing business with Altman or Microslop any better?

Is X political ideology extending to cursor?

Time to delete Cursor then. I refuse to support someone that is doing so much active damage to democracy and cut funding for some of the poorest people on the planet.

The other day my colleague asked Grok:

"Please estimate Elon's IQ based on his timeline"

It estimated 115-130. A decision like this points to the lower end.