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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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”.

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.

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

A sobering thought.

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.

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

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_

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

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.

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

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

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

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!

https://xcancel.com/trq212/status/2046713419978453374

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.

Never bet against Elon.

Elon is determined to take down Altman

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

Is this to force cursor to use xAI

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.)

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.

At 50 employees, that is $1.2B an employee

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

Makes sense. Cursor is extremely overhyped as well.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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?

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

cursor was interesting about a year ago

anyone still using cursor?

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

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"

wat

wat

Wait... dude just use openclaw.

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

But dear... just use openclaw.

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.

Time to switch

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.

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

A text editor?

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

Dude, cursor's not even worth a billion.

immediately unsubscribed from Cursor. Hello OpenCode!

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.

these valuations are total madness

Another one bites the dust.

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

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

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.