alt Hacker NewsSo 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.
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This valuation is absurd. Perhaps a year ago- sure, but there have been so many iterations of this “kind of editor” since then, not to mention countless alternatives.
So for me it’s more of a data deal - Elon buying himself some insight into codebases and real dev usage patterns? Oh finally someone to use his dirty data centres
Despite their impressive ARR, Cursor faces existential threat from not only BigLabs (Claude Code, Open AI Codex) but also BigTech (AWS Kiro, Google Antigravity, MS VSCode). I am sure the usual suspects would have lined up to purchase Cursor, and the deal from xAI was probably the best of the lot. Marks an end to a remarkable sprint for a 3yo company, and an admirable exit (considering the recent discombobulation of Windsurf's), just as investor money and/or hype is going belly up.
Paying $10B for the option is also crazy though. Paying $10B for the thing outright and not just an option would be absurdly high.