alt Hacker NewsSpaceX to buy Cursor for $60B
Comments
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...
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.
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.
>> 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?"
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).
When FB bought Instagram for $1B it seemed crazy too.
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?
$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.
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.
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.
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.
$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?
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`.
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.
In related news, I'm open to suggestions for coding agent harnesses.
I wonder why IDEA didn't catch up with its own agent support and even their own models. It's not like agent harness is that hard to build, right? Or maybe they did, it's just that they haven't won the hearts and minds of the developers like Cursor did?
Does anyone here think Cursor is overvalued? It's just packaging up what already exists, it has no moat or IP.
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...
Are people still using Cursor? I haven't in at least a year but perhaps I'm in the minority.
What are the alternatives to Graphite these days? Github's stacked PR support is still immature, AFAIK. I would love to see Linear move into this space and start offering both git hosting and stacked PR management.
For what it's worth, this was effectively announced months ago, and at this valuation.
That's a lot of money for a buggy product that is at best slightly better than its competitors.
I run Claude Code in cmux with Soonpatch and that's it. I tried looking at Cursor but honestly it wasn't providing any value and I prefer being 100% up to date with CC updates/interface
90% of my dev workflows have moved to Devin cloud agents.
I don’t miss the days of fumbling around with my local repos across my multiple agent work trees or clones.
I just throw a task at Devin and I get a PR a few moments later.
Then it monitors the PR for any failing CI or review comments without me in the loop.
Now I can have 10+ Devin’s running at any given moment as I walk home from the coffee shop.
I really dont get the point of cursor, I always find it subpar product too, but damn they are all got acquired congrats
Not bad for a VS Code fork and a Chinese LLM fine tune.
I had high hopes in Antigravity and Gemini, but they royally screwed up everything to such a level that the only worth plan is to use free plan for creating docs.
paying 60bn for a dev team that wrapped vs is insane.
Well, when your stock is massively overpriced it's a smart time to buy stuff with it.
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.
Who is this Cursor person you speak of?
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47855293
Initial announcement back in April
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.
Interesting that they disclose this right after IPO.
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.
Not sure how this closes the gap to Anthropic and OpenAI for xAI. Is there a play that I am overlooking?
If this acquisition goes through the only winner here is Cursor, especially since CC and Codex are chipping away at Cursor very hard!
Everybody remember when Zuckerberg told in an Interview in 2024 that human data does not matter that much or more specifically "individual creators or publishers tend to overestimate the value of their specific content". Something along the line RL-Loops are more important.
Hard to square this with that acquisition which seems to be focused on Cursors vast amount of User Data.
At least for now.
What does cursor have? An ide and coding orchestration? They are using Claude or codex for llms, so they get acquired for their user base and tooling? Feels like a lot of money for that given Claude has the majority mindshare.
Glad I've jumped ship to Zed+ACP. I liked the idea of the new agent window view, but it's obviously slop and hasn't had a any polish or care put behind it given the number of bugs I keep seeing.
Zed is so much more stable and sleek and the agent view (threads) actually integrates nicely in a real editor. The side editor in the agent window was so much worse than the vscode base I expected, I have no idea how they dropped the ball so hard here.
Good hopefully Grok Build gets better and they start to innovate in this area. Claude Code and ChatGPT need more competition. So that they also innovate more.
Will cursor launch a CLI tool like Claude/codex/opencode/pi ?
ai is like the first technology with a conversational service manual inside it..
you should be foaming at the mouth to use claude or codex to make a custom harness, just for your own personal use with local models...
Anyone recommend an alternatives? For no particular reason I’m canceling my cursor subscription today.
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.