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.
60B in all stock. So basically “free” assuming cursor leadership believes Elons feverdreams.
I wonder how long until Elon makes everyone believe he founded Cursor.
It seems like a data/roadmap acquisition. Reports have been that Cursor's footprint was still growing rapidly, and their composer model wasn't bad.
Take that data / training recipe and scale it up with compute to see what happens?
Its 60B for a huge amount of RL coding data to become competitive in the space.
> to become competitive in the space.
In the rocket ship space?
That would make more sense to me.
Using grok at work and gpt at home, it's not better. Must be Elon fanboys and bots. It's what Elon does best. Subpar products with guerilla marketing campaigns.
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 is betting that the world will be compute/energy constrained by 2030 and that orbital datacenters will become cost-effective for inference. If they are right about that, they will be the largest company in the solar system. If they are wrong, they will still be one of the largest telecom companies.
To me this is a classic case of low-downside, very-high-upside.
I hope you’re not in the business of investing other people’s money
SpaceX has a monopoly on The Universe. Therefore the TAM for selling tokens to all possible alien species is what justifies the valuation.
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.