SpaceX To Acquire AI Coding Startup Cursor For $60 Billion (cnbc.com) 67
SpaceX has agreed to acquire Cursor for $60 billion in stock, adding the popular AI coding assistant to Elon Musk's newly public aerospace-and-AI conglomerate. CNBC reports: Cursor built a popular AI coding tool that helps software developers generate, edit and review code, and the company has experienced explosive growth since its founding in 2022. In November, Cursor said it crossed $1 billion in annualized revenue, according to a release at the time. Cursor was also ranked at No. 37 on the annual CNBC Disruptor 50 list in 2026.
[...] Musk merged SpaceX with his AI startup, xAI, earlier this year, and the Cursor deal looks set to help revitalize the company's efforts to compete with rivals like Anthropic and OpenAI, which also offer popular coding tools. SpaceX expects the merger to close during the third quarter of this year, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The transaction is subject to "requisite regulatory approvals," the filing said.
[...] Musk merged SpaceX with his AI startup, xAI, earlier this year, and the Cursor deal looks set to help revitalize the company's efforts to compete with rivals like Anthropic and OpenAI, which also offer popular coding tools. SpaceX expects the merger to close during the third quarter of this year, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The transaction is subject to "requisite regulatory approvals," the filing said.
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Too bad if you didn't get in on the IPO.
It hit trading markets at $150 per share. At least with something like Bitcoin, you could honestly say that at one point it was affordable to mere mortals who really did miss out on a chance at going from rags-to-riches. Tech IPOs are the realm of folks with insane amounts of extra money to gamble.
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That's $60 billion today (with SpaceX stock near $170) but how much/little will it be in 2 year's time? If I was Cursor, I'd be wanting a fair amount of cold, hard cash in that deal :-)
Re: With xAI and Cursor (Score:2)
Re: With xAI and Cursor (Score:1)
Do you think Musk read Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson?
AI Overview:
The AI in Red Mars: "Paul"Unlike standard science fiction tropes of sentient, rogue androids, the artificial intelligence in Red Mars is depicted with grounded, near-future realism.
The "Paul" System: The primary AI is a ubiquitous, advanced operating system named Paul, run on the colony's wrist-bound computers (vidphones) and lab networks. It is named after the physicist Wolfgang Pauli.
Functional Utility: Paul acts as a highly sophisticated
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Judging from the name of his drone ships, he's clearly read some of Iain Bank's Culture series. It features a futuristic interstellar socialist civilization run by benevolent AI's who just happen to be very deadly spaceships.
(I recommend Player of Games for an easy/fun read and Use of Weapons for deeper theme/characterization.)
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I think xAI is falling behind (does anyone using Cursor use xAI as a coding agent?).
Perhaps this is Musk's way of buying market-share for a product that's really failing to perform right now (xAI).
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Not only are they falling behind from a capability perspective, they're falling behind from a usage perspective too. There's a reason they're renting out their compute to their competition - because they're not using it and it costs a shitload of money to keep all that powered up.
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They monetize rocket launch tests today by tossing starlinks out the window. They will further monetize rocket launch tests by tossing AI datacenters out the window.
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Except no. They're planning to throw racks out, not datacenters. If they put a significant number of them up that might be a "datacentre" except spread out in a shell 40,000 km in circumference with a couple hundred kilowatts of solar panels, all of which gets incinerated every few years.
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There's no minimum size requirement for "datacenter". My Raspberry Pi is a datacenter if I say it is.
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Yup, you can go the absurdum route if you want.
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$60B *in stock* (Score:5, Funny)
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It probably will drop, but the trick of successfully shorting involves getting the timing right. Nobody would agree to a short that worked exactly the inverse of buying as in investment (where you'd buy your short position high and then have the freedom to wait as long as you'd like for the stock to dip low enough to your satisfaction). If shorts worked like that, most people would bet against IPOs, because historically the majority of them do drop within the first year.
It's easier to think of shorts as l
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Well, there are those inverse etfs that you could go long on, but I'm not sure how well their swings correlate to what they're trying to track
Re:$60B *in stock* (Score:5, Interesting)
Don't short stocks. Period. The loss potential is unlimited and you will get margin called if it keeps going up.
If you really want to short SPCX, buy puts on the options market. Your max loss is the cost of the put.
Also, if an inverse ETF gets created eventually, don't do that as the child thread suggests. Inverse ETFs have a specific purpose, same as the leveraged ETFs. They are intended for day trading and short term hedging. The ETFs have to settle positions daily so there there isn't a perfect correlation the the actual rise and fall of the underlying security.
Enjoy. I bought 10 lousy shares at trading started. I always kick myself for not being more aggressive, not much of a risk taker. That little trade is up 30% so far, still holding.
The SpaceX Valuation is Insane (Score:2)
Genius, alright... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The SpaceX Valuation is Insane (Score:4, Insightful)
It boggles the mind how much people are betting on the future just because Musk is a genius.
Not as much as it boggles the mind how people can still think Musk is a genius. Literally all of his wealth is based on their beliefs making them make stupid decisions which enrich him.
Re:The SpaceX Valuation is Insane (Score:4, Insightful)
Delivering "late" is not delivering at all.
For example -- "The Roadster 2 is going into manufacture *this year*" he said, several years ago.
For example -- "We will have humans on Mars by 2024" he said. Even if he eventually does deliver humans to Mars, he still broke that promise.
Saying you're going to do something by a certain date and then not doing so constitutes a broken promise -- even if you do it a decade later.
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I’m still waiting for my $39,999 cybertruck that was announced in 2019. Or fully self driving semi, or (fill in the blank)
Re:The SpaceX Valuation is Insane (Score:5, Insightful)
You sound like a simping cuck.
Anyone can miss deadlines. A lot of people do, sometimes very publicly.
This guy is the one of the few humans that seem to be completely above accountability, with an army of volunteers following him around explaining "what he really meant" or explaining why it's actually ok for him to repeatedly lie.
Please stop being in a one-way dependent relationship with such a terrible person. He will never acknowledge your existence, so he will never thank you for trying to clean up his mess no matter how hard you try.
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I have an aversion to people who act like a terrible person and do terrible things, yeah.
Remember: this is the richest man in the world, directly responsible for taking food and medicine away from the poorest people in the world so he could hang onto a few more bucks on his tax return. He is not worthy of the cult following.
Find a person deserving of the worship and apologies.
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So he didn't "put USAID in the wood chipper" to use his own words?
You do know that USAID would buy American farmer surplus, paying American farmers to farm, and then donate that food to starving people elsewhere?
Just how is "feeding USAID into the wood chipper" not taking away a customer from American farmers? How is that not taking food and medicine from the world's poorest people?
And how did he not do that?
Take your own advice. You have been, and are continuing to be lied to. And you are repeating thos
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Re:The SpaceX Valuation is Insane (Score:5, Funny)
Of course Musk is a genius... those who say otherwise are idiots.
After all, how else would I be enjoying my FSD Roadster 2 that charges from my solar roof-tiles before the drive through a Boring Company tunnel to the Hyperloop terminal where I'm whisked off to the SpaceX launch-pad in anticipation of a Starship flight to join some of the others who set up that initial Mars base back in 2024.
Those who say that Musk is a snake-oil merchant who doesn't deliver on his promises are just deniers who simply choose not to see the reality of the world as it is today.
Or I could be wrong :-)
Re:The SpaceX Valuation is Insane (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh look, a guy that can't actually refute what is being said, so he makes a move-the-goalpost false-equivalency argument equating accumulated wealth to intelligence.
People who think that accumulated wealth is a stand-in for intelligence measurement are people who don't have any money, nor intelligence.
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well if a dum dum like Musk can become a trillionaire, surely someone as smart as you will have no problems making say 10 trillion?
Sure, if we all have a daddy with an emerald mine and a bunch of clueless cucks to line up to suck our cocks we can ALL make 10 trillion!
Re:The SpaceX Valuation is Insane (Score:5, Insightful)
SpaceX is worth more than Microsoft or Amazon at this point. It boggles the mind how much people are betting on the future just because Musk is a genius. If he gets sick the stocks craters 80% easily and this $60B is more like $12B.
He's not a genius, I sincerely think he's average to slightly below average intelligence for a software dev. Just look how clueless he really is when he pretends to be a technical guru in front of actual experts [youtube.com].
That doesn't mean he doesn't have some exceptional skills, but IQ isn't one of them.
First, he's hard working, at least in spurts (during critical deadlines), and he's willing to make and implement big decisions quickly. Just look at DOGE, Republicans have been trying to lay waste to the US government for decades, but Musk is the only one to actually do it. It was a complete disaster, but it wasn't ethics or common sense that stopped the previous attempts, that's a legit talent for Musk.
Second, CEOs aren't allowed to lie, but Musk has figured out that you can get around that by building a cult of personality and then making ridiculously optimistic predictions and then sell minor advancements as progress. The result is he has a core group of retail investors that buy his stocks based on vibes and refuse to sell once in. Since these retail investors prevent the stock from going down too much institutional investors also jump in on the ride. It's basically tulip bulbs.
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In the real world he has teams of people whose job it to prevent him from making decisions at his companies.
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I still laugh at that.
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Not only the retail investors. Many experts were questioning his financials in the run up to that IPO, but not the SEC. The SEC more or less just bent over for him and do whatever he wants. Now millions of Americans will have their 401Ks hitched to that company. And he controls 80-85% percent of it, so there is no oversight. The investors better hope he's some kind of genius, but if he fuck ups, he will fuck up hard.
The SEC is suppose to guard against market manipulation. However, in this alleged administra
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You forgot third: He delivers results often enough to keep the believers believing. Tesla really is an electric car company that builds actual cars. SpaceX is actually flying rockets, and has achieved reusability, opening the door for dramatically cheaper space access.
Little of that is his own genius, but he does seem to have a knack for getting actually smart people working on visionary stuff.
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Just look at DOGE, Republicans have been trying to lay waste to the US government for decades, but Musk is the only one to actually do it. It was a complete disaster, but it wasn't ethics or common sense that stopped the previous attempts, that's a legit talent for Musk.
DOGE was a huge success.
For the stated goal of eliminating "fraud and waste" it was an abject failure.
For the actual goal of eliminating or neutering any government entity that might pull the reins on Musk's (or Orange Man's) activities it was a rousing success.
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For what? (Score:5, Interesting)
It's just a reskinned VSCode, 99% of users probably dont even use Cursor's model.
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Interesting, that explains a lot. Until now, I thought I might want to try Cursor, but I already have VS Code with Claude and GitHub Copilot, so why bother!
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Interesting, that explains a lot. Until now, I thought I might want to try Cursor, but I already have VS Code with Claude and GitHub Copilot, so why bother!
The integration is a little better in Cursor; the main difference being the in-line edit diffs. But I bounce back and forth between Claude Code and cursor, so I end up just using the git diff view to look at changes about 80% of the time, so it's not much better.
Honestly, my reason for using it is that I have separate Claude and Cursor token budgets -- though I set Cursor to use Claude so I'm using the same model both ways.
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If you install the official Claude Code add-in to VS Code, you get the inline diffs too.
Yeah, I use both GitHub Copilot and Claude Code for the same reason: to control token budgets.
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If you install the official Claude Code add-in to VS Code, you get the inline diffs too.
Yeah, I use both GitHub Copilot and Claude Code for the same reason: to control token budgets.
I also use the Claude Code extension with VS Code. The inline diffs it provides are quite clumsy compared to Cursor's.
Re: For what? (Score:2)
I much prefer it to using CoPilot in VSCode, which is pretty much useless (I can only access the one file that's open in your editor, or the extra file(s) you give me one just one query and then you have to add them all again to all a follow up question -- such bollox).
Re: For what? (Score:2)
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Where I work, I get a Cursor license (which gets used a fair bit). I'm not sure that'll continue for long after the sale, but we'll see (not sure how, erm, 'sensitive' they are ;-).
FWIW, it's actually quite good. It generally does some pretty decent stuff when I point it at some god awful mess and ask it to explain or tidy up. It's also quite good if you say "this code works with system1, make it also work with system2", it figures out permissions and other details quite well (at least as well as I probably
When OpenAI offered to buy Windsurf IDE (Score:3)
Back in early 2025, Elon Musk laughed that OpenAI was paying $3 billion for Windsurf and mused that they can't even build an IDE themselves. .. but I recall someone else had said that and he re-tweeted it with a crying with laughter smiley.
I can't find the tweet easily to link here
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Yeah but when was the last time you heard a story about Windsurf?
60 Billion (Score:2)
Panic buying (Score:2)