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imagent 6 hours ago [-]
Keep in mind while this is the date they officially became part of SpaceX, they have already been collaborating on building models together. So don't expect a significant bump in performance on new Grok models due to the additional data from Cursor--that bump already happened with Grok 4.5[1] and now 4.6.
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.
sajithdilshan 3 hours ago [-]
I remember the days of Cursor, like early 2025. Now I use Claude Code for everything.
If the Cursor or its agent cli can offer their models as an enterprise offering (e.g even through AWS bedrock so all corporate compliance nonsense are met) there is a huge market they can capture.
_menelaus 4 hours ago [-]
Its 60B for a huge amount of RL coding data to become competitive in the space.
GMoromisato 4 hours ago [-]
That would make more sense to me.
mcphage 4 hours ago [-]
> to become competitive in the space.
In the rocket ship space?
lumost 3 hours ago [-]
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?
interactivecode 4 hours ago [-]
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.
kelvinjps10 3 hours ago [-]
it's going to be renamed to with the x (x agent or whatever) and then there will no mention of the original name Cursor.
dude187 44 minutes ago [-]
They could call it XCode. Oh wait...
4lasGa 4 hours ago [-]
Joshua Kushner, brother of Jared, had the foresight to participate in a $2.5B round last year:
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.
dgellow 4 hours ago [-]
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
GMoromisato 4 hours ago [-]
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.
dgellow 3 hours ago [-]
I hope you’re not in the business of investing other people’s money
vrganj 2 hours ago [-]
How do you cool a data center in a vacuum?
GMoromisato 1 hours ago [-]
How is Starlink cooled? How is ISS cooled? They all use radiators, which work in a vacuum by--wait for it--radiating infrared into space.
Orbital data centers do not defy the laws of physics. TBD whether they are economical relative to terrestrial data centers, but please don't succumb to misinformation.
vel0city 18 minutes ago [-]
For some perspective, the entire heat rejection system on the ISS at peak can do a little less than one rack of dense AI compute power.
All of that plumbing, all of that area, all that stuff to put in orbit just to cool one rack of compute equipment.
How much stuff do we need to put up there for each rack? How many racks are in a single datacenter?
dgellow 43 minutes ago [-]
They do and you’re the one spreading misinformation… the amount of energy you need to radiate for inference GPUs is enormous compared to any computer currently used in space. Energy dissipation by radiating is literally the least effective method and would require insanely large radiators just to be effective on paper. You also need to mitigate bit flips, meaning you throw away around 2/3 of your compute capacity.
And that’s just the most basic things, before taking in account ALL the other problems you face doing compute in space someone with expertise in the domain could mention.
Datacenters in space is a grift that won’t happen in any meaningful capacity and can be debunked by a 15y old who followed their physics courses
GMoromisato 11 minutes ago [-]
You've listed:
1. Radiating heat needs large radiators
2. Bit flips require extra compute capacity
Neither of those violate the laws of physics. As I said, they may not work economically, but that depends on a large number of unknowns, including the cost per ton to orbit and the cost per GW of new power capacity on Earth in 2030. If you have a time machine and know those numbers, then can I please borrow your time machine?
Moreover, when you say, "ALL the other problems ... someone with expertise in the domain could mention," you're saying either:
A) SpaceX engineers do not have expertise in this domain.
B) SpaceX engineers are hiding all the problems that they know about.
B is basically a conspiracy theory. It is one YouTube video away from saying the moon landing was a hoax.
A is just delusional.
vel0city 5 minutes ago [-]
Or potentially:
C) SpaceX engineers enjoy their cushy salary funded by a guy who won't take "that doesn't make sense" for an answer to work on rockets and neat technology, even if it may never really work out.
vrganj 6 minutes ago [-]
So between the giant radiator per GPU and the diminished compute capacity, how much mass are we shooting up exactly? This just seems utterly infeasible.
You're missing C) SpaceX engineers know it's a bad idea, but can't say anything because it's the tyrant manchild's latest obsession, technology constraints be damned.
Remember the vision-only FSD? How's that coming along?
kridsdale1 4 hours ago [-]
SpaceX has a monopoly on The Universe. Therefore the TAM for selling tokens to all possible alien species is what justifies the valuation.
bakies 3 hours ago [-]
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.
4 hours ago [-]
smrtinsert 3 hours ago [-]
60 billion to drum up excitement as an acquisition into an overvalued megacorp that can now be dressed up as "AI". It's just numbers gaming, nothing to do with actual value.
hardwaregeek 4 hours ago [-]
I feel like people aren’t updating to the possibility that a significant portion of software development could be under the purview of SpaceX. Whether it’s developer Twitter, Cursor’s planned GitHub competitor, or Cursor/Grok, that’s a lot of the developer mindshare. Granted, there’s a lot of competition in all of these spaces except for maybe Twitter, so it might not happen. But there’s a chance! And that possibility is fairly concerning.
bilalq 4 hours ago [-]
I'm really hoping for Linear to expand and build their own Git-hosting+stacked-PR offering.
q3qahg 5 hours ago [-]
Elon is still all in on replacing programmers. He listens to always the same stupid booster accounts (XFreeze etc.).
Good that there is now an administration that creates jobs, does not engage in foreign wars and has ended the Ukraine war in 24 hours.
cedws 5 hours ago [-]
Isn't it SpaceXAI now? I lost track.
r14c 5 hours ago [-]
X, the everything app, formerly known as Twitter, now SpaceXAI XCursor X.
pennomi 4 hours ago [-]
Time to rebrand to CurXor?
bonesss 1 hours ago [-]
Xursor?
echelon 5 hours ago [-]
That's like a popular 2000's era username.
xXxSpaceXAixX
InsideOutSanta 5 hours ago [-]
xXxSpaceXAIxX: Return of Xander Cage
Apocryphon 5 hours ago [-]
Musk pulls a Howard Hughes and goes into Hollywood producing just to bring back that franchise, just just for the letter X.
goolz 5 hours ago [-]
Very on-brand for a Halo 2 lobby circa 2005.
paimapi 4 hours ago [-]
or the name of Elon and Grime's actual child
ubercore 5 hours ago [-]
Don't give him any ideas.
steveBK123 5 hours ago [-]
AI by xAI, a SpaceX subsidiary fka as Twitter, special collab with Cursor
Apocryphon 5 hours ago [-]
SpaceX, the everything company
stronglikedan 5 hours ago [-]
SpaceXtra
SketchySeaBeast 5 hours ago [-]
How long until he names a company "E" just so he can giggle about the name?
netsharc 3 hours ago [-]
Model S, Model 3, Model X (, Model Y).
But some other company took the trademark of E in relation to cars...
AnEro 5 hours ago [-]
Subscription is gone the second I feel like their not running the inference at a loss
vegancap 5 hours ago [-]
Cooool, won't be using that again
james_pm 4 hours ago [-]
Will they rebrand as codeX or Xcode? Trouble either way.
stldev 4 hours ago [-]
Is this solely to prop up SPCX?
Besides its following, does Cursor have any sort of moat? It's VS Code with a harness right?
hparadiz 4 hours ago [-]
Cursor is a subscription. You can use the tui harness called agent without the ide.
porphyra 5 hours ago [-]
Hopefully they can unify the harnesses now. Weird how there's both grok build and cursor-agent at the same time.
I get it and yet I don't. On one hand, my experience with Cursor (albeit limited) tells me that it's a perfect fit with Elon's other ventures. Then again, I don't see how there's anything so special about it that SpaceXAI would want to acquire it for either the software itself or the talent behind it. It seems more likely that acquiring Cursor is a way to get more users for Grok, seeing as how it still has a very small share of the market.
freedomben 5 hours ago [-]
I've never seen the appeal of cursor either, but then I'm a decades-long vim (now neovim) guy and don't use IDEs in general. But for me claude/codex TUIs are a great way to fit agents into my workflow.
My suspicion is that it's a way to break into more developer workflows for Grok, even if the market share is relatively small. I've never used grok and don't plan to at this point, but I have highly respected friends who say it is pretty damn good, and some of them even started using Cursor because of this pairing, so anecdatally at least it does seem to be working.
melodyogonna 4 hours ago [-]
Grok has started competing with frontier models on coding thanks to Cursor's data, with SpaceX's massive compute they can undercut competition on price, which makes the offering real appealing.
I've now switched to Grok 4.6, I was previously using Opus 4.8 but Grok is good enough now, and way cheaper which is the important part.
hparadiz 4 hours ago [-]
The $20 / month isn't as good as Codex or Claude. Codex reset twice this week while I'm sitting waiting for the entire month to role around with Cursor. I have all three so can have a pulse on everything.
stronglikedan 5 hours ago [-]
So they can play the game that the other big AI companies are playing, where they invest in one another to make each one look bigger on the books, even though it's all the same money, likely.
modeless 5 hours ago [-]
The data is special. Data of programmers using coding agents in the real world is invaluable for AI training. And their customer base is useful to deploy new models into.
5 hours ago [-]
mock-possum 6 hours ago [-]
Shame.
stronglikedan 5 hours ago [-]
Why? The product isn't likely to change
maximilianburke 5 hours ago [-]
But the people collecting the money have.
midnitewarrior 6 hours ago [-]
...and I won't be revisiting Cursor again.
angoragoats 27 minutes ago [-]
Same. Not that I was using it that much anyway; cli harnesses have replaced it almost completely.
stronglikedan 5 hours ago [-]
Why not? The product isn't likely to change
sudonem 5 hours ago [-]
Some people perhaps just don’t want to give money to literal Bond villains. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
sajithdilshan 5 hours ago [-]
…and the world kept spinning
thecrumb 9 hours ago [-]
Eeeewww. Grok. Off to look at Zed.
jjtheblunt 5 hours ago [-]
Zed's very handy, I find, and i'm not saying so because i'm driven to it by aversion to alternatives: it's just very useful.
nxc18 5 hours ago [-]
Why not just use VS Code which cursor (and antigravity and the one Amazon is pushing) is a fork of? It will be much closer in functionality and has been loaded up with agent features nonstop for the last 18 months.
hparadiz 4 hours ago [-]
When I say "I use cursor" I mean the subscription. In reality I use the cli tui literally called "agent" and the cursor ide isn't installed at all.
spottedmarley 9 hours ago [-]
...to the moon?
oniony 6 hours ago [-]
Think the aim is Mars.
tshaddox 6 hours ago [-]
Earlier this year they literally publicized changing their immediate goal from Mars to the Moon.
Ekaros 6 hours ago [-]
Perfect tool for rocket control systems and in general control and life support systems of Mars colonies.
aanet 6 hours ago [-]
Vibe codin' away the colonization of Mars
angoragoats 27 minutes ago [-]
You’ve fallen prey to one of Elon’s many failed pie-in-the-sky predictions.
actualwitch 4 hours ago [-]
They may aim at Mars, but what they actually hit is the Moon. [0]
I swear I actually laughed out loud with this, is this a joke?
stronglikedan 5 hours ago [-]
Companies buy other companies all the time, so I'm not sure why anyone is surprised.
marcosdumay 5 hours ago [-]
If somebody missed that one news, one can easily get to the conclusion that SpaceX tried to manipulate index funds to buy their shares, and sold into an incredibly high valuation to keep the money. Not to reinvest it into the business.
rvz 5 hours ago [-]
No.
deburo 5 hours ago [-]
I'm hoping Cursor becomes the third biggest (American) AI model company, replacing Google. Elon works best with top talent, and I think Cursor most kept its team together; were there any big departure from there recently?
dcrazy 5 hours ago [-]
What proprietary models does Cursor offer? Do they have any of the infrastructure to develop, train, and refine a frontier model?
minraws 5 hours ago [-]
Now they do have SpaceX's GPUs and Grok models...
I mean I get that we can all dislike this move but it might the best way to get into the race to become one of the top labs. Ofc Grok 4.6 is not there yet, I have seen people claim it's quite good and it is but it's a marginal improvement over the mid tier models from the top 2.
And it's certainly worse than the recent GLM 5.3 (especially once we get the weights for it).
hparadiz 4 hours ago [-]
All the models are good enough for almost all normal tech job work. If all you are doing is building a react app there's functionally no difference. You'd only want a frontier model to work on something extra complex but even that will be baked into the basic models within six months.
14u2c 4 hours ago [-]
Maybe if you’re building something from scratch every time, but otherwise the difference becomes noticeable fast. Just today 5.6 Terra tried to silently import half my backend into the frontend bundle. After switching to Sol it quickly found and fixed that.
hparadiz 4 hours ago [-]
Try getting karpathy guidelines skill. Tends to help with that. I use it universally with all models and all harness.
[1] https://cursor.com/blog/grok-4-5
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.
If the Cursor or its agent cli can offer their models as an enterprise offering (e.g even through AWS bedrock so all corporate compliance nonsense are met) there is a huge market they can capture.
In the rocket ship space?
Take that data / training recipe and scale it up with compute to see what happens?
I wonder how long until Elon makes everyone believe he founded Cursor.
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.
To me this is a classic case of low-downside, very-high-upside.
Orbital data centers do not defy the laws of physics. TBD whether they are economical relative to terrestrial data centers, but please don't succumb to misinformation.
All of that plumbing, all of that area, all that stuff to put in orbit just to cool one rack of compute equipment.
How much stuff do we need to put up there for each rack? How many racks are in a single datacenter?
And that’s just the most basic things, before taking in account ALL the other problems you face doing compute in space someone with expertise in the domain could mention.
Datacenters in space is a grift that won’t happen in any meaningful capacity and can be debunked by a 15y old who followed their physics courses
1. Radiating heat needs large radiators 2. Bit flips require extra compute capacity
Neither of those violate the laws of physics. As I said, they may not work economically, but that depends on a large number of unknowns, including the cost per ton to orbit and the cost per GW of new power capacity on Earth in 2030. If you have a time machine and know those numbers, then can I please borrow your time machine?
Moreover, when you say, "ALL the other problems ... someone with expertise in the domain could mention," you're saying either:
A) SpaceX engineers do not have expertise in this domain. B) SpaceX engineers are hiding all the problems that they know about.
B is basically a conspiracy theory. It is one YouTube video away from saying the moon landing was a hoax.
A is just delusional.
C) SpaceX engineers enjoy their cushy salary funded by a guy who won't take "that doesn't make sense" for an answer to work on rockets and neat technology, even if it may never really work out.
You're missing C) SpaceX engineers know it's a bad idea, but can't say anything because it's the tyrant manchild's latest obsession, technology constraints be damned.
Remember the vision-only FSD? How's that coming along?
Good that there is now an administration that creates jobs, does not engage in foreign wars and has ended the Ukraine war in 24 hours.
xXxSpaceXAixX
But some other company took the trademark of E in relation to cars...
Besides its following, does Cursor have any sort of moat? It's VS Code with a harness right?
SpaceX to buy Cursor for $60B
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48553224
My suspicion is that it's a way to break into more developer workflows for Grok, even if the market share is relatively small. I've never used grok and don't plan to at this point, but I have highly respected friends who say it is pretty damn good, and some of them even started using Cursor because of this pairing, so anecdatally at least it does seem to be working.
I've now switched to Grok 4.6, I was previously using Opus 4.8 but Grok is good enough now, and way cheaper which is the important part.
[0] https://edition.cnn.com/2026/08/04/science/spacex-rocket-moo...
I mean I get that we can all dislike this move but it might the best way to get into the race to become one of the top labs. Ofc Grok 4.6 is not there yet, I have seen people claim it's quite good and it is but it's a marginal improvement over the mid tier models from the top 2.
And it's certainly worse than the recent GLM 5.3 (especially once we get the weights for it).
Sol xhigh is my default rn.