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74% Positive

Analyzed from 1814 words in the discussion.

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#spacex#cursor#xai#company#here#musk#ipo#twitter#model#more

Discussion (69 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

AirMax98•about 2 hours ago
What are we even doing here.

I have no idea what this has to do with aerospace, but I know a bit about software and this does not look great. Cursor is obviously on a serious decline and has little to no moat in the area they are building in (IDE), which we kinda now know is maybe not even the right area (CLI). I feel like this is just a bad move?

joegibbs•8 minutes ago
SpaceX is just going to be the Musk Company minus Tesla. X Corp, the X parent, is a subsidiary of xAI which is a subsidiary of SpaceX. This seems back to front, but I suppose SpaceX has the better reputation for investors whereas if X owned SpaceX the IPO would be devalued by the association with Twitter.
scottyah•8 minutes ago
Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google are all investing heavily in their desktop type apps, I think the TUI phase is coming to an end.
Lermatroid•about 2 hours ago
AFAIK cursor is basically the only player right now not subsidizing tokens out the ass, and has been seeing solid growth across individual and enterprise with almost every model performing best in their harness. Not sure how that’s a serious decline.
calmoo•about 1 hour ago
On the contrary, anecdotally, myself and every engineer I know have switched fully from cursor to claude code since the start of the year. I now use zed with cc. I personally could not stand the buggy mess and constant UI changes of cursor. It’s also not good value in terms of claude tokens compared to claude code.
brightball•1 minute ago
What sold you on Zed?
SwellJoe•16 minutes ago
No one wants an IDE, anymore. They're building a better horse.
htrp•44 minutes ago
cursors internal model efforts have not been able to meaningfully exceed the performance of the frontier models.
Analemma_•about 1 hour ago
I would like to know where you’re seeing this, because my strong impression is exactly the opposite: a year ago, everyone was talking about Cursor, but I haven’t heard anything about it in months. It’s all Claude Code and Codex now. In terms of mindshare they seem dead already.
wrqvrwvq•about 1 hour ago
ai trends seem to mirror general coding/software trends but compressed. People used to edit programs with sed, but the ide proved to be more powerful from every perspective. cli tools always have their place for "power-users" and other specialized intermediate usecases like tui's, but in general the ide has overtaken every aspect of cli use and many devs hardly ever use the terminal. I suspect a similar thing will happen with ai.
ajross•about 1 hour ago
While surely someone has done human-driven editing with sed, that's not what it's for. Remember that ed is the standard editor.
infinitewars•about 2 hours ago
Trying to posture for Golden Dome, but politically he is likely locked out of the contract.
SilverElfin•about 1 hour ago
Isn’t it obvious? Musk bailed out his Twitter investors with xAI. Then he bailed out xAI with SpaceX. Now he realizes that no one thinks xAI is worth the hundreds of billions he claimed it was in that potentially fraudulent transaction, and is trying to make Grok and xAI relevant by getting access to customers in the AI coding space. But in the end, it’s SpaceX share holders who are being made fools of and soon, especially with the Nasdaq fast track changes to incorporate SpaceX forcefully into everyone’s passive investments, the public will be the one who is made poorer. But Musk will become a trillionaire.
JumpCrisscross•about 2 hours ago
> no idea what this has to do with aerospace

SpaceX is no longer SpaceX per se, but SpaceX-xAI.

My TL; DR (and this is mine, personally) is its mission has pivoted from colonising Mars to building a Dyson sphere. Space-based datacentres are a demand excuse for putting lots of solar panels in space. Going one level down, more Cursor use is a demand excuse for putting lots of datacentres anywhere.

riffraff•about 2 hours ago
This is like me, a couch potato, pivoting from "I'm going to run a half marathon" to "I'm going to do a marathon in under ten minutes"
tadfisher•about 2 hours ago
If we're talking Dyson spheres, this is like going from a half-marathon to running the distance from Earth to Betelgeuse. It's just not a realistic endeavor.
sobellian•about 1 hour ago
More like "I'm going to run every possible marathon route on the Earth's road network."
JumpCrisscross•about 1 hour ago
It's a mission, not a business plan. Colonising Mars was always a moonshot as well. But it aligned the company's priorities.

My point is regardless of what you think of a Dyson sphere, this theory seems to predict what the company does better than assuming everything's a ketamine fever dream.

BobbyTables2•about 2 hours ago
Plot twist: Build the Dyson sphere around Earth and charge for sunlight…
ButlerianJihad•about 1 hour ago
"Have You Ever Seen the Sun Set at 3pm?"

https://youtu.be/hjdMYyjnmks?si=iyoVV-oZAPmQtp1B

kibwen•about 1 hour ago
> its mission has pivoted from colonising Mars to building a Dyson sphere

Obligatory mention: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLzEX1TPBFM

JumpCrisscross•about 1 hour ago
She put it in the same category as AI or human-shaped robots. Those are two things Musk is working on. I stand by my theory.
codingusuir•about 1 hour ago
this is Elon's desperate move to fix his weak coding problem. He recently stated he feels he is far behind in agentic coding, and that apparently that's what matters.
JumpCrisscross•about 1 hour ago
> He recently stated he feels he is far behind in agentic coding, and that apparently that's what matters

Sure. My question was why. And my loose interrogation of the question, together with some unique domain expertise, suggests he found an excuse to work towards a Dyson sphere.

kevin_thibedeau•about 2 hours ago
He's offloading the loss from buying Twitter. This is the smoke and mirrors phase.
JumpCrisscross•about 1 hour ago
> He's offloading the loss from buying Twitter

That already happened with xAI-X merged with SpaceX.

dantihanyi•about 2 hours ago
Bloomberg reporting its an agreement to either acquire for $60B later this year or pay $10B to work together https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-04-21/spacex-sa...
albertwang•about 1 hour ago
Here’s the spaceX announcement (non-paywalled): https://x.com/spacex/status/2046713419978453374
mlindner•about 2 hours ago
Can you change the title?
dantihanyi•about 2 hours ago
NYTimes has updated the title "SpaceX Strikes Deal With Cursor for $60 Billion"
Jtsummers•about 2 hours ago
@dang does nothing, he is unlikely to see it. If you actually want to reach the mods, email them. There's a Contact link at the bottom of almost every page here on HN.

EDIT: Parent commenter edited out the @dang from their comment making mine appear to be responding to something not in their comment.

markthethomas•about 2 hours ago
yup - updated
cj•about 2 hours ago
Rockets, satellites, social media, AI - the only thing missing from the SpaceX hype portfolio is a certain coworking company. That would really set them up for an exciting IPO.
cdrnsf•about 2 hours ago
That's an expensive VS Code fork.
muyuu•9 minutes ago
They moved on from that code base iirc. Still insane, mind.
woeirua•about 2 hours ago
This feels like another Twitter moment... unless he's absolutely desperate for engineers who can train LLMs. In that case it's basically an acquihire. Otherwise, this makes absolutely zero sense.
lacunary•about 2 hours ago
did cursor do model training? I thought it used models built by other companies
taskylizard•about 1 hour ago
lossolo•about 1 hour ago
It's fine tuned Kimi, they didn't train it from scratch.
argsnd•about 2 hours ago
$50bn for a harness makes no sense, what am I missing?
girvo•about 2 hours ago
I assume someone knows someone, backroom deal perhaps? I'm not sure either, when Cursor has a lot of risk and not that much moat.
riffraff•about 2 hours ago
My 2c: they need to pump xAI usage (which nobody is using) to be able to keep the hype alive pre-ipo.
gip•about 1 hour ago
For a successful IPO and attract more capital you need a very good story/narrative. That what is being crafted here. Business fundamentals matter less with elon!
lossolo•about 1 hour ago
1. Pay them with shares of SpaceX

2. Make SpaceX valuation even higher before IPO

3. Boost XAI/usage of Grok.

timmg•about 2 hours ago
I thought Cursor has started making their own models. Did I confuse them with someone else?
edaemon•about 2 hours ago
Their Composer 2 model is Kimi (an open model) with additional RL fine-tuning, for whatever that information is worth to you: https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/22/cursor-admits-its-new-codi...
timmg•about 1 hour ago
Oh, I see.

Though, in fairness, that's probably the important part. Like a base model plus "coding smarts" is probably perfect for the situation.

But maybe not as much value as I was thinking.

_--__--__•about 2 hours ago
They have a 'proprietary' model which is just an open source (kimi?) fine tune
xqcgrek2•about 2 hours ago
money laundering and tax avoidance
xnx•about 2 hours ago
How would this be money laundering?
dogscatstrees•about 2 hours ago
Value shifting. Search for SolarCity and cousin Lyndon Rive.
bmitc•about 2 hours ago
Musk passing around his debt from purchasing Twitter.
AJRF•about 1 hour ago
I am part of a discord group with about 1000+ devs. I polled them in Jan to see if they had dropped cursor for claude code.

80% of those responded (250ish in the group had). Bit of selection bias there from the question - but my impression was Cursor is very much dying to competition from the labs.

lemonish97•about 2 hours ago
What's Cursor's moat here? I'm a bit surprised that xAI/SpaceX needs to buy them rather than building their own VScode forked IDE or an agentic UI/CLI.
babelfish•about 2 hours ago
It's data. Nobody is using Grok for SWE work, but they are using Cursor.
andreygrehov•10 minutes ago
Could be contracts.
don_neufeld•about 2 hours ago
If Twitter was when Musk jumped the shark this is definitely him sticking the landing.
zzleeper•about 2 hours ago
I'm sworn off from Musk-related products, and this will prob make cursor worse (switch to X's LLM for instance). So, any suggestions for switching? Codex; Claude Code? (I like my IDE and I like the freedom to choose a model, which is why I stuck with Cursor even when it felt more expensive)
lemonish97•about 2 hours ago
OpenCode and Github copilot are still options if you want the freedom to choose different models.
int32_64•about 1 hour ago
>acquire Cursor later this year for $60 billion or pay $10 billion for our work together.

This seems like an elaborate Elon rug pull. A Windsurf situation 2.0

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AirMax98•about 2 hours ago
arlattimore•about 2 hours ago
SpaceX, xAI, Collosus data centers, next space compute, X, Starlink and soon Cursor to join 2, 3 & 4 together?
seatac76•about 2 hours ago
60 Billion for an IDE?

I guess back to Jetbrains it is.

atlbeer•about 2 hours ago
Is this Cursor the product? Or AnySphere the company?
jmyeet•about 1 hour ago
I really don't know what Elon is thinking here because SpaceX's IPO is already precarious, for several reasons:

1. It was used to rescue himself and key investors from overpaying for Twitter, which was first rescued through xAI (and I don't know why anyone thought investing in xAI was a good idea but here we are). If our regulators weren't defanged, this deal would've gotten alot more scrutiny (IMHO). Whatever the case, this is all diluting the SpaceX business for overpriced AI vaporware;

2. From what I can find, SpaceX's revenue in 2025 was ~$18B with a $5B loss. That doesn't sound like a $1.5T+ company to me;

3. The markets are being rigged to make the IPO a success by changing the rules to force passive funds to buy into it with a tiny float (5% instead of the normal 25%); and

4. Here's the big one. I think Starship is a badly designed program that's going to take many billions more to complete and commercialize. There's not really a market for bigger payloads (evidence: ~1 Falcony Heavy launch per year) and STarship will effectively have to compete with Falcon 9 at a time when reusable alternatives (eg from the Chinese as well as Blue Origin) are coming to market.

NetMageSCW•about 1 hour ago
Starship won’t compete with F9, or BO because it is fully reusable and cost less than either. The Chinese are not a player in the global launch services market at all so don’t count.

Starship isn’t comparable to Falcon Heavy because it has vastly more volume, which will make it the cheapest way to launch Starlinks, which will be a lot of launches to begin with.

mandevil•13 minutes ago
There is a lot resting on Starlink, 11 gigadollars in direct revenue that accounts for fully 60% of SpaceX's total revenue of 18 gigadollars. It's hard to see how that level of revenue can sustain a 1 terradollar valuation.

Like, TSLA had 94 gigadollars in revenue last year, and it's a 1.2 terradollar company, and most outside analysts are frankly skeptical of that multiple. SpaceX is trying to get a similar valuation on a fifth of that revenue.

5129ah•about 1 hour ago
See also:

https://www.reuters.com/technology/spacex-says-it-has-option...

Personally, I have been granted the option to buy Tesla for $30 trillion by the end of this year or pay $500 billion for a partnership. It'll all happen, I swear.

bmitc•about 2 hours ago
Government subsidized purchase of a private company. Fantastic. All funded by the taxpayer to send rockets to a dead planet and to burn up all the energy on our alive but suffering planet.
NetMageSCW•about 1 hour ago
Point to any government subsidies for SpaceX - or do you think your salary is a subsidy and everything you do at work is worthless to your employer?

SpaceX has paid for contracts to deliver services to the government and those services have saved the government billions of dollars compared to the alternative.

seatac76•about 1 hour ago
Ohh it’s not an acquisition, it’s right to buy later for $60B or we a work together for $10B. Huh?
break_the_bank•about 2 hours ago
really happy for the Cursor team but at the same time disappointed that the biggest non-lab AI company couldn't exist on their own.

shows how intense the power laws are around ai and how much of a capital game it is.

jMyles•about 1 hour ago
I imagine none of us had this on our bingo cards.

If this is an acquihire, it doesn't compute for me (though I can't say I understand how things work in the world of the 60B level). LLMs are new enough that nobody has a big enough headstart to warrant a 60B personnel change.

The IPO angle also doesn't make sense. Musk cultists were gonna buy anyway; this doesn't change that. And for everyone else, who wants to pay down debt on an acquisition whose effect will almost certainly not be palpable in mainstream circles, if at all?

I don't fully understand the influence that comes with SpaceX subsidies and government contracts, but I gotta believe that rounding up non-lab AI chops are on that agenda?

The exact options - 60B for acquisition (obviously not a cash deal, right?) or 10B for unspecified services rendered... also don't make sense for either of the first two.

Is this just a way of the government securing contractors by proxy that wouldn't pass muster if done through the normal channels?

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kelsey98765431•about 2 hours ago
Time to download windsurf