Cursor is now a part of SpaceX

bbilly_jones_75 about 5 hours ago 67 commentsRead Article on cursor.com

HI version is available. Content is displayed in original English for accuracy.

⚡ Community Insights

Discussion Sentiment

86% Positive

Analyzed from 1212 words in the discussion.

Discussion (67 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

GMoromisato•32 minutes ago

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.

_menelaus•16 minutes ago

Its 60B for a huge amount of RL coding data to become competitive in the space.

GMoromisato•13 minutes ago

That would make more sense to me.

4lasGa•9 minutes ago

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.

dgellow•10 minutes 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

kridsdale1•9 minutes ago

SpaceX has a monopoly on The Universe. Therefore the TAM for selling tokens to all possible alien species is what justifies the valuation.

imagent•about 2 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.

[1] https://cursor.com/blog/grok-4-5

q3qahg•about 1 hour 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.

hardwaregeek•23 minutes 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•13 minutes ago

I'm really hoping for Linear to expand and build their own Git-hosting+stacked-PR offering.

stldev•10 minutes 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•10 minutes ago

Cursor is a subscription. You can use the tui harness called agent without the ide.

cedws•about 1 hour ago

Isn't it SpaceXAI now? I lost track.

r14c•about 1 hour ago

X, the everything app, formerly known as Twitter, now SpaceXAI XCursor X.

pennomi•21 minutes ago

Time to rebrand to CurXor?

echelon•about 1 hour ago

That's like a popular 2000's era username.

xXxSpaceXAixX

InsideOutSanta•about 1 hour ago

xXxSpaceXAIxX: Return of Xander Cage

goolz•about 1 hour ago

Very on-brand for a Halo 2 lobby circa 2005.

ubercore•about 1 hour ago

Don't give him any ideas.

steveBK123•about 1 hour ago

AI by xAI, a SpaceX subsidiary fka as Twitter, special collab with Cursor

Apocryphon•about 1 hour ago

SpaceX, the everything company

stronglikedan•about 1 hour ago

SpaceXtra

SketchySeaBeast•about 1 hour ago

How long until he names a company "E" just so he can giggle about the name?

james_pm•18 minutes ago

Will they rebrand as codeX or Xcode? Trouble either way.

AnEro•about 1 hour ago

Subscription is gone the second I feel like their not running the inference at a loss

deburo•34 minutes 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•31 minutes ago

What proprietary models does Cursor offer? Do they have any of the infrastructure to develop, train, and refine a frontier model?

minraws•28 minutes 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•18 minutes 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.

stackghost•32 minutes ago

Conversely, I'm hoping all Elon's companies go bankrupt. Elon works best with top talent because he is nothing but a grifter good at taking credit for the hard work of others (see: Tesla), and failing upwards.

Concentrating so much wealth in one unstable Nazi[0] like Elon is objectively bad for society.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2bbb-6Clhs

sajithdilshan•5 minutes ago

Cry me a river

someluccc•9 minutes ago

Touch grass bud

andsoitis•about 1 hour ago

Congrats to everyone at Cursor!

vegancap•30 minutes ago

Cooool, won't be using that again

ChrisArchitect•about 1 hour ago

Previously in June:

SpaceX to buy Cursor for $60B

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48553224

porphyra•40 minutes ago

Hopefully they can unify the harnesses now. Weird how there's both grok build and cursor-agent at the same time.

ravenstine•about 1 hour ago

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.

melodyogonna•22 minutes 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•13 minutes 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.

freedomben•about 1 hour 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.

stronglikedan•about 1 hour 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•about 1 hour 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.

sidcool•about 2 hours ago

They were not joking

mock-possum•about 2 hours ago

Shame.

stronglikedan•about 1 hour ago

Why? The product isn't likely to change

maximilianburke•31 minutes ago

But the people collecting the money have.

midnitewarrior•about 2 hours ago

...and I won't be revisiting Cursor again.

stronglikedan•about 1 hour ago

Why not? The product isn't likely to change

sudonem•42 minutes ago

Some people perhaps just don’t want to give money to literal Bond villains. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

sajithdilshan•about 1 hour ago

…and the world kept spinning

thecrumb•about 5 hours ago

Eeeewww. Grok. Off to look at Zed.

jjtheblunt•about 1 hour 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•about 1 hour 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•11 minutes 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•about 5 hours ago

...to the moon?

oniony•about 2 hours ago

Think the aim is Mars.

tshaddox•about 2 hours ago

Earlier this year they literally publicized changing their immediate goal from Mars to the Moon.

Ekaros•about 2 hours ago

Perfect tool for rocket control systems and in general control and life support systems of Mars colonies.

aanet•about 2 hours ago

Vibe codin' away the colonization of Mars

actualwitch•10 minutes ago

They may aim at Mars, but what they actually hit is the Moon. [0]

[0] https://edition.cnn.com/2026/08/04/science/spacex-rocket-moo...

an0malous•about 1 hour ago

It’s been enshittified to the Moon now

kykat•about 1 hour ago

I swear I actually laughed out loud with this, is this a joke?

stronglikedan•about 1 hour ago

Companies buy other companies all the time, so I'm not sure why anyone is surprised.

marcosdumay•27 minutes 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•about 1 hour ago

No.