SpaceX to buy Cursor AI coding agent operator Anysphere for $60B

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iitsmarcelg about 3 hours ago 98 commentsRead Article on reuters.com

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Discussion (98 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

wmeredith•about 2 hours ago

"SpaceX told investors during the IPO process that it sees an addressable market for AI products worth $26 trillion, roughly equivalent to U.S. GDP."

This is unhinged.

TrackerFF•about 2 hours ago

I know it has become a meme by now, but IIRC the market for all foods (agriculture, processed food, etc.) on earth is around $10 trillion.

So according to SpaceX, the market for AI is 2.5 larger than all the food sold on this planet.

They're also saying that the AI market is worth roughly 10% of all global real estate.

lumost•11 minutes ago

This is true if you take the ai market as equal to the market for labor discounted to 5-10% penetration.

It’s not a totally unreasonable assertion, it’s the implication of the assertion that we are uncomfortable with. There is no reason for the models to stop their improvements in the near future.

bcrl•29 minutes ago

What precisely is the moat surrounding AI that SpaceX is using to justify this kind of spending spree? I don't how SpaceX and other AI companies will be able to keep the weights of their AI models private in the face of interest by virtually everyone in the world. It would be absolutely trivial for a nation state to walk into a data center using a state issued security certificate to seize a few of the physical servers running the cloud services of OpenAI / Grok / Claude. Copying the weights is trivial. Infiltrating a company with spies as new hire coders to gain access to source code is also trivial.

This is really starting to feel like the pets.com era again.

yifanl•18 minutes ago

Because there's nowhere else for the money to go, the money must go to AI.

There are no growth opportunities in any other industry (except healthcare due to disastrous demographics), where else are people going to invest?

f6v•about 1 hour ago

> the market for AI is 2.5 larger than all the food sold on this planet.

It just shows how much the automation has impacted agriculture and the food industry. Sure, there're rural farms that apply 200 yo technology. But e.g. the grain production and farming are incredibly efficient at scale. So, it's not that costly for as a humanity to feed 8 billion people (at a varying level, of course).

TrackerFF•about 1 hour ago

Remove 20% of AI supply, and the world goes on like nothing happened.

Remove 20% of food supply, and watch prices explode, global unrest, and famine take place.

bryanlarsen•about 1 hour ago

Food is worth a lot more than that. If the alternative was starvation, we would pay approximately all the money for food. By that metric food is worth more than $100T. The difference between $100T and $10T is called the consumer surplus, one of the largest benefits of a free market economy.

AI might eventually provide $26T worth of value, but if it captures anywhere close to that amount of revenue that'll indicate a failure of the free market economy. Competition and open source will have failed and the oligarchy has won.

(Either that, or inflation will have made $26T a relatively smaller number).

darkerside•about 1 hour ago

I'm sure the finance market is much larger as well

ActionHank•about 1 hour ago

Always fun to remember when calculating TAM - something like 85 - 90% of the world earns less than $1000 usd per month.

The math don’t math here, there literally aren’t enough people to afford this and businesses will go under the more people are displaced for gainful employment.

firecall•about 1 hour ago

Where is that quote from?

I can’t see it in the article when reading on my phone?

Aeolun•about 2 hours ago

> This is unhinged.

Just like the investors :D

emsign•about 2 hours ago

Marks believe anything the con tells them as long as it's promising big money ROI.

re-thc•about 2 hours ago

> sees an addressable market for AI products

Well if you start adding AI powered to "everything" then it is possible.

Soon you'll have AI face cream and AI donuts.

thinkingtoilet•about 1 hour ago

In a sensible world, this would be considered lying to investors and be prosecuted.

glenngillen•about 1 hour ago

Back in the early days of Heroku (when I worked there), we were all fairly deep into the Ruby community. Ruby has never had a great reputation for performance, but... it seemed like almost a running joke that any time you went down a rabbit-hole trying to understand some weird performance issue you'd eventually discover that @tmm1 had already identified the same issue months earlier, patched it in core, and given an hour long talk about it somewhere. Despite his ability and willingness talk publicly about quite deep technical topics Aman always came across as an incredibly quiet and humble in person. Every Ruby developer has benefited from his attention to finding and fixing performance issues. I'm sure the same can probably said for every GitHub user (where he worked for years).

Congrats to the entire Cursor team! I don't know all of their stories, but I do like to smile and celebrate a little when I see people who are often hidden in the shadows quietly making things x% better for all of millions of us every day for many years getting reward for that effort.

roxolotl•about 2 hours ago

Wow they are using 80% of what they raised 4 days ago to buy an IDE. Absolutely incredible.

kjksf•33 minutes ago

Per latest reporting, Cursor's current annual revenue rate is $4 billion.

So SpaceX is buying 15 years of future cashflows, assuming no change in revenue. Which is bad assumption given past growth was gigantic.

They are also buying 300-400 employees with proven record of training good coding models.

Their expertise will be used to improve Grok Build coding agent.

Also, they're using stock, not cash, so effectively they doubled the amount of money raised.

ubertaco•13 minutes ago

>Their expertise will be used to improve Grok Build coding agent.

Is Grok not a toxic enough brand (by association with Musk) that people who would use Cursor wouldn't avoid Grok?

Like, the assumption seems to be that all the goodwill that Cursor users have towards Cursor will now apply automatically to Grok, which seems like a pretty significant leap.

porridgeraisin•9 minutes ago

Companies using cursor could not care less about the CEO's ideology if they tried. Individuals may, but they don't matter in this context.

ActionHank•about 1 hour ago

Not even an IDE. A workflow built on top of an opensource editor.

irjustin•about 2 hours ago

Unsure if you're serious, but if you are, they wouldn't buy with cash, at least not the vast majority of it.

blitzar•about 2 hours ago

Its an all stonks deal.

HarHarVeryFunny•about 1 hour ago

It's $60B in SPCX stock, not in cash.

https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/16/spacex-to-acquire-cursor-f...

rchaud•about 1 hour ago

Guess Musk figured out that paying all cash to acquire something was a bad idea.

HarHarVeryFunny•about 1 hour ago

Sure - why use cash when you can use bits of paper instead?

I'd expect more of the same to come - good way to lock in some of this crazy SpaceX valuation by converting it into something with a bit more inherent worth.

Tesla next?

bsenftner•about 2 hours ago

Money laundry

aenis•about 2 hours ago

Nope. They pay with the monopoly money, dilluting the shareholders.

barredo•about 2 hours ago

>> SpaceX told investors during the IPO process that it sees an addressable market for AI products worth $26 trillion, roughly equivalent to U.S. GDP.

I very much can imagine a future documentary in a few years. With the host asking the audience: "Where were the signs?"

yanis_t•about 1 hour ago

$60b is crazy.

Cursor is an extension for VS Code, a harness and a bunch of prompts.

They have their own model (Composer 2) which is based Kimi K2.5, but I don't think SpaceX would be interested in it.

If they need a harness for grok, they could fork PI.

What are they after for here? Customer base? Talent?

datsci_est_2015•5 minutes ago

I could see it being a talent / first mover acquisition. I’m bullish on harnesses, but I think there’s still a very long road to get to something that is stable and relatively optimal - harness user experience is pretty trash tier right now imo.

My hot take is that it will probably be like the OS landscape:

  - Some established enterprise option (Windows)
  - Quality secondary option for professionals (OS X)
  - Super users / nerds / tinkerers (Unix flavors)

kjksf•31 minutes ago

Cursor has $4 billion annual revenue rate so $60b is 15 years of future cashflows.

That's not crazy because if past predicts the future, that revenue will grow quickly. At $8 billion/year it's just 7.5 years, which is a reasonable investment.

pietz•about 1 hour ago

It's a crazy number especially since Cursor feels kinda dead. Few thoughts from the other side:

- xAI needs the coding related data to compete with Claude Code and Codex

- Recent progress with Composer 2.5 seems promising given the size

- The may get a comeback on the smaller than Enterprise battle field now that the other two got so expensive

- The way that Elon set up this entire process was quite genius. They locked in this option before, and now after the gains through the IPO, it feels almost like a discount, lol

hagbarth•43 minutes ago

Well. $60b in bloated stock is probably much better than the $10b cash penalty for not going through with the deal.

BoumTAC•about 1 hour ago

Compose 2.5 is the default model in Grok Build. And it's quite incredible. It's comparable to Opus 4.7 but faster and incredibly cheaper .

827a•37 minutes ago

You clearly have not used Cursor lately. It’s substantially more than all that. It’s not a VSCode extension anymore.

dubeye•about 1 hour ago

shocked that an engineer would not mention user numbers or revenue growth in their analysis

ArtificlObstcl•about 1 hour ago

Usage data.

PUSH_AX•about 2 hours ago

In related news, I'm open to suggestions for coding agent harnesses.

mackenney•about 2 hours ago

Happy pi.dev user here, give it a try! I would say that's kind of the "vim experience" but for harnesses: has the minimum, if you want something more you extend it :)

mkj•about 2 hours ago

I'm wondering who's going to buy pi!

(Edit sorry forgetting names, I mean who's going to buy Earendil). Good luck to Armin, he's done some good stuff.

uaksom•about 2 hours ago

Earendil did! https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/5/24/pi-oss/

agentcooper•about 1 hour ago

At Poolside we have pool (https://github.com/poolsideai/pool), it runs in a terminal and you can use it with any Agent Client Protocol compatible agent (https://agentclientprotocol.com/get-started/agents).

_pdp_•about 2 hours ago

Since you've asked, I am working on one but it is super early days so I am just posting it here for feedback.

https://zot.im

The idea is to make it fully autonomous so it is not really something that is meant to be constantly prompted and it is unlikely to fit most workflows but the idea is to make something that fits the future - not the present.

oneshtein•about 1 hour ago

https://github.com/can1357/oh-my-pi

Klathmon•about 1 hour ago

I've been pretty damn happy with codex and vscode.

Between the codex app, cli, and vscode extension there are options for most ways of working

heisgone•about 1 hour ago

Codex UI is great. It just make sense for an AI tool.

jofzar•about 1 hour ago

Been very impressed by the codex app tbh

dizhn•about 1 hour ago

Paseo with opencode backing.

syngrog66•about 1 hour ago

vim

itsmarcelg•about 3 hours ago

These are the SEC filings that confirms the merger:

Announcement of Cursor acquisition to SpaceX

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1181412/000162828026...

Details of Acquisition

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1181412/000162828026...

dolkycape•about 2 hours ago

That's a lot of money for a buggy product that is at best slightly better than its competitors.

tptacek•about 2 hours ago

For what it's worth, this was effectively announced months ago, and at this valuation.

rvz•about 1 hour ago

But they (SpaceX) could have backed out of the deal at any given time as they had the option to (and be required to pay the 10B break up fee). Nobody knew what would happen at the time.

This announcement is a definitive agreement of the acquisition at that $60B valuation.

Sammi•19 minutes ago

Yes, that's what was said basically. The pedantry is not adding anything to the conversation.

tptacek•39 minutes ago

Sure, not saying there's no news hook here.

tippa123•about 2 hours ago

Not sure how this closes the gap to Anthropic and OpenAI for xAI. Is there a play that I am overlooking?

If this acquisition goes through the only winner here is Cursor, especially since CC and Codex are chipping away at Cursor very hard!

tippa123•about 2 hours ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47855293

Initial announcement back in April

greenoracle9•about 1 hour ago

$60B is a huge price, but buying Cursor gives Musk something xAI has struggled to build: a popular coding product with real developer and enterprise adoption. It may be the fastest way to catch up in AI coding. The real question is whether SpaceX ownership improves Cursor or drives its users away.

Sammi•24 minutes ago

My sense is that enterprises are extremely cautious. They like everything that is already common and hr friendly. They abhor anything that might be seen as divisive and controversial. That's why they're currently going with Anthropic and not Openai or Xai or anything Chinese. It's the smaller actors that are using everything but Anthropic. Anthropic got that safe enterprise bland vibe. The only pr trouble Anthropic is in is with saying no to the military, which just makes them even more enterprise safe. Meanwhile Sam Altman and Elon are out there freaking out the enterprises almost every day it seems like.

chvid•about 1 hour ago

Not bad for a VS Code fork and a Chinese LLM fine tune.

thm•about 2 hours ago

That’s two zeros too many.

LgWoodenBadger•38 minutes ago

Nonsense like this reminds me of the following quote from the 1999 Thomas Crown Affair movie:

“Have you figured out what you're going to say to your board when they realize you paid me thirty million more than others were offering?”

In the span of <20 years we’re talking about a sale price 3 orders of magnitude larger than a minor plot point of a hollywood movie.

mDyJzDPmBdG•about 3 hours ago

Wasn't that already announced few weeks ago, only with deal going through depending on Cursor future stock price?

dockerd•about 2 hours ago

That was future option, now they are purchasing it.

xiphias2•about 2 hours ago

They needed to raise money for the purchase, they just did it (raising from public market)

vicentwu•43 minutes ago

It's absurd. let's mark it down.

aenis•about 2 hours ago

Out of curiosity, anyone here still using cursor?

veber-alex•28 minutes ago

Yes it's my main AI thing.

It has access to all top models, great IDE integration and their AI based autocomplete is still unbeaten.

I have no desire to use a TUI, feels like a downgrade to me.

warmedcookie•about 1 hour ago

I use CC/Codex/Cursor.

CC is mostly my default for large tasks / features (ex. Plan > execute plan ) Biggest gripe with Claude Code is that it is painfully slow relative to the other two.

Cursor for small stuff like bug fixes since it has a lot of models to choose from. I love the review/ diff / checkpoint features. It's planning feature is on par with CC. I'd probably use Cursor as primary driver if it had better cost efficiency. Next version or two of Composer may fill that gap in cost/quality/speed.

Codex isn't allowed at my work, but I use it for personal projects. It has the best balance of quality / cost / speed even if it's planner is poor and quite frankly the codex harness needs to catch up with the other two.

CC for quality / cost. Cursor for quality / speed. Codex for balance of the 3.

aabdi•about 1 hour ago

composer is competitive with around opus 4.5 in feeling?

largely lags behind opus4.7/gpt5.4, but is respectable, and generally outperforms the glm/qwen equivalents anecdotally despite benchmarks.

fails to follow instructions more often, and is less code critical, but performs okay if you can decompose the task to smaller problem spaces. i.e. only do manual review, only do typechecking, only do specific component. etc

https://artificialanalysis.ai/agents/coding-agents?coding-ag...

senordevnyc•about 1 hour ago

I agree, Composer 2.5 is really good. I use it for all kinds of small tasks, and really for any kind of first pass at debugging, answering questions about the codebase, pulling data for reports, etc. It’s fast, pretty accurate, and basically free.

yanis_t•about 1 hour ago

Never did. Having been using Github Copilot since its launch (as autocomplete, they have a Vim plugin) and claude code for agentic coding.

blitzar•about 2 hours ago

Co-Pilot -> Cursor -> Claude Code.

I think my relationship with cursor was the shortest of all.

Aeolun•about 2 hours ago

Cursor was really good for like 2-3 months. It felt like magic compared to Copilot.

Claude Code is like... I dunno, something better than magic because it actually exists.

senordevnyc•about 1 hour ago

Yes, it’s my daily driver for building the saas I run full-time. I’m not happy about this news.

I like the ability to switch between any models, Composer 2.5 is really solid, I like having my agents coworking in the IDE with me, the plan mode is great, Cloud Agents are great, especially with slack, linear, web, etc integrations. I routinely tag an error report in slack and Cursor fires up a Composer 2.5 cloud agent that has readonly db access, access to error reporting, etc, and it can triage the issue, issue a PR, and tag me in slack.

The only thing I’ve felt like I’m missing out on is the subsidies of the CC/Codex subscriptions, but it seems like that is rapidly eroding anyway.

buntp•8 minutes ago

Curious, what does your SaaS do? even the general area is fine

electriclove•31 minutes ago

Why are you not happy about this news? Didn’t their collaboration make Composer 2.5 possible?

AndreyK1984•about 2 hours ago

good enough for simple tasks.

blondie9x•21 minutes ago

What are the best open source IDE alternatives to Cursor? There was Continue for a bit but Cursor bought it. Is Visual Code by itself the only open source IDE atm? My main gripe with Visual Code is it doesn't make it easy to use open weight models or non Copilot model APIs. Continue helped but its now part of Cursor.

As for coding in the terminal, we have Opencode, Claude Code, and Codex etc. They are all open source but only Opencode can route to open weight models. But non of these are really an IDE like Visual Code or Cursor.

Are we missing a really good open source IDE to use open weight models? It seems like we are.

transitKnox•about 2 hours ago

Well that's a lot of money. They must see this as a distribution pipeline for Grok?

chinathrow•about 1 hour ago

Is this Elon listening to Pieter Levels?

manwithopinions•about 1 hour ago

Pieter is so dumb. All he seems to do is post comparisons between the wonderful U.S. and dying EU that are completely wrong. If Elon is listening to Pieter, pray for Elon.

TrackerFF•about 2 hours ago

Congrats to the founders, arguably the first true AI-wrapper billionaires? 0 to multigenerational wealth in 4 years is impressive. It is crazy how much more wealth per user that can be created in the AI-space, compared to other products.

Hendrikto•about 1 hour ago

It is crazy how much more wealth per user that can be created in the tulip space, compared to other products.

4er_transform•37 minutes ago

Surprising how tech people on a tech forum are some of the biggest Luddites. Maybe it’s because the creative destruction is coming to your industry this time?

AtNightWeCode•43 minutes ago

$60B. Wow. Congrats to Anysphere. But $60B. That is just a ludicrous price.

kypro•about 1 hour ago

$60b is genuinely insane. Very high from a P/S ratio perspective, and for a product with arguably no defensible moat.

Congrats to the Cursor team though... One of the most crazy exit stories ever – 4 years to a $60b buyout. Damn.

polnurfer•about 1 hour ago

That is very hinged

tomwphillips•about 2 hours ago

Definitely not a bubble.