SpaceX Strikes Deal With Coding Startup Cursor For $60 Billion (nytimes.com) 72
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: SpaceX, Elon Musk's rocket and satellite company, said on Tuesday that it had struck a deal with the artificial intelligence start-up Cursor that could result in its acquiring the young company for $60 billion. SpaceX is making the deal just as it prepares to go public in what is likely to be one of the largest initial public offerings ever. In a social media post, SpaceX said the combination with Cursor, which makes code-writing software, would "allow us to build the world's most useful" A.I. models.
SpaceX added that the agreement gave it the option "to acquire Cursor later this year for $60 billion or pay $10 billion for our work together." It is unclear if the companies plan to consummate the deal before or after SpaceX's I.P.O., which could happen as early as June. [...] Cursor, which has raised more than $3 billion in funding, was founded in 2022 and made waves as a fast-growing A.I. start-up. It was under pressure in recent months after OpenAI and Anthropic announced competing code-writing products that were embraced by tech companies. Cursor had been in talks to raise funding in recent weeks.
SpaceX added that the agreement gave it the option "to acquire Cursor later this year for $60 billion or pay $10 billion for our work together." It is unclear if the companies plan to consummate the deal before or after SpaceX's I.P.O., which could happen as early as June. [...] Cursor, which has raised more than $3 billion in funding, was founded in 2022 and made waves as a fast-growing A.I. start-up. It was under pressure in recent months after OpenAI and Anthropic announced competing code-writing products that were embraced by tech companies. Cursor had been in talks to raise funding in recent weeks.
Why?? (Score:5, Funny)
Elon already has the bestest brain & most superduper sentient AI?
Surely Grok will attain cosmic consciousness before the end of the year, right?
Re:Why?? (Score:4, Insightful)
Capitalism rewards the strategy of consuming your potential competition. Actual competition is only a last resort in this economic system.
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What I don't understand is why "Too Big To Fail" wasn't taken as a guideline to break up monopolies during a financial crisis. You can't be too big to fail without being a monopoly or oligopoly.
Solutions, anyone? (Score:3)
I didn't think so, though it should be some kind of joke how many of them claim they believe in some form of laissez-faire.
I think there should be a progressive profit tax linked to market share, so the natural path to higher retained earnings would be to split your too-dominant company into competing companies. Various metrics for "too dominant", such as lack of customer choice, blockage of wannabe competitors, and even lack of employee choice.
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Grok sux in spite of all his efforts so Elon will just buy something that doesn't.
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Grok sux in spite of all his efforts so Elon will just buy something that doesn't.
The only reason it sucks is because Musk doesn't like the answers it gives. When Grok was asked who the largest purveyor of lies and misinformation on Twitter was, it responded with Musk [yahoo.com]. As soon as that happened Musk publicly stated he would fix that, meaning Grok.
When Grok responded to a question about violence in the U.S. and it came back with white-supremacists, Musk again stated he would correct that, meaning Grok.
Not defending the hallucinating clanker, but Grok does have its moments where it gives a
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have you actauly used cursor.
It is awful i can kinda do web based stuff.
raw HTML
but i hve been using for 6 months and it has yet to maek code tht actaully compiles.
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I've used a lot of models but I haven't used Cursor. It may very well be crappy as you say but there are people who swear by it.
Re:Why?? (Score:4, Insightful)
Cursor isn't an AI, it's just an IDE.
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Have you seen the price of tokens? (Score:2)
The best you can do for $60B in tokens is a half-baked mobile app.
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It's interesting how these multi-billion-dollar AI companies all have such remarkably terrible UI.
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Technically a fork of VS Code with a few plugins and modifications to use AI.
There is no IP here to buy. At best you are buying a customer base.
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Technically a fork of VS Code with a few plugins and modifications to use AI.
There is no IP here to buy. At best you are buying a customer base.
I think the Composer model is from Cursor, in-house.
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It's just rebranded Kimi
https://techcrunch.com/2026/03... [techcrunch.com]
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It's just rebranded Kimi
https://techcrunch.com/2026/03... [techcrunch.com]
Interesting, though the article says that Cursor says it's only about 1/4 Kimi.
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I thought Cursor was just a way to make programming a subscription service.
Re: We just dumped Cursor (Score:2)
Re: We just dumped Cursor (Score:4, Interesting)
It's insane a company with a vscode clone with ai bits slapped on can get that kind of value
It's a click bait headline. This is a $10 billion option, not a $60 billion acquisition.
$10 billion is still on the insane side for a vscode extension. However, Elon has an AI platform, and that platform lacks the IDE integration that others have, so my guess is he's looking to plug that hole with money.
When you couple all that with the recent "Terafab" kickoff, it's clear Elon wants his whole AI compute stack under one roof; from the chips to the developer stack. He's building a vertically integrated AI platform.
He's doing all that because he's convinced solar powered space compute is the answer, and will make him billions. He's been right often enough that I'm not betting against it, but it's a big bet. He won't die a pauper either way, so why not?
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There are about 60 GW of AI compute data centers in the world. I saw a Youtube video where some space guy claimed to do the analysis that a starlink-sized satellite could possibly handle the thermal load for 20kW of compute. If we triple that to 60kW, that means Elon needs to build and launch 1,000,000 satellites into space. Elon had 100 launch sites sending up one rocket per hour, you would be launching continuously for over a year. Note, there are only 20-something launch sites in use worldwide. The logis
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It's the next snake oil scam to capture some of that sweet VC money.
The biggest 'data center' that has been put into space has the performance of a recent iPhone model.
The biggest hurdle is getting rid of the heat.
The near vacuum of space doesn't absorb heat very well.
It needs to be converted to infrared radiation because nothing else works.
So as long as that hasn't been solved for kW sized space data centers, it is indeed ridiculous.
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Agreed. We're in the final stages of this AI "race to IPO", which is the final step in the tech grift cycle, for the VCs get "made whole", while "retail investors" take all the losses. Elon is trying to bootstrap this by tying everything to the SpaceX IPO.
It's truly just a cash-out for the original investors. Twitter is bought for $54 billion, loses money hand over fist, and has no path to profitability. The answer: form your AI spite company, vacuum up the "Elon" money, then buy Twitter to pay out those or
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Lol. Elon's "He's been right often enough" that this guy's not betting against him. Apperently he discounts the very notably large number of times elon wasn't right. Its funny because its sad.
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The saddest part is that our society worships one-hit wonders. Get one thing right once and you're suddenly a genius at everything. It's literally just probability at work, a winning lottery ticket. How many times do you see the headline "PERSON WHO PREDICTED X DOES Y!!!!!!!!!!!!!". I used to work with a guy who would claim the sky was falling every day, was wrong 99.999% of the time, but you never heard the end of it the vanishingly few times he was right. Would have been more accurate flipping a coin.
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Just wondering why not just build the data centers somewhere really cold? Antarctica has got to be easier than working in space.. at least you can get there without a rocket, and you can dig underground. I am not sure I understand the economic argument for space-based data centers as opposed to ground-based data centers. Space might have more solar flux than the poles but has anyone actually compared the costs?
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p.s. for people saying it is a good way to need rockets, okay. And I am definitely all for going to space. But you can also build megarobots that can shrug off Antarctica and be self-driven / self-walking. Personally they are both cool to me. And both would be useful for building a Moon base too.
Re: We just dumped Cursor (Score:1)
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I think Antarctica would have a problem with electricity during the dark months. But there are more accessible places that are nearly as cold. The Canadian Shield is cold, extremely stable geologically, and more accessible, even if you had to lay undersea fiber along the coast instead of over land. I'm sure there are many more places.
The issue would be that few of them are "politically" convenient, for all the jerbs.
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They aren't bullshit concepts, but they also aren't even nearly practical now. Give it time. The Dyson sphere (practical variation) would need at least several centuries to be practical, and even then I think topopolis is a better approach, but it's not a bullshit concept. The "space AI" probably needs sustained space-based industry to become practical, and that, itself, has a few problems to overcome, but it's reasonable eventually.
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"Dyson sphere (practical variation) would need at least several centuries to be practical"
what practical variation is that?
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You don't have a solid sphere, you have collectors in multiple orbits differing not only in height, but also in angle WRT the plane of rotation of the star. You build it piece by piece, and it's working from the time the first piece is put into orbit. But I really prefer topopolis, which is also built piece by piece, and is easier to get around in. (In the Dyson sphere variation all the pieces need to be separate...which is a real problem. Of course, one could do a cross between the two, and have multi
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Elon has an AI platform, and that platform lacks the IDE integration that others have, so my guess is he's looking to plug that hole with money.
If Grok could do what he claims it could do, he could have it write the software for him and not spend anything.
Twitter (Score:2)
"Twitter isn't paying off for us the way we wanted, so let's do the same thing again but under a different name"
Time to dump Cursor (Score:2, Interesting)
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Given the current government, I don't find that evidence of anything except that somebody in government doesn't like them. Perhaps evidence will show up at the trial, if they actually follow through.
Seriously?! (Score:1)
I'd write Elon a Vscode extension for
Re:Seriously?! (Score:4, Insightful)
If your plan isn't to get in early and dump the stock as close as possible to the almost inevitable price spike those all who didn't a chance to pre-buy in cheap and are now taking part in the FOMO buying / cash-out frenzy that follows the shares hitting the stock exchanges, then you *really* need to be paying attention to where all Elon's debts and loss-making business units are. (Hint - he's been steadily moving them all into SpaceX).
Pyramid Company (Score:5, Insightful)
And now he's trying to put out to yet more investors his ultra mega unified company in an IPO, totally worth trillions of dollars because that's the new number someone managed to teach him. And in order to make it appear to have value he'll just buy yet another company! Most likely he'll buy this new company (companies?) with, an all SpaceX stock deal, which of course they should accept because after all, SpaceX is a company worth trillions of dollars!
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But your comment fails on the fact that Spacex is a real industry leader and is actually worth trillions.
When AI crashes, I just hope these AI side business don't jeopardize the real business of Spacex - launching stuff to space for much less than 10x what the competition charge.
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"Spacex....is actually worth trillions"
why and to whom? the total valuation of the global automotive industry is several trillion, likely no more than about $4T. for the pharmaceutical industry, it's about $2T total.
what exactly about this one company makes it worth as much as either - or both - of 2 of the most impactful industries of the past century?
Re: Pyramid Company (Score:1)
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the only reliable prediction that can be made about the coming century is that there'll still be plenty of greedy a-holes.
everything else is speculation, like the value of SpaceX
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"Spacex....is actually worth trillions" why and to whom? the total valuation of the global automotive industry is several trillion, likely no more than about $4T. for the pharmaceutical industry, it's about $2T total. what exactly about this one company makes it worth as much as either - or both - of 2 of the most impactful industries of the past century?
If (yes, that's an if) Starship is successful, it will bring launch costs down to a level that completely changes how we approach space. Assuming other companies don't manage to match the feat (another big if), this could indeed make SpaceX worth trillions.
Will it? Tough to say. If SpaceX does an IPO I'll probably buy some, but I won't invest my whole retirement fund.
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My feelings are different when it comes to the IPOs. All the current SV-crypto-AI bros want to tap the public equities market, but they're asking for all sorts of special velvet-glove treatment. No. No. No. Absolu
Let's vibe code spaceX software (Score:2)
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CursorX: Sorry, Elon, I see now what I did wrong. Let me fix that for you.
Elon: The last six Starship Version 3 launches have failed disastrously.
[...]
Good for cursor (Score:2)
They are really reaching for the stars.
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SpaceX is a scam. The too long didn't watch is they don't have any more customers.
Maxing out growth isn't a bad thing if you want to be a stable business. If you want eternal growth and to attract gambling on the stock market, that's of course a problem. They don't even know what to do with the successes they do have.
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It's a bad thing when you're raising $1.5 trillion in capital. You raise capital to grow a business. If the business can't grow that's a scam. The investors will lose their money. There won't be enough revenue to sustain that valuation.
/facepalm
Market capitalization does not mean the same thing as capital raise. You shouldn't need to be told something as basic as this if you've ever done any investing at all, which tells me that you haven't. And no, spending all of your social security check at the Indian casino every month is not investing.
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Exactly - they are selling less than 4% of the company at a valuation of 1.5 trillion. 4% of 1.5 trillion is ~70 billion. That's what they are expecting to raise.
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Cheese, your post is like a bad AI summary of another bad AI summary. It seems the video was too long and you therefore didn't watch it. And well...unlike you, I did watch it.
He didn't say anything about launch customers, he only spoke about the maximum viable starlink market, in which case he only looked at retail customers in western markets, ignored the rest of the world, ignored b2b customers, and ignored the direction starlink is heading in, which expands well beyond last-mile internet access, or even
I don't like where this is going. (Score:2)
Not giving any investment advice here, but I believe that Spacex is being loaded up with ailing companies and financial risk before it goes public. The Nasdaq 100 is going to be composed of around 6% of Spacex stock a few months after it starts trading on the Nasdaq stock exchange. For those with positions in QQQ this along with the 3.5% of QQQ allocated to Nvidia poses a risk.
If Spacex and Nvidia fail, you're looking at a 10% haircut not including any second order effects which might be even more significa
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Not giving any investment advice here, but I believe that Spacex is being loaded up with ailing companies and financial risk before it goes public.
Which is a really odd thing to do. SpaceX is successful. Why load up a success with a bunch of failures? Usually, you transfer all of the failures into a sacrificial entity that can declare bankruptcy while leaving the successes running.
Everybody's becoming an AI company these days (Score:2)
Even Allbirds, the failed shoe company, is now an AI company. https://www.forbes.com/sites/j... [forbes.com]
VS Code works just fine, and... (Score:2)