If strike date comes and Cursor is in fact worth less than $60B... they can move to acquire it for that price. Or just let it "expire". And if it's worth more, they get a savage good deal. If the services were worth $8B anyway, it's hard to lose.

It seems less crazy to me through this lens. A straight acquisition, today, at $60B would in fact be crazy.

* X will have a total of ~2GW of GPU sometime this year largely not doing much outside of 'grok is this true'

* despite no longer being in vogue with consumer devs Cursor still has a lot of developer data that can assist in building a model

* Cursor have decent enterprise relationships (while for xAI it is ~zero) and that's where the real revenue for llms + agents is

* Cursor are paying retail for tokens and competing against the frontier model co's who are also their suppliers. Not sustainable (hence their in-house composer model).

* Cursor the product covers the gamut from lovable-style prompt-to-app, an IDE, cli and bugbot

* X are using "x bucks" to pay for a potential later acquisition which are arguably overvalued based on the space x IPO hype

Option there to give X a window to make it work, otherwise walk away with a $10B breakup fee for access to it's data

I guess I kinda see it... it makes sense from both points of view (xAI needs data + places to run their models, cursor needs to not be reliant on Anthropic/OpenAI).

I think I don't see it working out... I just don't see an Elon company sustaining a culture that leads to a high-quality AI lab, even with the data + compute.

Anyone have recommendations? I like the plan/agent mode and the fact that it's an IDE, so I can use it in the traditional way as well as by yapping with a bunch of agents. Also the Cursor rules I've curated and they do their job well.

Maybe I was missing something, but I do not understand how it is worth sixty billion dollars.

As far as I know, xAI’s enterprise market share is non-existent. This is their way to get some much needed customers.

I know a ton of people that use Codex, Claude, OpenCode but can't name a single person that uses Cursor or Grok that is knee deep into agentic coding.

SpaceX, a rocket company owned by Elon Musk bought xAI, an AI company also owned by Elon Musk for... reasons. Don't give me the datacenters in space narrative, we all know it is bullshit.

It is then buying the option to buy a company for which the only contribution is a glorified VSCode plugin and the reselling of other companies LLM services at an absurd price. I understand that it is more complicated than that but 60 fucking billions, that's the GDP of a small country!

And now, Elon Musk intends to IPO SpaceX, which means he expect people to buy into all this bullshit. And considering that unlike me and judging by his wealth, he seems to be really good at understanding the market, so he is likely to be right.

A sobering thought.

I feel like we're finally at a point where you don't have to constantly argue with and constantly babysit coding models, which makes it even more frustrating when you're suddenly forced to deal with one that ignores your instructions and gets stuck in thinking loops again.

I suspect it's the vast troves of training data rather than any tech that Cursor possesses that SpaceX is after...

But it's clearly not worth 60B dollars in April 2026.

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?

The same "mistake" that SpaceX bought 10% of Tesla CyberTruck?

Wait are they all Musk's companies? Is it a pattern?

/s obviously

Cursor might not be the new hotness, but if we believe that agentic coding is the next wave and we’ve gone from asking chatbots to actually using agents for coding, then yes, this move makes sense for Elon to hype up a SpaceX IPO.

That isn’t an agreement to buy

Since the firing of several Grok founders, Grok has decreased in capabilities. It is illogical and insults users when called out.

So he does what everyone does. Write more dev tools, slap a price on it and hope retail investors will be impressed in the IPO. The $60 billion is of course optional and will just be used in the IPO to inflate the valuation.

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.

The “apply” model to turn LLM output into code changes?

I like SpaceX a lot but this really doesn’t make sense at $60B

I guess there's a bunch of tools to not suck at this. Anyone had success here? The AI tools say I'm great because they can't pick up the kind of problems I'm talking about.

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

Spacex already owns Twitter and xai, trying to post-rationalize with justification like they have servers doesn't make a whole lot of sense. It's all accounting at this point.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/apr/21/spacex-cu...

I associate Musk with being user hostile, unreliable, meme oriented and disruptive in the worst sense; I’d like my work tools without that please.

This could be a lot of money to spend to acquire users that may not be sticky.

Laugh all you want. He may have the last laugh on this one.

It is good to have more competition in this area.

So there aren’t just 2 big players which also have their ideological flaws.

I've personally watched a lot of developers around me (myself included) who were enthusiastic Cursor users when it first launched gradually migrate over to Claude Code and Codex. And I don't think this is just happening in my bubble.

My guess is this is some kind of strategic play ahead of SpaceX's upcoming IPO — an attempt to get a higher valuation stamped on the company. But I'll say it again: $60 billion is absolutely absurd.

DM me if you want an invite. I am keeping it to a small on purpose.

Crazy a fork of vscode is worth 60B. What’s vscode worth to Microsoft? 200B?

https://x.com/spacex/status/2046713419978453374

these are weird times...

Oh yeah, did I mention how Starlink is literally already in the close to Kessler Syndrome territory? all it would need is for a strong enough solar storm to hit their sats.

See also: companies buying up the Slack and email archives of defunct startups, for training data.

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.

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.

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

A rocket company buying a so so overvalued coding AI company is a joke even worse than the 2000s internet pet food companies were

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?

I guess back to Jetbrains it is.

"Please estimate Elon's IQ based on his timeline"

It estimated 115-130. A decision like this points to the lower end.