SpaceX is buying AI coding startup Cursor for $60 billion
www.businessinsider.com
Elon Musk's rocket company announced on Tuesday that it had exercised its option to buy AI coding startup Cursor for $60 billion.
  • Kazumara@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    19 minutes

    They entered into an agreement to buy Cursor, with an expected time for the merger in Q3. It’s an all stock transaction, the number of shares that will depend on the SpaceX share price, to make up the 60 billion USD. Also they will pay in Class A shares (so the shitty ones with nearly no voting power)

  • VeryFrugal@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    2 hours

    Very interesting. It doesn’t really make sense to “buy users” imo. Devs jump over to the current best offerings.

  • XLE@piefed.socialEnglish
    6 hours

    $60 billion.

    Minecraft was acquired for 2.5 billion in 2014.

  • StitchInTime@piefed.socialEnglish
    6 hours

    Perhaps I’m missing something, but isn’t Cursor simply a VSCode fork with some AI extensions integrated into it? Hate aside? What is the actual technical value of the product?

    • Not_mikey@slrpnk.netEnglish
      48 minutes

      Haven’t used cursor but I assume it’s like other harnesses where the special sauce is in how it manages context, schedules sub agents, feeds them context, enforces standards, uses tools and skills etc. that make it better then just directly prompting the model.

      For example you prompt opus directly with “refactor the auth flow” and it’s going to try and “one shot” it and produce the code from that prompt. Whereas a harness has instructions to say

      1. Research the current implementation
      2. Search the web for standards
      3. Ask the user questions on how they want to do it …

      Which produces way better results

    • abc@suppo.fiEnglish
      2 hours

      They have their own model called Composer that’s specialized for coding.

      Personally, I think generic Opus 4.8 beats it, but it is quite cheap and fast. I used Composer via Cursor for a few months in late 2025. I hear they have improved the model somewhat since.

    • mysteryhumpf@feddit.orgEnglish
      4 hours

      He is buying the users that cursor had. But these users can switch to another AI harness any day they wanted to.

    • Johanno@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      6 hours

      While it is nowhere near the value Elon paid. It is a tool for easy coding with ai. Like the others thousands that out there. I mean spacex buying companies left and right at prices that make no sense is weird. Spacex being valued that much when all they do is burn money at a rate of several states is confusing.

      Elon getting richer by the second with all that nonsense is suspicious…

  • realitista@lemmus.orgEnglish
    12 hours

    Because all space companies need a social network and an ai coding company. It just makes sense. And your pension needs to buy this very logical company because it’s large enough to be in the index.

      • clifmo@programming.devEnglish
        6 hours

        SpaceX is an infrastructure company. Deeply dependent on government good will and contracts. It leases it’s data center compute to actual AI companies.

        • NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2 hours

          They aren’t deeply dependent on government contracts anymore. Starlink will be able to support them. Government good will, id say yes.

          Starship is currently a money pit on the launch side, and will make or break that the company depending on if it works.

          Its leasing excess capacity, but that might not always be the case, but IMO that business model is probably better than the selling an LLM model one, but if you run out of people willing to lease it, youre still left with a pile of hardware you gotta do something with.

          If they stop leasing, xAI becomes a money pit too.

          • clifmo@programming.devEnglish
            1 hour

            I agree. But suffice to say if NASA walks away from SpaceX because they fail to deliver, it’ll make an outsized dent to their perceived value.

            • NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.worldEnglish
              49 minutes

              For sure, if something happened and NASA walks away, or reduces their interactions with SpaceX that will have ripple effects beyond what they currently provide.

        • abc@suppo.fiEnglish
          2 hours

          This is the sort of comment where I wish Lemmy had the option to block everyone who upvoted it.

          • Eldritch@piefed.worldEnglish
            9 minutes

            The original Founders had a lot of good ideas and did a lot of hard work. Unfortunately they let a clown come in and take them over and turn everything into a circus. Where people can say that sort of thing 100% accurately now. Tesla and SpaceX are both punch lines realistically anymore as is Twitter.

      • Test_Tickles@lemmy.worldEnglish
        7 hours

        This truly is the weirdest timeline. The only division of this shit company that brings in any money is the space and rockets division. However, the technology divisions are a money pit.

  • pivot_root@lemmy.worldEnglish
    11 hours

    “Cursor, help me figure out why this request is failing with a CORS error.”

    Thinking…

    Reviewing sources…

    • “Elon Musk on X”
    • “Elon Musk Twitter acquisition” townhall recording
    • “Programming best practices” and “Elon Musk”

    Done.

    It looks like everything needs to be thrown out and redone. The whole stack. It’s not good, it’s bloated, it was made by overpaid salary workers.

    “What’s wrong with the stack?”

    The whole stack. Just the stack. All of it.

  • fubarx@lemmy.worldEnglish
    12 hours

    Local coding LLMs are going to be the hot new commodity this year.

    • VonReposti@feddit.dkEnglish
      12 hours

      Already is, take a look at devstral, qwen3.6, deepseek coder. All can be run on a hugh end GPU and if you’re a developer you likely have one.

        • VonReposti@feddit.dkEnglish
          5 hours

          There is a significant overlap between developers and gamers.

          • GoatSynagogue@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1 hour

            Most developers use their work provided machines, which aren’t gaming machines with giant GPUs because again, GPUs don’t help development at all.

          • NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1 hour

            Also developers often want more ram, and if youre on the mac side, the M series ram works as video ram for loading and running models, so there’s a good chance you can already run something better than is typical of others, and apple is focusing on this by adding more NPUs and increasing memory bandwidth. They arent good at training, but can do inference.

      • makeshift0546@lemmy.todayEnglish
        10 hours

        The vast majority of users ain’t running anything but 27b max, more likely 14b, and that shit just ain’t nearly as good as older saas models much less dominant like opus. Maybe for small shit but complex talks just ain’t fitting on home hardware.

        • VonReposti@feddit.dkEnglish
          8 hours

          Completely agree, I forgot to mention that part. I am testing a few models ranging from 18b to 26b on my 7900xt. It is far from “make this complete system”, but it can handle some smaller tasks. I think that will be the end goal anyway since cloud models fail a lot at maintainability, security, and other higher levels of thought that goes into coding. They can make a convincing prototype but I wouldn’t hook it up to production.

          Local models are already functioning well as a force multiplier. It can help explain logic, do minor refactoring, debugging etc. but with a bit of latency. I do think this is where we’re headed since the frontier models required for generating a full prototype can’t make production quality code and it is prohibitively expensive to do so. As far as I’ve heard, they’re generally running spending ten times as much as they earn per token.

        • naeap@sopuli.xyzEnglish
          10 hours

          Sadly, that’s true

          Tried to refactor a spaghetti code state machine and thought, well, AI should handle this well. All the logic is there, just separate it into small functions to clean up the large one.

          None was able to, alone because of the context window already

          To be fair though, I tried Mistral online and it also stumbled around. ChatGPT was a complete clusterfuck - haven’t tried Claude.

          To be even fairer… it’s a really large state machine, which was written on site during a fever and in stress - so… To defend myself a bit as well, how it even came to that ;⁠-⁠)

          But seems, I’ll need to go through this myself
          Actually thought, that this would be a perfect example for using AI…

          • BeigeAgenda@lemmy.caEnglish
            7 hours

            Yeah LLM’s can help with many tasks but then there are times they just spout nonsense, or syntactically correct nonsense, the model size and context window just changes when they hit their limit.

            Sometimes you have to call it quits, and try another way.

    • Voytrekk@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      9 hours

      Yet somehow less valuable. Isn’t it just a fork of VSCode with more AI tools built in?

      • criss_cross@lemmy.worldEnglish
        7 hours

        Pretty much. And is getting its lunch eaten by the fact that people are using tools like Claude code and open code instead of vscode interfaces.

        This is cursor cashing out on top before the fallout and Musk being stuck with the bag.

  • CosmoNova@lemmy.worldEnglish
    12 hours

    is a validation of the soaring interest in AI-assisted coding.

    Sure, buddy. Whatever makes you feel better.