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  • $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?

    by yanis_t
  • It’s the coding, prompting, training data aligned w harness and ultimately usage of the user base.
    by justinai6
  • Well. $60b in bloated stock is probably much better than the $10b cash penalty for not going through with the deal.
    by hagbarth
  • I wonder what happens to fireworks ai, who provided the infra to train and serve composer 2, cursor was their largest customer, and they're probably loosing it.
    by zander_jiang
  • 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)
    by datsci_est_2015
  • 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 .
    by BoumTAC
  • 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

    by pietz
  • > What are they after for here? Customer base? Talent?

    users

    by wayeq
  • 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.

    by kjksf
  • I've tried most of the tools out there but have used cursor most consistently. Sure, some of the UI quirks get in the way sometimes, but I've found its auto complete predictions to be unparalleled. More importantly, these days I mainly use its Ask mode, Plan mode, and Agent mode. I like that I can use Opus via subscription pricing without Claude Code's wild and buggy harness. And I find cursor's plan mode to perform better than Claude's, but that may just be my personal preferences. I know cursor stopped being the cool thing a few months back, but I genuinely feel most effective with it!

    But I'll stop using it now, for the same reason I wouldn't buy a Tesla, or support that maniac in any other way. And I'm sad about that :(

    by timwis
  • Zed is pretty good these days. With a claude subscription, you get close to the same experience as Cursor, but with an editor that's much snappier.
    by neilpointer
  • I used Cursor for a couple of months like a year ago, and I found it to be good, but I preferred the CLI experience and switched to Claude Code. "Claude Code's wild and buggy harness": not sure when you tried it, but I've been using it daily for the last couple of months, and okay there were some quirks here and there, but its stable and very usable.
    by faeyanpiraat
  • Funny that “GitHub should really support stacked diffs” led the Graphite team to a space colonization co.

    2020: Leave Meta and start a company.

    2020–2021: Spend ~18 months looking for PMF.

    2021–2025: Build Graphite around stacked PRs, code review, and merge queues.

    2025: Get acquired by Cursor because AI makes code review the bottleneck.

    2026: Cursor gets acquired by SpaceX because Elon.

    Not a startup arc I would have predicted from `gt stack submit`.

    by turadg
  • Ah, it's somewhat like how Jeri Ryan's divorce caused Obama to get elected.

    Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/startrek/comments/187ghq/star_trek_...

    by da-x
  • $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.
    by greenoracle9
  • I can't imagine that any of the cautious companies or ones with their ear to the ground are going to want to cozy up to cursor with this acquisition; I'd suspect we'd see some exodus as well given the relationship to Musk.
    by stryakr
  • I just uninstalled it FWIW.
    by jacobgorm
  • I think it'd be an enormous endorsement of Cursor/xAI and proof of improvement if SpaceX started using it to code the mission critical software running on Falcon 9. Which other AI company can say their models powered a rocket launch?

    (mostly /s but I know I'd give it another look if it was that good)

    by doom2
  • i’m not interested in supporting a trillionaire with my money. i’ll be moving to vscode since the cost of switching is basically zero.
    by winfredJa
  • 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.
    by Sammi
  • > The real question is whether SpaceX ownership improves Cursor or drives its users away.

    I can't speak for anyone else but I wont be renewing my sub. Funding anything Musk related isn't exactly high up on my list of desires, and theres ample alternatives out there.

    by esskay
  • There's no way I will continue to use Cursor if it's Elon-owned. His actions at DOGE literally caused the deaths of thousands. We should all boycott.
    by greenpizza13
  • > The real question is whether SpaceX ownership improves Cursor or drives its users away.

    I know I'll sound hyperbolic but I'm deeply skeptical of the way anything Musk-owned is going to treat private data. I think he wouldn't hesitate to dig into it if it were to his benefit, even if there was an agreement against it. For that reason alone it makes Cursor look worse to me.

    by afavour
  • Is anyone on HN still actually using Cursor in 2026?

    Everyone I've spoken with is now using either Claude Code or Codex (or Copilot because their companies force them to).

    by frays
  • to be fair "nobody" is using grok either
    by petterroea
  • I much prefer Cursor to Claude Code. Claude Code hides too much of what it's doing from me (can't monitor the thinking output, can't see output from in-progress commands being run.

    I don't even use the IDE -- just the Agent Window interface. I also really like Composer 2.5.

    by x3n0ph3n3
  • I was on Claude Code the past year, now I use chinese models, but I've used Cursor and they have an ok pricing offering today because of their mix of sota models with usage based pricing along with their Kimi based Composer model with generous limits. I think it makes a lot of sense for the enterprise market, which is the real moat, and not the capabilities/features of the forked ide or app/tui/github bot anyone can come up with today.
    by frangonf
  • Still do. Composer 2.5 is a beast. But even with Opus (and Fable for a few days) their harness is many times faster. The main reason for me to use CC is the $200 subsidized pro max plan.

    Also their computer use in the cloud agents (when it works) is a game changer. No need to keep your laptop open / get a Mac mini if it runs in the cloud.

    by eranation
  • Yes, I use it as my daily driver at Discourse, the Cursor Tab autocompletion is still the best AI-based editor autocomplete I have used. I switched to nvim earlier in the year because there was no real great AI integrations that didn't feel cumbersome, Cursor in vim mode is a much nicer experience, I like adding lines of code to agent context and so on. All of the extensions from VSCode, LSP integration, and so on are really nice.

    That being said I do a lot of work in Codex or Claude now (they all feel pretty much the same to me), and use Claude for manual code writing and tweaks that I feel would be unnecessary for agents to do, or just when I am writing code that I enjoy writing, typically when exploring a new problem I'm interested in, not everything needs to be done at 1000% speed by a robot.

    Though I will likely reconsider this now that Elon will own it, either moving to VSCode or to Zed long-term.

    by mjrbrennan
  • I stopped using Cursor because of how terribly optimised it is (worse than VSCode despite being a fork). It would routinely take up 50% of the CPU resources on my MacBook M4 and gigabytes of RAM for absolutely no reason.

    I switched to Zed, and I'm never going back to Electron/non-native IDEs.

    by joefourier