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

"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.

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.

>> 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?"

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

$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?

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

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...

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

$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.

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!

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

Initial announcement back in April

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

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.

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

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

That’s two zeros too many.

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

Out of curiosity, anyone here still using cursor?

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

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

Is this Elon listening to Pieter Levels?

$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.

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.

Definitely not a bubble.

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!

>> 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?"

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...

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

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

Initial announcement back in April

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

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.

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

That’s two zeros too many.

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

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

$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.

Definitely not a bubble.

"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.

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.

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.

Where is that quote from?

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

> This is unhinged.

Just like the investors :D

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

> 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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

$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?

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.

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

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

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 .

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

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

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

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).

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 :)

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.

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

Paseo with opencode backing.

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

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.

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

That was future option, now they are purchasing it.

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

Out of curiosity, anyone here still using cursor?

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.

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...

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

Co-Pilot -> Cursor -> Claude Code.

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

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.

good enough for simple tasks.

Is this Elon listening to Pieter Levels?

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.

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