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Looking forward to seeing where this goes, both companies have a reputation for engineering excellence.
Good on them to get $10B breakup terms, after the Twitter shitshow
$50bn for a harness makes no sense, what am I missing?
Is this Cursor the product? Or AnySphere the company?
What are we even doing here.

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?

really happy for the Cursor team but at the same time disappointed that the biggest non-lab AI company couldn't exist on their own.

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

Rockets, satellites, social media, AI - the only thing missing from the SpaceX hype portfolio is a certain coworking company. That would really set them up for an exciting IPO.
That's an expensive VS Code fork.
I'm sworn off from Musk-related products, and this will prob make cursor worse (switch to X's LLM for instance). So, any suggestions for switching? Codex; Claude Code? (I like my IDE and I like the freedom to choose a model, which is why I stuck with Cursor even when it felt more expensive)
Same I'll be switching off Cursor today to either claude code or kiro. Luckily my company lets us choose which agentic software we want to use. I won't touch anything Musk is related to, he is toxic and anything he touches turns toxic and supports him.
Everyone talks badly about Cursor and it is kinda a piece of junk, but no, there's nothing that has the features of: being able to see agent diffs in an editor, seeing diffs inline in chat, be able to click them to jump to the code, and being able to click old chat messages to edit/fork them.

Those are basically my only requirements, and it feels like I've tried everything and they're all everything only has 1 of those features. Zed is the closest, it technically has those features, they're just buggy and have provider specific quirks.

So I'm stuck on Cursor until Anthropic invents IDE technology, or at least VS Code wrapper technology.

Kilo code; vscode extension as well but open source and based on OpenCode.
I switched to Windsurf recently and it's been pretty good for providing a Cursor-like experience; pricing is pretty similar.
What's Cursor's moat here? I'm a bit surprised that xAI/SpaceX needs to buy them rather than building their own VScode forked IDE or an agentic UI/CLI.
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SpaceX, xAI, Collosus data centers, next space compute, X, Starlink and soon Cursor to join 2, 3 & 4 together?
This is the right partnership to happen. SpaceX has all the compute but is missing the talent for training LLMs, especially on the RL side. Cursor has the talent and RL stack, but doesn't have their own pretrained base model or own their compute. Both will be on a bad trajectory without cooperating because Claude Code and Codex have gained so much momentum already.
This feels like another Twitter moment... unless he's absolutely desperate for engineers who can train LLMs. In that case it's basically an acquihire. Otherwise, this makes absolutely zero sense.
60 Billion for an IDE?

I guess back to Jetbrains it is.

Government subsidized purchase of a private company. Fantastic. All funded by the taxpayer to send rockets to a dead planet and to burn up all the energy on our alive but suffering planet.
If Twitter was when Musk jumped the shark this is definitely him sticking the landing.
Ohh it’s not an acquisition, it’s right to buy later for $60B or we a work together for $10B. Huh?
I am part of a discord group with about 1000+ devs. I polled them in Jan to see if they had dropped cursor for claude code.

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.

I really don't know what Elon is thinking here because SpaceX's IPO is already precarious, for several reasons:

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.