{"id":49470,"date":"2026-04-23T07:51:14","date_gmt":"2026-04-23T07:51:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/usa\/what-smart-people-are-saying-about-spacexs-60-billion-deal-with-cursor-the-hunger-games-have-just-begun\/"},"modified":"2026-04-23T07:51:14","modified_gmt":"2026-04-23T07:51:14","slug":"what-smart-people-are-saying-about-spacexs-60-billion-deal-with-cursor-the-hunger-games-have-just-begun","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/usa\/what-smart-people-are-saying-about-spacexs-60-billion-deal-with-cursor-the-hunger-games-have-just-begun\/","title":{"rendered":"What smart people are saying about SpaceX&#8217;s $60 billion deal with Cursor: &#8216;The Hunger Games have just begun&#8217;"},"content":{"rendered":"<figure><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/i.insider.com\/69e90938367066d7c296fb69?format=jpeg\" alt=\"Elon Musk and Michael Truell\"\/><figcaption>Michael Truell&#039;s startup, Cursor, is partnering with Elon Musk&#039;s SpaceX.<\/p>\n<p>Isaac Wasserman\/Big Event Media\/Getty Images<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<ul>\n<li>SpaceX said on Tuesday that it&#039;s partnering with Cursor, an AI coding startup.<\/li>\n<li>The deal gives Cursor access to SpaceX&#039;s computing resources.<\/li>\n<li>Here&#039;s what smart people in business and tech are saying about the multibillion-dollar deal.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>SpaceX&#039;s multibillion-dollar deal with AI coding startup Cursor marks a colossal step for Elon Musk and his ambitions to win the AI race. <\/p>\n<p>The space company, which owns AI startup xAi, said in an X post on Tuesday that it&#039;s working with Cursor to &quot;create the world&#039;s best coding and knowledge work AI.&quot; It&#039;s expected to combine Cursor&#039;s AI-powered coding model with SpaceX&#039;s Colossus training supercomputer, the companies said.<\/p>\n<p>As part of the deal, SpaceX gains the right to acquire Cursor later this year for $60 billion, or pay Cursor $10 million for the work they produce together.<\/p>\n<p>The companies have also held discussions in recent weeks with Mistral about a potential three-way partnership, Business Insider reported.<\/p>\n<p>The partnerships could be a crucial step for Musk to get ahead of rivals like OpenAI and Anthropic.<\/p>\n<p>Musk, who founded SpaceX in 2002, has made serious strides in AI this year. Chief among them is SpaceX&#039;s February acquisition of Musk&#039;s xAI, which helped SpaceX expand into AI infrastructure and software. In April, SpaceX confidentially filed for an IPO, boosting gains in other space stocks and teasing a public debut this year.<\/p>\n<p>News of the Cursor deal electrified chatter among business and tech industry professionals on social media, many of whom viewed it as a symbiotic match. Here&#039;s what people in tech are saying about the deal.<\/p>\n<p>Alex Finn, founder of Creator Buddy and Henry Intelligent Machines<\/p>\n<p>Alex Finn, founder of Creator Buddy and AI agent startup Henry Intelligent Machines, said the deal made &quot;so much sense&quot; in an X post.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;xAI has been behind on coding products for years now. Cursor has a great coding product, but will fail unless they build their own model,&quot; he said on Tuesday.<\/p>\n<p>The deal could allow the two companies to address those issues, Finn said. While SpaceX gains Cursor&#039;s coding capabilities, Cursor gets access to SpaceX&#039;s compute infrastructure to build its own model rather than relying on OpenAI&#039;s ChatGPT or Anthropic&#039;s Claude.<\/p>\n<p>Finn said the hurdle Cursor faced is likely happening to many vibe-coding tools that rely on OpenAI and Anthropic, which are building competing offerings.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;Wins for both sides,&quot; Finn said.<\/p>\n<p>Hadley Harris, cofounder of Eniac Ventures<\/p>\n<p>Hadley Harris, cofounder of seed-stage VC firm Eniac Ventures, said on X that he didn&#039;t &quot;get&quot; the deal.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;Every frontier dev I know has moved off Cursor and off IDEs entirely,&quot; Harris said on Wednesday, referring to &quot;integrated development environments,&quot; or applications that combine building, editing, testing, and other coding capabilities. &quot;Only laggards are still on it. And dev tools always move from thought leaders to laggards, never the reverse.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>Mario Nawfal, founder of the IBC Group<\/p>\n<p>Mario Nawfal, founder of the startup incubator and accelerator IBC Group, said Cursor&#039;s users are largely &quot;elite software engineers,&quot; who are an important group for SpaceX to cultivate ahead of an IPO.<\/p>\n<p>Bringing in more software engineers would help SpaceX, and by extension, xAI, delve further into AI infrastructure and development.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;@elonmusk now has space, satellites, AI, social media, and the world&#039;s most popular coding tool under one roof,&quot; Nawful said. &quot;What he&#039;s cooking up will be wild.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>Tomasz Tunguz, founder and general partner at Theory Ventures<\/p>\n<p>Tomasz Tunguz, general partner at early-stage VC firm Theory Ventures, said the partnership allows SpaceX and Cursor to fill their individual infrastructure gaps.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;Winning in agentic coding requires three layers: compute, models, &amp; distribution,&quot; Tunguz said in an X post on Wednesday. &quot;Anthropic, OpenAI, &amp; Google own the full stack. xAI &amp; Cursor each have gaps,&quot;<\/p>\n<p>He said xAI has massive compute power, referencing Musk&#039;s Colossus data center in Memphis, but the company is losing popularity. Cursor, he said, has the opposite problem.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;Millions of developers vibe coding, but its model layer depends on OpenAI, Google, &amp; Anthropic \u2014 all competitors. This relationship also pressures margins,&quot; Tunguz said. &quot;For $10 billion, SpaceX buys a call option on the distribution it couldn&#039;t retain, &amp; Cursor wins the independence it hasn&#039;t yet secured.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>Sarah Catanzaro, general partner at Amplify<\/p>\n<p>Amplify general partner Sarah Catanzaro reacted to the deal by referencing Elon Musk&#039;s ambitious plan to put data centers in space. Amplify is a VC focused on early-stage tech startups.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;I guess Elon realized to get data centers in space, you first need a really good coding agent \u2026&quot; Cantanzaro said in an X post on Tuesday.<\/p>\n<p>Anand Kannappan, a former data scientist at Meta and cofounder of PatronusAI<\/p>\n<p>Anand Kannappan, cofounder of Patronus AI startup, said on Tuesday that the deal wasn&#039;t so much a merger-and-acquisition as it is a &quot;a bet on what the real bottleneck in frontier coding models is.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>&quot;The deal lets Cursor train Composer on Colossus while xAI runs the same recipe on Grok,&quot; its AI assistant, Kannappan, a former data scientist at Meta, said on X. &quot;Both sides find out, at the same time, whether Cursor&#039;s data is actually the difference.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>He added: &quot;The option structure reflects that uncertainty. If the training work ports over, SpaceX buys Cursor and owns the pipeline. If it doesn&#039;t, they pay $10B for the experiment and walk.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>Regardless of the outcome, Kannappan said Musk&#039;s companies benefit.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;Either outcome, Grok ends up stronger than it would have been, and xAI gets an answer to a question it couldn&#039;t answer internally,&quot; he said.<\/p>\n<p>Aadit Sheth, cofounder of The Narrative Company<\/p>\n<p>On Wednesday, a cofounder of The Narrative Company \u2014 a communications firm aimed at company executives \u2014 said SpaceX&#039;s deal with Cursor puts the companies in direct competition with industry leaders like OpenAI and Anthropic.<\/p>\n<p>Aadit Sheth said the companies are betting that Musk&#039;s AI supercomputer can train a Cursor model that could replace Claude and GPT. Both Anthropic and OpenAI are working to build their own integrated development environments, which help streamline software production.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;Cursor has the user. It doesn&#039;t have the model. Distribution without a defensible model underneath is a rental,&quot; Sheth said in an X post on Wednesday. &quot;We&#039;ll know in 6-12 months whether that $60B bought a moat or a rental.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>Art Levy, chief business officer at Brex<\/p>\n<p>Art Levy, chief business officer at fintech company Brex, said he liked the deal in a X post on Tuesday.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;This is a &#039;try before you buy&#039; for Elon, with a massive &#039;break up fee&#039; for Cursor if it doesn&#039;t work out,&quot; Levy said.<\/p>\n<p>He pointed out that the deal&#039;s structure gives SpaceX a call option and prevents &quot;startup destruction&quot; if the deal falls through.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;I like it,&quot; he said.<\/p>\n<p>Max Kolysh, cofounder of Dover<\/p>\n<p>Max Kolysh, cofounder of recruiting startup Dover, said Cursor&#039;s decision to partner with SpaceX is likely a survival move.<\/p>\n<p>He said on X that Cursor&#039;s long-term viability had been contingent on its access to Anthropic&#039;s and OpenAI&#039;s models<\/p>\n<p>&quot;Both are actively building Cursor competitors,&quot; Kolysh said. &quot;That&#039;s an existential platform risk to survive.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>Kolysh also said Cursor needs its &quot;own foundation models&quot; \u2014 like Anthropic&#039;s Claude or Google&#039;s Gemini. Training those requires deep pockets.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;They found the guy with the deepest pockets in the world,&quot; he said.<\/p>\n<p>Rohit Mittal, cofounder and CEO of Helium Ventures<\/p>\n<p>On Tuesday, Helium Ventures CEO and cofounder Rohit Mittal said the deal could stir up the AI startup scene. Helium Ventures acquires and guides software businesses.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;It will be very interesting if Claude&#039;s token consumption from Cursor moves to xAI,&quot; he said on X.<\/p>\n<p>Cursor currently relies on Claude, using its tokens \u2014 units of data processed by AI models \u2014 in its offerings. A new partnership could instead bring xAI into focus, Mittal said.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;I can imagine that impacts the growth rate of Claude (not saying it&#039;ll slow down), but it&#039;ll pull xAI ahead much faster.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>&quot;The Hunger Games have just begun,&quot; he said.<\/p>\n<p>Vijay Shekhar Sharma, CEO and founder of Paytm<\/p>\n<p>Vijay Shekhar Sharma, the CEO and founder of Indian digital payment service Paytm, said on X that he thought Microsoft would acquire Cursor, not SpaceX.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;SpaceX was a space company for me,&quot; Sharma wrote. &quot;Thinking of them owning xAI and doing this deal was a bit far.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>&quot;Congratulations Musk &amp; Cursor team,&quot; he added.<\/p>\n<p>Thomas Smale, founder of FE International<\/p>\n<p>Thomas Smale, the founder of the New York-based technology M&amp;A advisory firm FE International, called the deal a &quot;test drive with a $10 billion deposit.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>Smale said that the real question in this deal is not whether SpaceX exercises the $60 billion option. He wondered aloud if Cursor can build enough of its own capabilities on SpaceX&#039;s compute to stay competitive, versus Anthropic and and OpenAI&#039;s rival models.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;That answer will determine whether $60 billion looks like a bargain or a cautionary tale,&quot; he said.<\/p>\n<p>Shay Boloor, chief market strategist at Futurum Equities<\/p>\n<p>Shay Boloor, a chief market strategist at Futurum Equities, said that the two scarcest assets in the AI economy are distribution and compute, and Cursor and SpaceX, combined, have both.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;That would give them an integrated AI platform that can train on proprietary usage data, ship into a massive developer base and improve faster than competitors that lack either side,&quot; he wrote on X.<\/p>\n<p>Read the original article on Business Insider<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Michael Truell&#039;s startup, Cursor, is partnering with Elon Musk&#039;s SpaceX. Isaac Wasserman\/Big Event Media\/Getty Images SpaceX said on Tuesday that it&#039;s partnering with Cursor, an AI coding startup. The deal gives Cursor access to SpaceX&#039;s computing resources. Here&#039;s what smart people in business and tech are saying about the multibillion-dollar deal. SpaceX&#039;s multibillion-dollar deal with [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":49471,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-49470","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-usa"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49470","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=49470"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49470\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/49471"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=49470"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=49470"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=49470"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}