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Comment by ravenstine | Hacker News Reader

I get it and yet I don't. On one hand, my experience with Cursor (albeit limited) tells me that it's a perfect fit with Elon's other ventures. Then again, I don't see how there's anything so special about it that SpaceXAI would want to acquire it for either the software itself or the talent behind it. It seems more likely that acquiring Cursor is a way to get more users for Grok, seeing as how it still has a very small share of the market.

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I've never seen the appeal of cursor either, but then I'm a decades-long vim (now neovim) guy and don't use IDEs in general. But for me claude/codex TUIs are a great way to fit agents into my workflow.

My suspicion is that it's a way to break into more developer workflows for Grok, even if the market share is relatively small. I've never used grok and don't plan to at this point, but I have highly respected friends who say it is pretty damn good, and some of them even started using Cursor because of this pairing, so anecdatally at least it does seem to be working.

Grok has started competing with frontier models on coding thanks to Cursor's data, with SpaceX's massive compute they can undercut competition on price, which makes the offering real appealing.

I've now switched to Grok 4.6, I was previously using Opus 4.8 but Grok is good enough now, and way cheaper which is the important part.

The $20 / month isn't as good as Codex or Claude. Codex reset twice this week while I'm sitting waiting for the entire month to role around with Cursor. I have all three so can have a pulse on everything.

I don't use Cursor, I use Grok.

I’m sorry for your loss.

So they can play the game that the other big AI companies are playing, where they invest in one another to make each one look bigger on the books, even though it's all the same money, likely.

The data is special. Data of programmers using coding agents in the real world is invaluable for AI training. And their customer base is useful to deploy new models into.

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