SpaceX Acquires Cursor: What This $60B Deal Means for AI-Powered Development

Hi folks, welcome to another AI briefing. My name is Tom. Thank you very much for joining me on this beautifully sunny, uh, Tuesday afternoon. Um, [clears throat] today we're gonna talk about Cursor, just briefly, but also, um, how you add value to your company and organization. So for anyone who's not been paying attention, uh, um, SpaceX, uh, entered into a deal with Cursor a couple of months ago where they would do some work together, and if it proved beneficial, SpaceX would buy them for sixty billion dollars.

Uh, and then if it didn't, then Cursor would walk away with one, fifteen, some number, like a lot of money regardless. And so it seemed like a bit of a no-brainer for Cursor to enter into. Um, SpaceX now owns Cursor, pending regulatory bits and pieces, but like, you know, it's basically that. Um, so if you don't know what Cursor is, Cursor is basically an agentic AI-powered, um, uh, IDE. Um, it does a load of stuff that's pretty cool, but it's basically VS Code on steroids with a load of extra stuff built into it.

Um, and so Cursor were at the forefront of trying to come up with a way to be able to integrate, uh, AI into a developer's workflow that wasn't Claude Code's terminal, basically. Um, and so it's VS Code with a whole bunch of stuff. Under the hood, I believe it uses Anthropic's model. I'm sure you can swap 'em. I've never tried.

Um, but like, you know, you can use a whole bunch of Claude stuff inside of Cursor, where they're also then building out their own specific domain expertise for model consumption usage or that type of thing. Um, and so it goes to show, if you can be the first mover in a market or the first, like, substantial mover in a market, there is an awful lot of cash to be made. Now, I made a podcast on Engineering Evolved last night, which was about, uh, making sure that you provide value to your customers. And whilst the AI stuff is good, make sure that whatever you're trying to do actually adds additional value to the product you're creating. Now, if you just tried to go and sell VS Code as a packaged up thing, well, no one will buy it because you can go and download VS Code free, uh, from Microsoft, go and do the thing.

You don't need to, like... No one's gonna buy a packaged up version of it. But if you can then integrate tightly, uh, AI workflows and processes that greatly aid developer empowerment and optimization, and then of course, you know, I know that Cursor are looking to move away from just purely IDE stuff, and so, like, starting to broaden that scope, you can see how AI really does benefit a business like that. And so, you know, whilst companies are charging around trying to find out how to incorporate AI into their ecosystem, Cursor sort of show you how it's been done from a IDE perspective. So maybe that's a decent case study to go and have a look at.

Go and find out more. Uh, Cursor is now owned by SpaceX. So there you go. That was, uh, today's little nugget. If you haven't seen the news, SpaceX now own Cursor.

Whatever you think about Elon Musk, he's obviously expanding in the AI space. So yeah, there you go. Thank you very much for watching. I'll be back soon with another AI briefing. My name is Tom.

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