$60 billion for a coding tool - innovation or a land grab?
· By Deborah Butler
My reaction when I saw the headline was immediate: ugh!
My reaction when I saw the headline was immediate: ugh! The world’s first trillionaire (or close enough to it) just put his mucky hands on yet another corner of AI. So let’s talk about what is actually happening here. What the deal actually is SpaceX , the rocket company owned by Elon Musk, agreed to acquire Anysphere , the company behind the popular AI coding tool Cursor , in an all-stock deal reportedly valued at $60 billion. If you have not used Cursor, it is one of the most widely used AI coding assistants. Developers write code inside it and the AI autocompletes, explains, and rewrites alongside them. It became popular partly because it tried to stay model-neutral: you could plug in different AI models depending on what you needed. It was not locked to one provider. That flexibility was a feature. Note the past tense. Before the deal, Anysphere was already valued at around $29 billion. The acquisition more than doubled that overnight. Cursor’s founders and early employees will have a very nice summer. That part, at least, is straightforward. The part that is not straightforward is what a rocket company needs with a code editor. Subscribe now Why the “bu…
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