October 12, 2026
SpaceX buys Cursor for $60 billion; Gergely Orosz doubts top engineers will follow
SpaceX bought Cursor for $60 billion in June 2026, and Gergely Orosz doubts top engineers will join without a big deal.
Gergely Orosz
@gergelyorosz
The Cursor team is genuinely very talented. What I don't get: now that they're at SpaceX, why would anyone with offers from Anthropic, OpenAI or GDM go to SpaceX, given how badly Musk's companies treat engineers. It's hard to imagine top people going there unless they're hired through an acquisition for big money.
Elon Musk on WHY SpaceXSI acquired Cursor: “In order to create a compelling SI, you need a LOT of training data and need to SOLVE CODING. As far as I can tell, three organizations that had enough coding training data: OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor (and, arguably perhaps Google) but you ABSOLUTELY have-to-have the DATA in order to train an effective coding SI. if you can't do CODING, your SI is not going to be very useful. There’s a LOT of Talented people at Cursor. basically for success in SI you need: Data, Talent & Compute..and you also need a good Enterprise sales team. Cursor also had that good enterprise sales team with Relationships with THOUSANDS of companies. Those were VERY SIgnificant advantages.”
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Elon Musk explained the purchase with three things: data, talent and compute, plus a strong enterprise sales team. By his list, only OpenAI, Anthropic and Cursor, and possibly Google, have enough code data.
The deal was announced in June 2026 and confirmed in August. According to Cursor's blog, the partnership with SpaceXAI began in April 2026: the team gets access to “the largest GPU fleet in the world.” The post gives no specific prices, limits or migration steps.
Models are leaving. On Aug 31, OpenAI announced that from Nov 12, 2026 it will end Cursor's access to its models. According to a publication's summary, the reason is that OpenAI cannot be sure SpaceX will use the technology within the terms of use. As of Sep 26, Cursor still has Grok 4.7, Composer 2.5, Claude and Gemini.
Pricing as of Sep 26: Hobby $0, Pro $20 a month, Pro+ $60, Ultra $200, Teams $40 or $120 per seat. For anyone on a paid plan, one thing matters: from Nov 12, OpenAI models disappear from Cursor.
The main question. Gergely Orosz writes that the Cursor team is very talented, but doesn't understand why anyone with offers from Anthropic, OpenAI or Google DeepMind would join Musk's company, given how badly Musk's companies treat engineers. It's his opinion, not data: in his view, strong people are only drawn into such companies by big acquisition money.
From Nov 12, 2026, OpenAI models leave Cursor: this is the first date when the deal touches the tool itself.