SpaceX acquires Cursor for $60 billion to compete in enterprise AI market

SpaceX will acquire coding tool Cursor to compete with Anthropic, OpenAI

SpaceX will acquire AI coding tool Cursor for $60 billion in an all-stock transaction, the companies announced today. The deal is expected to close in the third quarter. It comes just two days after SpaceX's unprecedented IPO and a few months after the merger of SpaceX and xAI, which brought a significant restructuring of xAI. Cursor was one of the first tools to fully bake features that leverage large language models into an IDE. It's a branch of Visual Studio Code with heavy AI integration. However, incumbent platforms and bigger AI companies have since rolled out comparable features. Cursor has seen considerable revenue growth over the past year, but its market share has also slipped as Anthropic's Claude Code has achieved dominance in the space. TechCrunch reported that Cursor was struggling to break even. Early this year, the Cursor team said its future growth was bottlenecked on compute. This spring, xAI struck a deal to give Cursor access to its compute infrastructure, foreshadowing similar, larger deals with Anthropic and Google in the future. xAI and Cursor also began training models together at that time, including Grok Build, xAI's coding and knowledge work model. Those deals with Anthropic and Google have relatively favorable termination clauses for SpaceX, so if SpaceX's enterprise AI efforts take off and see high demand, it will theoretically be possible to reallocate compute from competitors directly to SpaceX and the Cursor team. This is a marriage between two companies that have arguably been falling behind in the AI race. xAI-turned-SpaceX's Grok chatbot has been riddled with controversies, but its lack of a competitive coding model or harness has also been a strategic weakness. The tool has largely been stuck in an older, chatbot-centric paradigm, compared to offerings from Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI. Cursor had good talent and a strong product, but it couldn't compete with larger companies on compute. SpaceX had the capacity but lacked the product and models to be competitive, even though much of its more than $2 trillion IPO's promise hinged on providing AI services to enterprise customers. This acquisition is a direct response to both of their problems, though it still does not guarantee success in such a competitive field.

SpaceX to acquire Cursor for $60B in stock, days after blockbuster IPO

SpaceX has agreed to acquire AI coding startup Cursor in a $60 billion stock deal, just a few days after the space company's historic IPO and less than two months after announcing a tie-up between the two. The deal is meant to help SpaceX's AI division -- built around Elon Musk's AI company xAI, which SpaceX merged with earlier this year -- catch up to the major AI labs. Despite being a centerpiece of its IPO promises, SpaceX's AI division has been in the midst of a restructuring after running into repeated controversies, like allowing users to generate non-consensual deepfakes of women and children. SpaceX told investors during the IPO process that it sees an addressable market for AI products worth $26 trillion, roughly equivalent to U.S. GDP. SpaceX said Tuesday that the acquisition is likely to close in the third quarter of this year. Before SpaceX came knocking, Cursor was on track to close a $2 billion funding round from the likes of Andreessen Horowitz, Thrive, and Nvidia that would have valued the AI coding startup at $50 billion, TechCrunch has reported. Musk's company announced a curious deal in April ahead of its IPO: it would either buy Cursor for $60 billion in stock, or pay a $10 billion break-up fee if the deal fell through. This story is developing. Check back for updates.

SpaceX is officially buying Cursor for $60 billion

Days after its massive IPO, SpaceX says it is spending $60 billion to buy Cursor -- a bet designed to help Elon Musk's sprawling rocket / AI / social media behemoth win over lucrative enterprise customers and close the gap with AI rivals like Anthropic and OpenAI. The takeover was not entirely unexpected: SpaceX announced a peculiar arrangement in April in which it agreed to either acquire the programming platform for $60 billion or pay a $10 billion breakup fee. The company had been holding off completing the deal while going public. In an SEC filing, SpaceX said it expects the deal to close during the third quarter of 2026. Musk has previously expressed his frustration with xAI's sub-par coding product, which lags behind popular tools like Anthropic's Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex. Acquiring Cursor,, which offers similar tools to automate coding, could help close the gap. The startup has grown explosively in recent years amid booming demand for more efficient programming tools and a shift towards "vibe coding" in the industry.

SpaceX Acquires AI Coding Platform Cursor for $60 Billion

UPDATE 6/16: SpaceX says it will acquire Anysphere, the parent company of AI coding platform developer Cursor, for $60 billion. Cursor will become a SpaceX subsidiary, and the company expects the deal to close in the third quarter, pending regulatory approval, SpaceX says in an SEC filing. The news comes days after SpaceX went public. Original Story 4/22: SpaceX has struck a deal with AI coding platform developer Cursor that will allow it to use xAI's Colossus supercomputer to "create the world's best coding and knowledge work AI." On X, SpaceX said, "the combination of Cursor's leading product and distribution to expert software engineers with SpaceX's million H100 equivalent Colossus training supercomputer will allow us to build the world's most useful models." As part of the deal, SpaceX will retain the option to purchase Cursor for $60 billion later this year. If it doesn't, it will owe Cursor $10 billion "for our work together." All of this comes weeks before SpaceX's impending IPO, which could value the company as high as $1.75 trillion. Although SpaceX has been primarily a rocket company for most of its existence, it has diversified in recent years. While development of the Starship launch vehicle continues apace, in 2026, SpaceX also supports 10 million+ Starlink customers. In February, it also absorbed Grok-developer xAI, making it the parent company of X and bringing most of SpaceX CEO Elon Musk's various ventures under a single banner ahead of the IPO. The Cursor deal is just the latest step in boosting SpaceX's value ahead of its IPO, but it also solves a number of problems facing SpaceX, xAI, and Cursor. It means Cursor can train its own AI model(s) on xAI's massive dataset, and would no longer be dependent on OpenAI and Anthropic to enhance its coding toolsets. In a Tuesday blog post, Cursor says it "released Composer less than six months ago as our first agentic coding model. After that, Composer 1.5 scaled reinforcement learning by over 20x. Composer 2 then added continued pretraining, reaching frontier-level performance at a fraction of the cost of other models. Each step up in compute has translated to meaningfully more capable models." It acknowledged, however, that Cursor has "been bottlenecked by compute," so the SpaceX deal means "our team will leverage xAI's Colossus infrastructure to dramatically scale up the intelligence of our models." This move also gives xAI its own coding tool to better compete with contemporary AI firms, and it adds even more narrative and actual value to SpaceX. Cursor's momentum can now fuel the continued expansion and growth of xAI and Grok, which has struggled to maintain relevance versus ChatGPT, Gemini, and other AI chatbots. SpaceX also locks Cursor at a set value for its potential purchase, which, at the rate Cursor's valuation has grown, is a victory in itself. Cursor was valued at just $2.5 billion in January 2025, but that jumped to $29.3 billion by year's end, The Wall Street Journal reports. Last week, it was looking at a funding round that would push its estimated value to over $50 billion. However, this also represents a strategic risk for SpaceX. Although Cursor and xAI may be able to develop a proprietary coding tool to compete with other major AI companies, doing so will take time. If it takes too long, or never quite catches up, SpaceX could be saddled with a company that peaked before it was purchased. That's on top of the debt it acquired with the mergers with xAI and its subsidiary, Twitter/X. Fortunately for Musk and his fellow SpaceX shareholders, the IPO will probably come before the gamble needs to show its returns. But with Musk claiming xAI needs to be rebuilt from the ground up, how it is rebuilt may go a long way to deciding it and Cursor's long-term future.

SpaceX to buy Cursor AI coding agent operator Anysphere for $60 billion

June 16 (Reuters) - Elon Musk's SpaceX (SPCX.O), opens new tab said on Tuesday it would acquire Anysphere, the software firm behind the popular AI coding agent Cursor, for $60 billion, in a bid to ramp up its foothold in the enterprise AI market. The announcement comes just days after Musk took his rockets-to-AI company public ⁠in a blockbuster Nasdaq debut that valued the firm at more than $2 trillion and immediately made it one of the world's most valuable companies. SpaceX said it expects the merger to close during the third quarter of 2026. Along with OpenAI and Anthropic, Cursor is one of several Silicon ⁠Valley startups that have drawn waves of developers by using artificial intelligence to automate coding, a business where AI companies have found early commercial ⁠traction. The deal could give xAI, the Grok chatbot maker that SpaceX merged with in February, a stronger foothold ⁠in the AI coding market where it has so far lagged rivals. It also ⁠provides Cursor with more computing capacity to develop AI models. Reporting by Deborah Sophia in Bengaluru; Editing by Shilpi Majumdar and Sriraj Kalluvila Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab

SpaceX is buying AI coding startup Cursor for $60 billion - Engadget

The all-stock acquisition concludes an agreement the two announced in April. SpaceX has agreed to buy AI startup Cursor for $60 billion in stock, concluding a deal that was first announced earlier this year. In April, the two companies signed a partnership that saw SpaceX agree to either invest $10 billion into Cursor or buy it outright for $60 billion. Now, less than two months later, the two are moving forward with an acquisition, which SpaceX expects to close later this year. Cursor is known for its AI coding tool of the same name. As recently as April, the company was reportedly in talks to raise approximately $2 billion in new funding from Andreessen Horowitz, NVIDIA and other investors. However, TechCrunch reports that even had Cursor secured that funding, it wouldn't have been enough for it to break even. That's despite the company raising $2.3 billion last year. As for SpaceX, Cursor represents a way for it to shore up its xAI division. As you might recall, SpaceX bought Elon Musk's AI lab in February, which itself merged with X (formerly Twitter) last year. But despite being the centerpiece of SpaceX's IPO pitch to investors, the division has been mired in controversy. In July of last year, Grok, xAI's chatbot, briefly took a hard turn toward antisemitism when it called itself MechaHitler in response to some user prompts. More recently, xAI allowed Grok users to users to generate sexualized images of women and children. In the aftermath of those incidents, all 11 of Musk's xAI co-founders departed the company. Musk has said xAI "was not built right [the] first time around," and that the division is in the process of rebuilding itself from the ground up. Now the world's first trillionaire has bet $60 billion that Cursor can help with that undertaking.

SpaceX to acquire the AI coding startup Cursor for $60 billion

SpaceX to buy Cursor AI parent company Anysphere in $60 billion deal SpaceX on Tuesday announced it has acquired the artificial intelligence startup Cursor for $60 billion, just days after Elon Musk's rocket-maker debuted on the Nasdaq in the biggest initial public offering ever. Cursor built a popular AI coding tool that helps software developers generate, edit and review code, and the company has experienced explosive growth since its founding in 2022. In November, Cursor said it crossed $1 billion in annualized revenue, according to a release at the time. Musk merged SpaceX with his AI startup, xAI, earlier this year, and the Cursor deal will help to bolster the company's efforts to compete with rivals like Anthropic and OpenAI, which also offer popular coding tools. SpaceX expects the merger to close during the third quarter of this year, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. SpaceX President and COO Gwynne Shotwell recently told CNBC's Morgan Brennan that the Cursor partnership "makes a huge amount of sense." SpaceX shares climbed roughly 5% in premarket trading on Tuesday. SpaceX and Cursor did not immediately respond to CNBC's request for comment. In April, SpaceX said it had obtained the right to acquire Cursor for $60 billion later this year. If, for some reason, the deal did not occur, SpaceX had agreed to pay Cursor $10 billion for their collaboration. Cursor CEO Michael Truell said in a post on X at the time that he's, "Excited to partner with the SpaceX team to scale up Composer," referring to his company's AI model. "A meaningful step on our path to build the best place to code with AI."

SpaceX buys AI coding startup Cursor for $60 billion in race for an edge over Anthropic and OpenAI

SpaceX will move forward with its $60 billion acquisition of artificial intelligence startup Cursor as Elon Musk's space exploration and AI company seeks a competitive edge against rivals Anthropic and OpenAI after its Wall Street debut last week. SpaceX said in April that it had the rights to buy Cursor, or pay $10 billion to "work together" with the company. In a regulatory filing Tuesday, SpaceX said that Cursor will become a wholly owned subsidiary when the deal closes in the third quarter. Cursor, made by San Francisco startup Anysphere, is a popular AI coding assistant. What SpaceX has described as Cursor's wide "distribution to expert software engineers" is likely part of what made it attractive to Musk's company, giving it access to a new customer base. When it first announced the potential acquisition, Cursor said the partnership with SpaceX subsidiary xAI would enable it to build future AI products using xAI's massive AI data center complex Colossus, based in Memphis, Tennessee. Cursor, which started in 2022, helped sparked a trend called "vibe coding" as AI coding assistants have become increasingly capable of doing the work of computer programming. Cursor competes with other coding tools like Anthropic's Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex but also has relied heavily on partnerships with those larger AI research companies for the foundations of its technology. It was Cursor's Composer, combined with Anthropic's Claude Sonnet, that a prominent AI researcher was playing with for weekend projects when he coined the phrase "vibe coding" in early 2025. SpaceX became a public company on Friday in what is largely considered a successful debut. Shares of the company have jumped since Friday, and are up 9% before the opening bell Tuesday.

SpaceX acquires AI coding startup Cursor for $60 billion, days after record IPO

Serving tech enthusiasts for over 25 years. TechSpot means tech analysis and advice you can trust. Why it matters: SpaceX is acquiring Anysphere, the San Francisco startup behind the popular AI coding assistant Cursor, in an all-stock deal valued at $60 billion. This is the largest acquisition of a VC-backed startup on record. The timing is deliberate. SpaceX went public just four days ago in the biggest IPO in stock market history, raising $85.7 billion and initially valuing the company at over $2 trillion. Since the IPO, SpaceX shares have climbed more than 56% from the $135 offer price, briefly pushing SpaceX past Amazon to become the world's fifth most valuable company. Paying in stock rather than cash means SpaceX is using that inflated currency to its advantage. As investor Bill Ackman put it, the deal costs "materially less in dilution" precisely because SpaceX's valuation is so high. The acquisition is a direct response to the struggles of SpaceXAI, the internal division formed when SpaceX absorbed Elon Musk's xAI earlier this year. Despite anchoring nearly the entire SpaceX IPO pitch, the company told investors it sees a $26 trillion addressable market in AI, including a $22.7 trillion opportunity in enterprise applications. But xAI has failed to build a competitive coding product so far. Cursor is what xAI couldn't produce. The tool, which lets developers write, debug, and modify code through natural-language prompts, has become one of the most widely used AI coding assistants among professional engineers. Customers include Stripe, Adobe, and Nvidia - whose CEO Jensen Huang has called it his "favorite enterprise AI service." It reportedly carries roughly $2.6 billion in annualized B2B revenue, with enterprise sales growing sharply. SpaceX will pay a termination fee of $10 billion if the deal collapses under most circumstances, dropping to $4 billion if the deal fails specifically due to antitrust issues. But this arrangement didn't come out of nowhere. SpaceX disclosed the option to buy Cursor in April - at the same $60 billion figure, with the same $10 billion breakup fee - while holding off on completing the buyout until after the IPO. The most pressing question for the developers who use Cursor daily is what happens to its model-agnostic design. The tool currently runs on Anthropic's Claude, OpenAI's GPT, and its own Composer models simultaneously, a core part of its appeal. SpaceX said it plans to release an AI model directly on Cursor, which the two companies have been jointly training for several months. Whether SpaceX eventually makes Grok the primary backend, or preserves that flexibility to protect Cursor's market position, will be the clearest signal of how this integration is being handled.

SpaceX buys AI coding start-up Cursor for $60bn days after IPO

SpaceX has agreed to buy AI coding start-up Cursor for $60bn (£45bn) just days after its bumper initial public offering (IPO). Elon Musk's rocket company will take over Anysphere, which makes the artificial intelligence coding agent. The move comes after SpaceX joined New York's tech-focused Nasdaq stock exchange on Friday in the biggest ever listing, valuing it at more than $2tn and raising $85.7bn. The companies have been partners since April, when SpaceX announced it had the right to either buy it for $60bn, or pay $10bn for the work they have done together. Like OpenAI and Anthropic, Cursor's technology uses AI to automate the process of writing code, one of the most prominent current uses for artificial intelligence. Its tie-up with SpaceX comes as Musk's company tries to catch up with rivals by growing its AI business, xAI, which is behind the controversial Grok chatbot. Announcing the partnership in April, SpaceX said: "The combination of Cursor's leading product and distribution to expert software engineers with SpaceX's million H100 equivalent Colossus training supercomputer will allow us to build the world's most useful models." Cursor is used by major companies including Stripe, Adobe and Nvidia, whose boss Jensen Huang has described it as his "favourite enterprise AI service". SpaceX said the deal would be completed by the end of September, with Cursor's shareholders paid with $60bn worth of SpaceX shares. SpaceX's shares have soared by almost 50% from their $135 offer price, including a bumper first full day on the public markets. The company's listing also made Musk the world's first trillionaire, sparking a debate about inequality and wealth taxes. SpaceX's valuation is largely based on optimism about its potential future earnings, as opposed to financial results it has demonstrated so far. It is currently not profitable, meaning it loses more money from its operations than it makes. The company lost more than $9bn in 2025 and 2026 so far, according to its financial filings, due to its huge spending on AI and other infrastructure investments. The biggest focus of its business is the manufacture and launch of rockets with reusable parts. SpaceX also manufactures and launches Starlink internet satellites, and through this year's acquisition of xAI, another company Musk owned and operated, it entered into the AI business too.

Riding High After I.P.O., SpaceX to Buy A.I. Start-Up for $60 Billion

SpaceX exercised its option to acquire Cursor in an all-stock deal, bolstering Elon Musk's ambitions in artificial intelligence. SpaceX said on Tuesday that it would acquire the parent company of Cursor, an artificial intelligence code-writing start-up, for $60 billion, just days after its record-breaking debut on public markets for Elon Musk's rocket and A.I. company. SpaceX agreed to a deal with Cursor in April that gave it the option to acquire the company, an arrangement that would "allow us to build the world's most useful" A.I. models, SpaceX said at the time. It pushed ahead with an all-stock acquisition with Anysphere, the parent of Cursor, after SpaceX's initial public offering last week. The company's shares have continued to climb sharply since they started trading on Friday, making Mr. Musk the world's first trillionaire. The company is now valued at roughly $2.5 trillion. Its stock rose more than 4 percent in premarket trading on Monday. Mr. Musk, who is also the chief executive of Tesla, has been increasingly interested in expanding his empire into A.I. He founded xAI, the maker of the Grok chatbot that was built to compete with rivals like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Anthropic's Claude. In February, SpaceX merged with xAI in a deal that valued the combined venture at more than $1 trillion. SpaceX has also announced plans for a huge A.I. chip manufacturing plant in Texas, and it has inked deals with both Google and Anthropic to provide computing power. Mr. Musk's companies have a history of merging with one another, but they rarely acquire outside companies. The acquisition of Cursor is expected to close in the third quarter of this year, SpaceX said in a regulatory filing. Cursor was founded in 2022 and quickly made waves as tech companies adopted its tools. It amassed billions in funding from top investment firms including Thrive Capital, Andreessen Horowitz and Accel. In April, when the potential acquisition was first announced, Cursor said that its lack of access to computing power for training its A.I. models had "bottlenecked" its growth. The deal with SpaceX would give it access to xAI's infrastructure.

After Raising More Money Than God, SpaceX Is Ready to Tie the Knot With Cursor

The world's first trillionaire, Elon Musk, is not wasting any time building up SpaceX's AI credentials after the company's history-making IPO. SpaceX has agreed to acquire Anysphere, the parent company of Cursor, in a $60 billion all-stock deal, according to a regulatory filing. The acquisition is expected to close in the third quarter of this year. Cursor is best known for its AI-powered coding editor and AI coding agents. SpaceX and Cursor did not immediately respond to requests for comment. However, the companies teased a potential merger in April, when they announced they would work "closely together to create the world's best coding and knowledge work AI." Under that earlier agreement, SpaceX secured the right to acquire Cursor for $60 billion or pay $10 billion for their work together. "The combination of Cursor's leading product and distribution to expert software engineers with SpaceX's million H100 equivalent Colossus training supercomputer will allow us to build the world's most useful models," SpaceX posted on X at the time. SpaceX gets busy after its IPO The deal comes just days after SpaceX went public in a record-breaking IPO. Last week, the SpaceX priced its shares at $135 each, making it the largest stock debut in history. The company sold about 555 million shares during the offering, raising roughly $75 billion. As of Tuesday morning, SpaceX shares had soared more than 50% to about $211, putting the company on track to overtake Amazon as the fifth-largest company by market cap. SpaceX's argument for its massive IPO is that the company has an absurdly high future earnings potential. In its IPO filing, SpaceX estimated it has a $28.5 trillion total addressable market, with roughly $26.5 trillion expected to come from AI alone. Still, the company is currently unprofitable, and it only acquired Musk's xAI, the parent company of the social media site formerly known as Twitter and the controversial Grok chatbot, earlier this year. Musk is putting a lot of hope into xAI's ability to compete Unfortunately for Musk, things haven't been going great for xAI: the company has lost all of its non-Musk co-founders, and SpaceX has warned investors that some Grok features could potentially expose SpaceX to a range of regulatory and reputational risks. SpaceX also revealed in its IPO filing that it is already under investigation in the United States and internationally over allegations that its AI tools were used to make nonconsensual deepfakes of minors. This isn't the first time Grok has been bad for business. Last year, an update meant to address what Musk described as a "center-left bias" instead led Grok to generate antisemitic propaganda, even referring to itself as "MechaHitler." Now, it seems Musk is turning to Cursor to help turn the ship around. "xAI was not built right first time around, so is being rebuilt from the foundations up," Musk posted on X in March, after a Cursor engineer joined xAI. "Same thing happened with Tesla." Buying Cursor appears to be SpaceX's attempt to catch up to AI rivals like OpenAI and Anthropic before they make their own Wall Street debuts.

SpaceX makes its $60bn Cursor takeover official

Elon Musk's newly listed rocket company has signed a binding, all-stock deal to buy Anysphere, the startup behind the AI coding tool Cursor. It confirms an option SpaceX disclosed in April, and is meant to help xAI's Grok catch up on code. SpaceX has made it official. In a filing on Tuesday, Elon Musk's newly public rocket company said it had signed a binding agreement to buy Anysphere, the startup behind the popular AI coding tool Cursor, in an all-stock deal that values the company at $60bn. It confirms an option SpaceX first disclosed in April, and it lands just days after the largest IPO in history. The terms are spelled out in an 8-K filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. A SpaceX subsidiary, X67 Inc., will merge into Cursor, which survives as a wholly owned subsidiary. Cursor's shares convert into SpaceX Class A stock based on an implied equity value of $60bn, priced on the company's average share price over the seven trading days before the deal closes. SpaceX expects that to happen in the third quarter of 2026, subject to regulatory approval. Why SpaceX wants Cursor The logic is catch-up. SpaceX absorbed Musk's AI company xAI in February, and its Grok model has lagged rivals from Anthropic, OpenAI and Google, especially at writing code. Cursor is one of the fastest-growing names in exactly that field, with around $2.6bn in annualised business revenue, according to figures it shared with Reuters. Musk has already claimed on X that newer versions of Grok improved after training on "a lot" of Cursor data. SpaceX told IPO investors it sees an addressable AI market worth $26 trillion, roughly the size of the US economy, even as its AI division goes through a restructuring after a run of controversies. A price that pre-empted a funding round The $60bn tag is striking because Cursor never needed to sell. The company, founded in 2022 and led by 25-year-old chief executive Michael Truell, was on track to close a $2bn round from Andreessen Horowitz, Thrive and Nvidia at a $50bn valuation before SpaceX intervened. April's unusual deal gave SpaceX the right either to buy Cursor for $60bn in stock or to pay a $10bn break-up fee if it walked. It chose to buy. One open question is compute: SpaceX has lately agreed to lease cloud capacity worth roughly $26bn a year to Anthropic and Google, both deals carrying 90-day termination clauses, and it is not yet clear how owning a hungry AI lab of its own changes that maths.

SpaceX buys AI coding startup Cursor for $60 billion in race for an edge over Anthropic and OpenAI

SpaceX will move forward with its $60 billion acquisition of artificial intelligence startup Cursor as Elon Musk's space exploration and AI company seeks a competitive edge against rivals Anthropic and OpenAI after its Wall Street debut last week. SpaceX said in April that it had the rights to buy Cursor, or pay $10 billion to "work together" with the company. In a regulatory filing Tuesday, SpaceX said that Cursor will become a wholly owned subsidiary when the deal closes in the third quarter. Cursor, made by San Francisco startup Anysphere, is a popular AI coding assistant. What SpaceX has described as Cursor's wide "distribution to expert software engineers" is likely part of what made it attractive to Musk's company, giving it access to a new customer base. When it first announced the potential acquisition, Cursor said the partnership with SpaceX subsidiary xAI would enable it to build future AI products using xAI's massive AI data center complex Colossus, based in Memphis, Tennessee. Cursor, which started in 2022, helped sparked a trend called "vibe coding" as AI coding assistants have become increasingly capable of doing the work of computer programming. Cursor competes with other coding tools like Anthropic's Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex but also has relied heavily on partnerships with those larger AI research companies for the foundations of its technology. It was Cursor's Composer, combined with Anthropic's Claude Sonnet, that a prominent AI researcher was playing with for weekend projects when he coined the phrase "vibe coding" in early 2025. SpaceX became a public company on Friday in what is largely considered a successful debut. Shares of the company have jumped since Friday, and are up 9% before the opening bell Tuesday.

Elon Musk's SpaceX strikes $60B Cursor deal as coding race heats up

SpaceX has agreed to acquire coding startup Cursor in a $60 billion all-stock deal, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The acquisition deepens the Elon Musk-led company's push into artificial intelligence software and developer tools just days after its record-breaking Nasdaq debut. The deal brings San Francisco-based Anysphere, the company behind Cursor, under the SpaceX umbrella as thje company looks to strengthen its position against rivals such as OpenAI and Anthropic in the fast-growing AI coding market. SpaceX announced the massive deal in a post on X, saying: "SpaceX has exercised the option to acquire @cursor_ai in an all-stock transaction with the goal of building the world's most useful AI models." The company added that it has been jointly training a model with Cursor over the past several months and plans to release it in both Cursor and Grok Build, xAI's coding agent, in the near future. The acquisition comes after an agreement between the two companies in April that gave SpaceX the right to acquire Cursor at a predetermined valuation. According to SpaceX's SEC filing, the companies also entered into a compute partnership under which SpaceX would provide GPU cluster capacity and collaborate on improving existing models, including Grok, while potentially developing new AI products together. In the filing, SpaceX described software development as a strategically important AI use case because it generates structured, verifiable data and frequent user feedback. The company said Cursor's coding workflows provide valuable developer interaction data, including coding prompts, iteration cycles and software architecture decisions that could help improve model training and inference. Cursor has emerged as one of the fastest-growing AI software companies since its founding in 2022. Reports suggest that the company has reached roughly $2.6 billion in annualized business-to-business revenue and has recently been discussing a funding round that would have valued it at $50 billion. The startup's coding assistant is widely used by developers to generate, edit, and review software code. Cursor counts major companies such as Stripe, Adobe and Nvidia among its users, while Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has described it as his "favourite enterprise AI service." SpaceX said the acquisition will help advance its broader AI strategy by integrating its models more directly into developer workflows and expanding distribution through high-engagement software products. "We look forward to working closely with the Cursor team to advance our frontier AI capabilities," SpaceX said in its announcement. Cursor also welcomed the deal, posting on X: "We're excited to join forces with @SpaceX to advance the frontier of useful AI. Expect significant improvements to Cursor soon." The acquisition follows SpaceX's blockbuster stock market debut last week. Reuters reported that the company's valuation climbed above $2 trillion after the listing. The company's shares surged further Tuesday, briefly pushing SpaceX past Amazon by market value. SpaceX expects the transaction to close during the third quarter of 2026, subject to regulatory approvals. Once completed, the deal would give the company direct control of one of the industry's most prominent AI coding platforms while expanding access to developer data that it believes can strengthen future versions of Grok and other AI models.

SpaceX to ​buy ⁠Cursor AI parent Anysphere ⁠for $60 billion

Elon Musk's SpaceX said on Tuesday it would acquire Anysphere, ⁠the software firm behind the popular artificial intelligence coding agent Cursor, for $60 billion, in a bid to expand its foothold in the enterprise AI market. The announcement ⁠comes just days after Musk ⁠took his rockets-to-AI company public in a blockbuster Nasdaq debut that valued the firm at more than $2 trillion and immediately made it one of the world's most valuable companies. SpaceX said it expects the merger to close during the third quarter of 2026. Along with ⁠OpenAI and Anthropic, Cursor is one of several Silicon Valley startups that have drawn waves of developers by using artificial intelligence to automate coding, a ⁠business where AI companies have found early commercial ⁠traction. The deal could give ⁠xAI, the Grok chatbot maker that SpaceX merged with in February, a stronger foothold in the AI coding market where it has so far lagged rivals. It also provides Cursor with more computing capacity to develop AI models.

SpaceX purchases Cursor, a Claude Code and OpenAI Codex competitor [U]

When SpaceX isn't landing rockets, it's apparently landing AI company deals. In February, the firm behind Starlink absorbed xAI, which includes Twitter-turned-X. In April, SpaceX inked a deal with Cursor, a competitor to Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex. Update 6/16/2026: SpaceX has acquired Cursor a week after becoming a publicly traded company. Updated original story below: SpaceX strikes $10 billion deal with Cursor that may lead to $60 billion acquisition Cursor has been popular with software engineers who code with AI on the Mac. It was one of the first services to connect large language model artificial intelligence to the process of building apps. In April, SpaceX and Cursor are "working closely together to create the world's best coding and knowledge work AI," the two companies say. The collaboration originally included a $10 billion payment from SpaceX to Cursor: Cursor shared more details about the arrangement in April ahead of today's acquisition: Cursor is partnering with SpaceX to accelerate our model training efforts. We released Composer less than six months ago as our first agentic coding model. After that, Composer 1.5 scaled reinforcement learning by over 20x. Composer 2 then added continued pretraining, reaching frontier-level performance at a fraction of the cost of other models. Each step up in compute has translated to meaningfully more capable models. We've wanted to push our training efforts much further, but we've been bottlenecked by compute. With this partnership, our team will leverage xAI's Colossus infrastructure to dramatically scale up the intelligence of our models The SpaceX-Cursor arrangement strengthens a competitor to Anthropic's Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex agentic coding software.

SpaceX just spent $60 billion on Cursor -- and it proves AI chatbots aren't the future anymore

This deal highlights the beginning of a new AI era, one that moves away from chatbots and towards agents For the past few years, artificial intelligence has largely meant chatbots. Every few weeks, Anthropic, OpenAI and Google (among others) race to launch a smarter, faster model before the competition. And while the simple interface helped launch the AI boom, it also made AI approachable for the average person to use. But one of the biggest AI deals of the year suggests the industry may already be moving beyond chatbots. According to Reuters, SpaceX has agreed to acquire Cursor maker Anysphere in a deal valued at roughly $60 billion. While most chatbot users have never heard of Cursor, developers have embraced it as one of the most powerful AI coding assistants available today. And that's exactly why this aqcuisition is a really big deal. SpaceX is betting on agents When ChatGPT launched in late 2022, the breakthrough wasn't just the technology. It was the interface, which made AI feel as simple to use as sending a text message. The chat window became the default way we interacted with AI and even searched the web. Upon OpenAI's success, every major company followed suit. Google built Gemini, Anthropic built Claude and Microsoft integrated Copilot across its products. Even Elon Musk's xAI launched Grok. Now, the most valuable AI tools are increasingly moving away from answering questions and toward completing tasks. That's where Cursor comes in. Unlike a traditional chatbot, Cursor isn't designed primarily for conversation, but rather built to help developers write, edit, understand and debug software. Instead of acting like an assistant you chat with, it becomes part of the workflow itself. The goal for AI agents is to help someone work more efficiently. Why investors are paying attention A $60 billion valuation sounds shocking until you look at where AI companies are actually making money. Users love free chatbots. Businesses will willingly pay for productivity solutions. That's exactly why coding assistants have become the hottest categories in AI. Companies are discovering that AI tools capable of saving employees hours each week are often easier to monetize than general-purpose chatbots. If an AI coding assistant helps a developer complete projects faster, the return on investment becomes relatively easy to calculate. Developers tend to be early adopters. They use AI all day, every day. And unlike casual chatbot users, they're often willing to pay significant subscription fees if the tools genuinely improve their productivity. The result is a growing market for AI systems that function less like conversational partners and more like coworkers. The chat window is becoming a control panel I've written before that the chatbot era may already be ending, even if most people haven't noticed yet. The reason is simply that the interface is becoming less important than the actions happening behind it. OpenAI is building tools that can perform tasks on your behalf, Anthropic continues expanding Claude's project capabilities, and Google is embedding AI deeper into Search, Workspace and Android. And while the chat box still exists, it's inceasingly becoming a command center rather than the destination itself. Coding assistants like Cursor are one of the clearest examples of the latest shift because software development is highly structured work. But the same idea is spreading into research, customer support, content creation, scheduling, shopping and countless other tasks. What this means for everyday users If you're wondering why you need Cursor right now, don't worry. Most people won't start using Cursor tomorrow. But, it is worth paying attention to why this acquisition happened. It says a lot about the way opportunities for AI are shifting towards building entire systems that can handle large chunks of work with minimal supervision. For employees who currently use chatbots for answers, SpaceX's purchase highlights the fact that AI might be closer to becoming a coworker. It will be interesting to see how the next phase of the AI race takes on a new face as big tech races to build the most useful agent. Follow Tom's Guide on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our up-to-date news, analysis, and reviews in your feeds. Subscribe to Tom's Guide on YouTube and follow us on TikTok. Finally, you can visit our dedicated Tom's Guide Savings Squad hub for expert help on getting the best products for less.

SpaceX Acquires AI Coding Tool Cursor For $60B In Year's Largest Startup M&A Deal

SpaceX, fresh off its record-breaking IPO, formalized plans to purchase the startup behind the popular AI coding tool Cursor for $60 billion in an all-stock deal, marking one of the largest acquisitions of a venture-backed startup in recent years and the biggest so far in 2026. The acquisition represents an enormous return on investment for Cursor's backers. Since its founding just four years ago, parent company Anysphere raised $3.4 billion from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, repeat backer Thrive Capital, Accel and Coatue and was most recently valued at roughly $30 billion in November, per Crunchbase. The acquisition gives SpaceX, which raised $75 billion in its IPO last week, a foothold into the enterprise software development market, where AI-assisted coding has taken off and led large companies to significantly pare back their reliance on human engineers. Cursor said in November last year that it had crossed $1 billion in annualized revenue. Hawthorne, California-based SpaceX has in recent years expanded beyond space exploration to become something of an umbrella company for CEO Elon Musk's numerous other interests and ambitions, as the company acquired the social media platform X (formerly Twitter) and the AI company xAI. SpaceX shares jumped around 16% on Tuesday following the Cursor announcement. This year has proven robust for M&A activity involving venture-backed startups, Crunchbase data shows. Through June 16, at least 1,177 such deals altogether valued at $182.7 billion have been announced. That compares with 1,132 deals valued at $106.7 billion in the same period last year.

SpaceX to buy AI coding firm Anysphere for $60bn and passes Amazon valuation

Elon Musk firm adds startup behind Cursor app to its portfolio with xAI and reaches $2.8tn market capitalisation Elon Musk's SpaceX is buying the startup behind the AI-powered coding app Cursor for $60bn and has moved ahead of Amazon in valuation days after its stock market debut. The company has agreed to buy Anysphere, which has capitalised on AI's success as a coding technology. SpaceX is the parent of Musk's AI business xAI, which will be able to boost its capabilities in an area - AI systems writing code - that has proven to be a strong commercial success for Anthropic, the rival company behind the Claude chatbot. The news was announced as SpaceX passed Amazon in market capitalisation, a key measure of value for a publicly listed company. SpaceX was worth just under $2.8tn after its shares rose 13% on opening on the Nasdaq index on Tuesday, overtaking Amazon's $2.66tn to become the world's fifth most valuable company by market value. SpaceX floated at $135 per share on Friday and its shares have risen by approximately 60% since then. The float made Musk, SpaceX's founder and chief executive, the world's first trillionaire. The 54-year-old is now worth $1.27tn, according to Bloomberg. SpaceX had been circling Cursor for months. It said in April it had secured an option to either buy the San Francisco-based firm for $60bn later this year or pay $10bn for a partnership. Cursor will be paid in stock under the deal, a regulatory filing showed, and the deal will not use proceeds from SpaceX's IPO. The transaction is expected to close in the third quarter of 2026.

Elon's super currency: SpaceX' surging stock paid for the $60 billion Cursor acquisition in just a few hours of trading | Fortune

SpaceX's stunning IPO pop has driven Elon Musk's net worth to astronomical levels. It's also given him an extraordinary business tool: a supercurrency for mergers and acquisitions. Musk demonstrated the power of that currency on Tuesday when SpaceX announced its acquisition of AI coding startup Cursor for $60 billion in stock. Some say the deal may be the largest ever acquisition of a venture-backed startup. While SpaceX and Cursor had announced a deal in April that gave SpaceX a call option to buy the startup after the IPO for $60 billion in stock, Wall Street's appetite for SpaceX stock has transformed the economics of the deal for Musk. In theory, the deal has cost Musk almost nothing. SpaceX is paying for Cursor entirely in stock -- and that stock has appreciated by several times the initial price of the deal. SpaceX opened at $135 per share on June 12 and closed Monday at $192.46, giving SpaceX a market cap of $2.51 trillion -- up roughly $740 billion from its IPO valuation in less than four trading days. The $60 billion Cursor acquisition represents less than a tenth of that gain. In fact, SpaceX's stock appreciated by the entire cost of Cursor in a matter of hours on its first day of trading. "The IPO gave SpaceX a valuation and a premium currency," Franco Granda, Senior Analyst at Pitchbook who covers SpaceX told Fortune over email. "Signing a $60 billion all-stock deal four days after listing, with the stock up more than 50% from the offer price, shows the playbook. SpaceX can now buy a company that size without touching cash, debt, or IPO proceeds, and the higher the stock runs, the cheaper the deal feels." What's more, Granda said, SpaceX's dual-class structure, in which Musk controls nearly all the votes, "removes the last bit of friction," allowing SpaceX to "move at a speed no normal large-cap acquirer can." SpaceX raised $86.2 billion after exercising its greenshoe option to purchase additional shares -- the largest IPO ever -- giving Musk both a cash war chest and a public stock he can deploy as acquisition currency without touching it. The Cursor deal is the first demonstration of what that looks like in practice. A win, win deal The deal is a nice outcome for Cursor too, of course. Three months ago, Silicon Valley was preemptively writing the AI coding startup's obituary. Cursor was thought to be losing ground to rivals like Anthropic's Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex. Cursor cofounder and CEO Michael Truell, 25, is now, on paper, one of the youngest billionaires in history. The San Francisco-based startup, which is backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Thrive Capital, and Accel, and was last formally valued at $29.3 billion in November 2025, builds AI coding tools used by 67% of the Fortune 500, generating 150 million lines of enterprise code a day. It was, by some measures, the fastest-scaling B2B software company ever. The company hit $1 billion in annualized revenue in under 24 months, and $4 billion as of this year, with its enterprise segment tripling in the first quarter alone. The $60 billion acquisition price is paid in Class A SpaceX shares, priced at the volume-weighted average closing price of SpaceX over the seven trading days immediately before the deal closes. Cursor's founders and investors won't know their exact share count until then -- but at current prices, $60 billion buys roughly 312 million SpaceX shares. The higher SPCX climbs before closing, the fewer shares Cursor receives; the lower it falls, the more shares Cursor collects, and the more upside it retains. SpaceX had the option to continue working with Cursor under existing contracts, and pay a combined breakup fee and deferred services fee of $10 billion if it chose not to exercise the acquisition option. But as Musk made AI a greater part of the SpaceX story in marketing the IPO, Cursor provides an important piece of SpaceX's AI infrastructure puzzle that includes the Grok AI model and the Colossus datacenter. Cursor's enterprise footprint makes it a high-frequency developer platform feeding real-world coding data back into Grok's training pipeline. Per the S-1, SpaceX expects that data to directly enhance "model training and inference, including with respect to Grok." For Pitchbook's Granda, there is also a defensive motive for SpaceX. "Cursor is among the fastest-growing assets in enterprise AI," he explained. "Paying in richly valued stock is a low-friction way to ensure no rival owns it. When your currency is appreciating this fast, locking up a scarce asset with paper is an easy call, almost regardless of whether Composer ever becomes a real frontier contender." SpaceX rivals OpenAI and Anthropic are both racing to list their shares as well; both companies have recently filed the paperwork to begin the IPO process. Until they go public however, Musk's new currency will give him a big advantage in the market -- so long as the stock price stays high.

SpaceX Shares Hit New High as Elon Musk's Firm Agrees to Acquire AI Startup Cursor for $60 Billion

Shares of SpaceX have climbed above $200 since the company's IPO last week. SpaceX shares hit a new high on Tuesday after Elon Musk's company announced a $60 billion all-stock deal to acquire AI coding startup Cursor, extending a post-IPO rally that has pushed SpaceX's stock above $210 per share, according to MarketWatch. The Cursor acquisition was disclosed in a Form 8-K filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. "SpaceX has exercised the option to acquire [Cursor] in an all-stock transaction with the goal of building the world's most useful AI models," SpaceX said in a post on X. "For the past few months, SpaceXAI has been jointly training a model with Cursor, which will be released in Cursor and Grok Build soon." The deal had been in the works for months. According to the filing, SpaceX secured an exclusive option in April to acquire Anysphere, the company behind Cursor, or pay a $10 billion breakup fee. After exercising that option on June 16, SpaceX signed a $60 billion merger agreement with Anysphere and its subsidiary X67 that will make the AI coding startup a wholly owned SpaceX subsidiary. Anysphere shareholders will receive SpaceX Class A stock based on the company's average share price over the seven trading days preceding the deal's close. The acquisition is expected to close in the third quarter of 2026, pending regulatory approval. Founded in 2022 as Anysphere, Cursor has emerged as one of the leading AI coding platforms as developers increasingly adopt generative AI and AI agents to write and review software. Before agreeing to the acquisition, the company was reportedly raising a $2 billion funding round that would have valued it at $50 billion. Earlier this year, Cursor announced the latest version of its software, Cursor 3 which it described as a "unified workspace for building software with agents." "We're excited to join forces with [SpaceX] to advance the frontier of useful AI," Cursor wrote on X. "Expect significant improvements to Cursor soon." However, Cursor has not been without controversy. In April, PocketOS founder Jeremy Crane claimed an AI agent powered by Cursor deleted the startup's database in nine seconds, before explaining how it happened. The deal comes days after SpaceX's historic IPO, with shares rising above $200 and reaching as high as $210 on Tuesday. In its April 2026 confidential filing with the SEC, SpaceX said that AI represents a major growth opportunity, reaching as high as $2.4 trillion for AI infrastructure and $22.7 trillion for enterprise applications. The Cursor acquisition strengthens SpaceX's push into AI-powered development and infrastructure. "We look forward to working closely with the Cursor team to advance our frontier AI capabilities," SpaceX said on X.

SpaceX snaps up AI coding star Cursor in $60bn bet to challenge OpenAI

SpaceX has agreed to acquire Anysphere, the company behind the popular AI coding tool Cursor, in an all-stock deal valuing the startup at $60 billion (€51.7bn), just days after Elon Musk's firm had a record-breaking IPO. SpaceX is pushing deeper into AI with its largest acquisition yet, striking a $60 billion (€51.7bn) all-stock agreement to buy Anysphere, the developer of the AI coding assistant Cursor. The purchase, announced on Tuesday, is intended to strengthen SpaceX's position in the enterprise AI market, where rivals such as OpenAI and Anthropic have found early commercial traction. Anysphere is a San Francisco startup that uses AI to automate large parts of software development, and its Cursor tool is widely used by programmers. According to a regulatory filing, the two sides signed a merger agreement under which a SpaceX subsidiary, X67 Inc., will merge into Anysphere, leaving Cursor as a wholly owned subsidiary. The merger is expected to close in the third quarter of this year, subject to regulatory approval. The deal lands barely a week after Elon Musk's company completed a blockbuster listing, and marks an aggressive move beyond rockets and satellites into enterprise AI software. At the time of writing, SpaceX shares were trading a few cents below $200 in premarket trading, up more than 4% from Monday's close and roughly 50% higher than its IPO price of $135. Tuesday's rally could see SpaceX overtake Amazon by market capitalisation if gains hold through the session. The acquisition follows an option SpaceX secured in April, when it agreed to either acquire Cursor for $60 billion (€51.7bn) later in the year or pay $10 billion (€8.6bn) for a narrower partnership to provide compute. Founded in 2022, Cursor has grown quickly, reporting roughly $2.6 billion (€2.2bn) in annualised business-to-business revenue, according to company data shared with Reuters this month. The firm had previously raised more than $3 billion (€2.5bn) from backers including Nvidia and OpenAI. SpaceX merged with Musk's chatbot venture xAI in February, and this new deal could hand xAI a stronger position in AI-assisted coding, an area where it has trailed competitors, while giving Cursor access to far greater computing power.

SpaceX to buy AI coding assistant Cursor for $60 billion

Aimee Picchi is the associate managing editor for CBS MoneyWatch, where she covers business and personal finance. She previously worked at Bloomberg News and has written for national news outlets including USA Today and Consumer Reports. SpaceX, fresh off its blockbuster initial public offering last week, said on Tuesday that it is buying artificial coding assistant Cursor for $60 billion in stock, according to a securities filing. Elon Musk's space exploration and satellite company said Cursor, developed by San Francisco startup Anysphere, will become a wholly owned subsidiary when the deal closes in the third quarter of 2026. Launched only in 2022, Cursor helped spark a trend called "vibe coding" as AI coding tools have become increasingly capable of autonomously producing computer software. -- This is breaking news and will be updated.

SpaceX buys AI coding startup Cursor for $60 billion

SpaceX will move forward with its $60 billion acquisition of artificial intelligence startup Cursor as Elon Musk's space exploration and AI company seeks a competitive edge against rivals Anthropic and OpenAI after its Wall Street debut last week. SpaceX said in April that it had the rights to buy Cursor, or pay $10 billion to "work together" with the company. In a regulatory filing Tuesday, SpaceX said that Cursor will become a wholly owned subsidiary when the deal closes in the third quarter. Cursor, made by San Francisco startup Anysphere, is a popular AI coding assistant. What SpaceX has described as Cursor's wide "distribution to expert software engineers" is likely part of what made it attractive to Musk's company, giving it access to a new customer base. When it first announced the potential acquisition, Cursor said the partnership with SpaceX subsidiary xAI would enable it to build future AI products using xAI's massive AI data center complex Colossus, based in Memphis, Tennessee. Cursor, which started in 2022, helped sparked a trend called "vibe coding" as AI coding assistants have become increasingly capable of doing the work of computer programming. Cursor competes with other coding tools like Anthropic's Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex but also has relied heavily on partnerships with those larger AI research companies for the foundations of its technology. It was Cursor's Composer, combined with Anthropic's Claude Sonnet, that a prominent AI researcher was playing with for weekend projects when he coined the phrase "vibe coding" in early 2025. SpaceX became a public company on Friday in what is largely considered a successful debut. Shares of the company have jumped since Friday, and are up 9% before the opening bell Tuesday.

SpaceX buys AI coding startup Cursor for $60 billion

SpaceX said in April that it had the rights to buy Cursor, or pay $10 billion to "work together" with the company. In a regulatory filing Tuesday, SpaceX said that Cursor will become a wholly owned subsidiary when the deal closes in the third quarter. Cursor, made by San Francisco startup Anysphere, is a popular AI coding assistant. What SpaceX has described as Cursor's wide "distribution to expert software engineers" is likely part of what made it attractive to Musk's company, giving it access to a new customer base.

SpaceX to acquire vibe coding startup Cursor for $60B

Newly public SpaceX Corp. today announced plans to acquire Cursor, the developer of a popular vibe coding platform, for $60 billion in stock. The companies expect to close the transaction by the end of the quarter. The move is not unexpected. In April, SpaceX partnered with Cursor to develop artificial intelligence models optimized for coding tasks. The spaceflight company stated at the time that it would either pay $10 billion for the collaboration or buy Cursor by year's end. Cursor, officially Anysphere Inc., was reportedly looking to raise funding at a more than $50 billion valuation prior to the partnership. Nvidia Corp. was expected to participate in the round. The chipmaker and Cursor's other backers have invested more than $3 billion in the company since its launch. The steep acquisition price reflects the popularity of Cursor's vibe coding platform. CNBC reported in May that the company has more than 1 million daily active users. Cursor enables developers to build application modules, rewrite legacy code in a new language and perform other complex tasks using prompts. Earlier this year, the platform received a major upgrade that enhanced its AI agent capabilities. When Cursor receives a complex task, it splits the project into smaller steps and assigns each one to a different agent. The agents run in separate cloud-based sandboxes. Developers can customize them by uploading instructions on how specific coding tasks should be performed. Cursor's platform uses a mix of third party and custom AI models. Its newest in-house algorithm, Composer 2.5, debuted in May. SpaceX reportedly provided Cursor with access to tens of thousands of graphics cards to support the development of the model. Cursor built Composer 2.5 using an algorithm called Muon that speeds up AI training. According to the company, its implementation of Muon can complete some tasks that usually require 16 graphics cards using just eight. For added measure, Cursor provided Composer 2.5 with 25 times as many synthetic training tasks as its previous-generation model. The company's sale to SpaceX may accelerate its AI development roadmap. When the rocket maker merged with xAI Holding Corp. earlier this year, it gained access to data centers with hundreds of thousands of Nvidia Corp. chips. However, it's unclear how much of that computing capacity will be available to the Cursor team. SpaceX recently inked two data center deals with Anthropic PBC and Google LLC that are together worth $2.15 billion per month. It's also unclear how the acquisition will affect xAI's product development efforts. In May, the SpaceX unit launched a model called Grok Build 0.1 that is specifically optimized to power coding agents. It also provides a programming assistant called Grok Build that offers similar abilities to Cursor. Earlier this month, xAI brought Composer 2.5 to Grok Build users. The SpaceX unit's models, meanwhile, are available in Cursor. More product integrations could follow after the acquisition closes. Additionally, it's possible that SpaceX will discontinue some overlapping Cursor and xAI products to streamline its AI engineering efforts.

SpaceX strikes $60 billion deal to buy AI startup Cursor

SpaceX has agreed to acquire AI coding startup Cursor in a $60 billion stock deal, announced shortly after the company's historic IPO and less than two months following an initial tie-up between the two. This acquisition aims to bolster SpaceX's AI division, which is part of Elon Musk's xAI initiative, as it seeks to compete with leading AI labs. The completion of the deal is anticipated in the third quarter of this year. Cursor was on the verge of finalizing a $2 billion funding round before SpaceX's interest emerged, a round that would have valued the startup at $50 billion, according to TechCrunch. In April, SpaceX offered to acquire Cursor for $60 billion or pay a $10 billion break-up fee if the deal fell through. Despite expectations for growth, Cursor faced concerns that the planned funding would not be sufficient for sustainability, despite raising $900 million in a Series C round in June 2025 and another $2.3 billion later that year. Founded in 2022 as Anysphere, Cursor experienced rapid growth in AI-driven coding tools. The startup participated in OpenAI's accelerator in 2024 and was valued at around $29 billion prior to the SpaceX acquisition announcement. Signs of SpaceX's interest in Cursor surfaced when xAI hired two senior engineers from the startup earlier this year. In April, reports indicated that xAI rented out data center capacity to Cursor, indicating a developing relationship. This deal comes amid significant turmoil in xAI, including the departure of all 11 co-founders by the end of March. Musk acknowledged that xAI's initial structure was inadequate and stated intentions to rebuild the company from the ground up. xAI has faced controversies, including incidents involving inappropriate chatbot behavior and user-generated harmful content. These controversies pose legal risks to SpaceX's business, as noted in its IPO filings. In its IPO presentaion, SpaceX claimed a total addressable market of about $28 trillion, with $26 trillion focused on AI-related efforts. The company envisions a $2.4 trillion market for AI infrastructure and a $22.7 trillion opportunity in enterprise applications. Following the IPO, SpaceX's stock price surged from $135 to over $200 per share, adding nearly $1 trillion to its valuation in just a few days.

Why SpaceX Just Paid $60 Billion to Acquire an AI Coding Company

The move comes as Musk works to improve the coding capabilities of his Grok family of AI models. Musk recently combined his AI company, xAI, with SpaceX to form a mega-sized firm, which he took public last week. The Tesla CEO had been gradually siphoning resources away from Cursor, one of the first startups to go all-in on AI-generated coding. In March, Musk confirmed that he had hired two product and engineering leads away from Cursor. One month later, on April 21, SpaceX announced that it had signed a deal to work with Cursor on future AI models, and reserved the right for SpaceX to either buy Cursor for $60 billion, or pay $10 billion for their work together. Now, SpaceX has announced that it will exercise that right and acquire Cursor. In an X post announcing the acquisition, SpaceX revealed that it and Cursor have been jointly training a new coding-focused AI model, which will soon be released on both the Cursor and Grok platforms. The company's most recent model, Grok 4.3, placed at number 33 on AI benchmarking startup Vals.AI's proprietary vibe coding benchmark, well below older models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.

SpaceX Buys AI Coding Startup Cursor for $60 Billion in Race for an Edge Over Anthropic and OpenAI

SpaceX will move forward with its $60 billion acquisition of artificial intelligence startup Cursor as Elon Musk's space exploration and AI company seeks a competitive edge against rivals Anthropic and OpenAI after its Wall Street debut last week. SpaceX said in April that it had the rights to buy Cursor, or pay $10 billion to "work together" with the company. In a regulatory filing Tuesday, SpaceX said that Cursor will become a wholly owned subsidiary when the deal closes in the third quarter. Cursor, made by San Francisco startup Anysphere, is a popular AI coding assistant. What SpaceX has described as Cursor's wide "distribution to expert software engineers" is likely part of what made it attractive to Musk's company, giving it access to a new customer base. When it first announced the potential acquisition, Cursor said the partnership with SpaceX subsidiary xAI would enable it to build future AI products using xAI's massive AI data center complex Colossus, based in Memphis, Tennessee. Cursor, which started in 2022, helped sparked a trend called "vibe coding" as AI coding assistants have become increasingly capable of doing the work of computer programming. Cursor competes with other coding tools like Anthropic's Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex but also has relied heavily on partnerships with those larger AI research companies for the foundations of its technology. It was Cursor's Composer, combined with Anthropic's Claude Sonnet, that a prominent AI researcher was playing with for weekend projects when he coined the phrase "vibe coding" in early 2025. SpaceX became a public company on Friday in what is largely considered a successful debut. Shares of the company have jumped since Friday, and are up 9% before the opening bell Tuesday.

SpaceX's First Post-IPO Deal Mints Four Young A.I. Multibillionaires

SpaceX's planned $60 billion acquisition of Cursor parent Anysphere could turn its four young MIT founders into multibillionaires. Days after SpaceX hit the public market, Elon Musk's mega-company announced plans to acquire Anysphere, the parent company of A.I. coding agent Cursor, for $60 billion in the third quarter of this year. Behind Cursor are four former MIT classmates in their mid-20s. All co-founders became billionaires in November following a $2.3 billion funding round that valued the company at $29.3 billion. With each holding roughly a 4.5 percent stake, a SpaceX acquisition would push their net worth to about $2.7 billion each. Sign Up For Our Daily Newsletter Sign Up Thank you for signing up! By clicking submit, you agree to our <a href="http://observermedia.com/terms">terms of service</a> and acknowledge we may use your information to send you emails, product samples, and promotions on this website and other properties. You can opt out anytime. See all of our newsletters Michael Truell, Sualeh Asif, Arvid Lunnemark and Aman Sanger founded San Francisco-based Anysphere in 2022 after meeting at MIT. In just a few years, their flagship product, Cursor, has become a widely used tool for building A.I. coding agents, now adopted by 64 percent of Fortune 500 companies, including Nvidia, Adobe and even competitor OpenAI. Global research firm Gartner has positioned it as a leader in enterprise coding tools alongside OpenAI, Anthropic and GitHub. The move comes nearly two months after Cursor, which has been working closely with xAI to integrate its technology into the Grok assistant, granted exclusive acquisition rights to xAI's now parent company SpaceX. If the $60 billion deal falls through, SpaceX has agreed to pay Cursor $10 billion for their collaboration. The deal caps a rapid rise for a team that went from university classmates to major players in the A.I. race within just a few years. Michael Truell, CEO The 25-year-old co-founder and CEO attended New York's Horace Mann School before enrolling at MIT in 2018. He interned at Two Sigma, Google and Octant before dropping out in 2021 to co-found Cursor. In 2020, Truell was recognized as a Neo Scholar alongside Aman Sanger, with Neo later becoming one of the earliest investors in Cursor's $400,000 pre-seed round. "There was going to be an opportunity for all of coding to change in the next five years and for all of software development to flow through models," Truell said in an interview for Y Combinator's AI Startup School in San Francisco last year. "It felt like no one working on the space at the time was really taking that seriously." Sualeh Asif, Chief Product Officer Originally from Pakistan, Asif attended the country's prestigeous prep school, Nixor College, where he graduated as valedictorian in 2018. At MIT, he worked as a research assistant at the Supertech Lab and the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). "In general, over a 1-2 year time frame, I expect that the way people will code will change," Asif said in an interview with A.I. researcher and entrepreneur Lukas Biewald on his YouTube series Gradient Dissent last year. "In the short term, that seems really scary, but it'll be this gradual process and will be extremely natural to everyone." Aman Sanger, Chief Operating Officer Sanger attended Horace Mann School with Truell before enrolling at MIT in 2018. He interned at Google and hedge fund giant Bridgewater Associates prior to graduating and was also named a Neo Scholar in 2020. "A lot of the work for Cursor has been just experimenting with what is possible," Sanger said in an interview with venture capitalist Rajan Anandan. "For everything that you may see in the product, there's ten failed experiments of what didn't work." Sanger said he began coding at age 14. Arvid Lunnemark, Co-founder Lunnemark, 26, graduated from Malmö Borgarskola High School in Sweden in 2018 before attending MIT, where he worked at QuantCo, Stripe and trading firm Jane Street. In October 2025, he announced his departure from Cursor to found a new venture, Integrous Research, focused on building safer A.I. systems. He reportedly retains his founding equity stake, allowing him to benefit from the potential acquisition. While still in stealth mode, Integrous Research says it is "devoted to protecting individual human freedom before, during and after the start of the superintelligence era" and believes that "by the time the superintelligence can do that research for us, it may already be too late."

Inside Cursor's journey to a $60 billion deal with Elon Musk's SpaceX

SpaceX has acquired AI coding assistant Cursor for $60 billion in an all-stock deal, significantly bolstering its AI ambitions. This move positions SpaceX strongly in the AI coding tools segment, competing with giants like OpenAI and Anthropic. Cursor, cofounded by Indian-origin entrepreneur Aman Sanger, boasts substantial annual revenue and a growing user base. Silicon Valley-based artificial intelligence (AI) coding assistant Cursor, cofounded by 25-year-old Indian-origin entrepreneur Aman Sanger alongside three other Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduates, shot into the spotlight on Tuesday after Elon Musk-led SpaceX announced its acquisition in a $60 billion all-stock deal. The transaction is among the largest acquisitions ever of a VC-backed startup globally. Cursor currently has $2.6 billion in annualised business-to-business revenue, making it one of the fastest-growing AI software startups. The company has so far raised $3.3 billion in funding from Nvidia, Google, Accel, Thrive Capital and Andreessen Horowitz across multiple rounds. Last November, the four cofounders, including Michael Truell (CEO), Sualeh Asif and Arvid Lunnemark, became self-made billionaires after their parent company, Anysphere, achieved a valuation of nearly $30 billion following a $2.3 billion funding round. Each founder held a 4.5% stake in the company, which was reportedly worth at least $1.3 billion. Lunnemark left the company last year. Deedy Das, a partner at Silicon Valley venture capital fund, said on microblogging platform X, "What a brilliant $60B exit for Cursor to SpaceX today! $4B in run rate growing 7x YoY. The 4 25yr MIT founders will make ~$2.7B in a span 4yrs and first 50 hires ~$20-500M each. A testament to why you should actually join early stage startups and of huge outcomes building apps on top of AI models." The deal strengthens SpaceX's AI ambitions and gives it a strong foothold in the AI coding tools segment, where rivals such as OpenAI and Anthropic have gained traction. This follows the acquisition of AI coding platform Windsurf by Cognition, the maker of AI coding agent Devin, after its deal with OpenAI fell through in July 2025. Google acqui-hired Windsurf cofounder Varun Mohan through a licensing deal with the firm. In earlier interactions with ET, investors and founders said the first-mover advantage enjoyed by AI startups is increasingly coming under pressure from leading firms such as OpenAI, Anthropic and Google. They said that as the cost of developing frontier AI models and infrastructure continues to rise, access to capital, computing power and proprietary models are likely to determine competitive advantage in the AI era. India, second-largest market Earlier, in an interview to ET in November 2025, Sanger said that India remained Cursor's second or third-largest market. "A big push for us is we want to be used by the world's biggest and best enterprises, in addition to developers across the world. So, we probably are doing a push into Indian enterprises as well," he said Sanger grew up in the US, where his father, Arvind Sanger, relocated 40 years ago after graduating from IIT Bombay. Cursor has about one million daily users and 360,000 paid subscribers, according to reports. The company counts British Airways, BP, Nokia and Sanofi among its clients. It competes with products such as Microsoft-owned GitHub Copilot and offerings from OpenAI and Google, positioning itself as a "model-agnostic" platform that lets customers choose among different AI systems. Founded in 2022, Cursor, which started as a training-model startup focused on mechanical engineering, eventually evolved into a developer tool. "If you've used CAD (computer-aided design) software like SolidWorks, you kind of place these objects and design these 3D bodies and volumes that get turned into actual manufactured things in the real world. We trained models to do the copilot-style autocomplete before that," cofounder Sanger had told ET. He said the business proposition did not work because of a lack of data. The company subsequently shifted its focus to coding, aiming to create a platform that could reimagine programming as AI models began getting significantly better at writing code in early 2022. Musk's AI ambitions The acquisition announcement comes days after in an interview to ET, which valued the company at more than $2 trillion. "The Company currently expects the merger to close during the third quarter of 2026," SpaceX said in a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. The buyout follows months-long courtship between the two companies. In April, SpaceX secured an option to either acquire Cursor for $60 billion or pursue a strategic partnership for $10 billion. The companies began collaborating on AI initiatives in May. The deal is expected to accelerate development of Cursor's AI models by providing access to SpaceX's large computing infrastructure. It also comes against the backdrop of two of Cursor's product engineering leaders joining SpaceX earlier this year. This underscores Musk's efforts to build a vertically integrated AI ecosystem spanning data centres, foundation models and enterprise software, as competition intensifies across the generative AI industry. SpaceX stock jumped 14% in early trading to $222.33 apiece on the US exchanges after the acquisition announcement on Tuesday.

SpaceX to Buy Cursor AI Coding Agent Operator Anysphere for $60 Billion

June 16 (Reuters) - Elon Musk's ⁠SpaceX ⁠said on Tuesday ⁠it would acquire Anysphere, the software firm behind the popular AI coding agent Cursor, for $60 billion, in a bid to ramp up ⁠its foothold ⁠in the enterprise AI market. The announcement comes just days after Musk took his rockets-to-AI company public in a blockbuster Nasdaq debut that valued the firm at more than $2 trillion and ⁠immediately ⁠made it one of ⁠the world's most valuable companies. SpaceX said it expects the merger to ⁠close during the third quarter of 2026. Along with OpenAI and Anthropic, Cursor is one of several Silicon Valley startups ⁠that have drawn waves of developers by using artificial ⁠intelligence to automate coding, a business where AI companies have found early commercial traction. The deal could give xAI, the Grok chatbot maker that SpaceX merged with in February, a stronger foothold in the AI coding market where it ⁠has so far lagged rivals. It also provides Cursor with more computing capacity to develop AI models. (Reporting by Deborah Sophia in Bengaluru; Editing by Shilpi Majumdar and Sriraj Kalluvila)

Why Did SpaceX Buy Cursor? The Merger Filing Offers Clues - SpaceX (NASDAQ:SPCX)

While investors and AI enthusiasts focused on the size of the deal, the document suggests the relationship between the two companies began months before the acquisition was formally announced. It also references a 'Compute Agreement' between the two companies that points to a relationship deeper than a simple acquisition. The Deal May Have Started In April According to the merger agreement, Anysphere granted SpaceX an exclusive call option on April 19, 2026. The filing further states that SpaceX exercised that option before the merger agreement was signed. That detail is easy to overlook, but it suggests the key strategic decision may have been made nearly two months before the acquisition was officially unveiled. In practice, the June merger announcement may have represented the formal completion of a process that had already been set in motion in April. For investors trying to understand why SpaceX moved so aggressively, that timeline matters. The Compute Agreement The merger filing also references a separate Compute Agreement entered into by the companies on April 19, the same day the call option was signed. The document does not disclose the terms of that agreement. That omission leaves several unanswered questions. The existence of the agreement suggests the relationship may have extended beyond a traditional buyer-seller transaction. More Than A Software Acquisition? Most coverage has framed the transaction as SpaceX acquiring a popular AI coding assistant. But the filing hints at a broader strategic picture. Before the merger agreement was signed, certain service-provider shareholders entered into so-called Revest Agreements with SpaceX and Anysphere. Such agreements are commonly used to retain key employees after acquisitions by tying compensation or equity to continued service. That suggests the deal may be as much about securing engineering talent as it is about acquiring software assets. In the AI industry, elite engineering teams are often viewed as the most valuable asset of all. The IPO Clues Another notable feature of the merger agreement is the extensive attention given to IPO-related scenarios. The document contains provisions covering IPO lockups, public-market share transfers, resale restrictions and situations in which SpaceX could be operating as a public company. On their own, such provisions are not unusual. Yet their prominence raises an interesting question: Was SpaceX assembling strategic AI assets ahead of a potential future public listing? The agreement does not answer that question directly. But it does suggest that the possibility of a public-market future was considered during deal negotiations. The Bigger Question The most important takeaway from the filing may be that the acquisition did not emerge overnight. An exclusive call option, a separate Compute Agreement and employee-retention arrangements all point to a relationship that appears to have been developing months before the $60 billion deal became public. That does not necessarily explain why SpaceX bought Cursor. But it does suggest the acquisition was likely the culmination of a broader strategic partnership rather than a standalone transaction. And until the full terms of the Compute Agreement come to light, the deal's complete rationale remains an open question. Photo Courtesy: JRdes on Shutterstock.com Market News and Data brought to you by Benzinga APIs To add Benzinga News as your preferred source on Google, click here.

Can Elon Musk's xAI challenge Anthropic after SpaceX's $60 billion Cursor AI acquisition from Anysphere?

SpaceX has agreed to acquire Cursor AI parent Anysphere for $60 billion in an all-stock deal, days after SpaceX's blockbuster Nasdaq debut. The acquisition hands xAI's Grok a foothold in AI coding tools, tapping Cursor's $2 billion annualized revenue and rapid enterprise adoption. Closing is expected in Q3 2026. Now the bigger question is whether Cursor AI can help xAI challenge Anthropic's lead in enterprise AI coding. Elon Musk's SpaceX has agreed to buy Cursor AI parent Anysphere for $60 billion, and the timing says as much as the price tag. The all-stock deal lands just days after SpaceX's own Nasdaq debut valued the rockets-to-AI company north of $2 trillion, and it instantly hands xAI's Grok a foothold it never had on its own. For developers, investors, and anyone tracking where AI coding tools are headed next, this is the clearest signal yet that owning a model is no longer enough. You also need the product millions of engineers already open every morning. SpaceX Cursor AI Deal: Why the $60 Billion Acquisition Changes the AI Coding RaceThe structure is simple even though the number is enormous. SpaceX will absorb Anysphere through an all-stock merger, converting every share of Cursor's common and preferred stock into SpaceX Class A shares at closing. The exchange ratio depends on SpaceX's volume-weighted average price over the seven trading days before the deal finalizes, so the exact share count stays a moving target until then. SpaceX expects the transaction to close in the third quarter of 2026, pending the usual regulatory approvals that accompany a deal this size. This wasn't a sudden courtship. Back in April, SpaceX disclosed it had already locked in an option on Cursor, giving it the right to either acquire the company outright for $60 billion or pay $10 billion for a looser partnership arrangement. Choosing the larger path tells you SpaceX wanted full control, not a licensing deal. Notably, Microsoft had reportedly examined buying Cursor before SpaceX's arrangement took shape, and OpenAI made two separate approaches that Cursor's leadership turned down, preferring to stay independent until SpaceX came calling with both compute and capital. Cursor itself is not some scrappy underdog padding its valuation. Founded in 2022 by four MIT students, Michael Truell, Sualeh Asif, Arvid Lunnemark, and Aman Sanger, the company forked VS Code and rebuilt it as an AI-native editor rather than bolting AI onto an existing tool. That decision paid off at a pace enterprise software has never seen. Cursor's annualized revenue went from $100 million in January 2025 to $500 million by June, crossed $1 billion by November, and reached roughly $2 billion by February 2026, outrunning the growth curves of Slack, Zoom, and even Snowflake. Internal projections reportedly put Cursor on track for more than $6 billion in annualized revenue by the end of this year, which is the kind of trajectory that makes a $60 billion price tag look almost conservative rather than reckless. Why Does Cursor Matter So Much To xAI And Grok?Because compute without a workflow is just an expensive idle asset, and Grok has been missing the workflow. SpaceX already controls enormous computing capacity through its Colossus infrastructure, and xAI already has a capable model in Grok. What neither had was a daily habit loop, the kind where developers open the tool first thing, write code inside it, accept or reject suggestions, and keep coming back tomorrow. Cursor brings exactly that, plus a customer base that already includes engineers at Nvidia, Adobe, Stripe, Uber, and OpenAI itself, which is a notable irony given OpenAI's own coding ambitions. There's also a research angle that gets less attention than the price tag deserves. SpaceX confirmed its AI arm has been jointly training a model with Cursor for months already, drawing on Colossus's supercomputing scale, with that model expected to ship inside both Cursor and Grok Build before long. That suggests the acquisition formalizes a relationship that was already shaping product decisions, rather than starting one from a blank page. For xAI, which has trailed Anthropic and OpenAI in coding-specific tools despite Grok's broader ambitions, this is the fastest route to relevance that money could buy. Will SpaceX's $60 Billion Bet On Cursor Actually Pay Off?That depends almost entirely on whether Cursor keeps its independence in the eyes of developers. Cursor's appeal has always rested partly on being model-agnostic, letting engineers route requests to whichever AI model fits the task rather than locking them into one vendor's ecosystem. If SpaceX nudges Cursor toward becoming a Grok-only front end, the risk is that enterprise customers quietly migrate toward Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, or OpenAI's Codex instead, taking their subscriptions with them. The financial case still looks compelling on paper. SpaceX posted $18.7 billion in 2025 revenue, and Cursor's revenue alone could eventually represent a meaningful slice of that, while the acquisition price sits at a small fraction of SpaceX's overall valuation following its IPO. Unlike much of SpaceX's capital-intensive space and AI infrastructure spending, Cursor's enterprise subscription business already runs at positive gross margins, even if Anysphere as a whole hasn't reached overall profitability. The next few quarters of retention data, Grok coding benchmarks, and revenue growth will tell investors whether this was a masterstroke or an expensive vanity purchase dressed up as strategy.

SpaceX Bets $60 Billion on AI It Couldn't Build | PYMNTS.com

SpaceX announced the acquisition of Cursor Tuesday (June 16), days after its Nasdaq debut Friday (June 12). The deal follows an April arrangement giving SpaceX the right to buy Cursor for $60 billion or pay a $10 billion breakup fee. The transaction is expected to close in the third quarter of 2026, with Cursor's parent company, Anysphere, becoming a wholly owned subsidiary. The strategy took shape in February, when SpaceX, owned by trillionaire Elon Musk, absorbed xAI, an AI lab also owned by Musk and the maker of the Grok chatbot. The deal valued the combined entity at $1.25 trillion, CNBC reported Feb. 3. The merger gave SpaceX the computing infrastructure but not the product. Cursor supplied what xAI couldn't: a widely adopted AI coding tool with a large base of professional software engineers already paying for it. Cursor's Revenue, Customers and Fading Market Share Cursor, founded in 2022 by Anysphere, carried roughly $2.6 billion in annualized B2B revenue at the time of the deal, with enterprise sales growing, Reuters reported Tuesday. Customers include Adobe, Stripe and Nvidia, whose CEO, Jensen Huang, has called it his "favorite enterprise AI service," TechSpot reported Tuesday. The acquisition came as Cursor's competitive position was slipping. Cursor's share of the AI coding tool market fell from 41% in June 2025 to about 26% in May, CNBC reported Tuesday, citing spending data from Ramp. Half of the category is now controlled by Anthropic. Even the $2 billion funding round Cursor had been raising from Andreessen Horowitz, Nvidia and Thrive Capital wasn't going to be enough for the startup to break even, TechCrunch reported Tuesday. That round did not close. For SpaceX, the price reflects what it costs to buy distribution it couldn't build. When SpaceX first announced the April deal in a post on social platform X, also owned by Musk, it framed the combination of Cursor's product and customer base with its Colossus supercomputer infrastructure in Memphis, Tennessee, as the path to building "the world's most useful [AI] models." Losses and Leadership Exodus at xAI, and the Gap Cursor Fills The AI segment that SpaceX absorbed through its xAI merger posted a $6.35 billion operating loss in 2025 and burned an additional $2.5 billion in the first quarter of 2026, TechTimes reported Tuesday. The xAI division has seen its share of controversy, including incidents in which Grok generated harmful content, Engadget reported Tuesday. Afterward, all 11 of Musk's xAI co-founders left the company. In March, Musk posted on X that "xAI was not built right [the] first time around, so is being rebuilt from the foundations up." Cursor gives the rebuild something xAI lacked: a product with proven traction in the fastest-growing segment of AI software. For all PYMNTS AI coverage, subscribe to the daily AI Newsletter.

SpaceX To Buy AI Coding Startup Cursor - SpaceX (NASDAQ:SPCX)

On June 16, 2026, SpaceX, its wholly owned subsidiary X67 Inc., and Anysphere entered into an Agreement and Plan of Merger. Under the agreement, X67 will merge with Cursor, with Cursor surviving as a wholly owned subsidiary of SpaceX. The transaction remains subject to customary closing conditions, including required regulatory approvals. SpaceX expects the acquisition to close during the third quarter of 2026. Deal Values Cursor At $60 Billion At closing, each outstanding share of Cursor's common and preferred stock will automatically convert into the right to receive shares of SpaceX Class A common stock. The exchange ratio will be based on Cursor's implied equity value of $60 billion and the volume-weighted average closing price of SpaceX Class A shares over the seven consecutive trading days immediately preceding the merger's closing. SpaceX Stock Performance SpaceX stock rose nearly 5% in Tuesday's premarket session as investors continued to buy into the stock's powerful rally. The gains came even as broader market sentiment weakened, with Nasdaq futures down 0.17% and S&P 500 futures slipping 0.07%. SPCX Stock Price Activity: SpaceX shares were up 4.49% at $201.14 during premarket trading on Tuesday, according to Benzinga Pro data. Photo via Shutterstock Market News and Data brought to you by Benzinga APIs To add Benzinga News as your preferred source on Google, click here.

SpaceX Explores New AI Avenues With $60 Billion Cursor Deal | PYMNTS.com

The deal, announced in a regulatory filing Tuesday (June 16), comes soon after SpaceX's gargantuan initial public offering (IPO). The all-stock transaction is expected to close in the third quarter of the year. In a post on social platform X, which, like SpaceX, is owned by trillionaire Elon Musk, the company said the acquisition is designed to help SpaceX build "the world's most useful AI models." In its registration statement last month, SpaceX estimated a $28.5 trillion total addressable market, with around 93% connected to AI. "For the past few months, SpaceXAI has been jointly training a model with Cursor, which will be released in Cursor and Grok Build soon," the X post said. "We look forward to working closely with the Cursor team to advance our frontier AI capabilities." The deal follows a partnership between the two companies announced in April, with Cursor writing on its blog that the collaboration would help accelerate Cursor's model training efforts. This came after it released its first agentic coding model, Composer, which was followed by increasingly capable models. "We've wanted to push our training efforts much further, but we've been bottlenecked by compute," Cursor said in the post. "With this partnership, our team will leverage xAI's Colossus infrastructure to dramatically scale up the intelligence of our models." Cursor is at the center of the world of vibe coding, or the ability to express intent in "plain language and have AI systems translate that intent into functional outputs," as PYMNTS wrote in January. In a May report, PYMNTS examined SpaceX's pre-IPO paperwork, which revealed just how intertwined Musk's business empire has become. "Tesla batteries power AI infrastructure and Tesla cash flows into SpaceX," the report said. "There are social platform X advertising purchases, shared facilities, overlapping executives and intertwined financing arrangements, offering perhaps the clearest picture yet of how Musk's empire increasingly operates less like a collection of separate businesses and more like a single industrial system." SpaceX may "represent the most extreme version yet" of a path charted by Nvidia, Amazon and Microsoft with their respective AI infrastructure and cloud businesses. "The result is a business increasingly difficult to categorize within traditional sector boundaries," the report said. "Is SpaceX a telecom provider? A defense contractor? An AI infrastructure company? A launch operator? The answer is increasingly all of the above." For all PYMNTS AI coverage, subscribe to the daily AI Newsletter.

Why SpaceX Is Spending $60 Billion on AI Coding Startup Cursor

* SpaceX's takeover of Cursor [PDF] SpaceX has agreed to buy AI coding startup Cursor for $60 billion, just days after making its stock market debut and less than two months after announcing a peculiar deal between the two companies. According to an SEC filing, Cursor will receive $60 billion worth of SpaceX stock under the agreement. The deal, which is expected to close during the third quarter of 2026, will help the robot, AI, and social media company narrow the gap with rivals OpenAI and Anthropic in agentic coding and enterprise AI. How does SpaceX stand to benefit from the deal? xAI's deepening crisis: While SpaceX was rocketing toward an IPO, its AI arm, xAI, was struggling. By the end of March, all 11 co-founders who helped build xAI alongside Elon Musk had quit the company. Musk has also previously expressed frustration that xAI was not "built right the first time around" and with its subpar coding product, which lags behind popular coding tools such as Anthropic's Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex. Grok's sexualised deepfake controversy: Earlier this year, the California Attorney General's Office sent xAI a cease-and-desist letter over concerns that its chatbot, Grok, was being used to create non-consensual sexual imagery of women and minors. In its IPO filings, SpaceX told investors that such behaviour posed a threat to its business. Cursor gives xAI the software and distribution layer it needs: According to some estimates, Cursor has about one million daily users and 360,000 paid subscribers, with India reportedly its second or third-largest market. In its IPO prospectus, SpaceX said it sees its compute deal with Cursor as a natural extension of its strategy to vertically integrate compute infrastructure, AI models, and applications. The acquisition of Cursor will help the company improve its existing AI models, including Grok, and potentially develop new models at lower costs. "The depth of Cursor's integration with a high-frequency coding workflow generates valuable developer interaction data, including coding generation prompts, iteration cycles, and software architecture decisions. We expect that access to this data will enhance our model training and inference, including with respect to Grok," SpaceX said. SpaceX told investors that it sees a huge opportunity in large-scale, frontier-level AI infrastructure and believes it could become a $2.4 trillion business. Additionally, it sees a $22.7 trillion opportunity in the enterprise AI space. Cursor's takeover is expected to help SpaceX deliver on some of those ambitions. SpaceX's AI segment lost about $2.5 billion from operations in the March quarter on segment revenue of $818 million, according to its IPO filing. What is Cursor and what is it getting out of the deal? Agentic coding has taken off over the past two years. Like Anthropic's Claude Code and OpenAI's revamped Codex, Cursor provides an AI-powered programming platform that allows users to build software and write code using natural-language prompts. SpaceX's acquisition of Cursor will help the AI coding startup scale its IDE and Composer models by leveraging xAI's Colossus AI training data centres. In a blog post published in April, Cursor said that its partnership with SpaceX would help the startup address the compute "bottleneck" it identified after releasing Composer 2. Launched in November last year, Composer was Cursor's first agentic coding model. The company later released Composer 1.5, which scaled reinforcement learning by more than 20 times. Composer 2 then added continued pretraining, reaching frontier-level performance at a fraction of the cost of other models. Cursor's unique proposition lies in its model-agnostic nature, meaning it allows users to choose from various AI coding offerings, including Anthropic's Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex, to write code and build software using simple prompts. However, it could lose this competitive advantage if OpenAI or Anthropic decides to withdraw support for the platform following SpaceX's takeover. Conversely, SpaceX could also block its rivals from Cursor if its own AI coding capabilities deliver better-than-expected results. Besides compute infrastructure challenges, Cursor had also been operating with negative gross margins on compute costs until recently, meaning it cost more to run the product than the revenue it generated from users. Following its acquisition by SpaceX, the company is better positioned to overcome these hurdles. In the AI coding market, Cursor competes with startups such as Replit, Lovable, and Bolt, as well as LLM providers including Meta, Anthropic, and OpenAI.

SpaceX to acquire AI coding company Cursor for $60 billion

SpaceX is set to acquire AI coding firm Anysphere, creators of Cursor, for a staggering $60 billion. This strategic move aims to bolster SpaceX's enterprise AI market presence, following its recent blockbuster IPO. The deal, expected by Q3 2026, could significantly boost xAI's capabilities. Elon Musk's SpaceX said on Tuesday it would acquire Anysphere, the software firm behind the popular AI coding agent Cursor, for $60 billion, in a bid to ramp up its presence in the enterprise AI market. The announcement comes just days after Musk took his rockets-to-AI company public in a blockbuster Nasdaq debut that valued the firm at more ⁠than $2 ⁠trillion and immediately made it one of the world's most valuable companies. SpaceX said it expects the merger to close during the third quarter of 2026. SpaceX had been eyeing Cursor for several months. The company said in April it had secured an option to either acquire San Francisco-based Cursor for $60 billion later this year, or pay $10 billion for their new partnership. Along with OpenAI ⁠and Anthropic, Cursor is one of several Silicon Valley startups that have drawn waves of developers by using artificial intelligence to automate coding, ⁠a business where AI companies have found early commercial traction. Cursor's business has scaled rapidly since its founding in 2022, with roughly $2.6 billion in annualised business-to-business revenue and enterprise sales growing sharply, according to company data shared with Reuters earlier this month. The deal could give xAI, the Grok chatbot maker that SpaceX merged with in February, a stronger foothold in the AI coding market where it has so far lagged rivals. It would also provide Cursor with more computing capacity to develop AI models. In March, two product engineering heads at Cursor said they ⁠joined SpaceX to contribute to the company's lunar projects and xAI. It was not immediately clear if the deal would affect SpaceX's agreements to rent out its data centers. The company has in recent weeks struck deals with Anthropic and Alphabet-owned Google to lease cloud computing capacity worth roughly $26 billion combined on an annual basis. Both deals include 90-day termination clauses, meaning SpaceX could quickly reclaim computing capacity if needed.

SpaceX to buy AI coding startup Cursor for US$60 billion in enterprise push

Elon Musk's SpaceX said on Tuesday it would acquire Anysphere, the software firm behind the popular AI coding agent Cursor, for US$60 billion, in a bid to ramp up its presence in the enterprise AI market. The announcement comes just days after Musk took his rockets-to-AI company public in a blockbuster Nasdaq debut that valued the firm at more than $2 trillion and immediately made it one of the world's most valuable companies. SpaceX said it expects the merger to close during the third quarter of 2026. SpaceX had been eyeing Cursor for several months. The company said in April it had secured an option to either acquire San Francisco-based Cursor for $60 billion later this year, or pay $10 billion for their new partnership. Along with OpenAI and Anthropic, Cursor is one of several Silicon Valley startups that have drawn waves of developers by using artificial intelligence to automate coding, a business where AI companies have found early commercial traction. Cursor's business has scaled rapidly since its founding in 2022, with roughly $2.6 billion in annualized business-to-business revenue and enterprise sales growing sharply, according to company data shared with Reuters earlier this month. The deal could give xAI, the Grok chatbot maker that SpaceX merged with in February, a stronger foothold in the AI coding market where it has so far lagged rivals. It would also provide Cursor with more computing capacity to develop AI models. In March, two product engineering heads at Cursor said they joined SpaceX to contribute to the company's lunar projects and xAI. It was not immediately clear if the deal would affect SpaceX's agreements to rent out its data centers. The company has in recent weeks struck deals with Anthropic and Alphabet-owned Google to lease cloud computing capacity worth roughly $26 billion combined on an annual basis. Both deals include 90-day termination clauses, meaning SpaceX could quickly reclaim computing capacity if needed.

SpaceX strikes €51bn deal for AI coding firm as valuation rockets after IPO | BreakingNews

Elon Musk's SpaceX has struck a deal to buy AI coding agent Cursor for 60 billion US dollars (€51.7 billion) as its valuation continues to rocket days after a record-breaking stock market debut. Shares in SpaceX have been soaring since Friday's initial public offering (IPO) and news of the acquisition helped fuel a fresh uplift. The deal will see Musk's spaceflight and technology business take over Anysphere, the San Francisco-based company behind the coding platform. It comes with a hefty price tag which is based on Cursor's stock valuation. SpaceX said in April that it had started working with Cursor to jointly train an AI model, and that it had been given the right to acquire the firm. Cursor works by using AI technology to automate parts of the process of writing code and support software development. The formal agreement of the takeover comes days after SpaceX's IPO on the Nasdaq index in New York. The record-breaking IPO valued the company at two trillion US dollars (€1.7 trillion) on the first day of trading. It made Tesla and X owner Musk - already a billionaire - the world's first paper trillionaire and cemented his position as the richest man on the planet. SpaceX shares have been rising since and are currently trading at more than 210 dollars per share - up from the 150 dollar opening price on Friday. Its market capitalisation surpassed 2.8 trillion US dollars on Tuesday afternoon, overtaking Amazon's 2.67 trillion. The company said in its IPO prospectus that the biggest potential market was the sale of business-oriented AI products, an ambition which is set to be helped by the Cursor acquisition.

SpaceX Acquires Cursor to Accelerate AI Ambitions

This acquisition is coherent with SpaceX's diversification strategy following its partnership with xAI, Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company. The integration of Cursor is intended to strengthen the group's position in the AI-assisted development tools market, competing against rivals such as OpenAI and Anthropic. According to filings with the SEC, the agreement establishes a precise financial framework to govern the transaction. SpaceX President and COO Gwynne Shotwell stated that the merger offers significant synergies between the two companies. In April, SpaceX had already secured an option to acquire Cursor for $60bn, including a clause providing for a $10bn breakup fee if the deal fails to close. The announcement was applauded by the markets, with SpaceX shares rising approximately 5% in pre-market trading on Wall Street.