SpaceX acquires Cursor for $60 billion, betting big on AI coding to catch rivals

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 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 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.

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 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 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 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.

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 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 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)

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 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.