SpaceX wastes no time. Barely recovered from the fireworks of its stock-market debut, Elon Musk’s group announces the acquisition of Anysphere, the company behind the AI coding assistant Cursor, for a record $60 billion.
The deal is expected to close in the third quarter of 2026.
The move isn’t a complete surprise. In April, SpaceX secured an option allowing it to either buy Cursor for $60 billion or pay $10 billion for a straightforward partnership.
It’s the first option, the more ambitious one, that was ultimately chosen. According to filings made on Tuesday, Cursor will receive the full amount in SpaceX shares.
Founded in 2023 by four MIT graduates initially as a secure messaging project, Cursor shifted its focus to AI-powered coding tools.
Its technology enables developers to switch among multiple AI models—OpenAI’s, Anthropic’s, xAI’s, or Google’s—to compete with Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex.
The company, which had rejected several takeover bids from major AI groups last year, was valued at $29.3 billion during a funding round in November.
Bolstering xAI in the Coding Arena
For SpaceX, the aim is to give xAI, the maker of the Grok chatbot, a stronger foothold in the AI-assisted coding market. Cursor will be able to lean on Colossus, the AI training supercomputer developed by xAI in Memphis, Tennessee, boasting roughly the power of a million H100 chips.
In a post on X at the time of the April option announcement, SpaceX described the objective: to combine Cursor’s flagship product and its distribution among expert developers with Colossus’ computing power.
The collaboration between the two teams had already begun. In March, two Cursor product-engineering leaders joined SpaceX to work on the group’s lunar projects as well as on xAI.
