In AI Power Move, SpaceX Buys Cursor for $60 Billion

“SpaceX said it would buy Cursor parent Anysphere for $60 billion, striking a massive deal for an autonomous coding agent that could help the company catch up with its AI rivals after its blockbuster initial public offering.

 

The all-stock deal comes days after SpaceX's historic public offering Friday. SpaceX's market value is now nearing $3 trillion after its shares jumped 19% in their first day of trading, another 20% Monday and over 10% Tuesday morning. SpaceX shares ended the day up 4.8% to close at $201.80.

 

The third straight day of gains for Elon Musk's rocket company after its IPO gave SpaceX a market capitalization of $2.66 trillion, edging past Amazon.com's $2.65 trillion and putting it in the top five most valuable U.S. public companies.

 

Cursor will receive SpaceX stock under the agreement, according to a filing released Tuesday.

 

Fresh off raising $85.7 billion from investors from SpaceX's public offering, Musk is ready to put his war chest to work. And the first target is getting enterprise customers who are willing to pay large sums for access to SpaceX's tools and computing power.

 

Cursor is a San Francisco startup that built a product used by the biggest AI labs and companies like Nvidia, British Airways and Deloitte.

 

"AI will achieve Stockfish-level coding and generalized computer use," Musk said about the Cursor deal on Tuesday, referencing a popular chess engine that can beat the best human players.

 

SpaceX in recent months has restructured itself around the desire to build out its artificial-intelligence capabilities. It acquired Musk-controlled firm xAI earlier this year, which brought chat assistant Grok and the social-media site X, as well as massive data centers into the fold.

 

 And the big prize with Cursor: a reliable stream of revenue.

 

Cursor Chief Executive Michael Truell said the deal with SpaceX would help it advance its frontier AI capabilities "with the goal of building the world's most useful AI models."

 

Cursor kicked off the "vibe-coding" era and already brings in billions of dollars in annualized revenue. It was started by four MIT graduates in 2023 as an encrypted-messaging startup, but has expanded into AI coding tools.

 

Cursor competes with Anthropic's Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex with a software development tool that helps companies code faster. Its product allows developers to toggle between different AI models to autocomplete, edit and review lines of code.

 

Still, the company has grown at an astonishing rate. In 2025, the company's annualized sales -- an extrapolation of the next 12 months' revenue based on recent sales -- grew from $100 million to $1 billion. As of early June, that figure shot up to $4 billion, according to a person familiar with the matter.

 

More than half of its revenue comes from enterprise customers, and the company expects to continue to partner with the other model providers, a different person said.

 

That includes Musk's rivals at OpenAI, which the SpaceX boss sued and accused of attempting to steal trade secrets. On Monday, a California federal judge dismissed Musk's case.

 

SpaceX is paying a premium for the opportunity to win at a market where it has largely floundered. The purchase price for Cursor was more than double its $29.3 billion valuation in a November funding round. In April, SpaceX said it had secured the option to buy the startup or pay $10 billion for their partnership.

 

The acquisition could help fill in a leadership gap at xAI since Musk announced the company needed to be "rebuilt from the foundations up." XAI laid off staffers, including its founding team.

 

Cursor's Truell is viewed as a rising star in the AI industry, where competition is steep for the top talent. "Lots to do together. Excited to be joining forces with @SpaceX to build useful AI," Truell said on X.

 

While SpaceX dominates at its core businesses of rocket launches and satellite internet, the AI business it acquired from xAI had little revenue and few customers. That's a really big problem based on the amount of investment needed to train AI models, employ engineers and build computing infrastructure.

 

Last year, xAI brought in $3.2 billion in revenue but reported $6.4 billion in losses, according to securities filings. The gap widened in the first quarter, when it had $818 million in revenue and $2.5 billion in losses.

 

While revenue from X and xAI make up a fraction of SpaceX's revenue, they account for most of the company's total addressable market (TAM), which is the business the company thinks it can win in the future. In its IPO prospectus, SpaceX said it sees a TAM of $28.5 trillion, what it called "the largest actionable" TAM "in human history."

 

Of that total, it attributes $26.5 trillion to AI products, including $2.4 trillion in AI infrastructure, $760 billion in consumer subscriptions, $600 billion in digital advertising, and $22.7 trillion in enterprise applications.

 

SpaceX recently started renting out its data-center capacity to rivals such as Anthropic and Google to bring in revenue -- a timely strategy as the entire AI industry faces a computing crunch. The deals could drive $26 billion in annual revenue if they continue through the end of their contracts in 2029.

 

The company has also outlined plans to boost employment to meet Musk's AI ambitions. During testing the waters meetings with investors in April, SpaceX said it planned to build out the xAI enterprise sales team, two people familiar with the matter said.

 

There are some limitations to how much of its IPO cash pile can be spent toward AI endeavors.

 

Some of its IPO fundraise will go to repay $20 billion in debt that the company took out as a bridge loan in March. SpaceX announced billions of dollars in projects, including at least $55 billion to build a chip fabrication facility in Texas.” [1]

 

1. In AI Power Move, SpaceX Buys Cursor for $60 Billion. Peterson, Becky; Au-Yeung, Angel.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 17 June 2026: A1.