SpaceX has agreed to buy Cursor, the AI coding editor made by Anysphere, in an all-stock deal worth about $60 billion. The announcement came June 16 and the deal is expected to close in the third quarter, landing just days after SpaceX's blockbuster initial public offering on June 12, which priced at $135 a share, climbed past $200 in the days after, and added close to a trillion dollars of value almost overnight. In other words, SpaceX is spending freshly minted and richly valued public stock to make one of the largest acquisitions the software industry has seen.
The stated reason is to shore up SpaceX's artificial intelligence effort, which is built around xAI and has had a difficult year. All eleven of xAI's co-founders had left by March, Elon Musk has acknowledged the unit was not built right the first time around, and it drew a cease-and-desist order from California's attorney general over the generation of non-consensual deepfakes. SpaceX told IPO investors it sees a $26 trillion addressable market in AI, most of it in enterprise applications, and an established coding tool with millions of paying developers is a faster way into that market than rebuilding a research lab from the inside.
Cursor is not a distressed asset being scooped up cheap. Founded in 2022 as Anysphere, it was valued near $29 billion before the deal, had raised $2.3 billion in late 2025 on top of a $900 million round earlier that year, and was reportedly negotiating a fresh raise at a $50 billion valuation with Andreessen Horowitz, Thrive, and Nvidia. The $60 billion price is a premium on that, paid in stock rather than cash, which ties Cursor's fortunes to SpaceX's newly public shares.
The part getting less attention is what it means for Anthropic. Cursor has been one of the largest consumers of Claude, reportedly accounting for up to half of Anthropic's revenue at one point, so a company now inside Elon Musk's orbit, and adjacent to the rival model Grok, suddenly owns one of Claude's biggest customers. Whether Cursor stays on Claude or is steered toward Grok is the question with the most downstream consequences, and there is no answer yet. The usual caveats apply: the deal is not closed until the third quarter, the coverage carries no direct quotes from Musk or Cursor's founders, and the revenue figure is a report rather than a disclosed number. Disclosure: this article mentions Anthropic, the company that makes Claude, the AI model that wrote it.