SpaceX to Buy AI Coding Startup Cursor for $60 Billion
Days after its $2 trillion listing, Musk's SpaceX is paying $60 billion for the maker of Cursor, a bet on AI coding where his Grok has lagged rivals.
Elon Musk is buying his way into the AI coding race. SpaceX said on Monday it would acquire Anysphere, the startup behind the popular Cursor coding assistant, for $60 billion, one of the largest software deals on record and a sharp turn for a company best known for rockets.
The all-stock deal, which SpaceX expects to close in the third quarter, hands Anysphere’s shareholders SpaceX Class A shares at a $60 billion valuation. It lands days after SpaceX’s blockbuster Nasdaq debut valued the company above $2 trillion, and folds Cursor into Musk’s widening empire, where SpaceX merged with his xAI startup earlier this year.
Cursor is an AI “coding agent,” software that writes, edits and debugs code alongside human programmers, and one of the fastest-growing tools of the generative-AI boom, with roughly $2.6 billion in annualised business revenue. For Musk, the appeal is strategic: his Grok chatbot, built by xAI, has lagged rivals in coding, so far the most lucrative enterprise use of large language models.
The number invites scrutiny. At $60 billion, SpaceX is paying more than 20 times Cursor’s annual revenue, a premium that makes sense only if AI coding keeps compounding and if Cursor can hold off well-funded rivals like Anthropic and OpenAI, whose models power many coding tools. SpaceX had locked in the option to buy at this price back in April, suggesting a pre-arranged path rather than a bidding war; CNBC reported that Microsoft had looked at Cursor before bowing out.
The price also reads as a marker of how frothy the AI market has become. Coding assistants have emerged as the clearest place where companies will pay real money for generative AI, and the biggest names, Microsoft, Anthropic, OpenAI and now Musk, are scrambling to own the layer that sits between developers and the models. Paying $60 billion for a young company with a few billion in revenue is the kind of bet that looks visionary or reckless depending entirely on what AI coding turns out to be worth.
The deal blurs the lines between Musk’s ventures further still. A rocket company now owns a chatbot maker that owns a coding agent, all financed by the soaring stock of a newly public SpaceX. Whether that sprawl becomes a coherent AI business or an expensive distraction is the question the next quarter, and Cursor’s customers, will begin to answer.
