SpaceX Closes Its $60 Billion Acquisition of AI Coding Startup Cursor

SpaceX has completed its $60 billion, all-stock acquisition of Cursor, the AI-powered code editor built by Anysphere, making the developer tool an official part of Elon Musk’s space and satellite company. The deal became effective on August 14, according to a regulatory filing that TheNextWeb says SpaceX confirmed, with Bloomberg’s Carmen Arroyo and Natasha Mascarenhas reporting the close. It caps a process that started as an April partnership, turned into a binding deal within days of SpaceX’s own June stock market debut, and closed roughly two months after that. Cursor announced the close on its own blog the same day; TechCrunch picked up the story the following morning.

From an April Option to an August Close

Cursor and SpaceX first announced a partnership in April to accelerate model training, an agreement that also gave SpaceX a call option to acquire Cursor outright for $60 billion once SpaceX itself went public, according to Fortune. SpaceX’s IPO opened at $135 a share on June 12. Four days later, with the stock already trading well above its offer price, SpaceX exercised the option and moved to formalize the acquisition, saying it expected to close in the third quarter subject to regulatory approval, per TheNextWeb’s review of the filing. That schedule held: the deal closed August 14, roughly two months after the binding agreement became public.

Fortune reported that if SpaceX had instead declined to exercise its option, it would have owed Cursor a combined breakup fee and deferred services fee of $10 billion under the original April terms, a detail that shows how committed both sides already were before any of this became public. The $60 billion price is being paid entirely in SpaceX Class A shares, valued at the stock’s volume-weighted average closing price over the seven trading days before closing rather than a fixed share count set back in April, so the exact number of shares Cursor’s founders and investors end up with depends on where SpaceX stock traded heading into August 14.

What Cursor Gets, and Why It Needed It

In a short post announcing the close, Cursor framed the deal almost entirely around compute. “We will have access to the largest fleet of GPUs in the world, giving us the compute to build stronger models that are also more economical to run,” the company wrote, adding that SpaceX “is building the computing capacity needed to scale intelligence far beyond what exists today” and that Cursor “will be one place where that intelligence becomes useful.” Cursor pointed to Grok 4.6, which it says it released “Wednesday,” as an early example of what the two companies can build together.

The business context makes the timing clearer. Fortune reported in June that Cursor, backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Thrive Capital, and Accel and last formally valued at $29.3 billion in November 2025, had been “thought to be losing ground” to rivals like Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex just three months earlier, even as its own usage kept climbing: Fortune reported that Cursor’s tools are used by 67% of the Fortune 500, generate 150 million lines of enterprise code a day, and helped it cross $4 billion in annualized revenue this year after passing $1 billion in under 24 months. Cursor cofounder and CEO Michael Truell, 25, becomes one of the youngest billionaires in history on paper as a result, Fortune reported, though Cursor’s own post framed the deal around GPU access rather than the founders’ payout.

Feeding Grok, and Competing With Its Own Customer

SpaceX’s interest runs the other direction too. Per Fortune’s reading of SpaceX’s IPO prospectus, the company expects Cursor’s enterprise coding data to directly enhance “model training and inference” for Grok, the model line run by SpaceXAI, the AI division Musk created in February when SpaceX absorbed xAI in an all-stock deal reported at the time to value the combined company at $1.25 trillion, the largest merger on record. sxz.io covered SpaceXAI’s own contribution to Nvidia’s Open Secure AI Alliance earlier this month, when the division open sourced its Grok Build coding agent.

Not everyone is convinced the strategic logic holds up. “I’m just not sure what else he wants to add to the portfolio. Grok is not performing as well as the other tools that are on the market,” Tammy Madsen, a professor at Santa Clara University’s Leavey School of Business, told Fortune, while still predicting Musk would keep dealmaking given his appetite for “high risk, high reward” bets. There is also a more direct tension in the strategy: SpaceX is trying to close the gap with Anthropic and OpenAI in AI coding tools specifically, per Bloomberg’s reporting on the acquisition, even as Anthropic pays SpaceX for the compute to run its own competing models. Anthropic agreed in May to pay SpaceX roughly $45 billion for computing capacity, about $15 billion a year, according to Axios, a relationship sxz.io has noted before; Google has a similar compute arrangement with SpaceX, per TheNextWeb. For now, selling GPU time to the same labs it is trying to out-compete on coding tools is simply the business SpaceX has built around itself.

A Deal Financed by a Record IPO

Fortune reported that some observers consider the $60 billion price the largest-ever acquisition of a venture-backed startup, though SpaceX’s own $250 billion absorption of xAI five months earlier remains larger still. Fortune traced the deal’s economics back to SpaceX’s own June IPO, which the outlet reported raised $86.2 billion after underwriters exercised their option for additional shares, the largest IPO ever by Fortune’s account. SpaceX’s stock appreciated by more than the entire $60 billion cost of the Cursor deal within hours of its first day of trading, Fortune reported, meaning the acquisition cost Musk comparatively little in practice even at a $60 billion sticker price. “Signing a $60 billion all-stock deal four days after listing, with the stock up more than 50% from the offer price, shows the playbook,” Franco Granda, a PitchBook senior analyst who covers SpaceX, told Fortune, adding that SpaceX’s dual-class share structure, in which Musk controls nearly all the votes, “removes the last bit of friction” for deals like this one. Investors reacted well to the actual close, too: SpaceX shares rose about 3.6% to $136.20 on the news, TheNextWeb reported.

Cursor keeps its name, its blog, and by all appearances its own dealmaking: the day before the SpaceX acquisition closed, Cursor announced it had itself acquired Firetiger, a startup building AI agents that monitor production software for regressions and incidents, following its purchase of code-review startup Graphite in December 2025. Musk has told SpaceX staff this month that the company “must succeed on the software front,” predicting AI revenue will out-earn the rocket business by September and significantly exceed the rest of SpaceX’s revenue in the fourth quarter: the scale of ambition this deal is meant to serve.