SpaceX to buy Cursor maker Anysphere for $60 billion in all-stock deal

Elon Musk's SpaceX is buying Anysphere, the startup behind the popular AI coding agent Cursor, for $60 billion in an all-stock deal, Reuters reports. The transaction, announced on Tuesday, is meant to strengthen the company's position in the enterprise AI tools market.

It comes a week after the rockets-to-AI company's Nasdaq debut, where its valuation surged to more than $2 trillion. The acquisition gives xAI, which SpaceX acquired in February, a stronger hold on AI coding — one of the first areas where companies turned AI into a real source of revenue from businesses.

What the deal involves

SpaceX had been eyeing Cursor for months: in April it unveiled an option to either buy the startup for $60 billion later this year or pay $10 billion for a partnership. In its IPO filing the company said Cursor's access to developers' data, including coding requests and design decisions, could help improve its AI models such as Grok.

On Tuesday SpaceX said it would soon release an AI model on Cursor as well as Grok Build, xAI's coding agent, which has been jointly trained for several months. The all-stock transaction does not use IPO proceeds and is expected to close in the third quarter of 2026.

Market reaction

SpaceX shares jumped 10% in early trading, putting the company on track to add about $247 billion to its $2.53 trillion market capitalization. At $211.27, the stock has climbed more than 56% from its IPO price of $135; if the gains hold, SpaceX is set to overtake Amazon in market value and become the fifth-largest company.

Billionaire Bill Ackman noted on X that paying in stock lets SpaceX take advantage of its towering valuation: "The Cursor acquisition costs materially less in dilution because of SpaceX's high valuation."

Why it matters for the AI coding market

Cursor has scaled rapidly since its founding in 2022: according to company data shared with Reuters, its annualized business-to-business revenue is roughly $2.6 billion. The San Francisco-based startup is backed by Andreessen Horowitz and Thrive as well as Nvidia and Alphabet's Google, and had reportedly been in talks for a funding round valuing it at $50 billion.

Under the regulatory filing, SpaceX will pay a $10 billion termination fee if the deal collapses under specific circumstances, and only $4 billion if it fails due to antitrust issues. It is not yet clear whether the deal affects SpaceX's data-centre rental agreements: in recent weeks it struck deals with Anthropic and Google to lease computing capacity worth roughly $26 billion combined on an annual basis. D.A. Davidson analyst Gil Luria expects that capacity to keep going to Anthropic and Google for the foreseeable future.