SpaceX Buys Cursor in a $60 Billion AI Coding Bet

SpaceX has agreed to buy Anysphere, the company behind the popular AI coding tool Cursor, in an all-stock deal that values the startup at $60 billion. The merger agreement was signed on 16 June, according to CNBC, and ranks among the largest private technology acquisitions of the year.

Under the terms, Cursor will become a wholly owned SpaceX subsidiary, with Anysphere shareholders receiving SpaceX Class A stock priced on a seven-day average. The companies expect the deal to close in the third quarter, pending regulatory approval. SpaceX is not paying in cash. It is paying in itself.

A four-year-old company with rocket-sized revenue

Cursor has grown quickly since its founding in 2022. The tool sits on top of large language models and helps engineers write, edit and refactor code through natural-language prompts, and it has become a fixture in many professional development teams. Quartz reports the business now runs at roughly $2.6 billion in annualised revenue, with enterprise sales climbing.

The purchase did not come out of nowhere. In April, SpaceX secured an option that gave it two paths: pay about $10 billion for a partnership, or buy the company outright for $60 billion later in the year. It chose to buy.

Folding code into the rocket company

The logic, in SpaceX's telling, is straightforward. The company writes enormous amounts of software to fly rockets and run satellites, and owning a frontier coding tool pulls that capability in-house. The deal also fits a wider pattern at Elon Musk's empire. In February, SpaceX absorbed xAI, the maker of Grok, folding the AI lab, the X platform and the Colossus supercomputer into a division named SpaceXAI. Cursor extends that consolidation into developer tooling.

It is also part of a busy stretch of AI dealmaking. OpenAI recently bought the cloud startup Ona to run coding agents, which we covered in OpenAI Buys Ona to Let Codex Work While You Sleep, and the biggest AI firms are lining up for a wave of public offerings. A $60 billion all-stock purchase of a four-year-old startup tells you how richly the market is pricing anything that makes engineers faster.