SpaceX buys Cursor for $60 billion in stock four days after history-making IPO

SpaceX will acquire Anysphere, the company behind the AI coding agent Cursor, in a $60 billion all-stock deal. The merger agreement was filed with the SEC on Tuesday morning. A wholly owned subsidiary called X67 Inc. will merge with and into Cursor, which survives as a wholly owned SpaceX subsidiary. The deal is expected to close in Q3 2026.

The price tag is only possible because of what happened between Friday and Tuesday. SpaceX went public on Nasdaq last week at $135 per share. By Tuesday pre-market, SPCX was trading above $200. That run added roughly $1 trillion to SpaceX’s market cap in four days. Paying for Anysphere in freshly printed stock at those prices is a lot cheaper than it looks.

This deal was pre-loaded. SpaceX disclosed in April that it had secured an option to buy Cursor for $60 billion or pay a $10 billion breakup fee. Tuesday’s 8-K filing converts that option into a binding merger agreement. The breakup fee stands if the deal dies. The exchange ratio for Anysphere shareholders gets determined by SpaceX’s volume-weighted average closing price over the seven trading days before closing.

Cursor had alternatives. Before SpaceX came knocking, the startup was closing a $2 billion funding round from Andreessen Horowitz, Thrive, and Nvidia at a $50 billion valuation, per TechCrunch. It previously raised $900 million in a June 2025 Series C and another $2.3 billion in late 2025. It went through OpenAI’s startup accelerator in 2024. The SpaceX deal blew all of that up.

The acquisition makes strategic sense for SpaceX because xAI is a mess. All 11 of Musk’s co-founders at xAI had left the company by the end of March. Musk publicly admitted the division “was not built right the first time around” and that he was rebuilding it “from the foundations up.” xAI’s Grok chatbot called itself “MechaHitler” in 2025 and allowed users to generate non-consensual deepfakes earlier this year. SpaceX told investors in its IPO filings that this behavior is a business risk, and the company faces multiple legal challenges as a result.

Buying Cursor gives SpaceX a product that actually works and a user base that actually pays. Founded in 2022 by four MIT students, Cursor crossed $1 billion in annualized revenue by November 2025 and has since grown to roughly $2.6 billion in annualized B2B revenue per Reuters, serving millions of developers with a team of over 300 people.

The compute story matters too. Cursor said in April it was “bottlenecked by compute” and would use xAI’s Colossus infrastructure in Memphis, described as the largest supercomputer cluster in the world, to train future models. An AI coding tool that cannot afford enough GPU hours to improve its models is a company that will fall behind. The Colossus pipeline theoretically solves that.

But Cursor’s relationship with foundation model providers is about to get awkward. The tool has relied heavily on Anthropic and OpenAI models to power its coding assistance. Those companies are now direct competitors. Anthropic ships Claude Code. OpenAI ships Codex. And Cursor now belongs to the company that runs Grok.

SpaceX pitched investors on a $28 trillion total addressable market during its IPO roadshow. Nearly all of it, $26 trillion, was AI. That breaks down to $2.4 trillion in AI infrastructure and $22.7 trillion in enterprise applications. Cursor is supposed to be the wedge into that enterprise number. Whether an AI coding agent that just hit $2.6 billion in revenue can justify a $60 billion price tag, and whether SpaceX’s stock can stay above $200 long enough for the all-stock deal to close, are separate questions entirely.