Elon Musk’s SpaceX has signed an all-stock agreement to acquire Anysphere, the startup behind the artificial intelligence coding assistant Cursor, for $60 billion. The transaction is aimed at expanding the company’s footprint in the enterprise AI tools market.
Anysphere was co-founded by Pakistan-born Sualeh Asif. The development follows SpaceX’s recent debut on the Nasdaq, which brought the company’s valuation to over $2 trillion. Through this acquisition, SpaceX aims to strengthen its position in AI coding via xAI, an entity it absorbed in February.
SpaceX previously outlined a theoretical addressable market of $28.5 trillion to Initial Public Offering (IPO) investors, with a significant portion tied to commercial AI applications.
While Cursor competes with platforms backed by OpenAI and Anthropic, its expansion has been restricted by limited computing power. Regarding the acquisition, Matt Britzman, senior equity analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown, stated, “Cursor does not have the scale of OpenAI or Anthropic, but it has built some very impressive coding models relative to cost. That makes this a positive move for SpaceX”.
SpaceX secured an option in April to either purchase the startup for $60 billion or enter a $10 billion partnership.
Regulatory filings indicate that access to Cursor’s developer data will be utilized to train SpaceX’s existing AI infrastructure, including its Grok models.
Following the acquisition, SpaceX plans to launch a new AI model on Cursor alongside Grok Build, a coding tool developed over recent months.
The transaction will not utilize IPO proceeds and is scheduled for completion in the third quarter of 2026. Following the announcement, SpaceX shares increased by 10 percent to $211.27 in early trading, representing a 56 percent rise from the initial $135 IPO price. This movement increased the company’s total market capitalization to $2.53 trillion.
By utilizing equity for the purchase, SpaceX minimizes share dilution.
Commenting on the financial structure, billionaire Bill Ackman stated on X, “One of the things that makes SpaceX so valuable is how valuable it is. The Cursor acquisition costs materially less in dilution because of SpaceX’s high valuation”.
Founded in 2022, San Francisco-based Anysphere generates $2.6 billion in annualized business-to-business revenue.
The company is backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Thrive, Nvidia, and Alphabet. The acquisition framework includes a $10 billion termination fee under specific conditions, which drops to $4 billion if regulatory antitrust challenges block the transaction.
SpaceX recently finalized data center leasing agreements with Anthropic and Google valued at a combined $26 billion annually.
The contracts contain 90-day termination clauses, allowing SpaceX to reclaim its server capacity if internal data demands grow.
