SpaceX has agreed to buy AI coding start-up Cursor for $60 billion (£45 billion), just days after its bumper initial public offering on the US stock market.
Elon Musk’s rocket company will take over Anysphere, which makes the artificial intelligence coding agent. The move comes after SpaceX joined New York’s tech-focused Nasdaq stock exchange on Friday in the biggest ever listing, valuing it at more than $2 trillion and raising $85.7 billion.
A surge in SpaceX’s share price on Monday and Tuesday saw the company overtake Amazon to become the world’s fifth most valuable company, with a market value now at $2.9 trillion.
The Deal
SpaceX and Cursor have been partners since April, when Musk’s firm announced it had the right to either buy it for $60 billion, or pay $10 billion for the work they have done together.
Cursor is used by major companies including Stripe, Adobe, and Nvidia, whose boss Jensen Huang has described it as his “favourite enterprise AI service.”
Like OpenAI and Anthropic, Cursor’s technology uses AI to automate the process of writing code, one of the most prominent current uses for artificial intelligence. Its tie-up with SpaceX comes as Musk’s company tries to catch up with rivals by growing its AI business, xAI, which is behind the controversial Grok chatbot.
Announcing the partnership in April, SpaceX said: “The combination of Cursor’s leading product and distribution to expert software engineers with SpaceX’s million H100 equivalent Colossus training supercomputer will allow us to build the world’s most useful models.”
The Financial Picture
SpaceX said the deal would be completed by the end of September, with Cursor’s shareholders paid with $60 billion worth of SpaceX shares.
SpaceX’s shares have soared by almost two thirds from their $135 offer price, including a bumper first full day on the public markets. The company’s listing also made Musk the world’s first trillionaire, sparking a debate about inequality and wealth taxes.
However, SpaceX is currently not profitable, meaning it loses more money from its operations than it makes. The company has lost a total of $9 billion over 2025 and 2026 so far, according to its financial filings, due to its huge spending on AI and other infrastructure investments.
The Bottom Line
SpaceX has agreed to buy AI coding start-up Cursor for $60 billion, just days after its record-breaking US IPO on the Nasdaq stock exchange. The deal follows a partnership established in April. Cursor’s AI technology automates code writing and is used by major companies including Nvidia and Adobe. SpaceX’s share price has surged, making Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire, though the company itself remains unprofitable due to massive AI and infrastructure spending.
