SpaceX to acquire the AI coding startup Cursor for $60 billion

Elon Musk's aerospace giant wasted no time flexing its new public-market muscle. Just days after SpaceX's Nasdaq debut became the largest IPO in history, the company announced Tuesday it's acquiring Cursor, the AI coding assistant startup, for $60 billion in class A stock. That's roughly 3.4% dilution against SpaceX's IPO valuation, and shares still jumped about 16% on the news, pushing SpaceX past Amazon and Microsoft to become the fourth most valuable company in America.

Cursor's rise has been fast by any standard. Founded in 2022, the company said in November it had crossed $1 billion in annualized revenue, and it landed at No. 37 on CNBC's Disruptor 50 list this year. But the competitive picture has gotten messier. Ramp spending data shows Cursor's market share sliding from 41% in June 2025 to about 26% by May, while Anthropic has grabbed roughly half the category. Buying Cursor outright looks like SpaceX's way of buying back relevance in a coding-tools race it's currently losing.

This isn't a spontaneous move. SpaceX disclosed back in April that it had already locked in the right to acquire Cursor for $60 billion, with a hefty $1.5 billion termination fee and $8.5 billion in computing resources owed to Cursor if the deal fell through. So Tuesday's announcement mostly formalizes an arrangement investors already knew was coming. The merger is expected to close in the third quarter, pending regulatory sign-off.

The deal also folds neatly into Musk's broader consolidation strategy. He merged SpaceX with xAI earlier this year, and grafting Cursor's coding technology onto that stack gives the combined entity a direct AI-development arm to compete with well-funded rivals. SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell called the partnership something that