Elon Musk’s SpaceX is buying the startup behind popular AI coding agent Cursor, Anysphere, for $60 billion in an all-stock deal to boost its presence in the lucrative enterprise AI tools market.
The development comes months after SpaceX announced a partnership with Cursor, an AI code generation startup co-founded by Pakistan-born Sualeh Asif.
Tuesday’s deal follows a grand Nasdaq debut for the rockets-to-AI company last week, which saw its valuation rise to more than $2 trillion.
The acquisition will give xAI, which was acquired by SpaceX in February, a stronger team in AI coding, one of the first areas where companies have turned AI into a real source of business revenue.
Capitalizing on that interest is crucial for SpaceX, as it had beaten its IPO investors to an addressable market worth $28.5 trillion, the theoretical maximum revenue it could capture, much of which is expected to come from enterprise artificial intelligence.
Cursor is one of several Silicon Valley startups that have drawn waves of developers by using AI to automate coding, making it a key rival to market leaders Anthropic and OpenAI. But lack of access to computing power has hampered Cursor’s growth.
“Cursor doesn’t have the scale of OpenAI or Anthropic, but it has built some very impressive coding models for the cost. That makes this a positive move for SpaceX,” said Matt Britzman, senior equity analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown.
SpaceX had been eyeing Cursor for months and in April had revealed an option to either buy the startup for $60 billion later this year or pay $10 billion for a partnership.
In its IPO, the company had said that Cursor’s access to developers’ data, including coding requests and design decisions, could help improve its AI models such as Grok.
SpaceX said Tuesday it would soon release an AI model on Cursor as well as Grok Build, the xAI coding agent it has been jointly training for months.
The all-stock transaction, for which SpaceX will not use the proceeds from its IPO, is expected to close in the third quarter of 2026.
Its shares jumped 10% in early trading, putting the company on track to add about $247 billion to its $2.53 trillion market capitalization. At $211.27, the stock is up more than 56% from its IPO price of $135.
If the gains hold, SpaceX is set to overtake Amazon in market capitalization to become the fifth-largest company.
