SpaceX Acquires AI Leader
SpaceX Confirms $60 Billion Acquisition of AI Coding Assistant Cursor; Shares Rise
Key Points
In an SEC filing tied to an “Agreement and Plan of Merger” dated June 16, SpaceX said its wholly owned unit X67 would merge with and into Anysphere/Cursor, with Cursor surviving as a wholly owned SpaceX subsidiary—turning the earlier option arrangement into a binding merger expected to close in Q3 2026.
Cursor previously said its expansion was “bottlenecked by compute” and that it planned to use xAI’s Colossus supercomputer infrastructure (located in Memphis) to scale model training, a detail Cursor highlighted in an April blog post.
According to Forbes, Cursor recently “crossed $4 billion in annualized revenue.” Earlier in April, reporting also said Cursor was in discussions to raise about $2 billion at a valuation “exceeding $50 billion” (before any acquisition premium).
SpaceX stock’s preannouncement move was sharply quantified: shares rose more than 10% in Tuesday’s premarket, then changed hands at $203.40 (a 5.64% gain versus Monday’s close) after the announcement.
SpaceX has agreed to buy Anysphere, the company behind AI coding tool Cursor, for $60 billion in an all-stock deal — the largest acquisition of a venture-backed startup in history, according to Forbes. The company filed an SEC merger agreement on June 16, confirming its wholly owned unit X67 will merge into Anysphere, with Cursor surviving as a SpaceX subsidiary. SpaceX shares jumped more than 10% in premarket trading before closing at $203.40, a 5.64% gain, per Benzinga.
The deal exercises a pre-negotiated option SpaceX locked in during April 2026. At the time, SpaceX could either pay $10 billion to remain a compute partner or buy Cursor outright for $60 billion. SpaceX chose the latter. The merger is expected to close in Q3 2026, pending regulatory approval, Reuters reported.
From Compute Partner to Full Takeover in Two Months
The road to this deal started in April 2026. SpaceX gave Cursor access to its Colossus supercomputer cluster in Memphis — a system built around one million H100-equivalent GPUs. In return, SpaceX got the buy-or-pay option. Cursor CEO Michael Truell had said the company's growth was "bottlenecked by compute," according to the Cursor Blog. The April partnership solved that problem. The June merger made it permanent.
Under the merger terms, Cursor shareholders will receive SpaceX Class A shares. The exchange ratio will be set near closing, using a volume-weighted average stock price formula. SpaceX's market cap hit $2.66 trillion on the day of the announcement, surpassing Amazon as the world's fifth most valuable company, The Guardian reported.
Cursor Hit $4 Billion in Revenue Before the Deal Closed
Cursor's growth numbers are staggering. The company crossed $4 billion in annualized revenue by June 2026, up from roughly $100 million in early 2025, according to Forbes. Just weeks before the acquisition was confirmed, Cursor was in talks to raise $2 billion at a valuation exceeding $50 billion — before any acquisition premium. SpaceX's $60 billion offer came in above that mark.
The three co-founders — Michael Truell, Aman Sanger, and Sualeh Asif — are all around 25 years old. Each holds a stake now worth roughly $1.3 billion in SpaceX stock, per W.Media. Truell said the team looks "forward to working closely with the SpaceX team to advance our frontier AI capabilities," CBS News reported.
SpaceX Builds a Full Stack: Cloud, Model, and Code Editor
Analysts say SpaceX is making a vertical integration play. After absorbing xAI — Elon Musk's AI firm — in February 2026 for roughly $1.25 trillion, SpaceX now owns the Grok language model, the Colossus compute cluster, and soon the Cursor IDE. That means one company controls the infrastructure, the AI brain, and the tool developers use every day. Matt Britzman of Hargreaves Lansdown told Reuters that Cursor has built "impressive coding models relative to cost."
The concern among some developers is exactly that. Critics worry Cursor's flexibility — it currently works with models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and others — could shrink once it is inside SpaceX. Antitrust experts point to a $4 billion break fee tied specifically to regulatory failure as a sign the deal could face scrutiny, according to Appwrite. OpenAI tried to acquire Cursor twice and was turned away, Quartz reported.
SpaceX's IPO Was Four Days Ago — Now It's Spending $60 Billion
The timing is remarkable. SpaceX went public on June 12, 2026, opening at $150 and closing at $160.95 on its first day, giving it a $2.1 trillion valuation, per The Guardian. Four days later, it announced the biggest startup acquisition ever. SpaceX priced its IPO at $135 per share and raised a record $75 billion. The Cursor deal is all-stock, so no cash changes hands immediately.
SpaceX claims the AI coding market is part of a broader $26 trillion addressable opportunity. The company has already begun jointly training a new model — combining Cursor's "Composer" system with the Grok LLM — to be released under the working name "Cursor and Grok Build," GovCon Wire reported. If regulators approve the deal, SpaceX will close the merger by September 2026.
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