SpaceX buys AI coding startup for $60B in race for an edge over Anthropic and OpenAI
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Elon Musk’s SpaceX has acquired Cursor, an autonomous coding startup for $60 billion in an all-stock deal, allowing the space exploration and AI company to compete against rivals Anthropic and OpenAI after its Wall Street debut last week.SpaceX said in April that it had the rights to buy Cursor, or pay $10 billion to “work together” with the company.
The Cursor deal comes days after SpaceX’s blockbuster public listing on Friday saw its stock rise 20%.SpaceX’s market capitalization reached $2.8 trillion on Tuesday, eclipsing e-commerce giant Amazon, and made SpaceX the fifth largest public company.
Business SpaceX shares rose 19% in the first day of trading Friday after the rocket company’s historic IPO.San Francisco-based Cursor was launched by software company Anysphere, which was founded in 2022 by four Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduates.They built an extremely popular AI coding assistant which allowed engineers to instruct the software in English that would subsequently run coding tasks autonomously.It kick-started the phenomenon of “vibe coding” where even users without coding knowledge — or understanding of software — could share verbal instruction and build apps and websites.
Cursor growth exploded bringing in $4 billion in annualized revenue.But its adoption came with a catch.Cursor’s interface allowed coders to switch between multiple AI models such as Anthropic and OpenAI, and it became a platform that merely hosted other companies AI.
It raised questions about Cursor’s ability to build an independent company on top of models provided by larger rivals.To reduce its reliance on competitors, in late 2025, Cursor introduced its own proprietary AI agent, Composer, alongside other third-party coding assistants.Now, Cursor directly competes with Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex.Despite Musk’s backing, xAI’s chatbot ...