SpaceX Buys Cursor for $60 Billion, the Largest Startup Acquisition in History

SpaceX has formally announced the acquisition of Cursor, one of the most popular AI-based coding assistants, for $60 billion in stock. It is the largest acquisition of a venture-backed company in history, and further proof that the race for dominance in developer tools has entered the era of the mega-deal.

Cursor's developer, Anysphere, was founded in 2022 and built one of the fastest-growing developer tools on the market within four years. The app popularized so-called vibe coding, writing code by describing intent in natural language while an AI agent generates, edits, and reviews the code for the programmer. Before the acquisition, Cursor had been negotiating a $2 billion funding round at a $50 billion valuation with participation from A16Z, Thrive Capital, and Nvidia, but SpaceX beat that deal to the punch.

How the Deal Came Together

SpaceX first signaled interest in Cursor back in April 2026, securing an option to either buy the company outright or pay $10 billion for a technology partnership alone. Elon Musk's company ultimately chose to exercise the full-acquisition option, paying six times more than the partnership alternative would have cost. The stock conversion rate is to be set based on the volume-weighted average price of SpaceX shares over the seven trading days preceding the deal's closing.

The decision came just days after SpaceX's historic stock market debut, in which the IPO raised $75 billion, the largest public offering in market history. A sharp rise in the company's share price after the debut, from around $135 to over $200 per share within days, lowered the real cost of the acquisition relative to the company's growing market capitalization.

We're thrilled to share that SpaceX has exercised its option to acquire Cursor in an all-stock deal, as we work to build the most useful AI models in the world - Michael Truell, CEO of Cursor

A Piece of SpaceX's AI Strategy

The acquisition is meant to strengthen SpaceX's AI division, built earlier this year around its merger with xAI. During the IPO, the company told investors that the AI market is worth $26 trillion, with $2.4 trillion in infrastructure and $22.7 trillion in enterprise applications. Cursor is expected to give SpaceX a ready-made product with an enterprise customer base, along with an engineering team that has spent recent months working with xAI to train a new language model destined for both Cursor and Grok.

The xAI division has been through turbulence in recent months, including the departure of all eleven co-founders by March 2026 and controversy over deepfake content generation that led to lawsuits. The Cursor acquisition is meant to help rebuild Grok's standing in developer tools, an area where SpaceX had clearly been losing ground to Anthropic and OpenAI.

Market and Competitor Reaction

SpaceX shares rose 8 percent on the day of the announcement. Analysts, including Adam Crisafulli of Vital Knowledge, said the acquisition should give fresh momentum to Grok's competitiveness in the frontier model market, currently led by Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and Meta. The deal also fits into a broader wave of record venture-backed mergers and acquisitions, with 1,177 such deals worth a combined $182.7 billion recorded through June 2026 alone, up 71 percent from a year earlier.

For Polish companies that rely on Cursor in their daily development work, the change of ownership raises uncertainty over future pricing and over whether the tool will be integrated with xAI's models instead of the third-party providers it currently uses. The tool is widely used among local development teams, and its acquisition by a player outside the traditional OpenAI-Anthropic-Google trio shifts the balance of power that many companies' purchasing strategies have been built on.

The deal still requires standard regulatory review before closing, though no details have yet emerged about possible antitrust scrutiny. Both OpenAI and Anthropic are reportedly planning their own stock market debuts this year, meaning the clash between the biggest AI players will soon play out on the stock exchange as well.

Sources: SpaceX buys AI coding startup Cursor for $60 billion (nbcnews.com), SpaceX to buy AI coding assistant Cursor for $60 billion (cbsnews.com), SpaceX Acquires AI Coding Startup Cursor for $60 Billion in All-Stock Deal (mlq.ai), SpaceX to acquire Cursor for $60B in stock, days after blockbuster IPO (techcrunch.com)