SpaceX had 30 days after its record-shattering IPO to decide on a $60 billion takeover of AI coding startup Cursor. It took two trading days.
On Tuesday, four days after its Nasdaq debut, SpaceX signed a definitive all-stock merger agreement to acquire Anysphere, the San Francisco company behind the popular AI coding agent Cursor. The deal, confirmed through an 8-K regulatory filing, is the largest acquisition of an AI developer-tools company ever recorded.
Cursor investors will receive SpaceX stock based on the startup's implied $60 billion equity value. The speed matters. SpaceX priced its IPO at $135 per share on June 11, raising $75 billion in the largest public offering in history.
SPCX opened on the Nasdaq on June 12, closing up 19% at $161 with a market cap above $2.1 trillion. By Tuesday, shares climbed roughly 10% in premarket trading to around $202, making SpaceX the fourth most valuable company in the U.S. ahead of Amazon and Microsoft. The $60 billion price tag represents a 3.4% dilution at SpaceX's IPO valuation, per the company's filing.
The deal exposes a glaring weakness inside Musk's empire. xAI, which SpaceX absorbed in February 2026 in a merger that valued the Grok chatbot maker at $250 billion, lost $6.35 billion last year and has no meaningful presence in developer tools.
All 11 of xAI's original co-founders had departed by the end of March 2026. Musk acknowledged in April that xAI "was not built right the first time around" and said he was rebuilding it "from the foundations up."
Grok Build 0.1, xAI's first dedicated coding model released in May 2026, remains in public beta with no enterprise footprint.
Cursor hands xAI something it conspicuously lacks: a proven application layer with over a million paying users. The AI coding tool, built as a fork of Microsoft's open-source VS Code, hit $1 billion in annualized revenue by November and surpassed $4 billion in ARR by June 2026, with roughly $2.6 billion from enterprise customers.
One survey found Cursor deployed inside 64% of the Fortune 500.
Cursor's competitive advantage has rested on letting developers choose between Anthropic's Claude, OpenAI's GPT, and its own Composer models. Many enterprise teams chose Cursor specifically because they could route code through Claude rather than models with less established privacy records.
No changes to Cursor's model access have been announced as of June 16. But the math is straightforward: xAI's Grok division lost $6.35 billion in 2025, and every API call routed to Anthropic or OpenAI is revenue that leaves SpaceX's ecosystem. The incentive to prioritize Grok as Cursor's default model is substantial.
Cursor's market share had already declined from 41% in June 2025 to about 26% in May, according to spending data from Ramp. Anthropic now controls half of that category.
The path to this deal began months before the IPO. In April, SpaceX disclosed it had secured a formal option to either acquire Anysphere for $60 billion or pay $10 billion to continue a collaborative training arrangement.
Cursor was already training its Composer 2.5 models on xAI's Colossus supercluster in Memphis, using more than 220,000 NVIDIA GPUs across 300 megawatts of capacity.
Cursor confirmed in April: "We've wanted to push our training efforts much further, but we've been bottlenecked by compute. With this partnership, our team will use xAI's Colossus infrastructure."
Microsoft examined a potential acquisition of Cursor but declined to submit a formal bid. OpenAI approached Anysphere's leadership twice and was rebuffed both times, moving on to acquire Windsurf for a reported $3 billion.
SpaceX expects the merger to close in the third quarter of 2026, pending regulatory approval. The merger agreement includes a $10 billion general termination fee and a separate $4 billion "regulatory termination fee" if the deal is blocked on antitrust grounds, a signal that SpaceX's own legal team views antitrust review as a genuine constraint.
