SpaceX Acquires Cursor-Maker Anysphere for $60 Billion in All-Stock Deal

SpaceX has agreed to acquire Anysphere, the San Francisco startup behind the AI coding agent Cursor, in a $60 billion all-stock deal — one of the largest AI acquisitions on record. The move comes just days after SpaceX's blockbuster Nasdaq IPO last week, which pushed its market cap past $2 trillion. Shares jumped 10% on the news, adding roughly $247 billion in market value and potentially vaulting SpaceX past Amazon to become the fifth-largest company by market cap. The stock now trades at $211.27, more than 56% above its IPO price of $135.

The deal is a direct play on enterprise AI. SpaceX had pitched IPO investors on a $28.5 trillion total addressable market, with a significant chunk expected to come from AI tools for businesses. Cursor fits squarely into that pitch: the startup has scaled to roughly $2.6 billion in annualized B2B revenue since its 2022 founding and has seen sharp growth in enterprise sales. Its backers include Andreessen Horowitz, Thrive Capital, Nvidia, and Google — and it had reportedly been in talks for a fresh funding round at a $50 billion valuation before SpaceX swooped in.

SpaceX had been circling the deal for months. Back in April, it gave Anysphere a binary choice: accept a $60 billion buyout later in 2026, or take a $10 billion partnership arrangement. Anysphere chose the full acquisition. Paying in stock is a deliberate financial maneuver — at a $2.5 trillion valuation, SpaceX can hand over a relatively tiny equity slice to fund a $60 billion deal, a point billionaire investor Bill Ackman highlighted publicly.

The strategic logic runs through xAI, which SpaceX acquired in February. SpaceX plans to release an AI model directly on Cursor and integrate it with Grok Build, xAI's coding agent that has been in joint training for months. Cursor's treasure trove of developer data — coding requests, design decisions, architectural choices — is seen as a crucial training resource for improving Grok and future models. One analyst noted Cursor has built impressive coding models relative to cost, even if it lacks the raw compute scale of OpenAI or Anthropic.

The compute angle is worth watching. Cursor's growth had been constrained by limited access to computing power — a gap SpaceX's infrastructure could fill. Meanwhile, SpaceX recently signed roughly $26 billion in annual cloud-leasing deals with Anthropic and Google, both of which include 90-day termination clauses. Analysts note SpaceX could reclaim that capacity for internal use if Grok and Cursor demand scales up sufficiently. The all-stock deal is expected to close in Q3 2026. SpaceX faces a $10 billion termination fee if the deal falls apart, reduced to $4 billion in the event of an antitrust-driven collapse.