Days after the largest IPO in US history, SpaceX is already moving on its next deal. The rocket company has formally agreed to acquire Cursor — the AI coding platform used by millions of professional developers — for $60 billion in stock.
Cursor was built by Anysphere, a San Francisco startup founded in 2022. It grew fast: by mid-2026 the company was generating around $3 billion in annualized revenue and had raised more than $3 billion in total funding. Cursor does the tedious parts of programming — it autocompletes code, spots bugs, explains unfamiliar codebases, and handles large chunks of routine work. Before SpaceX's offer, the startup was valued at around $29 billion and was preparing a new funding round that would have pushed that to $50 billion. SpaceX got there first.
SpaceX had held an option to buy Cursor since April, but delayed acting until after its own IPO. Now that SpaceX shares are trading on Nasdaq at a market cap above $2 trillion, the company converted that option into a formal agreement. Cursor shareholders will receive SpaceX stock at a $60 billion implied equity value; the merger is expected to close in Q3 2026.
The deal fits the architecture Musk has been building all year. In February, SpaceX absorbed xAI — the team behind Grok — along with Colossus, a supercomputer equivalent to one million H100 GPUs. Cursor fills the one gap: direct reach to the engineers who actually write production code. As SpaceX put it, combining Cursor's product and its distribution to expert software engineers with Colossus creates the foundation to build the world's most useful models.
Microsoft had reportedly been looking at Cursor too, but SpaceX moved faster. GitHub Copilot — owned by Microsoft — now faces a rival backed by vastly larger compute resources. For the millions of developers who rely on Cursor today, the real question is whether the product they chose partly for its independence will feel different inside Musk's ecosystem — or stay exactly the same.
