The world’s first trillionaire, Elon Musk, is not wasting any time building up SpaceX’s AI credentials after the company’s history-making IPO.
SpaceX has agreed to acquire Anysphere, the parent company of Cursor, in a $60 billion all-stock deal, according to a regulatory filing. The acquisition is expected to close in the third quarter of this year.
Cursor is best known for its AI-powered coding editor and AI coding agents.
SpaceX and Cursor did not immediately respond to requests for comment. However, the companies teased a potential merger in April, when they announced they would work “closely together to create the world’s best coding and knowledge work AI.”
Under that earlier agreement, SpaceX secured the right to acquire Cursor for $60 billion or pay $10 billion for their work together.
“The combination of Cursor’s leading product and distribution to expert software engineers with SpaceX’s million H100 equivalent Colossus training supercomputer will allow us to build the world’s most useful models,” SpaceX posted on X at the time.
SpaceX gets busy after its IPO #
The deal comes just days after SpaceX went public in a record-breaking IPO. Last week, the SpaceX priced its shares at $135 each, making it the largest stock debut in history. The company sold about 555 million shares during the offering, raising roughly $75 billion. As of Tuesday morning, SpaceX shares had soared more than 50% to about $211, putting the company on track to overtake Amazon as the fifth-largest company by market cap.
SpaceX’s argument for its massive IPO is that the company has an absurdly high future earnings potential. In its IPO filing, SpaceX estimated it has a $28.5 trillion total addressable market, with roughly $26.5 trillion expected to come from AI alone.
Still, the company is currently unprofitable, and it only acquired Musk’s xAI, the parent company of the social media site formerly known as Twitter and the controversial Grok chatbot, earlier this year.
Musk is putting a lot of hope into xAI’s ability to compete #
Unfortunately for Musk, things haven’t been going great for xAI: the company has lost all of its non-Musk co-founders, and SpaceX has warned investors that some Grok features could potentially expose SpaceX to a range of regulatory and reputational risks.
SpaceX also revealed in its IPO filing that it is already under investigation in the United States and internationally over allegations that its AI tools were used to make nonconsensual deepfakes of minors.
This isn’t the first time Grok has been bad for business. Last year, an update meant to address what Musk described as a “center-left bias” instead led Grok to generate antisemitic propaganda, even referring to itself as “MechaHitler.”
Now, it seems Musk is turning to Cursor to help turn the ship around.
“xAI was not built right first time around, so is being rebuilt from the foundations up,” Musk posted on X in March, after a Cursor engineer joined xAI. “Same thing happened with Tesla.”
Buying Cursor appears to be SpaceX’s attempt to catch up to AI rivals like OpenAI and Anthropic before they make their own Wall Street debuts.