# SpaceX purchases Cursor, a Claude Code and OpenAI Codex competitor [U]

> Source: <https://9to5mac.com/2026/06/16/spacex-lands-deal-to-likely-purchase-claude-code-and-openai-codex-competitor/>
> Published: 2026-06-16 13:05:28+00:00

When SpaceX isn’t landing rockets, it’s apparently landing AI company deals. In February, the firm behind [Starlink](https://9to5mac.com/2025/09/08/starlink-direct-to-cell-satellite-connectivity-expanding-beyond-t-mobile/) absorbed [xAI](https://electrek.co/2026/02/02/spacex-bails-out-xai-in-mega-deal-heres-what-it-means-for-tesla/), which includes Twitter-turned-X. In April, SpaceX inked a deal with Cursor, a competitor to Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex.

Update 6/16/2026: SpaceX has [acquired](https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/spacex-buy-anysphere-60-billion-2026-06-16/) Cursor a week after becoming a publicly traded company. Updated original story below:

## SpaceX struck $10 billion deal with Cursor ahead of $60 billion acquisition

Cursor has been popular with software engineers who code with AI on the Mac. It was one of the first services to connect large language model artificial intelligence to the process of building apps.

In April, SpaceX and Cursor are “working closely together to create the world’s best coding and knowledge work AI,” the two companies say.

The collaboration originally included a $10 billion payment from SpaceX to Cursor:

Cursor [shared](https://cursor.com/blog/spacex-model-training) more details about the arrangement in April ahead of today’s acquisition:

Cursor is partnering with SpaceX to accelerate our model training efforts.

We released Composer less than six months ago as our first agentic coding model.

After that, Composer 1.5 scaled reinforcement learning by over 20x. Composer 2 then added continued pretraining, reaching frontier-level performance at a fraction of the cost of other models. Each step up in compute has translated to meaningfully more capable models.

We’ve wanted to push our training efforts much further, but we’ve been bottlenecked by compute. With this partnership, our team will leverage xAI’s Colossus infrastructure to dramatically scale up the intelligence of our models

The SpaceX-Cursor arrangement strengthens a competitor to [Anthropic’s Claude Code](https://9to5mac.com/2026/04/14/anthropic-adds-repeatable-routines-feature-to-claude-code-heres-how-it-works/) and [OpenAI’s Codex](https://9to5mac.com/2026/04/16/openais-codex-app-adds-three-key-features-for-expanding-beyond-agentic-coding/) agentic coding software.

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