SpaceX will acquire AI coding tool Cursor for $60 billion in an all-stock transaction, the companies announced today. The deal is expected to close in the third quarter.
It comes just two days after SpaceX’s unprecedented IPO and a few months after the merger of SpaceX and xAI, which brought a significant restructuring of xAI.
Cursor was one of the first tools to fully bake features that leverage large language models into an IDE. It’s a branch of Visual Studio Code with heavy AI integration. However, incumbent platforms and bigger AI companies have since rolled out comparable features.
Cursor has seen considerable revenue growth over the past year, but its market share has also slipped as Anthropic’s Claude Code has achieved dominance in the space. TechCrunch reported that Cursor was struggling to break even.
Early this year, the Cursor team said its future growth was bottlenecked on compute. This spring, xAI struck a deal to give Cursor access to its compute infrastructure, foreshadowing similar, larger deals with Anthropic and Google in the future. xAI and Cursor also began training models together at that time, including Grok Build, xAI’s coding and knowledge work model.
