SpaceX said Tuesday it is buying Cursor, the AI coding assistant made by San Francisco-based startup Anysphere, for $60 billion in stock. The announcement came less than a week after SpaceX raised $75 billion in its initial public offering last Friday.
According to a CBS News report citing a securities filing, Cursor will become a wholly owned SpaceX subsidiary once the deal closes, which is expected in the third quarter of 2026. SpaceX shares rose 5% in pre-market trading Tuesday to $202.11 following the news.
Cursor launched in 2022 and helped spark what became known as "vibe coding," a trend driven by AI tools capable of autonomously writing computer software. The company bills itself on its website as a "coding agent for building ambitious software." It has since become one of the more widely used AI coding tools in the industry.
The acquisition puts SpaceX in more direct competition with OpenAI and Anthropic, both of which have their own AI coding products and are expected to go public later this year. Vital Knowledge analyst Adam Crisafulli wrote in a note to investors Tuesday that "SpaceX hopes the Cursor team/product will give a jolt to its Grok AI business (especially in coding), which has so far failed to make a dent in the frontier market (which is led by Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and Meta in the US, in that order)."
SpaceX first hinted at the deal in April on its X account, writing that it was working with Cursor to create the "world's best coding and knowledge work AI." At the time, SpaceX said Cursor had given it approval to either buy the company outright for $60 billion or pay $10 billion to "work together."
When the potential deal was first announced, Cursor said that teaming with SpaceX subsidiary xAI would allow it to build future software products using xAI's AI data center complex in Memphis, Tennessee. That facility would provide the computing infrastructure needed to develop and run more advanced versions of Cursor's tools.
SpaceX and Cursor did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
