- SpaceX has agreed to buy Anysphere, the startup that created the AI coding tool Cursor, for $60 billion in an all-stock deal. The agreement comes just four days after SpaceX’s debut on Nasdaq.
- By February 2026, Cursor reached $2 billion in annual recurring revenue, making it the fastest-growing business software company ever recorded.
- The deal gives xAI, which SpaceX merged with in February and is known for the Grok chatbot, its first major entry into AI developer tools. Until now, it has trailed behind Microsoft, Anthropic, and Google in this area.
Only four days after its major Nasdaq debut, SpaceX agreed to acquire Anysphere, the San Francisco startup behind the AI coding agent Cursor, in an all-stock deal that values the company at $60 billion, according to Reuters.
Elon Musk plans to use his company’s new public status to enter the AI developer tools market, an area where xAI has struggled to compete.
According to the agreement, all outstanding Anysphere common and preferred shares will be converted into SpaceX Class A stock. The exchange ratio will be based on SpaceX’s seven-day average share price as of the date the deal closes.
The transaction is expected to be completed in the third quarter of 2026, pending regulatory approval. Cursor will become a wholly owned subsidiary of SpaceX.
The IPO gave SpaceX a financial war chest
SpaceX went public on June 12, with its Nasdaq debut valuing the company at over $2 trillion and making it one of the world’s most valuable firms.
The Anysphere deal, filed just four days later, suggests the IPO was meant to give SpaceX the resources to make big moves, not just raise money. SpaceX had been considering Cursor for several months. In April, the company said it had secured an option to either buy Anysphere for $60 billion later this year or pay $10 billion for a partnership. SpaceX has now chosen to buy.
The AI coding market has quickly become one of the biggest early successes in the generative AI boom. In 2024, AI application companies raised $8.2 billion, twice as much as in 2023, thanks to strong demand for tools like Cursor.
Cursor has been at the centre of this growth: the company went from $100 million in annual recurring revenue in January 2025 to $500 million by June, passed $1 billion by November 2025, and reached $2 billion by February 2026.
No other enterprise software company has grown this fast. Anysphere now expects to reach more than $6 billion in annual recurring revenue by the end of 2026.
The startup behind the deal
Anysphere was founded in 2022 by four MIT graduates: Michael Truell, who is the CEO, along with Sualeh Asif, Aman Sanger, and Arvid Lunnemark.
The company raised an $8 million in a seed round led by the OpenAI Startup Fund in 2023. The founders built Cursor as a version of the VS Code editor with AI features that help developers write, edit, and review code using natural language. Engineers at OpenAI, Stripe, and Spotify already use Cursor.
A major turning point came in November 2025, when Anysphere released Composer, its first in-house inference model designed for code generation. Before Composer, every Cursor query was sent to a third-party model, mainly Claude and GPT-4. Composer improved the company’s finances, moving its gross margin from break-even on heavy users to positive across the enterprise segment.
What SpaceX is buying and what it will inherit
The deal gives xAI, which SpaceX merged with in February and is known for the Grok chatbot, a product that already has strong support among developers in a market it has struggled to enter on its own.
The deal also brings up an important question: Cursor currently sends queries to Anthropic’s Claude and other third-party models. SpaceX has recently made agreements with Anthropic and Google to lease cloud computing capacity. These agreements include 90-day termination clauses, according to Reuters, which means SpaceX can quickly reclaim that computing power. Deciding whether to use that capacity for Cursor after the deal closes will be one of the first choices the combined company must make.
The $60 billion price tag shows how much Anysphere’s value has grown. In November 2025, the company raised $2.3 billion at a $29.3 billion valuation in a round co-led by Accel and Coatue. This means SpaceX has been paying about twice that amount since November 2025. Investors such as Accel, Thrive Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, DST Global, Coatue, Nvidia, and Google all participated in Anysphere’s funding rounds and will receive SpaceX Class A stock in exchange for their shares.
This acquisition puts SpaceX in direct competition with Microsoft, which owns GitHub Copilot and offers Gemini Code, and with Anthropic, which recently launched Claude Code. Every major AI platform is now trying to control the tools developers use daily.
By owning Cursor, which has 50,000 enterprise customers and $2 billion in annual recurring revenue, SpaceX would gain direct access to this market. The next challenge will be whether regulators allow the deal to close on time.
