SpaceX Secures Option to Acquire AI Coding Startup Cursor for $60B

SAN FRANCISCO: SpaceX has struck a deal with Cursor, the AI coding platform, giving it the option to acquire the company for $60 billion later this year. The announcement came via SpaceX’s official account on X on April 21. Under the current arrangement, SpaceX pays Cursor $10 billion for joint development work. If SpaceX exercises its acquisition option, that payment converts into the larger deal.

Cursor is the most widely used AI coding editor outside of Claude Code. Its Composer model, released less than six months ago, is the engine behind the partnership. Composer 1.5 scaled reinforcement learning by more than 20 times. Composer 2 added continued pretraining and reached frontier-level performance at a fraction of the cost of rival models. SpaceX’s pitch is straightforward: pair Cursor’s product with the Colossus supercomputer, equivalent to one million H100 GPUs, to build what both companies describe as the world’s most useful coding AI.

The deal preempted a $2 billion fundraising round Cursor was days away from closing. That round would have valued the company at $50 billion, with Andreessen Horowitz, Nvidia, Thrive Capital, and Battery Ventures set to participate. SpaceX moved first. The acquisition option priced Cursor $10 billion above what those investors were prepared to pay.

SpaceX merged with xAI in February. Together they are now attempting to close the gap with Anthropic’s Claude Code, which holds an estimated 54% of the AI coding market, and OpenAI’s Codex. The timing is not accidental. SpaceX is targeting its IPO for June at a valuation of approximately $1.75 trillion. Acquiring Cursor before listing would require updating confidential financial filings. Instead, SpaceX structured the deal so the $60 billion acquisition can be financed using publicly traded stock after the IPO completes.

Two Cursor engineers, Andrew Milich and Jason Ginsberg, had already joined SpaceX weeks before Tuesday’s announcement. The deal was not entirely without precedent.