SpaceX acquires Anthropic and OpenAI rival in $60B deal

Elon Musk just made his biggest bet yet on artificial intelligence.

Days after SpaceX's record-breaking stock market debut, the company confirmed it would acquire Anysphere, the San Francisco-based startup behind the popular AI coding tool Cursor, in a deal valued at $60 billion.

The move puts SpaceX (SPCX) in direct competition with Anthropic and OpenAI in one of the hottest corners of tech right now: AI-powered coding tools.

What is Cursor, and why does it matter so much?

Cursor launched in 2023 and helps software developers write, fix, and automate code faster using artificial intelligence. 

• The platform lets users toggle between AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Google, and others.
• The tool became one of the fastest-growing startups in Silicon Valley history, according to Bloomberg. 
• It now has more than one million users and already pulls in billions in annualized revenue, the Wall Street Journal reported.

That user base is what makes it so attractive. In an interview with The Guardian, PitchBook analyst Harrison Rolfes put it plainly: 

"Owning the tool that professional developers already trust daily is a faster path to enterprise AI revenue than winning the model race."

Related: Franklin Templeton CEO sends strong message on SpaceX

Cursor competed with Anthropic's Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex, but without SpaceX's computing resources, its growth hit a ceiling. 

Access to SpaceX's Colossus supercomputer in Memphis, Tenn., which houses around one million H100-equivalent chips, changes that equation entirely.

SpaceX is playing catch-up 

SpaceX's AI division, xAI, has openly lagged behind rivals like Anthropic and OpenAI on coding capabilities.

Musk has admitted the gap is real. The company has been quietly poaching engineers from Cursor for months, Bloomberg reported. 

SpaceX teams and Cursor employees were already collaborating on coding and compute as recently as May.

The formal acquisition closes the loop.

In an interview with The Guardian, Gil Luria, head of technology research at DA Davidson, said the deal will "improve SpaceX's position in the frontier model race with Anthropic and OpenAI." 

He added that Grok, xAI's chatbot, "has to have a coding component that enterprise customers can utilize side by side with Anthropic Claude Code and OpenAI Codex."

Right now, enterprise clients have largely avoided Grok. Cursor's brand credibility with professional developers gives SpaceX a much faster path to those lucrative corporate contracts.

Spencer Platt&solGetty Images

The SpaceX-Cursor deal term

Anysphere investors will receive $60 billion worth of SpaceX stock, as per a regulatory filing. 

The transaction is expected to close in the third quarter of 2026. Crucially, the deal will not use proceeds from SpaceX's IPO.

SpaceX originally locked in the option to acquire Cursor back in April, according to The Guardian, paying to either buy it outright for $60 billion or pursue a $10 billion partnership.

The timing of the formal announcement is no coincidence.

SpaceX's stock surged roughly 50% in its first few trading sessions after its IPO, pushing its market valuation past Amazon's to make it the world's fifth-most-valuable publicly traded company, according to Bloomberg. 

More SpaceX:

• SpaceX IPO creates a tough call for small investors
• SpaceX IPO gives Elon Musk net worth number that stuns Wall Street
• Former Tesla board member issues candid message on SpaceX stock

As hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman noted on X: "The Cursor acquisition costs materially less in dilution because of SpaceX's high valuation."

Ackman added, "SpaceX’s ability to do economically, strategically, and technologically accretive acquisitions is an important component of its value. There is enormous value inherent to a company with a high value particularly when it is controlled by an entrepreneur that the most talented people want to work for and partner with."

In other words, a higher stock price means SpaceX issues fewer shares to fund the deal, a key advantage.

SpaceX posted revenues of $18.7 billion in 2025, though it also recorded a net loss of $4.9 billion as it absorbed xAI's debt.

The Cursor deal signals that SpaceX is doubling down on its AI ambitions.

Related: Oppenheimer issues bold SpaceX stock price target