SpaceX Signs the $60B Deal to Buy Cursor — an All-Stock Merger That Hands xAI a Coding Powerhouse

SpaceX has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Anysphere, the maker of the AI coding tool Cursor, in an all-stock deal valuing the startup at $60 billion, the company confirmed on June 16. The transaction turns a buyout that was merely an option two months ago into one of the largest acquisitions the AI sector has ever seen — and pulls a fast-growing developer-tools business into Elon Musk's expanding industrial empire.

Crucially, the deal is structured as a stock-for-stock merger between Anysphere and a wholly owned SpaceX subsidiary named X67, which means none of the capital SpaceX raised in its record IPO is being used to fund it. Completion is expected in the third quarter of 2026. The agreement carries a $10 billion termination fee under certain conditions, plus an additional $4 billion "regulatory" break fee if the merger is blocked on antitrust grounds — a signal that both sides expect the tie-up to draw close scrutiny.

The strategic logic runs through xAI, the Grok maker that merged into SpaceX in February. xAI has lagged OpenAI and Anthropic in the lucrative AI-coding race, and Cursor instantly closes that gap with a product developers already love and a sales motion that is accelerating fast. In return, Cursor gains access to the enormous compute footprint SpaceX and xAI have been assembling. Founded only in 2022, Cursor now generates roughly $4 billion in annualized revenue — about $2.6 billion of it from enterprise customers — after having been valued near $50 billion in earlier funding talks.

Investors cheered. SpaceX stock jumped nearly 10% in premarket trading to about $211, up 56% from its $135 IPO price. The move vindicates the option SpaceX secured back in April, when it locked in the right to either buy Cursor outright for $60 billion or take a $10 billion partnership stake — a structure that let it watch Cursor's revenue climb before committing. This is a sharp escalation from the buyout SpaceX lined up just weeks ago, now formalized into a binding merger.

For the broader market, the deal underscores how the agentic-coding category has become a must-own asset. Cursor's in-house Composer models have closed much of the quality gap with frontier labs at a fraction of the cost, and owning the full stack — model, editor and now SpaceX-scale infrastructure — gives Musk's group a credible third pillar against OpenAI's Codex and Anthropic's Claude Code. Fresh off the largest IPO in history, SpaceX is wasting no time spending its newfound currency.