Elon Musk’s rocket company SpaceX has revealed it holds the option to acquire Cursor, an artificial intelligence programming assistant, for $60 billion sometime this year. The potential acquisition comes as SpaceX seeks to strengthen its position against competitors like Anthropic and OpenAI while preparing for a possible public stock offering.
The space company disclosed it also has the alternative option to invest $10 billion in a collaborative partnership with Cursor instead of a full buyout.
The announcement was made Tuesday through Musk’s social media platform X, which along with the AI chatbot Grok forms part of the interconnected business portfolio that Musk has integrated with his aerospace venture.
Cursor, developed by San Francisco-based startup Anysphere, has gained popularity as an AI-powered programming tool. SpaceX appears drawn to what it describes as Cursor’s extensive reach among skilled software developers, which would provide access to an expanded user network.
The coding tool company stated that its new alliance with SpaceX’s AI division xAI will allow it to develop advanced artificial intelligence products using xAI’s enormous data processing facility called Colossus, located in Memphis, Tennessee.
“We’ve wanted to push our training efforts much further, but we’ve been bottlenecked by compute,” Cursor said in a statement on X, which didn’t mention the possibility of being acquired. “With this partnership, our team will leverage xAI’s Colossus infrastructure to dramatically scale up the intelligence of our models.”
Founded in 2022, Cursor helped launch a programming approach known as “vibe coding” as artificial intelligence coding tools have grown increasingly sophisticated in handling software development tasks.
The company faces competition from similar programming tools including Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex, though it has depended significantly on partnerships with these larger AI research firms for its underlying technology.
A leading AI researcher created the term “vibe coding” in early 2025 while experimenting with Cursor’s Composer feature combined with Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet during personal weekend coding projects.
