SpaceX is pressing forward with its $60 billion purchase of artificial intelligence startup Cursor as Elon Musk’s space and AI company looks to sharpen its competitive edge against Anthropic and OpenAI — coming off a successful Wall Street debut last week.
Back in April, SpaceX announced it had secured the option to either acquire Cursor outright or pay $10 billion to enter into a collaborative arrangement with the company.
A regulatory filing submitted Tuesday confirmed that Cursor will become a wholly owned subsidiary of SpaceX once the transaction is finalized, which is expected to happen during the third quarter.
Cursor is an AI-powered coding assistant developed by San Francisco-based startup Anysphere. SpaceX has pointed to Cursor’s strong reach among professional software engineers as a key draw, giving the company access to an entirely new customer base.
When the potential deal was first made public, Cursor noted that teaming up with SpaceX’s subsidiary xAI would allow it to develop future AI products using xAI’s massive data center complex known as Colossus, located in Memphis, Tennessee.
Founded in 2022, Cursor played a significant role in popularizing a concept known as “vibe coding” — a trend that emerged as AI coding tools became increasingly capable of handling real software development tasks on their own.
While Cursor goes head-to-head with other AI coding products such as Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex, it has also leaned heavily on partnerships with those same larger AI companies to power the underlying technology behind its tool.
It was actually a combination of Cursor’s Composer feature and Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet that inspired a well-known AI researcher to coin the term “vibe coding” in early 2025, while experimenting with the tools on personal weekend projects.
SpaceX made its public market debut on Friday in what analysts widely viewed as a strong showing. The company’s shares have climbed since then, rising 9% ahead of Tuesday’s opening bell.
