June 16 (Reuters) – Elon Musk’s SpaceX said on Tuesday it would acquire Anysphere, the software firm behind the popular AI coding agent Cursor, for $60 billion, in a bid to ramp up its presence in the enterprise AI market.
The announcement comes days after Musk took the rockets-to-AI company public in a blockbuster Nasdaq debut that valued the firm at more than $2 trillion and immediately made it one of the world’s most valuable companies.
SpaceX had been eyeing Cursor for several months. The company said in April it had secured an option to either acquire the San Francisco-based company for $60 billion later this year, or pay $10 billion for a new partnership.
The deal could give xAI, the Grok chatbot maker that SpaceX merged with in February, a stronger foothold in the AI coding market where it has so far lagged rivals. It would also provide Cursor with more computing capacity to develop AI models.
SpaceX’s shares were up nearly 10% in premarket trading, on track to add about $247 billion to its market capitalization of $2.53 trillion. At $211.27, the stock has climbed more than 56% from its IPO price of $135.
If the gains hold, SpaceX is set to overtake Amazon in market value to become the fifth-largest company.
Along with OpenAI and Anthropic, Cursor is one of several Silicon Valley startups that have drawn waves of developers by using artificial intelligence to automate coding, a business where AI companies have found early commercial traction.
Cursor’s business has scaled rapidly since its founding in 2022, with roughly $2.6 billion in annualised business-to-business revenue and enterprise sales growing sharply, according to company data shared with Reuters earlier this month.
Backed by some of the most prominent Silicon Valley venture capital names including Andreessen Horowitz and Thrive, as well as Nvidia and Alphabet’s Google, Cursor had reportedly been in talks earlier this year for a funding round valuing it at $50 billion.
The deal, which is expected to close during the third quarter of 2026, is structured as a stock-based merger between Cursor parent Anysphere and SpaceX’s wholly owned subsidiary called X67, indicating the capital raised in SpaceX’s IPO is not being used to fund the deal.
If the deal is ended under specific circumstances, SpaceX will pay a termination fee of $10 billion, according to a regulatory filing.
The filing also said SpaceX will pay a “regulatory” termination fee of $4 billion if the deal falls through due to antitrust issues.