SpaceX will move forward with its $60 billion acquisition of artificial intelligence startup Cursor as Elon Musk’s space exploration and AI company seeks a competitive edge against rivals Anthropic and OpenAI after making its debut on Wall Street last week.
SpaceX said in April that it had the right to pay $10 billion to acquire Cursor or “work with” the company.
SpaceX said in a regulatory filing Tuesday that Cursor will become a wholly owned subsidiary once the deal closes in the third quarter.
Cursor, developed by San Francisco startup Anysphere, is a popular AI coding assistant. What SpaceX described as Cursor’s broad “distribution to professional software engineers” is likely part of what made Cursor attractive to Musk’s company and gave it access to a new customer base.
When first announcing the potential acquisition, Cursor said the partnership with xAI, a SpaceX subsidiary, would allow the company to build future AI products using xAI’s large AI data center complex, Colossus, based in Memphis, Tennessee.
Launched in 2022, Cursor sparked a trend known as “vibe coding” as AI coding assistants become increasingly capable of computer programming tasks.
Although Cursor competes with other coding tools such as Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex, it also relies heavily on partnerships with these leading AI research companies for its technology foundations.
When a prominent AI researcher coined the term “vibe coding” in early 2025, he was playing around with a weekend project that combined Cursor’s Composer and Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet.
SpaceX became a publicly traded company on Friday, and the debut is considered a success. The company’s stock price has soared since Friday, rising 9% by Tuesday’s opening bell.
