SpaceX has reached an agreement to acquire Anysphere, the San Francisco-based maker of the AI coding assistant Cursor, through an all-stock transaction valued at $60 billion. The deal comes just days after SpaceX’s historic IPO and is the largest acquisition ever involving a venture-backed startup.
The company raised $85.7 billion in its IPO, which gave it an initial valuation of more than $2 trillion. Shares have climbed over 56% from their $135 offering price, briefly making SpaceX more valuable than Amazon by market capitalization. Funding the deal entirely with stock allows the company to capitalize on that increase. According to investor Bill Ackman, the structure leads to “materially less dilution” because of SpaceX’s elevated valuation.
The acquisition comes as SpaceXAI continues to face challenges following SpaceX’s integration of Elon Musk’s xAI earlier this year. Despite telling investors that artificial intelligence represents a $26 trillion market opportunity, with $22.7 trillion tied to enterprise applications, the company struggled to develop a competitive AI coding product.
The AI coding assistant allows developers to write, edit, and troubleshoot software using plain-language instructions, and it has gained widespread adoption among professional engineers. Its customer roster includes Stripe, Adobe, and Nvidia. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has described Cursor as his “favorite enterprise AI service.” The company is reportedly generating about $2.6 billion in annualized B2B revenue, driven by rapid growth in enterprise adoption.
Under the terms of the agreement, SpaceX would owe a $10 billion termination fee if the deal falls apart in most scenarios. That penalty is reduced to $4 billion if regulatory or antitrust objections are the sole reason for the collapse. The acquisition had been in the works for months: SpaceX disclosed an option to purchase Cursor in April at the same $60 billion valuation and with the same breakup fee, but delayed closing the transaction until after its IPO.
For Cursor’s user base, the key concern is whether the platform will maintain the model flexibility that helped drive its popularity. The tool currently supports multiple AI systems, including Anthropic’s Claude, OpenAI’s GPT models, and Cursor’s own Composer. SpaceX said it intends to launch a dedicated AI model within Cursor, developed through a joint training effort that has been underway for several months.
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