Days after its massive IPO, SpaceX has announced it will spend $60 billion to acquire Cursor, a programming platform that helps automate coding. The move is apparently designed to help Elon Musk's sprawling rocket/AI/social media empire win over lucrative enterprise customers and close the gap with AI rivals like Anthropic and OpenAI.
The takeover wasn't entirely unexpected: back in April, SpaceX announced a peculiar arrangement in which it agreed to either acquire Cursor for $60 billion or pay a $10 billion breakup fee. The company had been holding off on completing the deal while it went public, presumably because buying a startup for the GDP of a small country is the kind of thing you want to do after your IPO, not before.
In an SEC filing, SpaceX said it expects the deal to close during the third quarter of 2026, giving everyone plenty of time to wonder what exactly $60 billion gets you in the coding-tools business.
Musk has previously expressed frustration with xAI's sub-par coding product, which lags behind popular tools like Anthropic's Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex. Acquiring Cursor, which offers similar tools to automate coding, could help close the gap. The startup has grown explosively in recent years amid booming demand for more efficient programming tools and a shift toward "vibe coding" in the industry - because apparently, the future of software development involves not just writing code but also having the right feelings about it.