SpaceX closed its $60 billion purchase of AI coding startup Cursor on Aug. 14, a regulatory filing confirms, handing Elon Musk a critical asset in his escalating race against Anthropic and OpenAI.
The acquisition, first announced two months prior, ranks among the largest technology deals ever completed. Musk wants Cursor’s technology to sharpen SpaceX’s AI tools for coding, a high-value market where rivals have gained an early foothold. His AI operation, branded SpaceXAI, struggled with enterprise adoption before this deal and endured rounds of layoffs and internal restructuring.
Cursor’s assistant product hit the market in 2023. It helps developers write and fix code faster, making the company a breakout leader in the so-called vibe coding movement, where engineers build software through chatbot prompts. Cursor became one of the fastest-growing startups in history.
The windfall extends to Cursor’s founders, who now join the billionaire ranks, while the startup’s engineers gain access to SpaceX’s massive inventory of advanced AI processors.
“We will have access to the largest fleet of GPUs in the world, giving us the compute to build stronger models that are also more economical to run,” Cursor noted in a Friday blog post.
The two companies had already begun collaborating before the deal closed. July brought Grok 4.5, their first joint model, tuned for coding, finance, and legal work and priced below competing options. SpaceX subsequently released Grok Bot, an AI agent system that handles assignments throughout the day, followed by an upgraded Grok 4.6 model.
Meanwhile, SpaceX has maintained multibillion-dollar infrastructure deals that let Anthropic and Google access its computing power. Still, Musk told employees in August that the company “must succeed on the software front.” He framed AI as the organization’s core priority, predicting AI revenue would surpass all other SpaceX income by September.
