SpaceX announced the deal on X, pre-empting a New York Times report that framed it as a completed acquisition. The structure gives SpaceX optionality: exercise the call by year end or walk away having paid $10B for shared compute access and joint model work. Cursor CEO Michael Truell called it a partnership to ‘scale up Composer’.
SpaceX has secured a call option to acquire AI coding startup Cursor, developed by San Francisco-based Anysphere, for $60 billion later this year, or, alternatively, to pay $10 billion for the joint AI development work the two companies are conducting together.
SpaceX announced the arrangement in a post on X on Tuesday, describing “SpaceXAI” and Cursor as working together to “create the world’s best coding and knowledge work AI.”
The post came just before the New York Times published a story citing two people who said SpaceX had agreed to purchase Cursor for $50 billion. The Times subsequently updated its story to reflect SpaceX’s own framing of the deal as an option, not a completed acquisition.
Cursor CEO Michael Truell confirmed the arrangement in a post on X, writing that he was “excited to partner with the SpaceX team to scale up Composer”, a reference to Cursor’s proprietary AI model. The option period runs through the end of 2026.
Whether SpaceX exercises the $60 billion option will depend in part on how the joint model development progresses over the intervening months. No employee transfer or integration details have been disclosed.
The commercial logic on both sides is clear. Cursor, a fork of Visual Studio Code with deep AI integration, developed by Anysphere, a company founded in 2022 by four MIT students: Michael Truell, Sualeh Asif, Arvid Lunnemark, and Aman Sanger, has grown at a pace that has become a benchmark for AI-era startups.
It was valued at $400 million in a Series A in mid-2024, climbed to $2.5 billion by January 2025, raised $900 million at $9.9 billion in June 2025, and closed a $2.3 billion Series D in November 2025 at $29.3 billion.
By February 2026 it had crossed $2 billion in annualised recurring revenue, making it the fastest B2B company to scale from zero to $2 billion in roughly three years, by widely cited metrics.
More than half of the Fortune 500 now use Cursor. Co-founder and CTO Arvid Lunnemark departed in October 2025 to found Integrous Research, an AI safety lab; the three remaining founders continue to lead the company.
For SpaceX, which absorbed Elon Musk’s AI venture xAI in an all-stock transaction in February 2026 valuing the combined entity at $1.25 trillion, the deal addresses a visible gap.
While OpenAI’s Codex has reached three million weekly users and Anthropic’s Claude Code has become the most-used AI coding tool among professional engineers, xAI has no comparable product.
The Colossus supercomputer in Memphis, targeting one million H100-equivalent GPUs, gives SpaceX training infrastructure at scale, but without a leading application to route it through.
The Cursor partnership provides that application. SpaceX had already hired two Cursor engineers, Andrew Milich and Jason Ginsberg, following an exodus of xAI co-founders. And last week, xAI began renting compute capacity to Cursor, allowing the startup to use tens of thousands of xAI chips to train its latest model, suggesting the commercial relationship predates Tuesday’s announcement.
The IPO context matters. SpaceX is preparing for a planned Nasdaq listing in June 2026, targeting a $1.75 trillion valuation and a raise of up to $75 billion.
A $60 billion option over the world’s fastest-growing AI developer tool adds narrative and commercial value to that prospectus regardless of whether the option is ultimately exercised.
For Cursor, the deal provides financial certainty, either $10 billion in near-term cash for the collaboration or a $60 billion exit, without requiring an immediate sale. This is particularly notable because Cursor was simultaneously in talks as of the weekend to raise $2 billion at a valuation above $50 billion in a separate fundraising round, with Andreessen Horowitz expected to co-lead and Nvidia and Thrive Capital also participating.
Whether that round proceeds alongside or instead of the SpaceX arrangement is unclear.
The deal also sharpens the competitive map in AI coding tools. Cursor had previously turned down acquisition overtures from OpenAI.
OpenAI’s own response is to press ahead with Codex, now at three million weekly users with 40% of revenue from enterprise, and with its planned acquisition of Windsurf. Anthropic’s Claude Code is the third significant player.
SpaceX is now formally entering this market through Cursor’s existing distribution rather than building from scratch, a faster path to relevance, at an extraordinary price.
Stephan is the sports journalist for the Maple Grove Report.
