June 17, 2026
On June 16, 2026, SpaceX agreed to acquire Anysphere, the San Francisco company behind the AI coding tool Cursor, in an all-stock deal that values Cursor at 60 billion dollars. The acquisition gives xAI, which merged with SpaceX in February 2026, its first major presence in AI developer tools, a market where it had trailed Microsoft, Anthropic, and Google. The deal was announced four days after SpaceX’s record Nasdaq debut and is expected to close in the third quarter of 2026.
What is xAI buying in the 60 billion dollar Cursor deal?
Under the agreement, all outstanding Anysphere common and preferred shares will be converted into SpaceX Class A stock, with the exchange ratio based on SpaceX’s seven-day average share price on the date the deal closes. Cursor will become a wholly owned subsidiary of SpaceX once the transaction completes, which is expected in the third quarter of 2026 pending regulatory approval.
The purchase is the result of an option SpaceX secured in April 2026, when it agreed to either buy Anysphere for 60 billion dollars later in the year or pay 10 billion dollars for a partnership. SpaceX has now chosen to buy outright. The move follows SpaceX’s June 12 Nasdaq debut, which valued the company at over 2 trillion dollars and gave it the share currency to fund an all-stock acquisition of this size.
How big is Cursor and how fast has it grown?
Cursor is the fastest-growing business software product on record. Its annual recurring revenue went from 100 million dollars in January 2025 to 500 million dollars by June 2025, passed 1 billion dollars in November 2025, and reached 2 billion dollars by February 2026. Anysphere now expects to exceed 6 billion dollars in annual recurring revenue by the end of 2026, and the product already serves around 50,000 enterprise customers.
Anysphere was founded in 2022 by four MIT graduates: Michael Truell, who is chief executive, along with Sualeh Asif, Aman Sanger, and Arvid Lunnemark. The company raised an 8 million dollar seed round led by the OpenAI Startup Fund in 2023. Cursor is built as a fork of the VS Code editor with AI features that let developers write, edit, and review code in natural language, and it is already used by engineers at OpenAI, Stripe, and Spotify. In November 2025, Anysphere released Composer, its first in-house inference model for code generation, which until then had been handled mainly by third-party models such as Claude and GPT-4.
Why does xAI want Cursor, and what changes for Grok?
xAI, which SpaceX merged with in February 2026 and which is known for the Grok chatbot, has struggled to compete in AI developer tools against Microsoft, Anthropic, and Google. Buying Cursor gives it a product with strong developer adoption and 2 billion dollars in annual recurring revenue, rather than building a competitor from scratch.
SpaceX confirmed that it has been jointly training a model with Cursor for several months, using xAI’s Colossus supercomputing cluster in Memphis, Tennessee. That model is expected to ship inside both Cursor and Grok Build, xAI’s own AI coding agent, in the near term. The deal also gives Cursor access to xAI’s compute, which Anysphere has cited as a constraint on its growth.
What does the deal mean for Cursor’s use of Claude and other models?
Cursor currently routes many of its queries to Anthropic’s Claude and other third-party models. SpaceX has separately signed agreements to lease cloud computing capacity from Anthropic and Google, and according to Reuters those agreements include 90-day termination clauses, meaning SpaceX could reclaim that capacity quickly. Deciding whether to keep sending Cursor traffic to Claude or move it onto xAI infrastructure will be one of the first choices the combined company faces.
The 60 billion dollar price reflects how quickly Anysphere’s value has risen. In November 2025 the company raised 2.3 billion dollars at a 29.3 billion dollar valuation in a round co-led by Accel and Coatue, so SpaceX is paying roughly twice that level. Investors including Accel, Thrive Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, DST Global, Coatue, Nvidia, and Google will receive SpaceX Class A stock in exchange for their Anysphere shares.
How does this compare to GitHub Copilot and Claude Code?
The acquisition puts SpaceX and xAI in direct competition with Microsoft, which owns GitHub Copilot and offers Gemini Code, and with Anthropic, which has launched Claude Code. Each major AI platform is now trying to own the tools developers use every day, and owning Cursor gives xAI an established channel into that market rather than a late entry.
For enterprises, the open question is model neutrality. Cursor’s appeal has partly rested on letting developers choose between models such as Claude and GPT-4. How xAI balances that flexibility against promoting its own Grok and Composer models will shape whether Cursor keeps its position as developer tools consolidate under the largest AI platforms.
For more details, which quite frankly are slightly limited, you can check out the official acquisition announcement of Cursor by SpaceX as posted on X.
