Newly Public SpaceX Moves to Buy Cursor for $60 Billion
· TexaHub · AI in Industry, LLMs & Foundation Models, Space & Aerospace
Days after its record IPO, SpaceX signed a stock merger with AI coding company Cursor, betting that developer workflow data can make its Grok models competitive.
The deal
On 16 June, Space Exploration Technologies Corp. signed a merger agreement with Anysphere, the company behind the Cursor coding tool, under which Cursor will become a wholly owned subsidiary [1]. Cursor shareholders will receive SpaceX Class A shares based on an implied equity value of $60.0 billion, priced on the volume-weighted average closing price over the seven trading days before closing, which SpaceX expects in the third quarter of 2026 subject to regulatory approvals [1].
The agreement came days after SpaceX's listing. The company priced its offering of 555,555,555 Class A shares at $135 each, to trade on Nasdaq under the symbol SPCX [2]. TechCrunch reported that the sale raised $75 billion, making it the largest IPO on record, ahead of Saudi Aramco's $24.9 billion in 2019 [3].
Why SpaceX wants a coding tool
The merger exercises an option disclosed in the IPO prospectus. In April, SpaceX entered a compute and option agreement with Cursor, providing GPU cluster capacity and collaborating on models including Grok, with the right to buy Cursor at a predetermined price or pay a fee [2]. Had SpaceX walked away, Cursor would have been entitled to a $1.5 billion termination fee and an $8.5 billion deferred services fee [2].
The prospectus is explicit about the rationale. SpaceX says Cursor's workflow "generates valuable developer interaction data, including coding generation prompts, iteration cycles, and software architecture decisions", and that it expects this data to "enhance our model training and inference, including with respect to Grok" [2]. TechCrunch described the deal as an attempt by SpaceX's AI division, built around the xAI business it merged with earlier this year, to catch up with the major AI labs after a restructuring [4]. heise reported that Cursor could draw on xAI's Colossus supercomputer, which it put at around 200,000 Nvidia Hopper GPUs [5].
Before the deal, Cursor had been on track to raise $2 billion at a $50 billion valuation from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Thrive and Nvidia, according to TechCrunch [4].
What to watch
In our assessment, the deal turns a space and connectivity company into a direct competitor in AI coding tools, a market where the largest model developers can be both suppliers to a tool like Cursor and rivals to it. The key open questions are whether customers accept that their coding interactions may be used to train Grok, how Cursor's access to third-party models changes once it is owned by a model developer, and what regulators require before closing. None of these has been settled publicly, and SpaceX has so far described the benefits only in its own filings.
Sources
[1] Form 8-K: Entry into a Material Definitive Agreement (Agreement and Plan of Merger with Anysphere, Inc.) — SEC EDGAR, 16 Jun 2026
[2] Space Exploration Technologies Corp. Prospectus (Form 424(b)(4)) — SEC EDGAR, 12 Jun 2026
[3] SpaceX officially prices shares at $135 in the largest IPO ever — TechCrunch, 11 Jun 2026
[4] SpaceX to acquire Cursor for $60B in stock, days after blockbuster IPO — TechCrunch, 16 Jun 2026
[5] SpaceX acquires AI coding tool Cursor for $60 billion — heise online, 16 Jun 2026