Following its Wall Street debut last week, SpaceX will proceed with its $60 billion acquisition of artificial intelligence firm Cursor as Elon Musk’s space exploration and AI business looks to gain an advantage over competitors Anthropic and OpenAI.
In April, SpaceX declared that it could either purchase Cursor or pay $10 billion to “work together” with the business.
When the purchase is complete in the third quarter, Cursor will become a fully owned subsidiary, according to a regulatory filing made by SpaceX on Tuesday.
Cursor, a San Francisco-based startup One well-known AI coding assistance is Anysphere. Cursor’s broad “distribution to expert software engineers,” as SpaceX has defined it, probably contributed to its appeal to Musk’s business by providing it with access to a new clientele.
Cursor said that the collaboration with SpaceX subsidiary xAI would allow it to develop future AI products using xAI’s enormous AI data center complex Colossus, located in Memphis, Tennessee, when it originally announced the possible acquisition.
As AI coding helpers have grown more adept at doing computer programming tasks, Cursor, which was founded in 2022, helped ignite a movement known as “vibe coding.”
In addition to competing with other coding tools like Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex, Cursor’s technology is largely based on collaborations with those larger AI research firms.
In early 2025, a well-known AI researcher came up with the term “vibe coding” while experimenting with Cursor’s Composer and Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet for weekend projects.
In what is generally seen as a good debut, SpaceX went public on Friday. The company’s stock has surged since Friday and is up 9% ahead of Tuesday’s opening bell.
