$60 billion. That's the reported price SpaceX has agreed to pay for Cursor, the AI coding assistant made by Anysphere. If the deal closes at that figure, it would rank among the largest acquisitions in tech history - and it places Elon Musk in direct competition with Anthropic's Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex in the AI-assisted coding market.
AI Business reported the deal, describing it as "potential" - meaning terms are agreed but the transaction is not yet final.
Why SpaceX Wants a Coding Tool
Cursor sits inside VS Code and lets developers write, edit, and debug code through plain-English conversation. It's one of the most widely adopted AI coding tools among professional developers, competing directly with GitHub Copilot and a growing field of alternatives.
The SpaceX angle makes more sense than it first appears. The company employs thousands of software engineers across its rocket and Starlink divisions, and has been deepening AI integration in its development workflows. Owning Cursor outright gives SpaceX direct control over tooling its own engineers use daily - and hands Musk a foothold in a market currently dominated by Microsoft (via GitHub Copilot) and Anthropic.
A 24x Step-Up in 18 Months
The valuation is hard to square with Cursor's fundraising history. Anysphere raised at a reported $2.5 billion valuation in late 2024. A $60 billion acquisition price would represent roughly a 24x step-up in under two years - an extraordinary multiple for a company whose core product is a subscription coding assistant.
That gap either reflects serious confidence in Cursor's enterprise growth trajectory, or a strategic premium Musk is willing to pay to own a credible competitor to OpenAI's developer tools. Given his public disputes with OpenAI over the past two years, the competitive motivation is plausible.
The deal is not final. Regulatory review of a $60 billion acquisition would likely take months, and terms could change. But if it closes as reported, it reshapes the AI coding tools landscape overnight.