$60 billion. That's how much SpaceX is potentially offering for Cursor, the AI coding editor used by millions of developers - a price that would rank among the largest tech acquisitions ever.
The arrangement, reported by The Verge, has an unusual structure: SpaceX either buys Cursor outright for $60 billion, or pays a $10 billion fee instead. That kind of either/or structure suggests SpaceX wants access to Cursor's technology and user base regardless of whether the full acquisition closes - likely as part of a broader xAI strategy to compete with GitHub Copilot and other AI coding tools.
The timing connects to SpaceX's anticipated IPO, which would combine SpaceX, xAI (Musk's AI lab), and X (formerly Twitter) under one corporate structure. Bringing Cursor into that family would give xAI a direct consumer AI coding product, something it currently lacks despite building its own Grok AI models.
Cursor, made by Anysphere, sits at the center of the AI coding market. It uses large language models - AI systems trained on code and text to understand and generate programming languages - to auto-complete, explain, and write code from plain-language instructions. The tool has grown rapidly and is used at thousands of companies. Whether Cursor's founding team would want to be absorbed into Musk's corporate structure is a separate question entirely. Retention after acquisition is one of the hardest problems in tech, and especially so for engineering-heavy startups where the founders' judgment drives the product roadmap.
The $60 billion figure, if accurate, reflects how much the AI coding market is expected to grow - and how much SpaceX values owning a coding platform outright rather than building one from scratch.