SpaceX has completed its acquisition of Cursor, a startup developing artificial intelligence-based programming tools; the deal is expected to be worth $60 billion. For the company’s head, Musk, this is an important step in closing the gap with market leaders such as Anthropic and OpenAI.
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The deal takes effect on August 14, two months after SpaceX announced it had reached an agreement to acquire the startup. It’s one of the largest such deals in tech history and is designed to help Musk’s company speed up development of better artificial intelligence tools to optimize tasks, including its popular programming services. Musk’s artificial intelligence startup, renamed SpaceXAI, has few corporate customers, forcing him to make a series of reorganizations and layoffs.
The Cursor programming assistant was launched in 2023 to help write and debug code. The company has become one of the fastest-growing startups and a key player in the “vibe coding” era as demand surges among software developers for tools that can build apps based on chatbot responses. After the deal is completed, Cursor’s co-founders will become billionaires, and employees of new startups will have access to the artificial intelligence accelerator reserves provided by SpaceX.
In July, SpaceX and Cursor jointly released the Grok 4.5 model, which has advanced capabilities for writing programming code and handling financial and legal tasks. SpaceX then released the Grok Bot AI agent application, followed by the updated Grok 4.6 model. The company also has multibillion-dollar deals with Anthropic and Google to use its computing resources. At a staff meeting in August, Musk said the company must excel at software development but that its future lies in artificial intelligence. “By September, our artificial intelligence revenue will exceed all other SpaceX revenue.” – He agreed.
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