In Brief: SpaceX has secured the right to acquire Cursor-maker Anysphere for $60 billion later this year — or pay $10 billion for joint work already underway — as Elon Musk moves to plug a notable gap in xAI's AI coding tooling lineup.
SpaceX announced on April 21 that it has entered a partnership with Anysphere, the company behind AI coding tool Cursor, and holds an option to acquire the startup outright for $60 billion later in 2026. Alternatively, SpaceX can elect to pay $10 billion for the collaborative work the two companies have already begun — effectively a floor price for the relationship. The deal was first reported by Bloomberg and later confirmed by Anysphere.
The announcement arrives against the backdrop of SpaceX's February 2026 merger with Elon Musk's xAI, a combined entity now valued at approximately $1.25 trillion. Cursor has become one of the most remarkable growth stories in enterprise software: Anysphere reached $100 million in annual recurring revenue in January 2025, surged to $1 billion ARR by November 2025, and has continued climbing through 2026 — a trajectory that outpaced Slack, Zoom, and Snowflake at equivalent stages. The product is an AI-powered code editor used by millions of developers globally on a subscription basis.
The strategic motivation is clear. Since the xAI-SpaceX merger, Musk's combined entity has competed directly against OpenAI's Codex and Anthropic's Claude in the AI coding assistant market but has lacked a comparable product with Cursor's developer install base. Acquiring Anysphere would hand SpaceX an enterprise customer base and a high-growth recurring revenue stream — both of which align with the company's stated ambition to build orbital data centres that depend on strong software-side demand signals to justify compute deployment in space.
Whether the $60 billion option is ultimately exercised will depend on Cursor's continued growth momentum and the appetite of antitrust regulators. A deal at that price — against roughly $1 billion in ARR — implies a 50x revenue multiple, and the vertical integration of a dominant rocket launch provider, an AI lab, and a developer tooling platform used by tens of millions of engineers would be unprecedented in regulatory terms. Expect scrutiny from both the DOJ and European Commission before any close.