SpaceX Says It Has Agreement to Acquire Cursor for $60 Billion

SpaceX said it has an agreement to either acquire AI coding startup Cursor for $60 billion later this year or pay $10 billion for its work together, as it works to catch up to rivals in AI coding.

SpaceX announced the deal in a post on X, saying the companies are "now working closely together to create the world's best coding and knowledge work AI."

SpaceX, which is planning an initial public offering later this year, recently merged with xAI, Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company. The deal comes shortly after Musk said that xAI is behind on coding tools compared with its peers and vowed to rebuild the company from the ground up. In March, he ordered a round of layoffs. He's also been seeking engineering talent, and has previously hired from Cursor.

Cursor had been in talks with investors to raise about $2 billion in a funding round with a valuation of more than $50 billion, not including the investment. Bloomberg reported. Both Nvidia and Andreessen Horowitz were set to participate in the deal.

Cursor's AI assistant, launched in 2023, helps programmers write and debug code more efficiently. It's become one of the fastest-growing startups of all time and a central player in tech's "vibe coding" era, as demand surges among software developers for artificial intelligence coding tools.

The SpaceX team "has an enormous amount of compute and we think together we can scale up our model efforts and we're really excited about it," Cursor president Oskar Schulz said. "We really like their team."

Competition among AI coding startups is heating up as Anthropic, OpenAI and a long list of startups push out products to streamline software development.