<p>SpaceX has announced a partnership with AI coding startup Cursor (built by Anysphere), with an option to acquire the company outright for $60 billion later this year, or pay $10 billion for the joint development work if the acquisition doesn’t happen.</p>
<p>The deal was announced on X by SpaceX’s official account before a New York Times report initially described it as a completed acquisition — which it isn’t, at least not yet.</p>
<h2>What’s actually in the deal</h2>
<p>SpaceX holds a call option to buy Cursor by end of 2026. In the meantime, the two companies are working together to build what they’re calling “the world’s best coding and knowledge work AI,” combining Cursor’s Composer model and developer distribution with SpaceX’s Colossus supercomputer — roughly equivalent to one million NVIDIA H100 chips.</p>
<p>Cursor CEO Michael Truell described the arrangement as a partnership to scale up Composer. The $10 billion floor payment covers the collaboration regardless of whether the acquisition closes.</p>
<h2>Why this makes sense for both sides</h2>
<p>Cursor has been growing fast. Its valuation went from $400 million in mid-2024 to $29.3 billion after a Series D, and it crossed $2 billion in annualized recurring revenue by early 2026, with projections of $6 billion by year-end. The bottleneck has been compute.</p>
<p>SpaceX, which absorbed xAI in February 2026, has the opposite problem: abundant GPU capacity but no competitive AI coding product. OpenAI has Codex, Anthropic has Claude Code, and xAI has been playing catch-up on coding benchmarks. Cursor fills that gap immediately.</p>
<p>There’s also a timing angle. SpaceX is preparing for a Nasdaq IPO targeting a $1.75 trillion valuation. Acquiring Cursor with publicly traded stock after the IPO is cleaner than doing it now — hence the option structure rather than an outright purchase.</p>
<p>The deal also preempted a nearly-closed $2 billion funding round that Cursor was days away from signing, with investors including a16z, Thrive, NVIDIA, and Battery Ventures at a $50 billion valuation.</p>
<h2>The talent signal that came first</h2>
<p>In retrospect, the deal had been telegraphed for weeks. In March, Cursor’s two co-heads of product engineering left to join xAI. Those were the engineers most responsible for building the product that reached $2 billion in ARR. The capital and the headlines followed the talent, as they usually do.</p>
<h2>What this means for enterprise users</h2>
<p>This is where things get complicated. Cursor currently relies on models from Anthropic and OpenAI under zero-data-retention agreements. Once SpaceX owns Cursor — or even while the partnership is active — there’s an obvious incentive to route users toward Grok and away from Claude or GPT-4o.</p>
<p>This isn’t hypothetical. When Windsurf entered acquisition talks with OpenAI, Anthropic cut off its model access. The same dynamic could play out here in reverse, with Anthropic and OpenAI restricting Cursor’s access to their models as the SpaceX relationship deepens.</p>
<p>Analysts are already advising enterprise CIOs to demand change-of-control clauses in their Cursor contracts. There are also governance questions around Cursor’s Composer model, which is fine-tuned on Kimi 2.5, a Chinese base model — a detail that may matter to regulated industries.</p>
<p>The broader pattern is vertical integration. OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google all have their own coding tools now. The independent, model-agnostic layer that Cursor occupied is shrinking. Whether Cursor under SpaceX remains genuinely multi-model or gradually becomes a Grok delivery vehicle is the question enterprise customers should be asking before renewing contracts.</p>
<p>Cursor had previously turned down acquisition approaches from OpenAI. The SpaceX deal, structured as an option rather than a sale, gave the founders more flexibility — effectively a call spread on whether Elon Musk ships fast enough to make the $60 billion price worth paying.</p>


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SpaceX has announced a partnership with AI coding startup Cursor (Anysphere), securing a call option to acquire the company for $60 billion by end of 2026, with a $10 billion floor payment for joint development regardless of whether the acquisition closes. The deal pairs Cursor's Composer model and developer distribution with SpaceX's Colossus supercomputer. Cursor had grown from a $400M valuation to $29.3B after a Series D, crossing $2B in annualized recurring revenue. The partnership preempted a nearly-closed $2B funding round. Key risks for enterprise users include potential model access restrictions from Anthropic and OpenAI as the SpaceX relationship deepens, governance questions around Cursor's Composer model fine-tuned on a Chinese base model, and the broader trend of vertical integration shrinking the independent, model-agnostic coding tool layer.

xAI and Cursor announce partnership to build coding AI