Musk’s latest AI gamble: $60 billion stock deal for Cursor maker

SpaceX has announced it will acquire Anysphere, the company behind the Cursor development platform, in a stock deal valued at $60 billion. The report says the move comes shortly after SpaceX’s massive offering, which valued the company at about $2.7 trillion.

The transaction is being described as more than a software purchase. According to the report, Elon Musk sees it as a strategic step toward building an AI empire that spans computing infrastructure, advanced models, data centers, satellite communications, and now a popular coding environment used by programmers.

Cursor is considered one of the leading AI development platforms. It lets developers write, fix, and automate code using natural language, and has become a core tool for millions of developers. Its annualized revenue has already surpassed $2.5 billion, according to the reports.

The deal is also meant to help Musk narrow the gap with OpenAI, Anthropic and Google. Despite major investments in xAI and the Grok model, the company still trails ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini. By adding Cursor, xAI gains direct access to a broad developer community and a key entry point into software creation, especially if the platform is integrated with xAI’s computing infrastructure, including the Colossus supercomputer.

The long-term goal is to turn the coding tool from a programming assistant into an AI agent capable of handling more complex development tasks and even building entire systems with minimal human intervention. The move also puts Musk in direct competition with Microsoft and OpenAI’s GitHub Copilot, and with Anthropic’s Claude Code. However, the deal carries risks because Cursor is currently relatively open and works with models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and xAI. If rivals see the new ownership as a threat, they could restrict access to their models. If the deal is not completed because of regulatory or other obstacles, Cursor would receive about $10 billion in compensation, including substantial computing resources.