Musk’s SpaceX to buy AI coding startup Anysphere in $60 billion deal

SpaceX, the company led by Elon Musk, said Tuesday that it will acquire Anysphere, the maker of the AI coding tool Cursor, in a deal valued at $60 billion. The transaction is described as one of the largest in the artificial intelligence sector so far, and it comes only days after SpaceX’s blockbuster Nasdaq listing, which valued the company at more than $2 trillion.

Cursor is now considered one of the fastest-growing AI companies in the world. Its product lets developers write, edit and build software using natural-language instructions, and in recent years it has become one of the most popular development tools among software engineers. Founded in 2022, the company has already reached an annual revenue run rate of about $2.6 billion, an unusually fast rise for such a young firm.

The acquisition signals Musk’s aggressive push into AI-powered software development, one of the hottest areas in the industry. Along with OpenAI and Anthropic, Cursor is seen as one of the companies that has proven a meaningful business model around code-writing automation, an area where organizations are willing to pay heavily for productivity gains.

The deal is also expected to strengthen xAI, Musk’s AI company, which merged with SpaceX earlier this year. While OpenAI and Anthropic currently lead the market for language models, xAI has struggled to establish a major presence in developer tools. Adding Cursor could give it access to millions of developers and large enterprise customers, while allowing tighter integration between Grok models and autonomous software tools. The move highlights the intensifying race among AI giants for control of the software layer, as competition shifts from building stronger models and securing computing power to the products employees actually use.