SpaceX acquires Cursor for $60 billion. Can it fix Musk’s coding division?

Today it was announced SpaceX will buy Anysphere, Inc., maker of AI coding agent Cursor, for $60 billion. 

The news comes a few days after SpaceX’s historic IPO listing, with the rocket and AI company stating in its SEC filing that the Cursor deal will likely close in Q3 2026. 

Developers can now wonder how the AI coding agent might change under the Musk umbrella.

April partnership brings June ownership

SpaceX and Cursor have been flirting about a potential acquisition for a couple of months now. 

Back in April, the pair inked a unique partnership, where Elon Musk’s company agreed to either pay $10 billion to the then-independent startup in a model-training collaboration or opt to buy the whole company later on for $60 billion. 

That day has now come. 

At the time, Cursor described its partnership with SpaceX as a way to accelerate its model training efforts, stating in a brief announcement blog post that Musk’s company would enable the startup to scale up intelligence via xAI’s Colossus infrastructure. 

For its part, SpaceX posted on X back in April that working with Cursor would allow it “to build the world’s most useful models.” 

SpaceX sets its sights on AI coding

It seems SpaceX has been eyeing Cursor’s talent for quite some time.

Even before the April partnership, back in March, Reuters reported that xAI had hired two engineers from Cursor. In fact, Peter Swimm, former principal product manager — Microsoft Copilot Studio, Microsoft, tells The New Stack he expects it’s largely engineering and AI talent that SpaceX hopes to gain from the new acquisition: 

What remains genuinely scarce is elite AI engineering talent and the teams that know how to build these systems at scale.

“The more interesting lens is to view it as an acqui-hire and talent consolidation play. The AI coding assistant market is crowded, features are converging rapidly, and long-term differentiation is proving difficult. What remains genuinely scarce is elite AI engineering talent and the teams that know how to build these systems at scale.” 

SpaceX may very well need that talent. As The New Stack wrote back in April, “SpaceX’s xAI has not had a coding hit since its grok-code-fast-1 model had its time in the sun.”

Though SpaceX’s recent IPO puts its valuation at an eye-watering $2+ trillion, its coding division has not been performing up to par, as Reuters reported in March when several aXI founders left the company. Cursor, meanwhile, rocketed to a $29.3 billion valuation at the end of 2025, scooping up $2.3 billion in Series D funding.

By bringing Cursor into its fold, SpaceX is likely hoping to score more engineering talent and level up its AI coding. 

What does it mean for developers? 

Swimm tells The New Stack he thinks Cursor users can expect better performance from the coding agent, assuming access to SpaceX’s deep resources.

What he says remains to be seen is whether the tool will “maintai[n] broad model support and ecosystem neutrality” or face sweeping changes à la Twitter when Musk morphed the social media company into X:

“For Cursor users, the question isn’t whether the product gets better. With significantly more resources behind it, it probably will. The question is whether it remains an independent platform optimized for developers or becomes another component in a larger corporate strategy.” 

Whoever owns the interface where developers spend eight hours a day gains visibility into how software gets built, which models get adopted, and ultimately where AI spending flows.

If that’s the case, he also predicts procurement evaluations will change, as enterprises may now assess the coding agent as one piece of Mr. Musk’s growing AI puzzle rather than an independent vendor. 

Bigger picture, Swimm says the SpaceX acquisition highlights where real strategic value likely now sits. He doesn’t see AI coding agents, themselves, as the gamechanger but the access they provide into developer workflows: 

“What it [the acquisition] does suggest is that access to developer workflows is becoming strategically valuable. Whoever owns the interface where developers spend eight hours a day gains visibility into how software gets built, which models get adopted, and ultimately where AI spending flows.”