SpaceX, having recently held its initial public offering, announced on Tuesday its plan to acquire Cursor, an AI startup specializing in tools for writing computer code, in a $60 billion all-stock transaction. This acquisition follows an agreement made in April between the two companies, which granted SpaceX the option to buy Cursor's parent company, Anysphere, after its IPO, or pay $10 billion for their collaboration. The deal is expected to close in the third quarter of this year.
This move further emphasizes Elon Musk's expansion into the artificial intelligence sector, going beyond SpaceX's traditional focus on rocket ships and satellite internet. Musk founded xAI in 2023, an AI startup known for the Grok chatbot, a competitor to OpenAI's ChatGPT and Anthropic's Claude. In February, SpaceX merged with xAI in a transaction that valued the combined entity at $1.25 trillion.
Following the merger, SpaceX secured significant deals to provide computing power to Google and Anthropic, generating billions of dollars monthly. These deals help offset considerable AI-related expenditures, which contributed to a $4.9 billion loss for SpaceX last year, contrasting with a $791 million profit in 2024. The acquisition of Cursor is expected to bolster SpaceX's position in coding tools, an area where its efforts have lagged behind competitors like Anthropic and OpenAI.
