Four trading days after the largest IPO in history priced at $135 a share, SpaceX signed an Agreement and Plan of Merger on June 16 to acquire Anysphere, the company behind Cursor, in an all-stock deal valuing the AI coding startup at $60 billion. The merger will be executed through X67, a wholly owned SpaceX subsidiary, and is expected to close in Q3 2026.

The price tag is the same one Musk telegraphed in April, when he framed the choice as a binary: buy Cursor outright for $60 billion, or pay $10 billion for a partnership. What’s changed is the currency. SPCX has surged more than 56% from its IPO price, adding nearly $1 trillion in market cap and making the equity in Musk’s pocket suddenly cheaper to spend than the cash on Cursor’s term sheet.

Bill Ackman, posting on X, said the quiet part: “The Cursor acquisition costs materially less in dilution because of SpaceX’s high valuation.” The exchange ratio will be set by SpaceX’s volume-weighted average closing price over the seven trading days before closing, meaning Cursor’s shareholders are effectively long SPCX into Q3. A $4 billion antitrust termination fee is disclosed in the accompanying 8-K.

Cursor, founded in 2022, reported roughly $2.6 billion in annualized B2B revenue to Reuters, with Andreessen Horowitz, Thrive, Nvidia, and Google previously circling a private round at $50 billion. SpaceX’s offer clears that mark by 20% and pays in freshly liquid paper.

The strategic logic traces back to xAI’s attrition problem. By the end of March, all 11 of xAI’s co-founders had departed, and Musk has since described the lab as one that “was not built right [the] first time around,” saying he’s rebuilding it “from the foundations up.” Cursor’s pipeline into developer coding requests and design decisions, flagged in SpaceX’s IPO filing alongside plans to release an AI model on Cursor next to Grok Build, is the data substrate that xAI internally couldn’t generate on its own timeline.

The IPO filing also cited a $28.5 trillion addressable market, described as mostly AI. The Cursor deal is the first test of whether the public market agrees enough to keep funding the conversion of rocket equity into model equity.

Sources