SpaceX Buys AI Coding Tool Cursor for $60 Billion in Record Startup Deal

Quick Facts

• SpaceX signed a definitive all-stock merger agreement to acquire Anysphere, maker of AI coding tool Cursor, for $60 billion on June 16, 2026.
• Cursor surpassed $4 billion in annualized revenue as of early June 2026, with 64% of Fortune 500 companies among its customers.
• The deal includes a $10 billion general termination fee and a separate $4 billion regulatory termination fee if antitrust review blocks the transaction.

SpaceX on Tuesday signed a definitive all-stock merger agreement to acquire Anysphere, the San Francisco startup behind AI coding agent Cursor, for $60 billion. The deal is the largest acquisition of an AI developer-tools company ever recorded and the biggest startup merger-and-acquisition transaction of 2026.

The agreement was confirmed through an 8-K regulatory filing. SpaceX expects the deal to close in the third quarter, pending regulatory approvals. At SpaceX’s IPO valuation, the $60 billion price tag represents a 3.4% dilution, per the company’s filing.

The deal follows an April agreement in which SpaceX secured the right to either acquire Anysphere for $60 billion or pay $10 billion to enter a partnership. The acquisition was contingent on the success of a model training effort, making the $10 billion payment the largest breakup fee in history had the training failed.

Cursor’s rise

Anysphere was founded in 2022 by Michael Truell and three other MIT dropouts. The company grew from zero to $2 billion in annualized revenue in under 24 months, a milestone no other B2B software company has achieved in that timeframe. By early June 2026, Cursor’s annualized revenue reached $4 billion, up from $3 billion in late April and $2 billion in February.

Around 75% of that run rate comes from enterprise customers, representing roughly $2.6 billion in annualized B2B revenue. Cursor claims more than 50,000 enterprise clients, including Uber, Stripe, and Nvidia, and counts 64% of Fortune 500 companies among its users. The product has surpassed 1 million daily active users.

Despite the revenue growth, Cursor’s market share in the AI coding category has slipped. Spending data from Ramp shows its share fell from 41% in June 2025 to roughly 26% in May 2026. Anthropic now controls half of that category.

What SpaceX gets

SpaceX, which went public June 11 in the largest IPO on record at $75 billion, has been building out its AI ambitions since absorbing xAI in a February 2026 merger that valued the Grok chatbot maker at $250 billion. xAI lost $6.35 billion last year, had no meaningful presence in developer tools, and lost all 11 of its original co-founders by the end of March 2026. Elon Musk said in April that xAI was being rebuilt from the ground up.

Cursor gives SpaceX direct access to a large base of professional software engineers, a distribution channel xAI never developed. SpaceX’s Colossus supercluster in Memphis, home to more than 220,000 Nvidia GPUs across 300 megawatts of capacity, also resolves Cursor’s compute constraints.

‘The combination of Cursor’s leading product and distribution to expert software engineers with SpaceX’s million H100 equivalent Colossus training supercomputer will allow us to build the world’s most useful models,’ SpaceX said in a statement.

Cursor CEO Michael Truell called the deal a step toward ‘building the world’s most useful AI models.’ Vital Knowledge analyst Adam Crisafulli wrote in a note to investors that SpaceX hopes the acquisition will ‘give a jolt to its Grok AI business, which has so far failed to make a dent in the frontier market.’

SpaceX shares rose roughly 16% on Tuesday, pushing the company past Amazon and Microsoft by market cap to become the fourth most valuable company in the United States.

M&A market context

The Cursor deal tops a strong year for startup acquisitions. Through June 16, at least 1,177 venture-backed startup deals totaling $182.7 billion have been announced in 2026, compared with 1,132 deals worth $106.7 billion in the same period last year.

Read more: SpaceX Acquires AI Coding Tool Cursor For $60B In Year’s Largest Startup M&A Deal