Startups

SpaceX seals $60B all-stock takeover of Cursor maker Anysphere, days after record IPO

The deal, formalized two trading days after SpaceX's Nasdaq debut, hands Elon Musk's xAI a million-user coding tool — and ranks as the largest venture-backed startup acquisition of 2026.

By Giulia Donatello · Startups & funding · 2026-06-18 · 3 min read

Photo: Unsplash / Chris Ried — Lines of code displayed on a developer's monitor

SpaceX agreed on Tuesday to acquire Anysphere, the maker of AI coding assistant Cursor, in an all-stock deal valuing the startup at $60 billion, according to a regulatory filing, the largest venture-backed startup acquisition of 2026, and a transaction Elon Musk’s newly public rocket company moved on within two trading days of ringing the Nasdaq bell.

The structure had been telegraphed in April, when SpaceX disclosed it held a 30-day post-IPO option to either buy Cursor at $60 billion or pay a $10 billion break-up fee. Bloomberg reported SpaceX used just two of those thirty days. The transaction is expected to close in Q3 and represents roughly 3.4% dilution at SpaceX’s IPO valuation. Shares gained about 16% on the news.

For Anysphere’s investors, including Andreessen Horowitz, Thrive Capital, Accel and Coatue, the exit doubles the roughly $30 billion mark set in November and lands above the $50 billion valuation at which Cursor had been on track to close a $2 billion round led by Andreessen Horowitz, Thrive and Nvidia. The company has raised $3.4 billion to date.

The strategic logic sits with xAI, not the launch business. By the end of March, all 11 of Musk’s xAI co-founders had departed, and Musk himself conceded the lab “was not built right [the] first time around.” Buying Cursor imports a developer-facing product the in-house effort hasn’t produced against Anthropic and OpenAI.

It also imports a real business. Cursor crossed $1 billion in annualized revenue in November and now runs at roughly $2.6 billion in annualized B2B revenue, with 64% of the Fortune 500 on enterprise subscriptions, per Reuters and Ramp spending data. Market share, however, has compressed from 41% in June 2025 to about 26% in May as Anthropic, Amazon and Microsoft pushed competing tools.

CEO Michael Truell framed the deal narrowly on X: “Excited to partner with the SpaceX team to scale up Composer. A meaningful step on our path to build the best place to code with AI.”

It’s a tidy line for a transaction that, two days after a public listing, effectively rerouted xAI’s product roadmap through a regulatory filing.

Sources