On June 16, SpaceX filed paperwork with the SEC to buy Anysphere, the company behind the AI code editor Cursor, for $60 billion in stock. It's the largest acquisition of a venture-backed company on record, run as an all-stock merger through a SpaceX shell called X67 Inc., with Cursor set to become a wholly owned subsidiary once it clears regulators in the third quarter. A rocket maker bought a code editor. The number looks absurd until you check the calendar.
By now "SpaceX" barely means rockets. It absorbed xAI, Musk's AI arm, in February, and sold investors a $28 trillion future built mostly on AI. The problem was the AI. In the one area that matters most this year, writing code, xAI trailed both OpenAI and Anthropic. Cursor closes that gap overnight: a mature product with a huge base of developers and revenue that keeps doubling, from $1 billion last November to $2 billion in February to around $4 billion by June, according to Forbes.
Cursor is the sort of thing you can't build in a hurry. Founded in 2022 and run through OpenAI's own accelerator, it became the editor a large share of working engineers open every day. For an AI division that couldn't ship its own, buying the best one was faster than catching up.
The price is where it gets interesting. SpaceX went public on June 12 at $135 a share, jumped nineteen percent on day one to close at $161, and crossed $2 trillion in market value, above the $1.75 trillion the IPO had targeted. Four days later it used that stock, four days old and freshly repriced, to pay for Cursor. All stock. Not a dollar of cash.
For anyone who has watched a merger cycle, the shape is familiar. A company floats on a wave of demand, then spends the inflated paper before the market reprices it. AOL bought Time Warner this way in 2000, at the top of the dot-com run, and it's still the standard warning about deals paid in bubble stock. Cursor had raised at a $29 billion valuation late last year and was closing a new round near $50 billion when SpaceX pre-empted it at $60 billion, every share converting into Class A stock at a ratio set by the seven trading days before close.
Whether the deal ages well depends entirely on SpaceX holding a valuation it has had for barely a week.
None of it came out of nowhere. Cursor had trained its newest model on tens of thousands of xAI chips, and two of its senior engineers had moved to Musk's teams months earlier. The deal just made official a company that was already, in every way that counted, inside. Strip away the rocket-and-code novelty and it's vertical integration: one owner for the chips, the model, and the tool people type into, bought with a currency that didn't exist a week before. Cursor was the last independent piece of the stack. The more useful question is who still owns the pieces of everyone else's.
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