SpaceX strikes $10 billion Cursor deal, with $60 billion buyout option

SpaceX put an unusually high-stakes wager on coding AI on Tuesday, giving Cursor the right to collect $10 billion for joint work or sell itself to Elon Musk’s company for $60 billion later this year. The structure turns a product partnership into a possible acquisition path and gives SpaceX leverage over one of the fastest-rising names in enterprise software before any public listing can reset the terms.

The deal centers on a next-generation coding and knowledge work AI built with Cursor’s software tools and SpaceX’s Colossus supercomputer, which SpaceX says has compute equal to one million Nvidia H100 chips. That pairing matters because it links a private aerospace giant to a leading code-generation platform, concentrating more of the most valuable AI infrastructure, talent and distribution inside a tighter corporate circle.

Cursor, originally known as Anysphere, was founded in 2022 by four MIT students, Michael Truell, Sualeh Asif, Aman Sanger and Arvid Lunnemark. The startup said in its own blog that it had just raised a $2.3 billion Series D at a $29.3 billion post-money valuation. Days earlier, it was said to be in talks to raise at least $2 billion at a $50 billion valuation, a rapid climb that makes SpaceX’s $60 billion buyout option look less like a side clause than a valuation marker.

The move also fits Musk’s broader effort to catch up in AI coding. Two Cursor product engineering heads, Andrew Milich and Jason Ginsberg, joined SpaceX in March to work on lunar projects and xAI, Musk’s AI startup that is now part of SpaceX. Cursor did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but the message from the deal is already clear: the fight for elite coding-AI talent is moving inside the same closed ecosystems that control launch vehicles, supercomputing and frontier models. That consolidation could narrow the field for independent enterprise AI vendors just as demand for software automation is accelerating.