AI & ML · 4 min read
Days after its record-breaking IPO, SpaceX just made the biggest bet yet on AI coding — buying Cursor for roughly $60 billion in stock.
On June 16, 2026, SpaceX agreed to acquire Anysphere — the company behind the AI coding tool Cursor — for roughly $60 billion in an all-stock deal. A securities filing that day confirmed it, and the numbers speak for themselves: this is widely described as the largest acquisition of a venture-backed startup on record, surpassing Google's ~$32 billion deal for Wiz.
The acquisition traces back to an option agreement signed on April 21, 2026. Under it, SpaceX could either buy Cursor outright for $60 billion or walk away for about $10 billion — a $1.5 billion cash termination fee plus $8.5 billion in compute resources. In June, SpaceX exercised the full purchase option.
It's an all-stock transaction: Anysphere shareholders receive SpaceX Class A shares priced on the volume-weighted average closing price over the seven trading days before close. The deal is expected to close in Q3 2026, pending regulatory approval, and notably does not use IPO cash.
Cursor didn't get here by accident. Its annualized revenue reached roughly $4 billion by early June 2026 — about $2.6 billion of that from enterprise customers — up from a ~$2 billion run rate just four months earlier. In other words, it had blown past $1 billion in ARR long before the deal was signed.
The windfall also minted a new class of young billionaires: cofounders Michael Truell, Aman Sanger, Sualeh Asif, and Arvid Lunnemark are each seeing net worth around $2.7 billion.
The move ties Cursor directly into Elon Musk's AI ambitions. SpaceX and xAI say joint AI model training is already underway, with plans to ship a new model through Cursor and xAI's Grok Build coding agent, leveraging xAI's Memphis, Tennessee data center.
The timing was striking, too. The deal landed just days after SpaceX's record Nasdaq IPO on June 12 (ticker SPCX), which priced at $135/share, jumped nearly 20% on debut, and pushed SpaceX's valuation above $2 trillion.
As Cursor CEO Michael Truell put it: "We are excited to share that SpaceX has exercised their option to acquire Cursor in an all-stock transaction with the goal of building the world's most useful AI models."
Cursor has become part of the daily toolkit for a huge slice of professional developers, and a deal this size signals just how central AI-assisted coding has become to serious engineering. At WOT Dev, our senior engineers build with these tools every day — pairing hard-won judgment with the best of AI so the software that ships actually holds up. Moments like this are a good reminder that the tooling is moving fast; the craft of using it well still matters most.
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