SpaceX has acquired Cursor, an AI tool that helps software developers write code faster, for $60 billion in stock. This is according to SpaceX.

To understand why that price matters: Cursor's parent company, Anysphere, was valued at about $9 billion just a year ago. SpaceX is paying roughly seven times that amount. That's a massive jump in a short period.

Instead of paying with cash, SpaceX is paying with its own stock. This means the people who owned Cursor can't immediately sell those shares and turn them into cash. They have to wait, likely until SpaceX goes public or gets sold to someone else.

Cursor is popular with software developers. It sits inside a text editor called VS Code—one of the most widely used tools for writing code—and uses artificial intelligence to help developers generate, fix, and improve code. Many developers use it regularly and keep coming back to it.

Why Would SpaceX Do This?

SpaceX launches rockets and runs Starlink, a satellite internet service. Neither of these businesses has traditionally relied on selling software to customers. So a $60 billion purchase of a coding tool seems odd at first.

But SpaceX's own operations require enormous amounts of software development. Starlink now serves many millions of people, and maintaining that network requires constant engineering work. An AI tool that makes developers more productive could help SpaceX build and maintain that system faster.

SpaceX also has a history of building things in-house rather than buying them from others. It makes its own rocket engines and navigation systems. Adding a best-in-class coding tool to that list fits a familiar pattern.

There's a catch worth noting. The founders and investors in Cursor are getting SpaceX stock they can't sell. SpaceX has been private for years and has repeatedly delayed plans to go public. Anyone accepting this deal is betting that SpaceX will eventually go public or be sold—and that could take a long time.

This $60 billion price is one of the largest payments ever made for a private AI company. Microsoft invested $13 billion in OpenAI, and Google paid $2.7 billion for a team and licensing deal with Character.AI in 2024. So the market has decided AI coding tools are worth far more than it did a year and a half ago.

What Happens to Cursor?

Now that SpaceX owns Cursor, the question is whether it stays a tool people can buy, or becomes just an internal tool for SpaceX's own engineers.

If SpaceX keeps selling Cursor to other companies, the acquisition brings money and resources to a tool that was already popular. If SpaceX pulls Cursor inward and keeps it for itself, companies using Cursor today could find themselves without a key tool, or forced to use a version that no longer gets improved.

SpaceX hasn't said which path it will take.

For the rest of the AI coding tool market, this deal sends a signal: tools like this are suddenly worth much more. Other AI coding assistants that compete with Cursor will probably be valued higher in private investment markets. Investors are now using the $60 billion figure as a reference point for what these tools might be worth.

But whether $60 billion is the right price depends on numbers nobody has made public—how much money Cursor makes, how many of its users stick with it, and how fast it's growing. Those are the same unknowns that make big private deals hard to judge from the outside.

The deal has not yet closed, and the conditions required for it to complete have not been disclosed.