Cursor has been part of SpaceX since last Friday. Musk's company completed the acquisition of the AI coding startup for $60 billion. The deal took effect on August 14, two months after SpaceX officially announced that it was buying the company. It is one of the largest technology acquisitions ever and a major step in Elon Musk's effort to catch up with rivals Anthropic and OpenAI.
From the April option to signing
In its announcement, Cursor repeatedly discusses SpaceX's infrastructure, clearly indicating the main motivation behind the entire transaction. The company says it will gain access to the world's largest fleet of graphics chips and, with it, the computing power needed to train more powerful models. These models will also be more efficient to operate, which should provide customers with more capable tools at a lower price. Cursor itself describes this as a continuation of its journey so far. Over the course of its existence, it has evolved from completing a few lines of code to building AI colleagues that can be assigned real work.
The company adds that SpaceX is building computing capacity for artificial intelligence far beyond today's levels, with Cursor set to become one of the places where this technology will be most useful.
Musk wants software
For SpaceX, this acquisition is a completely different type of deal from those the company has been accustomed to so far. The goal is to strengthen the development of more advanced AI tools that simplify work, with programming among the most lucrative segments in this field. According to Musk, the company must succeed on the software front. He also reiterated that artificial intelligence is both the present and the future of SpaceX, and estimated that AI revenue will eventually surpass all of the company's other revenue combined.
The two sides were already collaborating while waiting for the deal to close. They released their first joint model, Grok 4.5, in July. It focuses on programming, finance, and legal tasks, and according to the companies, it is cheaper to operate than competing models. Since then, SpaceX has introduced the Grok Bot product, which functions as a team of AI agents that automatically take on assignments throughout the day. It subsequently added an improved version, Grok 4.6. Cursor describes this latest model, released last Wednesday, as the first true demonstration of what the two companies can now build together.
Who profited from the deal
The relationship with the companies to which SpaceX leases its computing capacity is also interesting. Musk's company lends hardware to customers including Anthropic and Google, with which it has signed billion-dollar contracts. Anthropic, with its Claude Code tool, is Cursor's main competitor. Paradoxically, some of the computing power that is now set to drive Musk's models currently supports his direct rival.
The startup grew unusually quickly. Its founders launched this AI assistant in 2023 as a tool for writing and debugging code. The project soon became one of the fastest-growing startups in history and one of the names that defined the era of so-called “vibe coding.” This is a trend in which developers use tools capable of generating entire software applications based solely on instructions given in a chat. The company itself was founded in 2022 by four friends from MIT.
The founders have now secured the biggest one-time financial windfall. By signing the agreement, they have become billionaires, while the entire Cursor team gains access to SpaceX's vast reserves of advanced AI chips. Michael Truell, Aman Sanger, and Sualeh Asif are twenty-five years old, while Arvid Lunnemark is one year older. According to estimates, each of them will have a net worth of around $2.7 billion, approximately twice what they owned before the deal closed.
The investors who were the first to back Cursor also profited. Andreessen Horowitz holds approximately one-tenth of the company, worth $6 billion, while the Thrive fund owns around seven percent, worth $4.2 billion. Thrive is on both sides of the table because it also holds a stake in SpaceX, and its total ownership in the two companies exceeds $10 billion.
Sources: finance.yahoo.com, bloomberg.com and techcrunch.com
