SpaceX Turns Its New Stock Into M&A Currency in $60B Cursor Deal

Just days after its historic IPO, SpaceX is following through on its announced acquisition: Elon Musk’s space and AI company is buying the AI coding startup Cursor in an all-stock deal worth $60 billion. The details emerge from a regulatory filing that SpaceX submitted on Tuesday. The purchase is being sealed less than two months after the two companies first announced a partnership.

The purchase price will be paid entirely in SpaceX shares — meaning none of the $85.7 billion that Musk’s company raised in the IPO will be used.

Catching Up with Anthropic and OpenAI

With the multi-billion-dollar deal, Musk aims to position his AI division against the leading labs. That division is built around xAI — Musk’s AI company, which merged with SpaceX earlier this year. The stated goal is to close the gap on major players such as Anthropic and OpenAI.

Yet this very AI unit, which SpaceX marketed as a central promise during its IPO, is in the midst of a restructuring. It was preceded by repeated controversies — including the fact that users were able to generate non-consensual deepfakes of women and children through the tools.

A $26 Trillion Addressable Market

Ahead of the IPO, SpaceX had dangled an enormous market opportunity in front of investors: an addressable market for AI products worth $26 trillion — roughly equivalent to the entire economic output of the United States. According to SpaceX, the Cursor acquisition is expected to close in the third quarter of this year. Cursor will then become a wholly owned subsidiary of the company.

How the Deal Is Structured

The specifics come from the Form 8-K that SpaceX filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). According to the filing, Space Exploration Technologies Corp., its wholly owned subsidiary X67 Inc., and Cursor’s parent company Anysphere entered into an Agreement and Plan of Merger on June 16, 2026. Legally, it is a classic reverse triangular merger: the subsidiary X67 merges into Cursor, which survives the merger as a wholly owned SpaceX subsidiary.

Payment is made exclusively in stock. At the effective time, both each common share and each preferred share of Cursor will automatically be converted into the right to receive Class A common stock of SpaceX. The conversion is based on an implied equity value of Cursor of $60.0 billion.

What ultimately determines the exchange ratio is the valuation of the SpaceX share: it is set by the volume-weighted average closing price (VWAP) of the Class A stock over the seven consecutive trading days immediately preceding the closing. For SpaceX’s freshly listed shares, this means the number of shares issued to Cursor’s owners will only be fixed shortly before completion — a potential lever should the price swing sharply during that window.

Completion is subject to the closing conditions set out in the agreement, in particular the required regulatory approvals. The full text of the agreement is attached to the 8-K as Exhibit 10.1. SpaceX continues to expect a close in the third quarter of 2026.

Musk Preempted a $2 Billion Round

Before SpaceX came knocking, Cursor was on track to close a funding round of over $2 billion — backed by, among others, Andreessen Horowitz, Thrive, and Nvidia. That round would have valued the startup at $50 billion, as TechCrunch reported. Musk’s company preempted it with an unusual offer: back in April — still ahead of the IPO — SpaceX secured the right to buy Cursor for $60 billion in stock, or to pay a $10 billion break-up fee if the deal fell through.

What Makes Cursor So Attractive to Musk

Cursor is developed by San Francisco-based Anysphere and is considered one of the most popular AI coding assistants on the market. A key draw for SpaceX is likely its broad “distribution to expert software engineers,” as the company itself describes it — in other words, access to a new, high-value user base.

Cursor itself had said at the time of the initial announcement that the partnership with SpaceX subsidiary xAI would allow it to build future AI products on the massive data center complex Colossus in Memphis, Tennessee.

Founded in 2022, the startup played a major role in kicking off the trend known as “vibe coding” — the development in which AI assistants increasingly take over the work of programmers themselves.