space x Elon Musk’s rocket maker announced on Tuesday that it had acquired artificial intelligence startup Cursor for $60 billion, days after it debuted on the Nasdaq in the largest initial public offering in history.
Cursor builds popular AI coding tools that help software developers generate, edit, and review code, and the company has experienced explosive growth since its founding in 2022. Cursor announced in November that its annual revenue exceeded $1 billion, according to a release at the time.
Musk merged SpaceX with his AI startup xAI earlier this year, and the deal with Cursor will help strengthen the company’s efforts to compete with rivals like Anthropic and OpenAI, which also offer popular coding tools. SpaceX expects the merger to close during the third quarter of this year, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
SpaceX President and Chief Operating Officer Gwynne Shotwell recently told CNBC’s Morgan Brennan that the partnership with Cursor “makes a lot of sense.”
SpaceX stock rose about 5% in premarket trading Tuesday. SpaceX and Cursor did not immediately respond to CNBC’s requests for comment.
SpaceX announced in April that it had acquired the rights to acquire Curser for $60 billion later this year. If the deal fell through for any reason, SpaceX had agreed to pay Cursor $10 billion for its cooperation.
“We’re excited to partner with the SpaceX team to scale up Composer,” Cursor CEO Michael Tuell said in a post to X at the time, referring to the company’s AI model. “This is a meaningful step on our path to using AI to build the best place to code.”
