SpaceX Acquires Cursor for $60B to Rescue Struggling Grok AI Division

Published by James Harris on June 16, 2026June 16, 2026

SpaceX opened above $200 per share on Tuesday for the first time, pushing its market value past $2.8 trillion and briefly making Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire. Within hours, the company announced it would acquire Anysphere, the maker of AI coding tool Cursor, in a $60 billion all-stock deal. One IPO, one megadeal, same day.

The Cursor acquisition is not primarily a product bet. As analyst Adam Crisafulli of Vital Knowledge wrote in a note to investors, SpaceX hopes the Cursor team will “give a jolt to its Grok AI business, especially in coding, which has so far failed to make a dent in the frontier market.” That market is currently led by Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and Meta, in that order. SpaceX had secured an option back in April to either acquire Anysphere outright for $60 billion or pay $10 billion for a partnership arrangement, so Tuesday’s announcement was an exercise of a pre-existing right, not a sudden move. The deal is expected to close in the third quarter of 2026, and SpaceX says it will not use IPO proceeds to fund it. BlackRock had already signaled its appetite for SpaceX equity well before the listing, which helps explain how a company at this scale finds willing counterparties for an all-stock transaction of this size.

Cursor CEO Michael Truell confirmed the deal in a statement, describing the goal as “building the world’s most useful AI models.” That is a significant scope expansion from what Cursor currently does.

The more structurally interesting development sits with Anthropic. The company revealed last week that the U.S. Department of Commerce ordered it to stop allowing non-U.S. users access to its frontier models, a restriction Anthropic met by cutting off all users worldwide. The affected program, Project Glasswing, had granted institutions in roughly 15 countries, including U.S. allies Japan and South Korea, access to a model called Mythos for security research. Paul Triolo of DGA-Albright Stonebridge Group called it “the first time that a government has ordered a model developer to restrict access to a particular model based on nationality,” and warned that foreign governments and companies will now explore alternatives, potentially benefiting European developers like Mistral and Cohere, and Chinese open-source models including DeepSeek and Moonshot AI. That the order landed precisely as Anthropic, valued at $965 billion, and OpenAI, at $852 billion, are both preparing public listings this fall is timing that neither company would have chosen.

Anthropic filed confidentially with the SEC on June 1, 2026, and OpenAI followed on June 8. Both are targeting a fall listing, which means both will spend the next several months explaining to prospective public investors how a government-mandated access blackout affects their international growth story. SpaceX, which priced its IPO at $135 per share before reaching Tuesday’s levels, now enters that competitive field as a well-capitalized and newly public rival in AI coding, a category its two largest competitors are actively defending.