SpaceX takes $60B acquisition option on Cursor (Anysphere) — Grok's coding gap, plugged
Per April 21 reporting, SpaceX secured the right to acquire Cursor parent Anysphere for $60B later this year — or pay $10B for joint work — after Musk's own engineers and xAI staff were quietly defaulting to Claude for coding over Grok.
The structure of the deal: SpaceX (which merged with xAI earlier this year) has the right to either acquire Anysphere for $60B or pay $10B for ongoing joint work. The acquirer-to-target ratio is the story. Cursor went from $100M ARR in January 2025 to $2B ARR by February 2026 — the fastest-scaling B2B software company on record.
The strategic rationale isn't subtle. Public reporting indicates SpaceX engineers and xAI staff have been using Claude (a competitor's product) for technical work because Grok hasn't been competitive on coding. A Cursor acquisition wires up a full vertical stack: compute (Colossus 1, just leased to Anthropic too), model (Grok + whatever Cursor's reasoning layer becomes), harness (Cursor's Composer agent loop), and GUI (the Cursor editor).
This is full vertical integration in coding, the same shape Apple ran in mobile. Whether $60B is sane depends on how durable Cursor's distribution edge is once the AI coding tool market consolidates around 3-4 winners.