SpaceX will move forward with its $60 billion acquisition of artificial intelligence startup Cursor as Elon Musk\u2019s space exploration and AI company seeks a competitive edge against rivals Anthropic and OpenAI after its Wall Street debut last week. <\/p>\n
SpaceX said in April that it had the rights to buy Cursor, or pay $10 billion to \u201cwork together\u201d with the company. <\/p>\n
In a regulatory filing Tuesday, SpaceX said that Cursor will become a wholly owned subsidiary when the deal closes in the third quarter. <\/p>\n
Cursor, made by San Francisco startup Anysphere, is a popular AI coding assistant. What SpaceX has described as Cursor\u2019s wide \u201cdistribution to expert software engineers\u201d is likely part of what made it attractive to Musk\u2019s company, giving it access to a new customer base.<\/p>\n
When it first announced the potential acquisition, Cursor said the partnership with SpaceX subsidiary xAI would enable it to build future AI products using xAI\u2019s massive AI data center complex Colossus, based in Memphis, Tennessee.<\/p>\n
Cursor, which started in 2022, helped sparked a trend called \u201cvibe coding\u201d as AI coding assistants have become increasingly capable of doing the work of computer programming.<\/p>\n
Cursor competes with other coding tools like Anthropic\u2019s Claude Code and OpenAI\u2019s Codex but also has relied heavily on partnerships with those larger AI research companies for the foundations of its technology.<\/p>\n
It was Cursor\u2019s Composer, combined with Anthropic\u2019s Claude Sonnet, that a prominent AI researcher was playing with for weekend projects when he coined the phrase \u201cvibe coding\u201d in early 2025.<\/p>\n