Over the last year, Elon Musk has jumped further into the artificial intelligence boom and refocused his rocket company, SpaceX, on building orbital data centers and manufacturing A.I. computer chips.<\/p>\n
On Tuesday, just four days after holding the largest initial public offering ever, SpaceX said it was completing a $60 billion deal to buy Cursor, a start-up that develops A.I. tools for writing computer code.<\/p>\n
SpaceX had struck an agreement with Cursor in April<\/a> that gave it the option to purchase its parent company, Anysphere, in an all-stock deal after the rocket maker\u2019s I.P.O. The arrangement would \u201callow us to build the world\u2019s most useful\u201d A.I. models, SpaceX said at the time.<\/p>\n SpaceX, whose shares closed about 5 percent higher on Tuesday, is now valued at more than $2.6 trillion. Its market capitalization temporarily passed tech giants including Amazon, and its performance on the stock market over its first few days of trading made Mr. Musk the world\u2019s first trillionaire<\/a>.<\/p>\n The deal signaled how Mr. Musk is delving further into A.I. and expanding SpaceX from its main businesses of building rocket ships and offering satellite internet service. In 2023, he founded xAI, an A.I. start-up that makes the Grok chatbot, which competes with OpenAI\u2019s ChatGPT and Anthropic\u2019s Claude. In Tennessee, xAI also built two massive data centers, the computing sites for powering A.I.<\/p>\n In February, Mr. Musk merged SpaceX with xAI<\/a>, and said he wanted to develop data centers for A.I. that would operate from orbit. Mr. Musk told investors that the combined venture was worth $1.25 trillion.<\/p>\n \u201cThe capabilities we will unlock by making space-based data centers a reality will fund and enable self-growing bases on the moon, an entire civilization on Mars and ultimately expansion to the universe,\u201d Mr. Musk said in a memo<\/a> to workers at the time.<\/p>\n Last month, SpaceX also outlined plans for the first stage of an A.I. chip manufacturing<\/a> project in Texas that would cost at least $55 billion.<\/p>\n \u201cWe look forward to working closely with the SpaceX team to advance our frontier A.I. capabilities and continue to work closely with our customers and partners,\u201d Michael Truell, Cursor\u2019s chief executive, said in a statement.<\/p>\n A SpaceX spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n Mr. Musk\u2019s A.I. ventures have shown choppy progress. This year, xAI experienced several high-profile departures of technologists as it struggled to create A.I. models that could compete with those from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google. On social media, Mr. Musk has said xAI needed to be restructured.<\/p>\n His A.I. start-up had also committed resources to building its two data centers to power its own A.I. models, but did not use the facilities to their maximum capacity.<\/p>\n After xAI and SpaceX merged, the company announced major deals with Google<\/a> and Anthropic<\/a> to provide them with computing power. The deals will generate billions of dollars a month for SpaceX, which can help offset A.I. spending that has been a drain on its bottom line<\/a>. The company reported a $4.9 billion loss last year, compared with a $791 million profit in 2024, because of increased expenditures on A.I. <\/p>\n Franco Granda, an analyst at PitchBook, which tracks start-ups, said in a report that SpaceX\u2019s acquisition of Cursor represented the company\u2019s new way of operating now that it was public.<\/p>\n \u201cThe I.P.O. gave SpaceX a valuation and a premium currency,\u201d he wrote. \u201cSigning a $60 billion all-stock deal four days after listing, with the stock up more than 50 percent from the offer price, shows the playbook.\u201d<\/p>\n Mr. Musk\u2019s companies have merged with one another, but he rarely buys outside companies. In 2016, Tesla, the electric carmaker he runs, bought SolarCity, an embattled solar company that he had helped establish. Last year, xAI acquired X, the social media platform he had bought in 2022.<\/p>\n SpaceX\u2019s deal for Cursor is expected to close in the third quarter, the company said in a regulatory filing<\/a>.<\/p>\n Cursor was founded in 2022 and quickly made waves as tech companies adopted its tools. It amassed billions in funding from top investment firms including Thrive Capital, Andreessen Horowitz and Accel.<\/p>\n