Original text丨Bo Yang, Tencent Technology
On June 16 in the United States, just four days after SpaceX completed the largest IPO in history, it announced its first major acquisition since going public.
According to filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), SpaceX will acquire AI programming startup Cursor, its parent company Anysphere, in a $60 billion all-stock transaction.CursorThe deal is expected to close in the third quarter of 2026, subject to regulatory approval.
After the announcement, SpaceX's stock surged more than 16% intraday, briefly pushing its market capitalization above $2.94 trillion and surpassing Microsoft. By closing, SpaceX had surpassed Amazon to become the fourth-largest company by market cap in the U.S. Since its IPO price of $135 per share, SpaceX's stock has risen nearly 50%.
CNBC host Jim Cramer commented: "Buying SpaceX is really buying Musk's brain." He believes traditional valuation models struggle to quantify Musk's ability to turn grand visions into business realities.
What is 01 Cursor, and why is it valued at $60 billion?
Cursor is one of the most popular AI programming tools globally, founded in 2022 by Michael Truell and his MIT classmates Sualeh Asif, Arvid Lunnemark, and Aman Sanger. Headquartered in San Francisco, the company employs around 700 people and serves 60% of the Fortune 500.
Cursor's core product is an AI programming assistant that enables developers to seamlessly switch between leading AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Google, and others, automatically generating, editing, and reviewing code—directly competing with Anthropic's Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex.
In terms of revenue, Cursor has shown astonishing growth. In November 2025, its annualized revenue surpassed $1 billion, representing a roughly tenfold increase from a year earlier. According to reports, its annualized revenue doubled again within the following three months, reaching $4 billion. Currently, Cursor has ranked 37th on CNBC’s 2026 Disruptor 50 list.
However, according to Ramp consumption data, Cursor's market share has declined from 41% in June 2025 to approximately 26% in May 2026, while Anthropic's Claude Code now holds about half of the market in this segment.
02 The Entrepreneurial Journey of a Teenage Genius
Michael Truell, CEO of Cursor
Cursor's story begins with a quiet red-haired boy.
In 2019, 18-year-old MIT freshman Trull, faced with a programming test expected to take an hour, submitted his paper in less than ten minutes. Tech investor Ali Partovi, who was proctoring the exam that day and led a program dedicated to identifying top student programmers, later asked Trull to create a test for him. He discovered that the teenager’s code was neat and concise, while his own answer sheet was messy.
Trull was raised in New York, both of his parents being journalists, and he demonstrated exceptional programming talent from a young age. At age 15, while attending the prestigious private school Horace Mann, he co-developed a programming game called Halite with classmates, guiding players to learn programming fundamentals by conquering grid-based territories. The game attracted thousands of middle and high school students and college students with no prior programming experience, earning him a $10,000 prize from a leading mathematics association.
At MIT, Trull majored in computer science and mathematics while beginning to develop entrepreneurial ideas. Claire Shorall, who mentored him in an entrepreneurship boot camp, recalls being impressed by Trull’s curiosity and humility. "I gave him some advice, but he clearly already had it figured out."
After graduating in 2022, Trull and three MIT classmates co-founded Anysphere, initially positioning it as a code editing platform. By building an enhanced version of Microsoft’s open-source editor VS Code, they achieved $1 million in monthly recurring revenue within a year. In March 2023, Cursor officially launched and quickly gained widespread popularity among developers and enterprise users.
03 The "Strange" Relationship with Anthropic
Cursor's rise has not been without challenges, with the biggest uncertainty stemming from its core AI provider—Anthropic.
The two companies are highly interdependent: Cursor’s product heavily relies on Anthropic’s AI models, and Cursor’s explosive growth previously contributed approximately 40% to 50% of Anthropic’s revenue; both are acutely aware of each other’s importance.
However, before launching its code editor Claude Code, Anthropic privately informed Cursor’s management that the product was more research-oriented and not intended for major commercial deployment, but Claude Code quickly gained widespread adoption among the developer community.
By February 2026, Claude Code's annualized revenue had increased to $2.5 billion, approximately $500 million higher than Cursor's revenue at the time, prompting many developers to post on social media about abandoning Cursor in favor of Claude Code. Meanwhile, Anthropic’s prior decision to cut off model access to Windsurf during OpenAI’s acquisition negotiations had intensified Cursor’s management concerns over excessive reliance on a single vendor.
On January 5, 2026, Trull convened an all-hands meeting described by internal employees as “urgent,” announcing that Cursor must develop its own AI model. His message was clear and forceful: we cannot fall behind; cancel all non-essential meetings, be ready to collaborate across teams at any time, and we must remain agile and responsive.
Subsequently, Cursor launched its proprietary programming model suite, Composer, built on the open-source model from China’s AI lab Moonshot; however, according to Cursor, over 85% of the work in the Composer 2.5 version released in May is now自主研发 (based on the Kimi K2.5 model). Cursor engineer Lucas Garza said that Composer has received “extremely enthusiastic” feedback from developers due to its low cost and extremely fast response speed.
04 Following Musk: A Win-Win Gamble
Self-developed models require massive computing power, which is precisely Cursor’s weakness. This spring, Trull found another visionary founder to fill this gap.
On April 21, Trull posted on X in his characteristic concise style: "Excited to collaborate with the SpaceX team to scale Composer. This is a significant step on our journey to build the best AI-powered programming platform."
On the same day, SpaceX also publicly announced on X that it has acquired an option to acquire Cursor. SpaceX may choose to acquire Cursor for $60 billion in an all-stock transaction following its IPO; if it declines the acquisition, it must pay a $1 billion breakup fee and $8.5 billion in free computing resources.
Days after SpaceX successfully completed the largest IPO in history, SpaceX officially exercised its acquisition option, announcing the $60 billion acquisition of Cursor, fulfilling the "premise" planted in April.
Both parties have their own interests in this transaction. Cursor gains access to Colossus, SpaceX’s supercomputer powered by hundreds of thousands of top-tier NVIDIA AI chips, while SpaceX aims to leverage Cursor’s deep penetration among elite software engineers to outpace competitors in AI-driven programming. Elon Musk’s AI chatbot, Grok, still lags behind mainstream models in programming tasks; a contractor from xAI once admitted that Grok “is not good at programming.”
After the announcement, many Cursor employees were caught off guard. After all, Trull had repeatedly stated his intention to build the company into a “lasting enterprise” and viewed selling as “a significant risk and a major gamble.” Patovi, who had issued Cursor’s first check in its early days, said he believed Trull was the type of founder inclined to maintain independence, “possessing the ambition, confidence, and drive to take it much further.”
SpaceX stated that the Colossus supercomputer is its key asset in attracting Cursor. “Cursor’s leading product and distribution capabilities among top software engineers, combined with SpaceX’s Colossus supercomputer equivalent to millions of H100s, will enable us to build the world’s most practical AI models.”
05 Greater Ambitions: Satellite Data Centers and Trillion-Dollar Revenue
This acquisition also supports SpaceX’s broader AI strategy. The company is seeking regulatory approval to deploy up to one million AI satellites and is exploring solar-powered orbital data centers to handle ground-based computing workloads. Meanwhile, SpaceX has announced multi-billion-dollar cloud computing agreements with Anthropic and Google, significantly strengthening its revenue base ahead of its IPO.
However, Musk also stated on X that SpaceX reserves the right to cancel the aforementioned agreement if Colossus experiences high computing demand.
On June 14, Musk posted that SpaceX “could generate around $1 trillion in revenue by 2030,” representing a dramatic leap from its $18.7 billion in revenue in 2025. In 2025, SpaceX reported a net loss of $4.9 billion, and this quarter’s loss widened further to $4.28 billion.
For Musk, the goal has always been clear. He wrote on X: “Whether it will become the best remains to be seen, but I will never give up. Never.”
For Trull, this may be the greatest challenge of his life: Will the bet with Musk come to fruition? “It’s all a bit crazy,” he says, “but we know just how special this is—how unprecedented in history.”