SpaceX's $60 Billion Cursor Deal Comes With a Twist: It Didn't Spend a Dollar in Cash

Elon Musk has acquired one of the most coveted names in artificial intelligence, and the headline price of £44.7 billion ($60 billion) cost SpaceX almost nothing in cash.

The rocket and satellite company confirmed on Tuesday that it had signed a formal agreement to buy Cursor, the AI coding assistant built by San Francisco firm Anysphere, in an all-stock transaction, sealing one of the most keenly awaited deals in tech. The merger is expected to close in the third quarter, pending regulatory approval, according to a securities filing detailed by CNBC.

Every dollar of the purchase will be settled in SpaceX Class A shares rather than money from its balance sheet. At completion, each Cursor share converts into SpaceX stock priced on the volume-weighted average of the company's shares over the seven trading days before the deal closes.

The option dated to April. SpaceX could buy Cursor outright for stock, or keep working with it under existing contracts and pay a combined breakup and deferred-services fee of £7.4 billion ($10 billion). It chose to buy.

SpaceX only floated on the Nasdaq the previous Friday, under the ticker SPCX, in what Fortune called the largest initial public offering in history, raising £64.2 billion ($86.2 billion) once underwriters exercised their greenshoe option. The shares then ran. They opened at £101 ($135) on 12 June and closed on Monday at £143 ($192.46), lifting SpaceX's market value to roughly £1.87 trillion ($2.51 trillion), around £551 billion ($740 billion) above its listing valuation in fewer than four trading days.

The £44.7 billion ($60 billion) price was less than a tenth of that rise. By Fortune's calculation, the stock had gained the acquisition's entire cost within hours of its first day of trading, in what the magazine called possibly the largest takeover of a venture-backed start-up on record.

Why SpaceX Paid for Cursor Without Touching Its Cash

'The IPO gave SpaceX a valuation and a premium currency,' Franco Granda, a senior analyst at PitchBook who covers the company, told Fortune. 'SpaceX can now buy a company that size without touching cash, debt, or IPO proceeds, and the higher the stock runs, the cheaper the deal feels.'

Granda said Musk's near-total grip on the voting shares, through a dual-class structure, 'removes the last bit of friction.'

Bill Ackman made a similar point. 'The Cursor acquisition costs materially less in dilution because of SpaceX's high valuation,' the billionaire investor wrote on X, calling that capacity part of the company's worth. 'Value begets value. Talent begets talent.'

The payment works out at a 3.4% dilution against SpaceX's IPO valuation, CNBC said, or roughly 312 million shares at current prices.

What SpaceX Gets From the Cursor Acquisition

The deal hands SpaceX one of the fastest-scaling names in enterprise software. Cursor launched in 2022 and passed £745 million ($1 billion) in annualised revenue last November. It was valued privately at £21.8 billion ($29.3 billion) in November 2025, backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Thrive Capital, and Accel, with its tools reaching 67% of the Fortune 500.

Cofounder Michael Truell, 25, an MIT dropout and former Google intern, is now a paper billionaire, his stake valued by Forbes at about £970 million ($1.3 billion). IBTimes UK has charted his rise from teenage games coder to one of Silicon Valley's fastest-climbing founders.

'SpaceX has exercised the option to acquire Cursor in an all-stock transaction with the goal of building the world's most useful AI models,' the company said in a statement. It added that its AI arm had spent recent months jointly training a model with Cursor, due to surface in Cursor and Grok Build.

The purchase also shores up Musk's hand against Anthropic and OpenAI, whose coding products have been chipping away at Cursor's lead. Citing spending data from Ramp, CNBC said Cursor's share of the AI coding market had slipped from 41% in June 2025 to about 26% by May, with Anthropic now holding half the category.

SpaceX, which merged with Musk's AI start-up xAI earlier this year, saw its own shares climb a further 16% on Tuesday, carrying it past Amazon and Microsoft to become the fourth most valuable listed company in the United States.