Elon Musk's SpaceX gears up to take on rivals OpenAI, Anthropic with $60 billion acquisition of AI startup Cursor

(Bloomberg) — SpaceX has completed a $60 billion acquisition of artificial intelligence coding startup Cursor, a key part of Elon Musk’s bid to gain ground on rivals Anthropic PBC and OpenAI.

The deal became effective on Aug. 14, according to a regulatory filing, two months after SpaceX formally announced it had agreed to acquire the company.

The takeover, one of the largest tech acquisitions ever, is intended to help Musk’s firm bolster efforts to build more advanced AI tools to streamline tasks, including for coding, a lucrative market for AI. Musk’s AI venture, now known as SpaceXAI, previously had limited business adoption and carried out a series of job cuts and restructurings.

Cursor’s AI assistant, launched in 2023, was designed to help programmers write and debug code more efficiently. It became one of the fastest-growing startups of all time and a central player in tech’s “vibe coding” era, as demand surged among software developers for tools that could build based on prompts to a chatbot.

With the deal, Cursor’s co-founders will become billionaires and the startup’s team will gain access to SpaceX’s stockpile of advanced AI chips.

“We will have access to the largest fleet of GPUs in the world, giving us the compute to build stronger models that are also more economical to run,” Cursor said in a blog post Friday.

SpaceX and Cursor launched their first joint model in July, Grok 4.5, ahead of the deal closing. Grok 4.5 focused on coding, finance and legal tasks and was cheaper to use than other competing models, the companies said. Since then, SpaceX released Grok Bot, a product that works like a team of AI agents fielding assignments throughout the day. It also introduced an updated Grok 4.6 model.

Alongside these efforts, SpaceX has struck a series of multibillion-dollar deals letting companies like Anthropic and Alphabet Inc.’s Google tap into its computing resources. But in a meeting with SpaceX staffers in August, Musk said that the company “must succeed on the software front.”

Musk also stressed that artificial intelligence is the present and future of the firm. “Our AI revenue will exceed all other SpaceX revenue by September,” he said in the meeting.

(Updates with more context throughout.)

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