Cursor, why did you get on Musk's spaceship?

Original text丨Boyang, Tencent Technology

On June 16, local time in the United States, just four days after SpaceX completed the largest IPO in history, it announced its first major acquisition post-listing.

According to documents submitted to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), SpaceX will acquire Anysphere, the parent company of AI programming startup Cursor, in an all-stock deal valued at $60 billion. The transaction is expected to be completed in the third quarter of 2026, subject to regulatory approval.

After the announcement, SpaceX's stock price surged over 16% at one point during the trading day, with its market capitalization briefly surpassing $2.94 trillion, temporarily overtaking Microsoft. By the close of trading, SpaceX surpassed Amazon to become the fourth largest company by market capitalization in the U.S. Based on the IPO issue price of $135 per share, SpaceX's stock price has increased nearly 50%.

CNBC host Jim Cramer commented, "Buying SpaceX is essentially buying Musk's brain." He believes that traditional valuation models struggle to measure Musk's ability to turn grand visions into commercial realities.

01 What is Cursor, and why is it worth $60 billion?

Cursor is one of the hottest AI programming tools globally, co-founded in 2022 by Michael Truell and his MIT classmates Sualeh Asif, Arvid Lunnemark, and Aman Sanger. The company is headquartered in San Francisco and has about 700 employees, serving 60% of the Fortune 500 companies.

Cursor's core product is an AI programming assistant that allows developers to switch flexibly between mainstream AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Google, etc., and can automatically generate, edit, and review code, directly competing with Anthropic's Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex.

In terms of revenue, Cursor has shown astonishing growth. By November 2025, its annualized revenue exceeded $1 billion, growing nearly tenfold from a year earlier. Reports indicate that within the next three months, Cursor's annualized revenue doubled again to $4 billion. Currently, Cursor ranks 37th on CNBC's list of annual disruptors for 2026.

However, according to Ramp consumer data, Cursor's market share has dropped from 41% in June 2025 to about 26% in May 2026, while Anthropic's Claude Code currently holds about half of that market segment.

02 The entrepreneurial journey of a genius teenager

Cursor CEO Michael Truell

The story of Cursor begins with a quiet red-haired teenager.

In 2019, 18-year-old MIT freshman Truell faced a programming test expected to take an hour to complete but submitted it in less than ten minutes. Tech investor Ali Partovi was the examiner that day, leading a project specifically aimed at discovering top programming talent among students. Partovi later had Truell create a test for him, only to find that Truell's code was neat and concise, while his own answers were a mess.

Truell grew up in New York, with both parents being journalists, and showed extraordinary programming talent from a young age. At 15, while attending the prestigious Horace Mann School, he co-developed a programming game called Halite with classmates, guiding players to learn programming basics by conquering grid territories, attracting thousands of middle and high school students who had never encountered programming before, and winning him a $10,000 prize from a top mathematics association.

At MIT, Truell majored in computer science and mathematics while beginning to formulate entrepreneurial ideas. Claire Shorall, who guided him through an entrepreneurship boot camp, recalled that Truell's curiosity and humility left a strong impression on her. "I gave him some advice, but he clearly already had a good sense of direction."

After graduating in 2022, Truell co-founded Anysphere with three MIT classmates, initially positioning it as a code editing platform. By building an improved version of Microsoft's open-source editor VS Code, they achieved a monthly recurring revenue of $1 million within a year. In March 2023, Cursor officially launched and was immediately embraced by developers and enterprise users.

03 The "strange" relationship with Anthropic

Cursor's rise has not been smooth, with the biggest variable coming from its core AI supplier—Anthropic.

The two companies are highly interdependent: Cursor's products heavily rely on Anthropic's AI models, and Cursor's explosive growth has contributed about 40% to 50% of Anthropic's revenue, with both parties 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 a major commercial deployment, but Claude Code quickly swept through the developer community.

By February 2026, Claude Code's annualized revenue had risen to $2.5 billion, about $500 million higher than Cursor's revenue at the time, leading many developers to post on social media announcing their switch from Cursor to Claude Code. Meanwhile, Anthropic had previously cut off model access to Windsurf during negotiations for its acquisition by OpenAI, heightening Cursor's management's concerns about over-reliance on a single supplier.

On January 5, 2026, Truell held an "emergency" all-hands meeting, as described by internal employees, announcing that Cursor must develop its own AI models. The message he conveyed was clear and powerful: we cannot fall behind, cancel all unnecessary meetings, be ready for cross-team collaboration at any time, and we must remain flexible and responsive.

Subsequently, Cursor launched its self-developed programming model suite, Composer, based on the open-source model from the Chinese AI lab Moonshot. However, according to Cursor, over 85% of the work in the May-released Composer 2.5 version was independently developed by Cursor (based on the Kimi K2.5 model). Cursor engineer Lucas Garza stated that Composer received an "extremely enthusiastic" response from developers due to its low price and rapid response speed.

04 Aligning with Musk: A win-win gamble

Developing its own model requires massive computing power, which is a shortcoming for Cursor. This spring, Truell found another visionary founder to fill this gap.

On April 21, Truell posted on the X platform in his usual concise style: "Excited to collaborate with the SpaceX team to scale Composer. This is an important step on our journey to build the best AI programming platform."

On the same day, SpaceX publicly announced on X that it had been granted an acquisition option by Cursor. SpaceX can choose to acquire Cursor in an all-stock deal valued at $60 billion after completing its IPO; if it decides not to proceed with the acquisition, it must pay a $1 billion breakup fee and $8.5 billion in free computing resources.

A few days after SpaceX successfully completed the largest IPO in history, it officially exercised the acquisition option, announcing the $60 billion acquisition of Cursor, fulfilling the "foreshadowing" laid out in April.

This deal serves the interests of both parties. Cursor gains access to SpaceX's Colossus supercomputer, which consists of hundreds of thousands of top NVIDIA AI chips; meanwhile, SpaceX hopes to leverage Cursor's deep penetration among top software engineers to achieve a leapfrog advantage in the AI programming competition. Musk's AI chatbot Grok currently lags behind mainstream models in programming, with one xAI contractor admitting that Grok "is not good at programming."

After the announcement, many Cursor employees felt caught off guard. After all, Truell had repeatedly stated his intention to make the company a "evergreen enterprise" and viewed selling as "a significant risk and a major gamble." Early investor Partovi, who wrote the first check for Cursor, said he believes Truell is the type of founder inclined to maintain independence, "he has the ambition, confidence, and drive to support him in going further."

SpaceX stated that the Colossus supercomputer is a core bargaining chip in attracting Cursor. "Cursor's leading product and distribution capabilities among top software engineers, combined with SpaceX's Colossus supercomputer with the equivalent of a million H100 computing power, will enable us to build the world's most practical AI model."

05 Greater ambitions: Satellite data centers and trillion-dollar revenue

This acquisition also serves SpaceX's broader AI strategy. The company is seeking regulatory approval to deploy up to 1 million AI satellites and exploring solar-powered orbital data centers to undertake ground computing tasks. Meanwhile, SpaceX has announced multi-billion dollar cloud computing agreements with Anthropic and Google, significantly bolstering its revenue base before the IPO.

However, Musk also stated on X that if Colossus computing power becomes tight, SpaceX reserves the right to cancel the aforementioned agreements.

On June 14, Musk wrote that SpaceX "might achieve about $1 trillion in revenue by 2030." Compared to the company's projected revenue of $18.7 billion in 2025, this would be a qualitative leap. In 2025, SpaceX reported a net loss of $4.9 billion, with losses further expanding to $4.28 billion in the first quarter of this year.

For Musk, the goal has always been clear. He wrote on X: "Whether it can become the best remains to be seen, but I will never give up. Never."

For Truell, this may be the biggest test of his life: can the gamble with Musk pay off? "This is indeed a bit crazy," he said, "but we are well aware of how special this is—how unprecedented it is in history."