SpaceX strikes $60 billion deal to acquire or fund Cursor, an AI coding platform, as Elon Musk's companies race against OpenAI and Google in artificial intelligence

SpaceX announced a deal to either buy Cursor (an AI tool that auto-generates computer code) for $60 billion or pay a $10 billion fee if the acquisition doesn't close — likely timed ahead of a planned IPO for Musk's combined SpaceX/xAI/X businesses.

Cursor lets programmers write software faster by having AI suggest and write code automatically. Adding it to xAI would give Musk's AI division a major weapon against Anthropic (the current market leader in advanced AI tools) and OpenAI, which already shut down its Sora video tool last year to focus engineering resources on competing AI code assistants.

For software developers and tech companies, this signals the AI coding-assistant market is becoming a core battleground — Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic are all pouring resources into code-generation tools, meaning these products will likely improve faster and compete harder for your subscription dollar over the next 18 months.