A rocket company now owns Cursor — the $60 billion deal closed on Friday, and not a dollar of it was cash
SpaceX told regulators that its purchase of Anysphere, the company behind the Cursor code editor, became effective on 14 August, making Cursor a wholly owned subsidiary. Nothing was paid in cash: Cursor's common and preferred shareholders received 389,289,254 SpaceX Class A shares, priced off the volume-weighted average close of the seven trading days before the deal shut, at an implied Cursor value of $60.0 billion. SpaceX also took on about 29.1 million unvested restricted stock units and roughly 44.4 million options held by Cursor staff. The merger agreement was signed on 16 June. It is the largest acquisition of a venture-backed startup on record, and Cursor now sits in the same group as Grok, after SpaceX absorbed xAI in May.
Why it mattersCursor is the editor a large share of professional developers open every morning, and as of Friday it is no longer an independent product. Two things follow from that. Its roadmap is now set by a group that sells its own model, which is a different incentive from an editor that stayed neutral about which model you point it at. And the whole price was paid in SpaceX stock, so the $60 billion only means $60 billion for as long as those shares hold their value — the sellers took the risk, not the buyer's bank account. If you write code inside Cursor, nothing changed on your screen today; the question is what the next year of product decisions looks like when the owner also has a model to put in front of you.
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