SpaceX buys the AI coding tool Cursor for $60bn — and briefly becomes worth more than Amazon

Information Technology 4 min 80 sources

Elon Musk's SpaceX agreed to buy Anysphere, the maker of the AI coding app Cursor, for $60 billion in stock — days after a public listing that made the company more valuable than Amazon, even as the AI products it's betting on lose money.

Key takeaways

SpaceX agreed to buy the AI coding tool Cursor for $60 billion in stock, days after a stock listing pushed its value briefly above Amazon's.
The deal joins two companies that were both losing ground in AI — Cursor lacked computing power, SpaceX lacked a competitive product.
SpaceX gained about $1 trillion in value in four days on the promise of a future AI business, even as AI leaders like OpenAI lose tens of billions a year.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX said on Tuesday it will buy Anysphere — the startup behind the AI-powered coding app Cursor — for $60 billion, paid entirely in SpaceX stock [15][16]. Cursor is a code editor with a large language model wired into it; it writes, fixes, and explains code as a developer types. The deal is expected to close in the third quarter [15].

The price is striking on its own. It’s more striking against where SpaceX was a week ago. The company floated on the Nasdaq on Friday at $135 a share; by Tuesday the stock had risen about 60%, and the company was briefly worth nearly $2.8 trillion — enough to overtake Amazon’s $2.66 trillion and become one of the world’s five most valuable companies [15][36]. SpaceX added roughly $1 trillion in value in four trading days [36].

A deal between two companies that were losing the race

The plain version: neither side could win alone. Cursor had a good product and good engineers but, in its own words early this year, its growth was “bottlenecked on compute” — it didn’t have enough computing power to keep serving its users [16]. Its market share had also slipped as Anthropic’s rival coding tool, Claude Code, pulled ahead, and reporting suggested Cursor was struggling to break even [16].

SpaceX had the opposite problem. After absorbing Musk’s AI company xAI, it had compute capacity but no competitive coding product — Musk said in April that xAI “was not built right [the] first time around” and that he was rebuilding it “from the foundations up” [36]. The two had already been circling each other: in April, SpaceX agreed to either buy Cursor for $60 billion this year or pay $10 billion for a partnership [15]. xAI had since given Cursor access to its compute and started training models with the team [16].

So the acquisition closes a gap on both sides. It also mints fortunes — the deal turns four MIT co-founders, all in their mid-20s, into multibillionaires [62].

Paid in shares, not cash

A detail worth holding onto: SpaceX is paying with $60 billion of its own stock, not money [36]. That matters because the value of those shares is itself a fresh, fast-moving number. SpaceX raised about $86 billion in cash from its IPO but isn’t using it here [15][36]. The acquisition is funded by the very thing that just tripled in price — the market’s belief in SpaceX.

And that belief is doing heavy lifting. SpaceX made only about 4% of its shares available to trade, which experts warned would make the price swing hard [36]. It did: traders moved more than 300 million shares on Tuesday — over half the entire public float — and the valuation lurched above and below Amazon’s into after-hours trading [36]. A thin slice of stock setting the price for the whole company is a recipe for volatility, and a $1 trillion valuation gain in four days is what that looks like.

The numbers underneath the AI boom

The Cursor deal lands the same day as a reminder of how much money the AI industry is spending to grow. Leaked audited accounts show OpenAI’s operating loss rose from $8.78 billion in 2024 to $20.92 billion in 2025 [1]. Its research-and-development spending alone — $19.18 billion in 2025 — was larger than its total revenue [1]. Its headline net loss for 2024, just over $5 billion, ballooned to nearly $39 billion for 2025 [1]. Separately, The Information reported OpenAI burned through $3.7 billion in the first quarter of 2026 — more than half its $5.7 billion in revenue for the period [18]. OpenAI has confidentially filed to go public at a valuation of up to $1 trillion, possibly as soon as September [18].

The pattern across all three companies is the same: enormous spending now, against a bet on enormous demand later. SpaceX is worth more than Amazon — a company with about $700 billion in annual sales — on the promise that it can build an AI business worth trillions, “a wild claim for a company that recently tore its AI division down to the studs” [36].

The angle for anyone in or near the field: if you build software, Cursor now sits inside SpaceX, with its compute tied to deals with Anthropic and Google that have termination clauses favourable to SpaceX [16]. Those rival-supplied resources could be reallocated to SpaceX’s own products later [16] — a dependency worth watching if your team relies on Cursor or any single AI coding tool.

02 · Lesson · why it matters

A price is a story the crowd is telling about the future

What a company is worth today is mostly a bet on what it might become — and that bet quietly reaches into your savings, not just Elon Musk's.

A company gains a trillion dollars while its product loses money

In four trading days, SpaceX became worth about a trillion dollars more than it was the week before. On Tuesday it was briefly more valuable than Amazon — a company that sells around $700 billion of goods a year. SpaceX does not sell anywhere near that. The AI business it’s betting on, it recently rebuilt “from the foundations up.” The coding tool it just paid $60 billion for was, by its own account, struggling to break even.

Read that plainly and it makes no sense. A company worth more than Amazon, built on a product that loses money. The instinct is to call it madness, or a con. It is neither. It’s how prices work — and the confusion comes from a mistake almost everyone makes.

Two different questions hide inside one number

When you see “SpaceX is worth $2.8 trillion,” it’s easy to hear: this company has $2.8 trillion of stuff. It doesn’t. A market value isn’t a tally of what a company owns or earns. It’s the price of one share multiplied out — and a share price is whatever the last buyer was willing to pay.

So the real question a price answers isn’t “what is this worth now?” It’s “what does the crowd believe this will become?” Those are different questions, and the gap between them is the entire story. Amazon’s price mostly reflects what Amazon already does. SpaceX’s price mostly reflects what people believe it might do — launch the world’s rockets, run a satellite network, and now build a giant AI business. Most of that hasn’t happened. The price is a wager on it.

This is why OpenAI can lose nearly $39 billion in a year and still file to go public at a valuation near a trillion dollars. The losses are the present. The valuation is a vote on the future. The crowd is saying: spend now, because what you’re building will be worth far more later. They may be right. They may be wrong. But the number was never a measure of today.

A thin slice sets the price for the whole

Here’s the part that should make anyone humble about that number. SpaceX let only about 4% of its shares trade publicly. On Tuesday, traders swapped more than half of that tiny float in a single day, and the price lurched up and down — past Amazon, then back, then past again after hours.

A handful of shares, changing hands fast, set the headline value of the entire company. The “trillion dollars” wasn’t agreed by everyone who owns SpaceX. It was set by the small, jumpy crowd actually buying and selling that day. Multiply their mood by all the shares, and you get a number that looks solid and is anything but. A price is not a fact carved in stone. It’s the most recent guess of the most recent buyers — and when only a sliver is trading, a few nervous guesses move trillions.

The story buys things, including itself

Watch what the price then does. SpaceX is paying for Cursor not with cash, but with $60 billion of its own stock — the very thing that just tripled in value. The crowd’s belief became real money the company could spend. The story bought a company.

This is the loop that makes booms feel unstoppable. Belief lifts the price; the high price becomes currency; that currency buys more, which feeds more belief. Four engineers in their mid-20s became billionaires overnight inside that loop — not because Cursor suddenly earned billions, but because the story said it would. The same loop runs in reverse when belief drains. Nothing about the company changed in those four days. The story did.

You are already standing inside the story

It’s tempting to watch all this from the outside, as someone else’s casino. It isn’t. If you have a pension, a retirement account, or money in an index fund, you almost certainly own a slice of this — companies like SpaceX, OpenAI’s backers, the chipmakers underneath them. The crowd whose mood sets these prices includes the fund that holds your savings.

That’s the quiet half of it. When a thin slice of jumpy buyers moves a trillion dollars on a Tuesday, the value of what ordinary people have set aside for old age moves with it — up on the good days, down on the bad ones, on the strength of a story most of them never voted on and can’t see the whole of. The people inside the boom can’t see its edges either; no single seat, not even Musk’s, knows whether the future the price is betting on will arrive.

A price looks like an answer. It’s closer to a question the whole crowd is asking together — what will this become? — with real money riding on the guess, and far more people inside the wager than ever chose to be.

03 · Lab · your turn

Set the Price

Rehearse how a company's valuation is a crowd's bet on the future, swung by a thin trading float and spendable as its own currency.

04 · Hope · carry this

A price can soar on belief alone — and that same belief, when it's honest, is just people pooling their faith that something useful can be built. We have funded what didn't yet exist before, and some of it became the world we live in.