SpaceX’s Next Launch Is A $60 Billion Bid For… Vibe Coding?

Elon Musk’s rockets and AI company is following up its record IPO with a deal to acquire AI coding startup Anysphere.

SpaceX announced last week that it’s acquiring Anysphere – the company behind AI coding assistant Cursor – in a deal valuing the startup at $60 billion. The move wasn’t exactly a surprise: SpaceX first secured the right to buy Anysphere in April, but put the deal on hold while it completed its IPO.

Even so, this is one of the biggest acquisitions of an AI company ever, and it has big implications for SpaceX’s ambitions. It could take Elon Musk’s sci-fi empire beyond rockets and satellites and into one of the most lucrative areas of AI commercialization – coding.

So here’s exactly what’s happening – and my take on it.

Who is Anysphere?

Anysphere has emerged as one of the standout winners of the AI coding boom. Founded in 2022 by four 20-somethings, it’s the startup behind Cursor – an AI-powered coding assistant that helps developers write, edit, review, and debug software using simple natural-language prompts. Initially pitched as an alternative to Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot, Cursor quickly gained traction among engineers looking to boost productivity.

That momentum has turned Anysphere into one of Silicon Valley’s fastest-growing startups. Cursor has become a flagship product in the rise of “vibe coding” – a new approach to software development where developers describe what they want in plain English and let AI handle much of the heavy lifting.

Investors have taken notice: as demand for AI-powered developer tools exploded, Anysphere’s valuation climbed from $2.5 billion to almost $30 billion in 2025 alone. The company originally relied on Anthropic’s Claude models to power Cursor, but increasingly shifted toward its own models after Anthropic launched its competing product, Claude Code.

Anysphere’s valuation has surged over the past few years. Source: FT, Pitchbook.

Today, Cursor is used by more than 50,000 businesses and counts millions of daily active users. On the back of that solid growth, Anysphere recently reached a $4 billion annualized revenue run rate – up from $1 billion just seven months earlier.

What are the specifics of the deal?

Last Tuesday, SpaceX confirmed it was moving ahead with its acquisition of Anysphere, valuing the AI coding startup at $60 billion. The transaction is expected to close in the third quarter, with Anysphere investors receiving SpaceX Class A shares.

SpaceX is signaling confidence that the deal will get over the line – if the acquisition falls apart, the company has agreed to pay Anysphere a hefty $10 billion breakup fee. That drops to $4 billion if regulators block the transaction on antitrust grounds, underscoring both the strategic importance of the deal and the growing scrutiny facing the tech industry’s biggest players.

There is one wrinkle, however. When SpaceX first negotiated the acquisition option in April, the breakup fee was structured as $1.5 billion in cash and $8.5 billion worth of computing resources. It remains unclear whether that split still applies today – or how the payout would be allocated if antitrust concerns reduced the fee to $4 billion.

How do I view the deal?

As with most things in investing, there are reasons to like the deal and reasons to be cautious. Let’s start with the positives.