Musk’s $60B Gambit Shocks Big Tech

Just days after the biggest stock market debut in history, SpaceX locked up a $60 billion deal to buy an AI coding tool — and then surpassed Amazon in total value, leaving Wall Street scrambling to keep up.

Story Highlights

SpaceX completed the largest initial public offering ever, raising $85.7 billion, then quickly announced a $60 billion all-stock deal to acquire AI coding startup Cursor.
The acquisition pushed SpaceX’s market value past Amazon and briefly above Microsoft, making it one of the most valuable companies on Earth.
SpaceX first secured the right to buy Cursor back in April — paying $10 billion for the partnership if the full deal fell through.
The move is part of Elon Musk’s push to compete directly with OpenAI and Anthropic in the fast-growing AI coding market.

The Biggest IPO in History — Then a $60 Billion Buyout

SpaceX went public on the Nasdaq stock exchange on June 12, 2026, raising $85.7 billion — the largest initial public offering in market history, topping Saudi Aramco’s $29.4 billion debut in 2019. Shares opened at $135 and surged nearly 40 percent in just three trading sessions. Then, four days after the IPO, SpaceX filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission to acquire Cursor, the artificial intelligence coding startup, in an all-stock deal valued at $60 billion.^[2]

The deal structure had actually been in place since April. SpaceX had secured an option to buy Cursor for $60 billion or, if the acquisition never closed, pay $10 billion for the work done through a joint partnership. With the IPO complete and the stock flying high, SpaceX chose the full buyout. Cursor will become a wholly owned subsidiary, and the deal is expected to close in the third quarter of 2026.^[12]

SpaceX Passes Amazon, Challenges Microsoft

The Cursor announcement sent SpaceX shares up another 11.2 percent on June 17. That pushed the company’s market value to roughly $2.94 trillion at its peak — surpassing Amazon’s $2.66 trillion and briefly topping Microsoft as well. SpaceX, now formally known as Space Exploration Technologies Corp., became the fifth-largest company in the world by market value, sitting within striking distance of Apple, Nvidia, and Alphabet.^[3]

Cursor, built by a San Francisco company called Anysphere, reported more than $1 billion in annualized revenue as of late 2025. The $60 billion price tag is a steep multiple on that revenue — roughly 30 times what Cursor was raising in its most recent private funding round. For comparison, Microsoft paid $7.5 billion for GitHub in 2018. SpaceX is paying eight times that amount for Cursor.^[6]

Why SpaceX Wants an AI Coding Tool

SpaceX merged with Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI in February 2026 in an all-stock deal valued at $1.25 trillion — at the time the largest corporate merger ever. That deal folded in xAI’s Grok chatbot, its Colossus supercomputer data center, and the social media platform X. Buying Cursor adds a widely used AI coding product and its large developer user base to that growing technology empire.^[5]

live at @cursor_ai – 3 insane announcements!

– cursor mobile (code on the go)
– origin (cursors solution to git)
– new model (1.5T+ parameter, pre-trained on 100k+ GPUs)

just off the backs of the @SpaceX acquisition announcement, what a day! pic.twitter.com/iae6I8Z5TZ

— Sherry Jiang is at ai engineer singapore (@SherryYanJiang) June 16, 2026

The strategy is clear: SpaceX wants to compete head-to-head with OpenAI and Anthropic in AI-assisted software development. Cursor brings a strong product that millions of software engineers already use daily. SpaceX brings Colossus, a massive computing system built with the equivalent of one million high-end graphics chips. Together, the companies say they plan to build what they call the world’s most useful models for coding and knowledge work.^[4]

A Big Bet on America’s AI Future

This deal is a reminder of what American innovation looks like when government gets out of the way. A private company — not a federal program — just pulled off the largest stock market debut ever and immediately plowed resources into the AI race. SpaceX is competing against well-funded rivals using private capital, not taxpayer money. That is exactly the kind of bold, market-driven competition that built American technological leadership in the first place.

The price is aggressive, and the valuation multiples are eye-popping. But the underlying logic is sound. The AI coding market is growing fast, and whoever controls the best tools and the most compute will have enormous leverage. SpaceX is betting it can win that race. Given its track record — from reusable rockets to global satellite internet — dismissing that bet would be a mistake.^[1]