SpaceX Got Cursor for $60 Billion. Microsoft Looked — and Walked.
On 22 April 2026, SpaceX posted on X that it had secured the right to acquire AI coding startup Cursor for $60 billion later in the year — or pay the company $10 billion as a collaboration fee if the deal does not go through. What emerged separately was that Microsoft had quietly looked at the same target and chosen not to proceed with a bid, according to two people familiar with the matter cited by CNBC.
The deal landed just as Cursor was days away from closing a separate $2 billion funding round at a $50 billion valuation, catching the investors in that round off guard. The announcement sits at the centre of a fast-moving AI coding tools market where Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic are all competing for the same developer audience. This piece covers the full story — the deal structure, Cursor’s rise, the people behind it, and where each major player stands today.
From a College Side Project to a $60 Billion Target
Four MIT dropouts, one product pivot, and less than four years to get here.
Who’s Who in the AI Coding Market Right Now
Select a player to see where they stand. Each tab covers their current position, key numbers, and what the SpaceX-Cursor deal means for them.
Cursor is an AI coding assistant built around its own IDE, where the AI is built directly into the development environment. Its core function is predicting the code a user is likely to write next. With Cursor 3, the tool has expanded into agentic coding — AI writing code on its own given high-level instructions. The company was incorporated as Anysphere. Companies including Salesforce, Samsung, and Budweiser use it. 95% of Cursor’s users are now using its agent mode. Cursor still resells access to Claude and GPT models — even as both Anthropic and OpenAI have launched competing tools — an arrangement the SpaceX compute deal may eventually resolve.
Elon Musk merged SpaceX with xAI in February 2026 in a deal he valued at $1.25 trillion. SpaceX is targeting an IPO in June 2026 at a $1.75 trillion valuation — which would be the largest public listing in history. The company’s Colossus supercomputer has compute equivalent to approximately one million Nvidia H100 chips. In the weeks before the Cursor deal, SpaceX had already been offering Cursor access to compute — with Cursor using tens of thousands of xAI chips to train its latest model. SpaceX is delaying a potential Cursor acquisition until after its IPO to avoid updating financial filings before the listing and to use public stock to finance the purchase. The deal positions SpaceX as an AI company ahead of its public market debut.
Microsoft looked at a potential acquisition of Cursor before SpaceX moved, and chose not to proceed, according to two people familiar with the matter cited by CNBC. The company has been focused on growing GitHub Copilot — its own AI coding assistant — which had 4.7 million paying subscribers as of January 2026, up 75% year-on-year, per CEO Satya Nadella. Microsoft’s primary role in the broader AI space has been as an investor and cloud provider: it has committed billions to both Anthropic and OpenAI, which have spending commitments on Microsoft Azure. Microsoft’s stock is down 10% so far in 2026.
OpenAI is pushing its Codex programming app directly against Cursor in the AI coding market. CEO Sam Altman said on X on 22 April 2026 that Codex had crossed 4 million active users — less than two weeks after hitting 3 million. OpenAI was an early investor in Cursor. The week after the SpaceX-Cursor announcement, a trial was scheduled to begin in Musk v. Altman, a legal case between Musk and OpenAI’s CEO.
Anthropic’s Claude Code service launched just over a year before the SpaceX announcement and has become one of Cursor’s main competitors. It has gained significant adoption among developers and helped Anthropic reach $30 billion in annualized revenue as of April 2026. The competitive dynamic is complicated: Cursor still resells access to Claude models even as Anthropic’s own coding tool competes for the same users. The wider race for developer tools has intensified as major AI companies seek revenue beyond general-purpose chat.
$2.5 Billion to $60 Billion in Under Two Years
Each bar marks a funding milestone. The bars animate as you scroll into view.
Two Outcomes — Cursor Wins Either Way
This is not a standard acquisition. Here is exactly how the SpaceX-Cursor agreement works.
From Mobile Games at 11 to a $1.3 Billion Net Worth at 25
Truell is the CEO of Cursor. Forbes estimates his net worth at $1.3 billion.
“In 2021 we were trying to figure out what we do with that interest. Do we go and work on AI in academia? Or do we go join a big existing AI effort? Or do we start our own thing?”
— Michael Truell, Y Combinator AI Startup School, San Francisco, June 2025“We had a ton of conviction about that, and we had a ton of excitement about that, and so at some point we just decided to go for it.”
— Michael Truell, on the pivot to AI coding, Y Combinator AI Startup School, June 2025The SpaceX-Cursor deal was covered as reported: SpaceX obtained the right to acquire Cursor for $60 billion or pay a $10 billion collaboration fee, with the announcement arriving just before Cursor was set to close a separate $2 billion funding round at a $50 billion valuation. Microsoft’s prior consideration of the same deal — and its decision not to proceed — was reported by CNBC, citing two people with knowledge of the discussions.
Cursor’s revenue trajectory, valuation milestones, deal structure, and the competitive positions of Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot, OpenAI’s Codex, and Anthropic’s Claude Code were reviewed. The background of CEO Michael Truell — from the Horace Mann School and a Google internship to the Neo Scholars programme and an MIT dropout — was drawn from verified public sources. The broader context of how AI companies are competing for developer tools infrastructure was also discussed as part of the deal’s background.
