Cursor: Why Did It Board Musk’s Spaceship?
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Cursor: Why Did It Board Musk’s Spaceship?
Musk propelled Tesla’s market capitalization to skyrocket—surpassing Amazon—by completing the “ultimate puzzle” of “supercomputing power + top-tier code engine.”
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsOriginal article by Boyang, Tencent Technology
On June 16 local time in the United States—just four days after SpaceX completed the largest IPO in history—the company announced its first major acquisition following its public listing.
According to filings submitted to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), SpaceX will acquire Anysphere—the parent company of AI programming startup Cursor—in an all-stock transaction valued at $60 billion. The deal is expected to close in Q3 2026, subject to regulatory approval.
Following the announcement, SpaceX’s stock surged over 16% intraday, briefly pushing its market capitalization above $2.94 trillion—temporarily surpassing Microsoft. By market close, SpaceX had overtaken Amazon to become the fourth-largest company by market cap in the U.S. Since its IPO price of $135 per share, SpaceX’s stock has risen nearly 50%.
Jim Cramer, CNBC host, commented: “Buying SpaceX is essentially buying Musk’s brain.” He argued that traditional valuation models struggle to capture Musk’s unique ability to translate grand visions into commercial reality.
01 What Is Cursor—and Why Is It Worth $60 Billion?
Cursor is currently one of the world’s hottest AI-powered programming tools. Founded in 2022 by Michael Truell and his MIT classmates Sualeh Asif, Arvid Lunnemark, and Aman Sanger, the company is headquartered in San Francisco and employs approximately 700 people, serving 60% of Fortune 500 companies.
Cursor’s flagship product is an AI-powered coding assistant that enables developers to seamlessly switch among leading AI models—including those from OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, and Google—and automatically generate, edit, and review code. It directly competes with Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex.
Revenue growth has been explosive. In November 2025, Cursor’s annualized revenue surpassed $1 billion—a roughly tenfold increase year-on-year. According to reports, its annualized revenue doubled again within the next three months, reaching $4 billion. Cursor now ranks #37 on CNBC’s 2026 Disruptor List.
However, Ramp consumer data shows Cursor’s market share has declined—from 41% in June 2025 to around 26% in May 2026—while Anthropic’s Claude Code now commands roughly half the market.
02 The Entrepreneurial Journey of a Prodigy
Michael Truell, CEO of Cursor
The story of Cursor begins with a quiet, red-haired teenager.
In 2019, 18-year-old MIT freshman Truell completed a programming exam expected to take an hour—in under ten minutes. Ali Partovi, a tech investor and the day’s proctor, was running a program specifically designed to identify elite undergraduate programming talent. Afterward, Partovi asked Truell to design a problem for him to solve—and discovered that while Truell’s code was clean and elegant, his own answer sheet was a chaotic mess.
Truell grew up in New York; both his parents are journalists, and he displayed extraordinary programming aptitude from an early age. At age 15, while attending the elite private Horace Mann School, he co-developed Halite—a programming game that taught coding fundamentals through territory-conquest mechanics. It attracted thousands of middle and university students with zero prior coding experience—and earned Truell a $10,000 award from a top mathematics society.
At MIT, Truell pursued dual degrees in computer science and mathematics while beginning to formulate entrepreneurial ideas. Claire Shorall, who mentored him in a startup accelerator, recalled being struck by his curiosity and humility: “I offered him some advice—but he clearly already knew exactly what he was doing.”
After graduating in 2022, Truell co-founded Anysphere with three fellow MIT graduates. Initially positioned as a code-editing platform, the team built an enhanced version of Microsoft’s open-source editor VS Code—and within a year achieved $1 million in monthly recurring revenue. Cursor officially launched in March 2023 and quickly gained traction among developers and enterprise users.
03 A “Strange” Relationship with Anthropic
Cursor’s ascent hasn’t been smooth—and its biggest challenge has come from its core AI supplier: Anthropic.
The two companies are deeply interdependent: Cursor’s product relies heavily on Anthropic’s AI models, while Cursor’s explosive growth once contributed 40–50% of Anthropic’s revenue. Both sides fully recognize their mutual importance.
Yet before launching its own code editor, Claude Code, Anthropic privately assured Cursor’s leadership that the product would remain research-oriented—not a major commercial deployment. Instead, Claude Code rapidly captured developer communities.
By February 2026, Claude Code’s annualized revenue had reached $2.5 billion—about $500 million more than Cursor’s at the time—prompting waves of developers to publicly announce they were abandoning Cursor for Claude Code on social media. Meanwhile, Anthropic’s earlier decision to cut off model access to Windsurf during its acquisition negotiations with OpenAI heightened Cursor’s leadership concerns about overreliance on a single supplier.
On January 5, 2026, Truell convened an all-hands meeting described internally as “urgent,” declaring that Cursor must develop its own AI models. His message was concise and forceful: “We cannot fall behind. Cancel all non-essential meetings. Be ready for cross-team collaboration. We must stay agile and respond fast.”
Subsequently, Cursor launched Composer—a proprietary suite of programming models built atop open-source models from Chinese AI lab Moonshot. According to Cursor, over 85% of work in Composer 2.5—released in May—is now independently developed by Cursor (based on the Kimi K2.5 model). Lucas Garza, a Cursor engineer, said Composer has generated “extremely enthusiastic” responses among developers thanks to its low cost and lightning-fast response times.
04 Aligning With Musk: A Win-Win Gamble
Developing proprietary models demands massive computing power—a critical gap for Cursor. This spring, Truell sought out another visionary founder to fill it.
On April 21, Truell posted on X in his trademark minimalist style: “Excited to partner with the SpaceX team to scale Composer. A key step toward building the best AI-powered programming platform.”
That same day, SpaceX publicly announced on X that it had secured an acquisition option from Cursor. SpaceX may elect, post-IPO, to acquire Cursor via a $60 billion all-stock transaction—or pay a $1 billion breakup fee plus $8.5 billion worth of free compute resources if it declines.
Days after successfully completing the largest IPO in history, SpaceX formally exercised its acquisition option—announcing the $60 billion Cursor acquisition and fulfilling the “teaser” planted back in April.
The deal benefits both parties. Cursor gains access to SpaceX’s Colossus supercomputer—a system composed of hundreds of thousands of top-tier NVIDIA AI chips—while SpaceX aims to leapfrog competitors in the AI programming race by leveraging Cursor’s deep penetration among elite software engineers. Musk’s AI chatbot Grok currently lags behind mainstream models in programming capability; an xAI contractor once candidly admitted Grok “isn’t good at programming.”
The announcement caught many Cursor employees off guard. After all, Truell had repeatedly stated his ambition to build a “century-old company,” calling any sale “a major risk—and a major bet.” Partovi, who wrote Cursor’s first check, said he viewed Truell as a founder inclined to preserve independence: “He possesses the ambition, confidence, and drive to go further on his own.”
SpaceX emphasized that Colossus was its central bargaining chip to attract Cursor: “Cursor’s leading product and distribution among elite software engineers—combined with SpaceX’s Colossus supercomputer, delivering the equivalent of one million H100 GPUs—will enable us to build the world’s most practical AI models.”
05 Bigger Ambitions: Satellite Data Centers and Trillion-Dollar Revenue
This acquisition also advances SpaceX’s broader AI strategy. The company is seeking regulatory approval to deploy up to one million AI satellites—and exploring solar-powered orbital data centers capable of offloading terrestrial compute tasks. Simultaneously, SpaceX has announced multi-billion-dollar cloud-computing agreements with Anthropic and Google, significantly bolstering its pre-IPO revenue base.
Yet Musk noted on X that SpaceX reserves the right to cancel those agreements if Colossus capacity becomes constrained.
In a June 14 post, Musk projected SpaceX “could achieve ~$1 trillion in revenue by 2030.” That would represent a quantum leap from its $18.7 billion revenue in 2025. In 2025, SpaceX reported a net loss of $4.9 billion; losses widened further to $4.28 billion in Q1 2026.
For Musk, the goal remains unequivocal. He wrote on X: “Whether it becomes the best remains to be seen—but I never give up. Never.”
For Truell, this may be the greatest test of his career: Can his bet on Musk truly pay off? “It’s all a bit crazy,” he said. “But we know just how special—and unprecedented in history—this really is.”
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