SpaceX Buys Cursor for $60 Billion as 25-Year-Old Founder Built Rival to Copilot
Updated
Updated · TIME · Aug 27
SpaceX Buys Cursor for $60 Billion as 25-Year-Old Founder Built Rival to Copilot
2 articles · Updated · TIME · Aug 27
Summary
$60 billion bought SpaceX the four-year-old startup behind Cursor, the AI coding tool Michael Truell built into the highest-revenue AI application outside major model labs.
By mid-2025, Cursor was used inside more than half of the Fortune 500, but pressure from Anthropic's Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex exposed its dependence on rented models.
Seven months of model work pushed Cursor from near the coding frontier to roughly tying Claude on several benchmarks, largely by refining an open-weight Chinese model.
A March deal with xAI gave Cursor computing infrastructure to train models from scratch; by July, the partners had unveiled Grok 4.5, followed by Grok 4.6 in August.
Truell said Cursor will stay model-agnostic inside Musk's empire, arguing customer choice remains central even after the acquisition.