SpaceX did not wait for the ink to dry on its public listing. Days after a Nasdaq debut that valued the company at more than $2 trillion, Elon Musk's company moved to spend $60 billion acquiring Anysphere, the maker of the AI coding assistant Cursor. The speed matters almost as much as the price. In April, SpaceX had already secured an option: buy Cursor outright later this year or pay $10 billion to "work together". Tuesday's announcement settled the question.
The company had reason to move quickly. SpaceX had been eyeing Cursor for several months, while the economics of AI coding shifted underneath it. Cursor is not just another chatbot wrapped in a coding interface. Its business has scaled rapidly since its founding in 2022, reaching roughly $2.6 billion in annualised business-to-business revenue. The company says Composer trains on more than 1 billion lines of code generated daily by Cursor users. That creates a data flywheel competitors cannot easily replicate.
That flywheel explains why developers have become strategic assets. Alongside OpenAI and Anthropic, Cursor drew waves of developers by automating coding, one of the first areas where AI companies found early commercial traction. The field is no longer experimental. Competition has intensified as AI coding tools move into mainstream software development. Anthropic's Claude Code is now a direct rival to Cursor, despite Anthropic previously supplying technology used by the startup. OpenAI's Codex is chasing the same developers and enterprise customers.
Control of developers becomes valuable enough to reshape the industry
SpaceX arrives late to this fight. The acquisition could give xAI a stronger foothold in AI coding, where it has so far lagged rivals. That matters because xAI is no longer a side project. SpaceX merged with the Grok chatbot maker in February, and Cursor has already signalled the attraction of the relationship. The company said its partnership with xAI would enable it to build future AI products using xAI's Colossus data centre complex in Memphis. The deal also provides Cursor with more computing capacity to develop AI models. SpaceX is buying customers, data and infrastructure at the same time.
Investors have rewarded the ambition without waiting to see whether the pieces fit. SpaceX shares rose nearly 10% in premarket trading, putting the company on track to add about $247 billion in market value. The stock has climbed more than 56% from its IPO price of $135. More than $3 billion worth of shares changed hands in early trading. If gains hold, SpaceX will overtake Amazon to become the fifth-largest company by market value.
Part of the momentum has little to do with rockets or artificial intelligence. The rally could continue because SpaceX is set for fast-track inclusion in the Nasdaq 100, making it a major holding for passive funds and ETFs that track the index. FTSE Russell and MSCI are also set to add the stock later this month. Zephirin Group sees passive flows, momentum and limited float driving upside, even while admitting index inclusion alone is typically insufficient to drive sustained repricing. Demand is becoming structural before conviction is.
Markets reward ambition long before certainty arrives
The numbers underneath are harder to romanticise. SpaceX reported sales of $18.67 billion last year and a net loss of $4.94 billion after merging with money-losing xAI. Yet the company debuted on Nasdaq at roughly 90 times annual revenue. "This valuation makes absolutely no sense today," one market view holds. "People are buying SpaceX in the expectation that others will buy too and push the price higher — that's speculation," said Ipek Ozkardeskaya of Swissquote Bank.
Musk is asking investors to believe that scale will arrive before doubt does. He says SpaceX has been cash-flow positive since around 2015 and describes the IPO as the start of "a significant growth phase". He has outlined plans to put more than 100,000 satellites in orbit and build artificial intelligence data centres in space. Those ambitions may prove achievable or not. What is already true is simpler: a company with $18.67 billion in sales, a $4.94 billion net loss and a stock propelled by index buying has just spent $60 billion to acquire a software company because control of developers now matters enough to justify almost any price, and that is a wager the market has already priced as success.
Cover photo Bruno Sanchez-Andrade Nuño CC-BY-2.0
