Elon Musk intercepted Anthropic's key client ahead of its IPO: details of the $60 billion deal with Cursor
The artificial intelligence market continues to deliver surprises. Elon Musk made an unexpected move by acquiring Anysphere — the developer of the popular AI programming tool Cursor — for $60 billion. The payment was made in SpaceX shares, and this deal, in my firm belief, deals a serious blow to one of Anthropic's key revenue sources right before its long-awaited stock market debut.
Cursor has long been more than just another code-writing tool. It became a true flagship for the use of Anthropic's Claude model. Every engineer working through this platform was, in essence, a paying customer of Anthropic "under the hood." The tool gained widespread adoption in Silicon Valley and among engineering teams at Fortune 500 companies. The Composer feature, powered by Claude Sonnet, was particularly popular. It is associated with the emergence of the term "vibe coding" — an approach where a developer describes a task in simple words, and the AI writes the code.
Why is this a blow to Anthropic?
The financial link between Cursor and Anthropic was critical. Anthropic's corporate revenue surged in 2025 largely because Cursor served as one of the largest external monetization channels for Claude. Musk didn't just buy a successful startup — he cut off this channel.
The structure of the deal itself is noteworthy. Not a single dollar in cash: all $60 billion were paid in SpaceX shares. Musk used SpaceX's IPO, which took place on June 12, to "print" new shares. The offering price was $135 per share, but within a few days they were trading above $211. SpaceX investors faced a dilution of their stakes by approximately 3.4% due to the issuance of new shares, which were immediately directed toward the purchase of Cursor.
A strategic move amid xAI's troubles
In my assessment, this move is driven not only by a desire to harm a competitor. Musk's own AI division, xAI, is experiencing serious difficulties. By the end of March 2026, all 11 of its co-founders had left the company, and Musk himself acknowledged that xAI was "built incorrectly from the start." Buying a brand that engineers already trust turned out to be easier and faster than trying to fix his own platform.
Thus, a chain emerges: SpaceX goes public to obtain "currency" in the form of expensive shares; Musk uses them to buy Cursor, which, although losing market share (from 41% in June 2025 to 26% in May 2026, trailing GitHub Copilot and Amazon Q), still remains the largest sales channel for Claude. And this entire operation occurred between Anthropic's IPO filing and the setting of the offering price.
My analysis shows that this is not just a deal, but a carefully planned attack on Anthropic's valuation. Now, the fate of one of the most anticipated AI IPOs this year depends on whether the company can quickly convince Wall Street that it has something to replace the lost revenue from Cursor.