Musk intercepted Cursor from Anthropic for $60 billion in SpaceX stock: a strategic divorce before the IPO
Elon Musk executed one of the biggest deals of the year, acquiring Anysphere — the developer of the popular AI coding tool Cursor — for $60 billion. The payment was made entirely in SpaceX stock, without a single dollar in cash. This deal, finalized just days before Anthropic's IPO, dealt a serious blow to one of the latter's key revenue sources.
Why Cursor Was So Important to Anthropic
Cursor ran on Anthropic's Claude model. Every engineer using the platform to write code was, in essence, a paying customer of Anthropic "under the hood." This tool became indispensable for a significant portion of Silicon Valley and numerous engineering teams from the Fortune 500. The flagship Composer feature, built on Claude Sonnet, became one of the most beloved AI products among programmers. It was with Cursor and Claude that the term "vibe coding" emerged — an approach where the developer describes a task in words, and the AI writes the code. Anthropic's corporate revenue surged in 2025 largely because every Cursor user was a hidden client. Cursor became one of the largest external channels for Claude usage across the entire internet.
The Deal Mechanics: How Musk "Printed" $60 Billion
The most interesting part is exactly how the payment was made. Musk used SpaceX's IPO as a "printing press." SpaceX shares went public on June 12 at $135 each, and by Tuesday were trading above $211. Using a few days of stock market frenzy, Musk "printed" $60 billion in fresh capital in the form of shares and immediately spent them on a pre-agreed purchase. SpaceX investors faced dilution of roughly 3.4% due to the issuance of new shares. The IPO itself became the mechanism for this acquisition.
Connection to Anthropic's IPO: A Planned Attack?
Cursor's share among corporate clients was declining: from 41% in June 2025 to 26% in May 2026, losing ground to GitHub Copilot and Amazon Q. Investors like Andreessen Horowitz, Thrive, and Nvidia were preparing to invest in Cursor at a $50 billion valuation, considering it aggressive. Musk paid 20% more — for a company that, according to analysts, was losing ground in the race. There is a theory that Musk went through with the deal because his own AI division, xAI, was facing serious difficulties. By the end of March 2026, all 11 of its co-founders had left, and Musk himself admitted that xAI was "built incorrectly from the start." For SpaceX to have a compelling AI story before entering the public market, the easiest path was to buy a brand that engineers already trust.
It is important to understand: interpreting all this as a planned attack on Anthropic's IPO is a personal assessment, not an established fact. Sources confirm the events themselves, but not the intention to specifically harm Anthropic. Nevertheless, much depends on Anthropic's next move. If the company cannot quickly convince Wall Street that the lost revenue from Cursor can be replaced, one of the most anticipated AI IPOs this year could be at risk.
Expert Opinion: This deal is a brilliant example of financial engineering, where an IPO is used not to raise capital for growth, but as a tool for acquisition. For Anthropic's investors, this is a worrying signal: the loss of such a major sales channel calls into question not only current financial performance but also the long-term monetization strategy. The market will be watching closely how Anthropic explains this gap in its upcoming reports.