A blow to Anthropic before its IPO: how Musk intercepted Cursor for $60 billion
Elon Musk has pulled off perhaps one of the most high-profile deals of the year by acquiring Anysphere, the developer of the popular AI coding tool Cursor. The deal was valued at $60 billion and paid for with SpaceX shares. But the most interesting part is the timing: the acquisition took place literally just days before Anthropic's expected stock market debut.
Cursor is not just another startup. This product has become one of the main growth drivers for Anthropic. The platform ran on the Claude model, and in effect, every developer using Cursor was a paying Anthropic client "under the hood." The flagship Composer feature, built on Claude Sonnet, spawned an entire term — "vibe coding" — where a programmer describes a task in words, and the AI writes the code. The tool is used by Silicon Valley engineers and Fortune 500 teams.
Financial Anatomy of the Deal
The mechanics of the deal are particularly noteworthy. Musk didn't spend a single dollar in cash. All $60 billion were paid in SpaceX shares. The scheme was implemented through a regulatory 8-K form, and the purchase option was signed back in April. The key point: SpaceX shares went public on June 12 at $135, and by the following Tuesday were trading above $211. Using this short-term frenzy, Musk "printed" $60 billion in new shares and immediately directed them toward the purchase of Cursor. As a result, SpaceX investors faced dilution of approximately 3.4%.
Why This Hits Anthropic
This is where it gets really interesting. Cursor was the largest external monetization channel for Claude. Anthropic's corporate revenue surged in 2025 largely because every engineer writing code through Cursor was a "hidden" paying client. According to data from the service Ramp, Cursor's share among corporate clients began to decline — from 41% in June 2025 to 26% in May 2026, losing ground to GitHub Copilot and Amazon Q. But Musk paid for a company that, in many opinions, is losing its leadership position, and at a 20% premium to the $50 billion valuation that investors like Andreessen Horowitz considered aggressive.
My analysis shows that Musk took this step not just for the technology. His own AI division, xAI, is experiencing serious problems: by the end of March 2026, all 11 co-founders had left the company, and Musk himself admitted that xAI was "built incorrectly from the start." For SpaceX, preparing for its public offering, it was easier to buy a brand that engineers already trust than to build an AI story from scratch.
Thus, we see a chain: SpaceX goes public, generating expensive currency → Musk uses it to buy Cursor, which was losing ground → Cursor was a key revenue channel for Anthropic. And all of this happens in the interval between Anthropic filing its IPO application and setting the offering price.
It is important to emphasize: interpreting these events as a planned attack on Anthropic's IPO is an analytical hypothesis, not an established fact. However, much now 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 of the year could be at risk.
Expert Commentary from Cryptalist: This is a brilliant, albeit cynical, move. Musk didn't just buy technology — he cut off a competitor's oxygen supply at the most sensitive moment. For Anthropic, it is now critically important not just to show growth, but to demonstrate that its model can generate profit independently of a single sales channel. The market will be evaluating not the technology, but the resilience of the business model.