Musk intercepted Cursor for $60 billion in SpaceX stock: a fatal blow to Anthropic's IPO?
Elon Musk pulled off one of the boldest deals of the year: for $60 billion, paid in SpaceX stock, he acquired Anysphere — the creator of the AI tool for programmers, Cursor. This happened literally just days before the long-awaited Anthropic IPO. And now all of Wall Street is wondering: was this just a lucky move or a planned attack on a competitor?
Cursor is not just a code editor. It is a key distribution channel for Anthropic's Claude model. Every developer using Cursor is, in essence, a paying customer of Anthropic "under the hood." The flagship Composer feature, running on Claude Sonnet, became so popular that it spawned the term "vibe coding" — where a programmer describes a task in words, and the AI writes the code. Cursor accounted for a significant portion of Anthropic's corporate revenue, which skyrocketed in 2025.
What makes this deal particularly interesting is the payment mechanism. Not a single dollar in cash. All $60 billion were paid in SpaceX stock. Musk used the SpaceX IPO as a "printing press": on June 12, the company's shares went public at $135, and within a few days were trading above $211. Musk effectively "printed" $60 billion in new capital from the stock market frenzy and immediately spent it on the acquisition. SpaceX investors, meanwhile, faced dilution of approximately 3.4%.
Why This Hits Anthropic
Data from the service Ramp shows that Cursor's share among corporate clients is declining: from 41% in June 2025 to 26% in May 2026, losing ground to GitHub Copilot and Amazon Q. Investors valued Cursor at $50 billion, considering this valuation aggressive, and Musk paid 20% more — for a company that, according to analysts, is "losing ground in the race."
My assessment of the situation: this is not just a purchase. Musk, whose AI division xAI is experiencing serious problems (all 11 co-founders had left the company by the end of March 2026, and Musk himself admitted that xAI was "built incorrectly from the start"), needed a compelling AI story for SpaceX before going public. The easiest way was to buy a brand that engineers already trust.
The chain of events makes logical sense: SpaceX goes public → gains expensive "currency" → spends it on buying Cursor → which was the largest corporate channel for Claude. And all of this happens in the gap between Anthropic filing for its IPO and setting the offering price.
Expert conclusion: If Anthropic 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 of falling through. The market is already pricing this uncertainty into the company's valuation.