Masked Deal: How Elon Musk intercepted Cursor from Anthropic with $60 billion in SpaceX shares right before the IPO
While the entire market was watching Anthropic prepare for its IPO, Elon Musk made an unexpected and extremely painful move for his competitor. His purchase of Anysphere — the creator of the popular AI coding tool Cursor — for $60 billion, paid for with SpaceX shares, was not just a major M&A deal, but a strategic strike delivered at the worst possible moment for Anthropic.
Cursor as a "gold mine" for Claude
The essence of the deal is deeper than it seems at first glance. Cursor, and especially its flagship feature Composer, became the main driver of the popularity of "vibe coding" — an approach where a developer describes a task in natural language, and the AI writes the code. And all this brilliance was powered by Anthropic's Claude model. Every engineer from Silicon Valley and Fortune 500 using Cursor was, in essence, a paying customer of Anthropic "under the hood." Cursor turned into one of the largest external monetization channels for Claude across the entire internet.
Anthropic's corporate revenue in 2025 skyrocketed largely thanks to this partnership. And that's when Musk struck.
The mechanics of the SpaceX "money printer"
The most elegant part of this deal is the payment method. Not a single dollar in cash. All $60 billion was paid in SpaceX shares. The scheme was honed to perfection: SpaceX went public on June 12 at $135 per share, but by the following Tuesday, the shares were trading above $211. Musk used a few days of stock market frenzy to "print" $60 billion in fresh capital in the form of shares and immediately direct them to the pre-agreed purchase of Cursor. SpaceX investors faced a dilution of approximately 3.4% — their stake decreased due to the issuance of new shares. In essence, the SpaceX IPO itself became the printing press for this acquisition.
A blow to Anthropic's IPO
According to analytics from the service Ramp, Cursor's share among corporate clients of coding tools was declining: from 41% in June 2025 to 26% in May 2026, losing ground to GitHub Copilot and Amazon Q. However, this did not stop Musk, who paid 20% more than the $50 billion valuation that even investors like Andreessen Horowitz and Thrive considered aggressive. He bought a company losing ground in the race, but one that was the largest sales channel for Claude.
Why is this related to Anthropic's IPO? The answer lies in the problems of Musk's own AI division — xAI. By the end of March 2026, all 11 of its co-founders had left the company, and Musk himself admitted that xAI was "built wrong from the start." For SpaceX to have a compelling AI story before going public, the easiest path was to buy a brand that engineers already trust.
Thus, a chain emerges: first, SpaceX goes public, gaining "currency" in the form of expensive shares. Then Musk uses them to buy Cursor, which, although losing its lead, remains the largest corporate channel for Claude. And the deal happens precisely in the window between Anthropic filing its IPO application and setting the offering price.
It's important to understand: interpreting this as a planned attack on Anthropic's IPO is my analytical assessment, not an established fact. However, if Anthropic cannot quickly convince Wall Street that the lost revenue from Cursor can be replaced, one of the most anticipated IPOs in the AI field this year could be under serious threat.
Expert opinion: This deal is a masterclass in corporate warfare at the intersection of finance and technology. Musk didn't just buy an asset; he deprived a competitor of a key distribution channel at the most critical moment. For Anthropic, the question is no longer how to replace Cursor, but how to convince the market that their own growth story wasn't built on someone else's success. Given the scale of the deal and its synchronization with the IPO, this could become one of the biggest failures or, conversely, triumphs of the year.