Deal of the century: Musk bought Cursor for $60 billion in SpaceX stock, striking a blow to Anthropic's IPO.
Elon Musk pulled off one of the most elegant and aggressive deals of the year, acquiring Anysphere — the developer of the popular AI coding tool Cursor — for $60 billion. Most notably: not a single dollar in cash. The entire sum was paid in SpaceX shares, which Musk essentially "printed" during his space company's recent IPO.
Why Cursor Was Critically Important to Anthropic
Cursor effectively served as the largest corporate sales channel for Anthropic's Claude models. Every engineer using Cursor was a hidden paying customer of Anthropic. It was precisely from the combination of Cursor and Claude that the term "vibe coding" emerged — where a developer describes a task in words, and the AI writes the code. The flagship Composer feature, built on Claude Sonnet, became one of the most beloved AI products in Silicon Valley and among Fortune 500 engineering teams.
Anthropic's corporate revenue skyrocketed in 2025, and a significant portion of this growth was driven by Cursor. In essence, this tool was one of the largest external consumers of Claude in the world. Now that channel is completely cut off.
The Deal Mechanism: IPO as a Printing Press
The deal was executed through a regulatory 8-K form, and Musk exercised an option signed back in April. The mechanics are impressive: SpaceX shares went public on June 12 at $135, and by Tuesday were trading above $211. Using a few days of stock market frenzy, Musk essentially "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 approximately 3.4%.
Key point: the purchase of Cursor occurred between Anthropic's IPO filing and the setting of the offering price. This cannot be a simple coincidence.
A Strategic Blow to Anthropic's IPO
Cursor's share among corporate clients of AI coding tools, according to data from Ramp, was declining: from 41% in June 2025 to 26% in May 2026, losing ground to GitHub Copilot and Amazon Q. Investors like Andreessen Horowitz and Thrive valued Cursor at $50 billion, considering this valuation aggressive. Musk paid 20% more — for a company that, in many opinions, is losing ground.
The problems of xAI, Musk's own AI division, are well known: 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." The purchase of Cursor solves two problems at once: it gives SpaceX a compelling AI story ahead of its public market debut, and simultaneously deals a blow to Anthropic's key revenue source right before their IPO.
Expert opinion: This deal is a brilliant example of how Musk uses the market capitalization of one company to solve the strategic problems of another. For Anthropic, losing Cursor is not just losing a client, but losing the most tangible proof of Claude's demand among corporate users. If Anthropic cannot quickly convince Wall Street that it will find a replacement for this channel, one of the most anticipated IPOs of the year could face serious jeopardy. We are witnessing a real-time reshuffling of the AI tools market, and so far, Musk is acting faster than everyone else.