SpaceX buys $60 billion to acquire Cursor, Musk's AI landscape falls back on weight

Comparatively, according to Kim Ju, Space Exploration Technology has completed the $60 billion acquisition of artificial intelligence coding startup Cursor, which is a key step for Musk to catch up with rivals Anthropic and OpenAI in the AI field. According to regulatory documents, the deal came into effect on August 14, two months after SpaceX officially announced that it had reached an acquisition agreement. The acquisition is one of the largest technology deals in history, and aims to help Musk's company step up efforts to build more advanced AI tools to simplify tasks, including coding — a lucrative market for AI. Musk's AI company, now known as SpaceXAI, had limited commercial applications and underwent a series of layoffs and restructuring.

Cursor's AI assistant was launched in 2023 to help programmers write and debug code more efficiently. It became one of the fastest-growing startups of all time and played a central role in the tech-driven programming era, when software developers surged in demand for tools that could be built on chatbot prompts.