SpaceX has announced its intention to acquire the artificial intelligence coding tool, Cursor, for an impressive $60 billion later this year, or alternatively, enter into a $10 billion partnership to "work together." This strategic move is part of Elon Musk’s broader effort to position his space exploration and AI company competitively against major rivals like Anthropic and OpenAI, especially as SpaceX prepares for a planned Wall Street debut. The announcement was made by SpaceX on the social platform X, integrating Cursor into the growing constellation of properties, including the Grok AI chatbot, that Musk has merged into his rocket company.

Cursor, developed by the San Francisco startup Anysphere, is a widely recognized and popular AI coding assistant. Its significant "distribution to expert software engineers" is a key factor making it highly attractive to Musk’s company, as it provides access to a valuable new customer base. Cursor itself confirmed a new partnership with xAI, a subsidiary of SpaceX, which will enable it to advance its AI product development by utilizing xAI’s massive Colossus AI data center complex located in Memphis, Tennessee. Cursor stated on X that this partnership is crucial for overcoming previous compute bottlenecks, allowing its team to dramatically scale up the intelligence of their models through xAI’s infrastructure.

Originating in 2022, Cursor has played a pivotal role in sparking a trend known as "vibe coding," as AI coding assistants have grown increasingly capable of performing complex computer programming tasks. While Cursor competes with other leading coding tools such as Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex, it has also historically relied heavily on partnerships with these larger AI research companies for the foundational technologies that underpin its own capabilities.

The term "vibe coding" itself was coined in early 2025 by a prominent AI researcher. This phrase emerged during the researcher's weekend projects, where they experimented with a combination of Cursor’s Composer and Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet, highlighting the evolving and increasingly intuitive interaction between human programmers and advanced AI coding assistants.