SpaceX purchases Cursor, a Claude Code and OpenAI Codex competitor [U] - 9to5Mac
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SpaceX purchases Cursor, a Claude Code and OpenAI Codex competitor [U]
Zac Hall | Jun 16 2026 - 6:05 am PT
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When SpaceX isn’t landing rockets, it’s apparently landing AI company deals. In February, the firm behind Starlink absorbed xAI, which includes Twitter-turned-X. In April, SpaceX inked a deal with Cursor, a competitor to Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex.
Update 6/16/2026: SpaceX has acquired Cursor a week after becoming a publicly traded company.
We're excited to join forces with @SpaceX to advance the frontier of useful AI. Expect significant improvements to Cursor soon. https://t.co/62IMr2sgEy<br>— Cursor (@cursor_ai) June 16, 2026
Updated original story below:
SpaceX struck $10 billion deal with Cursor ahead of $60 billion acquisition
Cursor has been popular with software engineers who code with AI on the Mac. It was one of the first services to connect large language model artificial intelligence to the process of building apps.
In April, SpaceX and Cursor are "working closely together to create the world’s best coding and knowledge work AI," the two companies say.
The collaboration originally included a $10 billion payment from SpaceX to Cursor:
SpaceXAI and @cursor_ai are now working closely together to create the world’s best coding and knowledge work AI.
The combination of Cursor’s leading product and distribution to expert software engineers with SpaceX’s million H100 equivalent Colossus training supercomputer will…<br>— SpaceX (@SpaceX) April 21, 2026
Cursor shared more details about the arrangement in April ahead of today’s acquisition:
Cursor is partnering with SpaceX to accelerate our model training efforts.
We released Composer less than six months ago as our first agentic coding model.
After that, Composer 1.5 scaled reinforcement learning by over 20x. Composer 2 then added continued pretraining, reaching frontier-level performance at a fraction of the cost of other models. Each step up in compute has translated to meaningfully more capable models.
We’ve wanted to push our training efforts much further, but we’ve been bottlenecked by compute. With this partnership, our team will leverage xAI’s Colossus infrastructure to dramatically scale up the intelligence of our models
The SpaceX-Cursor arrangement strengthens a competitor to Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex agentic coding software.
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Zac Hall
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Zac covers Apple news, hosts the 9to5Mac Happy Hour podcast, and created SpaceExplored.com.