SpaceX Surpasses Amazon in Market Value, Acquires AI Coding Startup Cursor

Elon Musk’s SpaceX has overtaken Amazon as the world’s fifth-most valuable company days after its stock market debut.

The milestone came as it agreed to buy the startup behind the AI-powered coding app Cursor for $60bn (£44bn), in an attempt to capitalise on the technology’s success as a coding tool.

SpaceX is the parent of Musk’s AI business, xAI, which will be able to boost its capabilities in an area – AI systems writing code – that has proven to be a strong commercial success for Anthropic, the rival company behind the Claude chatbot.

The group also includes the SpaceX rocket company, social media platform X and the satellite maker and internet service provider Starlink, which is the only profitable part of the business.

The news of the Cursor acquisition was announced as SpaceX passed Amazon in market capitalisation, an important measure of value for a publicly listed company. SpaceX shares rose by 13% on opening on the Nasdaq index on Tuesday.

At one point, its valuation rose as high as $2.97tn, leaping over Amazon’s $2.65tn to become the world’s fifth most valuable company by market value. Its shares later eased back to about 5% up at the close and a valuation just ahead of the e-commerce company of $2.66tn.

SpaceX lost $4.9bn in 2025 on revenues of $18.7bn, while Amazon posted revenues of $717bn and net income – a US measure of profit – of $78bn.

SpaceX floated at $135 a share on Friday and its shares have risen by approximately 50% since. The float made Musk, SpaceX’s founder and chief executive, the world’s first trillionaire with a fortune of $1.1tn, according to Forbes. It reckons the 54-year-old is now worth $1.3tn.

The company had been circling Cursor, owned by the San Francisco-based Anysphere, for months. It said in April it had secured an option to ‌either buy Cursor for $60bn later this year or pay $10bn for a partnership.

Harrison Rolfes, an analyst at the financial research firm PitchBook, said the deal would not “close the gap” between xAI’s models and those developed by Anthropic and OpenAI. However, he said it made sense to gain access to Cursor’s more than 1 million users.

“Owning the tool that professional developers already trust daily is a faster path to enterprise AI revenue than winning the model race,” he said.

Anysphere is one of several Silicon Valley startups that have drawn waves of developers by using AI to automate coding, making it an important rival to market leaders ⁠Anthropic and OpenAI. But a lack of access to computing power – something SpaceX can offer as a datacentre owner – has hampered Cursor’s growth.

“Cursor does not have the scale of OpenAI or Anthropic, but it has built ​some very impressive coding models relative to cost. That makes this a positive ‌move for SpaceX,” said Matt Britzman, a senior equity ‌analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown.

In its filing for an initial public offering, SpaceX had said Cursor’s access to developers’ data, including coding requests and design decisions, could help improve xAI’s Grok model.

Gil Luria, head of technology research at the US investment firm DA Davidson, said Cursor would “improve SpaceX’s position in the frontier model race with Anthropic and OpenAI”. He added that Grok “has to have a coding component that enterprise customers can utilise side by side with [AI coding models] Anthropic Claude Code and OpenAI Codex.”

Anysphere will be paid in stock under the deal, a regulatory filing showed, and the deal will not use proceeds from SpaceX’s IPO. The transaction is expected to close in the third quarter of 2026.

The hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman said the strong value of SpaceX’s stock was another boon for the company because it would require fewer of the company’s shares to pull off large acquisitions.

“One of the things that makes SpaceX so valuable is how valuable it is. The Cursor acquisition costs materially less in dilution because of SpaceX’s high valuation,” Ackman posted on X.

Anysphere is backed by prominent Silicon Valley venture capitalists ⁠such as Andreessen Horowitz and Thrive, as well as Nvidia and Google.

Reuters contributed to the report