Applications

On 16 June 2026, four days after its shares began trading on Nasdaq, SpaceX said it would exercise its right to buy Anysphere, the company behind the AI code editor Cursor, in an all-stock deal valued at about $60 billion and priced on a seven-day average of SpaceX shares (SpaceX, reported). The right dated from 21 April, when SpaceX, which had absorbed Elon Musk's model lab xAI in February, announced an arrangement to buy Cursor later in the year for $60 billion or instead pay $10 billion for the joint work, with Cursor training its models on xAI's Colossus cluster (Cursor, reported). On 14 August 2026 Cursor posted "Cursor is now part of SpaceX", and a same-day filing confirmed completion (reported). Cursor had been founded in 2022 by four MIT students. At about $60 billion it was reported as the largest acquisition of a venture-backed start-up on record.

The price was about twenty times Cursor's reported annualised revenue of ~$3 billion in May 2026 (Bloomberg, reported), up from ~$100 million in January 2025. Yet for most of that climb Cursor had paid other companies, chiefly Anthropic, more to run its product than its customers paid it: reports put its gross margin at about −23% in early 2025 (The Information, reported). This chapter is about the businesses that sell AI to the people who do the work, and about the question every one of them must answer: when a product resells someone else's model, who keeps the margin?