SpaceX's $60B option on Cursor

On April 21, SpaceX told investors it could buy Cursor, the AI code editor used inside more than half the Fortune 500, for $60 billion later this year — or pay $10 billion just to keep working together. The widely-repeated line that SpaceX is 'completing' or has 'exercised' the deal is wrong: it holds an option it plans to pull only after its own IPO clears, around July, so it can pay in fresh public stock. The price still vaults a tool that was worth $2.5 billion sixteen months ago, and preempts a $50 billion round Cursor had nearly closed with a16z, Nvidia and Thrive.

Neither side has a frontier model of its own. — TechCrunch

The stranger fact sits under the price. Cursor's flagship Composer 2 model, shipped in March, is built on Kimi K2.5 — an open-weight model from Moonshot AI in Beijing. Cursor didn't say so; an engineer named Fynn intercepted the product's API traffic and read the model ID in plain text. The co-founder conceded the omission, a VP downplayed it as roughly a quarter of the compute, and then two House committees opened an investigation into Chinese-model use.

So the asset SpaceX is paying frontier money to own — folding it into the xAI division it absorbed in a $1.25 trillion merger — depends in part on the very Chinese AI the buyer is meant to be racing. The cheaper read, TechCrunch's, is that neither side has a frontier model of its own to match Anthropic or OpenAI, and they are leaning on each other and on Beijing's open weights to close the gap.