Elon Musk's SpaceX has agreed a deal that gives it the option to acquire Cursor — one of the hottest AI coding tools in Silicon Valley for $60 billion, in a move that stunned the tech industry just weeks before the startup was set to go public.

Cursor, built by the team at Anysphere, has become one of the most widely used AI-assisted coding environments in the world. Developers praise it for its ability to understand context across an entire codebase, not just isolated lines of code. That capability, paired with rapid adoption among professional engineers, had already made Cursor one of the most talked-about pre-IPO companies in the market.

The deal is structured as an acquisition option rather than an outright purchase meaning SpaceX has secured the right to buy Cursor at that valuation, not a guarantee that it will. But the sheer size of the figure, and the timing, sent a clear message about where SpaceX sees the future of software development.

For a company whose core business is building rockets, the move might seem left-field. But SpaceX runs some of the most complex engineering operations on the planet, and the case for bringing powerful AI coding tools in-house — or owning the company that builds them — is easy to make when your engineers are writing mission-critical software every day.

The deal also throws the IPO timeline into uncertainty. Whether Cursor lists publicly as planned, or eventually folds into the SpaceX empire, is now very much an open question.