SpaceX has moved to acquire Cursor in a $60 billion deal designed to formally bring in-house the automated software tool that has been secretly designing its spacecraft for the past year.
SpaceX announced Tuesday it will exercise a previous option to acquire AI coding startup Cursor for $60 billion. In a filing outlining the merger, the aerospace manufacturer noted that since Cursor’s machine-learning tools have already been intimately involved in its day-to-day operations, it made financial sense to simply buy the underlying algorithm rather than continue paying human developers to pretend to supervise it.
The deal values the San Francisco-based startup at a massive premium. However, aerospace analysts reacted positively to the explicit confirmation that SpaceX’s development payroll will soon consist exclusively of Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk and a predictive text engine.
We looked at our overhead and realized we were paying competitive salaries to people whose only daily function was hitting the 'tab' key to accept Cursor's suggestions.
According to regulatory documents detailing the previous agreement between the two firms, Cursor was initially brought in as an experimental tool to assist with minor code formatting. Over the past twelve months, the software’s role has organically expanded to encompass life support telemetry, orbital reentry vectors, and the automatic drafting of severance packages for the engineering department.
Reached for comment on whether $60 billion was a steep price for a coding assistant, Musk posted a single rocket emoji on X. Cursor could not immediately be reached for an interview, as the program was reportedly busy optimizing the mass-layoff script to execute concurrently across all employee workstations.