Rockets and satellites, then a record IPO
SpaceX was founded in 2002 by Elon Musk to build reusable rockets, and its core business is still the Falcon 9 and Starship launch vehicles and the Starlink satellite internet network. Musk remains CEO, Chairman and CTO, with Gwynne Shotwell as President and Chief Operating Officer running day-to-day operations. [2]
SpaceX went public on the Nasdaq on June 12, 2026, at $135 a share, raising about $75 billion in what was widely reported as the largest IPO on record. The stock closed its first day up 19 percent, and the offering was led by Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. [3]
Atlas interpretation: The IPO's timing is the detail worth noticing: it came four months after SpaceX had already acquired xAI, and four days before it spent a large share of the proceeds acquiring Cursor. Going public did not fund a rocket-company expansion; it funded the acquisitions that turned SpaceX into an AI company as well as a launch company. [3]
Buying an AI lab to solve a compute problem
SpaceX acquired xAI in February 2026, an all-stock merger announced without a disclosed price or transaction structure. Contemporary reporting valued the combined companies at roughly $1.25 trillion. Musk's stated rationale centered on compute and power: he argued that terrestrial electricity supply could not meet AI's growing demands, and described the merger as building toward space-based, solar-powered data centers, with SpaceX's launch capability as the way to get there. [2]
The acquisition also brought Grok's training infrastructure inside SpaceX. In May 2026, Anthropic rented time on Colossus 1, the cluster built to train Grok, to expand Claude's usage limits, a deal Anthropic's own announcement priced at over $1 billion a month running through 2029. [4]
Atlas interpretation: A rocket company renting out AI training capacity to a rival AI lab is the clearest sign of what this acquisition actually bought SpaceX: not just a model line, but a compute asset large enough to sell to other frontier labs. Whether the space-based data center pitch is more than a Musk announcement remains to be seen; the Colossus rental is the part of the story that is already generating revenue. [4]
Then buying the coding tools too
In April 2026, SpaceX bought an option to acquire Cursor for $60 billion in stock, alongside a partnership giving Cursor's parent, Anysphere, training access to Colossus. SpaceX exercised the option in June, four days after its IPO, in what was reported as the largest acquisition of a venture-backed startup on record. The deal closed in August 2026, and Anysphere was folded into a new division alongside Grok, under the SpaceXAI name. [5][6][7]
The deal had an immediate consequence for Cursor's supply chain. In August 2026, OpenAI moved to cut off Cursor's access to its models, proposing a November cutoff and saying it could no longer trust a SpaceX-owned Cursor to honor its usage terms, pointing to Musk's own admission that xAI had trained on OpenAI's outputs. [8]
Atlas interpretation: The Cursor deal completes a pattern rather than starting one: SpaceX now owns the compute, a frontier model lab, a social platform, and a widely used coding tool that other labs' models used to run inside. Owning the whole stack also means SpaceX inherited Cursor's dependence on a competitor's models, which OpenAI's response shows is not a stable arrangement once the buyer is a rival lab's parent company. [8]
Sources
- SpaceX
SpaceX
- Elon Musk's SpaceX acquires xAI
NBC News · Feb 2, 2026
- SpaceX
Wikimedia Foundation · Sep 9, 2026
- Higher usage limits for Claude and a compute deal with SpaceX
Anthropic · May 6, 2026
- SpaceX strikes $60 billion deal for the right to buy AI coding startup Cursor
Yahoo Finance · Apr 23, 2026
- SpaceX to acquire the AI coding startup Cursor for $60 billion
CNBC · Jun 16, 2026
- Cursor is now a part of SpaceX
Cursor · Aug 14, 2026
- Our decision on Cursor following its acquisition by SpaceX
OpenAI · Aug 28, 2026