Inside 'ridiculous' AI startup that Elon Musk placed $60,000,000,000 'gamble' on

With a reported net worth of $789.7 billion, Elon Musk isn't exactly short of a dollar or two. While he got his financial start when he sold the X.com bank, which evolved into PayPal, to eBay for $175.8 million, he's since expanded his portfolio into a whole range of different industries.

From trying to monopolize the electric car industry with Tesla to taking over the stars with SpaceX, he's also overhauled Twitter as X, dug deep with The Boring Company, and tried to revolutionize neurotechnology with Neuralink.

Even though you might think that Elon Musk doesn't have the time or energy to take on any more companies, he's set to stump up a whopping $60 billion for an AI startup that's just three years old.

Musk already has his finger in the AI pie with xAI and the controversial Grok, but as part of SpaceX's expanding venture, it has apparently struck a deal with the AI code editor known as Cursor.

As reported by Business Insider, SpaceX has been given the option to acquire the coding startup for $60 billion. Even if the handshake doesn't happen, it will still have to pay Cursor $10 billion for its work.

In a social media post from SpaceX, it wrote: "The combination of Cursor’s leading product and distribution to expert software engineers with SpaceX’s million H100 equivalent Colossus training supercomputer will allow us to build the world’s most useful models."

These sentiments were echoed by Cursor CEO Michael Truell, who added: "Excited to partner with the SpaceX team to scale up Composer. A meaningful step on our path to build the best place to code with AI."

Cursor will now be given access to SpaceX's computing resources, which include the Colossus supercomputer that's powered by 200,000 Nvidia GPUs. Importantly, SpaceX is muscling into the AI coding market to compete with Anthropic's Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex. There are also vibe-coding startups like Lovable, Emergent, and Bolt.

This comes at a crucial time for SpaceX, which is preparing to go public in what many think could be one of the biggest initial public offerings ever. Still, it's unclear whether the Cursor deal will happen before or after the I.P.O., which is being pencilled in as early as June.

As SpaceX makes leaps far beyond just your standard maker of rockets (if that's even a standard thing), the Cursor acquisition has been branded as 'ridiculous' by some. Over on Reddit, one concerned onlooker wrote: "I feel like there will be a lot of startups and applications that will build applications blindly and run into its own pitfall. Leveraging AI to enhance engineering is the best. Just my opinion."

Another added: "It's a golden age for grifters. People who leverage AI can now bullsh*t things that were unimaginable 2yrs ago.”

Referring to Musk elsewhere on Reddit, a third said: "60B for AI wrapper just to keep the overhyped Space X valuation?? Guess we are on the peak of the market."

Someone else concluded: "Just had this conversation with my boss (my team runs our large enterprise’s cursor licenses): name a passive investment Elon has made.

Whether it’s Tesla, Solar City, Twitter, whatever - when Elon buys a company he changes its direction entirely and immediately. Good or bad, this won’t be a simple change in management."

For some, the fact that Cursor has a $10 billion fallback is the craziest aspect of the whole thing.