It didn't take long for Space Exploration Technologies (SPCX +0.15%), popularly known as SpaceX, to make a major move after its initial public offering. Fresh off raising $86 billion from the IPO, it announced that it's acquiring Anysphere, the developer of the AI-powered code editor Cursor. It's a $60 billion purchase that will be paid for entirely in new shares of SpaceX stock, and it's expected to close in the third quarter. Here's why that's a big deal, and what it means for shareholders.
The $26.5 trillion opportunity
There are various reasons investors are enthusiastic about SpaceX, but its artificial intelligence (AI) business probably doesn't top the list. People are excited about Elon Musk, his vision for a multiplanetary humanity, space travel, and even the Starlink satellite broadband business. But SpaceX only acquired xAI -- the part of the company that holds its AI segment -- earlier this year, and while it generated $818 million in revenue in 2026's first quarter, it also reported a $2.5 billion operating loss.
Image source: Getty Images.
However, an investment in SpaceX really is an investment in AI. Musk and Co. view the company as having what they say is "the largest actionable total addressable market in human history" -- $28.5 trillion.
And if you think that's all based on space and satellites, it's actually nearly all based on their outlook for AI. The company asserts that it has $26.5 trillion in AI opportunities, and $22.7 trillion of that is in "enterprise applications."
If that sounds incredible, it's worth keeping in mind that the entire U.S. gross domestic product for 2026 will be about $31 trillion.
What Cursor brings to the table
xAI's business is nothing to sneeze at, though. Its large language model, Grok, is one of the most widely used LLMs. Although it's more heavily used by individual users, xAI has Grok deals with large customers like the U.S. Department of Defense and prediction market sites Kalshi and Polymarket, and the LLM is built into Tesla electric vehicles.
However, it faces fierce competition from leading rivals like Anthropic's Claude, OpenAI's ChatGPT, and Alphabet's Gemini. Musk himself described Grok as being in fifth place in the space, with China's open-source Deepseek in fourth place. All of these tools presumably are competing for slices of the same total addressable market.
NASDAQ: SPCX
Key Data Points
Cursor is an autonomous coding agent, and many high-profile companies have deals to use it, including Nvidia. These are the enterprise deals that Musk is after. Anysphere also has an annualized revenue of $4 billion, which will pad SpaceX's top line.
SpaceX stock still looks overvalued, and the addition of Cursor's revenue won't help the company turn a profit overnight. But it does bring the company some important AI capabilities and make it more financially sound. That could help it get closer to becoming investment-worthy at some point in the future.
