SpaceX said in a social media post that it has an option to acquire Cursor later this year for $60 billion, “or pay $10 billion for our work together.” That work is aimed at creating “the world’s best coding and knowledge work AI.”
Gibson Dunn advised SpaceX on the deal with a national team led by Robert Little in Dallas and George Sampas in New York. The team also includes James Springer in Washington, D.C., Chris Trester in Palo Alto and Michelle Gourley in Orange County. Tina Soppitt has been Cursor’s general counsel since September after more than seven years in the GC office at Reddit.
SpaceX, the rocket and satellite company owned by Elon Musk and based in what’s now known as the city of Starbase in the farthest point south in Texas, also said in the social media post that combining Cursor’s software engineers with its “million H100 equivalent Colossus training supercomputer will allow us to build the world’s most useful models.”
Founded in 2022 by a handful of MIT grads, Cursor is based a few blocks from Fisherman’s Wharf in the North Beach area of San Francisco. The startup company has created an AI coding platform that it claims debugs faster and ships cleaner code.
Cursor said in a blog post on the company’s website that it “is partnering with SpaceX to accelerate our model training efforts.” The company released its first agentic coding model, Composer, less than six months ago.
“After that, Composer 1.5 scaled reinforcement learning by over 20x,” according to Cursor. “Composer 2 then added continued pretraining, reaching frontier-level performance at a fraction of the cost of other models. Each step up in compute has translated to meaningfully more capable models. We’ve wanted to push our training efforts much further, but we’ve been bottlenecked by compute. With this partnership, our team will leverage xAI’s Colossus infrastructure to dramatically scale up the intelligence of our models.”
Gibson Dunn also advised SpaceX earlier this year when the company acquired Musk’s California-based xAI — founded in 2023 and home to the Grok chatbot — in a deal the companies said was worth $1.25 trillion.
Gibson Dunn is also advising SpaceX in regards to its initial public offering that is expected to come later this year. Reuters reported in March that Davis Polk & Wardwell has been tapped to provide counsel to the underwriters of the IPO, which is projected to be the largest ever with some valuations of between $1.75 trillion and $2 trillion.