It’s official: reports show SpaceX has completed its all-stock purchase of AI coding firm Cursor, for $60 billion. I wanted to go into this a little, noting that the four founders enriched by this merger are from MIT.
Dorm to 60B
A scout that a colleague of mine built to harvest MIT-related news turned up some notes on the four former MIT students who built Cursor: Michael Truell, Aman Sanger, Sualeh Asif, and Arvid Lunnemark. It characterized their meteoric rise as “dorm to 60B” following the closure of the SpaceX deal. That’s a big number, but it makes sense.
“Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which also acquired Musk’s xAI earlier this year, announced a deal in April for the companies to develop technology together,” writes Anthony Ha at TechCrunch. “The deal also gave SpaceX the option to acquire Cursor for $60 billion. Two months later, as SpaceX became a public company, the companies said they were moving forward with the acquisition.”
That makes the four intrepid fellows behind Cursor some of the most prominent MIT people right now.
Joint Work on Grok 4.6
In an announcement on the Cursor web site, spokespersons note that Cursor’s teams have been working with their business partners on the release of Grok 4.6.
Here’s how the writers make this announcement:
“Grok 4.6, which we released Wednesday, provides an early look at what we can now build together. SpaceX is building the computing capacity needed to scale intelligence far beyond what exists today. Cursor will be one place where that intelligence becomes useful.”
That editorial “we” says it all.
One interesting part of this deal is that Cursor had been working on developing coding AI from assistive technology to more of an autonomous agent process. Internal documentation of Grok 4.6 shows it is focused on some of these same goals:
“Grok 4.6 stays with complex tasks across many steps, whether researching a topic, analyzing information, working across a codebase, or turning an idea into a polished application or work artifact,” write spokespersons. “Grok 4.6 is trained on a wide range of agentic RL tasks, including knowledge work, general coding, and domain-specific environments for kernel optimization, web development, computer-aided design, and more. … we tested Grok 4.6 on projects designed to stretch its range and ability to sustain work over many steps. We found the model is especially strong at turning a broad product idea into a working first version. It can research unfamiliar domains, structure the application, implement the core interactions, and continue refining the result through several rounds of feedback.”
Data Center Power
I wanted to zero in on another line from Cursor’s rather brief announcement on the company web site, as follows:
“Together with SpaceX, we will push that ambition further. We will have access to the largest fleet of GPUs in the world, giving us the compute to build stronger models that are also more economical to run.”
I was curious about that reference, the “largest fleet of GPUs in the world,” so I researched and confirmed that they’re talking about xAI Colossus in Memphis, which is a gargantuan operation with some estimated 200,000 Nvidia GPUs. Even more breathtaking is the plan for Colossus 2 just down the road, as it were, with a plan for up to half a million of these chips, all humming along together.
This was news to me, and has been happening somewhat under the radar, in terms of national news. Presumably, locals know more.
In any case, the Cursor/SpaceX deal is big MIT-related news.
The Stock
Just for fun, I looked up the SPCX chart. There had been some worry about share dilution on the Cursor deal.
It turns out that, after an initial IPO share price of $160 and a quick rocket up to around $210, share prices bottomed out weeks ago just over $100, and now, the stock has struggled back up to the $150 range, pretty close to the IPO price.
Overall, the gambit of the “Cursor Four” seems to have been timely. Keep an eye out here as I bring you more on AI, from MIT and beyond.
