Elon Musk says SpaceX trails rivals in AI race, plans to use $86B war chest

Elon Musk, the man who builds rockets that land themselves, just admitted his rocket company has a blind spot. SpaceX, he says, is behind the curve on artificial intelligence compared to players like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.

The fix? Throw approximately $86 billion at the problem. That’s the haul from SpaceX’s June 2026 IPO, the largest initial public offering in recorded history, and Musk apparently has no intention of letting it sit idle.

The biggest IPO ever, and where the money is going

Raising approximately $86 billion in a single offering puts SpaceX in a category by itself. For context, Saudi Aramco’s 2019 IPO raised around $25.6 billion. SpaceX more than tripled that figure.

But rather than funneling the entire war chest into Starship iterations or Starlink satellites, Musk is redirecting a massive chunk toward AI. The centerpiece move: SpaceX agreed on June 16, 2026, to acquire Anysphere, the parent company behind the AI coding agent Cursor, in a $60 billion all-stock transaction.

The Anysphere deal didn’t materialize overnight. It followed months of negotiations and option agreements that reportedly gave SpaceX the flexibility to either acquire the company outright or pursue a $10 billion collaboration instead. Musk chose the bigger play. The acquisition is expected to close in Q3 2026.

Why Cursor, and why now

Cursor has become one of the most talked-about tools in software development circles. It’s an AI-powered coding assistant that has carved out a significant niche among developers who want to write code faster and with fewer bugs.

The xAI connection

Musk’s AI ambitions don’t exist in a vacuum. His separate venture, xAI, which developed the Grok AI model, has already begun playing a critical role in supporting SpaceX’s expanding computational initiatives.

SpaceX has also entered large-scale AI compute rental agreements, including collaborations with Google. SpaceX is both renting computing power from tech giants to train its own models and potentially leasing out its own infrastructure to generate additional revenue.

What this means for investors

SpaceX now trades publicly under the ticker SPCX. Committing $60 billion to an AI acquisition immediately after an IPO is aggressive capital allocation. Investors who bought into SpaceX for rockets and Starlink are now, whether they like it or not, also betting on Musk’s ability to compete in the AI coding tools market.

Watch the Q3 2026 close of the Anysphere deal carefully. Integration timelines, retention of key Anysphere talent, and any early signals about how Cursor fits into SpaceX’s broader product ecosystem will be the first real indicators of whether this was a masterstroke or an expensive distraction.

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